It is an old patent - I can see why they are going after ISPs - it's the only way they can enforce it (because it calls out the use of a modem). It also sais that hyperlinks are selected with a keypad - not a mouse - how are they going to FIND anyone who actually meets these requirements.
I think they are going to end up with a PR nightmare.... they are going to find out that they've targetted the BLIND.
actually I was thinking more of a random visit to a random website - you click on a new link (say in some spam, or as a result of a search from some search engine) to check out a website sight-unseen and suddenly discover yourself bound by some legal agreement you haven't had a chance to read because you've never been there before (similar to the way you UICTA allows you to be bound to the legal mumbo-jumbo that you can't read in some shrink-wrapped package because it's shrink-wrapped)
Yeah but sadly there's not a lot of interesting jobs in the East Bay - I've lived here for 16 years now and for the past 11 tele-commuted to various companies in the South Bay - as well as physically driven there 1-2 days a week - the traffic suckith - and more recently suckith really badly. Also telecommuting has begun to really wear on me - I get cut out of political decisions too much because I'm not there - almost everything I've done for the past 2 years got cancelled:-(
So I'm doing the only thing I can - last week I quit - today I'm filing incorporation papers on my very own baby linux-based startup - hey you only live once:-)
"I always figured a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house *grin*. "
I wish:-(... maybe it's cause my house it almost hitting the old 100 - lath and plaster do not make the quick&dirty - drill and pull some cable process anything close to easy - plus the wiring here is ancient, to say the least (grounding why would we want to do that - why waste the copper...).
Still when we had the shingles done a few years back and the house was 'naked' I had them put in a few extra circuits to my office - but running all those machines to get my rc5 rate up to 100MKeys/sec is starting to strain that:-(
Seriously though the best thing you can do is at admit to yourself that you don't know what you'll need 5-10 years from now (fiber to every room? or after the Y2K.1 bug hits cans and string?) so just put conduit in the walls and figure it out when you need it
Have you seen this thing - it has 4 (yup count 'em 4) fans and an external power supply - I bet when you turn it on your tower takes off and hovers a few inches off the floor - and all the lights on the block dim. To be fair this seems to the the 6000 which I guess is the next-big-thing-TM after the just-recalled 5500:-)
My goals have change over the years - I spent much of the 80s doing Unix kernel hacking.... and the 90s designing chips (these days logic design is really programming - honest) - with side trips into compiler design along the way - the 00s? who knows - probably more programming I think - I've decided it's more rewarding on a day to day basis.
The important thing is not to dig your self a big hole by becoming too specialised - become a generalist - be adaptable - than you can follow your interests as they develop. There will be cool interesting technology to play with along the way and if you become too specialised you will eventually find yourself stuck doing the same thing over and over and over again.
The other thing that I think is a usefull (non-programming) skill - become a 'self-starter' ie don't need a lot of management to get your work done - let your enthusiasm drive your work - you'll probably get ahead a lot faster and you'll be able to work in smaller more cutting-edge companies
It used to be they couldn't tap telephones.... that's something that's only happened recently - because telephones haven't been around for that long.
Before that they started opening mail - that's why people would put those elaborate wax seals on their mail.... and before there was an organised mail delivery system intercepting mail was hard....
My point is that there's been an ongoing technological battle between those who want their privacy and those who want to breach their privacy.... it's been going on for centurys.... maybe the spooks will give up when we're all using quantum entanglement to comunicate.... or maybe they'll juts get a lot more spooky:-)
In maany ways I'm paraphrasing what you'v said but:
Think about it - the basic thing that has changed is that the cost of production and distribution of media (be it music, or film/video or books, or even software) has gone pretty much to 0.
But the various media industries still have their existing distribution infrastructure in place (the publishing companies of which the RIAA represents one part) - and that infrastructure is ussed to making big bucks on that flow of information through their hands - that's all changed and they are dinosaurs after the meteorite - they're going to die but don't know it yet - but in the mean time they are still big and have lots of resources and are going to thrash around and make a lot of noise - they aren't going to die quietly.
But I think we (as in 'we the class of techy geeks') have screwed up - we've taken the easy way out and short circuited ALL of the distribution process - but in reality there's another group that WE can't do without - the artists - if we'd started out with a model that provided them a way to make money from their art we'd have them on our side - instead the only people they have to turn to are the people with the lawyers - the RIAA etc al.
So it is in our interest to find a way to distribute 'owned' (ie copyrighted) bits about the net in a manner that allows their authors to make some money off of them - otherwise those dinosaurs will hang on suing everything in sight.
Encryption is a problem. Sadly simple open source encryption/players don't work - they always allow access to the raw bits at some level - I suspect what may end up working is some form of hardware decryption/playback where the bits are lost inside the electronics somewhere before they become analog.... (mp3 decryption/playback hardware anyone?).
I tried the IWill and Soyo parts - neither worked (carefull reading of the IWill slocket II box sais that "Celeron SMP" is supported - while their web page sais "Dual FPGA" is supported).
As I said in my posting I now suspect the problem is with the PIIIs and not the slotkets (for the record I was using them in a SuperMicro P6DBE that happily runs SMP with normal slot1 PIIIs)
Trying to get around the current lack of cheapo Slot 1 CPUs on the market (I tend to buy 20-40 at a time - and suddenly everything dried up) I tried out some of the FGPGA-to-Slot1 kits on the market - I tried 2 both claimed 'SMP' but neither delivered.... seems my PIIIs are the problem after all - hey Intel do you do exchanges?
How on earth am I going to buy CPUs mailorder and get the right microcode? none of the online stores are set up to handle buying a particular uCode rev - it's pretty hit or miss - Intel needs to have these fixed CPUs out with a different SKU number if people want to be able to order them reliably - in the mean time I'm waiting for SMP Athlons - if this Intel-drought continues for much longer I'll jump to AMD asap
Try searching for "slockets" or "slokets" etc - they go for usually about $20 a piece - check to make sure they are SMP PIII capable and handle the right voltages. If your mother board is older and you are running PIIs you might need a 'PIII BIOS upgrade'
Slashdot Mirror
when I posted the original with a score of 1 someone promptly marked it down 'offtopic' - hence my rant - and yeah I was wrong it wasn't Asimov/s
yeah you're right serves me right for doing an altavista search, seeing "Asimov's Homepage" show up first and not actually look at it :-)
geez - who mod'd me down - have you never read Asimov's "Flowers for Algernon"? about amoung other things an intelligence enhanced lab-mouse
for Algernon ...
I think they are going to end up with a PR nightmare .... they are going to find out that they've targetted the BLIND.
If these guys start looking like comtenders isn't M$ going to flex its $200M nVidia XBox contract muscle and lean on them hard?
can anyone else menatally hear that tiny tiny ripping noise when they pull their feet off of the wall :-)
of course
- He may not have a clue, and he may not have style
- But everything he lacks, he makes up in denial
that was BillG they were talking about right?actually I was thinking more of a random visit to a random website - you click on a new link (say in some spam, or as a result of a search from some search engine) to check out a website sight-unseen and suddenly discover yourself bound by some legal agreement you haven't had a chance to read because you've never been there before (similar to the way you UICTA allows you to be bound to the legal mumbo-jumbo that you can't read in some shrink-wrapped package because it's shrink-wrapped)
PS: anyone who trademarks "Balls of Steel" probably doesn't have any
VLSI CAD software
So I'm doing the only thing I can - last week I quit - today I'm filing incorporation papers on my very own baby linux-based startup - hey you only live once :-)
because he's the webmaster of the web pages at cedr.lbl.gov which include, amoung other things, textbook examples of POST and GET
POST and GET were in common usage at the time and any claim on them by this bogus patent is really pushing it
it seems so obvious - has someone done this? is there a Mac or Linux front end I give to my kids?
I wish :-( ... maybe it's cause my house it almost hitting the old 100 - lath and plaster do not make the quick&dirty - drill and pull some cable process anything close to easy - plus the wiring here is ancient, to say the least (grounding why would we want to do that - why waste the copper ...).
Still when we had the shingles done a few years back and the house was 'naked' I had them put in a few extra circuits to my office - but running all those machines to get my rc5 rate up to 100MKeys/sec is starting to strain that :-(
Seriously though the best thing you can do is at admit to yourself that you don't know what you'll need 5-10 years from now (fiber to every room? or after the Y2K.1 bug hits cans and string?) so just put conduit in the walls and figure it out when you need it
see www.cobalt.com
Have you seen this thing - it has 4 (yup count 'em 4) fans and an external power supply - I bet when you turn it on your tower takes off and hovers a few inches off the floor - and all the lights on the block dim. To be fair this seems to the the 6000 which I guess is the next-big-thing-TM after the just-recalled 5500 :-)
The important thing is not to dig your self a big hole by becoming too specialised - become a generalist - be adaptable - than you can follow your interests as they develop. There will be cool interesting technology to play with along the way and if you become too specialised you will eventually find yourself stuck doing the same thing over and over and over again.
The other thing that I think is a usefull (non-programming) skill - become a 'self-starter' ie don't need a lot of management to get your work done - let your enthusiasm drive your work - you'll probably get ahead a lot faster and you'll be able to work in smaller more cutting-edge companies
Before that they started opening mail - that's why people would put those elaborate wax seals on their mail .... and before there was an organised mail delivery system intercepting mail was hard ....
My point is that there's been an ongoing technological battle between those who want their privacy and those who want to breach their privacy .... it's been going on for centurys .... maybe the spooks will give up when we're all using quantum entanglement to comunicate .... or maybe they'll juts get a lot more spooky :-)
Think about it - the basic thing that has changed is that the cost of production and distribution of media (be it music, or film/video or books, or even software) has gone pretty much to 0.
But the various media industries still have their existing distribution infrastructure in place (the publishing companies of which the RIAA represents one part) - and that infrastructure is ussed to making big bucks on that flow of information through their hands - that's all changed and they are dinosaurs after the meteorite - they're going to die but don't know it yet - but in the mean time they are still big and have lots of resources and are going to thrash around and make a lot of noise - they aren't going to die quietly.
But I think we (as in 'we the class of techy geeks') have screwed up - we've taken the easy way out and short circuited ALL of the distribution process - but in reality there's another group that WE can't do without - the artists - if we'd started out with a model that provided them a way to make money from their art we'd have them on our side - instead the only people they have to turn to are the people with the lawyers - the RIAA etc al.
So it is in our interest to find a way to distribute 'owned' (ie copyrighted) bits about the net in a manner that allows their authors to make some money off of them - otherwise those dinosaurs will hang on suing everything in sight.
Encryption is a problem. Sadly simple open source encryption/players don't work - they always allow access to the raw bits at some level - I suspect what may end up working is some form of hardware decryption/playback where the bits are lost inside the electronics somewhere before they become analog .... (mp3 decryption/playback hardware anyone?).
As I said in my posting I now suspect the problem is with the PIIIs and not the slotkets (for the record I was using them in a SuperMicro P6DBE that happily runs SMP with normal slot1 PIIIs)
How on earth am I going to buy CPUs mailorder and get the right microcode? none of the online stores are set up to handle buying a particular uCode rev - it's pretty hit or miss - Intel needs to have these fixed CPUs out with a different SKU number if people want to be able to order them reliably - in the mean time I'm waiting for SMP Athlons - if this Intel-drought continues for much longer I'll jump to AMD asap
Try searching for "slockets" or "slokets" etc - they go for usually about $20 a piece - check to make sure they are SMP PIII capable and handle the right voltages. If your mother board is older and you are running PIIs you might need a 'PIII BIOS upgrade'