I hereby coin: sco, scoed, and scojob as in: "They attemped to sco us." "That was a pathetic scojob." (Ok, the last one is redundant.)
It's a 'snow', 'snowjob' to a higher level. Not SCO mind you, must differ from the trademark.
AOL is their own prior art
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 1
I've generally considered BuddyList to be unpatentable, although it was the first presence system to be massively scalable, to completely avoid any kind of polling, AND to gain critical mass. It certainly might have been NARROWLY patentable originally more than many of these silly vanity patents.
AOL, before they purchased ICQ, had already developed BuddyList. I know because I wrote it in 1995 while a consultant to AOL. (No, I never received a single stock option. I also created a high performance database library used in BuddyList/Member Directory and created a project called Instant Images that was very cool, IMHO.)
Since the people that filed the ICQ patent were a couple years too late, it can't be a valid filing even though AOL owns it now. Additionally, I added a number of features and wrote all of the code so any AOL patent based on BuddyList would probably have to have my name on it to be valid.
It's the lifetime of the serial number of the box. In other words, if the box dies, you can buy a new TiVo and transfer the membership to a new TiVo.
The box/service is $550 to $650 depending on size and well worth it. It's also easily hackable for network or extra drive storage and people have even setup HTTP remote programming.
Portable, hand-held cell phones are limited to.8 Watts in the US. Only permanent car phones or 'bag phones', if they still exist, were allowed to go to 2 watts. Basically, anything near your head is limited to.8 watts.
Microwaves use a frequency at which water resonates. It therefore works by exciting, mainly, water molecules. This is why most plates don't warm up except where (moisture containing) food comes into contact. Since this is non-ionizing radiation, it is not supposed to disrupt DNA and other biological processes (i.e., cause mutations) except for the effects of heating. To a large extent, microwaves have a shielded door to: A) hold the heat in so that most of it ends up heating the food, B) not broadcasting which would create nasty radio noise interference, and C) avoid causing burns or other spot heat injuries to humans, animals, and surroundings.
A VCR is a useless piece of ancient junk compared to a Tivo, for time shifting.
Try subscribing to a show for the season, no matter when it's on, and having the device manage recording, aging, automatically deleting, and other features. 30+ hours of these shows with perfect fast forward/reverse, pause, bookmarking, etc. You can't do any of that automatically with a VCR.
Unfortunately, people can't seem to get over the price tag, even though it's fairly cheap now ($300 + listing subscription).
Go buy a Tivo and buy the lifetime subscription (just went up?). Best video entertainment purchase you'll ever make.
I bought one of the original units directly from Tivo when the first/. story on them appeared, long ago.
Schools, especially public schools, are acting as surrogate parents/guardians to minors on behalf of their parents. As surrogate parents, they have, in some cases, parental powers that are completely outside the normal Constitutional rights between the government and adults.
Conflicts come from the difference between parental desire and school policy and actions.
I've had to explain this to a couple teenage sons so far as they tell me that the school is infringing on their Constitutional rights...
I disagree: Atari Basic was on of the best, especially for those running on a 6502. It was far more stable, complete, and carried a number of advanced features that MS Basic was lacking. The math package was a very cool base-100 system that was accurate (unlike ALL MSBasic versions until recently) with high-precision. Strings were only limited by size of memory and could contain relocatable assembly that could be executed easily.
On top of all of that, they published the source to the whole thing: Basic, math rom, and OS rom, with complete documentation. I still have a complete set of books and documentation and a working later model.
I learned Basic, 6502 assembly, Forth, Small C, Pascal, Lisp, etc. on my 8-bit Atari when I was 15-16...
First, it wouldn't be that difficult to modify the kernel to support this. I've released patches to work around bugs in the ARP reply with two NIC's. Routing to the active port shouldn't be too difficult.
A non-kernel invasive version of this would be a script that configures one port with the desired IP/mask and creates the default route. It then puts the other port in promiscuous mode and monitors it for traffic using a libpcap based program or even a possibly modified tcpdump. As soon as it sees any traffic, it switches the configuration and starts monitoring the other port. This could probably be written in 2-4 hours given a network to test it in.
For a possibly simpler solution (i.e. no code to write), use a pair of additional Linux systems. Configure each of them to load balance with LinuxVirtualServer (aka LinuxDirector) or the Pirhana version of it to as many backend servers as you have, BUT to Different internal IP addresses. Good choices would be 10.* addresses, say 10.0.1.* and 10.0.2.*. Using either a dual NIC or two NIC cards in each server, create two networks with one for each of the load distribution servers. Configure Apache et al to respond to the IP addresses of each network the same.
BTW, there are 4 port 100-base-T cards out there, from Adaptec I think.
I've started toying with web browsing via email. My RIM 950, Ardis via Skytel (with an 800# for paging), has unlimited 2K email. The email is lame because: the from email address is the pager ID@skytel.net, it doesn't, through Skytel, access an Imap account, and the system doesn't support adding a signature at the gateway where it wouldn't take airtime characters.
lynx -dump -width=60 http://www.cnn.com, for instance, gives you most of what you need to easily create a web display and process links. It cops out on forms so far and the output needs to be postprocessed to target zones of the page. All easily doable. Links could be requested by replying with the link number. Forms submitted with text after the quoted field lines or tagged.
Email me if you want to help or be notified of progress and I'll create a list.
I have the RIM dev kit, which is free, so it's possible some enhancement could be done that way.
I agree with everything you've said, however you are neglecting the other way to achieve replication and failover: middleware transaction monitor systems.
I am not impressed with what I've heard and observed about the Oracle failover and MS SQL failover. I would completely trust Tandom non-stop, however that's a very high-end solution. I'm not sure about DB2, Informix, and Sybase. When I used Sybase at AOL, we didn't have failover, only RAID.
Most of these systems (except I think Tandom) are limited in a number of ways. Requiring shared hardware (in Oracle's case, as in some others) is not scalable and very expensive, not to mention not ideally reliable. Most are limited to one master machine that replicates to others, often hot spares rather than distributed load processing.
Systems like Tuxedo act as a front-end to database systems and manage distributed transactions, failover, and load balancing. IMHO, this is the way to go.
I have been studying this problem and working on solutions for a while now. If there is anyone who would be interested in working on a transaction monitor project with me, please let me know.
I visited the competition Sunday afternoon. I received an invitation in the mail a month ago.
Viviana was very personable and explained her project to our 14 year old very well. While she is obviously very talented and has a cool project, I actually would have rated several other projects higher for research, experimentation, difficulty, and innovation.
At least 3/4 of the projects were amazing. Robert Wang's project was particularly impressive for a 15 year old from Arkansas. (There were two finalists age 15, the rest were 17 or 18.) He had come up with two useful and apparently innovative 3D detail scaling and visibility culling algorithms that he had implemented in C++ on Windows with an Open/GL demo. He's been programming since he was 10. I suggested he contribute the source to one of the Linux game projects. Scaled for his age, it was impressive.
The most impressive projects, to me, were those that appeared to have broken new ground and actually extended human knowledge sucessfully.
First you install the basic OS with a couple reboots.
Then you install the hotfixes and service packs at home to 20MB a piece (just how are you supposed to get those if you only had one machine??? Each one of these requires a reboot. (5 reboots)
Then, if you have a laptop, try to get the PCMCIA ethernet to work. Last year I had to pay $80 to SystemSoft to get a software layer that would allow my 10/100 card to work, after buying a new one because the old one wouldn't. (2 reboots)
Then install apps, noting that MS says that you must install all hotfixes and service packs after installing any software. I suppose this is needed to replace any of the shared crap in the System directory, etc. (A reboot for some apps and 5 more after installing the OS fix/upgrades again.)
Not to mention that I couldn't get NT to use more than 4GB for a partition.
Something like 40 reboots before I had a database and an app builder working.
Linux on the other hand, takes one reboot and at worst installing a new version of the PCMCIA drivers. Configuring video/audio is sometimes a problem, but recently these have been 5-20 min tasks meaning I'm still done before I would have been through babying an NT 4.0 install.
It is very well established that anyone can make a legal copy of anything they own for at least three purposes that I know of:
Backup (Especially software and data) Time Shifting (Originally VCR/video and now MP3, etc.) Fair Use (fuzzy, but legal use of clips, likeness, parody, reviews, etc.)
These rights supercede contracts and shinkwrap licenses in many or all cases.
As many people have said, we just want to play DVD's under Linux! My laptop is Linux; I don't want to have to reboot into Win98 land to play DVD's. In fact, because of VMWare, the only reason I have a 1GB partition on my HD is to play DVD's.
As an example of legal use of broken/pirated software, I have a software package that I paid $2000+ for, of my own money. The package is great, but it requires a precious dongle that can't be replaced and is quite annoying. After much searching, my friend found a cracked version of the software. I feel I am completely in my rights to use this cracked copy because I have not deprived the company of revenue.
Deprivation of revenue is a key deciding factor in much of copyright law. It can be abused and confused, especially controversial is the claim by many that they would never have purchased something (say Autocad) anyway so there is no harm. I can see both sides.
There are other interesting fair use rules. One that I was told a very long time ago, and have not verified, is that you are allowed to 'make and use' up to 10 copies of an invention for personal use. For paper clips this isn't that useful, but for RSA it may be. As it was described to me, this was part of the basic patent law authorization. (My understanding is that you can't sell an infringing product, probably can't use an infringing product if it is sold to you (maybe given also), but if you 'make' it yourself (from instructions?) you are ok.)
Oh come on! The essence of the 'non-obvious' requirement is to prevent things like this.
I am absolutely sure that any competent engineer would have whipped up substantially the design of the Rio, etc. if you suggested that Flash memory, harddrives, or something similar were about to reach a price point that made it feasible.
What is not obvious about extending the idea of a portable listening device with electro-magnetic memory (Sony (cassette) Walkman) to a portable listening device with optical memory (cd player) to a portable listening device with electro-magnetic-optical memory (Sony Minidisc) to a portable listening device with Flash/Harddrive/SuperRam...?
Just assembling the technology de jour in an obvious way doesn't make a valid patent.
While the Exokernel stuff is interesting, I think that VIA-like optimizations (http://www.viarch.org as previously noted on/., owned by Compaq/Intel/MS) are a better way to go. The idea was originally from a thesis paper and implemented for Unix. (Author not handy due to a recently deceased HD.)
VIA stands for Virtual Interface Architecture. The idea, generally, is to build device drivers that can directly interact with processes or threads with little or no interaction with the kernel. The idea is generally that the driver presents a virtual device interface to each process. The viarch.org guys appear to be concentrating on applying the idea to SAN I/O, but I think that the network/OS/Webserver (SMB, etc. also) is even more interesting given the smaller payloads and higher overhead.
What I would like is to have a process or group of threads that would interface to the NIC and receive a stream of packets and transmit a stream of packets. The exchange could be completely async with large queues and no context switches or other OS interaction (for network traffic). The service processes would contain an integral TCP/IP stack and HTTP server. The device driver would send packets for a particular IP address only to the VIA processes while handling other IP addresses normally.
This would allow optimizations just like those for the Exokernel. People could experiment with various zero copy schemes and other TCP/IP stack optimizations without affecting the operation of the system they were running on.
We need to do this now!
Is anyone working on something like this? Email me! I might even be able to provide some funding.
First, Open Source is not a communist movement. In fact I have always viewed it as a very customized type of market. The exchange is quite a bit different from a typical monetary transaction but it is a market nonetheless. In many ways, as has been shown with projects that have succeeded, it is a more efficient market than the traditional commercial software market, at least for certain classes of problems.
The fact that people can use the software for free doesn't mean that it's communist or socialist. It's a natural extension of realizing that there are other ways to gain benefit from labor than being a toll taker. In a sense everyone that uses Open Source software gains in a way that could be viewed at least two ways: benefiting from the culmination of knowledge (similar to our inheritance of science and other cumulated knowledge) and as pre-payment from the open-source 'group' for possible future contributions. In addition, it creates a society where anyone can use the benefits of the cumulative effort of society while contributing when able. (Similar to what people enjoy in the Real World in most parts of the world.) This contribution will often be a market driven transaction. (Similar to a construction company building a park.)
Just to wear this metaphor a bit, we all like visiting Disney World, but we're sick of paying for admission and every ride and are willing to work together to build some of those features into our neighborhoods.
In other words, the Open Source movement has similarities to scientific and other academic communities, society in general, and commercial markets with a melding of characteristics.
Open Source is a thin but resilient framework consisting of simultaneous bartering, customization or application to a problem for direct or indirect payments, play, academic expansion, creative and constructive outlet, etc.
A company like Microsoft makes the implicit assumption that there are few programmers and they can hire nearly all the good ones and make software for the rest of us. I believe that eventually a large segment of the population will be programmers of some sort, and I firmly believe that it should be a standard subject in secondary schools now. The result, given a few more advances in software and hardware, would be much greater utility, control, and interaction with computers, the net, and other people. More and more programmers will never again be satisfied with closed source. Similarly, companies will become more wary of closed source and the support or existence of the companies that create it.
What many of us see is how much better this hard-to-define, but friendly, comfortable, efficient, rewarding, and fun Open Source (Free Software, etc.) society is than the old world many of us have suffered through (for 18 years in my case).
As for Linux and Unix, you are also way off base. The beauty of the Unix design is that it is infinitely extendable to absorb any advance in operating system design that comes out. The interfaces are lean and clean, the best way to add extensions is generally clear, there is no required truckload of fat if not needed (I.e. MS's requirement of a single user GUI central OS), and it is practically the definition of stable, open interfaces. Linux/Unix of today is light-years ahead of Unix 30 years ago, or even 15 years ago when people had to buy a TCP/IP stack from Wollongong, etc. Just because the core API and concepts have remained stable longer than a MS marketing cycle does not cast obsolescence on the current incarnation.
The number of individuals and companies making contributions to Linux is growing at an amazing rate. It has long ago acheived enough critical mass to propel it for the forseeable future. The value proposition, as the marketing people would say, is very attactive.
I Totally agree! I've been preaching this for a couple years and am implementing a very cool, full featured middleware solution now.
I read a description of what eBay had a few months ago and was shocked at the predictable crash they were heading toward.
The thing is you can't easily patch a monolithic system to run on loose clusters with replication and redundancy. It will appear much more attractive to continue down the monolithic road and add hot-spares.
Few people seem to get what it takes to build truly scalable and reliable systems.
Although everything I do can't practically be open source, I have begun to add clauses to consulting contracts that explicitly allow appropriate contributions. The following is a good example. This is in force now.
"Consultant's and Company's Ownership of Intellectual Property and Derivatives" To best further the goals of the Company, Consultant may make use of third party products or works in the design, creation, and support of the Project Deliverables. Bug fixes, modifications, improvements, and closely related additions to such third party products that do not specifically relate to the Company's business and are not Confidential Information will be property of the Consultant without restriction, and shall be considered part of the Consultant's Accumulated Know-How. An example of this situation is the use by Consultant of a so-called "open source component", where the contribution of fixes and improvements allows such components to be integrated into future versions thereby indirectly helping the Company and the development community. Consultant and Williams hereby grant to COmpany a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license to utilize the Consultant's Accumulated Know-How in connection with the development, use, operation and mainenance of Company's internet-based site. The license shall be assignable or transferable to the Company's successors by merger or consolidation, and to any subsidiaries with respect to which the Company or any such successor shall own more than 50% of the outstanding capital stock, but shall not otherwise be assignable or transferable.
Of course a few windy clauses were added to what I wrote to begin with, but you get the idea. If more consultants and employees had this in their agreements it would help Open/Free source a lot.
TI has been selling the basic chip used in high-end projectors for several years now that uses this same idea. They build a silicon grid of little micromachined mirrors that act as a ram array. The difference between 0 and 1 is 10-15 degrees which is enough to create an on-off visual state. They work great because of the speed and the high-reflectivity. I have always thought that the simplicity of this display method would mean that it would replace CRT's fairly quickly, but it looks like TI has been milking the market for big bucks first. The Digital Light Switch based projectors have been $10,000. If they ever sell the basic technlogy for a reasonable price it will have quite an impact. I'm pleased to see it being used in a hand-held device. There must have been some breakthrough or competition in the basic chip.
ODBC is just about the worst and most proprietary way to accomplish the task it tries to solve. It's idiotic and has cost the industry a ridiculous amount of money and time needlessly.
The Problem it is trying to solve: standard access to multiple databases so that a program can be configured for any particular database needed.
The MS solution: Design only the library interface and the SQL administration level and require custom, database specific drivers for each database a program has to talk to. Absolutely avoid creating a standard protocol since that would mean that anyone could write a non-proprietary driver. Charge money for ODBC drivers and encourage database vendors to do the same.
PLEASE! ARGHHHH.....
We are finally seeing this madness come to an end slowly, but it has been a nightmare! How hard do you have to make databases??? Login, send a query, get results and status messages, bind data to variables, close.
Message Oriented (MOM) or Message Passing (MPI, Voyager, etc.) with XML requests and results will soon obliterate the stupidity... I hope!
Slashdot Mirror
The Nikon WiFi support with the D2X does support standards, FTP and PTP/IP, which are both published and supported by Linux.
? cid=7-6459-72133 -0a7f-45cc-ba68-9560e9f3c061/Default.html e=article&sid=3061t ml;jsessionid=E0TTJLUSVT5NSQSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?art icleID=47204433&_requestid=171509
The ptp/ip protocol:
https://www.fotonation.com/
Linux support for digital cameras and PTP/IP in particular:
http://www.gphoto.org/
Raw image processing, including encrypted Nikon D2X images:
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp
http://www.photoreview.com.au/Articlexasp/90c8305
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C3218/
http://dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&fi
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jh
It's a 'snow', 'snowjob' to a higher level.
Not SCO mind you, must differ from the trademark.
I've generally considered BuddyList to be unpatentable, although it was the first presence system to be massively scalable, to completely avoid any kind of polling, AND to gain critical mass. It certainly might have been NARROWLY patentable originally more than many of these silly vanity patents.
AOL, before they purchased ICQ, had already developed BuddyList. I know because I wrote it in 1995 while a consultant to AOL. (No, I never received a single stock option. I also created a high performance database library used in BuddyList/Member Directory and created a project called Instant Images that was very cool, IMHO.)
Since the people that filed the ICQ patent were a couple years too late, it can't be a valid filing even though AOL owns it now. Additionally, I added a number of features and wrote all of the code so any AOL patent based on BuddyList would probably have to have my name on it to be valid.
sdw
It's the lifetime of the serial number of the box. In other words, if the box dies, you can buy a new TiVo and transfer the membership to a new TiVo.
The box/service is $550 to $650 depending on size and well worth it. It's also easily hackable for network or extra drive storage and people have even setup HTTP remote programming.
sdw
Portable, hand-held cell phones are limited to .8 Watts in the US. Only permanent car phones or 'bag phones', if they still exist, were allowed to go to 2 watts. Basically, anything near your head is limited to .8 watts.
Microwaves use a frequency at which water resonates. It therefore works by exciting, mainly, water molecules. This is why most plates don't warm up except where (moisture containing) food comes into contact. Since this is non-ionizing radiation, it is not supposed to disrupt DNA and other biological processes (i.e., cause mutations) except for the effects of heating.
To a large extent, microwaves have a shielded door to: A) hold the heat in so that most of it ends up heating the food, B) not broadcasting which would create nasty radio noise interference, and C) avoid causing burns or other spot heat injuries to humans, animals, and surroundings.
sdw
You are wrong about GUI development environments.
QT blows away everything else I've seen. Makes MFC look like the mess it is.
sdw
Try subscribing to a show for the season, no matter when it's on, and having the device manage recording, aging, automatically deleting, and other features. 30+ hours of these shows with perfect fast forward/reverse, pause, bookmarking, etc. You can't do any of that automatically with a VCR.
Unfortunately, people can't seem to get over the price tag, even though it's fairly cheap now ($300 + listing subscription).
Go buy a Tivo and buy the lifetime subscription (just went up?). Best video entertainment purchase you'll ever make.
I bought one of the original units directly from Tivo when the first /. story on them appeared, long ago.
sdw
Conflicts come from the difference between parental desire and school policy and actions.
I've had to explain this to a couple teenage sons so far as they tell me that the school is infringing on their Constitutional rights...
I disagree: Atari Basic was on of the best, especially for those running on a 6502. It was far more stable, complete, and carried a number of advanced features that MS Basic was lacking. The math package was a very cool base-100 system that was accurate (unlike ALL MSBasic versions until recently) with high-precision. Strings were only limited by size of memory and could contain relocatable assembly that could be executed easily.
On top of all of that, they published the source to the whole thing: Basic, math rom, and OS rom, with complete documentation. I still have a complete set of books and documentation and a working later model.
I learned Basic, 6502 assembly, Forth, Small C, Pascal, Lisp, etc. on my 8-bit Atari when I was 15-16...
A non-kernel invasive version of this would be a script that configures one port with the desired IP/mask and creates the default route. It then puts the other port in promiscuous mode and monitors it for traffic using a libpcap based program or even a possibly modified tcpdump. As soon as it sees any traffic, it switches the configuration and starts monitoring the other port. This could probably be written in 2-4 hours given a network to test it in.
For a possibly simpler solution (i.e. no code to write), use a pair of additional Linux systems. Configure each of them to load balance with LinuxVirtualServer (aka LinuxDirector) or the Pirhana version of it to as many backend servers as you have, BUT to Different internal IP addresses. Good choices would be 10.* addresses, say 10.0.1.* and 10.0.2.*. Using either a dual NIC or two NIC cards in each server, create two networks with one for each of the load distribution servers. Configure Apache et al to respond to the IP addresses of each network the same.
BTW, there are 4 port 100-base-T cards out there, from Adaptec I think.
Good Luck!
lynx -dump -width=60 http://www.cnn.com, for instance, gives you most of what you need to easily create a web display and process links. It cops out on forms so far and the output needs to be postprocessed to target zones of the page. All easily doable. Links could be requested by replying with the link number. Forms submitted with text after the quoted field lines or tagged.
Email me if you want to help or be notified of progress and I'll create a list.
I have the RIM dev kit, which is free, so it's possible some enhancement could be done that way.
I agree with everything you've said, however you are neglecting the other way to achieve replication and failover: middleware transaction monitor systems.
I am not impressed with what I've heard and observed about the Oracle failover and MS SQL failover. I would completely trust Tandom non-stop, however that's a very high-end solution. I'm not sure about DB2, Informix, and Sybase. When I used Sybase at AOL, we didn't have failover, only RAID.
Most of these systems (except I think Tandom) are limited in a number of ways. Requiring shared hardware (in Oracle's case, as in some others) is not scalable and very expensive, not to mention not ideally reliable. Most are limited to one master machine that replicates to others, often hot spares rather than distributed load processing.
Systems like Tuxedo act as a front-end to database systems and manage distributed transactions, failover, and load balancing. IMHO, this is the way to go.
I have been studying this problem and working on solutions for a while now. If there is anyone who would be interested in working on a transaction monitor project with me, please let me know.
Thanks sdw
I visited the competition Sunday afternoon. I received an invitation in the mail a month ago.
Viviana was very personable and explained her project to our 14 year old very well. While she is obviously very talented and has a cool project, I actually would have rated several other projects higher for research, experimentation, difficulty, and innovation.
At least 3/4 of the projects were amazing. Robert Wang's project was particularly impressive for a 15 year old from Arkansas. (There were two finalists age 15, the rest were 17 or 18.) He had come up with two useful and apparently innovative 3D detail scaling and visibility culling algorithms that he had implemented in C++ on Windows with an Open/GL demo. He's been programming since he was 10. I suggested he contribute the source to one of the Linux game projects. Scaled for his age, it was impressive.
The most impressive projects, to me, were those that appeared to have broken new ground and actually extended human knowledge sucessfully.
sdw
NT is a nightmare to install compared to Linux.
Give me a break.
First you install the basic OS with a couple reboots.
Then you install the hotfixes and service packs at home to 20MB a piece (just how are you supposed to get those if you only had one machine??? Each one of these requires a reboot. (5 reboots)
Then, if you have a laptop, try to get the PCMCIA ethernet to work. Last year I had to pay $80 to SystemSoft to get a software layer that would allow my 10/100 card to work, after buying a new one because the old one wouldn't. (2 reboots)
Then install apps, noting that MS says that you must install all hotfixes and service packs after installing any software. I suppose this is needed to replace any of the shared crap in the System directory, etc. (A reboot for some apps and 5 more after installing the OS fix/upgrades again.)
Not to mention that I couldn't get NT to use more than 4GB for a partition.
Something like 40 reboots before I had a database and an app builder working.
Linux on the other hand, takes one reboot and at worst installing a new version of the PCMCIA drivers. Configuring video/audio is sometimes a problem, but recently these have been 5-20 min tasks meaning I'm still done before I would have been through babying an NT 4.0 install.
sdw
BZZZZT, Wrong, please play again.
Copying is NOT ALWAYS stealing.
It is very well established that anyone can make a legal copy of anything they own for at least three purposes that I know of:
Backup (Especially software and data)
Time Shifting (Originally VCR/video and now MP3, etc.)
Fair Use (fuzzy, but legal use of clips, likeness, parody, reviews, etc.)
These rights supercede contracts and shinkwrap licenses in many or all cases.
As many people have said, we just want to play DVD's under Linux! My laptop is Linux; I don't want to have to reboot into Win98 land to play DVD's. In fact, because of VMWare, the only reason I have a 1GB partition on my HD is to play DVD's.
As an example of legal use of broken/pirated software, I have a software package that I paid $2000+ for, of my own money. The package is great, but it requires a precious dongle that can't be replaced and is quite annoying. After much searching, my friend found a cracked version of the software. I feel I am completely in my rights to use this cracked copy because I have not deprived the company of revenue.
Deprivation of revenue is a key deciding factor in much of copyright law. It can be abused and confused, especially controversial is the claim by many that they would never have purchased something (say Autocad) anyway so there is no harm. I can see both sides.
There are other interesting fair use rules. One that I was told a very long time ago, and have not verified, is that you are allowed to 'make and use' up to 10 copies of an invention for personal use. For paper clips this isn't that useful, but for RSA it may be. As it was described to me, this was part of the basic patent law authorization. (My understanding is that you can't sell an infringing product, probably can't use an infringing product if it is sold to you (maybe given also), but if you 'make' it yourself (from instructions?) you are ok.)
sdw
Oh come on! The essence of the 'non-obvious' requirement is to prevent things like this.
I am absolutely sure that any competent engineer would have whipped up substantially the design of the Rio, etc. if you suggested that Flash memory, harddrives, or something similar were about to reach a price point that made it feasible.
What is not obvious about extending the idea of a portable listening device with electro-magnetic memory (Sony (cassette) Walkman) to a portable listening device with optical memory (cd player) to a portable listening device with electro-magnetic-optical memory (Sony Minidisc) to a portable listening device with Flash/Harddrive/SuperRam...?
Just assembling the technology de jour in an obvious way doesn't make a valid patent.
IMHO, It won't hold up long...
sdw
While the Exokernel stuff is interesting, I think that VIA-like optimizations (http://www.viarch.org as previously noted on /., owned by Compaq/Intel/MS) are a better way to go. The idea was originally from a thesis paper and implemented for Unix. (Author not handy due to a recently deceased HD.)
VIA stands for Virtual Interface Architecture. The idea, generally, is to build device drivers that can directly interact with processes or threads with little or no interaction with the kernel. The idea is generally that the driver presents a virtual device interface to each process. The viarch.org guys appear to be concentrating on applying the idea to SAN I/O, but I think that the network/OS/Webserver (SMB, etc. also) is even more interesting given the smaller payloads and higher overhead.
What I would like is to have a process or group of threads that would interface to the NIC and receive a stream of packets and transmit a stream of packets. The exchange could be completely async with large queues and no context switches or other OS interaction (for network traffic). The service processes would contain an integral TCP/IP stack and HTTP server. The device driver would send packets for a particular IP address only to the VIA processes while handling other IP addresses normally.
This would allow optimizations just like those for the Exokernel. People could experiment with various zero copy schemes and other TCP/IP stack optimizations without affecting the operation of the system they were running on.
We need to do this now!
Is anyone working on something like this? Email me! I might even be able to provide some funding.
sdw
First, Open Source is not a communist movement. In fact I have always viewed it as a very customized
type of market. The exchange is quite a bit different from a typical monetary transaction but it is a market
nonetheless. In many ways, as has been shown with projects that have succeeded, it is a more efficient
market than the traditional commercial software market, at least for certain classes of problems.
The fact that people can use the software for free doesn't mean that it's communist or socialist. It's a
natural extension of realizing that there are other ways to gain benefit from labor than being a toll taker. In
a sense everyone that uses Open Source software gains in a way that could be viewed at least two ways:
benefiting from the culmination of knowledge (similar to our inheritance of science and other cumulated
knowledge) and as pre-payment from the open-source 'group' for possible future contributions. In
addition, it creates a society where anyone can use the benefits of the cumulative effort of society while
contributing when able. (Similar to what people enjoy in the Real World in most parts of the world.) This
contribution will often be a market driven transaction. (Similar to a construction company building a
park.)
Just to wear this metaphor a bit, we all like visiting Disney World, but we're sick of paying for admission
and every ride and are willing to work together to build some of those features into our neighborhoods.
In other words, the Open Source movement has similarities to scientific and other academic communities,
society in general, and commercial markets with a melding of characteristics.
Open Source is a thin but resilient framework consisting of simultaneous bartering, customization or
application to a problem for direct or indirect payments, play, academic expansion, creative and
constructive outlet, etc.
A company like Microsoft makes the implicit assumption that there are few programmers and they can
hire nearly all the good ones and make software for the rest of us. I believe that eventually a large
segment of the population will be programmers of some sort, and I firmly believe that it should be a
standard subject in secondary schools now. The result, given a few more advances in software and
hardware, would be much greater utility, control, and interaction with computers, the net, and other
people. More and more programmers will never again be satisfied with closed source. Similarly,
companies will become more wary of closed source and the support or existence of the companies that
create it.
What many of us see is how much better this hard-to-define, but friendly, comfortable, efficient,
rewarding, and fun Open Source (Free Software, etc.) society is than the old world many of us have
suffered through (for 18 years in my case).
As for Linux and Unix, you are also way off base. The beauty of the Unix design is that it is infinitely
extendable to absorb any advance in operating system design that comes out. The interfaces are lean and
clean, the best way to add extensions is generally clear, there is no required truckload of fat if not needed
(I.e. MS's requirement of a single user GUI central OS), and it is practically the definition of stable, open
interfaces. Linux/Unix of today is light-years ahead of Unix 30 years ago, or even 15 years ago when
people had to buy a TCP/IP stack from Wollongong, etc. Just because the core API and concepts have
remained stable longer than a MS marketing cycle does not cast obsolescence on the current incarnation.
The number of individuals and companies making contributions to Linux is growing at an amazing rate. It
has long ago acheived enough critical mass to propel it for the forseeable future. The value proposition,
as the marketing people would say, is very attactive.
sdw
I Totally agree! I've been preaching this for a couple years and am implementing a very cool, full featured middleware solution now.
I read a description of what eBay had a few months ago and was shocked at the predictable crash they were heading toward.
The thing is you can't easily patch a monolithic system to run on loose clusters with replication and redundancy. It will appear much more attractive to continue down the monolithic road and add hot-spares.
Few people seem to get what it takes to build truly scalable and reliable systems.
sdw
Although everything I do can't practically be open source, I have begun to add clauses to consulting contracts that explicitly allow appropriate contributions. The following is a good example. This is in force now.
"Consultant's and Company's Ownership of Intellectual Property and Derivatives"
To best further the goals of the Company, Consultant may make use of third party products or works in the design, creation, and support of the Project Deliverables. Bug fixes, modifications, improvements, and closely related additions to such third party products that do not specifically relate to the Company's business and are not Confidential Information will be property of the Consultant without restriction, and shall be considered part of the Consultant's Accumulated Know-How. An example of this situation is the use by Consultant of a so-called "open source component", where the contribution of fixes and improvements allows such components to be integrated into future versions thereby indirectly helping the Company and the development community. Consultant and Williams hereby grant to COmpany a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license to utilize the Consultant's Accumulated Know-How in connection with the development, use, operation and mainenance of Company's internet-based site. The license shall be assignable or transferable to the Company's successors by merger or consolidation, and to any subsidiaries with respect to which the Company or any such successor shall own more than 50% of the outstanding capital stock, but shall not otherwise be assignable or transferable.
Of course a few windy clauses were added to what I wrote to begin with, but you get the idea. If more consultants and employees had this in their agreements it would help Open/Free source a lot.
TI has been selling the basic chip used in high-end projectors for several years now that uses this same idea. They build a silicon grid of little micromachined mirrors that act as a ram array. The difference between 0 and 1 is 10-15 degrees which is enough to create an on-off visual state. They work great because of the speed and the high-reflectivity.
I have always thought that the simplicity of this display method would mean that it would replace CRT's fairly quickly, but it looks like TI has been milking the market for big bucks first. The Digital Light Switch based projectors have been $10,000. If they ever sell the basic technlogy for a reasonable price it will have quite an impact.
I'm pleased to see it being used in a hand-held device. There must have been some breakthrough or competition in the basic chip.
Where are the details?
What are they proposing exactly??
If it doesn't meet and exceed the best ideas we can come up with, we shouldn't standardize yet!
That has killed many things (ADA, X.400/ISO, etc. etc.). Good riddance, but let's not follow.
sdw
I actually told SGI reps 2+ years ago to go talk to Id...
In fact, Id should hire those developers and build on the Cosmo pieces. They have the tech and brains to fix VRML.
There ARE cool and useful things you can do with all of it.
sdw
ODBC is just about the worst and most proprietary way to accomplish the task it tries to solve. It's idiotic and has cost the industry a ridiculous amount of money and time needlessly.
The Problem it is trying to solve: standard access to multiple databases so that a program can be configured for any particular database needed.
The MS solution: Design only the library interface and the SQL administration level and require custom, database specific drivers for each database a program has to talk to. Absolutely avoid creating a standard protocol since that would mean that anyone could write a non-proprietary driver. Charge money for ODBC drivers and encourage database vendors to do the same.
PLEASE! ARGHHHH.....
We are finally seeing this madness come to an end slowly, but it has been a nightmare! How hard do you have to make databases??? Login, send a query, get results and status messages, bind data to variables, close.
Message Oriented (MOM) or Message Passing (MPI, Voyager, etc.) with XML requests and results will soon obliterate the stupidity... I hope!
sdw
NO! Not Pascal!
I did machine control with Pascal and assembly...
Believe me, C is far better for many reasons.
Java would be my choice, in fact my 10-YO has been working his way through the tutorial. Hopefully I'll help him hit critical mass soon.
I have been thinking of this idea of a game/programming environment for quite a while in fact...
sdw