Had you clicked the link in the summary you would have seen this as the second sentence:
The two have been mired in litigation since 1990, which is when Rambus first sought license fees and threatened infringement lawsuits against memory makers who turned to the popular SDRAM standard over its own.
Rambus started suing immediately after they formed the company.
The Rambus debacle actually pre-dates Slashdot. The patent cat fight started in 1990, and slashdot started in 1997. It was old news by the time it was first mentioned on Slashdot.
Join a consortium to develop a standard, sneak out at a quarter to four and patent the whole thing behind everyone's back and start throwing sue balls at everyone. They never had an original idea, or a working product.
Yeah, but start billing somebody every time they look at your page and you can guarantee that people won't be coming to your site very often, or the number of page views will go down quite a bit.
But to-date, nobody has set up a payment method that is as easy to get into as the one proposed here, and you end up having to create accounts all over the web, give out credentials to people you don't trust etc. If I could do it one place, and expect to see minuscule page view rates I think you could sell it.
All of the current methods of doing this are simply too expensive to process and the web sites have an inflated concept of their value.
This is due to the current ad based revenue model where advertisers end up paying anywhere from 10 cents to 4 or 5 bucks per click, and web site developers earn virtually nothing on those clicks, and the rest flows to google.
The actual cost of a web page view is minuscule, and the actual earnings a company needs to make are similarly small, because the volume of hits means they can make money even at 100th of a cent, or even less.
I tossed out a quarter of a cent in my example above, but that is very much probably excessive. It would be hard to measure on a site like Slashdot, because just defining what is a Page View is not clear due to all the server transactions that occur in support of posting.
But on CNN, or the NYT, or any blog site you are interested in, I think I could justify paying somewhere between 1/100th and 1/10th of a cent per story view (not the landing page).
And being DJB, surely some of that 300 lines is comments insulting all his fellow cryptographers, the users, and generally complaining that the world is full of idiots?
Or, you could click the link and find out how wrong you are....
. Kind of hard to do with a single piece of equipment though.
The poster you are responding to spoke of blue-ray players in the plural. No risk of a single piece of equipment failing here. Apparently being without a movie playing for more than 10 seconds is a very frightening thing. He needs multiple players so that he has no single point of failure.
Sounds more like burying them in useless information to justify your high price of maintenance contracts. People see through this snow job very quickly.
People want summary information, not line by line code change logs.
The OP asks "Can you provide PUBLICLY AVAILABLE REFERENCES on the pros and cons of open and honest communication of changes and bug fixes, especially in commercial environments?"
Well he may have asked for that, but I wager he knows better than to expect Slashdot to do his google work for him. Instead, he gets a multitude of opinions, which, for someone too lazy to google, is all they deserve.
There are bugs in software. Everyone knows that. All people want to know is that the big issues are fixed. New functionality is added, or old functionality is made easier to use. Nobody cares about spelling errors corrected.
That kind of stuff is used to justify your job to your boss (found 17 client facing spelling errors, here is the list...... That isn't the kind of stuff any customer is looking for.
I find the whole topic rather contrived. Does this guy not use software purchased from others? Does he sit waiting with baited breath for each release, and track down every minor change and spelling correction? Who does that? Who would care?
Your customers are lucky, they get to know that something changed. If you were making 'cloud' software, they wouldn't know anything changed until they logged in one morning and things are broken.
Not sure you need that much detail to know something is happening and something changed.
Many companies just mention "bug fixes" as a general category that covers typos or potential problems that no one has actually reported.
We just mention things that users have reported, improvements they have asked for, and limitations that were removed and new capabilities added. We've issued some updates with the single statement "Bug Fixes". We've issued other updates that require extensive documentation changes as well as conversion steps to get to the new version.
But no one needs to see every t you belatedly cross or every i you finally got around to dotting. People want to see progress in features and functions, and as little disruption to their work flow as possible.
More likely they discovered early on that the best Indian Lawyers are a wise investment. Never try to do business in a country without hiring a well connected local lawyer.
Nonsense, there at least 6 manufacturers making windows phones. They don't need to manufacturer their own. But if they want to, They could buy HTC out of petty cash.
I don't think you can compare it to a physical situation.
If you had secure operating systems, and encrypted data flows, and weren't listening on a bazillion ports, it would be just as easy to secure the network by securing individual computers as it would to secure the perimeter.
The problem is security is a bolted on afterthought for some operating systems (Windows), printers, storage devices, and software applications. If we could get past that, we could stop building walls.
The thing is, reading some random web page is worth some fraction of a cent. And if a news story, or a blog post cost a quarter of a cent, (or less) and the authors would probably earn more money than by foisting ads on their readers.
The ads cost money (bandwidth, to both sender and receiver) to serve, integrate, and manage. A micro-payment with zero friction (no fees) could be just as cost effective.
If they can maintain the anonymity angle (and make it NSA proof) everybody gains. Its a great concept, long over due, and significantly different than Bitcoin. That doesn't mean I think it is patentable.
"Why bother investing in a huge corp network when you can't trust it anyway?"
Redundency in security.
And its in-hand. You can fix it, expand it, modernize it, control it, instead of shifting all that responsibility to some third party to which you are merely another customer.
Trusting nothing, protection at machine level, the user level, the application level and the data level will not do away with the corporate networks. If anything, it may have the opposite effect, and encourage more use of such wholly-owned networks, perhaps melded with some cloud services.
But as sooner we move away from the Maginot Line mentality for our networks the better.
It may seem counter intuitive in the physical world, but a point defense system is easier to implement in computer networks than in the real world. Each computer should protect itself. Build this in from the beginning and it just happens naturally each computer, each file, each application. Because relying on the stockade to keep out the attackers hasn't actually worked that well in the physical world, and costs a boatload of money and expertise in the network world.
What good is ipv6 if we all have to hide behind firewalls forever.?
Yes, but I'm thinking more of USPTO process in this case. The patent can still be granted unless someone files a petition citing prior art. After that it may be invalidated based on Bitcoin existing, but my point it that it's still possible that the bank can receive this patent.
Except that it is almost exactly unlike bitcoin. Because it deals in real bank account and real money. Money you can spend anywhere.
The novel part is the fees-free micropayments, which will allow you to use things on the web without being flooded with ads for things you don't want. Payments as low as factional pennies. Its a frangible currency.
However, SCOTUS is currently reviewing this whole field of "do something via computer" and get a patent, and the whole business practices thing is as likely to be tossed out or more tightly limited in the aftermath. Coin is coin. And doing it by computer is not that new. Micro-payments are not that new. They were simply too expensive to deal with in the past.
Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
But its not bitcoin, and you can actually spend the money anywhere you want, because in the end it is delivering real money to real accounts from other real accounts.
Negotiating a bitcoin sale or purchase is still like a scavenger hunt. Even if a willing buyer finds a willing seller the product is usually not exactly what they were looking for, close by, or convenient. There are maybe 5 restaurants in the world that will take bitcoin. And who wants to eat in a crowd of nerds.
It makes perfect sense in industry. Plant automation is a huge field.
To date, this has all been done with limit switches, really simple devices that sense moving parts along conveyors. Break one of the limit switches and the whole place comes crashing down. M2M would make a lot of sense in this regard, but its not clear that your average home would benefit all that much, nor the average home owner.
I seriously doubt the average employee sits around with his fellow workers, rubbing their hands together, checking out people's e-mail for the sake of violating their liberty..
Then you haven't been paying attention.
Seriously, stop thumping your chest like you know something and start reading what ex-employees are saying.
All well and good, but not realistic. People don't want this. No one wants their fridge to place orders just because that 20 pound turkey is almost gone. Lets get grocery delivery working before we have fridges ordering food for us. We would be more successful bar code scanning what cans and packages that we throw in the trash to create a shopping list, but even the supermarkets can't get bar code scanning fool proof yet.
We need to concentrate on what is practical, not attempt to remake civilization.
Manage power consumption, turn off lights when no one is around, dim them, etc. Start the coffee pot, but only if its prepped and ready.
The story is about standards, and first and foremost we should start with security. Then easy of use (how to tell said toaster who owns it, who it should listen to, who it may talk to, etc).
How utterly sad it must be to function like this. Are all americans sheeple?
This is somehow unique to Americans, is that your implication?
I'm pretty sure you can find "go along to get along" thinking in any country you could name. Including many countries who are currently engaged in a war against their own people simply to avoid having a real election.
I don't think painting them all the same color is fair.
They insist that we do so.
Until they open up about who does what, we have no recourse but to treat them as a black box.
There are a whole raft of US Judges that need to be prosecuted as well. We can start there. Those are the people who gave the NSA and CIA cover to do all this stuff.
But that takes a conspiracy, doesn't it? The stuff the NSA does is dependent on everyone involved being comfortable with what they're doing. That may not be the same as what we're comfortable with, but there has to be an internal narrative that supports the action and that's shared by the people acting on that narrative.
A conspiracy of ONE, as Snowden clearly demonstrated.
And if you believe this agency is above tipping the party that promises them the most, about the activities of the others, you are sadly mistaken. Emails with opposition talking points mysteriously appearing in inboxes? That would Never happen, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Had you clicked the link in the summary you would have seen this as the second sentence:
The two have been mired in litigation since 1990, which is when Rambus first sought license fees and threatened infringement lawsuits against memory makers who turned to the popular SDRAM standard over its own.
Rambus started suing immediately after they formed the company.
The Rambus debacle actually pre-dates Slashdot.
The patent cat fight started in 1990, and slashdot started in 1997. It was old news by the time it was first mentioned on Slashdot.
Exactly,
Join a consortium to develop a standard, sneak out at a quarter to four and patent the whole thing behind everyone's back and start throwing sue balls at everyone. They never had an original idea, or a working product.
Nothing in bitcoin can infringe this new patent application, because bitcoin is prior art.
Its up to the patent to avoid bitcoin features.
Yeah, but start billing somebody every time they look at your page and you can guarantee that people won't be coming to your site very often, or the number of page views will go down quite a bit.
But to-date, nobody has set up a payment method that is as easy to get into as the one proposed here, and you end up having to create accounts all over the web, give out credentials to people you don't trust etc. If I could do it one place, and expect to see minuscule page view rates I think you could sell it.
All of the current methods of doing this are simply too expensive to process and the web sites have an inflated concept of their value.
This is due to the current ad based revenue model where advertisers end up paying anywhere from 10 cents to 4 or 5 bucks per click, and web site developers earn virtually nothing on those clicks, and the rest flows to google.
The actual cost of a web page view is minuscule, and the actual earnings a company needs to make are similarly small, because the volume of hits means they can make money even at 100th of a cent, or even less.
I tossed out a quarter of a cent in my example above, but that is very much probably excessive.
It would be hard to measure on a site like Slashdot, because just defining what is a Page View is not clear due to all the
server transactions that occur in support of posting.
But on CNN, or the NYT, or any blog site you are interested in, I think I could justify paying somewhere between 1/100th and 1/10th of a cent per story view (not the landing page).
Most of the problems were addressed in a Stanford Study and they all center around the friction and transaction costs..
When you don't understand encryption, it all looks like ROT13.
Best leave that to the big boys.
And being DJB, surely some of that 300 lines is comments insulting all his fellow cryptographers, the users, and generally complaining that the world is full of idiots?
Or, you could click the link and find out how wrong you are....
. Kind of hard to do with a single piece of equipment though.
The poster you are responding to spoke of blue-ray players in the plural. No risk of a single piece of equipment failing here.
Apparently being without a movie playing for more than 10 seconds is a very frightening thing. He needs multiple players
so that he has no single point of failure.
Trust my ass...
Sounds more like burying them in useless information to justify your high price of maintenance contracts.
People see through this snow job very quickly.
People want summary information, not line by line code change logs.
The OP asks "Can you provide PUBLICLY AVAILABLE REFERENCES on the pros and cons of open and honest communication of changes and bug fixes, especially in commercial environments?"
Well he may have asked for that, but I wager he knows better than to expect Slashdot to do his google work for him.
Instead, he gets a multitude of opinions, which, for someone too lazy to google, is all they deserve.
There are bugs in software. Everyone knows that.
All people want to know is that the big issues are fixed. New functionality is added, or old functionality is made easier to use.
Nobody cares about spelling errors corrected.
That kind of stuff is used to justify your job to your boss (found 17 client facing spelling errors, here is the list......
That isn't the kind of stuff any customer is looking for.
I find the whole topic rather contrived. Does this guy not use software purchased from others?
Does he sit waiting with baited breath for each release, and track down every minor change and spelling correction?
Who does that? Who would care?
Your customers are lucky, they get to know that something changed. If you were making 'cloud' software, they wouldn't know anything changed until they logged in one morning and things are broken.
Not sure you need that much detail to know something is happening and something changed.
Many companies just mention "bug fixes" as a general category that covers typos or potential problems that no one has actually reported.
We just mention things that users have reported, improvements they have asked for, and limitations that were removed and new capabilities added.
We've issued some updates with the single statement "Bug Fixes".
We've issued other updates that require extensive documentation changes as well as conversion steps to get to the new version.
But no one needs to see every t you belatedly cross or every i you finally got around to dotting. People want to see progress in features and functions, and as little disruption to their work flow as possible.
More likely they discovered early on that the best Indian Lawyers are a wise investment.
Never try to do business in a country without hiring a well connected local lawyer.
Nonsense, there at least 6 manufacturers making windows phones. They don't need to manufacturer their own.
But if they want to, They could buy HTC out of petty cash.
I don't think you can compare it to a physical situation.
If you had secure operating systems, and encrypted data flows, and weren't listening on a bazillion ports, it would be just as easy to secure the network by securing individual computers as it would to secure the perimeter.
The problem is security is a bolted on afterthought for some operating systems (Windows), printers, storage devices, and software applications.
If we could get past that, we could stop building walls.
Pieces of eight.
The thing is, reading some random web page is worth some fraction of a cent. And if a news story, or a blog post cost a quarter of a cent, (or less) and the authors would probably earn more money than by foisting ads on their readers.
The ads cost money (bandwidth, to both sender and receiver) to serve, integrate, and manage. A micro-payment with zero friction (no fees) could be just as cost effective.
If they can maintain the anonymity angle (and make it NSA proof) everybody gains. Its a great concept, long over due, and significantly different than Bitcoin. That doesn't mean I think it is patentable.
"Why bother investing in a huge corp network when you can't trust it anyway?"
Redundency in security.
And its in-hand. You can fix it, expand it, modernize it, control it, instead of shifting all that responsibility to some third party to which you are merely another customer.
Trusting nothing, protection at machine level, the user level, the application level and the data level will not do away with the corporate networks.
If anything, it may have the opposite effect, and encourage more use of such wholly-owned networks, perhaps melded with some cloud services.
But as sooner we move away from the Maginot Line mentality for our networks the better.
It may seem counter intuitive in the physical world, but a point defense system is easier to implement in computer networks than in the real world. Each computer should protect itself. Build this in from the beginning and it just happens naturally each computer, each file, each application. Because relying on the stockade to keep out the attackers hasn't actually worked that well in the physical world, and costs a boatload of money and expertise in the network world.
What good is ipv6 if we all have to hide behind firewalls forever.?
Yes, but I'm thinking more of USPTO process in this case. The patent can still be granted unless someone files a petition citing prior art. After that it may be invalidated based on Bitcoin existing, but my point it that it's still possible that the bank can receive this patent.
Except that it is almost exactly unlike bitcoin. Because it deals in real bank account and real money. Money you can spend anywhere.
The novel part is the fees-free micropayments, which will allow you to use things on the web without being flooded with ads for things
you don't want. Payments as low as factional pennies. Its a frangible currency.
However, SCOTUS is currently reviewing this whole field of "do something via computer" and get a patent, and the whole business practices thing is as likely to be tossed out or more tightly limited in the aftermath.
Coin is coin. And doing it by computer is not that new. Micro-payments are not that new. They were simply too expensive to deal with in the past.
Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
But its not bitcoin, and you can actually spend the money anywhere you want, because in the end it is
delivering real money to real accounts from other real accounts.
Negotiating a bitcoin sale or purchase is still like a scavenger hunt. Even if a willing buyer finds a willing seller the product is usually not exactly what they were looking for, close by, or convenient. There are maybe 5 restaurants in the world that will take bitcoin. And who wants to eat in a crowd of nerds.
It makes perfect sense in industry. Plant automation is a huge field.
To date, this has all been done with limit switches, really simple devices that sense moving parts along conveyors.
Break one of the limit switches and the whole place comes crashing down.
M2M would make a lot of sense in this regard, but its not clear that your average home would benefit all that much,
nor the average home owner.
I seriously doubt the average employee sits around with his fellow workers, rubbing their hands together, checking out people's e-mail for the sake of violating their liberty..
Then you haven't been paying attention.
Seriously, stop thumping your chest like you know something and start reading what ex-employees are saying.
All well and good, but not realistic.
People don't want this. No one wants their fridge to place orders just because that 20 pound turkey is almost gone.
Lets get grocery delivery working before we have fridges ordering food for us.
We would be more successful bar code scanning what cans and packages that we throw in the trash
to create a shopping list, but even the supermarkets can't get bar code scanning fool proof yet.
We need to concentrate on what is practical, not attempt to remake civilization.
Manage power consumption, turn off lights when no one is around, dim them, etc.
Start the coffee pot, but only if its prepped and ready.
The story is about standards, and first and foremost we should start with security.
Then easy of use (how to tell said toaster who owns it, who it should listen to, who it may talk to, etc).
Let's see if I can rephrase your post: "They wouldn't let me in their club because I discovered THEY were lying
Fixed it for you.
How utterly sad it must be to function like this. Are all americans sheeple?
This is somehow unique to Americans, is that your implication?
I'm pretty sure you can find "go along to get along" thinking in any country you could name.
Including many countries who are currently engaged in a war against their own people simply to avoid having
a real election.
I don't think painting them all the same color is fair.
They insist that we do so.
Until they open up about who does what, we have no recourse but to treat them as a black box.
There are a whole raft of US Judges that need to be prosecuted as well. We can start there. Those are the people who gave the NSA and CIA cover to do all this stuff.
But that takes a conspiracy, doesn't it? The stuff the NSA does is dependent on everyone involved being comfortable with what they're doing. That may not be the same as what we're comfortable with, but there has to be an internal narrative that supports the action and that's shared by the people acting on that narrative.
A conspiracy of ONE, as Snowden clearly demonstrated.
And if you believe this agency is above tipping the party that promises them the most, about the activities of the others, you are sadly mistaken. Emails with opposition talking points mysteriously appearing in inboxes? That would Never happen, right?