The problem isn't patents per se -- it's patent abuse.
The first pproblem is that people have been allowed to patent concepts that have not truly novel. Take the FAT file system (please take the FAT file system!), for example. Nothing about it is particularly unique and there are tons and tons of examples of prior art.
The second problem is that people have been allowed to patent vague ideas that include no actual implementation or plan. There are patents on transporter technologies and all sorts of things that have never been implemented and have no hopes of being implemented because the technology doesn't exist yet. Yet when someone comes out with a transporter or something like that -- bam! -- here come the lawsuits.
The third problem is that patents are granted with inadequate research -- the patent examiner very frequently doesn't look for prior art or even prior patents, as in your cell phone "bootleg" example. This also goes back to problem #1...
The fourth problem is those that game the system in order to make few $$$. Look at The SCO Group for an example, and there are countless others.
The real problem in the fourth problem is that this country needs real torte reform -- frivolous and nuisance lawsuits are all-too-common. And the lack of real controls on such lawsuits are what allow scumbags like Darl McBride (who had a long history of this sort of gaming of the system long before he joined SCOX) to continue grabbing for dollars by conducting such things as publically-traded nuisance lawsuits against big megacorps like IBM in the hopes that they will be silenced by a few million bucks.
If patents were used in the way intended in all cases, then we wouldn't have all of these headaches and problems. But it's not, and, unfortunately, we have no compensating controls in place to keep it from happening.
But the programmer in this case has NO IDEA how this REALLY works. In reality, the machine doesn't know anything about strings. A string is just a bunch of bytes starting a particular position in memory and ending in 0x00 (for C string representation. Most Pascal compilers actually represent strings with the first byte of the string being set to the length, limiting Pascal strings to 255 chars).
SO if you need to concatenate two strings, you need a buffer to hold the new string, and you need to copy the bytes from each of the two src strings into the buffer.
That's how it really works, and you won't understand that if you just do like the above.
Yeah, yeah...all you "I live in DC and see hybrids" and "I live next door the Sierra Club HQ and see hybrids."
I live in Detroit. And yes, I see a ton of hybrids too.
If that's not a clue that hybrids are here to stay, I don't know what is.
BTW-- a good business plan would seem to go like this:
1. Start/buy a garage. 2. Wait for hybrids to come out of warranty 3. In the meantime, train your mechanics on hybrid technology 4. Be one of the first garages in your area to service hybrids 5. ??? 6. Profit!
Most people who think that C is low level, grungy programming language haven't written a lick of C code and couldn't write anything significant in C if their life depended on it.
C has very simple syntax. The language doesn't get in your way, and once you want to start doing OO, you can pick up C++ fairly easily once you know C.
One of the problems of learning a language like python first, is that it doens't teach you anything about proper dynamic memory allocation, the use of pointers, the use of operating system APIs, etc.
Scripting languages like Python are nice, but you'll never learn anything about systems-level programming writing things in Python, so, for example, your hands will be tied when new hardware comes along until us C programmers come along and write a library for you to access its driver.
Yep. GOOG and RHAT on Nasdaq.
Pretty much everything is on Nasdaq
Not entirely true. IBM, for example, is listed on NYSE, but not on Nasdaq. Generally stocks listed on one exchange aren't listed on another.
The Nasdaq-100 is not the same thing as the Nasdaq.
True. The Nasdaq-100 is an index, much like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P-500.
You look for recognizable structures. For instance, if you have some idea of the filenames involved, you might start looking for those in a mixed hex/ASCII dump, then start trying to figure what the numbers before and after the filename mean.
In analyzing these numbers, you try to see emerging patterns that represent data structure. One 64-bit number might refer to a location in a FAT table, or it might refer to something like an inode, another might contain a date/time stamp. Some other numbers might represent a files attributes or permissions. It's about making educated guesses. It helps if you have some way of reading back the data structure -- either through a program that reads the filesystem or in this case, the Xbox itself. That way you can start playing with different values and see what effect that they have when read back.
A bigger footprint on the hard drive almost always means a bigger footprint in RAM -- no matter what OS we're talking about. (And I only say almost always only because I could imagine, in theory, an OS with low memory requirements, but a high footprint due to high data requirements... If we look at only 'mainstream' OSes such as Linux, Windows, OS X, Classic MacOS, OS/2, *BSD, etc, then we can strike out the word 'almost')
Wait. So your solution to the insecurity of DNS is to run a another DNS server? That sounds a bit insane to me. What if someone hacked the root DNS servers? It's been done before.
Seems like a more sane solution would be to add your banks IP address to your/etc/hosts file(s) and then set the/etc/nsswitch.conf hosts entry to 'files dns'. Then, if the bank's IP address changes, confirm it with the bank's IT department.
This should be moderated 'Insightful', not 'Funny'.
Seriously, the problem is user education. People believe ANYTHING that appears on their computer screens, much in the same way people believe ANYTHING that appears on the TV news.
The problem we have is that too many people lack the critical thinking skills necessary to operate a computer (or watch the TV news).
The difference between frames and AJAX, though, is that frames were used for lots of ordinary Web pages. Where AJAX (and frames, for that matter), shine is in the use of Web applications -- applications that were traditionally run on the desktop that can now be run in a Web browser. Think gmail, Google Maps, Writely, etc. You don't need or necessarily even want a back button or bookmarkable URLs for these types of applications.
Yes, but the one thing they haven't been successful in is pointing out the danger of DRM to Joe Sixpack. A number of people I've spoken with have never heard of the Sony 'rootkit' case and had no idea that playing a recent Sony DRM-protected CD on a Windows PC could be dangerous to their computer system.
Last I checked Safari was was not available for linux.
Maybe not, but you can get a browser based on Apple's WebCore rendering engine (essentially modifications to KHTML) for Linux called Gtk+ WebCore, which is based on GTK 2.x.
Exactly. Major portions of the Windows GUI run at Ring 0 -- basically the same level as the kernel. That code has virtually no restrictions on what it can do. Any exploit that attacks the OS at the GUI level (which isn't hard to do with ActiveX) can pwn the system.
Rewrite the OS to run as much of the GUI in userland as possible and take the performance hit and/or 'ease of use' hit. You'll have less complaints out of your customers in the long run.
I never said that they were secular humanists. That's a 1930s thing. I said they were Deists. Many were also Freemasons. These were popular things to be amongst the intellecutal elites of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Deists aren't Christian, nor are they secular humanists. They believe in the God of Nature and the concept of Natural Law. See this link for more info. (Disclosure: I am not now nor have I ever been a Deist.)
Our founding fathers were God-fearing men who understood that for a country to stand it must have a solid foundation; the Bible was the source of this foundation. They believed that God's ways were much higher than Man's ways and held firmly that the Bible was the absolute standard of truth and used the Bible as a source to form our government.
From the Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11:
"The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
I think Thomas Paine's words are a perfect example that the Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians;
I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible).
Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses. Here is an order, attributed to 'God' to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and to debauch and rape the daughters. I would not dare so dishonor my Creator's name by (attaching) it to this filthy book (the Bible).
It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.
Accustom a people to believe that priests and clergy can forgive sins...and you will have sins in abundance.
The Christian church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in pretended imitation of a person (Jesus) who lived a life of poverty.
Or how about Benjamin Franklin?
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble...."
Still think the Founding Fathers never had Separation of Church and State in mind? How about Madison:
Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
The real myth is that the United States was founded on Christian principles. It wasn't. This is a lie propogated by people pushing a particular religious and political viewpoint not shared by the vast majority of Americans.
I completely disagree with EPIC's privacy analysis of Gmail's "content extraction" techniques.
First off, whether the ECPA extends to Internet e-mail has NOT been established. The ECPA was written in 1986 and at that time, most people's idea of an 'e-mail' service involved CompuServe or other proprietary mail services.
I doubt that anyone could have a reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to Internet e-mail. Mail can pass through so many servers and routers and such and ANY of those hosts along the way could grab your mail, which is, unless YOU encrypt it, pretty much transmitted in clear text, with very rare exceptions. Any of those hosts could store and analyze your mail, too. There's nothing stopping them. It's a direct result of the Internet's decentralized nature.
Anyone who expects that unencrypted Internet e-mail is private is very sadly mistaken.
Re:Was the Atari his webserver as well?
on
Atari 800 XE Laptop
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Why is it so hard to use coral cache?
Coral Cache is blocked by a lot of corporate firewalls as being an 'anonymous proxy'. So those of us at work right now can't use it.
MA doesn't have to turn its back on the 'small slice of its populace'. OpenOffice.org works pretty well with Gnopernicus on GNOME, for the most part, aside from a few minor bugs. Yeah, Gnopernicus doesn't support everything ZoomText or JAWS or SuperNova support. But, for the most part, we're talking about minor inconveniences rather than full blown showstoppers.
OpenOffice.org on Windows doesn't work all that well with screen readers/magnifiers. So, go to *nix where a real accessibility interface exists.
For those that need Voice Recognition technology, they'll have to wait until either WordPerfect implements ODF, or until Dragon and IBM update Naturally Speaking and ViaVoice to support OOo. I'd watch for IBM to update ViaVoice -- they probably will, being the open source advocates that they are.
Now, if this goober had coded up a new manager which integrated all the functions he talked about, or had an extensble base manager to replace the native file system, with a defined api for plugins that would allow you to customize the environment, that would be news.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't patents per se -- it's patent abuse.
The first pproblem is that people have been allowed to patent concepts that have not truly novel. Take the FAT file system (please take the FAT file system!), for example. Nothing about it is particularly unique and there are tons and tons of examples of prior art.
The second problem is that people have been allowed to patent vague ideas that include no actual implementation or plan. There are patents on transporter technologies and all sorts of things that have never been implemented and have no hopes of being implemented because the technology doesn't exist yet. Yet when someone comes out with a transporter or something like that -- bam! -- here come the lawsuits.
The third problem is that patents are granted with inadequate research -- the patent examiner very frequently doesn't look for prior art or even prior patents, as in your cell phone "bootleg" example. This also goes back to problem #1...
The fourth problem is those that game the system in order to make few $$$. Look at The SCO Group for an example, and there are countless others.
The real problem in the fourth problem is that this country needs real torte reform -- frivolous and nuisance lawsuits are all-too-common. And the lack of real controls on such lawsuits are what allow scumbags like Darl McBride (who had a long history of this sort of gaming of the system long before he joined SCOX) to continue grabbing for dollars by conducting such things as publically-traded nuisance lawsuits against big megacorps like IBM in the hopes that they will be silenced by a few million bucks.
If patents were used in the way intended in all cases, then we wouldn't have all of these headaches and problems. But it's not, and, unfortunately, we have no compensating controls in place to keep it from happening.
You'd like Pascal, I think:
:= string1 + string2;
buffer
But the programmer in this case has NO IDEA how this REALLY works. In reality, the machine doesn't know anything about strings. A string is just a bunch of bytes starting a particular position in memory and ending in 0x00 (for C string representation. Most Pascal compilers actually represent strings with the first byte of the string being set to the length, limiting Pascal strings to 255 chars).
SO if you need to concatenate two strings, you need a buffer to hold the new string, and you need to copy the bytes from each of the two src strings into the buffer.
That's how it really works, and you won't understand that if you just do like the above.
Yeah, yeah...all you "I live in DC and see hybrids" and "I live next door the Sierra Club HQ and see hybrids."
I live in Detroit. And yes, I see a ton of hybrids too.
If that's not a clue that hybrids are here to stay, I don't know what is.
BTW-- a good business plan would seem to go like this:
1. Start/buy a garage.
2. Wait for hybrids to come out of warranty
3. In the meantime, train your mechanics on hybrid technology
4. Be one of the first garages in your area to service hybrids
5. ???
6. Profit!
And Jon Postel, who is the principle author of RFC 959. Probably Tim Berners-Lee, too.
No. Open XML is a real open standardfor Kylix and Delphi. I can't see what that has to do with Office, though. Is there a conflicting name here?
strcpy(buffer,"hello"); strcat(buffer,somevariable);
(providing you've done the proper memory allocations)
Most people who think that C is low level, grungy programming language haven't written a lick of C code and couldn't write anything significant in C if their life depended on it.
C has very simple syntax. The language doesn't get in your way, and once you want to start doing OO, you can pick up C++ fairly easily once you know C.
One of the problems of learning a language like python first, is that it doens't teach you anything about proper dynamic memory allocation, the use of pointers, the use of operating system APIs, etc.
Scripting languages like Python are nice, but you'll never learn anything about systems-level programming writing things in Python, so, for example, your hands will be tied when new hardware comes along until us C programmers come along and write a library for you to access its driver.
You look for recognizable structures. For instance, if you have some idea of the filenames involved, you might start looking for those in a mixed hex/ASCII dump, then start trying to figure what the numbers before and after the filename mean.
In analyzing these numbers, you try to see emerging patterns that represent data structure. One 64-bit number might refer to a location in a FAT table, or it might refer to something like an inode, another might contain a date/time stamp. Some other numbers might represent a files attributes or permissions. It's about making educated guesses. It helps if you have some way of reading back the data structure -- either through a program that reads the filesystem or in this case, the Xbox itself. That way you can start playing with different values and see what effect that they have when read back.
A bigger footprint on the hard drive almost always means a bigger footprint in RAM -- no matter what OS we're talking about. (And I only say almost always only because I could imagine, in theory, an OS with low memory requirements, but a high footprint due to high data requirements... If we look at only 'mainstream' OSes such as Linux, Windows, OS X, Classic MacOS, OS/2, *BSD, etc, then we can strike out the word 'almost')
Wait. So your solution to the insecurity of DNS is to run a another DNS server? That sounds a bit insane to me. What if someone hacked the root DNS servers? It's been done before.
/etc/hosts file(s) and then set the /etc/nsswitch.conf hosts entry to 'files dns'. Then, if the bank's IP address changes, confirm it with the bank's IT department.
Seems like a more sane solution would be to add your banks IP address to your
This should be moderated 'Insightful', not 'Funny'.
Seriously, the problem is user education. People believe ANYTHING that appears on their computer screens, much in the same way people believe ANYTHING that appears on the TV news.
The problem we have is that too many people lack the critical thinking skills necessary to operate a computer (or watch the TV news).
The difference between frames and AJAX, though, is that frames were used for lots of ordinary Web pages. Where AJAX (and frames, for that matter), shine is in the use of Web applications -- applications that were traditionally run on the desktop that can now be run in a Web browser. Think gmail, Google Maps, Writely, etc. You don't need or necessarily even want a back button or bookmarkable URLs for these types of applications.
Yes, but the one thing they haven't been successful in is pointing out the danger of DRM to Joe Sixpack. A number of people I've spoken with have never heard of the Sony 'rootkit' case and had no idea that playing a recent Sony DRM-protected CD on a Windows PC could be dangerous to their computer system.
Last I checked Safari was was not available for linux. Maybe not, but you can get a browser based on Apple's WebCore rendering engine (essentially modifications to KHTML) for Linux called Gtk+ WebCore, which is based on GTK 2.x.
Exactly. Major portions of the Windows GUI run at Ring 0 -- basically the same level as the kernel. That code has virtually no restrictions on what it can do. Any exploit that attacks the OS at the GUI level (which isn't hard to do with ActiveX) can pwn the system.
Rewrite the OS to run as much of the GUI in userland as possible and take the performance hit and/or 'ease of use' hit. You'll have less complaints out of your customers in the long run.
I never said that they were secular humanists. That's a 1930s thing. I said they were Deists. Many were also Freemasons. These were popular things to be amongst the intellecutal elites of the 17th and 18th centuries. Deists aren't Christian, nor are they secular humanists. They believe in the God of Nature and the concept of Natural Law. See this link for more info. (Disclosure: I am not now nor have I ever been a Deist.)
From the Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11:
"The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
I think Thomas Paine's words are a perfect example that the Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians;
Or how about Benjamin Franklin?
Still think the Founding Fathers never had Separation of Church and State in mind? How about Madison: The real myth is that the United States was founded on Christian principles. It wasn't. This is a lie propogated by people pushing a particular religious and political viewpoint not shared by the vast majority of Americans.I completely disagree with EPIC's privacy analysis of Gmail's "content extraction" techniques.
First off, whether the ECPA extends to Internet e-mail has NOT been established. The ECPA was written in 1986 and at that time, most people's idea of an 'e-mail' service involved CompuServe or other proprietary mail services.
I doubt that anyone could have a reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to Internet e-mail. Mail can pass through so many servers and routers and such and ANY of those hosts along the way could grab your mail, which is, unless YOU encrypt it, pretty much transmitted in clear text, with very rare exceptions. Any of those hosts could store and analyze your mail, too. There's nothing stopping them. It's a direct result of the Internet's decentralized nature.
Anyone who expects that unencrypted Internet e-mail is private is very sadly mistaken.
What happens if you are running a pirated copy of Firefox?.
Dude, torrents are here!
Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Nepal, Uzbekhistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.
Coincidentally, these are some of the same countries that have protested the loudest about ICANN's control of DNS.
Also, coincidentally, these are some of the nations with the worst human rights records.
Hmmm...
The important question is, where can I get one?
Why is it so hard to use coral cache? Coral Cache is blocked by a lot of corporate firewalls as being an 'anonymous proxy'. So those of us at work right now can't use it.
MA doesn't have to turn its back on the 'small slice of its populace'. OpenOffice.org works pretty well with Gnopernicus on GNOME, for the most part, aside from a few minor bugs. Yeah, Gnopernicus doesn't support everything ZoomText or JAWS or SuperNova support. But, for the most part, we're talking about minor inconveniences rather than full blown showstoppers.
OpenOffice.org on Windows doesn't work all that well with screen readers/magnifiers. So, go to *nix where a real accessibility interface exists.
For those that need Voice Recognition technology, they'll have to wait until either WordPerfect implements ODF, or until Dragon and IBM update Naturally Speaking and ViaVoice to support OOo. I'd watch for IBM to update ViaVoice -- they probably will, being the open source advocates that they are.
Hmmm...that sounds an awful lot like Nautilus with GnomeVFS.