Some friends of mine had a very long-running and fairly successful cable access show entitled, "Fusion Patrol," in Phoenix, that ran weekly for many seasons, and actually had a fairly decent following. They made fun of science fiction and mainstream TV shows and the personalities behind those shows, with a little of other stuff along with. They got cancelled when they made an episode parodying awards shows with, "The Limp Cable Awards", which got them banned by COX Cable due to the political incorrectness of the skit "Jerry's Kids Can Cook Too"...
Ah, good times...
I didn't say that he doesn't have a right to use another company's product. He doesn't have a right to restrict or develop use at a patentable level without obtaining some kind of developer's rights. He can still even create his tool, but it shouldn't be patentable.
But so far enforcement of software patents hasn't been very strong. The entire software industry is a house of cards, and almost all of the heavies know that if they started enforcing software patents on each other that *someone* would come out as top dog with the most secure base, and basically everyone would lose.
I'm not 100% against software patents, but I believe that such a circumstance should require that the patent be actively used in a product or be a product in of itself. In this particular example I don't believe that the guy's patent should have really been valid anyway, since he's using another company's copyrighted products in his device without licensing those products for his own process. My enjoyment of seeing Microsoft take one in the shorts just happens to outweigh my dislike of the system for once.
I don't believe that holding companies that don't have any direct products should be allowed to hold patents on software processes that weren't developed internally, and I also believe that failure to continue to maintain a product with an applicable patent should be grounds for release of that patent back into the community at large. This way if a company stops making software available then others can make workalikes rather than let a possibly good thing disappear.
... if you're running around being chased by someone with one of these, chanting, "I refuse to be railed! I refuse to be railed!" repeatedly at high speed will cause them to lose their nerve and not be able to hit the broad side of a barn.
At least, it worked that way in Quake II at LAN parties.
Though it sometimes caused the person with the gun to drop out of the game, reboot into Linux, and start denial-of-service attacking the guy who was chanting...
"that MS is firing a few thousand patents a year at the USPTO - protecting themselves."
EEEEH! Wrong!
All that they have to do is demonstrate prior art if they're charged with patent infringement. If they can show such then they should be able to win just about any lawsuit alleging wrongdoing.
The entire point of a patent is to claim exclusive original rights or exclusive use.
"However, most people don't aquire a wifi card until they get broadband, unless their laptop comes with one."
That's not the experience that I have in coffee shops. I know of plenty of people in the 18-30 demographic that only own a laptop for their computer and only use Internet access where it's available free. Amusingly enough they're also the kind of people to take up space in a coffee house without buying much if anything because they're borderline-poor; they grew up not wanting for basics in life and now that they've never had to really work for them before they don't really plant roots to live or to get down to making a professional living of their own.
The broken hinge on my laptop was probably the best thing to happen to me to keep me from falling into that lifestyle myself. When I'm out and about I don't concern myself with Internet access. I'm going on a trip to a science fiction convention tomorrow and I'll be taking a camera, a PDA to look at the pictures from the camera, and travel accessories, and I'll be away from mainstream computer use for about four days. I'm looking forward to it.
Why do you assume that they don't notify? They have forums and discussion groups and the like for the various developers to talk to each other, so if the distros are involved in that part of the process then they should have a fairly clear understanding of the timetable of the next update.
In some distributions like Debian, individual package maintainers or small teams of maintainers contribute new patches to 'stable' and new versions to 'unstable'. With individual people responsible for such it shouldn't theoretically be that difficult for that person in particular to keep tabs on what's going on with the software that they support.
"I knew a guy who did that on a network of just 20 workstations. He was anal, and wouldn't give anyone else access to authorize MAC addresses. The other techs got rather irate, when they'd change a NIC, add a new machine, or whatever."
Thing is, I know exactly which vendors we have ethernet chipsets (and therefore MAC addresses) from. I don't have to disallow all except certain specific addresses, I have to allow certain ranges that conform to known assets. Admittedly this list is fairly lengthy, but there are a lot that specifically shouldn't be on the network that we can later make exceptions for if the users call us.
"It is a shame that they allow these agencies to recieve funding or for their IS / IT departments to still have jobs."
I work for a large IT department for a government-based organization. The users don't call us when they get new equipment frequently unless it doesn't work. With all of these wireless devices coming 'ready to go' out of the box we don't usually find them unless we physically stumble across them or unless the DHCP server in the device is handing out address on the LAN at the site and therefore breaking connectivity for the users.
Yes, it is technically possible to note the MAC address of a device when it comes on the network and compare it to a table of kinds of equipment, but there are 11 field technicians, four network engineers, and two cable/infrastructure technicians for 25,000 machines. We don't get the funding for supplies, equipment, or manpower that we need, we don't get support from higher-ups in the organization, and we are left being reactionary. Even worse yet, some of the agency-level higherups are all about 'new technology' without giving us the resources to thoroughly investigate it and how it will impact our network, and half of the time they don't even figure out why the users need such technology for before allowing them to order it.
We have machines running from average as low as Windows 95 (though I do still encounter Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in rare cases) and MacOS 7.5.3. Most days I'm astounded that things work as well as they do, let alone at all.
That's the beautiful part- They don't have to write back, they just have to disable the original one and keep a replacement on their person, like in a glove or sleeve.
"Longhorn and Xbox360 look really.. uh.. 'unbranded'"
I could see them doing that almost on purpose. For many markets they are the establishment, whether we want them to be or not. For a long time they did understate their position as far as their operating system is concerned. The user was left with, "this is what a computer is like," rather than, "this is what Windows is like." That has helped ingrain to the userbase what they should expect, which makes any challenger to that (be they Apple, Gnome, KDE, etc) have to overcome being not-normal in addition to simply being different.
If Microsoft's competitors in this market are smart then they'll work to have the best software titles for their platforms available, and to try to get as many third party software producers to produce games for their consoles that the software producers had already planned for Microsoft's. As SNK's NeoGeo proved, a game system is absolutely nothing at all without the software to run on it, no matter how powerful or advanced it really is.
A friend of mine is a planetary geologist that has been working with data from this probe since it reached Mars. He's reasonably convinced that Mars has had active hydrology in the recent past geologically-speaking, so from what I gather he'd be really, really surprised if they found no water at all.
I didn't particularly care for the BBC miniseries. I liked the movie. It's all taste really.
Honestly part of my reason for liking the movie so much was because it managed to do in two hours what the BBC miniseries couldn't do in six or eight or however long it was- tell a decent story but maintain the fairly active pace that I had come to expect from the novels, and still bear some resemblance to what I've known as The Hitchhiker's Guide.
Yeah... I have dermatitis, basically when my skin is exposed to soap (the skin on my hands is more susceptible to this) it starts to "peel" off and the skin does not recover for 4-6 weeks. I avoid soap as much as possible, the non soap alternatives are quite expensive however.
So, we have your excuse, what's the excuse of the millions of other unwashed geeks out there?
"Meaning the police isn't interested in the US$20 bill you found, but sure as hell is interested in the duffle bag stuffed with US$100's that you found."
That's probably true more because of the increased likelihood of some illicit activity associated with that money rather than simply because it's lost.
If I were a customer, I'd insist that they ship me the supposedly legitimate one and pay for my return postage before they get the other one back, seeing as how it was their mistake, not mine, and that I should not be liable for their cockup. If they want it right, they have to do the work to make it right, not me. If they won't support the product then the credit card company gets called and the charge is revoked, as I as a consumer haven't been given what I've paid for.
"True hardware box failures are taken care of by redundancies,not by limiting parts."
It's still very smart to use a small core of very expensive and high quality parts that can function entirely on their own, rather than to have a vast, interconnected system that needs most everything present and working in order to remain functional. It's kind of like Galileo and the Voyager probes, where the basic core was over-engineered the right way to withstand problems, while the external stuff was ultimately expendable or redundant.
"Yes, but response time for anomaly teams is usually an hour at best. Many satellites have built-in error checking and will take care of themselves given the chance, including putting themselves into 'safemode.'"
These systems drop back to a minimal mode using their high quality cores while ignoring the add-ons and modules that have failed. The basic system is very solid, the severable or ignorable expansion bus, to use an analogy, is where parts that could malfunction or otherwise have issues are placed, so to reduce the chances of causing a complete failure.
K.I.S.S. principle is a very, very good design, especially when there are a lack of restrictions governing how the core has to be applied. Cars got complicated, for example, not when automakers decided to make them more difficult, but when external forces like pollution controls forced automakers to cobble extra stuff on to their engines and exhaust systems, and when fuel economy rules forced the adoption of increasingly complex control systems that are themselves prone to failure LONG before the "open valve, suck air and fuel in, compress fuel/air, explode fuel/air, decompress fuel/air, force fuel/air out through another valve" portion of the engine malfunctions.
"Somehow, I doubt that. A tactical spacecraft--at the current, only an ICBM or slimiar missle--will be nothing but manuvering, with an unusually high allotment of its weight given over to course correction."
So, what's to prevent the engaging ship from detonating weapons in six to eight positions relative to where they think the target is, so that if the target moves they still end up destroying it?
I'd think that the future of space warfare would be in the effectiveness of decoys and disguise, rather than in the effectiveness of dodging close range fire. If they can't find you then it's harder to hit you, and if they find a convincing enough decoy then they may mistake its destruction for your destruction, leaving you to find them and destroy them or to pull out and regroup elsewhere.
A point that is missed by lots of people, and even myself when I don't actively think about it, is that since we're using web browsers that aren't subject to hijacking or spyware, we don't see the other reason to get mad at web site owners and advertisers.
As far as I'm concerned, they've violated any form of 'social contract' en masse by hijacking peoples' PCs for new ways of delivering ads. I believe that installing software through bugs in the web browser is tantamount to breaking into someones' computer. Companies that design and implement such software, and other companies that contract for their ads to be delivered should be prosecuted and their owners/directors jailed for their abuses.
I also have an opinion about software companies leaving their products vulnerable for years like this, but that's for another debate.
Your plan:
1. Hack Train System.
2. Stop Train at Pre-determined location
3. Have baddies with guns at location to hold hostages.
My plan:
1. Use gun to stop train.
2. Use gun to hold hostages.
The only thing that I could think of is that it would let the bad guys take remote control and hold the passengers hostage without ever having to physically put themselves at risk. The flaw in this though is that since the train is powered off of the 3rd rail, all that the MTA has to do is to power down that segment of track like they were performing maintenance, which should stop everything.
Either way, if someone these days is taking hostages they'd better be prepared to kill a lot of them, especially if there are only a few of them and there are a lot of hostages. After recent history, hostages are very much likely to fight back. It may kill a few of them, but I'd personally rather run the risk of being one harmed in a swarm attacking than leave fate totally unknown and have high odds of dying without trying to save myself.
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Some friends of mine had a very long-running and fairly successful cable access show entitled, "Fusion Patrol," in Phoenix, that ran weekly for many seasons, and actually had a fairly decent following. They made fun of science fiction and mainstream TV shows and the personalities behind those shows, with a little of other stuff along with. They got cancelled when they made an episode parodying awards shows with, "The Limp Cable Awards", which got them banned by COX Cable due to the political incorrectness of the skit "Jerry's Kids Can Cook Too"... Ah, good times...
I didn't say that he doesn't have a right to use another company's product. He doesn't have a right to restrict or develop use at a patentable level without obtaining some kind of developer's rights. He can still even create his tool, but it shouldn't be patentable.
But so far enforcement of software patents hasn't been very strong. The entire software industry is a house of cards, and almost all of the heavies know that if they started enforcing software patents on each other that *someone* would come out as top dog with the most secure base, and basically everyone would lose.
I'm not 100% against software patents, but I believe that such a circumstance should require that the patent be actively used in a product or be a product in of itself. In this particular example I don't believe that the guy's patent should have really been valid anyway, since he's using another company's copyrighted products in his device without licensing those products for his own process. My enjoyment of seeing Microsoft take one in the shorts just happens to outweigh my dislike of the system for once.
I don't believe that holding companies that don't have any direct products should be allowed to hold patents on software processes that weren't developed internally, and I also believe that failure to continue to maintain a product with an applicable patent should be grounds for release of that patent back into the community at large. This way if a company stops making software available then others can make workalikes rather than let a possibly good thing disappear.
... if you're running around being chased by someone with one of these, chanting, "I refuse to be railed! I refuse to be railed!" repeatedly at high speed will cause them to lose their nerve and not be able to hit the broad side of a barn.
At least, it worked that way in Quake II at LAN parties.
Though it sometimes caused the person with the gun to drop out of the game, reboot into Linux, and start denial-of-service attacking the guy who was chanting...
"that MS is firing a few thousand patents a year at the USPTO - protecting themselves."
EEEEH! Wrong! All that they have to do is demonstrate prior art if they're charged with patent infringement. If they can show such then they should be able to win just about any lawsuit alleging wrongdoing. The entire point of a patent is to claim exclusive original rights or exclusive use.
"However, most people don't aquire a wifi card until they get broadband, unless their laptop comes with one."
That's not the experience that I have in coffee shops. I know of plenty of people in the 18-30 demographic that only own a laptop for their computer and only use Internet access where it's available free. Amusingly enough they're also the kind of people to take up space in a coffee house without buying much if anything because they're borderline-poor; they grew up not wanting for basics in life and now that they've never had to really work for them before they don't really plant roots to live or to get down to making a professional living of their own.
The broken hinge on my laptop was probably the best thing to happen to me to keep me from falling into that lifestyle myself. When I'm out and about I don't concern myself with Internet access. I'm going on a trip to a science fiction convention tomorrow and I'll be taking a camera, a PDA to look at the pictures from the camera, and travel accessories, and I'll be away from mainstream computer use for about four days. I'm looking forward to it.
...stays under the control of Time Warner but ends up going off and doing it's own thing then they should name it "AWOL"...
Why do you assume that they don't notify? They have forums and discussion groups and the like for the various developers to talk to each other, so if the distros are involved in that part of the process then they should have a fairly clear understanding of the timetable of the next update.
In some distributions like Debian, individual package maintainers or small teams of maintainers contribute new patches to 'stable' and new versions to 'unstable'. With individual people responsible for such it shouldn't theoretically be that difficult for that person in particular to keep tabs on what's going on with the software that they support.
"I knew a guy who did that on a network of just 20 workstations. He was anal, and wouldn't give anyone else access to authorize MAC addresses. The other techs got rather irate, when they'd change a NIC, add a new machine, or whatever."
Thing is, I know exactly which vendors we have ethernet chipsets (and therefore MAC addresses) from. I don't have to disallow all except certain specific addresses, I have to allow certain ranges that conform to known assets. Admittedly this list is fairly lengthy, but there are a lot that specifically shouldn't be on the network that we can later make exceptions for if the users call us.
"It is a shame that they allow these agencies to recieve funding or for their IS / IT departments to still have jobs."
I work for a large IT department for a government-based organization. The users don't call us when they get new equipment frequently unless it doesn't work. With all of these wireless devices coming 'ready to go' out of the box we don't usually find them unless we physically stumble across them or unless the DHCP server in the device is handing out address on the LAN at the site and therefore breaking connectivity for the users.
Yes, it is technically possible to note the MAC address of a device when it comes on the network and compare it to a table of kinds of equipment, but there are 11 field technicians, four network engineers, and two cable/infrastructure technicians for 25,000 machines. We don't get the funding for supplies, equipment, or manpower that we need, we don't get support from higher-ups in the organization, and we are left being reactionary. Even worse yet, some of the agency-level higherups are all about 'new technology' without giving us the resources to thoroughly investigate it and how it will impact our network, and half of the time they don't even figure out why the users need such technology for before allowing them to order it.
We have machines running from average as low as Windows 95 (though I do still encounter Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in rare cases) and MacOS 7.5.3. Most days I'm astounded that things work as well as they do, let alone at all.
That's the beautiful part- They don't have to write back, they just have to disable the original one and keep a replacement on their person, like in a glove or sleeve.
"Longhorn and Xbox360 look really.. uh.. 'unbranded'"
I could see them doing that almost on purpose. For many markets they are the establishment, whether we want them to be or not. For a long time they did understate their position as far as their operating system is concerned. The user was left with, "this is what a computer is like," rather than, "this is what Windows is like." That has helped ingrain to the userbase what they should expect, which makes any challenger to that (be they Apple, Gnome, KDE, etc) have to overcome being not-normal in addition to simply being different.
If Microsoft's competitors in this market are smart then they'll work to have the best software titles for their platforms available, and to try to get as many third party software producers to produce games for their consoles that the software producers had already planned for Microsoft's. As SNK's NeoGeo proved, a game system is absolutely nothing at all without the software to run on it, no matter how powerful or advanced it really is.
A friend of mine is a planetary geologist that has been working with data from this probe since it reached Mars. He's reasonably convinced that Mars has had active hydrology in the recent past geologically-speaking, so from what I gather he'd be really, really surprised if they found no water at all.
I didn't particularly care for the BBC miniseries. I liked the movie. It's all taste really.
Honestly part of my reason for liking the movie so much was because it managed to do in two hours what the BBC miniseries couldn't do in six or eight or however long it was- tell a decent story but maintain the fairly active pace that I had come to expect from the novels, and still bear some resemblance to what I've known as The Hitchhiker's Guide.
"Meaning the police isn't interested in the US$20 bill you found, but sure as hell is interested in the duffle bag stuffed with US$100's that you found."
That's probably true more because of the increased likelihood of some illicit activity associated with that money rather than simply because it's lost.
Based on what I've seen (used to frequent the Goth scene and go to RHPS for years) you're probably right. Hell, they might not have even gotten paid.
I've got one better...
If I were a customer, I'd insist that they ship me the supposedly legitimate one and pay for my return postage before they get the other one back, seeing as how it was their mistake, not mine, and that I should not be liable for their cockup. If they want it right, they have to do the work to make it right, not me. If they won't support the product then the credit card company gets called and the charge is revoked, as I as a consumer haven't been given what I've paid for.
"True hardware box failures are taken care of by redundancies,not by limiting parts."
It's still very smart to use a small core of very expensive and high quality parts that can function entirely on their own, rather than to have a vast, interconnected system that needs most everything present and working in order to remain functional. It's kind of like Galileo and the Voyager probes, where the basic core was over-engineered the right way to withstand problems, while the external stuff was ultimately expendable or redundant.
"Yes, but response time for anomaly teams is usually an hour at best. Many satellites have built-in error checking and will take care of themselves given the chance, including putting themselves into 'safemode.'"
These systems drop back to a minimal mode using their high quality cores while ignoring the add-ons and modules that have failed. The basic system is very solid, the severable or ignorable expansion bus, to use an analogy, is where parts that could malfunction or otherwise have issues are placed, so to reduce the chances of causing a complete failure. K.I.S.S. principle is a very, very good design, especially when there are a lack of restrictions governing how the core has to be applied. Cars got complicated, for example, not when automakers decided to make them more difficult, but when external forces like pollution controls forced automakers to cobble extra stuff on to their engines and exhaust systems, and when fuel economy rules forced the adoption of increasingly complex control systems that are themselves prone to failure LONG before the "open valve, suck air and fuel in, compress fuel/air, explode fuel/air, decompress fuel/air, force fuel/air out through another valve" portion of the engine malfunctions.
"Somehow, I doubt that. A tactical spacecraft--at the current, only an ICBM or slimiar missle--will be nothing but manuvering, with an unusually high allotment of its weight given over to course correction."
So, what's to prevent the engaging ship from detonating weapons in six to eight positions relative to where they think the target is, so that if the target moves they still end up destroying it?
I'd think that the future of space warfare would be in the effectiveness of decoys and disguise, rather than in the effectiveness of dodging close range fire. If they can't find you then it's harder to hit you, and if they find a convincing enough decoy then they may mistake its destruction for your destruction, leaving you to find them and destroy them or to pull out and regroup elsewhere.
A point that is missed by lots of people, and even myself when I don't actively think about it, is that since we're using web browsers that aren't subject to hijacking or spyware, we don't see the other reason to get mad at web site owners and advertisers.
As far as I'm concerned, they've violated any form of 'social contract' en masse by hijacking peoples' PCs for new ways of delivering ads. I believe that installing software through bugs in the web browser is tantamount to breaking into someones' computer. Companies that design and implement such software, and other companies that contract for their ads to be delivered should be prosecuted and their owners/directors jailed for their abuses.
I also have an opinion about software companies leaving their products vulnerable for years like this, but that's for another debate.
...except on versions of their operating system below 10.0 that weren't AUX...
Either way, if someone these days is taking hostages they'd better be prepared to kill a lot of them, especially if there are only a few of them and there are a lot of hostages. After recent history, hostages are very much likely to fight back. It may kill a few of them, but I'd personally rather run the risk of being one harmed in a swarm attacking than leave fate totally unknown and have high odds of dying without trying to save myself.
"Corresponding windows assistance. Click on the link thingie, then click the movie thingie."
That's odd, that's what I did on my Debian box and it worked too...