Microsoft is using its scare tactics to warn of possible lawsuits because Linux violates about 228 patents.
Not only that, it's an outright lie. There are 220 something patents that apply to IP within Linux.
Many of those patents are already owned by Linux companies.
Saying Linux violates all those 228 patents is like saying MS Windows violates a thousands patents belonging to Microsoft. It's word play with an agenda.
If this is indeed as open as it sounds, then it's a massive step forward. MS will be forcing itself not to become complacent and hide behind the obscurity of a vulnerability that may not be known, but instead will have to deal with the vulnerability in the correct way - fixing the thing.
Whether it's actually this open, and whether they do end up fixing more problems because of it still has to be seen. Past behaviour has me cynical.
> They should get into the habit of voting while they are young > and more likely to get into meaningful debates with their > friends.
Certainly. I've noticed that among so many of the young people I know (under 25s, or around there) there is a lot of political opinion. A lot of discussion about issues relevant to them, relevant to the bigger picture, relevant to a nation as a whole. People who were quite capable of voting, but also quite capable of complaining about the outcome of the last election.
Did they bother to vote though? Hardly. Talk is easy.
> Who's gonna take the heat for the file swapping? the students > or the campus/university
As the RIAA are scumsucking filth, they'll attack those with the most to lose from a loss to their "alleged" lawsuit, and coerce thousands in settlement from them.
Never fear, I have it on good authority that the next US Secret Service targets are the massive online drug smuggling ring American Geneaology, another two identity theft conspiracies that go by the name Worcestor Collector's Society and The Royal Canon Assn then finally what will be their biggest bust yet, child pornographers at Teapot Cosy Appreciators of Georgia.
> Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has > failed the interface test.
I should also add that back in 1984, the idea of an 'intuitive' interface was absolutely central to the success of the mac.
Nowadays, there's no marketing the mac to a world that doesn't know how to use computers, that world barely exists. Kids are trained to use them just by their very saturation in everyday life, that by the time they're 10 that "intuition" in the form of translating common real world tasks to a computer's onscreen actions is meaningless now. The computer itself IS something people are used to in the first place. Ever felt like doing a/me in real conversation?
Raskin parades on about a few things, one is his newer UI theories on making things simple and easy to use, and another is complaining about systems that are "bloated", where a simple text editor is half a meg, for example.
I think the credibility of his opinions comes into questions when he's put his theories into code, and they just end up a clumsy mess of UI that's painfully difficult to use, and he actually develops these ideas as code so damn slowly, because he's still using the archaic development methods that make for efficient results but long coding time.
Sure, something like Mozilla for example, may be far far bigger and less hyper-fast than it would be if it were written in assembler, but better to get it out, usable, completely workable and oversized in a couple of years than still be waiting for the same features for another decade while development goes along at the same sluggish pace that was OK in 1984, when apps were simple because RAM, cpu speed and storage space were at an utter premium.
> Perhaps we wouldn't have been in that kind of trouble if we > hadn't been in Baghdad in the first place.
As much as that's an argument for another time, I will say this. What trouble? The article starts out on the premise that there were massive failures in iraq, and goes to state some info about one in particular.
Without comparing to what has happened in the past.
30 years ago it wouldn't be uncommon for 10,000 iraqi soldiers and 1000 american soldiers meeting to end up with most of the americans and a big chunk of the iraqis dead. In the entire war you'd be looking at deaths up above 100,000.
I don't go much on the iraq war, but relative to almost any other war preceding it, deaths on both 'sides' and on civilians has been low. Very very low.
(standard disclaimer: yeah all war deaths suck, all war is a failure of sorts, any loss of life is unacceptable etc)
Yeah. this really sucks. Imagine that, putting an RFID chip, a means of uniquely identifying a person, in a passport, a device that is meant to uniquely identify a person.
That's just what I've been doing with a new purchase, a Mac Plus. I also have a classic II and a couple of C64s I drag out from time to time.
Using them for real brings a real link between the "god how did we live like this" and the "wow - this thing can do THAT". It's a good base to touch occasionally. Web browsing on the classic is pretty bad. I couldn't use it for the imaging I do daily, and it doesn't have a hope of playing an MP3. It could play the equivalent.wav, but couldn't actually store it on the 40MB drive inside:). On the other hand IRC, wordprocessing and web serving is well within its capabilities.
It's just reminiscing in the end though. Looking back at the "wow" at how different it was, in the same way looking forward and extrapolating leads to the same kind of "wow".
How long until an entry level machine needs 3 phase power, 16GB ram, terabyte hard drives and networking quick enough to stream the entire iTMS all at once...
(don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)
Sad to say, but there are simply too many people out there that believe everything they read on the internet. Once the older generation passes on, I suspect this problem will go away, but until then scams like this and the old telephone ones will be a ripe place for ripoffs.
It's not just the older ones, not all the time. Take a third year university student I know who came in all excited that he got an email from this guy in africa who needed to transport $20million out of the country......his third year uni student brain started ticking over, realised it might be a trap and he should proceed warily, and announced his plan was to give his bank details to the guy so he'd get the cash in his account and then skip out on the scammer.
Never thinking for once that there just might not BE a $20million to start with. Sucked straight in. AFAIK he was just couldn't be bothered going ahead or was warned off by someone else - he still seems to be financially stable:P.
> In about a minute or two somebody will post a coral cache and > it won't work either. Why slashbots insist on linking to these is > beyond me. Have they ever worked
Two in about the 20 times I've tried. it's Just Not Big Enough.
Funniest bit is some of us are mirroring sites on home DSL/cable links, and they stay up longer than the coral cache.
You've probably heard about Echelon, the vast listening system run by the US, UK, Canada and Australia that scans the world's voice traffic looking for key words and phrases.
Aside from using the system for industrial espionage and bypassing international and national laws to listen in on people, it is also used to listen out for people like Osama bin Laden and assorted terrorists in the hope of preventing attacks.
All this is out in the relative open thanks to investigative journalists and a European Commission report into the system, concerned and annoyed that the Brits and Yanks has got there first.
It works like this: The calls are recorded by geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations, such as the UK's Menworth Hill, which combine satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in real time.
But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work?
Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose.
TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.
A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.
A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second.
Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US goverment with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it. Since then it has expanded into a general listening facility, an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the world's telephone conversations. Information about it's existence has been reluctantly revealed, prompted by scandals such as the recordings of Princess Diana's telephone calls by the NSA.
Recorded signals are fed into the TMS SAM systems where the DSPs filter out the noise to produce much clearer signals that software can work on to detect individual voices, perform voice recognition, and listen out for keywords, such as, for example, "Semtex". Decryption of encrypted calls is also a likely activity.
Hutsell says the SAM systems, "are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta. It's an intelligence community application involving data from various sources. This is loaded into RAM and then real-time analysis is carried out on it. Step one is to filter out the noise and our DSP chips are used for that. Then they look into patterns using other tools - images or voice. It's
> he feels that it's impossible to implement the specification for > InfiniBand in a free/open source product without violating the > licensing agreement of the spec, because of patent > infringement.
Not even in the nvidia drivers kind of way, with proprietary kernel modules? Not the most optimal solution (probably nearing highly pessimal) but probably possible.
This is worthless. There's no way you can just stop kids from buying games they want to play. Some obvious workarounds are ordering online and having a friend or relative buy the game.
So few young kids actually buy games it's pointless. (read: download it online) This isn't going to stop young kids getting hold of games, it's just going to piss off the few valid game buyers.
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's (who holds less a share of the automobile market than Apple does of the personal computer market) market share? I didn't buy I mac because I wanted a Ford Torus. I bought a mac because I wanted luxury.
Whether or not it's a Luxury machine, it's what you wanted. A BMW might have a low market share, but also the top selling sedan in the USA might also have a low market share when compared to the set of "All Vehicles". When it comes to the market share of cars, what matters isn't that comparison, but comparison to their direct competition. Whatever top selling passenger car there is, is competing against Other passenger cars, HP Servers compete against All Servers. HP Desktops compete against Desktops, Cheap & Cheerful PCs compete against other Cheap & Cheerful PCs, and so on.
Saying that Mack Trucks make only 0.3% of the total vehicle market sounds pretty fucked up, because it's a useless statistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is using its scare tactics to warn of possible lawsuits because Linux violates about 228 patents.
Not only that, it's an outright lie. There are 220 something patents that apply to IP within Linux.
Many of those patents are already owned by Linux companies.
Saying Linux violates all those 228 patents is like saying MS Windows violates a thousands patents belonging to Microsoft. It's word play with an agenda.
Can someone please point me to the place where they give jobs like this out, to come up with incredibly stupid ideas like this?
The idea was pretty obvious after looking at the attention span of most cellphone users.
If this is indeed as open as it sounds, then it's a massive step forward. MS will be forcing itself not to become complacent and hide behind the obscurity of a vulnerability that may not be known, but instead will have to deal with the vulnerability in the correct way - fixing the thing.
Whether it's actually this open, and whether they do end up fixing more problems because of it still has to be seen. Past behaviour has me cynical.
Now it's not just geeks, but also IT Managers who can imagine a beowulf cluster!
> They should get into the habit of voting while they are young
> and more likely to get into meaningful debates with their
> friends.
Certainly. I've noticed that among so many of the young people I know (under 25s, or around there) there is a lot of political opinion. A lot of discussion about issues relevant to them, relevant to the bigger picture, relevant to a nation as a whole. People who were quite capable of voting, but also quite capable of complaining about the outcome of the last election.
Did they bother to vote though? Hardly. Talk is easy.
> Who's gonna take the heat for the file swapping? the students
> or the campus/university
As the RIAA are scumsucking filth, they'll attack those with the most to lose from a loss to their "alleged" lawsuit, and coerce thousands in settlement from them.
Never fear, I have it on good authority that the next US Secret Service targets are the massive online drug smuggling ring American Geneaology , another two identity theft conspiracies that go by the name Worcestor Collector's Society and The Royal Canon Assn then finally what will be their biggest bust yet, child pornographers at Teapot Cosy Appreciators of Georgia .
But the RIAA wouldn't have a direct connection to your neurals then.
The only painful bit is getting the 3.5mm jack inserted into the back of your skull.
> Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has
/me in real conversation?
> failed the interface test.
I should also add that back in 1984, the idea of an 'intuitive' interface was absolutely central to the success of the mac.
Nowadays, there's no marketing the mac to a world that doesn't know how to use computers, that world barely exists. Kids are trained to use them just by their very saturation in everyday life, that by the time they're 10 that "intuition" in the form of translating common real world tasks to a computer's onscreen actions is meaningless now. The computer itself IS something people are used to in the first place. Ever felt like doing a
Raskin parades on about a few things, one is his newer UI theories on making things simple and easy to use, and another is complaining about systems that are "bloated", where a simple text editor is half a meg, for example.
I think the credibility of his opinions comes into questions when he's put his theories into code, and they just end up a clumsy mess of UI that's painfully difficult to use, and he actually develops these ideas as code so damn slowly, because he's still using the archaic development methods that make for efficient results but long coding time.
Sure, something like Mozilla for example, may be far far bigger and less hyper-fast than it would be if it were written in assembler, but better to get it out, usable, completely workable and oversized in a couple of years than still be waiting for the same features for another decade while development goes along at the same sluggish pace that was OK in 1984, when apps were simple because RAM, cpu speed and storage space were at an utter premium.
> Perhaps we wouldn't have been in that kind of trouble if we
> hadn't been in Baghdad in the first place.
As much as that's an argument for another time, I will say this. What trouble? The article starts out on the premise that there were massive failures in iraq, and goes to state some info about one in particular.
Without comparing to what has happened in the past.
30 years ago it wouldn't be uncommon for 10,000 iraqi soldiers and 1000 american soldiers meeting to end up with most of the americans and a big chunk of the iraqis dead. In the entire war you'd be looking at deaths up above 100,000.
I don't go much on the iraq war, but relative to almost any other war preceding it, deaths on both 'sides' and on civilians has been low. Very very low.
(standard disclaimer: yeah all war deaths suck, all war is a failure of sorts, any loss of life is unacceptable etc)
Yeah. this really sucks. Imagine that, putting an RFID chip, a means of uniquely identifying a person, in a passport, a device that is meant to uniquely identify a person.
Bastards!
I want to know, if you had a sheet of this stuff about 1cm by 1cm... could you see it? does light permeate it? refract off it in rainbows?
That's just what I've been doing with a new purchase, a Mac Plus. I also have a classic II and a couple of C64s I drag out from time to time.
.wav, but couldn't actually store it on the 40MB drive inside :). On the other hand IRC, wordprocessing and web serving is well within its capabilities.
Using them for real brings a real link between the "god how did we live like this" and the "wow - this thing can do THAT". It's a good base to touch occasionally. Web browsing on the classic is pretty bad. I couldn't use it for the imaging I do daily, and it doesn't have a hope of playing an MP3. It could play the equivalent
It's just reminiscing in the end though. Looking back at the "wow" at how different it was, in the same way looking forward and extrapolating leads to the same kind of "wow".
How long until an entry level machine needs 3 phase power, 16GB ram, terabyte hard drives and networking quick enough to stream the entire iTMS all at once... (don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)
> It's just a marketing campain... whats the big deal?
...not like fads which is what we used to call them when I was young.
But it's a meme, and memes have respectability...
Sad to say, but there are simply too many people out there that believe everything they read on the internet. Once the older generation passes on, I suspect this problem will go away, but until then scams like this and the old telephone ones will be a ripe place for ripoffs.
...his third year uni student brain started ticking over, realised it might be a trap and he should proceed warily, and announced his plan was to give his bank details to the guy so he'd get the cash in his account and then skip out on the scammer.
:P.
It's not just the older ones, not all the time. Take a third year university student I know who came in all excited that he got an email from this guy in africa who needed to transport $20million out of the country...
Never thinking for once that there just might not BE a $20million to start with. Sucked straight in. AFAIK he was just couldn't be bothered going ahead or was warned off by someone else - he still seems to be financially stable
> In about a minute or two somebody will post a coral cache and
> it won't work either. Why slashbots insist on linking to these is
> beyond me. Have they ever worked
Two in about the 20 times I've tried. it's Just Not Big Enough.
Funniest bit is some of us are mirroring sites on home DSL/cable links, and they stay up longer than the coral cache.
You've probably heard about Echelon, the vast listening system run by the US, UK, Canada and Australia that scans the world's voice traffic looking for key words and phrases.
Aside from using the system for industrial espionage and bypassing international and national laws to listen in on people, it is also used to listen out for people like Osama bin Laden and assorted terrorists in the hope of preventing attacks.
All this is out in the relative open thanks to investigative journalists and a European Commission report into the system, concerned and annoyed that the Brits and Yanks has got there first.
It works like this: The calls are recorded by geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations, such as the UK's Menworth Hill, which combine satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in real time.
But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work?
Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose.
TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.
A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.
A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second.
Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US goverment with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it. Since then it has expanded into a general listening facility, an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the world's telephone conversations. Information about it's existence has been reluctantly revealed, prompted by scandals such as the recordings of Princess Diana's telephone calls by the NSA.
Recorded signals are fed into the TMS SAM systems where the DSPs filter out the noise to produce much clearer signals that software can work on to detect individual voices, perform voice recognition, and listen out for keywords, such as, for example, "Semtex". Decryption of encrypted calls is also a likely activity.
Hutsell says the SAM systems, "are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta. It's an intelligence community application involving data from various sources. This is loaded into RAM and then real-time analysis is carried out on it. Step one is to filter out the noise and our DSP chips are used for that. Then they look into patterns using other tools - images or voice. It's
You bastards. You've slashdotted echelon.
> he feels that it's impossible to implement the specification for
> InfiniBand in a free/open source product without violating the
> licensing agreement of the spec, because of patent
> infringement.
Not even in the nvidia drivers kind of way, with proprietary kernel modules? Not the most optimal solution (probably nearing highly pessimal) but probably possible.
This is worthless. There's no way you can just stop kids from buying games they want to play. Some obvious workarounds are ordering online and having a friend or relative buy the game.
So few young kids actually buy games it's pointless. (read: download it online) This isn't going to stop young kids getting hold of games, it's just going to piss off the few valid game buyers.
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's (who holds less a share of the automobile market than Apple does of the personal computer market) market share? I didn't buy I mac because I wanted a Ford Torus. I bought a mac because I wanted luxury.
Whether or not it's a Luxury machine, it's what you wanted. A BMW might have a low market share, but also the top selling sedan in the USA might also have a low market share when compared to the set of "All Vehicles". When it comes to the market share of cars, what matters isn't that comparison, but comparison to their direct competition. Whatever top selling passenger car there is, is competing against Other passenger cars, HP Servers compete against All Servers. HP Desktops compete against Desktops, Cheap & Cheerful PCs compete against other Cheap & Cheerful PCs, and so on.
Saying that Mack Trucks make only 0.3% of the total vehicle market sounds pretty fucked up, because it's a useless statistic.
> I don't even think parse this, Yoda could. Ugh, that's what a night of too much studying does.