"if the crime does not involve physical presence?"
Is he corporeal? Then I think that he will have a physical presence *somewhere*. Perhaps not at the same place as the recipient of the crime, but somewhere. His DNA could be used to link him to that location and then the MAC/IP/whatever could link that location to the crime.
It's also worth noting that there are any number of cracks that are helped greatly by physical access to the actual hardware. E.g. the old Windows NT "reboot the server with a Linux boot disk and change the Administrator password" crack. Not to mention the possibility that he might commit a physical crime (e.g. murder) to try to cover up his participation in crimes like computer cracking.
"Would you find it logical if a convicted burglar, rapist, etc. would need to supply, for example, the MAC addresses of all his computers?"
I would mostly think it was silly, when you can buy a $50 router that will hide the MAC address from the outside world. Not to mention the ability to buy a new network card with a different MAC address.
"Microsoft isnt making huge amounts of money like you seem to think."
They didn't say that Microsoft had high revenues. They said that Microsoft had high cash reserves. Most companies don't maintain $33 billion cash reserves, both because that would make them takeover targets (the buyer can borrow against the cash reserves when making the purchase) and because share holders generally insist on getting the money in the form of dividends.
Btw, Microsoft has similar profits to Wal-Mart. Some quick googling found
Revenue is irrelevant to this discussion which is about companies ability to fund money losing operations. Despite having six times the revenue, Wal-Mart is only about as profitable as Microsoft because their costs are so much higher. Microsoft is considerably more profitable than Target, even with lower revenue. Of course, if the claim is "Microsoft has $33 billion in cash reserves, which it can use to fund years worth of money losing operations in search," then even profits don't enter into it. Although the truth is that it can fund search indefinitely even if the search space is not internally profitable for them.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft is not competing with Wal-Mart here. They're competing with Yahoo (and Google), which is a much smaller company (both combined are smaller than Microsoft; heck throw in Amazon and the three are smaller). See http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/031 703.asp for some relative comparisons. Incidentally, Wal-Mart's market capitalization has dropped since then. They would no longer qualify as a mega cap.
"[T]he press presentation will contain none of that, because the fraction of their readers who would understand the details is very small."...and won't include any of the reporters or editors who will be excerpting it.
"TiVo and Vonage are circling the drain hand in hand."
Please don't link TiVo and Vonage. Vonage is bleeding money for two reasons:
1. They have their price set below the amount needed to support their service (i.e. they have traditionally lost money on each customer).
2. They spend ungodly amounts on advertising. In fact, they spend roughly as much on advertising as they pull in as revenue. They spend five times as much on online advertising as the next biggest advertiser (classmates.com).
On the bright side, Vonage might make money if they stopped signing up new customers. Their two biggest costs are marketing and sales. If they stopped marketing and sales dropped to replacement level, they might actually make money for a while. This is sort of happening now. They're almost out of money (thus the IPO), so they're cutting back on the marketing for a bit. This has cut growth and in the first quarter, non-marketing costs were actually slightly lower than revenues.
Tivo spends less on marketing and doesn't have Vonage's.bust losses. Further, "TiVo simply can't compete with DVRs built into cable boxes that have multiple tuners in them" does not seem to be true. In fact, more and more cable companies are switching their boxes to Tivo because Tivo's interface is so much better. As a result, expect dual tunered Comcast Tivos in the near future. That won't need "some crappy S-VIDEO interface using a stupid IR blaster to change channels" as it will be integrated with Comcast hardware.
Btw, the stupid IR blaster works surprisingly well most of the time. Further, given the price of single tuner Tivos, I'm not sure that they aren't a better deal (for two) than dual tuner DVRs. Then one has not only dual tuners, but dual hard drives, processors, memory, bus, etc. The Google lesson: a quantity of cheap commodity hardware can be more effective than a single high quality piece of hardware.
"By profiling it as an american company (which ofcourse it is) they risk alienating a LOT of other countries which become sicker everyday of the american way."
And I suspect that you will find that in most other countries, Microsoft does not advertise as an American country. For example, in India, they probably talk about the size of their dev center and ignore the location of their headquarters (whereas in America, they downplay the dev center and emphasize the headquarters).
While it is certainly possible to access American media/advertising outside the states, it is unlikely that the people doing so will be the ones who would have a knee jerk reaction against anything American.
"this person says they are currently working for us but we have no record of them in the system"
It's quite possible to make your current job secret. For example, Monster actively supports this. Not to say that identifying current employees from resumes is impossible. Presumably your current resume info is the same as when you were hired... However, it's not name or current job that trigger this.
"Of course, for a small fee you can avoid all of this."
Did anyone else read that and think about what idiots they are? Offering ad free versions for a fee completely undercuts their advertising market. Think about it. Who pays money not to watch ads: people who are willing to spend money for convenience. Who watches the ads instead: people who are willing to accept inconvenience in return for cheapness. Which group of people makes a better advertising market?
The people advertisers want to reach are the people who have disposable income and part with it easily. The exact people who do not see the ads in this scenario.
The other thing that they continue to miss is that studies show that people have better retention of commercials through which they fast forward. Why? Because they actually watch them to see when the show comes back! By contrast, people who leave the commercials play tend to ignore the TV during the commercials (talk to others in the room; get up for a snack or bathroom break; etc.).
Disabling fast forward during commercials is a stupid idea. The only result of this change would be a bunch of people with MythTV or a gray market commercial skipper getting perfect commercial skip.
One of the problems that arises is that the very act of searching can increase your legal liability if you are ever found to infringe on someone else's patent. If you pay a patent lawyer to search for you, then you aren't tainted by the results of the search. The lawyer's search will only be relative to your patentable claims.
Inventors should never look at patents. That's why we have lawyers. Lawyers act as an important abstraction layer in the process.
To try to give a concrete (albeit abstract) example:
You have a process that involves method A, which you think is patentable.
Your process also requires method B, which you think is too obvious to be patentable.
Someone has a patent on B.
1. If you search for stuff related to A but find B, you're now screwed. You can't proceed without purchasing a license for B.
2. If you hire someone to search for you, even if they find B, they will ignore it as irrelevant to A. They file a patent application, noting prior art. You can later amend the application if necessary.
Even if method A infringes on another patent, it is still possible to proceed. The buyer of your patent can purchase licenses for the prior art for method A as well as the license for method B. You get paid for your work.
It's also a cult favorite. There are a lot of people who will buy both the DVD and the HD-DVD, just to say that they have them. It's a big screen special effects movie -- not as advanced as a Star Wars, but still keyed towards people who like visuals. Finally, Joss is probably willing to re-edit for HD-DVD, as he tends to be an early adopter. In fact, he might have already done that in the initial post-production period.
Contrast it with releasing a more popular romantic comedy on HD-DVD. What have they added? Would someone actually buy an HD player to watch any of the romantic comedies on HD-DVD (if available)?
I would also expect some bigger budget movies to follow: LotR; Mission Impossible; Terminator 2; etc.
"Drug companies exist in every nation, whether or not they have drug patents.... Patents changed nothing."
I think that the more critical question is if you can have ten year drug trials and no patents. Also, the Switzerland example is weak in that they were probably getting patents in other countries. I doubt that the market size in Switzerland itself could support a leading industry.
"Secondly, trials would need to be repeated for a second company making drugs"
OK, name a generic drug that required second drug trials. When you buy generic (non-Tylenol) acetaminophen, do you think that the generic version went through a repeat of the same testing as the original?
"how can the FCC be sure that the second-arriver got the same drug?"
Chemical analysis? Again, how does the FDA determine that a generic is the same drug?
"should making factories be protected by law?"
If anyone with a chem lab could duplicate them without having to pay the same construction costs? Possibly. In the real world, this is exactly the difference that I was highlighting. In factories, the design (copyable) is relatively cheap; the construction (needs to be repeated) is expensive. In pharmaceuticals, testing (only needs to be done once) is expensive; production is cheap. This is why I suggested copyright as a better model; drugs are more like writing (easy to copy but expensive to produce the first instance). We want to encourage companies to go through the testing phase and accept potential legal liability, therefore we give them protected markets after they go through that effort.
I glanced at your PDF link. You do realize that it's mostly speculation and opinion, right? It is written by a serious anti-patent advocate looking for every possible anti-patent interpretation of the data. Essentially the same kind of person who writes TCO studies for Microsoft.
If I didn't make it clear in my original post, I'll state it explicitly here. I am against software and business method patents. I am somewhat wishy-washy on patents on electronics or mechanical devices. I think that patents are the wrong form of protection for pharmaceuticals. Copyright would make more sense.
It's quite possible that pharmaceutical companies are receiving protection for the wrong things as well. Why do people buy Tylenol? You can get the same thing in a generic bottle for half the price. That's not patent protection that does that (the patent is expired). It's branding, the same place where Nike makes their profits.
There's a simple solution to that. Break up the drug companies. One piece owns the patent licensing (and research). One piece owns testing. The last piece owns marketing (and trademarks) and distribution. Now, when a patent is awarded to a licensing company, they need to pay a testing company to verify effect and safety. That cost becomes the limit on the patent. They can license for as much or little as they want, but once they make back their testing money, the patent expires.
The testing company makes money by running the tests that verify that the product is safe and that it has the effect that was expected. In return, they also take on the liability if it is later shown not to be safe.
The marketing and distribution company actually manufactures the drug. Each company that chooses to license the drug pays the licensing company the same amount per unit. During the patent period, they can only market the drug by their name and the patented name (e.g. acetaminophen from McNeil). They cannot trademark their own brand name (e.g. Tylenol) until after the patent has expired.
Now, marketing and distribution are separated from research and testing. Further, research is now rewarded for drugs that successfully pass testing only. Great marketing doesn't help them. Since the testing company bears the risk of bad testing but does not get the benefits of quick to market, undesirable testing does not get swept underneath the car
"the only way I see patents spurring innovation is if (a) developers were in the habit of following patent filings & reading through patent listings to develop new ideas"
No. Pharmaceuticals are a good example here (although their patent protection has more in common with copyright than with other patents). Pharmaceuticals cost millions to develop. The biggest part of this cost is all the trials to verify safety. If anyone could just copy the drug after the trials, there would be no point. Companies would not bother to get drugs approved.
This is the primary point of patents (and copyrights). They reward the original inventor for taking the effort to come up with the invention in the first place.
A secondary effect is that patents require that the inventor expose the inner workings of the invention. However, note that copyright does not do this -- mainly because copyright protects things where there are no unexposed inner workings. The exposing is not necessary for the promotion of creativity; it's just an additional benefit of the system.
3. Oracle is very powerful (in terms of expressiveness of its custom SQLish statements)
4. Oracle performance is incredible when properly tuned
That said, Oracle is not a newbie database. It won't configure itself for you like MS SQL does. It expects to be operated by a professional who does nothing other than work with Oracle all day.
In particular, "optimizer that needs many hints" is a sign of the power of Oracle. They assume that if you are optimizing, that you want to wring out every last bit of performance. Thus, they give many options but require you to take the time to analyze your data and tailor the optimizations to your data. Oracle rarely trades power for ease of use.
Oracle's not designed to be a push button solution. It's designed to allow expert users to do everything they really want to do.
It's easy enough to add muscle mass. It's hard to add muscle mass *and* keep the fat down. I.e. they're dieting and bulking up. Meanwhile, the naturally thin person just bulks up.
I should also point out that I'm talking about professional body builders here, not people like me. If I exercised more and ate a better diet, I could add muscle and lose weight at the same time. However, if I got my body fat under 10% and tried to keep it there while adding muscle mass, I'd make slow progress.
To me, it sounds like you're starting with a fat person and saying that it would be easy to add muscle mass and reduce fat at the same time. I would agree with that. However, I'm starting with in shape people who want to get more in shape but run to fat. These people don't have the easy gains of limited initial muscle mass. They struggle to keep their body fat down. Exercise helps, but it's still hard to get to a professional bodybuilder level.
Actually, Arnie was scrawny when he was younger (119 pounds). Most body builders were. They have naturally low body fat and then use exercise to pump up their muscles.
People who are naturally bulkier will tend to run to fat. Then they have to diet to bring down their body fat, which makes it harder to bulk up their muscles.
It's not the scrawny that's the problem. You aren't built like Arnie because
1. You probably don't exercise more than forty hours a week (six is a lot for most amateurs).
2. No steroids.
3. You don't sound like you always went to the gym. Arnie became Arnie with years of treating exercise as a full time job.
"I loath pharmaceutical companies, but let's be frank: they can't even bring a product to market within three years let alone recoup expenses, FDA approuval takes much longer than that."
Pharmaceuticals should be covered by copyright, since that's essentially what's involved. I.e. like media, drugs can be copied very cheaply. Most of the cost is development, marketing, and distribution. No need for patents.
"There is no evidence that MS spends money creating Windows?"
Microsoft spends money creating Windows and they get protection for that investment in the form of copyright. What they do not do is research unique solutions to specific problems that are then so obvious to the outside user that the user can copy the solution without infringing copyright.
How pharmaceutical companies differ from software:
1. Software does not require ten years of testing by the FDA before it can be used. This is the single largest investment a company must make in a drug before it can be released.
2. Software is protected by copyright. This keeps people from simply making copies of the software and redistributing. If pharmaceuticals were covered under copyright, then they wouldn't need patents. Copyright is strictly better for the holder than is a patent.
3. Software patents do not require revealing the actual implementation. I.e. you can make up an unworkable process, then someone else, without reference to your work, makes a working process and you sue them for infringement.
4. Software patents are not narrow. They routinely cover everything and the kitchen sink. By contrast, pharmaceutical companies receive patents for a single chemical compound for a single use! If they discover that their drug has a second use, then they need to get a new patent for the new use.
The biggest reason why software should not be patentable is simply that one does not write software by experimentation. It's not a matter of writing a thousand functions and then picking the one that works best. Instead, software is almost all about basic transforms. The computer takes input and produces output. 99% of doing that is drudge work. It can be drudge work that requires intelligence to implement, but it's still drudge work.
Copying a drug is comparatively trivial to the cost of getting the drug approved for use. By contrast, other than copying the entire software (prevented by copyright), software's difficult to reverse engineer. In truth, to completely reverse engineer a piece of software is probably more difficult than writing similar software from scratch. Especially if you plan to maintain or modify the software afterwards.
"but locally (with a zero id) user joebob is equivalent to root."
Including the ability to change user IDs?
Note that the danger here is not root access to the NFS mount. That can easily be prevented. The danger is that someone will spoof another user and get access to their data. If NFS is relying on the local machine to authenticate the user, then the user can't be given root and limited in their actions on the NFS mount.
As someone else pointed out, NFS is not the right tech for this problem. They need to change their setup to not rely on NFS mounted user directories with both public and private data. They can either
1. Switch to something like OpenAFS, which supports that model (it doesn't rely on local authentication for user ID).
2. Not NFS mount the private data globally, just the public data. Mount the private data only on hosts where the user(s) with root access should have access to the data.
Windows and OpenAFS allow the decision to be made at access time. The combination of NFS with local root requires that the decision be made at mount time.
"The GPL sets a maximum price for licensing GPLed software. That price is zero."
That's not the GPL. That's just copyright. Since I don't own the software, I can't sell licenses for it. I can't sell licenses for Microsoft Windows XP Pro either, except possibly to transfer the one that I have.
No it doesn't. I could offer to sell a copy of Fedora for a billion dollars if I wanted. Nothing the copyright holder(s) could do about it under the GPL, even if I found someone stupid enough to pay me. Even if I don't modify it at all.
You may be thinking of the source code clause, which says that once I have distributed the binary, I must offer the source code for no more than a reasonable cost of delivery of media. However, that clause doesn't affect binary cost at all. I could still sell the binary for a billion dollars; it's just that once I've sold the binary, I'd have to sell the source code for something more like $2. Of course, if I just ship the source *with* the binary (or deliver just the source), that clause goes out the window.
That would explain why the poster is trying to work *WITH* IT to come up with an agreement as to what IT will provide. Then this cross sectional group from across the company will go to management and explain why management should provide budget for these needs.
I think that you're missing the point of the question.
"Your department has IT needs. These needs are written down."
The poster's question was (essentially) "What are some needs that we might write down?" The poster is looking for suggestions as to
1. Phrasing of needs, e.g. instead of saying "keep servers up most of the time" write down: servers have less than 1% unscheduled downtime and scheduled downtime is limited to Sunday nights from 1 AM to 6 AM.
2. Identifying needs, e.g. 90% of user requests should receive a response within two business days and 100% within seven business days. A response is defined as one of a solution, a request for more information, or a denial of the request (w/ explanation). What other needs have slashdot readers noticed? Sure, some of these will be inapplicable to the poster's situation. However, some things we could suggest might be applicable but not obvious.
3. Realism of needs, e.g. are 99% uptime and 90% response rate within two days realistic? Is it required?
4. Requirements of needs, e.g. is seven business days too lax? Does a requirement that lax cause operational issues? Should it be tighter?
You're right, writing down needs is a no brainer. Note that the original post said that that was what they were trying to do. To define the requirements on which they wanted upper management to sign off. The request is for help *generating* that list.
It's important to get the right list of needs the first time, because it will be hard to get management to change them upwards (which requires more budget). Once the list is settled, it will be much easier to get budget for that list than it will be to change the list. Getting the list right the first time will be hard, as obviously they don't have an existing list from which to work. In fact, they may not be measuring things like uptime and response rates.
It's also important to be realistic. For example, if the list says 100% uptime, it's going to quickly be obvious that that is impossible. The net result is that management will get to pick an uptime. Otoh, if you pick an uptime of 99%, that at least seems reasonable. If the actual uptime is 98%, then you can demand more resources to push up the uptime.
Shouldn't they go under/home/${USER}, as personal info? I.e. each user should have their own rants. If you want them in a publicly shared place, how about under/var? These are going to VARy over time right?
Unix System Resources is generally for static files. That's why/usr can be relatively full and only resized when you change your distro (assuming that programs install under/opt in your distro).
Is it? There's a thriving market in stolen IDs that match one's face (to get into bars while underage). Why not in debit cards?
For that matter, who'd bother? Are you really telling me that you expect the minimum wage clerk to take the time to actually look at the photo? Carefully enough to detect differences while not creating false positives (e.g. you shave or grow a beard and look different)?
Not to mention that many of my purchases are online, where they can't see my face.
Slashdot Mirror
"if the crime does not involve physical presence?"
Is he corporeal? Then I think that he will have a physical presence *somewhere*. Perhaps not at the same place as the recipient of the crime, but somewhere. His DNA could be used to link him to that location and then the MAC/IP/whatever could link that location to the crime.
It's also worth noting that there are any number of cracks that are helped greatly by physical access to the actual hardware. E.g. the old Windows NT "reboot the server with a Linux boot disk and change the Administrator password" crack. Not to mention the possibility that he might commit a physical crime (e.g. murder) to try to cover up his participation in crimes like computer cracking.
"Would you find it logical if a convicted burglar, rapist, etc. would need to supply, for example, the MAC addresses of all his computers?"
I would mostly think it was silly, when you can buy a $50 router that will hide the MAC address from the outside world. Not to mention the ability to buy a new network card with a different MAC address.
"Microsoft isnt making huge amounts of money like you seem to think."
1 43-2004Oct21.html
1 703.asp for some relative comparisons. Incidentally, Wal-Mart's market capitalization has dropped since then. They would no longer qualify as a mega cap.
They didn't say that Microsoft had high revenues. They said that Microsoft had high cash reserves. Most companies don't maintain $33 billion cash reserves, both because that would make them takeover targets (the buyer can borrow against the cash reserves when making the purchase) and because share holders generally insist on getting the money in the form of dividends.
Btw, Microsoft has similar profits to Wal-Mart. Some quick googling found
Wal-Mart: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8969481/
Microsoft: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53
Revenue is irrelevant to this discussion which is about companies ability to fund money losing operations. Despite having six times the revenue, Wal-Mart is only about as profitable as Microsoft because their costs are so much higher. Microsoft is considerably more profitable than Target, even with lower revenue. Of course, if the claim is "Microsoft has $33 billion in cash reserves, which it can use to fund years worth of money losing operations in search," then even profits don't enter into it. Although the truth is that it can fund search indefinitely even if the search space is not internally profitable for them.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft is not competing with Wal-Mart here. They're competing with Yahoo (and Google), which is a much smaller company (both combined are smaller than Microsoft; heck throw in Amazon and the three are smaller). See http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/03
"[T]he press presentation will contain none of that, because the fraction of their readers who would understand the details is very small." ...and won't include any of the reporters or editors who will be excerpting it.
"TiVo and Vonage are circling the drain hand in hand."
.bust losses. Further, "TiVo simply can't compete with DVRs built into cable boxes that have multiple tuners in them" does not seem to be true. In fact, more and more cable companies are switching their boxes to Tivo because Tivo's interface is so much better. As a result, expect dual tunered Comcast Tivos in the near future. That won't need "some crappy S-VIDEO interface using a stupid IR blaster to change channels" as it will be integrated with Comcast hardware.
Please don't link TiVo and Vonage. Vonage is bleeding money for two reasons:
1. They have their price set below the amount needed to support their service (i.e. they have traditionally lost money on each customer).
2. They spend ungodly amounts on advertising. In fact, they spend roughly as much on advertising as they pull in as revenue. They spend five times as much on online advertising as the next biggest advertiser (classmates.com).
On the bright side, Vonage might make money if they stopped signing up new customers. Their two biggest costs are marketing and sales. If they stopped marketing and sales dropped to replacement level, they might actually make money for a while. This is sort of happening now. They're almost out of money (thus the IPO), so they're cutting back on the marketing for a bit. This has cut growth and in the first quarter, non-marketing costs were actually slightly lower than revenues.
Tivo spends less on marketing and doesn't have Vonage's
Btw, the stupid IR blaster works surprisingly well most of the time. Further, given the price of single tuner Tivos, I'm not sure that they aren't a better deal (for two) than dual tuner DVRs. Then one has not only dual tuners, but dual hard drives, processors, memory, bus, etc. The Google lesson: a quantity of cheap commodity hardware can be more effective than a single high quality piece of hardware.
"By profiling it as an american company (which ofcourse it is) they risk alienating a LOT of other countries which become sicker everyday of the american way."
And I suspect that you will find that in most other countries, Microsoft does not advertise as an American country. For example, in India, they probably talk about the size of their dev center and ignore the location of their headquarters (whereas in America, they downplay the dev center and emphasize the headquarters).
While it is certainly possible to access American media/advertising outside the states, it is unlikely that the people doing so will be the ones who would have a knee jerk reaction against anything American.
"this person says they are currently working for us but we have no record of them in the system"
It's quite possible to make your current job secret. For example, Monster actively supports this. Not to say that identifying current employees from resumes is impossible. Presumably your current resume info is the same as when you were hired... However, it's not name or current job that trigger this.
"the bandwidth simply wasn't there to stream such media to internet users"
I still think that streaming is the wrong solution here. I'd much rather they send stuff to my DVR in off peak times and I'll play it when I want.
"Of course, for a small fee you can avoid all of this."
Did anyone else read that and think about what idiots they are? Offering ad free versions for a fee completely undercuts their advertising market. Think about it. Who pays money not to watch ads: people who are willing to spend money for convenience. Who watches the ads instead: people who are willing to accept inconvenience in return for cheapness. Which group of people makes a better advertising market?
The people advertisers want to reach are the people who have disposable income and part with it easily. The exact people who do not see the ads in this scenario.
The other thing that they continue to miss is that studies show that people have better retention of commercials through which they fast forward. Why? Because they actually watch them to see when the show comes back! By contrast, people who leave the commercials play tend to ignore the TV during the commercials (talk to others in the room; get up for a snack or bathroom break; etc.).
Disabling fast forward during commercials is a stupid idea. The only result of this change would be a bunch of people with MythTV or a gray market commercial skipper getting perfect commercial skip.
One of the problems that arises is that the very act of searching can increase your legal liability if you are ever found to infringe on someone else's patent. If you pay a patent lawyer to search for you, then you aren't tainted by the results of the search. The lawyer's search will only be relative to your patentable claims.
Inventors should never look at patents. That's why we have lawyers. Lawyers act as an important abstraction layer in the process.
To try to give a concrete (albeit abstract) example:
You have a process that involves method A, which you think is patentable.
Your process also requires method B, which you think is too obvious to be patentable.
Someone has a patent on B.
1. If you search for stuff related to A but find B, you're now screwed. You can't proceed without purchasing a license for B.
2. If you hire someone to search for you, even if they find B, they will ignore it as irrelevant to A. They file a patent application, noting prior art. You can later amend the application if necessary.
Even if method A infringes on another patent, it is still possible to proceed. The buyer of your patent can purchase licenses for the prior art for method A as well as the license for method B. You get paid for your work.
It's also a cult favorite. There are a lot of people who will buy both the DVD and the HD-DVD, just to say that they have them. It's a big screen special effects movie -- not as advanced as a Star Wars, but still keyed towards people who like visuals. Finally, Joss is probably willing to re-edit for HD-DVD, as he tends to be an early adopter. In fact, he might have already done that in the initial post-production period.
Contrast it with releasing a more popular romantic comedy on HD-DVD. What have they added? Would someone actually buy an HD player to watch any of the romantic comedies on HD-DVD (if available)?
I would also expect some bigger budget movies to follow: LotR; Mission Impossible; Terminator 2; etc.
Wiki link to broken window fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken _window
"Drug companies exist in every nation, whether or not they have drug patents. ... Patents changed nothing."
I think that the more critical question is if you can have ten year drug trials and no patents. Also, the Switzerland example is weak in that they were probably getting patents in other countries. I doubt that the market size in Switzerland itself could support a leading industry.
"Secondly, trials would need to be repeated for a second company making drugs"
OK, name a generic drug that required second drug trials. When you buy generic (non-Tylenol) acetaminophen, do you think that the generic version went through a repeat of the same testing as the original?
"how can the FCC be sure that the second-arriver got the same drug?"
Chemical analysis? Again, how does the FDA determine that a generic is the same drug?
"should making factories be protected by law?"
If anyone with a chem lab could duplicate them without having to pay the same construction costs? Possibly. In the real world, this is exactly the difference that I was highlighting. In factories, the design (copyable) is relatively cheap; the construction (needs to be repeated) is expensive. In pharmaceuticals, testing (only needs to be done once) is expensive; production is cheap. This is why I suggested copyright as a better model; drugs are more like writing (easy to copy but expensive to produce the first instance). We want to encourage companies to go through the testing phase and accept potential legal liability, therefore we give them protected markets after they go through that effort.
I glanced at your PDF link. You do realize that it's mostly speculation and opinion, right? It is written by a serious anti-patent advocate looking for every possible anti-patent interpretation of the data. Essentially the same kind of person who writes TCO studies for Microsoft.
If I didn't make it clear in my original post, I'll state it explicitly here. I am against software and business method patents. I am somewhat wishy-washy on patents on electronics or mechanical devices. I think that patents are the wrong form of protection for pharmaceuticals. Copyright would make more sense.
It's quite possible that pharmaceutical companies are receiving protection for the wrong things as well. Why do people buy Tylenol? You can get the same thing in a generic bottle for half the price. That's not patent protection that does that (the patent is expired). It's branding, the same place where Nike makes their profits.
There's a simple solution to that. Break up the drug companies. One piece owns the patent licensing (and research). One piece owns testing. The last piece owns marketing (and trademarks) and distribution. Now, when a patent is awarded to a licensing company, they need to pay a testing company to verify effect and safety. That cost becomes the limit on the patent. They can license for as much or little as they want, but once they make back their testing money, the patent expires.
The testing company makes money by running the tests that verify that the product is safe and that it has the effect that was expected. In return, they also take on the liability if it is later shown not to be safe.
The marketing and distribution company actually manufactures the drug. Each company that chooses to license the drug pays the licensing company the same amount per unit. During the patent period, they can only market the drug by their name and the patented name (e.g. acetaminophen from McNeil). They cannot trademark their own brand name (e.g. Tylenol) until after the patent has expired.
Now, marketing and distribution are separated from research and testing. Further, research is now rewarded for drugs that successfully pass testing only. Great marketing doesn't help them. Since the testing company bears the risk of bad testing but does not get the benefits of quick to market, undesirable testing does not get swept underneath the car
"the only way I see patents spurring innovation is if (a) developers were in the habit of following patent filings & reading through patent listings to develop new ideas"
No. Pharmaceuticals are a good example here (although their patent protection has more in common with copyright than with other patents). Pharmaceuticals cost millions to develop. The biggest part of this cost is all the trials to verify safety. If anyone could just copy the drug after the trials, there would be no point. Companies would not bother to get drugs approved.
This is the primary point of patents (and copyrights). They reward the original inventor for taking the effort to come up with the invention in the first place.
A secondary effect is that patents require that the inventor expose the inner workings of the invention. However, note that copyright does not do this -- mainly because copyright protects things where there are no unexposed inner workings. The exposing is not necessary for the promotion of creativity; it's just an additional benefit of the system.
1. Oracle has good (albeit expensive) support
2. Oracle is very customizable
3. Oracle is very powerful (in terms of expressiveness of its custom SQLish statements)
4. Oracle performance is incredible when properly tuned
That said, Oracle is not a newbie database. It won't configure itself for you like MS SQL does. It expects to be operated by a professional who does nothing other than work with Oracle all day.
In particular, "optimizer that needs many hints" is a sign of the power of Oracle. They assume that if you are optimizing, that you want to wring out every last bit of performance. Thus, they give many options but require you to take the time to analyze your data and tailor the optimizations to your data. Oracle rarely trades power for ease of use.
Oracle's not designed to be a push button solution. It's designed to allow expert users to do everything they really want to do.
It's easy enough to add muscle mass. It's hard to add muscle mass *and* keep the fat down. I.e. they're dieting and bulking up. Meanwhile, the naturally thin person just bulks up.
I should also point out that I'm talking about professional body builders here, not people like me. If I exercised more and ate a better diet, I could add muscle and lose weight at the same time. However, if I got my body fat under 10% and tried to keep it there while adding muscle mass, I'd make slow progress.
To me, it sounds like you're starting with a fat person and saying that it would be easy to add muscle mass and reduce fat at the same time. I would agree with that. However, I'm starting with in shape people who want to get more in shape but run to fat. These people don't have the easy gains of limited initial muscle mass. They struggle to keep their body fat down. Exercise helps, but it's still hard to get to a professional bodybuilder level.
Actually, Arnie was scrawny when he was younger (119 pounds). Most body builders were. They have naturally low body fat and then use exercise to pump up their muscles.
People who are naturally bulkier will tend to run to fat. Then they have to diet to bring down their body fat, which makes it harder to bulk up their muscles.
It's not the scrawny that's the problem. You aren't built like Arnie because
1. You probably don't exercise more than forty hours a week (six is a lot for most amateurs).
2. No steroids.
3. You don't sound like you always went to the gym. Arnie became Arnie with years of treating exercise as a full time job.
"I loath pharmaceutical companies, but let's be frank: they can't even bring a product to market within three years let alone recoup expenses, FDA approuval takes much longer than that."
Pharmaceuticals should be covered by copyright, since that's essentially what's involved. I.e. like media, drugs can be copied very cheaply. Most of the cost is development, marketing, and distribution. No need for patents.
"There is no evidence that MS spends money creating Windows?"
Microsoft spends money creating Windows and they get protection for that investment in the form of copyright. What they do not do is research unique solutions to specific problems that are then so obvious to the outside user that the user can copy the solution without infringing copyright.
How pharmaceutical companies differ from software:
1. Software does not require ten years of testing by the FDA before it can be used. This is the single largest investment a company must make in a drug before it can be released.
2. Software is protected by copyright. This keeps people from simply making copies of the software and redistributing. If pharmaceuticals were covered under copyright, then they wouldn't need patents. Copyright is strictly better for the holder than is a patent.
3. Software patents do not require revealing the actual implementation. I.e. you can make up an unworkable process, then someone else, without reference to your work, makes a working process and you sue them for infringement.
4. Software patents are not narrow. They routinely cover everything and the kitchen sink. By contrast, pharmaceutical companies receive patents for a single chemical compound for a single use! If they discover that their drug has a second use, then they need to get a new patent for the new use.
The biggest reason why software should not be patentable is simply that one does not write software by experimentation. It's not a matter of writing a thousand functions and then picking the one that works best. Instead, software is almost all about basic transforms. The computer takes input and produces output. 99% of doing that is drudge work. It can be drudge work that requires intelligence to implement, but it's still drudge work.
Copying a drug is comparatively trivial to the cost of getting the drug approved for use. By contrast, other than copying the entire software (prevented by copyright), software's difficult to reverse engineer. In truth, to completely reverse engineer a piece of software is probably more difficult than writing similar software from scratch. Especially if you plan to maintain or modify the software afterwards.
"but locally (with a zero id) user joebob is equivalent to root."
Including the ability to change user IDs?
Note that the danger here is not root access to the NFS mount. That can easily be prevented. The danger is that someone will spoof another user and get access to their data. If NFS is relying on the local machine to authenticate the user, then the user can't be given root and limited in their actions on the NFS mount.
As someone else pointed out, NFS is not the right tech for this problem. They need to change their setup to not rely on NFS mounted user directories with both public and private data. They can either
1. Switch to something like OpenAFS, which supports that model (it doesn't rely on local authentication for user ID).
2. Not NFS mount the private data globally, just the public data. Mount the private data only on hosts where the user(s) with root access should have access to the data.
Windows and OpenAFS allow the decision to be made at access time. The combination of NFS with local root requires that the decision be made at mount time.
"The GPL sets a maximum price for licensing GPLed software. That price is zero."
That's not the GPL. That's just copyright. Since I don't own the software, I can't sell licenses for it. I can't sell licenses for Microsoft Windows XP Pro either, except possibly to transfer the one that I have.
"First, the GPL sets a maximum price."
No it doesn't. I could offer to sell a copy of Fedora for a billion dollars if I wanted. Nothing the copyright holder(s) could do about it under the GPL, even if I found someone stupid enough to pay me. Even if I don't modify it at all.
You may be thinking of the source code clause, which says that once I have distributed the binary, I must offer the source code for no more than a reasonable cost of delivery of media. However, that clause doesn't affect binary cost at all. I could still sell the binary for a billion dollars; it's just that once I've sold the binary, I'd have to sell the source code for something more like $2. Of course, if I just ship the source *with* the binary (or deliver just the source), that clause goes out the window.
That would explain why the poster is trying to work *WITH* IT to come up with an agreement as to what IT will provide. Then this cross sectional group from across the company will go to management and explain why management should provide budget for these needs.
I think that you're missing the point of the question.
"Your department has IT needs. These needs are written down."
The poster's question was (essentially) "What are some needs that we might write down?" The poster is looking for suggestions as to
1. Phrasing of needs, e.g. instead of saying "keep servers up most of the time" write down: servers have less than 1% unscheduled downtime and scheduled downtime is limited to Sunday nights from 1 AM to 6 AM.
2. Identifying needs, e.g. 90% of user requests should receive a response within two business days and 100% within seven business days. A response is defined as one of a solution, a request for more information, or a denial of the request (w/ explanation). What other needs have slashdot readers noticed? Sure, some of these will be inapplicable to the poster's situation. However, some things we could suggest might be applicable but not obvious.
3. Realism of needs, e.g. are 99% uptime and 90% response rate within two days realistic? Is it required?
4. Requirements of needs, e.g. is seven business days too lax? Does a requirement that lax cause operational issues? Should it be tighter?
You're right, writing down needs is a no brainer. Note that the original post said that that was what they were trying to do. To define the requirements on which they wanted upper management to sign off. The request is for help *generating* that list.
It's important to get the right list of needs the first time, because it will be hard to get management to change them upwards (which requires more budget). Once the list is settled, it will be much easier to get budget for that list than it will be to change the list. Getting the list right the first time will be hard, as obviously they don't have an existing list from which to work. In fact, they may not be measuring things like uptime and response rates.
It's also important to be realistic. For example, if the list says 100% uptime, it's going to quickly be obvious that that is impossible. The net result is that management will get to pick an uptime. Otoh, if you pick an uptime of 99%, that at least seems reasonable. If the actual uptime is 98%, then you can demand more resources to push up the uptime.
"Rants go in /usr/share."
/home/${USER}, as personal info? I.e. each user should have their own rants. If you want them in a publicly shared place, how about under /var? These are going to VARy over time right?
/usr can be relatively full and only resized when you change your distro (assuming that programs install under /opt in your distro).
/etc is not the right place.
Shouldn't they go under
Unix System Resources is generally for static files. That's why
I would agree that
"Its a little more dificult to steal my face."
Is it? There's a thriving market in stolen IDs that match one's face (to get into bars while underage). Why not in debit cards?
For that matter, who'd bother? Are you really telling me that you expect the minimum wage clerk to take the time to actually look at the photo? Carefully enough to detect differences while not creating false positives (e.g. you shave or grow a beard and look different)?
Not to mention that many of my purchases are online, where they can't see my face.