Well, would you believe it; seconds after I posted my previous message, I got a response from Richard Corbett MEP. He includes a nice summary of his position, copied here:
"My position is as follows:
* I am not in favour of the patenting of software as exists in the US.
* Europe needs a uniform legal approach to stop the drift towards extending patentability to areas, which would not have been traditionally allowed, and to stop patentability of pure business methods, algorithms or mathematical methods.
* Software products as such, must not be patented.
* Opensource software must be allowed to flourish and the Commission must ensure that this Directive must not have adverse effects on opensource software and small software developers.
* Patents and the threat of litigation must not be used as an anti-competitive weapon to squeeze out small companies."
I'm much more encouraged by those views. Let's just hope they translate into actions.
Yeah, I wrote to the 6 MEPs that represent my region (Yorkshire and Humberside). They include 2 Labour MEPs (Richard Corbett and Linda McAvan), 2 Conservative MEPs (Edward McMillan Scott and Timothy Kirkhope), a Liberal Democrat (Diana Wallis) and an member of the UK Independance Party (Godfrey Bloom).
That was on the 1st of March. So far, I have had exactly 1 response, from Edward McMillan Scott, and that consisted of a standard form letter, indicating that the Conservatives were *for* the proposed Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions, because it would "offer [the patent office] secure legal grounds for refusing a patent for an invention involving pure software".
The letter ended up by stating that the European Parliament had voted to restart the process, indicating that he (or more likely the secratary who selected the form letter response) hadn't actually read my letter, which was to protest about this vote to restart being ignored by the Commission, as reported on Slashdot.
To date, I haven't received so much as a "thank you for your letter" from any of the others.
This was the first time I have ever been motivated enough to write to my representatives. Considering the complete lack of a response, it may be the last.
I can see now why direct action is so appealing to so many these days. It's the only way to get anything done.
After the last story on Slashdot about how the commission had ignored the restart request, I decided that it was time to do something. For the first time in my life, I wrote to an MP (specifically, the six MEPs representing my constituency).
I spent at least an hour drafting the letter. I attempted to make it informative, fair, persuasive, and yet polite. I pointed out how copyright currently covers most of the necessary areas, how the field of computing isn't in need of "incentives to innovate", how patents are horrendously expensive, how they would turn software development into a walk through a minefield, etc.
The response to this letter? Not a damn thing. Not even a "thank you for your letter".
I wonder why he has to - the plane has an autopilot, but the plan is to only sleep for a few minutes at a time.
Considering that he'll have a chase plane beside him some of the time, you'd think he could just stick it on autopilot for a few hours nap, and people in the chase plane will yell over the radio to wake him up if anything goes amiss.
But maybe that's stretching the definition of "solo flight".
Hmm, but what about if the web address didn't change at all - ie: the first time you ask for page2.htm you get the advert page, and the next time you ask for it, you get the actual page 2.
In other words, just randomly replace page2 with an ad page every X loads, and make the continue link simply reload it again, at which point you get the real page.
And I think that will ultimately become the most prevalent ad type because I can't see any way of getting around it at all.
Unlike all these pop-ups and pop-unders and "floaters" and the like, if you click on the link to a page and are served a different page instead, then it's completely out of your control, and there's nothing at all that your browser can do about it. Disabling javascript or whatever won't help - you asked for a page, you got served a page, and the fact that the content isn't what you were expecting is impossible to detect, short of AI in the browser, or some sort of distributed checksum or Bayesian filter, like with spam.
Essentially it becomes like TV, where you have no control over when the ad breaks are inserted. With TV the solution is to record it, and then fast forward or skip the ads, but recording TV is a lot easier than fetching all the pages for a web article - a tv "stream" is linear, whereas with a website, each page can link to multiple other pages, so you'd have to crawl the whole site or something.
That's the crucial distinction between the GPL and BSD licenses. With the BSD license, anyone can rip off your work and bury it inside their own proprietary code, without giving anything back in return.
Hence it could be argued that the BSD license benfits freeloaders, while the GPL benefits the community as a whole, something that would not be possible without the protection of copyright.
As a BBC license payer, I'm appalled by the factual inaccuracy in the "EU software patent law faces axe" article.
The statement is made that "The open source movement, of which Linux is the flagbearer, eschews notions of property and instead allows anyone to examine and tinker with the inner workings of software."
This is nonsense, verging on the libellous. The open source movement has no such stance. Even minimal fact checking would quickly reveal that the Gnu Public License, under which much of today's open source software, including Linux, is released, depends fundamentally on the protections and rights granted by copyright.
The concept that the open source movement seeks to destroy any sense of property is precisely the sort of scare story being pushed by large computer manufacturers in their attempt to railroad the software patents directive through the European parliament.
I expect better from a supposedly neutral and unbiased news organisation.
The BBC coverage of this issue states that "The open source movement, of which Linux is the flagbearer, eschews notions of property and instead allows anyone to examine and tinker with the inner workings of software."
As a BBC license payer, I'm incensed that they could be spreading such FUD. Since when has Linux "eschewed the notion of property"?
Just because the open source community is vehemently opposed to software patents, doesn't mean that they don't support the "notion of property". Without such notions as copyright for instance, the GPL would be impossible.
If Apple really want to find out who's leaking information from their company, then, when the next product is due to be announced, they should simply circulate slightly different specifications to different people in the company. From that you can trace where the leak came from. It's worked for intelligence agencies for centuries.
Better than the very grubby process of threatening journalists.
The trouble with this is that everyone then claims that it's other people who are affected, in much the same way that most drivers tend to think they are "above average".
Rather than hoping that a load of people are going to admit, first to themselves, and then to the rest of the world, that they're really crap drivers when on the phone, better to just ban it for everyone.
It's not so different to alcohol - some people may be able to drive OK with high levels, but is it really worth taking the chance? Would you trust someone who claims to be able to drive OK even after a load of drinks?
"Theoretically impossible to decrypt...in the lifetime of the universe" you say?
That only applies if you're taking a brute force approach to cracking it - something that should be the absolute last resort.
Far more often, the code is broken by exploiting some mathematical weakness in the algorithm (or bug in the software implementation). If that's your aim, then it obviously pays to have a thorough understanding of the field, the various cyphers that have been devised, and how they've been broken in the past.
The common argument is that you can plug in any mouse you like, so if the standard one button mouse isn't to your liking, you can change it.
But plugging an external mouse into an Apple laptop is going to be a big pain.
Why can't Apple laptops come with split left/right mouse buttons like PC laptops, but simply configure them both to do the same thing by default?
That way, novice users (or those who prefer a 1 button system) could simply click on either button - essentially simulating a 1 button mouse - while those of us who prefer 2 buttons could change a configuration option to allow the buttons to work as left and right mouse buttons, rather than having to plug in an external mouse.
Exactly what mistakes has Microsoft made then? They are the biggest, most successful computer company on the face of the planet. The antitrust settlement was no more than a slap on the wrist; profits continue to climb, and show no signs of doing otherwise.
Before you flame away, note that I'm not passing judgement on any moral issues or suchlike, I'm just saying that, from Microsoft's point of view, as a business, any mistakes they might have made pale into insignificance compared to their spectacular successes.
We here on Slashdot may hate DRM and IE and a dozen other things that MS is pushing, but to claim that they were mistakes on Microsoft's part is just daft.
So this "learning from their mistakes" business seems to be nonsense, except in the sense that they're gunning for the 1% of the market that they feel they missed out on.
You're not wrong to say that developing parallel algorithms in general is hard. It wouldn't be much fun to try and code something like Word to make full use of x processors, say.
However, these days, most games are all about graphics and, by a happy co-incidence, that is one area that *does* work really, really well with parallel processing.
Just look at all the ray tracing systems that will happily soak up as many processors as you can throw at them - whether that be a single box with multiple processors, or a Beowulf cluster or the like. At the simplest level, you can just divide up the image into sections, and have each processor work on its own section.
So while parallel programming is hard, a games console might just be the ideal place for it.
Will they be able to match the total theoretical system performance? Probably not. Will they be able to make good use of all those parallel processors? Hell yes.
When the manufacturers refuse to open up the specs for their hardware, then there's an implicit understanding that they will at least supply working (closed) drivers of their own.
So I may not be able to get the device to work under Linux, or some other OS that wasn't listed on the box, but at least I'll be able to run it under Windows, as advertised.
Unfortunately, the driver for my particular card (Netgear WG511) is one of the worst pieces of crap that I've ever had the mispleasure of having to use.
By way of example, when run under Win 2K, it doesn't "remember" the settings, such as WEP keys, unless you're running as Admin. Netgear's advice has to be seen to be believed - they have a web page that tells you that you need to run with Administrator privileges to avoid the issue, and ON THE SAME PAGE, tells you how dangerous it is to run with admin privileges...
This same piece of crap utility loads itself into the system tray at startup, and continues to soak up processor time for no readily apparent reason - - you can kill it, and the wireless link continues to function.
This same utility also regularly sends packets out to numerical addresses on the web. Spyware, who knows?
In summary, if the manufacturers can't or won't supply working drivers, then the whole product they're selling is essentially fraudulent - they're promising something that they're not delivering.
So I believe that they should be FORCED to open the drivers.
Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.
No, having to learn a bunch of conversion constants is exactly what you don't want - that's what caused all the problems last time round.
You want to move them completely and utterly to SI units. All memory of Imperial units should be purged, and there should be none of this "conversion" nonsense going on.
The European Mars Express probe has a radar boom that was meant to do really accurate measuring of the subsurface ice. This sounds like the sort of knowledge that would be really useful to have in deciding exactly where to aim the Phoenix mission.
But they delayed unfolding the radar boom on Mars Express after some analysis showed that the forces released in springing it open might be enough to mess up the whole spacecraft.
First it was meant to happen in April 2004, then delayed till June I think. After that I can't find any furthur information. Anyone know what the score with that is?
Yeah, but plug in a USB keyboard and USB mouse and you've got no more free USB ports. So you need to get a USB hub now. Or a more expensive keyboard with its own USB ports.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they'd probably get sued for *not* including them...
Well, would you believe it; seconds after I posted my previous message, I got a response from Richard Corbett MEP. He includes a nice summary of his position, copied here:
"My position is as follows:
* I am not in favour of the patenting of software as exists in the US.
* Europe needs a uniform legal approach to stop the drift towards extending patentability to areas, which would not have been traditionally allowed, and to stop patentability of pure business methods, algorithms or mathematical methods.
* Software products as such, must not be patented.
* Opensource software must be allowed to flourish and the Commission must ensure that this Directive must not have adverse effects on opensource software and small software developers.
* Patents and the threat of litigation must not be used as an anti-competitive weapon to squeeze out small companies."
I'm much more encouraged by those views. Let's just hope they translate into actions.
Yeah, I wrote to the 6 MEPs that represent my region (Yorkshire and Humberside). They include 2 Labour MEPs (Richard Corbett and Linda McAvan), 2 Conservative MEPs (Edward McMillan Scott and Timothy Kirkhope), a Liberal Democrat (Diana Wallis) and an member of the UK Independance Party (Godfrey Bloom).
That was on the 1st of March. So far, I have had exactly 1 response, from Edward McMillan Scott, and that consisted of a standard form letter, indicating that the Conservatives were *for* the proposed Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions, because it would "offer [the patent office] secure legal grounds for refusing a patent for an invention involving pure software".
The letter ended up by stating that the European Parliament had voted to restart the process, indicating that he (or more likely the secratary who selected the form letter response) hadn't actually read my letter, which was to protest about this vote to restart being ignored by the Commission, as reported on Slashdot.
To date, I haven't received so much as a "thank you for your letter" from any of the others.
This was the first time I have ever been motivated enough to write to my representatives. Considering the complete lack of a response, it may be the last.
I can see now why direct action is so appealing to so many these days. It's the only way to get anything done.
After the last story on Slashdot about how the commission had ignored the restart request, I decided that it was time to do something. For the first time in my life, I wrote to an MP (specifically, the six MEPs representing my constituency).
I spent at least an hour drafting the letter. I attempted to make it informative, fair, persuasive, and yet polite. I pointed out how copyright currently covers most of the necessary areas, how the field of computing isn't in need of "incentives to innovate", how patents are horrendously expensive, how they would turn software development into a walk through a minefield, etc.
The response to this letter? Not a damn thing. Not even a "thank you for your letter".
So much for writing to your MEPs.
Yeah, how on earth are you meant to spot spoofing/phishing attempts if you can't even see the damn URL at all?
I wonder why he has to - the plane has an autopilot, but the plan is to only sleep for a few minutes at a time.
Considering that he'll have a chase plane beside him some of the time, you'd think he could just stick it on autopilot for a few hours nap, and people in the chase plane will yell over the radio to wake him up if anything goes amiss.
But maybe that's stretching the definition of "solo flight".
Hmm, but what about if the web address didn't change at all - ie: the first time you ask for page2.htm you get the advert page, and the next time you ask for it, you get the actual page 2.
In other words, just randomly replace page2 with an ad page every X loads, and make the continue link simply reload it again, at which point you get the real page.
And I think that will ultimately become the most prevalent ad type because I can't see any way of getting around it at all.
Unlike all these pop-ups and pop-unders and "floaters" and the like, if you click on the link to a page and are served a different page instead, then it's completely out of your control, and there's nothing at all that your browser can do about it. Disabling javascript or whatever won't help - you asked for a page, you got served a page, and the fact that the content isn't what you were expecting is impossible to detect, short of AI in the browser, or some sort of distributed checksum or Bayesian filter, like with spam.
Essentially it becomes like TV, where you have no control over when the ad breaks are inserted. With TV the solution is to record it, and then fast forward or skip the ads, but recording TV is a lot easier than fetching all the pages for a web article - a tv "stream" is linear, whereas with a website, each page can link to multiple other pages, so you'd have to crawl the whole site or something.
It's resting...
That's the crucial distinction between the GPL and BSD licenses. With the BSD license, anyone can rip off your work and bury it inside their own proprietary code, without giving anything back in return.
Hence it could be argued that the BSD license benfits freeloaders, while the GPL benefits the community as a whole, something that would not be possible without the protection of copyright.
My complaint to the BBC:
As a BBC license payer, I'm appalled by the factual inaccuracy in the "EU software patent law faces axe" article.
The statement is made that "The open source movement, of which Linux is the flagbearer, eschews notions of property and instead allows anyone to examine and tinker with the inner workings of software."
This is nonsense, verging on the libellous. The open source movement has no such stance. Even minimal fact checking would quickly reveal that the Gnu Public License, under which much of today's open source software, including Linux, is released, depends fundamentally on the protections and rights granted by copyright.
The concept that the open source movement seeks to destroy any sense of property is precisely the sort of scare story being pushed by large computer manufacturers in their attempt to railroad the software patents directive through the European parliament.
I expect better from a supposedly neutral and unbiased news organisation.
The BBC coverage of this issue states that "The open source movement, of which Linux is the flagbearer, eschews notions of property and instead allows anyone to examine and tinker with the inner workings of software."
As a BBC license payer, I'm incensed that they could be spreading such FUD. Since when has Linux "eschewed the notion of property"?
Just because the open source community is vehemently opposed to software patents, doesn't mean that they don't support the "notion of property". Without such notions as copyright for instance, the GPL would be impossible.
If Apple really want to find out who's leaking information from their company, then, when the next product is due to be announced, they should simply circulate slightly different specifications to different people in the company. From that you can trace where the leak came from. It's worked for intelligence agencies for centuries.
Better than the very grubby process of threatening journalists.
The trouble with this is that everyone then claims that it's other people who are affected, in much the same way that most drivers tend to think they are "above average".
Rather than hoping that a load of people are going to admit, first to themselves, and then to the rest of the world, that they're really crap drivers when on the phone, better to just ban it for everyone.
It's not so different to alcohol - some people may be able to drive OK with high levels, but is it really worth taking the chance? Would you trust someone who claims to be able to drive OK even after a load of drinks?
"Theoretically impossible to decrypt...in the lifetime of the universe" you say?
That only applies if you're taking a brute force approach to cracking it - something that should be the absolute last resort.
Far more often, the code is broken by exploiting some mathematical weakness in the algorithm (or bug in the software implementation). If that's your aim, then it obviously pays to have a thorough understanding of the field, the various cyphers that have been devised, and how they've been broken in the past.
The common argument is that you can plug in any mouse you like, so if the standard one button mouse isn't to your liking, you can change it.
But plugging an external mouse into an Apple laptop is going to be a big pain.
Why can't Apple laptops come with split left/right mouse buttons like PC laptops, but simply configure them both to do the same thing by default?
That way, novice users (or those who prefer a 1 button system) could simply click on either button - essentially simulating a 1 button mouse - while those of us who prefer 2 buttons could change a configuration option to allow the buttons to work as left and right mouse buttons, rather than having to plug in an external mouse.
Exactly what mistakes has Microsoft made then? They are the biggest, most successful computer company on the face of the planet. The antitrust settlement was no more than a slap on the wrist; profits continue to climb, and show no signs of doing otherwise.
Before you flame away, note that I'm not passing judgement on any moral issues or suchlike, I'm just saying that, from Microsoft's point of view, as a business, any mistakes they might have made pale into insignificance compared to their spectacular successes.
We here on Slashdot may hate DRM and IE and a dozen other things that MS is pushing, but to claim that they were mistakes on Microsoft's part is just daft.
So this "learning from their mistakes" business seems to be nonsense, except in the sense that they're gunning for the 1% of the market that they feel they missed out on.
You're not wrong to say that developing parallel algorithms in general is hard. It wouldn't be much fun to try and code something like Word to make full use of x processors, say.
However, these days, most games are all about graphics and, by a happy co-incidence, that is one area that *does* work really, really well with parallel processing.
Just look at all the ray tracing systems that will happily soak up as many processors as you can throw at them - whether that be a single box with multiple processors, or a Beowulf cluster or the like. At the simplest level, you can just divide up the image into sections, and have each processor work on its own section.
So while parallel programming is hard, a games console might just be the ideal place for it.
Will they be able to match the total theoretical system performance? Probably not. Will they be able to make good use of all those parallel processors? Hell yes.
When the manufacturers refuse to open up the specs for their hardware, then there's an implicit understanding that they will at least supply working (closed) drivers of their own.
So I may not be able to get the device to work under Linux, or some other OS that wasn't listed on the box, but at least I'll be able to run it under Windows, as advertised.
Unfortunately, the driver for my particular card (Netgear WG511) is one of the worst pieces of crap that I've ever had the mispleasure of having to use.
By way of example, when run under Win 2K, it doesn't "remember" the settings, such as WEP keys, unless you're running as Admin. Netgear's advice has to be seen to be believed - they have a web page that tells you that you need to run with Administrator privileges to avoid the issue, and ON THE SAME PAGE, tells you how dangerous it is to run with admin privileges...
This same piece of crap utility loads itself into the system tray at startup, and continues to soak up processor time for no readily apparent reason - - you can kill it, and the wireless link continues to function.
This same utility also regularly sends packets out to numerical addresses on the web. Spyware, who knows?
In summary, if the manufacturers can't or won't supply working drivers, then the whole product they're selling is essentially fraudulent - they're promising something that they're not delivering.
So I believe that they should be FORCED to open the drivers.
Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.
So what's so special about a router?
No, having to learn a bunch of conversion constants is exactly what you don't want - that's what caused all the problems last time round.
You want to move them completely and utterly to SI units. All memory of Imperial units should be purged, and there should be none of this "conversion" nonsense going on.
The European Mars Express probe has a radar boom that was meant to do really accurate measuring of the subsurface ice. This sounds like the sort of knowledge that would be really useful to have in deciding exactly where to aim the Phoenix mission.
But they delayed unfolding the radar boom on Mars Express after some analysis showed that the forces released in springing it open might be enough to mess up the whole spacecraft.
First it was meant to happen in April 2004, then delayed till June I think. After that I can't find any furthur information. Anyone know what the score with that is?
Yeah, but plug in a USB keyboard and USB mouse and you've got no more free USB ports. So you need to get a USB hub now. Or a more expensive keyboard with its own USB ports.
Since the poster and editors have obviously been away...
Remember the TV series Quantum Leap, where Al used to shake the controller for the mainframe (Ziggy?) around? Looks like they were ahead of the times.
Better start keeping a look out for people around you suddenly behaving weirdly for a day or so...