Corley served as a consultant for Hackers... if someone like Corley's involved, it's gotta be quality
Do you know how many people serve as 'consultants' for a given movie production? Most have very little access to understand the movie as a whole, nevermind be given a script, nevermind have their consultations heeded. I'd take that factoid with a grain of salt, and not tilt my opinion so easily.
If you don't rigorously enforce/protect your trademarks every time there's a possible infringement, the trademarks themselves can and will be wiped out.
This is very different from patent law, where a patent may be left idle. The patent holder can selectively choose to defend, license or ignore those who are possibly infringing. (It is for this reason that I am not against patents themselves, but against those patent bullies who find new revenue sources in the courtroom.)
"If you don't agree with the law, fix it." Explore the ways that trademark law can be fixed, and contact your local government official.
There are a lot of comments that are pointing out the semantic differences between 802.11b and Bluetooth. Ethernet vs Serial, or Different Uses, or Bluetooth Networking makes me sick.
My question, why split hairs? The point of both is to get two or more devices to talk by radio. The point of both is to be able to exchange data in that conversation. The point of both is to make devices interoperable.
The wifi or 802.11b approach is the extension of the network: give it an address and a standard suite of protocols, and the software support will explode. Why can't my cellphone have an IPv6 address? Why can't my mouse have an IPv6 address? Why can't my digicam or webcam or weather station or Palm XII or stereo have IPv6 addresses on my wireless home network?
Make the distinction of 'heavy' nodes and 'light' nodes go away. Sure, current 802.11b is power-hungry, but I expect there's ways of making "short haul" 802.11b work in the two meter desktop range where Bluetooth is supposed to win.
Maybe I'm missing the point. Educate me. Why shouldn't teeny handheld devices speak the same protocols that the desktop and servers speak? Why should we make yet another 'dumb device' protocol/transport like RS232, USB and Firewire? The 'dumb devices' seem to be evaporating.
Personally, I'd hope that as our electronics D/A converters get more accurate, we'd shift to more colorspace resolution. 48bpp (16bppR, 16bppG, 16bppB) is the next logical step, along with a 16bpp alpha channel, to give a natural 64bpp step.
While it's true that the human eye's sensitivity is right around 200 levels of gray, unable to see finer distinctions, a human can very easily see the mach banding in ramps of other more subtle hues in the 24bpp color resolution space.
I've heard Hollywood typically uses 48bpp for the special effects graphics, and there's some 16bpc (bit per channel) features in GIMP and Photoshop, but I don't know much more about how we're advancing for hardware support there. I just want better colors!
That would be the inteligent(sic) thing to ask yourself.
The writing on this thing alone sounds like someone who has spent way too much time on DALnet or AIM. While the 'suits' may make decisions this dumb, they probably use better spelling and grammar.
Before people ask, "why are the US President's bodyguards involved here?"
The Secret Service are a branch of the US Department of the Treasury.
A Secret Service FAQ: The Secret Service has primary jurisdiction to investigate threats against Secret Service protectees; counterfeiting of U.S. currency or other U.S. Government obligations; forgery or theft of U.S. Treasury checks, bonds or other securities; credit card fraud; telecommunications fraud; computer fraud; identify fraud; and certain other crimes affecting federally insured financial institutions.
How much validation is done on these claims of great exploits?
"9:15am Cracked a Brinks truck using my PalmOS hackmaster app called 'cash'."
"9:45am Almost tripped the goons at Fort Knox, but hid in the bushes an extra five minutes. An hour later, a five-nines bullion bar in my backpack, and off for new challenges."
Might this be just a tad bit embellished for the reporter's sake?
Every unique domain name found would get crawled for free. You paid for a domain name, you must care about your content.
Every geocities-style cheap personal page would require a small fee to get crawled. Too much schlock; scan only the stuff people care about. You don't wanna pay your own fee? Ask a visitor to pay the fee. PayPal or something newer/better should do the trick.
Every dynamic page like slashdot, everything2, or real estate listings, would have to have a more expensive agreement in place to get anything indexed. The buck stops at cgi. Waste no time on something that will probably be gone tomorrow.
Commit on the resources it will take to prune and groom the stale dead stuff out of the index, regularly. Dead links are bad business.
It started with Berkeley Systems games (or even earlier perhaps) in 1997 or so. ACROphobia and You Don't Know Jack Online had between-round interstitial advertising. And people chatted about the goofy ads they saw in the chat space, during the next round.
Today's iWON.com does this by requiring a gratiuitous banner ad click-through to 'collect' your tokens. Today's Uproar! site does interstitials between every round of that Family Feud style game. A few seconds of ads, and back to the game. It's accepted.
This is just another example of a press release suggesting that they're "reinventing the web" whether it's true or not, just to get more attention. And slashdot bit the bait.
[body bgcolor="..."] is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead.
As long as websites have matted images at all, the world of 'content' and 'presentation' are inextricably mixed. PNG support is uneven and broken, and few people even know about it. It is within a creator's prerogative to make an image that assumes a certain background color. CSS is an optional component of the system.
When images depend on background, a [body bgcolor] is not too much to ask, and is a lot simpler than setting up a CSS clause or override.
We have to face it, there is just no one "right" way to make a web page. You can't just say 'bgcolor is deprecated' and expect every tool that's out there to break the old traditions and bow to the holy new standards.
"Be strict in what one produces, but liberal in what one accepts."
... pretty soon you're talking real space. --paraphrased
Remember the unit discrepancy; hard drive "gigs" are measured in "billion bytes" formatted capacity, not the usual powers-of-two "gigs" that we talk about in memory or bus speeds. Lastly, the effective "baud" vs the actual data that gets through. Hard to do the math after so many definitions of "bits."
If you took '10 gigs' and '8 gigs' as the numbers on the outside of the hard drive packaging, you have 18 BB (billion bytes), or 144 Bb (billion bits) of actual stuff you could serve. (144 Gb is actually 144*1024^3, or 154,618,822,656 bits.)
The effective baud is harder; it depends on the protocols and the transport. RS232 has 'stop bits' and such; this makes it about 10 bits of time per effective byte transferred. Ethernet has less per byte, but big packets get wrapped in smaller datagrams with sequencing data. Tunneling takes more data wrapping, and so on.
With 128bpp, they may be talking about different buffers.
The high-end SGI workstations in '93 had an effective 140bpp video memory. (I thought I recalled 142, but this is from my hazy recollections.)
8+8+8bpp RGB front buffer.
8+8+8bpp RGB back buffer.
32bpp Z front buffer.
32bpp Z back buffer.
24bpp Windowing buffer.
4 bpp (rle compressed) per-pixel video mode selector.
I'd like to see more of that (plus today's dedicated memory for texture, vertex, transform, lightmaps, etc.)
As for color bit depth, 8bps (RGB 24bpp) is the most you'll see on most CRTs. You won't see 32bpp onscreen, usually the other 8 bits are just dword alignment for speed or an alpha channel for video source weaving.
However, the human eye is quite capable of seeing more colors in other situations; Hollywood typically does 16bps (RGB 48bpp) on their special effects, because they don't like to see 1"x1" jaggies or dithering on the 30' screen.
In high school (over 10 years ago - eeek!) me and a friend would set up an Apple IIe... with a Mandelbrot program written in BASIC..., we would let it run until our class..., where it would complete by the end of class, and save to floppy.
Wow, and at the same time (1990), I was using an Ardent Titan supercomputer, and made a realtime flythrough program. It could generate a 512x512 plot in 1/30th sec, and wherever your mouse was centered, it would zoom in just a little closer for the next frame. Psychedelic.
It is not logic[al?] why the USPTO protects only proprietary software developer's interests and not open source code software developer's interests.
The USPTO has no such discrepancy in its function. They don't care who files for patents, but it's clearly an advantage to be organized if you want the USPTO to pay attention.
Open Source people are able to file for patents as well. There's nothing about patent law that says you must (1) keep your method proprietary [it's exposed anyway], or even (2) vigorously defend your patent against every infringer [unlike trademarks]. File for the patent, even on an obvious thing, and then just sit on it. That keeps anyone else from filing the same stupid patent.
Microsoft holds thousands of patents. They don't use them to attack infringers. They use them as a defensive counter-attack only, when some other company does attack them on some other patent. (Find a headline that refutes this, I haven't found any.) Many other ethical companies do the same thing. Hold patents as a defensive posture.
There's no reason that Open Source writers cannot do that, or cannot post their concepts to communal patent groups or communal "prior art" databases like these. In fact, they may do one or both, and everyone benefits.
Unless it's very easily searchable, the USPTO cannot and will not keep abreast of the many "prior art" examples on its own. The task is just too large. It is up to people to organize, either by spending the pro-active effort required to review the USPTO's patents, or passively by offering a central searchable database for the USPTO to query. Both now are possible, whereas this was not true a year ago.
Hm, I thought one of the big tenets of Open Source was "expose the information so I can make an informed decision myself."
That's the same principle that gives us peer reviews, shallow bugs, security auditing, and frank discussion on how to improve things.
To say that the USPTO should keep the patents sealed is to return to the world of "users don't need to have access to the source code."
The USPTO has apparently promised to include a scan of such databases when it's aware of them. It's a two-way street and a mutual responsibility to avoid infringement. Just because Open Source projects are un/underfunded, doesn't mean they can scoff at their responsibilities to avoid infringements.
when the AOL people go overboard on censoring home pages. I don't expect them to be able to balance the issues of free speech, protected speech
I don't expect AOL, a corporation, to have to worry about 'free speech' or 'protected speech.'
[stock rant on subject]
The freedom of speech, guaranteed by the US Constitution's First Amendment, just ensures that the government will not consider any personal expression to be against the law.
That's it. No more.
You can't say just anything you like; forms of speech including libel, slander, inciting panic, insider trading, and matters risking national security are still illegal, as they infringe on other peoples' rights.
You aren't immune to censure by other parties, either. The government may not hold your speech to be illegal, but your private-sector employer may have the right to curtail your expression further, depending on the agreements you sign with that employer. The government may allow your speech, but your Internet Service Provider may have a completely different set of rules about content.
The Amendment is only two or three lines long, written in plain English, and yet it is the most misunderstood part of American Law.
A press release on www.uspto.gov indicates that the USPTO now exposes patent applications before they finish the grant. This makes it possible for third parties to challenge the grants as obvious or covered by prior art.
This was one of my "stock rant" solutions. Since the USPTO is a source of revenue for Congress, it has incentive to grant patents for a fee, and it has incentive to minimize the work it does to consider or invalidate applications.
"But all it takes to re-install Red Hat is 30 minutes. How do you come up with US$2000 damage?"
More typically, a company takes out insurance against such "disasters." When the company is attacked, they have to make a claim to the insurance company. They're knee-jerk worst-case numbers. It is often these numbers that are quoted to media.
Computers cannot be offended: it's not the censorware computer
program that is doing the filtering of offensive material.
If it's not the censorware, it's the proponents of the censorware,
that chooses what to hide from you. What political slant or prejudices
are you entrusting with the filter?
Government-mandated filtering via a commercial product means a
private company becomes a government bureacracy: think of the complexity
of ensuring several million, if not billions, of websites are blocked or
allowed according to government-mandated standards.
If a government sets the standards for what to filter, then the
government opens itself for lawsuits. Millions of lawsuits where
website creators feels they are being censored unfairly.
If the government requires censorship before they distribute funds, that's government sponsored censorship. That, by itself, is against your argument and against the First Amendment.
If your content is 'hello', and you encode that as 08, 05, 12, 12, 15, or 0805121215, then you can make it a number between 0 and 1 by simply prepending a decimal point: 0.08051212150000000...
Slashdot Mirror
Corley served as a consultant for Hackers ... if someone like Corley's involved, it's gotta be quality
Do you know how many people serve as 'consultants' for a given movie production? Most have very little access to understand the movie as a whole, nevermind be given a script, nevermind have their consultations heeded. I'd take that factoid with a grain of salt, and not tilt my opinion so easily.
If you don't rigorously enforce/protect your trademarks every time there's a possible infringement, the trademarks themselves can and will be wiped out.
This is very different from patent law, where a patent may be left idle. The patent holder can selectively choose to defend, license or ignore those who are possibly infringing. (It is for this reason that I am not against patents themselves, but against those patent bullies who find new revenue sources in the courtroom.)
"If you don't agree with the law, fix it." Explore the ways that trademark law can be fixed, and contact your local government official.
There are a lot of comments that are pointing out the semantic differences between 802.11b and Bluetooth. Ethernet vs Serial, or Different Uses, or Bluetooth Networking makes me sick.
My question, why split hairs? The point of both is to get two or more devices to talk by radio. The point of both is to be able to exchange data in that conversation. The point of both is to make devices interoperable.
The wifi or 802.11b approach is the extension of the network: give it an address and a standard suite of protocols, and the software support will explode. Why can't my cellphone have an IPv6 address? Why can't my mouse have an IPv6 address? Why can't my digicam or webcam or weather station or Palm XII or stereo have IPv6 addresses on my wireless home network?
Make the distinction of 'heavy' nodes and 'light' nodes go away. Sure, current 802.11b is power-hungry, but I expect there's ways of making "short haul" 802.11b work in the two meter desktop range where Bluetooth is supposed to win.
Maybe I'm missing the point. Educate me. Why shouldn't teeny handheld devices speak the same protocols that the desktop and servers speak? Why should we make yet another 'dumb device' protocol/transport like RS232, USB and Firewire? The 'dumb devices' seem to be evaporating.
Personally, I'd hope that as our electronics D/A converters get more accurate, we'd shift to more colorspace resolution. 48bpp (16bppR, 16bppG, 16bppB) is the next logical step, along with a 16bpp alpha channel, to give a natural 64bpp step.
While it's true that the human eye's sensitivity is right around 200 levels of gray, unable to see finer distinctions, a human can very easily see the mach banding in ramps of other more subtle hues in the 24bpp color resolution space.
I've heard Hollywood typically uses 48bpp for the special effects graphics, and there's some 16bpc (bit per channel) features in GIMP and Photoshop, but I don't know much more about how we're advancing for hardware support there. I just want better colors!
That would be the inteligent(sic) thing to ask yourself.
The writing on this thing alone sounds like someone who has spent way too much time on DALnet or AIM. While the 'suits' may make decisions this dumb, they probably use better spelling and grammar.
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/
Before people ask, "why are the US President's bodyguards involved here?"
The Secret Service are a branch of the US Department of the Treasury.
A Secret Service FAQ: The Secret Service has primary jurisdiction to investigate threats against Secret Service protectees; counterfeiting of U.S. currency or other U.S. Government obligations; forgery or theft of U.S. Treasury checks, bonds or other securities; credit card fraud; telecommunications fraud; computer fraud; identify fraud; and certain other crimes affecting federally insured financial institutions.
How much validation is done on these claims of great exploits?
"9:15am Cracked a Brinks truck using my PalmOS hackmaster app called 'cash'."
"9:45am Almost tripped the goons at Fort Knox, but hid in the bushes an extra five minutes. An hour later, a five-nines bullion bar in my backpack, and off for new challenges."
Might this be just a tad bit embellished for the reporter's sake?
If I were to set up a search engine:
Every unique domain name found would get crawled for free. You paid for a domain name, you must care about your content.
Every geocities-style cheap personal page would require a small fee to get crawled. Too much schlock; scan only the stuff people care about. You don't wanna pay your own fee? Ask a visitor to pay the fee. PayPal or something newer/better should do the trick.
Every dynamic page like slashdot, everything2, or real estate listings, would have to have a more expensive agreement in place to get anything indexed. The buck stops at cgi. Waste no time on something that will probably be gone tomorrow.
Commit on the resources it will take to prune and groom the stale dead stuff out of the index, regularly. Dead links are bad business.
It started with Berkeley Systems games (or even earlier perhaps) in 1997 or so. ACROphobia and You Don't Know Jack Online had between-round interstitial advertising. And people chatted about the goofy ads they saw in the chat space, during the next round.
Today's iWON.com does this by requiring a gratiuitous banner ad click-through to 'collect' your tokens. Today's Uproar! site does interstitials between every round of that Family Feud style game. A few seconds of ads, and back to the game. It's accepted.
This is just another example of a press release suggesting that they're "reinventing the web" whether it's true or not, just to get more attention. And slashdot bit the bait.
[body bgcolor="..."] is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead.
As long as websites have matted images at all, the world of 'content' and 'presentation' are inextricably mixed. PNG support is uneven and broken, and few people even know about it. It is within a creator's prerogative to make an image that assumes a certain background color. CSS is an optional component of the system.
When images depend on background, a [body bgcolor] is not too much to ask, and is a lot simpler than setting up a CSS clause or override.
We have to face it, there is just no one "right" way to make a web page. You can't just say 'bgcolor is deprecated' and expect every tool that's out there to break the old traditions and bow to the holy new standards.
"Be strict in what one produces, but liberal in what one accepts."
"Nobody will ever need more than 640KB RAM." -- Bill Gates.
Maybe he meant 'more than 640 atoms' or 'more than 640KB RSA'?
... pretty soon you're talking real space. --paraphrased
Remember the unit discrepancy; hard drive "gigs" are measured in "billion bytes" formatted capacity, not the usual powers-of-two "gigs" that we talk about in memory or bus speeds. Lastly, the effective "baud" vs the actual data that gets through. Hard to do the math after so many definitions of "bits."
If you took '10 gigs' and '8 gigs' as the numbers on the outside of the hard drive packaging, you have 18 BB (billion bytes), or 144 Bb (billion bits) of actual stuff you could serve. (144 Gb is actually 144*1024^3, or 154,618,822,656 bits.)
The effective baud is harder; it depends on the protocols and the transport. RS232 has 'stop bits' and such; this makes it about 10 bits of time per effective byte transferred. Ethernet has less per byte, but big packets get wrapped in smaller datagrams with sequencing data. Tunneling takes more data wrapping, and so on.
With 128bpp, they may be talking about different buffers.
The high-end SGI workstations in '93 had an effective 140bpp video memory. (I thought I recalled 142, but this is from my hazy recollections.)
8+8+8bpp RGB front buffer.
8+8+8bpp RGB back buffer.
32bpp Z front buffer.
32bpp Z back buffer.
24bpp Windowing buffer.
4 bpp (rle compressed) per-pixel video mode selector.
I'd like to see more of that (plus today's dedicated memory for texture, vertex, transform, lightmaps, etc.)
As for color bit depth, 8bps (RGB 24bpp) is the most you'll see on most CRTs. You won't see 32bpp onscreen, usually the other 8 bits are just dword alignment for speed or an alpha channel for video source weaving.
However, the human eye is quite capable of seeing more colors in other situations; Hollywood typically does 16bps (RGB 48bpp) on their special effects, because they don't like to see 1"x1" jaggies or dithering on the 30' screen.
Of course, it's not Linux, so some people may decide it's worthless. However, you may want to check out the Matsucom OnHand PC.
A friend of mine has developed a couple little applets for it, has worn it for a year now.
In high school (over 10 years ago - eeek!) me and a friend would set up an Apple IIe ... with a Mandelbrot program written in BASIC..., we would let it run until our class..., where it would complete by the end of class, and save to floppy.
Wow, and at the same time (1990), I was using an Ardent Titan supercomputer, and made a realtime flythrough program. It could generate a 512x512 plot in 1/30th sec, and wherever your mouse was centered, it would zoom in just a little closer for the next frame. Psychedelic.
Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum. :)
It is not logic[al?] why the USPTO protects only proprietary software developer's interests and not open source code software developer's interests.
The USPTO has no such discrepancy in its function. They don't care who files for patents, but it's clearly an advantage to be organized if you want the USPTO to pay attention.
Open Source people are able to file for patents as well. There's nothing about patent law that says you must (1) keep your method proprietary [it's exposed anyway], or even (2) vigorously defend your patent against every infringer [unlike trademarks]. File for the patent, even on an obvious thing, and then just sit on it. That keeps anyone else from filing the same stupid patent.
Microsoft holds thousands of patents. They don't use them to attack infringers. They use them as a defensive counter-attack only, when some other company does attack them on some other patent. (Find a headline that refutes this, I haven't found any.) Many other ethical companies do the same thing. Hold patents as a defensive posture.
There's no reason that Open Source writers cannot do that, or cannot post their concepts to communal patent groups or communal "prior art" databases like these. In fact, they may do one or both, and everyone benefits.
Unless it's very easily searchable, the USPTO cannot and will not keep abreast of the many "prior art" examples on its own. The task is just too large. It is up to people to organize, either by spending the pro-active effort required to review the USPTO's patents, or passively by offering a central searchable database for the USPTO to query. Both now are possible, whereas this was not true a year ago.
Hm, I thought one of the big tenets of Open Source was "expose the information so I can make an informed decision myself."
That's the same principle that gives us peer reviews, shallow bugs, security auditing, and frank discussion on how to improve things.
To say that the USPTO should keep the patents sealed is to return to the world of "users don't need to have access to the source code."
The USPTO has apparently promised to include a scan of such databases when it's aware of them. It's a two-way street and a mutual responsibility to avoid infringement. Just because Open Source projects are un/underfunded, doesn't mean they can scoff at their responsibilities to avoid infringements.
when the AOL people go overboard on censoring home pages. I don't expect them to be able to balance the issues of free speech, protected speech
I don't expect AOL, a corporation, to have to worry about 'free speech' or 'protected speech.'
[stock rant on subject]
- The freedom of speech, guaranteed by the US Constitution's First Amendment, just ensures that the government will not consider any personal expression to be against the law.
[end of stock rant on the subject]That's it. No more.
You can't say just anything you like; forms of speech including libel, slander, inciting panic, insider trading, and matters risking national security are still illegal, as they infringe on other peoples' rights.
You aren't immune to censure by other parties, either. The government may not hold your speech to be illegal, but your private-sector employer may have the right to curtail your expression further, depending on the agreements you sign with that employer. The government may allow your speech, but your Internet Service Provider may have a completely different set of rules about content.
The Amendment is only two or three lines long, written in plain English, and yet it is the most misunderstood part of American Law.
A press release on www.uspto.gov indicates that the USPTO now exposes patent applications before they finish the grant. This makes it possible for third parties to challenge the grants as obvious or covered by prior art.
This was one of my "stock rant" solutions. Since the USPTO is a source of revenue for Congress, it has incentive to grant patents for a fee, and it has incentive to minimize the work it does to consider or invalidate applications.
"But all it takes to re-install Red Hat is 30 minutes. How do you come up with US$2000 damage?"
More typically, a company takes out insurance against such "disasters." When the company is attacked, they have to make a claim to the insurance company. They're knee-jerk worst-case numbers. It is often these numbers that are quoted to media.
The E-Rate plan is legislation. The filtering stipulations on those funds are legislation. The filtering is an abridgement of speech.
Legislation, once signed, is Law. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." don't you get?
Computers cannot be offended: it's not the censorware computer program that is doing the filtering of offensive material.
If it's not the censorware, it's the proponents of the censorware, that chooses what to hide from you. What political slant or prejudices are you entrusting with the filter?
Government-mandated filtering via a commercial product means a private company becomes a government bureacracy: think of the complexity of ensuring several million, if not billions, of websites are blocked or allowed according to government-mandated standards.
If a government sets the standards for what to filter, then the government opens itself for lawsuits. Millions of lawsuits where website creators feels they are being censored unfairly.
If the government requires censorship before they distribute funds, that's government sponsored censorship. That, by itself, is against your argument and against the First Amendment.
I hope this sort of question makes it to the "cut list" for this interview!
If your content is 'hello', and you encode that as 08, 05, 12, 12, 15, or 0805121215, then you can make it a number between 0 and 1 by simply prepending a decimal point: 0.08051212150000000...