You see, here in America, it's okay if our kids are exposed to gratuitous violence: that'll just make grow up strong. It's the love and nekkid people that make's 'em crazed killers... that and Hollywood.
</sarcasm>
More accurate, prehaps, would be if you had an equipment failure on a phone line and an ISDN modem tried to connec to a long distance number once ever 30 sec for a month.
This actually did happen to an old company (Internet in a Mall, inc.), and the phone bill for that car was about 3" high. Although the phone company didn't give them a full credit, they did cut the charges in half. This was because the phone company didn't follow their internal procedure which is to verify payment with the customer (and possibly secure partial payment in mid billing cycle) when usage unexpectedly spikes.
It's worth mentioning that this is in place for the phone company's protection. But it's a good policy for ISP's that bill by bandwidth. It save you and the customer much pain.
However, there's also evidence that the dotcom bust took a lot of money out of the economy. I heard that if investments were calculated into inflation during the late 90's (using value and not earnings models), then we were experiencing triple digit inflation.
Since most of the dotcoms were doomed from the beginning (see "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Peter Drucker chapter on technology entrepreneurs), and dotcom investing was more popular than Jesus; it's not surprising that the massive shift in wealth (most went to the already wealthy) will take some time to sort out.
Some think we're headed to a depression again because of the massive shift in wealth to the wealthy. I guess it's our doom to see if it's true. If so, then in the midst of the rubble there may be a chance for America(ns) to take back some ground in the tech field... unless they're being pushed down by the powers that be.
It seems that American companies are trashing their R&D divsions and trying to cover up for it by making themselves "more efficient."
I agree. The problem I see is that it is impossible for a CEO to direct a company to long term profits unless (s)he holds a majority of voting stock in the company. CEO's are still being kept by their quarterly profits.
How many large computer manufacturers are out there that are NOT US based.
For a long time, TV's were made almost exclusively in the US. Then, as we stopped putting money into manufacturing R&D, Japan (and later China, et al) used its manufacturing industry - recently swelled by US policing action and government investment - to take over most of the manufacturing costs. Same for many (most?) big appliances. We didn't even give ourselves a chance to move VCRs overseas - we never started serious production of them here; only invention.
Give it time, we'll move the compuer jobs and profits overseas. We have an excellent track record on it.
I feel like I'm at a TOOLS conference with a lot of.5 hairs around:)
"Computers are not good at abstract thought. Brains are. Brains are actually not very good at computation. Computers ( go figure) are. To each its strength."
You got a point there. I believe it was pionted out (or maybe it was me screaming at my screen) that OOP were meant to make it easier on the humans to deal with the computers.
That said, if you can avoid being abused by OO fundies for a while, you may find that AOP is a correction of some things that OOP does poorly - that's all.
So, why stick to OOP if it has these flaws? Well, some don't. Some do, finding it easier to wrap their mind around "object" that are homogeneous to "real world" things.
Yes, I know you were saying something like this in the origional post, but I felt the need for clarification....
Interesting observation (if I had a mod point, I'd mod it "Interesting" and just shut up, but since I don't...).
Most of the limitations you mention weren't meant to be limitations, but rather codifications of practices that were seen as Good Things (ref. jargon).
* Fortran offered the ease of representing arrays, matrices, vectors (not sure they had the last two in old Fortran), etc. in a compact notation.
* Procedural programming offered the ability to reuse variable names in different scopes.
* OOP was a limitation, but its intention was to offer an easier interface to logical components that procedural programming offered (has anyone else done object oriented coding in K&R C? It's totally do-able, but very tricksy).
* Java's "feature" was a limitation... Yeah, I'll give you that one. Can't say I can complain much about it (I think my brain auto-switches when I go from C++ to Java so I don't notice...).
As for AOP, it's a tool to keep you from having to rewriting your (or someone elses) library everytime the implimentation calls for a linked list instead of a tree.
As for the somewhat off topic remark: all science and math (ie. science of patterns) is "simply" pointing out where the walls and doors are in the universe. It's not limiting or expanding in that sense; it simply *is*.
For Godel's proof (excellent, but very thick - non-math geeks should probably read "Godel Escher Bach" instead), it's a statement of the limitations of logical proof based systems (ie. all modern math). Keep in mind that, in the future, there may be ways of "proving" uncountable sets of theorems, as well as nontraditional logic to "prove" items that can't be addressed by current math. Never forget meta-math!!!!
eeks, this has turned into a total rant. Sorry, man.
Sure, but that isn't really the type, it's a description of what the variable does...
Indeed. As with any religion, variable name comes down to preference. After coding for VC++ (among other things) for about 5 years, I've personally developed a distaste for it. I'm currently more verbose than most of the variables I see in (for instance) the linux TCP/IP stack, but I doubt I'll ever voluntarily add the "m_"'s, "i"'s, and "d"'s of the MS world again. If you need that much identification in your variables, you're probably doing something wrong.
When I see coding like that now, it fills me with dread and sickness, which is funny since that's the same reaction my dad had to cigarette smoke after he stopped smoking.
I believe his implication was that All Organized Religions == General Badness. Which I'm inclined to believe. I'm sure there are plenty of people who believe in [gG]od* but don't put their views on other people. I simply haven't met any...
If you can't stop it from being abused, done put it there to begin with.
I remember hearing that the moon helped keep earth's orbit stable. As the mass of the moon decreases from mining, and the mass of the earth increases from importing said booty; how soon will Gnome Alaska become and intermediate tropical paradise...
Ack. You just put perfectly into words everything I wanted to post here and more. All I have left is:
One of my friends, who at the time was studying at CalArts, once commented that he saw people spending their lives making new interaction with their instruments but still producing the same old music. One guy made an interface to his synth rig that used interupted lasers as the triggers for midi signals; another, I believe, wired his hands to send notes depending on their positions. At the time my friend was looking for a change; something that wasn't US radio (he found euro jungle - new at the time).
It's kinda sad that at times we can feel the desprate need for change but can't find the path to make it happen. When we need a change in substance, the first thing we do is change the stick we're poking the old substance with.
When we use it, we are pretty sure that we know who we are talking to, and we know we'll get a bill at the end of the month and we know what rate we'll be charged at...
...it all depends no what you're doing. For a lot of applied math (read as: PDE, linear algebra intensive, etc.) there's a lot of optimizations that are best done in code.
At UCLA's math department, the applied people have a QUIST related research program that uses Fortran77 and shell scripts, and C++ for various parts of their code to implement the Level-Set method to simulate the growth of thin films (atom by atom construction of electronic devices). The language choice seems to be due to legacy reasons: the grad student that started it so long ago used it, and the code has continued to grow ever since(ie. legacy reasons).
Although I wouldn't call it *math* research, here at MBI, bioinformatics programs run on the cluster *seem* to be written in C or C++ for the most part. I thinks it's more of the former because that's the interface for a number of bioinformatics libraries that we have licenced. Also, these things tend to be mixed heavily with shell and perl scripts; so the language is only for ease of integration with support libraries.
For most all of my undergrad work, I saw everyone use matlab, mathimatica, and their relatives for their work. In grad school, it seems to depend more on the class and the religious leanings of the mathematician involved.
There's a class on scientific computing that uses VC++ with fortran libraries from netlib (leveraged by f2c) solve some math implementation problem (tends to vary from year to year). Prof Anderson tends to by a junkyard warrior when it comes to math code generation. But then he's the mathematician's MacGuyver. (side note: Prof Anderson is a wonderful teacher and researcher - check out his page for some handy software tools and papers. Also, look at 270B for tidbits of linear algebra optimizations).
The benifit of matlab-ish programs is that you can usually implement your math structure quickly. The down side is that if you want to use any advance optimization then it near impossible. On the other hand, if you don't have a numerical analysis background, then many of the things you try to do to optimize your code in more mundane languages are probably going to be *much* slower then matlab, et al.
All of this is assuming you'r doing numerical analysis. If you're interested in abstract algebra , then I think you're stuck with maple. good program, but I don't have a review on it since I did most of my work by pencil and paper. I did use it for one of my crypto classes and found its implementation of Z_n groups very nice... although I ended up just coding it in C++ anyway:)
Also, check out the R project as it is GNU matlab.
... is a bit too late here, but if we can start finding these patents while they're still pending...
From their FAQ, there's a link to the procedure of allowing the public to file a protest to a pending patent. There are some interesting problems that a patent lawyer might be able to clear up...
One of the conditions imposed on when a protest may be filed is (from Section 1901):
The protest is submitted prior to the date the application was published or the mailing of a notice of allowance under 1.311, whichever occurs first
How is the public to know that an incorrect patent has been filed? I haven't been able to find a repository of unpublished patents. So far, I haven't seen a company publish their patent application before the uspto does....
Sometiems I feel that the overstatement of damanges should be a crime in itself.
IANAL, but if it's testimony given under oath, then it probably is. Though, it's unlikely for DA's to go after lying corps who help them get big convictions on their names. If it is accurate, then should the FCC be going after them for hiding multi million (or billion) dollar losses? I believe it was in Cyberlaw that I read the justification that stealing code threatened to undermine all the developement a company put into it since it could be given to its competitors - hence taking away the victim's market advantage. This seems rediculous to me.
Yes, this is part rant, but I think it holds a valid question as well: How can a person be responsible for damages that don't exist?
There is actually no Constitutional right to privacy.
IANAL and I hate to beat a dead horse, but:
The courts have found that there is an implied right to privacy written into the first ammendment (sorry, don't have my copy of CyberLaw with me).
The list of rights in the constitution and its amendments is not enumerative. Please see amenment IX - " The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"
This has been covered on slashdot many times before.
Re:Another example of WHY the US Patent office suc
on
NCR Patents the Internet
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Agreed.
"A method, apparatus, article of manufacture, and a memory structure for storing and retrieving data in a database implementing privacy control is disclosed." (Abstract of 6,253,203)
I think a filesystem with permissions would be prior art for this... Who the hell would sign off on this patent?
Further on...
"1. A data warehousing, management, and privacy control system, comprising... a database table comprising a plurality of data columns and at least one data control column... information reflecting consumer privacy parameters"
exactly passwd which contains a "customer's" password hash and his/her home directory and shell.
"5. The apparatus of claim 1, further comprising a customer interface module providing access to the database table via the privileged view and to permit specification of the consumer privacy parameters."
A file system with permissions.... (eg. AS400 whose fs is *actually* a database)
Can anyone else see anything that's origional about this patent? I'm looking through all the claims and they all fit with either a filesystem or a rdbms.
Why the hell would anyone take an infringement law suit seriously from these patents?
Sometime the profound stupidity of businesses really hits me. Like the time an old boss of mine wanted to patent the ability to write libraries so that the implementation could change without changing the code written against it (ie. API's). This was in 2002.
It's broken, but I don't see it getting fixed in this life time:(
So this is how the "onetime pad" is generated, and this has always turned out to have a weakness.
Indeed, as has been mentioned in many other posts at many other times, their process is a pseudo random number extender. The problem is that the resulting sequence has the same amount of information as the origional sample (all input material used). So, that opens the door for finding patterns in the randomness.
Even if the stream output from their prne is feed back into itself, it'll still have a relation between the bits.... at most N bits of usable kti for N bits of input.......erg... no coffee... can't think.... Can anyone continue this?
We all know Slashdotters are far more intelligent than any of these suits...
I don't think the SAW is a result of/.ers believing they are more intelligent, but rather motivated differently. While most of us here want a good technical job on a platform that doesn't Suck (ref. slashdot definition of Suck), the ability to tweak with our toys, and bitch about the things that piss us off; the goal of *really* large corporations is to make a lot of money. If you're a suit at the head of said large corporation and you don't make more money, then you get canned and possible taken to court by the investers.
Is their composite track record on DRM really long enough for us to make any sort of valid assumptions about what this consortium will do?
These particular companies? Maybe not on DRM, but American business practices have been fairly steady over the last 20 years - make more money no matter how you do it. It's been true of the entertainment industry since the player piano.
While conspiracy theories are well and good on the X-Files and Fox News Specials, I'm inclined to give the technology companies the benefit of the doubt until their actions indicate their true intentions.
Microsoft's intentions are rather well defined - put everyone else out of business. Although IBM is taking the linux road now, they've been the shark and the bully for most of the computer industry's history. As for the rest, they generally come from the same MBA programs.
Although there's most definitely a ton of paranoia around here; I don't think it's such a bad thing. Closing your eyes can kill you on the road of life
Prohibition left its mark on US law, though. In its attempt to give law enforcement the tools it needed to deal with a poorly written law, the Supreme Court expanded search and seizure, let wire tapping go through, and set the grounds for much of modern day rug enforcement behavior.
Just about the only good thing that came out of it was the definition of entrapment.
Slashdot Mirror
You see, here in America, it's okay if our kids are exposed to gratuitous violence: that'll just make grow up strong. It's the love and nekkid people that make's 'em crazed killers... that and Hollywood.
</sarcasm>
More accurate, prehaps, would be if you had an equipment failure on a phone line and an ISDN modem tried to connec to a long distance number once ever 30 sec for a month.
This actually did happen to an old company (Internet in a Mall, inc.), and the phone bill for that car was about 3" high. Although the phone company didn't give them a full credit, they did cut the charges in half. This was because the phone company didn't follow their internal procedure which is to verify payment with the customer (and possibly secure partial payment in mid billing cycle) when usage unexpectedly spikes.
It's worth mentioning that this is in place for the phone company's protection. But it's a good policy for ISP's that bill by bandwidth. It save you and the customer much pain.
Not, it's a little too late in this case...
However, there's also evidence that the dotcom bust took a lot of money out of the economy. I heard that if investments were calculated into inflation during the late 90's (using value and not earnings models), then we were experiencing triple digit inflation.
Since most of the dotcoms were doomed from the beginning (see "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Peter Drucker chapter on technology entrepreneurs), and dotcom investing was more popular than Jesus; it's not surprising that the massive shift in wealth (most went to the already wealthy) will take some time to sort out.
Some think we're headed to a depression again because of the massive shift in wealth to the wealthy. I guess it's our doom to see if it's true. If so, then in the midst of the rubble there may be a chance for America(ns) to take back some ground in the tech field... unless they're being pushed down by the powers that be.
I agree. The problem I see is that it is impossible for a CEO to direct a company to long term profits unless (s)he holds a majority of voting stock in the company. CEO's are still being kept by their quarterly profits.
- How many large computer manufacturers are out there that are NOT US based.
For a long time, TV's were made almost exclusively in the US. Then, as we stopped putting money into manufacturing R&D, Japan (and later China, et al) used its manufacturing industry - recently swelled by US policing action and government investment - to take over most of the manufacturing costs. Same for many (most?) big appliances. We didn't even give ourselves a chance to move VCRs overseas - we never started serious production of them here; only invention.Give it time, we'll move the compuer jobs and profits overseas. We have an excellent track record on it.
Sorry, my bad. typing working tangentially to my brain :) That's what I meant to say...
I feel like I'm at a TOOLS conference with a lot of .5 hairs around :)
"Computers are not good at abstract thought. Brains are. Brains are actually not very good at computation. Computers ( go figure) are. To each its strength."
You got a point there. I believe it was pionted out (or maybe it was me screaming at my screen) that OOP were meant to make it easier on the humans to deal with the computers.
That said, if you can avoid being abused by OO fundies for a while, you may find that AOP is a correction of some things that OOP does poorly - that's all.
So, why stick to OOP if it has these flaws? Well, some don't. Some do, finding it easier to wrap their mind around "object" that are homogeneous to "real world" things.
Yes, I know you were saying something like this in the origional post, but I felt the need for clarification....
Interesting observation (if I had a mod point, I'd mod it "Interesting" and just shut up, but since I don't...).
Most of the limitations you mention weren't meant to be limitations, but rather codifications of practices that were seen as Good Things (ref. jargon).
* Fortran offered the ease of representing arrays, matrices, vectors (not sure they had the last two in old Fortran), etc. in a compact notation.
* Procedural programming offered the ability to reuse variable names in different scopes.
* OOP was a limitation, but its intention was to offer an easier interface to logical components that procedural programming offered (has anyone else done object oriented coding in K&R C? It's totally do-able, but very tricksy).
* Java's "feature" was a limitation... Yeah, I'll give you that one. Can't say I can complain much about it (I think my brain auto-switches when I go from C++ to Java so I don't notice...).
As for AOP, it's a tool to keep you from having to rewriting your (or someone elses) library everytime the implimentation calls for a linked list instead of a tree.
As for the somewhat off topic remark: all science and math (ie. science of patterns) is "simply" pointing out where the walls and doors are in the universe. It's not limiting or expanding in that sense; it simply *is*.
For Godel's proof (excellent, but very thick - non-math geeks should probably read "Godel Escher Bach" instead), it's a statement of the limitations of logical proof based systems (ie. all modern math). Keep in mind that, in the future, there may be ways of "proving" uncountable sets of theorems, as well as nontraditional logic to "prove" items that can't be addressed by current math. Never forget meta-math!!!!
eeks, this has turned into a total rant. Sorry, man.
Indeed. As with any religion, variable name comes down to preference. After coding for VC++ (among other things) for about 5 years, I've personally developed a distaste for it. I'm currently more verbose than most of the variables I see in (for instance) the linux TCP/IP stack, but I doubt I'll ever voluntarily add the "m_"'s, "i"'s, and "d"'s of the MS world again. If you need that much identification in your variables, you're probably doing something wrong.
When I see coding like that now, it fills me with dread and sickness, which is funny since that's the same reaction my dad had to cigarette smoke after he stopped smoking.
"Catholocism != All Organized Religion"
I believe his implication was that All Organized Religions == General Badness. Which I'm inclined to believe. I'm sure there are plenty of people who believe in [gG]od* but don't put their views on other people. I simply haven't met any...
If you can't stop it from being abused, done put it there to begin with.
...duh.
I just read a comment on 3He. I guess that wouldn't reduce the mass by much...
So, then, what happens when planetologists want to study the origins of earth and can't..
I remember hearing that the moon helped keep earth's orbit stable. As the mass of the moon decreases from mining, and the mass of the earth increases from importing said booty; how soon will Gnome Alaska become and intermediate tropical paradise...
Note to moderators: this is tongue in cheek.
Ack. You just put perfectly into words everything I wanted to post here and more. All I have left is:
One of my friends, who at the time was studying at CalArts, once commented that he saw people spending their lives making new interaction with their instruments but still producing the same old music. One guy made an interface to his synth rig that used interupted lasers as the triggers for midi signals; another, I believe, wired his hands to send notes depending on their positions. At the time my friend was looking for a change; something that wasn't US radio (he found euro jungle - new at the time).
It's kinda sad that at times we can feel the desprate need for change but can't find the path to make it happen. When we need a change in substance, the first thing we do is change the stick we're poking the old substance with.
Maybe it's because 'the truth' is ten years out of date.
I guess this means the answer is yes!
When we use it, we are pretty sure that we know who we are talking to, and we know we'll get a bill at the end of the month and we know what rate we'll be charged at...
So they want to bill me monthly? :)
At UCLA's math department, the applied people have a QUIST related research program that uses Fortran77 and shell scripts, and C++ for various parts of their code to implement the Level-Set method to simulate the growth of thin films (atom by atom construction of electronic devices). The language choice seems to be due to legacy reasons: the grad student that started it so long ago used it, and the code has continued to grow ever since(ie. legacy reasons).
Although I wouldn't call it *math* research, here at MBI, bioinformatics programs run on the cluster *seem* to be written in C or C++ for the most part. I thinks it's more of the former because that's the interface for a number of bioinformatics libraries that we have licenced. Also, these things tend to be mixed heavily with shell and perl scripts; so the language is only for ease of integration with support libraries.
For most all of my undergrad work, I saw everyone use matlab, mathimatica, and their relatives for their work. In grad school, it seems to depend more on the class and the religious leanings of the mathematician involved.
There's a class on scientific computing that uses VC++ with fortran libraries from netlib (leveraged by f2c) solve some math implementation problem (tends to vary from year to year). Prof Anderson tends to by a junkyard warrior when it comes to math code generation. But then he's the mathematician's MacGuyver. (side note: Prof Anderson is a wonderful teacher and researcher - check out his page for some handy software tools and papers. Also, look at 270B for tidbits of linear algebra optimizations).
The benifit of matlab-ish programs is that you can usually implement your math structure quickly. The down side is that if you want to use any advance optimization then it near impossible. On the other hand, if you don't have a numerical analysis background, then many of the things you try to do to optimize your code in more mundane languages are probably going to be *much* slower then matlab, et al.
All of this is assuming you'r doing numerical analysis. If you're interested in abstract algebra , then I think you're stuck with maple. good program, but I don't have a review on it since I did most of my work by pencil and paper. I did use it for one of my crypto classes and found its implementation of Z_n groups very nice... although I ended up just coding it in C++ anyway :)
Also, check out the R project as it is GNU matlab.
... is a bit too late here, but if we can start finding these patents while they're still pending...
From their FAQ, there's a link to the procedure of allowing the public to file a protest to a pending patent. There are some interesting problems that a patent lawyer might be able to clear up...
One of the conditions imposed on when a protest may be filed is (from Section 1901):
How is the public to know that an incorrect patent has been filed? I haven't been able to find a repository of unpublished patents. So far, I haven't seen a company publish their patent application before the uspto does....
IANAL, but if it's testimony given under oath, then it probably is. Though, it's unlikely for DA's to go after lying corps who help them get big convictions on their names. If it is accurate, then should the FCC be going after them for hiding multi million (or billion) dollar losses? I believe it was in Cyberlaw that I read the justification that stealing code threatened to undermine all the developement a company put into it since it could be given to its competitors - hence taking away the victim's market advantage. This seems rediculous to me.
Yes, this is part rant, but I think it holds a valid question as well: How can a person be responsible for damages that don't exist?
IANAL and I hate to beat a dead horse, but:
Agreed.
:(
"A method, apparatus, article of manufacture, and a memory structure for storing and retrieving data in a database implementing privacy control is disclosed." (Abstract of 6,253,203)
I think a filesystem with permissions would be prior art for this... Who the hell would sign off on this patent?
Further on...
"1. A data warehousing, management, and privacy control system, comprising... a database table comprising a plurality of data columns and at least one data control column... information reflecting consumer privacy parameters"
exactly passwd which contains a "customer's" password hash and his/her home directory and shell.
"5. The apparatus of claim 1, further comprising a customer interface module providing access to the database table via the privileged view and to permit specification of the consumer privacy parameters."
A file system with permissions.... (eg. AS400 whose fs is *actually* a database)
Can anyone else see anything that's origional about this patent? I'm looking through all the claims and they all fit with either a filesystem or a rdbms.
Why the hell would anyone take an infringement law suit seriously from these patents?
Sometime the profound stupidity of businesses really hits me. Like the time an old boss of mine wanted to patent the ability to write libraries so that the implementation could change without changing the code written against it (ie. API's). This was in 2002.
It's broken, but I don't see it getting fixed in this life time
-RB
Indeed, as has been mentioned in many other posts at many other times, their process is a pseudo random number extender. The problem is that the resulting sequence has the same amount of information as the origional sample (all input material used). So, that opens the door for finding patterns in the randomness.
...erg... no coffee... can't think.... Can anyone continue this?
Even if the stream output from their prne is feed back into itself, it'll still have a relation between the bits.... at most N bits of usable kti for N bits of input....
But if we walk without rhythm...
Hehe... Holy crap that was funny! Thank you for catching that :)
I don't think the SAW is a result of /.ers believing they are more intelligent, but rather motivated differently. While most of us here want a good technical job on a platform that doesn't Suck (ref. slashdot definition of Suck), the ability to tweak with our toys, and bitch about the things that piss us off; the goal of *really* large corporations is to make a lot of money. If you're a suit at the head of said large corporation and you don't make more money, then you get canned and possible taken to court by the investers.
These particular companies? Maybe not on DRM, but American business practices have been fairly steady over the last 20 years - make more money no matter how you do it. It's been true of the entertainment industry since the player piano.
Microsoft's intentions are rather well defined - put everyone else out of business. Although IBM is taking the linux road now, they've been the shark and the bully for most of the computer industry's history. As for the rest, they generally come from the same MBA programs.
Although there's most definitely a ton of paranoia around here; I don't think it's such a bad thing. Closing your eyes can kill you on the road of life
Prohibition left its mark on US law, though. In its attempt to give law enforcement the tools it needed to deal with a poorly written law, the Supreme Court expanded search and seizure, let wire tapping go through, and set the grounds for much of modern day rug enforcement behavior.
Just about the only good thing that came out of it was the definition of entrapment.
(IANAL, just an interested amateur historian).