Microsoft released this last year. Read the details here
As has already been pointed out, what Microsoft released last year wasn't really quite the same (though it was certainly related.
Interestingly enough, however, Microsoft released something that was probably even more effective long before that. OS/2 1.0 (way back in 1987) used the Intel segmentation model instead of page-based memory protection. One result of this was that when you allocated a chunk of memory, the protection on that chunk could be set to exactly the size you requested. Attempting to write even one byte beyond the amount allocated would result in an immediate trap. Interestingly enough, segments also had separate bits for execute vs. read from day one, so it was trivial to say something could be read by not executed. The NX bit just added that ability to page-based protection.
It looks like OpenBSD is also trying to make the heap use address space relatively sparsely -- i.e. attempting to assure that using a more or less random address is likely to result in a trap. Again, segment-based protection went a bit further: each segment required you to load a specific value in a segment register. With segment registers, you not only got a trap if you tried to use an illegal address, but you got a trap as soon as you even tried to form the address by loading an illegal value into the segment register.
The shortcoming is that segment registers are only 16 bits, and the required privilege level is encoded into a couple of those, reducing the address space still further. The bottom line is that if you catch the interrupt from the illegal access, it's pretty trivial to step through all possible segment register values, and find which ones are legal and which aren't.
The OpenBSD approach should gain a major advantage on a 64-bit processor -- a given amount of allocated memory will use the larger address space much more sparsely, so a randomly chosen address is much less likely to be valid.
As BSD is my other favorite OS (I tend to use XP for desktops and FreeBSD for servers), I'm glad to know that they've finally caught up with Microsoft in this important area.
This is in OpenBSD, not FreeBSD. Assuming it works out well, it might someday migrate to other OSes, and FreeBSD would probably be the first/easiest target for migration, but that's the future. OTOH, unless my memory has gotten even worse than usual, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux all do roughly the same sort of thing as XP SP2.
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This is the longest rant I think I've ever seen that was composed based on zero knowledge of the technical subject at hand [... ]
Sorry Bill, but if you'd bothered to read what I said, you'd realize that this was simply incorrect. In point of fact, to anybody who didn't know better (and nobody but their authors do for sure) it could easily look like at least two of the papers you cited were based on the background portion of an article I published critiquing one of the first attempts at an ESB spec.
See above.
Making, and later referring back to an ad hominem attack isn't exactly the stuff of deep technical discussions, now is it Bill?
SOA makes software reuse not only easy but unavoidable - through tooling.
Nonsense. While you can (and people are certainly trying to) create tools that make software reuse easier, the simple fact of the matter is that anybody who wants to can avoid just about anything they choose. SOA is mostly about specifying some interfaces -- but just using an interface can't (and certainly shouldn't) force anybody to use any particular piece of software for a particular job. As long as that remains true, reuse remains avoidable. Not only is it avoidable, but as long as it does remain avoidable, it will be avoided under some circumstances by some people, sometimes for better and others for worse, but inevitably it WILL happen. If somebody were to attempt to make some level of reuse truly unavoidable (i.e. make it mandatory to use specific pieces of software for particular jobs) then it would really become more easily avoided than ever -- because at that point, nobody with any intelligence whatsoever would even consider using SOA at all.
Interesting. What else have you tried to read besides this sales-oriented (I call it marketecture ) web page? Any actual technical articles?
Your question seems to entirely miss the point. I was critiquing the article in question, and pointed out that it contained virtually nothing about how SOA was supposed to contribute to software reuse. Your reply seems to indicate that you somehow believe my having read other articles would somehow affect the content of this one. If there was any logic involved in reaching that conclusion, it has utterly escaped me.
It doesn't surprise me when my post bothers an enthusiast. It does, however, dismay me when the enthusiast can't put up a better defense than "Your refusal to extoll the wonders of my favorite technology indicates obvious ignorance."
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First of all, I guess the obligatory grouch that this really doesn't seem to qualify as much in the way of news (the cited web page is almost a month old, and it's basically a combination editorial and sales pitch, not an announcement of anything new or revolutionary).
With that said, service oriented architecture strikes me as little more than the latest in a long string of TLAs so beloved by IT management and such (I.e. PHBs), but with very little in the way of real content behind it. The whole point of pretty nearly any software ever written is to provide some a service a user, so pretty clearly being "service oriented" is roughly as new as dirt.
Ignoring that, however, and taking web-service oriented software as somehow being revolutionary (even though it's really not) we're still left with a serious question about how in the world this would relate to software reuse. I'm reasonably certain the answer is that PHBs feel a need to sell their PHBs on the latest TLA, and IBM has thrown together a web page that tries to help them in that regard.
When you get down to it, however, the web page contains virtually nothing in the way of real information. It basically says that reuse is good. Whether you agree with that or not, the fact is they haven't really told you anything about how to facilitate reuse in general, or how SOA is supposed to contribute to that. They cite the usual reasons for reuse not working out well (e.g. lack of education and lack of software suitable for reuse). They go on to give the usual ideas that mentoring, careful analysis, etc., will help yield ideas for software to write that's worth reusing and more ability to reuse it.
Five years ago this article would have said "XP" instead of "SOA". Fifteen years ago, it would have been "OOP" instead. Twenty five years ago that would have been "structured programming". I wasn't around at the time to know for sure, but my guess is that if you looked carefully you could find something from the 1950's (or maybe even late '40s) talking about how the macro capability of the new assemblers wasn't resulting in as much code reuse as some people hoped, mostly due to 1) lack of education and 2) lack of macros worth reusing.
To make a long story short, "code reuse" has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. Now, that may make it sound like I consider software reuse a lost cause, or something on that order, but that's just not true. The fact is that macros allowed some reuse of a fair number of (mostly) relatively small pieces of code, as long as there wasn't too much variation between the uses.
Structured programming helped a bit more, particularly by helping readability so you might be able to figure out what something did more easily than writing it all over again.
Likewise OOP allowed more reusability as well. Despite being the newest TLA on the block "SOA" is really little more than modular programming, with the modules in this case being relatively large. There's been a bit of work done on standardizing the interfaces between the modules, so it's a bit easier (at least in some cases) to plug them together, but in software that's pretty much what most architecture boils down to anyway -- designing interfaces.
Now, having that interface pre-designed (to at least some extent) undoubtedly makes it a bit easier to reuse a bit more software with less design specific to the problem at hand, and that's probably a good thing in general. OTOH, Brooks was right: there probably is no silver bullet, and even if there is, SOA isn't it. SOA will probably provide an incremental improvement over previous methods, at least in a few places under a few circumstances (given the amount of effort that's been put into designing the SOA interface "stuff", we'd better hope so, because it needs to help some people quite a bit to even break even).
Articles will be published crediting it with saving company X from total oblivion, triumphing over their opposition, etc. Other articles will be published blaming it
Apple has it right for a company that sells consumer electronics. they don't make any money off song sales.
That doesn't seem to square with Apple's financial statements. Their latest 10-Q says they made 241 million US dollars on "other music products". That category covers:
Other music products consists of iTunes Music Store sales, iPod-related services, and Apple-branded and third-party iPodrelated
accessories.
Given the looks of the other parts of that, I'd guess the iTunes sales accounts for over $200 million US dollars per quarter.
According to the same statement, Apple's total net sales for the quarter were 3 520 million dollars, so iTunes accounts for between 5 and 6 percent of total sales. Given the profit margin on iTunes versus hardware sales, I'd guess that iTunes accounts for a substantially higher percentage of their profits.
To make a long story short: Apple does make money on iTunes, and fair amount of money at that. Even if we ignore percentages for the moment, $800 million US/year is certainly not a negligible amount of money. It's also worth noting that this currently has a growth rate of 230% annually, so unless the growth stalls out completely, it'll be well over a billion (milliard for non-US residents) US dollars next year.
In fairness, yes, Apple also makes a lot of money by selling iPods, and quite a bit of the cost of running iTunes is probably amortized over other parts of the company, so they can undoubtedly run iTunes profitably at a price per song that would kill almost anybody who was only selling music.
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Seriously, what kind of reviewer is impressed by this?
A reviewer who knows anything about analogue audio tech. There are things like impedances, voltages and signal to noise ratios involed in a task like this. Few devices can actually output a signal which is truly suitable for amplification.
The voltage levels for line inputs have been standardized for years and is quite non-critical anyway -- while standard line level is 2 V P-P for 0 dB, if this particula box only produced 1 V P-P for 0 dB, that would only be 3 dB down, which is a couple clicks of the volume control on a typical deck.
Impedances are even more trivial -- a typical line input as an impedance around 15 K ohms, which is easier to drive than the 600 ohms (or so) of a typical headphone. In any case, it would take considerable extra trouble to design a solid state amplifier that had problems driving a 15K input impedance. At the risk of oversimplifying, the basic idea is that the output impedance of the source should be substantially lower than the input impedance of the sink. A typical solid-state design has an output impedance down in the single digits (or less -- for a big power amp, you might see an output impedance in the milliohm range).
As far as signal to noise ratio goes, the SNR of the iPod should greatly exceed what's usable in a car. Even quiet luxury cars typically have noise levels around 65 dB SPL or so. If you limit the maximum volume to (say) 110 dB SPL, that means your environment only has about a 45 dB SNR. 24 bit sampling theoretically gives an SNR around 120 dB. Apple's analog section probably reduces that a little, but they'd really have to screw things up for it to become a problem under the circumstances.
The bottom line is that driving a line input in a car means next to nothing.
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I'm pretty sure there is plenty of examples prior to 1995 that display data in a graphical format.
The first sentence of the background of the invention in the patent reads "The use of computers to generate graphical displays which illustrate the relationships of underlying data is well known."
I didn't read into the others much but they're releasing a patent that is worthless because they never should have had it in the first place.
Clearly you didn't read into this one at all!
Those of us who bother to actually read patents before we condemn them usually find that there's some trick that isn't necessarily obvious in the patent's title.
In this case, the trick is that the graph is "live" so to speak. You're getting data from a database and displaying it on screen, which, as they said, was well known. The difference is that here, when/if you edit the graph, the graphics engine detects the edit, and sends a notification of that back to the database, so the underlying data gets updated to the new value.
I don't know whether that was new, novel, original, etc., in 1993 either, but if you want to claim there's obvious and well-known prior art, that's what you really need to look for, not just some program that displays some kind of graphics.
I should also note that what I've summarized above covers only one independent claim -- it has dependent claims that narrow the scope somewhat, and there are other independent claims as well, that may cover something slightly different (though at the level of detail I've given above, I'd expect all the independent claims to be similar).
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In fact, fellow nerds, just give me a link to ONE impressive piece of AI software (that isn't a chess player) and I'll be bowled over. PS I'm posting this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is one of the only examples of vaguely AI research reaching the home/office...
It can't be done -- but not because the software can't be written. The problem is that as soon as something even comes close to working well, it no longer qualifies (in most people's minds) as anything approaching AI.
If you look at AI research from the '50s (for example) you'll find that not only was speech recognition considered hardcore AI at one time (at one point, a box that simply blinked a light when anybody said "watermelon" within range of its microphone was hailed as a breakthrough in AI), but so also were handwriting recognition and even OCR. These have certainly been made to work (quite well in the case of OCR) but as soon as they even came close to working, they were re-classified as distinctly not AI.
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Raising application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents, but it does have the following effects:
1. It allows the USPTO to hire more staffers to determine validity of patents
2. It allows the USPTO to hire more qualified staffers to determine the validity of patents.
This would only be true if the application fees funded the patent office, and increasing the fees increased the funding.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, if the fees collected by the patent office were used to fund it, they probably wouldn't have much reason to raise fees at all.
OTOH, the patent office seems to have some pretty serious problems, many (if not most) of which are mostly independent of funding. In fact, allowing the PTO to keep and use all the money it raised from fees would probably make some of the problems even worse. One problem right now is that the PTO tends to grant patents they probably shouldn't -- and basing their funding directly on the number of patents they gratend would almost certainly provide more motivation to grant patents regardless of merit.
In fairness, part of this is due to the governing law -- most people believe the basic idea should be that if there's doubt about granting a patent, the tendency should be to not grant it. The law pretty much disagrees though -- without boring you with legalese, it basically says the PTO must grant a patent unless it can prove that the invention lack novelty, utility, originality, etc. IOW, if there's much room for doubt or argument, they're required to grant the patent.
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So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?
Any tax increase would (at most) almost certainly be indirect. At least the last time I checked, the PTO was profitable -- i.e. its budget was less than the amount in collected in application and maintainence fees.
I didn't think so.;-) Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.
It doesn't have to. Most patent office fees are exactly twice as much for a large business as for a small business or individual. It would be relatively trivial to increase that ratio if they wanted to.
I suspect congress sees patents a bit differently than most of us though. First of all, as pointed out above, I'm reasonably certain the PTO turns a profit, and increasing that profit would be seen as a good thing by most of congress.
Second, I'd guess congress sees patents partly in terms of balance of trade -- intellectual property is currently a huge export from the United States. We invent a great deal, but build relatively little. The US companies that invent/design most of what we use make their money primarily by licensing their technology to the foreign companies that build the devices that use the technology. Without patents, the US would almost certainly have a substantially larger trade deficit.
These might help to explain why congress has done exactly the opposite of what you suggest. As of December 8, 2004, the US congress cut the fees for filing a patent application by quite a wide margin -- from $790 to $300 (or half that for a small entity). That's the price for a utility patent -- design patents, plant patents, etc., each have their own fees.
It also required that the entire IP stack be deleted. It was quite a joke in the computer security business at the time.
It was a joke primarily among the clueless. A certification of an "operating system" was entirely separate from a certification of a "networking component". One of the first steps in certifying almost anything as an operating system was to remove all the networking (not just the IP stack).
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it wasn't "Windows NT" that got the rating (as much as M$ hyped it, and I don't remeber the exact spec, but the spec gave the EXACT make and model of computer (and hence hardware spec (that didn't include a network card)) as well as the exact patch level of NT and it specified the applications installed.
Of course -- in fact, that's the case with any such certifications. They never certify an OS as being secure -- they only ever examine and certify a specific installation, and any modification to that installation requires re-examination and re-certification.
In short it wasn't generically Windows NT, or even Windows NT4 sp2.
Just in case it wasn't clear the first time, I'll repeat: it is never generically any operating system, or other component. A certification is only ever given to a specific installation. After that's been done, most of the components that were used in that installation are placed on a certified products list. This basically helps others by letting them know that there is a configuration in which this product has been certified, so if (for example) that configuration fits their needs as well, getting their own installation certified is likely to be considerably easier than if they use an otherwise similar component.
The statements I saw from MS at the time claimed that Windows NT had been placed on the "Evaluated Products List", which was absolutely correct. That's not the same as claiming that NT in general had been certified.
Here is what MS has to say on the subject (I'm not sure, but one-time registration may well be needed to view that). Note in particular that far from claiming that the OS in general was certified, they specifically point out (as I did above) that an OS is never certified, but that the OS was placed on the Evaluated Products List. While this page mentions a certification of NT 3.5 (and a similar certification of NT 3.51 in the UK) they don't mention a certification (also at the C2 level) of WIndows NT 4.0 Server.
One-time pad (OTP) is the only "unbreakable" encryption.
True, but incomplete -- under the right circumstances, even an OTP can be broken.
To ensure that an OTP is unbreakable, you not only have to ensure that the key is used only once, but you also have to ensure that the key is completely unpredictable. This means starting with a truly random source, and ensuring against introducing bias in sampling that random source.
The problem with this is that most random sources have relatively low bandwidth. Those who really care may want to visit David Wagner's links page at: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rnd/. About halfway down the page is a section on random number generation hardware.
Most of these aren't very useful to provide key material for OTPs though -- they just don't provide enough random bits fast enough to provide much bandwidth.
That, of course, brings us back to the Achille's heel of OTP: the key is just as large as the message. If you can distribute the key securely, why don't you just send the original message by that secure route and be done with it? Clearly there are situations in which this doesn't apply, but it renders the OTP useless for most.
On a more or less unrelated aside, I was a bit disappointed -- if there's been any mention of elliptical curve cryptograpy, I've missed it...
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What if I have a really, really powerful microscope?
At least if you're thinking of an optical microscope, the situation's basically hopeless even with current production technology. The problem is pretty simple: the finest detail you can hope to see with an optical microscope is determined by the wavelength of light you're using.
Visible light has wavelengths from about 400 to 700 nanometers. Current high-end chips are built with roughly 100 nanometer processes (90 for Intel, AMD, IBM, 110 for nVidia chips, etc.)
Carbon nanotubes are around 1 and a quarter nanometers -- about the wavelength of an X ray.
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Of course, the cost of forgery is immeasurably less than the cost of losing a really big patent fight
This is only partially true. While the cost of a forgery is low, the cost of a forgery that stands a chance of holding up under modern investigation is not low at all. Worse, the cost of having it found that you did commit forgery can be exceptionally high.
In this case, there also seems to be little or no evidence that Microsoft stands to lose anything in this case -- in fact, there seems to be no real evidence that there is a case at all. What we have right now is 1) Apple's patent application has been rejected. 2) Microsoft's prior patent was cited as a reason for rejecting the patent. 3) Somebody at Microsoft has said that they're open to licensing their patent(s) to Apple.
Microsoft seems to have taken no action whatsoever, at least so far. When or if they ever do so, they still stand to lose no more than the cost of the case itself until or unless Apple comes up with some sort of countersuit.
Under the circumstances, the likelihood of Microsoft forging any documentation seems exceptionally remote to me -- unless they already have real documentation, they simply won't initiate a lawsuit in the first place. If anybody was going to do such a thing, the company that would be in that position would be Apple.
Given the money involved, I can't imagine that at all. First of all, I seriously doubt the number that's been quoted. A typical patent royalty rate is around 1%, and under the circumstances, that would be taken on the wholesale price, not the retail. Second, since this is a US patent, it only applies to iPods that are either manufactured in the US or sold in the US. It looks like they're all made in Tiawan, which would restrict it to sales in the US. According to Apple's most recent 10Q (available via a link on: http://www.apple.com/investor/, relevant data is on page 27) their average wholesale price for an iPod is about $179, which would put the royalties at around $1.79 apiece, not the ~$10 that's been quoted. Total iPod sales of $1103 per quarter, and about half of their overall sales in "the Americas" indicates no more than $550 million (and probably less) as the base off of which to take the 1%.
That comes to no more (and probably less) than $5 1/2 million a quarter. While that may not be exactly pocket change when viewed as a whole, it works out to less than a penny per share of earnings.
One final point: even though the Apple patent was rejected based on the Microsoft patent, the Microsoft patent may not apply to the iPod anyway. One of the basic ideas of a patent is that once it expires, anybody else can use the technology. To that end, a patent is required to include a full description of how to implement and make best use of the technology. It then has claims that describe what the patent really covers. Something that's described in the disclosure can't be later patented by somebody else, but if it's not included in the claims, then the patent doesn't cover the technology either.
Just for example, assume Microsoft's patent described something just like an iPod, but the claims said the device ran Windows CE. Since the iPod doesn't use CE, the patent doesn't apply -- but doing the same thing using some other OS is now so obvious that it doesn't qualify for a patent.
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Uhm... Doesn't Section 508 HTML/design standard make it ILLEGAL for a government web site to not follow the standard?
Like most such things, this has a clause at the beginning saying "unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency." Given that the agency in question appears to have made plans already, simply rewriting the plan itself might easily qualify in their minds as an undue burden. IOW, to make a clear-cut case for illegality, you'd probably have to show that it's easier to do the job in a standards-compliant manner -- specifically, that doing so would save enough money to cover the cost of the other rewriting (e.g. of plans) they'd have to do along with it.
Of course, if their minds are still open on the subject, things might not be that bad -- in that case, showing that a small incremental cost up-front would save money on the long run (for example) might easily qualify as relieving any undue burden. Don't take for granted that their minds are still really open just because they're soliciting opinions though -- that's probably required regardless.
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Two people with their own intellectual prowess create the same idea. Yet, the person that manages to get to the patent office first gets the patent.
This is simply incorrect. If Apple has evidence that they invented the technology first, they can get their patent (and invalidate the previous one) by showing that.
It's worth noting, however, that throughout most of the rest of the world, you'd be absoutely right -- most countries use a "first to file" rule rather than a "first to invent" rule like the US does. The weakness of the first to invent rule is that it's easy to find out exactly when somebody filed an application, where it can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to show exactly when something was invented -- especially since most things take a while to develop, so deciding on an exact point in time to say when it was invented is rarely easy. If memory serves, the usual criterion in this case is the point at which it was actually reduced to practice -- i.e. the first time it actually worked.
Even that can be difficult in some cases, however -- especially things like techniques for manufacturing, where the whole idea is to progress from something that sometimes works and other times doesn't, to something that works dependably. It may be quite a while later before you know something started to happen (more) dependably.
Obligatory warning: I'm not an attorney, so none of what I say should be taken as legal advice.
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If you are a typical consumer that just wants to shove out prints from a digicam, just take your CF, CD-R, SD, whatever to your local drugstore, Wal-Mart, Target, random one-hour photo place, pay them 19 cents a piece, and they will do a much better job than ANY consumer-level inkjet printer.
A lot here depends on what you class as "consumer-level". If you translate "consumer-level" as "less than fifty US dollars", you're undoubtedly correct. OTOH, the print quality from an Epson R300 (for one exaple) can be every bit as good as from a typical mini-lab, and with reasonable care will usually be substantially better. By Epson's standards even the R800 and R1800 are considered "consumer" printers, and with reasonably careful use, either one will easily beat not only minilabs, but the vast majority of professional dark rooms.
If you REALLY want to print out prints at home, then use a home dye-sub. Sony, Kodak, and Olympus make fine dye-sub printers. The prints only cost a little more than inkjet, and they are waterproof, UV resistant, and far higher quality (no dithering).
Pardon my pointing it out, but dye sub prints are not particularly resistant to UV as a rule.
Ink for inkjets fall into two classes: dye-based and pigment-based. As you can undoubtedly guess from the name, ink for a dye-sub printer is always dye-based.
As a simple rule of thumb, if you care much about longevity, you want to use pigment-based inks. Regardless of how you spray it onto the paper, a dye-based ink will generally be substantially less resistant to fading than a pigment-based ink.
On the negative side, pigment-based inks usually restrict your gamut somewhat -- i.e. they restrict the available range of colors somewhat compared to dye-based inks. The usual cure for this is to add more inks beyond Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (e.g. Red and Blue inks).
My own experience with dye-sub printers has been a lot less positive than the comments here tend to indicate. Dye sub certainly has good points, but they have some serious weaknesses as well. First of all, while ink jets certainly aren't cheap to run, supplies for dye-subs are generally substantially more expensive on a per-page basis. Second, dye-subs (as a rule) are only useful for photographs. Third, the range of papers available for dye-sub printers is extremely restricted -- if, for example, you decide you want double-sided semi-gloss paper, you can pretty nearly forget using a dye-sub printer.
As far as dithering goes, that's why decent ink-jets have ridiculously high resolution numbers -- so they can dither without the individual dots being visible. I've yet to meet anybody who could see the individual dots that made up the dither pattern at 5760 DPI (and I'm pretty sure I never will -- there's enough ink bleed that even under a microscope, a pattern of 1.5 picoliter droplets essentially turns into a continuous-tone image).
Waterproofness: I haven't used every available current printer, but this seems to be mostly a problem of the past, at least to me. I've used an Epson R800 for over a year now, and seen only one situation in which inks ran when wet: when printing directly onto a CD. At least AFAIK, there's no laser or dye sub that'll do this at all, so there's really no way to call this an advantage for the other technologies.
For non-photo printing, Lasers are superior in every way. Sharper text, cheaper supplies, faster, more reliable, etc.
Photographs make the terrible color quality of most lasers painfully obvious, but there are other such situations as well. Almost anybody who cares about color quality will generally be disappointed in nearly any cheap color laser (or even in the expensive ones I've seen). In terms of color quality, a $100 ink jet will easily beat a $1000 laser.
A few other comments: third party inks for ink jets are certainly a
Gee, I remember something called the Apple II doing this long before microsoft was the force it was.
Perhaps you're a bit young to have actually seen or run an Apple ][? If you remembered them well enough to have any room to comment on them at all, you'd undoubtedly remember that one of the first things you saw when you turned on an Apple ][ was a copyright on its BASIC interpreter -- a Microsoft copyright, for anybody who missed the obvious. Yes, they also had Apple integer BASIC, and some of us who wrote assembly language (Quick: how many people remember entering "3D0G" at the Apple monitor prompt?:-) remember SWEET16 as well, but what it ran by default at startup was AppleSoft (Microsoft BASIC).
For those who happen to care about other machines of this vintage, yes, the same thing was true of Commodore PETs, Atari 400/800's, most TRS-80's, and so on. Well before Gary Kildall entered the scene with his imitation of RT/11 (CP/M), Microsoft was supplying BASIC interpreters running on the Altair, Imsai, Heath H8, and such as well.
To make a long story short, Microsoft has been a force in the personal computer business for as long as the personal computer business has existed. Early on, they were thought of as a language vendor rather than an OS vendor, but in quite a few of those cases (PETs in particular) the BASIC interpreter was not just a language -- to the extent that the machine had an OS or user interface, the BASIC interpreter was pretty much it.
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Seriously, though, does anyone know just how much material is needed to block these rays?
No, nobody really knows -- in fact, there is no single answer. Here on earth, with a heavy-duty magnetic shield and miles of atmosphere, _some_ cancer is still due to cosmic radiation and secondary effects from it.
As soon as you reduce that, the amount of cosmic radiation goes up, and with it the risk of cancer. Blocking all the radiation is grossly impractical -- the real question is how high a risk you're willing to put up with; then you can figure out the amount of shielding you need to achieve that figure.
how many meters of rock would we require on the outer surface to make the place long-term habitable?
How long of a term, by whom, and at what risk of cancer due to radiation over that term? The risk goes up over time, and some people start out with higher cancer risks than others. Obviously different people are willing to live with different risk levels.
To get a meaningful answer, you need to define your goal much more specifically -- for example, you could decide that you wanted to hold the risk of cancer for a trip to the same level as smoking N cigarettes a day for the same period of time. That, of course, has a few problems as well -- particularly, that cigarettes cause a number of kinds of cancer at varying rates, and I doubt that cosmic radiation fits the same pattern. It's probably too obvious and simplistic to assume that cosmic radiation causes only (or primarily) skin cancer, but the rates are probably different from cigarettes anyway.
Risks from cancer vary over a wide range, leading to another obvious question: do we really care about limiting the risk of cancer, of do we want to limit the risk from cancer to a specified level? Depending on the types of cancer most often caused by cosmic radiation, these will almost certainly lead to considerably different answers as well.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
So real books are difficult to obtain, but Pocket PCs are plentiful?
Plentiful probably isn't the right word, but small and light (and therefore cheap to ship), and versatile, yes.
For that matter, the real strength (at least in the long term) probably isn't the PDAs themselves -- it's that they allow you to read electronic media.
Looks like I need to take a trip to Kenya with a couple suitcases full of books
From their viewpoint, consider that if those suitcases were full of DVDs instead, you could be carrying a reasonably complete cirriculum covering pre-school through a couple of reasonably well-equipped colleges.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Some reasons have already been pointed out, but I'll add one more to the list: much as economists can attribute a time-value to money, so there is also a time value to software.
IOW, software that mostly works now is often more valuable to the customer than software that's perfect but not available for quite a while. It wold probably be a pretty lousy tradeoff to add (say) 3 years to the schedule for IE7 just to fix a bug nobody's ever actually encountered.
Of course, the relative value of bug fixes vs. delivery date varies with the problem area addressed by the software -- a browser that mis-handles fallback when it encoutners malformed CSS code is a lot smaller problem than something that might otherwise be rather trivial, but happens to be in code for a flight control system or a pacemaker. Even with something like medical equipment, the time to produce 100% perfect code may not be worthwhile -- if the equipment in question handles a situation that nothing currently available can handle at all, quite a few people's lives might be saved by delivering the product sooner.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Pretty close. From their most recent 10Q, their sales numbers are (in millions of US dollars):
Macintosh
1494
iPod
1014
peripherals and other hardware
280
Software
134
I've skipped a few irrelevant categories like services. Software currently accounts for just over 8 1/2% of Apple's overall sales. These are quarterly, not annual, numbers. There are undoubtedly seasonal variations that don't show here, but I wouldn't expect software to do a lot better at other times of the year (rather the contrary -- in percentage terms, I'd expect that near holidays, nearly everything else loses percentage to the iPod).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
As you'd expect, the exact amount of data is hard to guess. The most common tape densities are 1600, 3200 and 6250 FCI. Reel sizes range from 100 to 3600 feet. Figuring for worst case, if they're 3600 foot reels at 6250 FCI, each reel holds about 240 MB.
Seven-track tapes are old enough that they're normally written at lower density, but offhand I don't remember what the maximum density for them normally was.
In the end, storing the data isn't really a majory concern -- even given a few thousand reels like this, a few hundred dollars would cover all the necessary hard-drive space pretty easily. The real problems are that 1) 7- and 9- track drives are now pretty rare, and 2) most of them used more or less proprietary channels to connect to the mainframe. As such, reading the tapes requires either finding function drives AND matching computers, or elese building new tape drives that can connect via SCSI or something on that order. The practicality of that approach might be open to some question though -- despite low-tech electronics, tape drives required quite precise mechanics if I'm not mistaken.
As far as data formats go, quite a few tapes had "labels", which were basically blocks of metadata to tell about the format of the rest of the tape. This didn't tell much about the logical format, but it did tell you things like the sizes of blocks and such. Of course, it's not really quite that simple: there were (at least) a couple of conflicting formats for the labels too...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I didn't really followed the Acrylic/Expression development, but from what I heard here on/. its revolutionary feature stands in the fact it combines raster and vector editing in one single software.
Now, what's the damned point in this?
First of all, I'm not sure that's really an accurate characterization.
Second, quite a few people work on graphics that combine the two, and being able to use one tool to do so can be pretty convenient. As it happens, at work we do this quite a bit, and with the tools we've been using, it's a massive pain. I'm not all sure that Acrylic/Expression will be an improvement, but I can certainly see where it could be.
A couple other points relative to the OP:
1) Lack of scroll bars. To quote from the help file:
There are no scroll bars on the bottom and right sides of the window as in other Windows applications. Instead, the rulers you see on the top and left hand side of the drawing area double as scroll bars. To scroll horizontally, click and drag the ruler at the top. Drag the ruler at the left to scroll vertically. Similarly, holding down the spacebar while you drag inside the document window lets you scroll in any direction with the Grabber Hand tool.
Given the amount of the time I'm just wishing my screen was bigger (despite being 22 inches, and running at 1920x1440) cutting down on the amount of space taken by things like scroll bars strikes me as a pretty good idea.
2) Poor performance in pixel-painting. To quote from the release notes:
Pixel painting has not yet been optimized and the performance is slow. Optimization work is currently in progress and drastically improved performance will be delivered in the final release.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether MS will follow through on this, but clearly we should expect more from a review than simply putting a negative spin on the release notes.
In fairness, I should add a few more things: this really is a vector program with some painting capabilities. Some of its painting features are nicely done (e.g. displaying the histogram in the curves dialog) but this clearly is not intended to compete directly with Photoshop. Just for example, while it supports layers, it does not support some things I use relatively frequently, such as selecting how layers will be combined.
That said, Photoshop's painting abilities reflect its intent: it's really for retouching photographs. It's not really intended for, and really isn't particularly good for, actual painting. Just from an initial look, the new Microsoft program seems to have a fair number of things Photoshop doesn't.
That's not intended to put down Photoshop -- in fact, Photoshop is probably a better fit for what I personally do. OTOH, I suspect some of the people I work with will find the new tool an improvement -- though that'll depend (in part) on Microsoft delivering on their promise of better performance -- and that's certainly not what most people see as one of their major strengths...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
It was too realistic that some moron might have posted exactly those words. Therefore to be effective, you needed to exaggerate even further, perhaps to the point where the joke was ruined.
Decades ago, a newspaper columnist was writing what was supposed to be a parody of racism and the attempts at integration at the time.
He noted that people didn't seem particularly concerned about who they were near when standing in lines waiting for things, and only got concerned about being segregated when they got in and sat down. For example, they'd all stand together in line waiting to get into a movie theater, but when they went inside to sit down, at least some of them wanted to be seated seperately.
Based on this, he wrote (as a parody) a column advocating that integration would be easy to achieve by simply removing the chairs from public places.
The day his column was supposed to run, one of the local libraries announed that as part of an integration effort, they were going to (you guessed it) remove all the chairs!
He concluded that parody would die because it was impossible to come up with anything so silly that it might not really happen.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
As has already been pointed out, what Microsoft released last year wasn't really quite the same (though it was certainly related.
Interestingly enough, however, Microsoft released something that was probably even more effective long before that. OS/2 1.0 (way back in 1987) used the Intel segmentation model instead of page-based memory protection. One result of this was that when you allocated a chunk of memory, the protection on that chunk could be set to exactly the size you requested. Attempting to write even one byte beyond the amount allocated would result in an immediate trap. Interestingly enough, segments also had separate bits for execute vs. read from day one, so it was trivial to say something could be read by not executed. The NX bit just added that ability to page-based protection.
It looks like OpenBSD is also trying to make the heap use address space relatively sparsely -- i.e. attempting to assure that using a more or less random address is likely to result in a trap. Again, segment-based protection went a bit further: each segment required you to load a specific value in a segment register. With segment registers, you not only got a trap if you tried to use an illegal address, but you got a trap as soon as you even tried to form the address by loading an illegal value into the segment register.
The shortcoming is that segment registers are only 16 bits, and the required privilege level is encoded into a couple of those, reducing the address space still further. The bottom line is that if you catch the interrupt from the illegal access, it's pretty trivial to step through all possible segment register values, and find which ones are legal and which aren't.
The OpenBSD approach should gain a major advantage on a 64-bit processor -- a given amount of allocated memory will use the larger address space much more sparsely, so a randomly chosen address is much less likely to be valid.
This is in OpenBSD, not FreeBSD. Assuming it works out well, it might someday migrate to other OSes, and FreeBSD would probably be the first/easiest target for migration, but that's the future. OTOH, unless my memory has gotten even worse than usual, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux all do roughly the same sort of thing as XP SP2.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Sorry Bill, but if you'd bothered to read what I said, you'd realize that this was simply incorrect. In point of fact, to anybody who didn't know better (and nobody but their authors do for sure) it could easily look like at least two of the papers you cited were based on the background portion of an article I published critiquing one of the first attempts at an ESB spec.
Making, and later referring back to an ad hominem attack isn't exactly the stuff of deep technical discussions, now is it Bill?
Nonsense. While you can (and people are certainly trying to) create tools that make software reuse easier, the simple fact of the matter is that anybody who wants to can avoid just about anything they choose. SOA is mostly about specifying some interfaces -- but just using an interface can't (and certainly shouldn't) force anybody to use any particular piece of software for a particular job. As long as that remains true, reuse remains avoidable. Not only is it avoidable, but as long as it does remain avoidable, it will be avoided under some circumstances by some people, sometimes for better and others for worse, but inevitably it WILL happen. If somebody were to attempt to make some level of reuse truly unavoidable (i.e. make it mandatory to use specific pieces of software for particular jobs) then it would really become more easily avoided than ever -- because at that point, nobody with any intelligence whatsoever would even consider using SOA at all.
Your question seems to entirely miss the point. I was critiquing the article in question, and pointed out that it contained virtually nothing about how SOA was supposed to contribute to software reuse. Your reply seems to indicate that you somehow believe my having read other articles would somehow affect the content of this one. If there was any logic involved in reaching that conclusion, it has utterly escaped me.
It doesn't surprise me when my post bothers an enthusiast. It does, however, dismay me when the enthusiast can't put up a better defense than "Your refusal to extoll the wonders of my favorite technology indicates obvious ignorance."
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
With that said, service oriented architecture strikes me as little more than the latest in a long string of TLAs so beloved by IT management and such (I.e. PHBs), but with very little in the way of real content behind it. The whole point of pretty nearly any software ever written is to provide some a service a user, so pretty clearly being "service oriented" is roughly as new as dirt.
Ignoring that, however, and taking web-service oriented software as somehow being revolutionary (even though it's really not) we're still left with a serious question about how in the world this would relate to software reuse. I'm reasonably certain the answer is that PHBs feel a need to sell their PHBs on the latest TLA, and IBM has thrown together a web page that tries to help them in that regard.
When you get down to it, however, the web page contains virtually nothing in the way of real information. It basically says that reuse is good. Whether you agree with that or not, the fact is they haven't really told you anything about how to facilitate reuse in general, or how SOA is supposed to contribute to that. They cite the usual reasons for reuse not working out well (e.g. lack of education and lack of software suitable for reuse). They go on to give the usual ideas that mentoring, careful analysis, etc., will help yield ideas for software to write that's worth reusing and more ability to reuse it.
Five years ago this article would have said "XP" instead of "SOA". Fifteen years ago, it would have been "OOP" instead. Twenty five years ago that would have been "structured programming". I wasn't around at the time to know for sure, but my guess is that if you looked carefully you could find something from the 1950's (or maybe even late '40s) talking about how the macro capability of the new assemblers wasn't resulting in as much code reuse as some people hoped, mostly due to 1) lack of education and 2) lack of macros worth reusing.
To make a long story short, "code reuse" has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. Now, that may make it sound like I consider software reuse a lost cause, or something on that order, but that's just not true. The fact is that macros allowed some reuse of a fair number of (mostly) relatively small pieces of code, as long as there wasn't too much variation between the uses.
Structured programming helped a bit more, particularly by helping readability so you might be able to figure out what something did more easily than writing it all over again.
Likewise OOP allowed more reusability as well. Despite being the newest TLA on the block "SOA" is really little more than modular programming, with the modules in this case being relatively large. There's been a bit of work done on standardizing the interfaces between the modules, so it's a bit easier (at least in some cases) to plug them together, but in software that's pretty much what most architecture boils down to anyway -- designing interfaces.
Now, having that interface pre-designed (to at least some extent) undoubtedly makes it a bit easier to reuse a bit more software with less design specific to the problem at hand, and that's probably a good thing in general. OTOH, Brooks was right: there probably is no silver bullet, and even if there is, SOA isn't it. SOA will probably provide an incremental improvement over previous methods, at least in a few places under a few circumstances (given the amount of effort that's been put into designing the SOA interface "stuff", we'd better hope so, because it needs to help some people quite a bit to even break even).
Articles will be published crediting it with saving company X from total oblivion, triumphing over their opposition, etc. Other articles will be published blaming it
That doesn't seem to square with Apple's financial statements. Their latest 10-Q says they made 241 million US dollars on "other music products". That category covers:
Given the looks of the other parts of that, I'd guess the iTunes sales accounts for over $200 million US dollars per quarter.
According to the same statement, Apple's total net sales for the quarter were 3 520 million dollars, so iTunes accounts for between 5 and 6 percent of total sales. Given the profit margin on iTunes versus hardware sales, I'd guess that iTunes accounts for a substantially higher percentage of their profits.
To make a long story short: Apple does make money on iTunes, and fair amount of money at that. Even if we ignore percentages for the moment, $800 million US/year is certainly not a negligible amount of money. It's also worth noting that this currently has a growth rate of 230% annually, so unless the growth stalls out completely, it'll be well over a billion (milliard for non-US residents) US dollars next year.
In fairness, yes, Apple also makes a lot of money by selling iPods, and quite a bit of the cost of running iTunes is probably amortized over other parts of the company, so they can undoubtedly run iTunes profitably at a price per song that would kill almost anybody who was only selling music. --
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The voltage levels for line inputs have been standardized for years and is quite non-critical anyway -- while standard line level is 2 V P-P for 0 dB, if this particula box only produced 1 V P-P for 0 dB, that would only be 3 dB down, which is a couple clicks of the volume control on a typical deck.
Impedances are even more trivial -- a typical line input as an impedance around 15 K ohms, which is easier to drive than the 600 ohms (or so) of a typical headphone. In any case, it would take considerable extra trouble to design a solid state amplifier that had problems driving a 15K input impedance. At the risk of oversimplifying, the basic idea is that the output impedance of the source should be substantially lower than the input impedance of the sink. A typical solid-state design has an output impedance down in the single digits (or less -- for a big power amp, you might see an output impedance in the milliohm range).
As far as signal to noise ratio goes, the SNR of the iPod should greatly exceed what's usable in a car. Even quiet luxury cars typically have noise levels around 65 dB SPL or so. If you limit the maximum volume to (say) 110 dB SPL, that means your environment only has about a 45 dB SNR. 24 bit sampling theoretically gives an SNR around 120 dB. Apple's analog section probably reduces that a little, but they'd really have to screw things up for it to become a problem under the circumstances.
The bottom line is that driving a line input in a car means next to nothing.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The first sentence of the background of the invention in the patent reads "The use of computers to generate graphical displays which illustrate the relationships of underlying data is well known."
Clearly you didn't read into this one at all!
Those of us who bother to actually read patents before we condemn them usually find that there's some trick that isn't necessarily obvious in the patent's title.
In this case, the trick is that the graph is "live" so to speak. You're getting data from a database and displaying it on screen, which, as they said, was well known. The difference is that here, when/if you edit the graph, the graphics engine detects the edit, and sends a notification of that back to the database, so the underlying data gets updated to the new value.
I don't know whether that was new, novel, original, etc., in 1993 either, but if you want to claim there's obvious and well-known prior art, that's what you really need to look for, not just some program that displays some kind of graphics.
I should also note that what I've summarized above covers only one independent claim -- it has dependent claims that narrow the scope somewhat, and there are other independent claims as well, that may cover something slightly different (though at the level of detail I've given above, I'd expect all the independent claims to be similar).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
It can't be done -- but not because the software can't be written. The problem is that as soon as something even comes close to working well, it no longer qualifies (in most people's minds) as anything approaching AI.
If you look at AI research from the '50s (for example) you'll find that not only was speech recognition considered hardcore AI at one time (at one point, a box that simply blinked a light when anybody said "watermelon" within range of its microphone was hailed as a breakthrough in AI), but so also were handwriting recognition and even OCR. These have certainly been made to work (quite well in the case of OCR) but as soon as they even came close to working, they were re-classified as distinctly not AI.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
This would only be true if the application fees funded the patent office, and increasing the fees increased the funding.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, if the fees collected by the patent office were used to fund it, they probably wouldn't have much reason to raise fees at all.
OTOH, the patent office seems to have some pretty serious problems, many (if not most) of which are mostly independent of funding. In fact, allowing the PTO to keep and use all the money it raised from fees would probably make some of the problems even worse. One problem right now is that the PTO tends to grant patents they probably shouldn't -- and basing their funding directly on the number of patents they gratend would almost certainly provide more motivation to grant patents regardless of merit.
In fairness, part of this is due to the governing law -- most people believe the basic idea should be that if there's doubt about granting a patent, the tendency should be to not grant it. The law pretty much disagrees though -- without boring you with legalese, it basically says the PTO must grant a patent unless it can prove that the invention lack novelty, utility, originality, etc. IOW, if there's much room for doubt or argument, they're required to grant the patent.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Any tax increase would (at most) almost certainly be indirect. At least the last time I checked, the PTO was profitable -- i.e. its budget was less than the amount in collected in application and maintainence fees.
It doesn't have to. Most patent office fees are exactly twice as much for a large business as for a small business or individual. It would be relatively trivial to increase that ratio if they wanted to.
I suspect congress sees patents a bit differently than most of us though. First of all, as pointed out above, I'm reasonably certain the PTO turns a profit, and increasing that profit would be seen as a good thing by most of congress.
Second, I'd guess congress sees patents partly in terms of balance of trade -- intellectual property is currently a huge export from the United States. We invent a great deal, but build relatively little. The US companies that invent/design most of what we use make their money primarily by licensing their technology to the foreign companies that build the devices that use the technology. Without patents, the US would almost certainly have a substantially larger trade deficit.
These might help to explain why congress has done exactly the opposite of what you suggest. As of December 8, 2004, the US congress cut the fees for filing a patent application by quite a wide margin -- from $790 to $300 (or half that for a small entity). That's the price for a utility patent -- design patents, plant patents, etc., each have their own fees.
Anybody who cares to can go to the US PTO web site for full details.
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It was a joke primarily among the clueless. A certification of an "operating system" was entirely separate from a certification of a "networking component". One of the first steps in certifying almost anything as an operating system was to remove all the networking (not just the IP stack).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Of course -- in fact, that's the case with any such certifications. They never certify an OS as being secure -- they only ever examine and certify a specific installation, and any modification to that installation requires re-examination and re-certification.
Just in case it wasn't clear the first time, I'll repeat: it is never generically any operating system, or other component. A certification is only ever given to a specific installation. After that's been done, most of the components that were used in that installation are placed on a certified products list. This basically helps others by letting them know that there is a configuration in which this product has been certified, so if (for example) that configuration fits their needs as well, getting their own installation certified is likely to be considerably easier than if they use an otherwise similar component.
The statements I saw from MS at the time claimed that Windows NT had been placed on the "Evaluated Products List", which was absolutely correct. That's not the same as claiming that NT in general had been certified.
Here is what MS has to say on the subject (I'm not sure, but one-time registration may well be needed to view that). Note in particular that far from claiming that the OS in general was certified, they specifically point out (as I did above) that an OS is never certified, but that the OS was placed on the Evaluated Products List. While this page mentions a certification of NT 3.5 (and a similar certification of NT 3.51 in the UK) they don't mention a certification (also at the C2 level) of WIndows NT 4.0 Server.
Anybody who cares can look at the entire Evaluated Products List.
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True, but incomplete -- under the right circumstances, even an OTP can be broken.
To ensure that an OTP is unbreakable, you not only have to ensure that the key is used only once, but you also have to ensure that the key is completely unpredictable. This means starting with a truly random source, and ensuring against introducing bias in sampling that random source.
The problem with this is that most random sources have relatively low bandwidth. Those who really care may want to visit David Wagner's links page at: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rnd/. About halfway down the page is a section on random number generation hardware.
Most of these aren't very useful to provide key material for OTPs though -- they just don't provide enough random bits fast enough to provide much bandwidth.
That, of course, brings us back to the Achille's heel of OTP: the key is just as large as the message. If you can distribute the key securely, why don't you just send the original message by that secure route and be done with it? Clearly there are situations in which this doesn't apply, but it renders the OTP useless for most.
On a more or less unrelated aside, I was a bit disappointed -- if there's been any mention of elliptical curve cryptograpy, I've missed it...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
At least if you're thinking of an optical microscope, the situation's basically hopeless even with current production technology. The problem is pretty simple: the finest detail you can hope to see with an optical microscope is determined by the wavelength of light you're using.
Visible light has wavelengths from about 400 to 700 nanometers. Current high-end chips are built with roughly 100 nanometer processes (90 for Intel, AMD, IBM, 110 for nVidia chips, etc.)
Carbon nanotubes are around 1 and a quarter nanometers -- about the wavelength of an X ray.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
This is only partially true. While the cost of a forgery is low, the cost of a forgery that stands a chance of holding up under modern investigation is not low at all. Worse, the cost of having it found that you did commit forgery can be exceptionally high.
In this case, there also seems to be little or no evidence that Microsoft stands to lose anything in this case -- in fact, there seems to be no real evidence that there is a case at all. What we have right now is 1) Apple's patent application has been rejected. 2) Microsoft's prior patent was cited as a reason for rejecting the patent. 3) Somebody at Microsoft has said that they're open to licensing their patent(s) to Apple.
Microsoft seems to have taken no action whatsoever, at least so far. When or if they ever do so, they still stand to lose no more than the cost of the case itself until or unless Apple comes up with some sort of countersuit.
Under the circumstances, the likelihood of Microsoft forging any documentation seems exceptionally remote to me -- unless they already have real documentation, they simply won't initiate a lawsuit in the first place. If anybody was going to do such a thing, the company that would be in that position would be Apple.
Given the money involved, I can't imagine that at all. First of all, I seriously doubt the number that's been quoted. A typical patent royalty rate is around 1%, and under the circumstances, that would be taken on the wholesale price, not the retail. Second, since this is a US patent, it only applies to iPods that are either manufactured in the US or sold in the US. It looks like they're all made in Tiawan, which would restrict it to sales in the US. According to Apple's most recent 10Q (available via a link on: http://www.apple.com/investor/, relevant data is on page 27) their average wholesale price for an iPod is about $179, which would put the royalties at around $1.79 apiece, not the ~$10 that's been quoted. Total iPod sales of $1103 per quarter, and about half of their overall sales in "the Americas" indicates no more than $550 million (and probably less) as the base off of which to take the 1%.
That comes to no more (and probably less) than $5 1/2 million a quarter. While that may not be exactly pocket change when viewed as a whole, it works out to less than a penny per share of earnings.
One final point: even though the Apple patent was rejected based on the Microsoft patent, the Microsoft patent may not apply to the iPod anyway. One of the basic ideas of a patent is that once it expires, anybody else can use the technology. To that end, a patent is required to include a full description of how to implement and make best use of the technology. It then has claims that describe what the patent really covers. Something that's described in the disclosure can't be later patented by somebody else, but if it's not included in the claims, then the patent doesn't cover the technology either.
Just for example, assume Microsoft's patent described something just like an iPod, but the claims said the device ran Windows CE. Since the iPod doesn't use CE, the patent doesn't apply -- but doing the same thing using some other OS is now so obvious that it doesn't qualify for a patent.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Like most such things, this has a clause at the beginning saying "unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency." Given that the agency in question appears to have made plans already, simply rewriting the plan itself might easily qualify in their minds as an undue burden. IOW, to make a clear-cut case for illegality, you'd probably have to show that it's easier to do the job in a standards-compliant manner -- specifically, that doing so would save enough money to cover the cost of the other rewriting (e.g. of plans) they'd have to do along with it.
Of course, if their minds are still open on the subject, things might not be that bad -- in that case, showing that a small incremental cost up-front would save money on the long run (for example) might easily qualify as relieving any undue burden. Don't take for granted that their minds are still really open just because they're soliciting opinions though -- that's probably required regardless.
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This is simply incorrect. If Apple has evidence that they invented the technology first, they can get their patent (and invalidate the previous one) by showing that.
If you really want to get into the details of this, http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/bpai/ would be one place to start.
It's worth noting, however, that throughout most of the rest of the world, you'd be absoutely right -- most countries use a "first to file" rule rather than a "first to invent" rule like the US does. The weakness of the first to invent rule is that it's easy to find out exactly when somebody filed an application, where it can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to show exactly when something was invented -- especially since most things take a while to develop, so deciding on an exact point in time to say when it was invented is rarely easy. If memory serves, the usual criterion in this case is the point at which it was actually reduced to practice -- i.e. the first time it actually worked.
Even that can be difficult in some cases, however -- especially things like techniques for manufacturing, where the whole idea is to progress from something that sometimes works and other times doesn't, to something that works dependably. It may be quite a while later before you know something started to happen (more) dependably.
Obligatory warning: I'm not an attorney, so none of what I say should be taken as legal advice.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
A lot here depends on what you class as "consumer-level". If you translate "consumer-level" as "less than fifty US dollars", you're undoubtedly correct. OTOH, the print quality from an Epson R300 (for one exaple) can be every bit as good as from a typical mini-lab, and with reasonable care will usually be substantially better. By Epson's standards even the R800 and R1800 are considered "consumer" printers, and with reasonably careful use, either one will easily beat not only minilabs, but the vast majority of professional dark rooms.
Pardon my pointing it out, but dye sub prints are not particularly resistant to UV as a rule.
Ink for inkjets fall into two classes: dye-based and pigment-based. As you can undoubtedly guess from the name, ink for a dye-sub printer is always dye-based.
As a simple rule of thumb, if you care much about longevity, you want to use pigment-based inks. Regardless of how you spray it onto the paper, a dye-based ink will generally be substantially less resistant to fading than a pigment-based ink.
On the negative side, pigment-based inks usually restrict your gamut somewhat -- i.e. they restrict the available range of colors somewhat compared to dye-based inks. The usual cure for this is to add more inks beyond Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (e.g. Red and Blue inks).
My own experience with dye-sub printers has been a lot less positive than the comments here tend to indicate. Dye sub certainly has good points, but they have some serious weaknesses as well. First of all, while ink jets certainly aren't cheap to run, supplies for dye-subs are generally substantially more expensive on a per-page basis. Second, dye-subs (as a rule) are only useful for photographs. Third, the range of papers available for dye-sub printers is extremely restricted -- if, for example, you decide you want double-sided semi-gloss paper, you can pretty nearly forget using a dye-sub printer.
As far as dithering goes, that's why decent ink-jets have ridiculously high resolution numbers -- so they can dither without the individual dots being visible. I've yet to meet anybody who could see the individual dots that made up the dither pattern at 5760 DPI (and I'm pretty sure I never will -- there's enough ink bleed that even under a microscope, a pattern of 1.5 picoliter droplets essentially turns into a continuous-tone image).
Waterproofness: I haven't used every available current printer, but this seems to be mostly a problem of the past, at least to me. I've used an Epson R800 for over a year now, and seen only one situation in which inks ran when wet: when printing directly onto a CD. At least AFAIK, there's no laser or dye sub that'll do this at all, so there's really no way to call this an advantage for the other technologies.
Photographs make the terrible color quality of most lasers painfully obvious, but there are other such situations as well. Almost anybody who cares about color quality will generally be disappointed in nearly any cheap color laser (or even in the expensive ones I've seen). In terms of color quality, a $100 ink jet will easily beat a $1000 laser.
A few other comments: third party inks for ink jets are certainly a
Perhaps you're a bit young to have actually seen or run an Apple ][? If you remembered them well enough to have any room to comment on them at all, you'd undoubtedly remember that one of the first things you saw when you turned on an Apple ][ was a copyright on its BASIC interpreter -- a Microsoft copyright, for anybody who missed the obvious. Yes, they also had Apple integer BASIC, and some of us who wrote assembly language (Quick: how many people remember entering "3D0G" at the Apple monitor prompt? :-) remember SWEET16 as well, but what it ran by default at startup was AppleSoft (Microsoft BASIC).
For those who happen to care about other machines of this vintage, yes, the same thing was true of Commodore PETs, Atari 400/800's, most TRS-80's, and so on. Well before Gary Kildall entered the scene with his imitation of RT/11 (CP/M), Microsoft was supplying BASIC interpreters running on the Altair, Imsai, Heath H8, and such as well.
To make a long story short, Microsoft has been a force in the personal computer business for as long as the personal computer business has existed. Early on, they were thought of as a language vendor rather than an OS vendor, but in quite a few of those cases (PETs in particular) the BASIC interpreter was not just a language -- to the extent that the machine had an OS or user interface, the BASIC interpreter was pretty much it.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
No, nobody really knows -- in fact, there is no single answer. Here on earth, with a heavy-duty magnetic shield and miles of atmosphere, _some_ cancer is still due to cosmic radiation and secondary effects from it.
As soon as you reduce that, the amount of cosmic radiation goes up, and with it the risk of cancer. Blocking all the radiation is grossly impractical -- the real question is how high a risk you're willing to put up with; then you can figure out the amount of shielding you need to achieve that figure.
How long of a term, by whom, and at what risk of cancer due to radiation over that term? The risk goes up over time, and some people start out with higher cancer risks than others. Obviously different people are willing to live with different risk levels.
To get a meaningful answer, you need to define your goal much more specifically -- for example, you could decide that you wanted to hold the risk of cancer for a trip to the same level as smoking N cigarettes a day for the same period of time. That, of course, has a few problems as well -- particularly, that cigarettes cause a number of kinds of cancer at varying rates, and I doubt that cosmic radiation fits the same pattern. It's probably too obvious and simplistic to assume that cosmic radiation causes only (or primarily) skin cancer, but the rates are probably different from cigarettes anyway.
Risks from cancer vary over a wide range, leading to another obvious question: do we really care about limiting the risk of cancer, of do we want to limit the risk from cancer to a specified level? Depending on the types of cancer most often caused by cosmic radiation, these will almost certainly lead to considerably different answers as well.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Plentiful probably isn't the right word, but small and light (and therefore cheap to ship), and versatile, yes.
For that matter, the real strength (at least in the long term) probably isn't the PDAs themselves -- it's that they allow you to read electronic media.
From their viewpoint, consider that if those suitcases were full of DVDs instead, you could be carrying a reasonably complete cirriculum covering pre-school through a couple of reasonably well-equipped colleges.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Some reasons have already been pointed out, but I'll add one more to the list: much as economists can attribute a time-value to money, so there is also a time value to software.
IOW, software that mostly works now is often more valuable to the customer than software that's perfect but not available for quite a while. It wold probably be a pretty lousy tradeoff to add (say) 3 years to the schedule for IE7 just to fix a bug nobody's ever actually encountered.
Of course, the relative value of bug fixes vs. delivery date varies with the problem area addressed by the software -- a browser that mis-handles fallback when it encoutners malformed CSS code is a lot smaller problem than something that might otherwise be rather trivial, but happens to be in code for a flight control system or a pacemaker. Even with something like medical equipment, the time to produce 100% perfect code may not be worthwhile -- if the equipment in question handles a situation that nothing currently available can handle at all, quite a few people's lives might be saved by delivering the product sooner.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Pretty close. From their most recent 10Q, their sales numbers are (in millions of US dollars):
Macintosh 1494 iPod 1014 peripherals and other hardware 280 Software 134I've skipped a few irrelevant categories like services. Software currently accounts for just over 8 1/2% of Apple's overall sales. These are quarterly, not annual, numbers. There are undoubtedly seasonal variations that don't show here, but I wouldn't expect software to do a lot better at other times of the year (rather the contrary -- in percentage terms, I'd expect that near holidays, nearly everything else loses percentage to the iPod).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
As you'd expect, the exact amount of data is hard to guess. The most common tape densities are 1600, 3200 and 6250 FCI. Reel sizes range from 100 to 3600 feet. Figuring for worst case, if they're 3600 foot reels at 6250 FCI, each reel holds about 240 MB.
Seven-track tapes are old enough that they're normally written at lower density, but offhand I don't remember what the maximum density for them normally was.
In the end, storing the data isn't really a majory concern -- even given a few thousand reels like this, a few hundred dollars would cover all the necessary hard-drive space pretty easily. The real problems are that 1) 7- and 9- track drives are now pretty rare, and 2) most of them used more or less proprietary channels to connect to the mainframe. As such, reading the tapes requires either finding function drives AND matching computers, or elese building new tape drives that can connect via SCSI or something on that order. The practicality of that approach might be open to some question though -- despite low-tech electronics, tape drives required quite precise mechanics if I'm not mistaken.
As far as data formats go, quite a few tapes had "labels", which were basically blocks of metadata to tell about the format of the rest of the tape. This didn't tell much about the logical format, but it did tell you things like the sizes of blocks and such. Of course, it's not really quite that simple: there were (at least) a couple of conflicting formats for the labels too...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
First of all, I'm not sure that's really an accurate characterization.
Second, quite a few people work on graphics that combine the two, and being able to use one tool to do so can be pretty convenient. As it happens, at work we do this quite a bit, and with the tools we've been using, it's a massive pain. I'm not all sure that Acrylic/Expression will be an improvement, but I can certainly see where it could be.
A couple other points relative to the OP:
Given the amount of the time I'm just wishing my screen was bigger (despite being 22 inches, and running at 1920x1440) cutting down on the amount of space taken by things like scroll bars strikes me as a pretty good idea.1) Lack of scroll bars. To quote from the help file:
2) Poor performance in pixel-painting. To quote from the release notes:
Of course, it remains to be seen whether MS will follow through on this, but clearly we should expect more from a review than simply putting a negative spin on the release notes.In fairness, I should add a few more things: this really is a vector program with some painting capabilities. Some of its painting features are nicely done (e.g. displaying the histogram in the curves dialog) but this clearly is not intended to compete directly with Photoshop. Just for example, while it supports layers, it does not support some things I use relatively frequently, such as selecting how layers will be combined.
That said, Photoshop's painting abilities reflect its intent: it's really for retouching photographs. It's not really intended for, and really isn't particularly good for, actual painting. Just from an initial look, the new Microsoft program seems to have a fair number of things Photoshop doesn't.
That's not intended to put down Photoshop -- in fact, Photoshop is probably a better fit for what I personally do. OTOH, I suspect some of the people I work with will find the new tool an improvement -- though that'll depend (in part) on Microsoft delivering on their promise of better performance -- and that's certainly not what most people see as one of their major strengths...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Decades ago, a newspaper columnist was writing what was supposed to be a parody of racism and the attempts at integration at the time.
He noted that people didn't seem particularly concerned about who they were near when standing in lines waiting for things, and only got concerned about being segregated when they got in and sat down. For example, they'd all stand together in line waiting to get into a movie theater, but when they went inside to sit down, at least some of them wanted to be seated seperately.
Based on this, he wrote (as a parody) a column advocating that integration would be easy to achieve by simply removing the chairs from public places.
The day his column was supposed to run, one of the local libraries announed that as part of an integration effort, they were going to (you guessed it) remove all the chairs!
He concluded that parody would die because it was impossible to come up with anything so silly that it might not really happen.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.