By that argument there's nothing wrong with patents that can't be fixed by halving their length. Quite a big difference between that and abolishing them altogether.
I can think of one way to do it - but it wouldn't be too hard for a determined ISP to defeat:
Step 1: Calculate md5sum of webpage, store in separate location. Step 2: Include on the webpage some javascript to md5sum itself and compare this to md5sum in known location. Issue an alert if it differs. Step 3: Profit!
Of course, this is awkward for dynamically generated pages and if the ISP is happy to mess around with the page to insert ads, they're probably also happy to mess around with any javascript which detects it coming down the line. Does this method solve that?
I believe the Carphone Warehouse was talking about making moves into the US.
Here in the UK (and much of Europe) they're a network-independent retailer who is quite happy to sell you a handset at the full, un-subsidised price and you either buy a SIM card separately or use an existing one. Alternatively, they have agreements with every major network to retail phones connected to those networks. I'm rather surprised to hear US people talking as if no such business exists over there.
I think the idea is that by making it feasible to develop a business plan (and ultimately, a profitable business) around the vacuum cleaner without risk of someone else coming along and taking unfair advantage, the vacuum cleaner inventor will be motivated to develop a better vacuum cleaner.
Remember that his patent will eventually expire, and when it does he's back to good old-fashioned "beat the competition on price and service because they've got much the same technology" (which is buggery difficult without a unique aspect to your product) unless he can come up with another patentable idea.
A government operates to benefit society as a whole, but does so by making laws and creating incentives which work for the individual. About the only kind of incentive a government can offer a business (either existing or potential) is financial - either by giving you money directly (in the form of benefits and subsidies), not taking it away from you in the first place (in the form of tax breaks) or by making it easier for you to make money (patents and IP law). The "making it easier for you to make money" is something a government needs to be most careful of, lest the law provided allows you to make money at the cost of society.
Speaking of patent reform, read about Velcro. The guy "created" velcro and then major textile companies just waited for it to expire and then they copied it.
Patents take years to expire for a reason.
The idea is to give time to market it. Clearly the major textile companies didn't think it would give them much of a business benefit - so the guy who created velcro has the task not only of inventing a product, but also finding someone who wants to buy it badly enough that they'll license his patent - or build it into a product to sell to the general public.
Let's look at this from another perspective. James Dyson has spent a lot of time and money suing companies for copying aspects of his vacuum cleaner - when it first came out, it genuinely was revolutionary and gave his product a definite edge over his competitors - but he's won those cases, and he did spend something like 10 years in his shed designing his vacuum cleaner.
There have been cases where farmers who didn't think they were growing Monsanto GM crops were rather shocked to find that actually, they were. Cross-pollination from a neighbours field, see.
This didn't stop Monsanto from suing such farmers into the ground.
The whole point of a patents system is limited monopolies to help the market. Without such a system, there's nothing stopping me from spending 10 years in a shed developing a revolutionary new vacuum cleaner, bringing it to market - and then you waltzing into a shop, buying one, copying it and selling it for half the price I do.
The point of a capitalist society is that the "10 years in a shed" bit gets rewarded with a time-limited monopoly, so instead of simply putting up with the status quo and accepting that all vacuum cleaners suck (if you'll pardon the pun), I have an incentive to do something about it above and beyond "making my house 4% cleaner".
Where monopolies do harm the market is where the system is abused. The obvious solution to that is a system which isn't terribly open to abuse. Many of today's patent laws were put together at a time when nobody imagined that a company might patent a genetically modified seed and then sue farmers for saving some from last years' crop for this year, or that a huge economy around software (which changes far faster than many other fields of innovation, and is thus not well served by 15-20 year monopolies) would develop.
In other words... Information Technology brought the problem about, now it can bring the solution about.
Even though it didn't really bring a problem about. All it did was what it's often designed for and generally very good at - improve the dissemination of data.
I run a whole bunch of virtual servers and that's exactly what I'm doing.
It's fantastically handy to be able to install and configure a service in the knowledge that no matter how screwed up the application (or, for that matter, how badly I screw it up), it's much harder for that application to mess up other services on the same host - or, for that matter, for existing services to mess up the application I've just set up.
Add to that - anyone who says "Unix never needs to be rebooted" has never dealt with the "quality" of code you often see today. The OS is fine, it's just that the application is quite capable of rendering the host so thoroughly wedged that it's not possible to get any app to respond, it's not possible to SSH in, it's not even possible to get a terminal on the console. But yeah, the OS itself is still running fine apparently, so there's no need to reboot it.
This way I can reboot virtual servers which run one or two services rather than physical servers which run a dozen or more services.
Granted, I could always run Solaris or AIX rather than Linux, but then I'll be replacing a set of known irritations with a new set of mostly unknown irritations, all with the added benefit that so much Unix software never actually gets tested on anything other than Linux these days that I could well find myself with just as many issues.
multiple versions confusing their ignorant customers.
Ignorant? I've been in IT for more years than I care to remember and I find all the versions confusing. Particularly this absurd notion that each version has specific features and the only way to get the features in a version which doesn't offer them is to buy an upgrade to the whole damn system - and in doing so, you may lose features you currently have because Microsoft don't believe users of the "Super Business Premium with Go Faster Stripes" version want them.
It would make far more sense to me for it to be a completely modular system - maybe with basic, deluxe, super editions with progressively more modules, and a nice, prepackaged way to upgrade by adding extra modules at a later date. Other commercial OSes have done this for years - cf. AIX, VMS.
On the other hand, the absolute market share figures are still interesting. With Apple selling 15% of new laptops this year, it is slightly surprising that they only have a 6-7% market share.
Considering the sheer size of the market as a whole, and the fact that Apple probably commanded only about 4-5% a couple of years ago, and that we're only half-way through this year, I think that sounds about right.
If (and it's a big if) Microsoft's stranglehold on desktop computing falls, it won't be overnight. I don't think it will take the 20 years or so it took them to get to where they are now, but I could easily see it taking 3-5 years.
These items should only occur in OOXML documents that were converted from predecessor Microsoft Office documents.
Which, for those who haven't extrapolated it yet, means "About 90% of them in any organisation which has decided to use OOXML as their standard file format".
5 years down the line and other suites are coming out with the "Supports OOXML" box ticked, but further investigation reveals that the organisation still has a huge number of files which haven't had much attention paid to them since the conversion process, are still relevant and don't open properly in anything other than MS Office, regardless of whether or not the product they're testing claims to support OOXML.
Worded a little ambiguously, but I presume it's Microsoft their talking about... How can a bug like this get through the QA process since 2005 and multiple product versions without getting fixed?
Very easily. Every bug gets a priority assigned to it, and from the sound of things this one was ranked pretty low.
The sheer number of bugs in any large product means it's not really practical to fix every one before a release so the higher priority ones get concentrated on. Time passes, products are realeased because there are deadlines and business needs and it's quite possible that something could be ranked at such a low priority that it never gets any real attention.
My memory may be faulty and I can't be bothered to search for a citation, but didn't it come out before the war started that all of those intelligence agencies were basing their information on a single, discredited source?
Re:why does anybody care?
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, a trick involving gcc has been used to work around the GPL in the past. The trick is this: main.c:
#include stuff #__INSERT__REAL__CODE__HERE
main(){
call_real_code();
exit 0; }
The compiler is then hacked to insert the actual code which does the work where it sees #__INSERT__REAL__CODE__HERE, but this version of the compiler is never distributed.
Voila! You can distribute the above file under GPL and it doesn't do someone who wants to modify the code any good because they need your hacked version of the compiler. But you never distributed the compiler, so you're not obliged to distribute the changes you made.
I'm not sure this technique would be affected by GPLv3. You could still reveal "this is how you change the hardware to load any image rather than just the one we distribute" without revealing what your code actually was.
That's a fairly accurate description of any modern digital SLR. However, they don't tend to do video because their designed such that either the user can see the image or the sensor can - never both.
That, however, could well change as I believe Olympus has an SLR out which doesn't have this design issue.
Isn't it much more like Linspire/Microsoft Agreement makes Linspire useless?
Darn! Bet MS never saw that coming!
Sidenote: Do any of these companies signing these agreements actually read them? Because so far most of the agreements seem to be designed to stop the Linux distributor from distributing Linux. Either that or there's some massive get-out clause in all of them which everybody else has missed.
Because what the world really needs right now is another version of a web standard which has had hardly any full, correct implementations in any version that's ever existed.
Or are the W3C just trying to justify their existence?
99 times out of 100, people with that kind of technical ability don't waste their time emailing bomb threats to a school every few days saying "it rly will go off nxt tim, prmse!! LOL ROFL OMGWTFBBQ".
There's not much functional difference between that and a telephone tap.
Be grateful that there is a due process which was followed. I'd be more concerned when such due process is considered a hindrance to the "war on terror" and done away with.
Slashdot Mirror
By that argument there's nothing wrong with patents that can't be fixed by halving their length. Quite a big difference between that and abolishing them altogether.
I can think of one way to do it - but it wouldn't be too hard for a determined ISP to defeat:
Step 1: Calculate md5sum of webpage, store in separate location.
Step 2: Include on the webpage some javascript to md5sum itself and compare this to md5sum in known location. Issue an alert if it differs.
Step 3: Profit!
Of course, this is awkward for dynamically generated pages and if the ISP is happy to mess around with the page to insert ads, they're probably also happy to mess around with any javascript which detects it coming down the line. Does this method solve that?
James Dyson did exactly that - though that's in the UK, I think it's easier to apply for a patent over here.
I believe the Carphone Warehouse was talking about making moves into the US.
Here in the UK (and much of Europe) they're a network-independent retailer who is quite happy to sell you a handset at the full, un-subsidised price and you either buy a SIM card separately or use an existing one. Alternatively, they have agreements with every major network to retail phones connected to those networks. I'm rather surprised to hear US people talking as if no such business exists over there.
I think the idea is that by making it feasible to develop a business plan (and ultimately, a profitable business) around the vacuum cleaner without risk of someone else coming along and taking unfair advantage, the vacuum cleaner inventor will be motivated to develop a better vacuum cleaner.
Remember that his patent will eventually expire, and when it does he's back to good old-fashioned "beat the competition on price and service because they've got much the same technology" (which is buggery difficult without a unique aspect to your product) unless he can come up with another patentable idea.
A government operates to benefit society as a whole, but does so by making laws and creating incentives which work for the individual. About the only kind of incentive a government can offer a business (either existing or potential) is financial - either by giving you money directly (in the form of benefits and subsidies), not taking it away from you in the first place (in the form of tax breaks) or by making it easier for you to make money (patents and IP law). The "making it easier for you to make money" is something a government needs to be most careful of, lest the law provided allows you to make money at the cost of society.
I really don't understand why the copyright couldn't be 25 or 50 years and leave it at that.
As far as I can tell, the main reason being given by the IFPI is that Paul McCartney and Cliff Richard are still not dead.
This is true, but neither particularly fit the image of "starving musician" that the IFPI wishes to project.
Speaking of patent reform, read about Velcro. The guy "created" velcro and then major textile companies just waited for it to expire and then they copied it.
Patents take years to expire for a reason.
The idea is to give time to market it. Clearly the major textile companies didn't think it would give them much of a business benefit - so the guy who created velcro has the task not only of inventing a product, but also finding someone who wants to buy it badly enough that they'll license his patent - or build it into a product to sell to the general public.
Let's look at this from another perspective. James Dyson has spent a lot of time and money suing companies for copying aspects of his vacuum cleaner - when it first came out, it genuinely was revolutionary and gave his product a definite edge over his competitors - but he's won those cases, and he did spend something like 10 years in his shed designing his vacuum cleaner.
There have been cases where farmers who didn't think they were growing Monsanto GM crops were rather shocked to find that actually, they were. Cross-pollination from a neighbours field, see.
This didn't stop Monsanto from suing such farmers into the ground.
Monopolies are at best bad for the market
The whole point of a patents system is limited monopolies to help the market. Without such a system, there's nothing stopping me from spending 10 years in a shed developing a revolutionary new vacuum cleaner, bringing it to market - and then you waltzing into a shop, buying one, copying it and selling it for half the price I do.
The point of a capitalist society is that the "10 years in a shed" bit gets rewarded with a time-limited monopoly, so instead of simply putting up with the status quo and accepting that all vacuum cleaners suck (if you'll pardon the pun), I have an incentive to do something about it above and beyond "making my house 4% cleaner".
Where monopolies do harm the market is where the system is abused. The obvious solution to that is a system which isn't terribly open to abuse. Many of today's patent laws were put together at a time when nobody imagined that a company might patent a genetically modified seed and then sue farmers for saving some from last years' crop for this year, or that a huge economy around software (which changes far faster than many other fields of innovation, and is thus not well served by 15-20 year monopolies) would develop.
In other words... Information Technology brought the problem about, now it can bring the solution about.
Even though it didn't really bring a problem about. All it did was what it's often designed for and generally very good at - improve the dissemination of data.
Welcome to the Law of Unintended Consequences.
I run a whole bunch of virtual servers and that's exactly what I'm doing.
It's fantastically handy to be able to install and configure a service in the knowledge that no matter how screwed up the application (or, for that matter, how badly I screw it up), it's much harder for that application to mess up other services on the same host - or, for that matter, for existing services to mess up the application I've just set up.
Add to that - anyone who says "Unix never needs to be rebooted" has never dealt with the "quality" of code you often see today. The OS is fine, it's just that the application is quite capable of rendering the host so thoroughly wedged that it's not possible to get any app to respond, it's not possible to SSH in, it's not even possible to get a terminal on the console. But yeah, the OS itself is still running fine apparently, so there's no need to reboot it.
This way I can reboot virtual servers which run one or two services rather than physical servers which run a dozen or more services.
Granted, I could always run Solaris or AIX rather than Linux, but then I'll be replacing a set of known irritations with a new set of mostly unknown irritations, all with the added benefit that so much Unix software never actually gets tested on anything other than Linux these days that I could well find myself with just as many issues.
multiple versions confusing their ignorant customers.
Ignorant? I've been in IT for more years than I care to remember and I find all the versions confusing. Particularly this absurd notion that each version has specific features and the only way to get the features in a version which doesn't offer them is to buy an upgrade to the whole damn system - and in doing so, you may lose features you currently have because Microsoft don't believe users of the "Super Business Premium with Go Faster Stripes" version want them.
It would make far more sense to me for it to be a completely modular system - maybe with basic, deluxe, super editions with progressively more modules, and a nice, prepackaged way to upgrade by adding extra modules at a later date. Other commercial OSes have done this for years - cf. AIX, VMS.
On the other hand, the absolute market share figures are still interesting. With Apple selling 15% of new laptops this year, it is slightly surprising that they only have a 6-7% market share.
Considering the sheer size of the market as a whole, and the fact that Apple probably commanded only about 4-5% a couple of years ago, and that we're only half-way through this year, I think that sounds about right.
If (and it's a big if) Microsoft's stranglehold on desktop computing falls, it won't be overnight. I don't think it will take the 20 years or so it took them to get to where they are now, but I could easily see it taking 3-5 years.
Yes, but they're generally minor typos rather than full-blown inaccuracy.
It seems to me that they are struggling businesses who get a one-time payday from Microsoft if they sign up.
On the understanding that they sign an agreement which essentially destroys their current business model?
Still seems a bit odd to me.
These items should only occur in OOXML documents that were converted from predecessor Microsoft Office documents.
Which, for those who haven't extrapolated it yet, means "About 90% of them in any organisation which has decided to use OOXML as their standard file format".
5 years down the line and other suites are coming out with the "Supports OOXML" box ticked, but further investigation reveals that the organisation still has a huge number of files which haven't had much attention paid to them since the conversion process, are still relevant and don't open properly in anything other than MS Office, regardless of whether or not the product they're testing claims to support OOXML.
Worded a little ambiguously, but I presume it's Microsoft their talking about... How can a bug like this get through the QA process since 2005 and multiple product versions without getting fixed?
Very easily. Every bug gets a priority assigned to it, and from the sound of things this one was ranked pretty low.
The sheer number of bugs in any large product means it's not really practical to fix every one before a release so the higher priority ones get concentrated on. Time passes, products are realeased because there are deadlines and business needs and it's quite possible that something could be ranked at such a low priority that it never gets any real attention.
My memory may be faulty and I can't be bothered to search for a citation, but didn't it come out before the war started that all of those intelligence agencies were basing their information on a single, discredited source?
Well, a trick involving gcc has been used to work around the GPL in the past. The trick is this:
main.c:
#include stuff
#__INSERT__REAL__CODE__HERE
main(){
call_real_code();
exit 0;
}
The compiler is then hacked to insert the actual code which does the work where it sees #__INSERT__REAL__CODE__HERE, but this version of the compiler is never distributed.
Voila! You can distribute the above file under GPL and it doesn't do someone who wants to modify the code any good because they need your hacked version of the compiler. But you never distributed the compiler, so you're not obliged to distribute the changes you made.
I'm not sure this technique would be affected by GPLv3. You could still reveal "this is how you change the hardware to load any image rather than just the one we distribute" without revealing what your code actually was.
800x600 at 23 fps?
Doesn't sound particularly challenging for even a cheap digital camera these days.
That's a fairly accurate description of any modern digital SLR. However, they don't tend to do video because their designed such that either the user can see the image or the sensor can - never both.
That, however, could well change as I believe Olympus has an SLR out which doesn't have this design issue.
Isn't it much more like Linspire/Microsoft Agreement makes Linspire useless?
Darn! Bet MS never saw that coming!
Sidenote: Do any of these companies signing these agreements actually read them? Because so far most of the agreements seem to be designed to stop the Linux distributor from distributing Linux. Either that or there's some massive get-out clause in all of them which everybody else has missed.
Because what the world really needs right now is another version of a web standard which has had hardly any full, correct implementations in any version that's ever existed.
Or are the W3C just trying to justify their existence?
99 times out of 100, people with that kind of technical ability don't waste their time emailing bomb threats to a school every few days saying "it rly will go off nxt tim, prmse!! LOL ROFL OMGWTFBBQ".
There's not much functional difference between that and a telephone tap.
Be grateful that there is a due process which was followed. I'd be more concerned when such due process is considered a hindrance to the "war on terror" and done away with.