Let me quote the most relevant entry on that page:
Q3A 1.27g Game Source This is the combined source code for Quake III Arena and Quake III: Team Arena. It can be used to build the 1.27g point release or the Team Arena release. It contains buildable project files and all related game source code as well as prebuilt tool executables.
It is released under the GPL. How is that not free software?
Ah, you mean the game data? You can get that for free as well abeit with some limits, and as a matter of fact there are free and Free datafiles for quake 3 that do not need the data files from ID software to work.
However, to spoil your nitpick, but won't there be free third party data files (maybe even Id software's demo levels too) that you can use with your free software Quake 3 binary?
This statement isn't an argument. The taxpayers agent (i.e., Fed agencies) get to use the invention without restraint, and the Navy accrue license fees from all others. The patent is licensed to anyone else. Everybody wins!
Research payed for by public money should if at all possible (ie, if not a risk to national security) made available to the public, regardless of if one department or another could make a buck by patenting it and requiring a license for use. That is indeed a matter of belief, but it is completely consistent with the fact that the government doesn't exactly have a mandate to run an enterprise.
Also, a situation where the invention is freely available to the public, it can be produced at a lower cost. This can be in the form of a free patent license of course, but then the question becomes: why bother. As long as the patent license costs money however the invention with be more expensive for the public, so arguing that that is a win for everyone is rather silly.
OT: If you're alleging that agencies somehow hide their license revenue out of their budget, then that's a pretty serious allegation that would have to be supported with facts to be credible.
No, I am arguing that alternative sources of income can easily make the budget less transparant. It is better and more clear when people pay for research directly instead of indirectly. No claim was made of illegal hiding of anything, rather the claim is one of needlessly complicating things to make it more difficult to see.
Then, the power the military-industrial complex has today is at the very least controversial. You may want to see absolute proof of a probem before believing this, I compare it to the huge amount of documented human history and behavior and follow the idea that where there is smoke, there is usually fire. You may not agree there is a problem, but you can hardly argue that there is no controversy about this.
For the rest, you don't have to agree with anything I say, but refusing to understand arguments you don't like, or misrepresenting them, is not a way to have a debate that leads anywhere.
Re:Seems an obvious patent
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However the purpose of the patent is legal protection, not technology documentation.
Almost. The purpose is legal protection in exchange for a documented invention. Patent law seems pretty clear about whom the target audience is for both documentation and things like 'obviousness', and it is not lawyers.
the context is not technology, or plain english and common sense, but the law and the universe of patents.
That is also the problem. The law and the 'universe of patents' exist for a reason, and failing to forfill their purpose while imposing a cost on society makes for a choice between 2 options: either the system changes or it is abbolished. For now however the supreme court seems to at least be ready to hear arguments on part of this problem (standards for obviousness serving a purely legal purpose without any relation to reality, or misinterpretation of patent law if you so desite), so an attempt at changing it for the better might yet happen.
what's the fix? abolishing the system? raising the bar for what is patentable? replacing legalese with plain language ? I don't know but I think abolishing it cold turkey has the highest entertainment value
It does, but I don't think it is the solution. What needs to change however is quite substantial. First the default assumption should change into any invention being non-novel and being obvious. An explicit argument has to be made as to why a specific invention is in fact novel and non-obvious. Second, patents should only be obtainable in fields of science and technology where progress without such a incentive does not take place. Then, patents need to provide for documented inventions that an expert in the field can implement in exchange for the legal protection they offer.
I think the system could work quite well with such changes applied.
Encouraging people to report the activities of their neighbors is not political involvement.
If you'd actually know anything about Germany and Italy in the pre-world war 2 years, you'd have known that in both countries political involvement was quite encouraged as long as it was 'the right kind' of involvement, ie, in line with what the party wanted.
If you disagree that czarist Russia spawned the future facist states, take it up with Richard Pipes or any number of other historians. Better yet, post a plausible and contradicting analysis.
Czarist Russia had disintegrated and turned into the Soviet Union some 15 years before the first facists took power in Europe. While Czarist Russia played quite a role in the events that resulted in the first world war, by the end of it, they had withdrawn from the war and were pretty much tied up with internal affairs. As a result they didn't play any role of significance in the treaty of Versailles which so much helped the nazi rise to power in Germany later on.
So tell me, what role did no longer existing Czarist Russia play there other then a rather indirect one?
Just for the record, Stalinism has many things in common with facism, but its definitely not the same. If you don't believe me, take a look at Russia today and Spain a decade after Franco died. For that matter, go talk to people who lived in both dictatorships. While facism caused extremely outrageous things to happen (esp. the variation on it called nazism), the stalinist kind of 'communism' is a lot more destructive still.
Your rant about Phil Hartman and car accidents does not address the very simple point I made - terrorist attacks have far greater and far reaching consequences than the mundane tragedies of life that you bring up. Even if, oh my gosh, a celebrity is murdered.
His rant quite did address it, but you seem to skillfully miss the explanation.
It is the importance people give to the event that make for the difference. Objectively, the events themselves do not warrant any difference in reaction.
The fact that Joe McCarthy was a nut does not mean the United States has no enemies.
Facism rising to power starts with the identification of an external enemy in order to 'unite' the people. Traumatic events are extremely helpfull here because they "make people feel so they don't think".
And no, those are not unique signs of a state turning to facism, however, they are typically a sign to become (even more) sceptical of the government and its actions.
I could go on, but why bother. There are many authors and historians who have done a much better job at this then I could ever do. Next time you read something about those matters, stop looking for things that confirm your political point of view and try to understand the whole picture.
The 'calculator' used by my bank already accomplishes this by generating login and approval keys in different ways and requires different steps from the user for each.
No it isn't. Your administrator just needs to have a clue. Actually, you only need one good admin in order to have many people run as "Limited User".
Maybe this would be a good argument if Microsoft was offering free administrators to home users, but it seems they are not. The typical home user doesn't and never will have a cluefull administrator around, regardless, those are by far the largest number of Windows installs.
In other words, while in theory true, your statement is absolutely not helpfull in the real world.
Making an older (or badly behaved) program run correctly on Winodws as Limited is as trivial as giving the rights to the folders the application wants to write to and giving the rights to the registry keys that the application wants to write to. (Often it's an implementation error: the app just wants to read them, but they open the key as R/W)
If it is an implementation error then it needs to be fixed by the developer, nothing the administrator can do there, and claiming it is trivially simple is just plain wrong. Unless you have the source and can fix the implementation, those are IMPOSSIBLE to fix. It is possible to create a workaround by giving additional but unneeded rights to such an application.
Up until now, I have only found one single application that I didn't manage to run under Limited User and that was a game called "Children of The Nile". I still do not know what exactly it needs to run, so that I can grant it rights.
Ah, and you somehow expect the typical home user to do this?
The only caveat with all this is that Windows XP *Home* removed the "Security Tab". Worst decision ever. You still can change the ACLs of files with the command line utility called "cacls.exe". There is also a way to reactivate the functionality by installing some powertool, but alas, I forgot again where you can download it.
No the only caveat is that while technically true, this kind of idea is simply not ever going to work in the real world at all. Any system that counts on substantial technical knowledge for being kept secure is not going to be secure in the hands of the public.
(and just before you mention it, no, OSX and Linux in themselves don't solve this problem either)
Re:Seems an obvious patent
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Hasn't this been a feature of cheesy videogames and movie depictions of hiw computers work for the last 20 years?
Probably quite a bit longer, and with a zillion variations on the theme...
Re:Seems an obvious patent
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Hmm, I think the 'idea' here is that you can navigate the on-screen menus without seeing them... It is slightly different from voice menus in that. (doesn't change it being bloody obvious of course..)
Re:Seems an obvious patent
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Did you read the patent? and are you a lawyer?
Yes, no.
As someone else already pointed out, the second question should not be relevant, rather, the relevant question should be: 'are you an expert in the field', and yes I am.
Maybe somewhere in the claims of the patent there is actually a genuine invention, I failed to spot it, but that might actually be one of the first and biggest problems with patents.
As an expert in the field, I should be able to take a patent and implement the invention described in it. As it is, this is often not true for software related 'inventions'. If I have to also become a legal expert and solve some purposefully created language puzzles, the patent stops forfilling one of its primary goals.
If there is indeed a genuine invention somewhere in there, they should come back and try to patent that specific invention instead of the broad and seemingly non novel and quite obvious 'invention' their overall claims make now.
Re:Seems an obvious patent
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So a bit more than just a text-to-speech menu system.
Preparing a sample on a 'high performance' machine for playback on a machine where realtime generation would be 'too expensive' for one reason or another is not exactly a new idea, and anyone who even needs a documented motivation for doing that seems in need of a new brain first:)
In other words, doing as you suggest should not make the patent valid because it should still fail being novel and non-obvious, even with todays broken concept of what 'obvious' means.
Re:Yay more comfort!
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· Score: 2, Insightful
this is because you might be vaporized by killer robot if you dont keep an eye out.
I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few years for those. Expect to see them in Korea or Japan first.
Untill then, cars and trucks happily take their place. Those employ kinetic energy to compress instead of vaporizing you but the result is not much different usually.
Re:Seems an obvious patent
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Text to speech applyed to menu navigation. Nothing new here.
Indeed. I was playing with that concept some 15 years ago on a Commodore Amiga, and back then it wasn't a new concept either.
If this patent gets approved, it would show once more that the tests for non-obviousness and novelty are seriously broken.
Non-obvious:
Prior art in the form of existing text to speech implementations (Amiga and others) and menus (Mac, Amiga, others).
Known and/or well documented motivation to combine the 2: See any software aimed at making a computer accessable to someone who cannot read the screen for one reason or another.
Got to think of it, screen readers and such seem to implement menu to speech interfaces and have been for at least some 2 decades.
Compare apples to apples. I'm not certain what your point is.
You did not specify which installation package you were talking about. Also, the size of the installation package differs between platforms and hence it doesn't just depend on the size of opera itself. I was wondering what the point was of comparing the size of installation packages at all.
I agree with this, but such metrics are not as simple to acquire, and nobody seems to have made a histogram of it. Interestingly enough, the size of the installation package is useful to determine the amount of novel code or data, because variations on a theme are compressed better. So they've done a remarkable job working with what's already there.
This is true, but by the same token the installation package size says little about tight integration of code. Having the same bit of code or slight variations on it repeated throughout the package will compress quite well and not be significantly larger then having that code on one place.
Really, looking at the size of the compressed installation package is interesting for various reasons, but isn't going to tell you much about what is in there at all.
It is possible that someone will invent a working time machine, warp drive, transmat beam or other device that works on physical principles currently entirely unknown to us. And yes, quantum computing effects are undestood, they are not an issue for symmetric ciphers.
Or something else we just haven't heard of yet.
It is not very likely that this will happen and if it did happen it is more than likely Gallileo becomes obsolete first.
Not being able to conceive the next revolutionary invention is of all time, but such inventions happen with quite some regularity. Better assume that it will happen, just not likely it happens soon.
Cryptanalysis effort has pretty much developed at exactly the speed predicted. DES was broken several years AFTER the original design life had expired.
Correction, a public efford to brute force DES succeeded several years after the original design life expired.
What this showed was that relatively inexpensive hardware at a price available to any medium and larger company could break a DES key in hours, and also that a large distributed network of PCs around the world could do the same job.
A 'full scale' Deep Crack would have costed less then $2m to build, and due to economics of scale, building more would just make them cheaper. This quite suggests that if a need existed, similar machines have been viable for quite some time before that.
Even today I would have no real concern using DES for a DRM scheme, the cost of breaking DES is much higher than most rewards.
The cost is 'owning' a large enough network of zombied PCs. There is virtually no real cost associated with that.
A much more likely event would be someone developing a better attack than brute force. This never happened for DES (except for the inversion effect which was always known), at least not in the sense that someone found an attack that was in total less effort than brute force (some people had attacks that they claimed were 2^50 or so but the amount of effort required per step was prohibitive.
We will see. I don't see AES being broken in the comming years, but I quite expect to see it happen during my life.
On the contrary. Assuming that no technology is developed that uses an entirely different form of computation we can create a lower bound for the computation effort required.
Your statement seems correct, but I think assuming that no such technology will be developed is wrong, esp. given that there is a real incentive to do so.
I'm curious what the point of that is though? The English install is 4.6MB, and you'll find this of interest: http://my.opera.com/FataL/blog/show.dml/298429. If you ignore the multi-language installer, Opera's install size has increased about 500kb over the past five years.
And the size of the installable package I am currently downloading from the opera site is 5.1mb not 4.6mb (FreeBSD version, English language, and no, it is not the statically linked version). That said, the size of the install package is interesting, but by far not as interesting as the memory footprint or actual disk space used after installation (not that Opera does bad in those usually, but I rather think that modularizing it more and only loading the actual modules used will help the memory footprint)
You seem to be implying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that Opera is more "cluttered" by default and takes up more screen real estate than "any other browser".
More or less, yes.
This is of course not true. I present you a screenshot with a default installation (freshly installed, nothing changed) of both Firefox and Opera, both recent versions. Note that Firefox takes up more screen space than Opera.
It was true for sure for the last version I tried, but your screenshot implies that this has improved quite a bit. Now, if only I'd get something more then 5kb/sec from their download site, I might actually take another look at it... Oh well, guess that will be another day:)
2^128 is a very big number. If the entire planet was turned into a vast computer with circuits an atom across it would take longer than the life of the universe to break an AES key by brute force.
First of all, yes, 2^128 is a very big number indeed. The rest of your statement however makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
The size of a computer and the circuits within have little to do with how capable that computer is of performign the specific operations for breaking AES efficiently. Neither does your statement take into account the potential of weaknesses in the algorithm that might eliminate part of the keyspace. Do I have proof of such weaknesses? Nope, but the question is if I need that, the large majority of algorithms turns out to have such flaws. so unless you have mathematical proof that they do not exist in this case, the assumption that they exist is a safe one.
I vaguely remember people arguing that breaking DES was not feasable only some 25 years ago, and at the time they were probably somewhat right. Yet, nowadays it is breakable in hours by the kind of technology that private civilians can afford.
So all in all, it is safe to assume that AES is safe for the moment, but there is no telling what future technology will do. The likelyhood however is that both a breach of AES will be found, and hardware will be made that makes the AES problem relatively simple to solve.
WTF?! You do know that the sidebar "Panel" toggles on and off with F4, right?
Yes, so I leave it permanently off (in all browsers btw).
That was however not what I commented on with regards to the side panel. The statement was that it contains usefull information, well, maybe so, but as long as it does it takes away screel real estate. Of course when you turn it off, it doesn't take screenb estate. You did read the start of my post where I said I fiddled a few hours with this and other panels and that I am quite aware that you can turn them off?
Requests ought to focus on stuff that isn't already in the browser and trivially available to users to configure, don't you think?
Fair enough. The better request would be, come with a profile that doesn't confuse the user with 20 toolbars, sidebars and what not..
I'm sorry, but requesting more space for the web page is sort of insane, considering there's always full screen mode (F11). The difference between full screen and my current configuration is neglible. Here's a current full screen screenshot (~44KiB) of my setup. Explain what you want to disable and how that makes a real difference to your browsing experience.
The bars you have at the bottom of the screen, they just take away space.. But then, you probably have a use for them..
I guess the point of my post was to say that toolbars and the like may provide some nice functionality, but the sheer number of them makes for a significant reduction in actually usable screen real estate. My only critisism of Opera in this is that by default, it is worse in this then about any other browser. You can indeed disable most of it, but making it less cluthered by default and possibly moving part of all the functionality into its own module/extension would imho be a serious improvement.
Personally I'd like a special tab which would include all client-server exchanges, toggable to exclude content body/show as hexa, etc.
Which to me sounds like another candidate for an extension. I see the use, but the use of this to the typical end-user is pretty much zero. Why bother them with this?
You would rather have the knowledge available to everyone (tax payer or not) without paying a portion of the revenue.
As has been argued by me and many others, it has already been payed for.
Also, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that your suggestion would in fact result in lower taxes, and even in the unlikely case it does (most departments rather keep their budget and extra income isn't used to replace tax income, it comes on top of it), this comes at the price of less competition and more expensive products using the patented technology.
The solution I suggest does not result in lower taxes for sure, but it does cause the techjnology to be freely avaiable, resulting in more competition and cheaper products that can use the patented technology.
As for the government having an "unfair advantage", I'm not sure how. By law, the governmnet does not have to pay royalties on patents for anything it purchases. It has, what some see, as unlimited funds in the form of taxes. (We probably both disagree with that statement).
It does have virtually unlimited funds in the form of taxes. It is also the party that can set the rules for everyone else in the market.
This is a highly undesirable mix of roles. Often this kind mixing of government and industry is regarded as a strong indication of facsism also and for good reasons I believe.
However, if someone else were to develope the technology first, they would still be able to license it. It just so happens that one of the governmental research organizations developed it first.
Paying companies on the free market for their products directly helps that free market, puts money directly into the economy, and as a result is highly desirable.
Having a government department develop some technology causes none of those effects, rather, it takes away chances from other participants on that free market, has a very high chance of favoritism towards specific 'producers', and has the additional problem that the government gets to decide who can involve himself in development of the technology. (of course that can be desirable in some specific cases, ie, nuclear weaponery, but there are different means to accomplish that in case of real need)
So in short, mixing the roles of government and producer on the free market is in itself a dangerous idea and is related to facism and opposed to a free market. If you allow government departments to develop technology then care should be taken to prevent thoise problems, and making their work freely avaiulable to all quite accomplishes that.
Opera 9 has integrated content blocking - it is quite good. You don't have to edit filter.ini any more...
So it has now what adblock started out with roughly.
There are very nice blocklists for adblock and ways to automatically import them, which means you won't get to see the ads without having to block them yourself.
Adblock also has some other nice features and all in all a content filter only covers part of what adblock does.
MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where,
I once spent an hour or 2 fiddling with this and you can indeed claim back part of the screen real estate, but even then it still usues way too much screen space for things other then the actual webpage.
but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver.
No, you really don't understand. A sidebar by definition takes away screen real estate from the webpage, this is completely regardless of how usefull you think the info in the sidebar is, the gp and people like me DO NOT WANT IT, we want the space available for the webpage and the webpage only, not toolbars, sidebars popup bars pop-over/under bars, and not even when they are auto-hiding.
Opera is relatively fast but not the fastest, and lean? well, not in featureset or looks for sure. It has a relatively small memory footprint for what it does of course.
An API for extentions would mean it can be made even leaner since you can effectively strip off functionality that is not used often and put it into an extension for those who need it. Result, even smaller browser.
So, did you hae any real reason for your response?
The problem with this kind of idea is that it is very difficult to implement without also giving hordes of unauthorized people access. Also, to address your argument, while with a warrant the police can get access to your house, there isn't a law mandating every lock to be pickable or easily opened by them, and I don't see why that should be different for network equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
..you must mean free drivers, since Quake 3 isn't free :)
So tell me, what the source packages on this page are about.
Let me quote the most relevant entry on that page:
Q3A 1.27g Game Source This is the combined source code for Quake III Arena and Quake III: Team Arena. It can be used to build the 1.27g point release or the Team Arena release. It contains buildable project files and all related game source code as well as prebuilt tool executables.
It is released under the GPL. How is that not free software?
Ah, you mean the game data? You can get that for free as well abeit with some limits, and as a matter of fact there are free and Free datafiles for quake 3 that do not need the data files from ID software to work.
However, to spoil your nitpick, but won't there be free third party data files (maybe even Id software's demo levels too) that you can use with your free software Quake 3 binary?
Indeed.
This statement isn't an argument. The taxpayers agent (i.e., Fed agencies) get to use the invention without restraint, and the Navy accrue license fees from all others. The patent is licensed to anyone else. Everybody wins!
Research payed for by public money should if at all possible (ie, if not a risk to national security) made available to the public, regardless of if one department or another could make a buck by patenting it and requiring a license for use. That is indeed a matter of belief, but it is completely consistent with the fact that the government doesn't exactly have a mandate to run an enterprise.
Also, a situation where the invention is freely available to the public, it can be produced at a lower cost. This can be in the form of a free patent license of course, but then the question becomes: why bother. As long as the patent license costs money however the invention with be more expensive for the public, so arguing that that is a win for everyone is rather silly.
OT: If you're alleging that agencies somehow hide their license revenue out of their budget, then that's a pretty serious allegation that would have to be supported with facts to be credible.
No, I am arguing that alternative sources of income can easily make the budget less transparant. It is better and more clear when people pay for research directly instead of indirectly. No claim was made of illegal hiding of anything, rather the claim is one of needlessly complicating things to make it more difficult to see.
Then, the power the military-industrial complex has today is at the very least controversial. You may want to see absolute proof of a probem before believing this, I compare it to the huge amount of documented human history and behavior and follow the idea that where there is smoke, there is usually fire. You may not agree there is a problem, but you can hardly argue that there is no controversy about this.
For the rest, you don't have to agree with anything I say, but refusing to understand arguments you don't like, or misrepresenting them, is not a way to have a debate that leads anywhere.
However the purpose of the patent is legal protection, not technology documentation.
Almost. The purpose is legal protection in exchange for a documented invention. Patent law seems pretty clear about whom the target audience is for both documentation and things like 'obviousness', and it is not lawyers.
the context is not technology, or plain english and common sense, but the law and the universe of patents.
That is also the problem. The law and the 'universe of patents' exist for a reason, and failing to forfill their purpose while imposing a cost on society makes for a choice between 2 options: either the system changes or it is abbolished. For now however the supreme court seems to at least be ready to hear arguments on part of this problem (standards for obviousness serving a purely legal purpose without any relation to reality, or misinterpretation of patent law if you so desite), so an attempt at changing it for the better might yet happen.
what's the fix? abolishing the system? raising the bar for what is patentable? replacing legalese with plain language ? I don't know but I think abolishing it cold turkey has the highest entertainment value
It does, but I don't think it is the solution. What needs to change however is quite substantial. First the default assumption should change into any invention being non-novel and being obvious. An explicit argument has to be made as to why a specific invention is in fact novel and non-obvious. Second, patents should only be obtainable in fields of science and technology where progress without such a incentive does not take place. Then, patents need to provide for documented inventions that an expert in the field can implement in exchange for the legal protection they offer.
I think the system could work quite well with such changes applied.
Encouraging people to report the activities of their neighbors is not political involvement.
If you'd actually know anything about Germany and Italy in the pre-world war 2 years, you'd have known that in both countries political involvement was quite encouraged as long as it was 'the right kind' of involvement, ie, in line with what the party wanted.
If you disagree that czarist Russia spawned the future facist states, take it up with Richard Pipes or any number of other historians. Better yet, post a plausible and contradicting analysis.
Czarist Russia had disintegrated and turned into the Soviet Union some 15 years before the first facists took power in Europe. While Czarist Russia played quite a role in the events that resulted in the first world war, by the end of it, they had withdrawn from the war and were pretty much tied up with internal affairs. As a result they didn't play any role of significance in the treaty of Versailles which so much helped the nazi rise to power in Germany later on.
So tell me, what role did no longer existing Czarist Russia play there other then a rather indirect one?
Just for the record, Stalinism has many things in common with facism, but its definitely not the same. If you don't believe me, take a look at Russia today and Spain a decade after Franco died. For that matter, go talk to people who lived in both dictatorships. While facism caused extremely outrageous things to happen (esp. the variation on it called nazism), the stalinist kind of 'communism' is a lot more destructive still.
Your rant about Phil Hartman and car accidents does not address the very simple point I made - terrorist attacks have far greater and far reaching consequences than the mundane tragedies of life that you bring up. Even if, oh my gosh, a celebrity is murdered.
His rant quite did address it, but you seem to skillfully miss the explanation.
It is the importance people give to the event that make for the difference. Objectively, the events themselves do not warrant any difference in reaction.
The fact that Joe McCarthy was a nut does not mean the United States has no enemies.
Facism rising to power starts with the identification of an external enemy in order to 'unite' the people. Traumatic events are extremely helpfull here because they "make people feel so they don't think".
And no, those are not unique signs of a state turning to facism, however, they are typically a sign to become (even more) sceptical of the government and its actions.
I could go on, but why bother. There are many authors and historians who have done a much better job at this then I could ever do. Next time you read something about those matters, stop looking for things that confirm your political point of view and try to understand the whole picture.
The 'calculator' used by my bank already accomplishes this by generating login and approval keys in different ways and requires different steps from the user for each.
No it isn't. Your administrator just needs to have a clue. Actually, you only need one good admin in order to have many people run as "Limited User".
Maybe this would be a good argument if Microsoft was offering free administrators to home users, but it seems they are not. The typical home user doesn't and never will have a cluefull administrator around, regardless, those are by far the largest number of Windows installs.
In other words, while in theory true, your statement is absolutely not helpfull in the real world.
Making an older (or badly behaved) program run correctly on Winodws as Limited is as trivial as giving the rights to the folders the application wants to write to and giving the rights to the registry keys that the application wants to write to. (Often it's an implementation error: the app just wants to read them, but they open the key as R/W)
If it is an implementation error then it needs to be fixed by the developer, nothing the administrator can do there, and claiming it is trivially simple is just plain wrong. Unless you have the source and can fix the implementation, those are IMPOSSIBLE to fix. It is possible to create a workaround by giving additional but unneeded rights to such an application.
Up until now, I have only found one single application that I didn't manage to run under Limited User and that was a game called "Children of The Nile". I still do not know what exactly it needs to run, so that I can grant it rights.
Ah, and you somehow expect the typical home user to do this?
The only caveat with all this is that Windows XP *Home* removed the "Security Tab". Worst decision ever. You still can change the ACLs of files with the command line utility called "cacls.exe". There is also a way to reactivate the functionality by installing some powertool, but alas, I forgot again where you can download it.
No the only caveat is that while technically true, this kind of idea is simply not ever going to work in the real world at all. Any system that counts on substantial technical knowledge for being kept secure is not going to be secure in the hands of the public.
(and just before you mention it, no, OSX and Linux in themselves don't solve this problem either)
Hasn't this been a feature of cheesy videogames and movie depictions of hiw computers work for the last 20 years?
Probably quite a bit longer, and with a zillion variations on the theme...
Hmm, I think the 'idea' here is that you can navigate the on-screen menus without seeing them... It is slightly different from voice menus in that. (doesn't change it being bloody obvious of course..)
Did you read the patent? and are you a lawyer?
Yes, no.
As someone else already pointed out, the second question should not be relevant, rather, the relevant question should be: 'are you an expert in the field', and yes I am.
Maybe somewhere in the claims of the patent there is actually a genuine invention, I failed to spot it, but that might actually be one of the first and biggest problems with patents.
As an expert in the field, I should be able to take a patent and implement the invention described in it. As it is, this is often not true for software related 'inventions'. If I have to also become a legal expert and solve some purposefully created language puzzles, the patent stops forfilling one of its primary goals.
If there is indeed a genuine invention somewhere in there, they should come back and try to patent that specific invention instead of the broad and seemingly non novel and quite obvious 'invention' their overall claims make now.
So a bit more than just a text-to-speech menu system.
:)
Preparing a sample on a 'high performance' machine for playback on a machine where realtime generation would be 'too expensive' for one reason or another is not exactly a new idea, and anyone who even needs a documented motivation for doing that seems in need of a new brain first
In other words, doing as you suggest should not make the patent valid because it should still fail being novel and non-obvious, even with todays broken concept of what 'obvious' means.
this is because you might be vaporized by killer robot if you dont keep an eye out.
I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few years for those. Expect to see them in Korea or Japan first.
Untill then, cars and trucks happily take their place. Those employ kinetic energy to compress instead of vaporizing you but the result is not much different usually.
Text to speech applyed to menu navigation. Nothing new here.
Indeed. I was playing with that concept some 15 years ago on a Commodore Amiga, and back then it wasn't a new concept either.
If this patent gets approved, it would show once more that the tests for non-obviousness and novelty are seriously broken.
Non-obvious:
Prior art in the form of existing text to speech implementations (Amiga and others) and menus (Mac, Amiga, others).
Known and/or well documented motivation to combine the 2: See any software aimed at making a computer accessable to someone who cannot read the screen for one reason or another.
Got to think of it, screen readers and such seem to implement menu to speech interfaces and have been for at least some 2 decades.
So.. the novelty part should be clear.
Compare apples to apples. I'm not certain what your point is.
You did not specify which installation package you were talking about. Also, the size of the installation package differs between platforms and hence it doesn't just depend on the size of opera itself. I was wondering what the point was of comparing the size of installation packages at all.
I agree with this, but such metrics are not as simple to acquire, and nobody seems to have made a histogram of it. Interestingly enough, the size of the installation package is useful to determine the amount of novel code or data, because variations on a theme are compressed better. So they've done a remarkable job working with what's already there.
This is true, but by the same token the installation package size says little about tight integration of code. Having the same bit of code or slight variations on it repeated throughout the package will compress quite well and not be significantly larger then having that code on one place.
Really, looking at the size of the compressed installation package is interesting for various reasons, but isn't going to tell you much about what is in there at all.
It is possible that someone will invent a working time machine, warp drive, transmat beam or other device that works on physical principles currently entirely unknown to us. And yes, quantum computing effects are undestood, they are not an issue for symmetric ciphers.
Or something else we just haven't heard of yet.
It is not very likely that this will happen and if it did happen it is more than likely Gallileo becomes obsolete first.
Not being able to conceive the next revolutionary invention is of all time, but such inventions happen with quite some regularity. Better assume that it will happen, just not likely it happens soon.
Cryptanalysis effort has pretty much developed at exactly the speed predicted. DES was broken several years AFTER the original design life had expired.
Correction, a public efford to brute force DES succeeded several years after the original design life expired.
What this showed was that relatively inexpensive hardware at a price available to any medium and larger company could break a DES key in hours, and also that a large distributed network of PCs around the world could do the same job.
A 'full scale' Deep Crack would have costed less then $2m to build, and due to economics of scale, building more would just make them cheaper. This quite suggests that if a need existed, similar machines have been viable for quite some time before that.
Even today I would have no real concern using DES for a DRM scheme, the cost of breaking DES is much higher than most rewards.
The cost is 'owning' a large enough network of zombied PCs. There is virtually no real cost associated with that.
A much more likely event would be someone developing a better attack than brute force. This never happened for DES (except for the inversion effect which was always known), at least not in the sense that someone found an attack that was in total less effort than brute force (some people had attacks that they claimed were 2^50 or so but the amount of effort required per step was prohibitive.
We will see. I don't see AES being broken in the comming years, but I quite expect to see it happen during my life.
On the contrary. Assuming that no technology is developed that uses an entirely different form of computation we can create a lower bound for the computation effort required.
Your statement seems correct, but I think assuming that no such technology will be developed is wrong, esp. given that there is a real incentive to do so.
I'm curious what the point of that is though? The English install is 4.6MB, and you'll find this of interest: http://my.opera.com/FataL/blog/show.dml/298429. If you ignore the multi-language installer, Opera's install size has increased about 500kb over the past five years.
And the size of the installable package I am currently downloading from the opera site is 5.1mb not 4.6mb (FreeBSD version, English language, and no, it is not the statically linked version). That said, the size of the install package is interesting, but by far not as interesting as the memory footprint or actual disk space used after installation (not that Opera does bad in those usually, but I rather think that modularizing it more and only loading the actual modules used will help the memory footprint)
You seem to be implying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that Opera is more "cluttered" by default and takes up more screen real estate than "any other browser".
:)
More or less, yes.
This is of course not true. I present you a screenshot with a default installation (freshly installed, nothing changed) of both Firefox and Opera, both recent versions. Note that Firefox takes up more screen space than Opera.
It was true for sure for the last version I tried, but your screenshot implies that this has improved quite a bit. Now, if only I'd get something more then 5kb/sec from their download site, I might actually take another look at it... Oh well, guess that will be another day
2^128 is a very big number. If the entire planet was turned into a vast computer with circuits an atom across it would take longer than the life of the universe to break an AES key by brute force.
First of all, yes, 2^128 is a very big number indeed. The rest of your statement however makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
The size of a computer and the circuits within have little to do with how capable that computer is of performign the specific operations for breaking AES efficiently. Neither does your statement take into account the potential of weaknesses in the algorithm that might eliminate part of the keyspace. Do I have proof of such weaknesses? Nope, but the question is if I need that, the large majority of algorithms turns out to have such flaws. so unless you have mathematical proof that they do not exist in this case, the assumption that they exist is a safe one.
I vaguely remember people arguing that breaking DES was not feasable only some 25 years ago, and at the time they were probably somewhat right. Yet, nowadays it is breakable in hours by the kind of technology that private civilians can afford.
So all in all, it is safe to assume that AES is safe for the moment, but there is no telling what future technology will do. The likelyhood however is that both a breach of AES will be found, and hardware will be made that makes the AES problem relatively simple to solve.
WTF?! You do know that the sidebar "Panel" toggles on and off with F4, right?
Yes, so I leave it permanently off (in all browsers btw).
That was however not what I commented on with regards to the side panel. The statement was that it contains usefull information, well, maybe so, but as long as it does it takes away screel real estate. Of course when you turn it off, it doesn't take screenb estate. You did read the start of my post where I said I fiddled a few hours with this and other panels and that I am quite aware that you can turn them off?
Requests ought to focus on stuff that isn't already in the browser and trivially available to users to configure, don't you think?
Fair enough. The better request would be, come with a profile that doesn't confuse the user with 20 toolbars, sidebars and what not..
I'm sorry, but requesting more space for the web page is sort of insane, considering there's always full screen mode (F11). The difference between full screen and my current configuration is neglible. Here's a current full screen screenshot (~44KiB) of my setup. Explain what you want to disable and how that makes a real difference to your browsing experience.
The bars you have at the bottom of the screen, they just take away space.. But then, you probably have a use for them..
I guess the point of my post was to say that toolbars and the like may provide some nice functionality, but the sheer number of them makes for a significant reduction in actually usable screen real estate. My only critisism of Opera in this is that by default, it is worse in this then about any other browser. You can indeed disable most of it, but making it less cluthered by default and possibly moving part of all the functionality into its own module/extension would imho be a serious improvement.
Personally I'd like a special tab which would include all client-server exchanges, toggable to exclude content body/show as hexa, etc.
Which to me sounds like another candidate for an extension. I see the use, but the use of this to the typical end-user is pretty much zero. Why bother them with this?
You would rather have the knowledge available to everyone (tax payer or not) without paying a portion of the revenue.
As has been argued by me and many others, it has already been payed for.
Also, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that your suggestion would in fact result in lower taxes, and even in the unlikely case it does (most departments rather keep their budget and extra income isn't used to replace tax income, it comes on top of it), this comes at the price of less competition and more expensive products using the patented technology.
The solution I suggest does not result in lower taxes for sure, but it does cause the techjnology to be freely avaiable, resulting in more competition and cheaper products that can use the patented technology.
As for the government having an "unfair advantage", I'm not sure how. By law, the governmnet does not have to pay royalties on patents for anything it purchases. It has, what some see, as unlimited funds in the form of taxes. (We probably both disagree with that statement).
It does have virtually unlimited funds in the form of taxes. It is also the party that can set the rules for everyone else in the market.
This is a highly undesirable mix of roles. Often this kind mixing of government and industry is regarded as a strong indication of facsism also and for good reasons I believe.
However, if someone else were to develope the technology first, they would still be able to license it. It just so happens that one of the governmental research organizations developed it first.
Paying companies on the free market for their products directly helps that free market, puts money directly into the economy, and as a result is highly desirable.
Having a government department develop some technology causes none of those effects, rather, it takes away chances from other participants on that free market, has a very high chance of favoritism towards specific 'producers', and has the additional problem that the government gets to decide who can involve himself in development of the technology. (of course that can be desirable in some specific cases, ie, nuclear weaponery, but there are different means to accomplish that in case of real need)
So in short, mixing the roles of government and producer on the free market is in itself a dangerous idea and is related to facism and opposed to a free market. If you allow government departments to develop technology then care should be taken to prevent thoise problems, and making their work freely avaiulable to all quite accomplishes that.
Opera 9 has integrated content blocking - it is quite good. You don't have to edit filter.ini any more...
So it has now what adblock started out with roughly.
There are very nice blocklists for adblock and ways to automatically import them, which means you won't get to see the ads without having to block them yourself.
Adblock also has some other nice features and all in all a content filter only covers part of what adblock does.
MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where,
I once spent an hour or 2 fiddling with this and you can indeed claim back part of the screen real estate, but even then it still usues way too much screen space for things other then the actual webpage.
but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver.
No, you really don't understand. A sidebar by definition takes away screen real estate from the webpage, this is completely regardless of how usefull you think the info in the sidebar is, the gp and people like me DO NOT WANT IT, we want the space available for the webpage and the webpage only, not toolbars, sidebars popup bars pop-over/under bars, and not even when they are auto-hiding.
Opera is relatively fast but not the fastest, and lean? well, not in featureset or looks for sure. It has a relatively small memory footprint for what it does of course.
An API for extentions would mean it can be made even leaner since you can effectively strip off functionality that is not used often and put it into an extension for those who need it. Result, even smaller browser.
So, did you hae any real reason for your response?
The problem with this kind of idea is that it is very difficult to implement without also giving hordes of unauthorized people access. Also, to address your argument, while with a warrant the police can get access to your house, there isn't a law mandating every lock to be pickable or easily opened by them, and I don't see why that should be different for network equipment.