Back in the old days we used to use separate instruction and data spaces (i.e. on the PDP-11)...
I don't know about RT-11 and RSX-11, but on RSTS-11 the I and D space either weren't used at all or were very rarely used.
I talked to one of the RSTS developers about that at a DECUS once. He said that they didn't use I and D space so you could use the MARK N instruction.
I thought that was rather strange because earlier in a room full of people there for the discussion of programming in assembler language, someone asked about the MARK N instruction. The guy leading the discussion asked if anyone in the room had ever used the MARK N instruction. Out of a couple hundred people or so, it appeared that I was the only one there who had ever used the instruction.
Note: For the benefit of the non-PDP-11 people here, the MARK N instruction was an instruction you pushed on the stack when calling a subroutine for one method of handling subroutine linkage. The 'N' was the number of arguments in the list (or more accurately, the number of words used by the arguments). When exiting the subroutine, you would then execute the instruction and it would do the cleanup and exit from the routine cleanly.
If you push the instruction on the stack, you're operating in D space. In the subroutine, when you would attempt to execute the MARK N instruction, the reference would be to I space and you would attempt to execute something other than the MARK N instruction.
I asked someone from Microsoft that very question a number of years ago. At least, he represented that he was from Microsoft and he did have a Microsoft e-mail address.
His unofficial answer was that as long as you held a valid certificate of authenticity and used that number in only that machine, then it was not a problem.
What I have been curious about is the situation where you purchase a used machine that includes an original valid certificate of authenticity.
If the manufacturers refuse to do do Microsoft's bidding, then Microsoft will be forced to change their attitude because their customers would be unhappy to find that they cannot access their new devices as a result of Microsoft's actions.
The problem is that a few manufacturers would be able to cheat and reap the rewards. The customers could then buy the products of those manufacturers and not the ones who refuse to go along with Microsoft.
At that point, they will all fall in line and do what Microsoft wants.
So if the manufacturers hang together , it will be better for them all. But a small number of defectors would gain a competitive advantage by not hanging together.
We don't have much crime in our community, but in the city to the north, the crime rate is rising.
Our real problem isn't what's in the houses, but what's in the barn and the shops. Someone did drive up one night years ago and load up a few rather expensive tools. We are pretty sure who did it, it is impossible to prove it. Fortunately, the thief has moved away from the area and isn't expected to return.
We are thinking about building a gate across the driveway leading to the house (about a half mile from the house) and locking it every night.
I don't think they'll try to conquer the US. At least not in the next century.
However, it is not unlikely that they will at some point invade another country in their region and draw us into the war. They will probably expect us to back down and will be surprised when we don't.
Another possibility is that they will use their dominant position (that we will give them) in certain critical areas to weaken us further to the point where we will have no choice but to back down.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least 100 instances of large corporations using patents to stifle competition for every instance of an individual using patents to protect their inventions.
Not all wars, probably not even most wars, are fought over ideology.
I think that wars are more often fought for reasons of power or to acquire territory. While such wars may be between countries with different ideologies, the ideological differences are more likely to be lead the countries to war than to be the purpose of the war.
I understand that the Chinese have already expressed the view that the US has no business interfering with China's ambitions in their own region. They see themselves as the leading power in their region and it is none of our business what they do with that power.
The only ideological differences that matter in this case are those of the Chinese that it is their right to exercise power throughout the region without limitation from outside that region and of the US that we have the right to limit or stop such aggrestion and to come to the aid of our allies.
These ideological differences may lead to war, but the war would not be fought over those ideological differences.
One common thread to anything done by the U.S. government is that big business is preferable over small business is preferable over independent contractors.
After all, how often does the federal government do anything to protect small businesses or individuals from being destroyed by large businesses?
They are more likely to protect the big businesses from being mistreated by small businesses.
For example, the whole patent system is nothing but protection of big business from small businesses and individuals.
When it comes time for important contracts, who gets the contracts, the big business or the small business? From what I see, it doesn't matter at all if the small business has much greater expertise in the matter.
So if the big business can make money by moving some activities overseas, everything is just fine with Congress.
As long as the big corporations and those corporations with friends in Congress make tons of money, nothing else matters.
Of course, there is a bigger issue that everyone ignores.
When we export jobs, we are exporting vital expertise. After those who used to do the work are no longer up to date, we lose the ability to do the work ourselves. We're not there with software development and it will take a while, but it is forseeable that at some point we won't have the expertise we need to handle emergencies.
So what happens when China declares war against us 40 or 50 years from now? What do we do after they cut off our access to the exepertise we will need to win the war?
Include all the manufacturing that we no longer have the capability of doing without a long lead-time, and we're going to be in serious trouble.
Our chances of prevailing against China will be about like Poland's chances against Germany in the early days of World War II.
It looks to me like we're well on our way to losing the next WOrld War.
"Well initially he told me that he really couldn't do anything for me," Tami Kegley says of the Wal-Mart employee she dealt with. "He said it was a corporate issue."
But Tami persisted, and got finally got the $150.00. Carol also got her money back.
Re:It ends when they get some tech folks in there
on
More Microsoft Patents
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My suggestions on how to fix the problem:
1) Publish all patent applications immediately.
2) Require that the patent application identify anyone against whom an action may be brought or anyone that the applicant may want to put on formal notice about the patent. Under this scheme, I would think that any company filing a patent would provide formal notice to all known competitors from the very beginning.
2a) If an alleged infringement is identified after the patent is filed, but not issued, ammend the patent to include the newly identified alleged infringers and restart the entire procedure from the date of the submission of the ammended patent.
2b) If the patent has already been granted when the alleged infringement is identified, begin a patent review process. This review proecess should include the same steps as the original application.
3) Require a public, working demonstration of the invention not less than three months after the date that the alleged infringers have been notified. Make sure that the date of the working demonstration is publicly available and that the alleged infringers have been made aware of the date of the demonstration.
4) Following the public demonstration, allow a period of at least six months, preferably twelve months, during which the public and the alleged infringers may provide comments and objections to the patent. All comments and objections would become part of the patent and would be publically available to any interested party.
5) Following the period available for public comments, the patent examiner would then review the patent and the public comments.
6) If the patent examiner requires changes to the patent, for example, changes to the claims, allow a further period of public comments on such changes. Two to three months after proper notification would be sufficient.
7) If all the claims are rejected, the patent should be rejected in its entirity and the company seeking the patent should be precluded from reapplying for the same patent, but with different claims.
8) Before the patent application is accepted, require a final public hearing during which time final objections to the patent may be made known.
I think that this would allow plenty of opportunity for truly novel and useful inventions to be patented, but would significantly cut down on the number of silly patents.
One of the primary purposes of the above process is to require that every possible defendant be given proper notice of the process and have opportunity to bring objections to the patent prior to any infringement action.
For example, suppose XYZ Widgets invented a new widget and wishes to patent the invention. Suppose that Widgets R Us is the company's primary competitor and seems likely to build something similar once they see the product. Then, in the patent application, XYZ Widgets could provide notice to Widgets R Us just in case. Thus, Widgets R Us would have been put on notice of the patent and will be able to object.
During the patent application process, another company, Mr Widget Inc, comments on the application. In spite of those comments, they would need to be formally notified of the patent application prior to any infringement action. Thus, XYZ Widgets may elect to ammend the patent application to include a formal notification to Mr Widget Inc. This would effectively restart the timetable for the application process.
After the patent has been granted, XYZ Widgets finds that a brand new company, Western Wyoming Widget, is infringing on their patent. Since they did not provide notice to Western Wyoming Widget of the application, they would file for a reexamination of the patent with a formal notification of the reexamination to Western Wyoming Widget. The entire proecess including the public demonstration, the period of public comments, and the final public hearing would begin again.
If, during this time, XYZ Widgets learned that Widgets R Us were violating the pat
On the other hand, you could tell anyone who you want to have the ability to call you from somewhere other than their house to spoof their id with their home telephone number. That way, you could ignore all telephone calls that don't appear to originate from a select set of telephone numbers.
For that matter, someone working from home could spoof their company's telephone number when they need to talk to a customer.
Or you could call home from the local bar or brothel but make your office telephone number show up on the display.
It just limits the domains that the spoofed addresses can originate from.
That's why I don't like SPF and hope it fails miserably. We need something stronger.
What I'd like to see is that the SMTP server requires users to authenticate themselves to send e-mail and signs the e-mail to assert that the from e-mail address really is the address of the sender.
For example, suppose you have an account at example.com, hypnagogue@example.com, and so do I, eric76@example.com.
With SPF, I can send e-mail with hypnagogue@example.com as the sender address.
If, on the other hand, I had to authenticate myself as hypnagogue@example.com, it would be much more difficult. I could put hypnagogue@example.com as the sender, but the server would insert a header line identifying eric76@example.com as the real sender and sign it so that the receiver could verify that it really came from that sender.
Of course, a blacklist would still be necessary.
A note on blacklists. The usual approach is to blacklist the server. To be really useful with SPF, the blacklist would have to cover the domain without regard to the server involved.
Consider the following scenario.
Assume that example.com is owned by a bunch of spammers who have control of many home machines. Assume that 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5 are two such machines. Then the spammers could use 1.2.3.4 on Sunday to spam aol.com and 1.2.3.5 to spam yahoo.com. They could then set their modified DNS server to answer SPF requests from aol.com to identify 1.2.3.4 as the valid SMTP server and they could answer SPF requests from yahoo.com to identify 1.2.3.5 as the valid server.
So one spammer with a lot of computers could mix them up day by day and it might take a while to get all the IP addresses listed.
But if you instead blacklisted on the domain name itself, all you would need to blacklist is example.com. It wouldn't matter which computer they used to send the spam.
If enough people over a period of time asked if they could hook it up to their computer and decided not to buy when they say no, maybe they would rethink their decision.
Maybe the objection to Harry Potter books is that in the Hogwart's school library, there is an entire section of books that are off-limits to the students unless they have special permission to read specific books.
Slashdot Mirror
They could scan in the documents and post them quicker than they would be available from the court.
I don't know about RT-11 and RSX-11, but on RSTS-11 the I and D space either weren't used at all or were very rarely used.
I talked to one of the RSTS developers about that at a DECUS once. He said that they didn't use I and D space so you could use the MARK N instruction.
I thought that was rather strange because earlier in a room full of people there for the discussion of programming in assembler language, someone asked about the MARK N instruction. The guy leading the discussion asked if anyone in the room had ever used the MARK N instruction. Out of a couple hundred people or so, it appeared that I was the only one there who had ever used the instruction.
Note: For the benefit of the non-PDP-11 people here, the MARK N instruction was an instruction you pushed on the stack when calling a subroutine for one method of handling subroutine linkage. The 'N' was the number of arguments in the list (or more accurately, the number of words used by the arguments). When exiting the subroutine, you would then execute the instruction and it would do the cleanup and exit from the routine cleanly.
If you push the instruction on the stack, you're operating in D space. In the subroutine, when you would attempt to execute the MARK N instruction, the reference would be to I space and you would attempt to execute something other than the MARK N instruction.
Also, remember that copyright law entitles you to make one backup of any software package you legally possess.
I take that to mean that you can legally make a complete backup copy of every Microsoft CD you have.
I asked someone from Microsoft that very question a number of years ago. At least, he represented that he was from Microsoft and he did have a Microsoft e-mail address.
His unofficial answer was that as long as you held a valid certificate of authenticity and used that number in only that machine, then it was not a problem.
What I have been curious about is the situation where you purchase a used machine that includes an original valid certificate of authenticity.
If the manufacturers refuse to do do Microsoft's bidding, then Microsoft will be forced to change their attitude because their customers would be unhappy to find that they cannot access their new devices as a result of Microsoft's actions.
The problem is that a few manufacturers would be able to cheat and reap the rewards. The customers could then buy the products of those manufacturers and not the ones who refuse to go along with Microsoft.
At that point, they will all fall in line and do what Microsoft wants.
So if the manufacturers hang together , it will be better for them all. But a small number of defectors would gain a competitive advantage by not hanging together.
We don't have much crime in our community, but in the city to the north, the crime rate is rising.
Our real problem isn't what's in the houses, but what's in the barn and the shops. Someone did drive up one night years ago and load up a few rather expensive tools. We are pretty sure who did it, it is impossible to prove it. Fortunately, the thief has moved away from the area and isn't expected to return.
We are thinking about building a gate across the driveway leading to the house (about a half mile from the house) and locking it every night.
I bet you believe everything SCO says to be factual as well.
I don't think they'll try to conquer the US. At least not in the next century.
However, it is not unlikely that they will at some point invade another country in their region and draw us into the war. They will probably expect us to back down and will be surprised when we don't.
Another possibility is that they will use their dominant position (that we will give them) in certain critical areas to weaken us further to the point where we will have no choice but to back down.
Actually, they do get something out of it.
When you have a paper to publish, you're going to get a little better treatment if you've done a good job of reviewing papers for that journal.
For example, if it's a close call between your paper and another, it may be enough to get yours accepted.
And it can help get you better reviewers for your papers than if you didn't do peer reviews.
Just how much do they pay for peer review?
Noone I know has ever been paid even one penny for doing a peer review.
I was trying to electronically access some reasearch journals the other day.
My access to those journals should be covered, but because of an authentication problem, the proxy server was not handling the connection.
Without the proxy server the journals wanted something like $30 just to read a single research paper.
If nuclear weapons is all we have at that point, we will have already lost.
When both sides have nuclear weapons, they really have a single purpose - to deter the other side from using their nuclear weapons on you.
There is no doubt that China already has nuclear weapons and that they will have more in the future.
With their nuclear weapons, China would be able to effectively limit our ability to use nuclear weapons against them.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least 100 instances of large corporations using patents to stifle competition for every instance of an individual using patents to protect their inventions.
To the best of my knowledge, Saudia Arabia doesn't have much in the way of aspirations that would lead them to war.
If Saudia Arabia were to go to war, I think it would almost surely be the result of being attacked by one of their neighbors.
Not all wars, probably not even most wars, are fought over ideology.
I think that wars are more often fought for reasons of power or to acquire territory. While such wars may be between countries with different ideologies, the ideological differences are more likely to be lead the countries to war than to be the purpose of the war.
I understand that the Chinese have already expressed the view that the US has no business interfering with China's ambitions in their own region. They see themselves as the leading power in their region and it is none of our business what they do with that power.
The only ideological differences that matter in this case are those of the Chinese that it is their right to exercise power throughout the region without limitation from outside that region and of the US that we have the right to limit or stop such aggrestion and to come to the aid of our allies.
These ideological differences may lead to war, but the war would not be fought over those ideological differences.
One common thread to anything done by the U.S. government is that big business is preferable over small business is preferable over independent contractors.
After all, how often does the federal government do anything to protect small businesses or individuals from being destroyed by large businesses?
They are more likely to protect the big businesses from being mistreated by small businesses.
For example, the whole patent system is nothing but protection of big business from small businesses and individuals.
When it comes time for important contracts, who gets the contracts, the big business or the small business? From what I see, it doesn't matter at all if the small business has much greater expertise in the matter.
So if the big business can make money by moving some activities overseas, everything is just fine with Congress.
As long as the big corporations and those corporations with friends in Congress make tons of money, nothing else matters.
Of course, there is a bigger issue that everyone ignores.
When we export jobs, we are exporting vital expertise. After those who used to do the work are no longer up to date, we lose the ability to do the work ourselves. We're not there with software development and it will take a while, but it is forseeable that at some point we won't have the expertise we need to handle emergencies.
So what happens when China declares war against us 40 or 50 years from now? What do we do after they cut off our access to the exepertise we will need to win the war?
Include all the manufacturing that we no longer have the capability of doing without a long lead-time, and we're going to be in serious trouble.
Our chances of prevailing against China will be about like Poland's chances against Germany in the early days of World War II.
It looks to me like we're well on our way to losing the next WOrld War.
From the article:
My suggestions on how to fix the problem:
1) Publish all patent applications immediately.
2) Require that the patent application identify anyone against whom an action may be brought or anyone that the applicant may want to put on formal notice about the patent. Under this scheme, I would think that any company filing a patent would provide formal notice to all known competitors from the very beginning.
2a) If an alleged infringement is identified after the patent is filed, but not issued, ammend the patent to include the newly identified alleged infringers and restart the entire procedure from the date of the submission of the ammended patent.
2b) If the patent has already been granted when the alleged infringement is identified, begin a patent review process. This review proecess should include the same steps as the original application.
3) Require a public, working demonstration of the invention not less than three months after the date that the alleged infringers have been notified. Make sure that the date of the working demonstration is publicly available and that the alleged infringers have been made aware of the date of the demonstration.
4) Following the public demonstration, allow a period of at least six months, preferably twelve months, during which the public and the alleged infringers may provide comments and objections to the patent. All comments and objections would become part of the patent and would be publically available to any interested party.
5) Following the period available for public comments, the patent examiner would then review the patent and the public comments.
6) If the patent examiner requires changes to the patent, for example, changes to the claims, allow a further period of public comments on such changes. Two to three months after proper notification would be sufficient.
7) If all the claims are rejected, the patent should be rejected in its entirity and the company seeking the patent should be precluded from reapplying for the same patent, but with different claims.
8) Before the patent application is accepted, require a final public hearing during which time final objections to the patent may be made known.
I think that this would allow plenty of opportunity for truly novel and useful inventions to be patented, but would significantly cut down on the number of silly patents.
One of the primary purposes of the above process is to require that every possible defendant be given proper notice of the process and have opportunity to bring objections to the patent prior to any infringement action.
For example, suppose XYZ Widgets invented a new widget and wishes to patent the invention. Suppose that Widgets R Us is the company's primary competitor and seems likely to build something similar once they see the product. Then, in the patent application, XYZ Widgets could provide notice to Widgets R Us just in case. Thus, Widgets R Us would have been put on notice of the patent and will be able to object.
During the patent application process, another company, Mr Widget Inc, comments on the application. In spite of those comments, they would need to be formally notified of the patent application prior to any infringement action. Thus, XYZ Widgets may elect to ammend the patent application to include a formal notification to Mr Widget Inc. This would effectively restart the timetable for the application process.
After the patent has been granted, XYZ Widgets finds that a brand new company, Western Wyoming Widget, is infringing on their patent. Since they did not provide notice to Western Wyoming Widget of the application, they would file for a reexamination of the patent with a formal notification of the reexamination to Western Wyoming Widget. The entire proecess including the public demonstration, the period of public comments, and the final public hearing would begin again.
If, during this time, XYZ Widgets learned that Widgets R Us were violating the pat
On the other hand, you could tell anyone who you want to have the ability to call you from somewhere other than their house to spoof their id with their home telephone number. That way, you could ignore all telephone calls that don't appear to originate from a select set of telephone numbers.
For that matter, someone working from home could spoof their company's telephone number when they need to talk to a customer.
Or you could call home from the local bar or brothel but make your office telephone number show up on the display.
Actually, it doesn't even eliminate spoofing.
It just limits the domains that the spoofed addresses can originate from.
That's why I don't like SPF and hope it fails miserably. We need something stronger.
What I'd like to see is that the SMTP server requires users to authenticate themselves to send e-mail and signs the e-mail to assert that the from e-mail address really is the address of the sender.
For example, suppose you have an account at example.com, hypnagogue@example.com, and so do I, eric76@example.com.
With SPF, I can send e-mail with hypnagogue@example.com as the sender address.
If, on the other hand, I had to authenticate myself as hypnagogue@example.com, it would be much more difficult. I could put hypnagogue@example.com as the sender, but the server would insert a header line identifying eric76@example.com as the real sender and sign it so that the receiver could verify that it really came from that sender.
Of course, a blacklist would still be necessary.
A note on blacklists. The usual approach is to blacklist the server. To be really useful with SPF, the blacklist would have to cover the domain without regard to the server involved.
Consider the following scenario.
Assume that example.com is owned by a bunch of spammers who have control of many home machines. Assume that 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5 are two such machines. Then the spammers could use 1.2.3.4 on Sunday to spam aol.com and 1.2.3.5 to spam yahoo.com. They could then set their modified DNS server to answer SPF requests from aol.com to identify 1.2.3.4 as the valid SMTP server and they could answer SPF requests from yahoo.com to identify 1.2.3.5 as the valid server.
So one spammer with a lot of computers could mix them up day by day and it might take a while to get all the IP addresses listed.
But if you instead blacklisted on the domain name itself, all you would need to blacklist is example.com. It wouldn't matter which computer they used to send the spam.
If I were working on that problem, I would be trying to prove that P and NP are different classes.
That is, that P != NP.
I just don't think that P = NP has any chance of being true.
At $10,000,000, that would be a nice contract to have.
What do you bet that someone with really good connections gets the contract?
If enough people over a period of time asked if they could hook it up to their computer and decided not to buy when they say no, maybe they would rethink their decision.
Maybe the objection to Harry Potter books is that in the Hogwart's school library, there is an entire section of books that are off-limits to the students unless they have special permission to read specific books.
I thought the ultimate was when one guy spotted some Jehovah's Witnesses walking toward his house.
So he quickly took off all his clothes and put them up.
When the Jehovah's Witnesses rang the doorbell, he opened the door and invited them in.
They declined and left.