You're thinking inside the box. By "fixing" I mean removing the ability to send a message from one machine to another without authenticating the source. There's absolutely no security in SMTP and POP. That's what allows spam to be sent with your return address, or a nonexistent return address. Email was developed in the days where the Internet was the domain of the scientific, educational and government communities, without regard to security, and we're still using the same system.
It might be as simple as a monitor on everyone's computer saying "your machine just sent 1.2 million email messages". Maybe even an ISP level kill switch for each subscriber.
As a kid, I saw an episode of the Jetsons which had a shot of building construction. A large, low profile square box was hoisted into the air and a fully formed building emerged from beneath at about four floors per second. The box must have been one of those printers - and I'm sure someone is going to claim prior art.
I'm killing my mods to yip in here - I was stationed in Korea (AFKN Seoul) for over a year (many years ago) and it was very clear the U.S. was there to keep the South Koreans from invading the North. The relationship didn't start that way, but the South was now heavy with U.S. supplied equipment, training and backing. The South was digging up more tunnels and shooting more people trying to sneak under the wire. As we braced for an imminent, long ranging battle with the North, the ROK Army troops I worked with were totally gung-ho to put an end to the North. We put the military dependents on alert that they may be rotating back to the States, but nothing happened.
The balance of threats have since shifted. In those days, the North promised the South total annihilation by sending 10 million crazed troops over the border if anything went down. Now, the North has a few thousand artillery pieces aimed at Seoul. Some of the shells may have nasty chemical or bio surprises in them.
I'd like to see the old "first to show the damned thing working" system come back. Ideas are one thing, but there's nothing like a working sample. No ambiguity if you can/can't show it, no pie-in-the-sky "inventions" that lay in wait in patent trolls' filing cabinets.
The people who have no resources to actually create their idea may be subject to someone else capitalizing on it, but I can see a robust VC or incubator lab market growing out of the need to show the device in action. Contracts would be between the idea person and the VC or lab and won't dirty up the patent system.
Felt it here in DC. I was in the can, intimately connected to the building so to speak. Felt every rattle and toss, about the same dynamics as riding the Metro for 20 secnods. On the 2nd floor of a 10 story building, corner of M and 17th N.W.
I look around just about every day (Washington DC Metro) and in the immediate radius I'll see three book readers of some sort, at least one iPad (there were three yesterday which is the most I've seen in one place), six to eight iPhones, two Blackberrys, two Android phones and fifteen to twenty people with white earbuds.
The iPad/Blackberry/Android phone people are playing games more than half the time. Any kids on the train will invariably have an iPod Touch if they have anything. I'll see one laptop every week or so.
The people with iPads stand and read, but you can tell it's more cumbersome than the iPhones (I read the morning news on my iPhone and don't feel the need for an iPad - maybe when version 3 comes out). The presence of iPads went way up when the iPad 2 came out.
I've only ever seen one Android tablet in the wild and the guy wasn't using it... more like brandishing it. That's unusual. When someone whips out a piece of tech like that, they intend to use it while they're just sitting there. Maybe the battery was dead.
I see a lot more iPads on the commuter trains than laptops. A lot more. They're usually people reviewing documents, some are typing on them (obviously creating something), some reading the morning news, more than half are standing up. The odd duck luzer with the laptop isn't getting anything done with his aircraft carrier sized HP concrete slab. He can't even open the screen far enough to see it. The average iPad user is probably thinking "fuck the IT department, this thing rocks". Actually, I've been told that to my face.
There's that "Press" word. As soon as the video gets uploaded as an iReport, it becomes "Press"... no? Those people are called "stringers" - mercenary reporters.
It's astonishing how the rich and powerful are apparently getting laws written to keep them so, and absolves them from paying a fair share of taxes, absolves them from their own laws plus forces the public to buy their wares (drug industry comes to mind).
I favor the classic old Patent Office scene - people sitting in a dank office in wooden chairs with their clap-trap inventions in their laps waiting nervously to get scrutinized.
That's not the law now. People apparently CAN patent very loose IDEAS and never need to bring it into reality. I think that's ludicrous, but that's the law for now. I say if you can't demonstrate it, there should be no patent, but working models have not been required since the 1890's.
And, yes, because of that, it's almost impossible to actually bring something to market because teams of assholes are blue-skying "inventions" to patent and put in a filing cabinet.
Here's the rub - if the classic Patent Office scene were a reality, Samsung and all the others would be in even bigger hot water with Apple. Every one of them would hand the invention scrutinizer yet another iPhone or iPad knockoff with a different logo on it. They probably wouldn't stand a chance. He'd tell them to get the hell out of his office. Apple actually DID IT in that form factor first, so I don't consider them patent trolls. It's actually necessary to protect themselves from an onslaught of pretenders... and that's exactly what they are.
There's a huge difference between your main point - people actually inventing something only to have a patent troll swoop down and claim the idea was stolen - and this, where a shipping product of another company was clearly not accidentally copied. Samsung makes components for the real iPad, so go figure.
It's good for the consumer, but the copy-cat behavior also discourages innovation - if everyone else waits for your hard work to be done and just copies your final product, that's bad. Why bother making something if you don't think you'll get your years of investment back?
How can anyone deploy a new idea if it's not their own?
You'll need to ask Samsung about that. They stole everything they could fair and square from a working model (not an "idea"), copied and polished it as far as Android and the plastic mold makers would customize them to look like shipping Apple products. Having the working retail model in your hands has got to be a clue that they can't do exactly THAT. The needed to do something DIFFERENT, because what they have in their hand has already been done. Shifting a button position or changing the color of an icon doesn't count as different.
I spent over a year in Korea, so I know the mindset. They copied EVERYTHING. I went to buy some shoes in Itaewon and they handed me a Sears catalog. Point to the shoes I want and they'll copy them right out of the catalog. Nice shoes, too. Bally loafers - and Bally was even spelled right. Want to buy music cheap (pre-internet), go downtown and get copies of albums for two bucks - jacket art and all. They made stereo equipment and cameras that looked exactly like my Sony and Nikon gear. Not one thought that they might be doing anything damaging. Go downtown and pick up a nice Rolodex watch or a SNOY VCR or a Nikkon camera. It's all there.
I work in television broadcast and the Korean TV station in Seoul (KBS) bought one broadcast video recorder from Ampex. Within a year, they had built 14 of them, all copied and machined to be exactly like the original. Parts were interchangeable. The Ampex rep was absolutely floored. You could close your eyes and work the thing, but open your eyes and not be able to read any of the labels. Was it wrong for KBS to copy and mass produce that many $100,000 video recorders? I thought it was enormously clever. Ampex went out of business.
Overall, no, it's not fair to be able to patent something without a working model which enables patent trolls. The PTO really needs to change. The real patent trolls, the one with the filing cabinets full of "ideas" need to go.
Betamax had a superior picture and much better sound. The biggest mistake was making the cassette shell hold only an hour of tape. The other mistake was making the transport very expensive to assemble. The head drum in Betamax needed careful alignment just like the U-Matic machine it was patterned after. JVC solved that problem by machining a self aligning drop-on head assembly for VHS which made them cheaper to make. Otherwise, VHS was a crudely inferior device.
...license fees which add no real value to the product...
It's a horrendous minefield we've created with the patent system and it does make it difficult to develop new ideas - but that doesn't mean you get to steal them. License fees add nothing to a product. Stolen technologies add a great deal to the product. The people who created the original technologies aren't typically in the donation game, especially with competitors who deploy new ideas that aren't their own.
1) Hacker sets up server with a big trap door 2) Hacker takes the machine he wants to win and drives the browser through the big trap door 3) Hacker willingly executes the instructions he set up in the big trap door 4) Hacker wins a new MacBook Pro
That doesn't sound like a random attack in the wild to me. Compare that to MS servers sitting in a room somewhere minding their own business with absolutely no human interaction. They get hacked if you just wait long enough.
"Click Here to See the Dancing Monkeys" is self inflicted "hacking".
Facts are a little shallow today. Look up the Dynabook idea from 1968, published by Xerox PARC as a research project in 1972. That's really the first concept tablet by Alan Kay(pro) who later became an Apple Fellow in 1984. Guess what he had a hand in there? The Apple Newton came out in 1993, as flawed as that was (if the Nokia N800 was a tablet, then so was the Newton).
The Microsoft/HP/Compaq tablet concepts showed up way after that in 2001. They were a joke relative to what we're seeing today - they were the concrete patio tile of portable computing. That form factor never took off as a must-have product with the general public but it did find uses in industrial applications. Ok, so it was just a laptop with a screen that swivels and a stylus to tap on it.
There was no thunderous stampede to make anything like tablets until the iPad.
Maybe Apple is tired of everyone riding their coattails. What...and everyone else thought of the form factor for these compelling phones and tablets first? Not one manufacturer has demonstrated an original thought beyond copying Apple with the exception of Microsoft. Sure, the knockoffs have some minutia as differentiators, but come up with something different if you can, knockoff manufacturers.
It did pretty well. The recording was from 1967 (Herbert von Karajan) and the pressing probably didn't use re-grind. The pressing itself was from about 1974 and was never played until about 1979. It was mostly played with a Dynavector MC pickup with 1/2 gram tracking force, silver Litz wire in the tone arm, Mission turntable and preamp, Yamaha FET power amp and Acoustat electrostatic speakers. That setup showed you everything wrong with your audio. You could play a record, play it again and hear the difference. If you didn't let vinyl "rest" between plays, there were distortions and deformities in the grooves that took a day to return to normal. I know... bullshit, right? I thought the same thing after hearing stories from the audiophile who owned all this stuff, then I heard it for myself. It's all voodoo. The more you did to your turntable setup, the more it drove you crazy because it sounded a little different each time. CDs put an end to that and I was able to test the differences when I got the same recording on a CD years later.
The 96kHz data rate referenced above is the clock rate of the finished data stream, not the audio sample rate or the upper frequency limit.
In terms of reproducing accurate waveforms, harmonics which extend well beyond what we can hear as pure tones play a very important role. A digital system like a CD may test as perfect in every way but there are subtleties which are selectively compromised to make it possible to create CDs. Recreating supersonic harmonic components is one of the compromises. Back when I was involved with making DVD-A disks, the differences between the 192kHz 24bit PCM stereo tracks from the master and the resultant 44.1kHz 16 bit tracks was astonishing. I don't think there's a measure for "clarity" or "accuracy", but those elements become clear once you've been able to A/B the two systems.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking inside the box. By "fixing" I mean removing the ability to send a message from one machine to another without authenticating the source. There's absolutely no security in SMTP and POP. That's what allows spam to be sent with your return address, or a nonexistent return address. Email was developed in the days where the Internet was the domain of the scientific, educational and government communities, without regard to security, and we're still using the same system.
It might be as simple as a monitor on everyone's computer saying "your machine just sent 1.2 million email messages". Maybe even an ISP level kill switch for each subscriber.
As a kid, I saw an episode of the Jetsons which had a shot of building construction. A large, low profile square box was hoisted into the air and a fully formed building emerged from beneath at about four floors per second. The box must have been one of those printers - and I'm sure someone is going to claim prior art.
Click here to unlock your account [notification.zip].
I know it's a crime and all, but should we feel sorry for people who get scammed because they're just that gullible? I know plenty of people who are.
And... when are we going to "fix" the email system to prevent this? It's the same system that was designed when there were 1,000 computers on ARPANET.
...and furthermore... it's funny how the Flash Fanatics ignore that Flash itself is proprietary. Hypocrisy.
I'm killing my mods to yip in here - I was stationed in Korea (AFKN Seoul) for over a year (many years ago) and it was very clear the U.S. was there to keep the South Koreans from invading the North. The relationship didn't start that way, but the South was now heavy with U.S. supplied equipment, training and backing. The South was digging up more tunnels and shooting more people trying to sneak under the wire. As we braced for an imminent, long ranging battle with the North, the ROK Army troops I worked with were totally gung-ho to put an end to the North. We put the military dependents on alert that they may be rotating back to the States, but nothing happened.
The balance of threats have since shifted. In those days, the North promised the South total annihilation by sending 10 million crazed troops over the border if anything went down. Now, the North has a few thousand artillery pieces aimed at Seoul. Some of the shells may have nasty chemical or bio surprises in them.
I'll see you in court!
Reseat the RAM.
I'd like to see the old "first to show the damned thing working" system come back. Ideas are one thing, but there's nothing like a working sample. No ambiguity if you can/can't show it, no pie-in-the-sky "inventions" that lay in wait in patent trolls' filing cabinets.
The people who have no resources to actually create their idea may be subject to someone else capitalizing on it, but I can see a robust VC or incubator lab market growing out of the need to show the device in action. Contracts would be between the idea person and the VC or lab and won't dirty up the patent system.
This is the funniest goddam thing I've ever read!
Felt it here in DC. I was in the can, intimately connected to the building so to speak. Felt every rattle and toss, about the same dynamics as riding the Metro for 20 secnods. On the 2nd floor of a 10 story building, corner of M and 17th N.W.
I look around just about every day (Washington DC Metro) and in the immediate radius I'll see three book readers of some sort, at least one iPad (there were three yesterday which is the most I've seen in one place), six to eight iPhones, two Blackberrys, two Android phones and fifteen to twenty people with white earbuds.
The iPad/Blackberry/Android phone people are playing games more than half the time. Any kids on the train will invariably have an iPod Touch if they have anything. I'll see one laptop every week or so.
The people with iPads stand and read, but you can tell it's more cumbersome than the iPhones (I read the morning news on my iPhone and don't feel the need for an iPad - maybe when version 3 comes out). The presence of iPads went way up when the iPad 2 came out.
I've only ever seen one Android tablet in the wild and the guy wasn't using it... more like brandishing it. That's unusual. When someone whips out a piece of tech like that, they intend to use it while they're just sitting there. Maybe the battery was dead.
I see a lot more iPads on the commuter trains than laptops. A lot more. They're usually people reviewing documents, some are typing on them (obviously creating something), some reading the morning news, more than half are standing up. The odd duck luzer with the laptop isn't getting anything done with his aircraft carrier sized HP concrete slab. He can't even open the screen far enough to see it. The average iPad user is probably thinking "fuck the IT department, this thing rocks". Actually, I've been told that to my face.
There's that "Press" word. As soon as the video gets uploaded as an iReport, it becomes "Press"... no? Those people are called "stringers" - mercenary reporters.
It's astonishing how the rich and powerful are apparently getting laws written to keep them so, and absolves them from paying a fair share of taxes, absolves them from their own laws plus forces the public to buy their wares (drug industry comes to mind).
I favor the classic old Patent Office scene - people sitting in a dank office in wooden chairs with their clap-trap inventions in their laps waiting nervously to get scrutinized.
That's not the law now. People apparently CAN patent very loose IDEAS and never need to bring it into reality. I think that's ludicrous, but that's the law for now. I say if you can't demonstrate it, there should be no patent, but working models have not been required since the 1890's.
And, yes, because of that, it's almost impossible to actually bring something to market because teams of assholes are blue-skying "inventions" to patent and put in a filing cabinet.
Here's the rub - if the classic Patent Office scene were a reality, Samsung and all the others would be in even bigger hot water with Apple. Every one of them would hand the invention scrutinizer yet another iPhone or iPad knockoff with a different logo on it. They probably wouldn't stand a chance. He'd tell them to get the hell out of his office. Apple actually DID IT in that form factor first, so I don't consider them patent trolls. It's actually necessary to protect themselves from an onslaught of pretenders... and that's exactly what they are.
There's a huge difference between your main point - people actually inventing something only to have a patent troll swoop down and claim the idea was stolen - and this, where a shipping product of another company was clearly not accidentally copied. Samsung makes components for the real iPad, so go figure.
It's good for the consumer, but the copy-cat behavior also discourages innovation - if everyone else waits for your hard work to be done and just copies your final product, that's bad. Why bother making something if you don't think you'll get your years of investment back?
How can anyone deploy a new idea if it's not their own?
You'll need to ask Samsung about that. They stole everything they could fair and square from a working model (not an "idea"), copied and polished it as far as Android and the plastic mold makers would customize them to look like shipping Apple products. Having the working retail model in your hands has got to be a clue that they can't do exactly THAT. The needed to do something DIFFERENT, because what they have in their hand has already been done. Shifting a button position or changing the color of an icon doesn't count as different.
I spent over a year in Korea, so I know the mindset. They copied EVERYTHING. I went to buy some shoes in Itaewon and they handed me a Sears catalog. Point to the shoes I want and they'll copy them right out of the catalog. Nice shoes, too. Bally loafers - and Bally was even spelled right. Want to buy music cheap (pre-internet), go downtown and get copies of albums for two bucks - jacket art and all. They made stereo equipment and cameras that looked exactly like my Sony and Nikon gear. Not one thought that they might be doing anything damaging. Go downtown and pick up a nice Rolodex watch or a SNOY VCR or a Nikkon camera. It's all there.
I work in television broadcast and the Korean TV station in Seoul (KBS) bought one broadcast video recorder from Ampex. Within a year, they had built 14 of them, all copied and machined to be exactly like the original. Parts were interchangeable. The Ampex rep was absolutely floored. You could close your eyes and work the thing, but open your eyes and not be able to read any of the labels. Was it wrong for KBS to copy and mass produce that many $100,000 video recorders? I thought it was enormously clever. Ampex went out of business.
Overall, no, it's not fair to be able to patent something without a working model which enables patent trolls. The PTO really needs to change. The real patent trolls, the one with the filing cabinets full of "ideas" need to go.
Nothing an air strike or two won't fix.
Betamax had a superior picture and much better sound. The biggest mistake was making the cassette shell hold only an hour of tape. The other mistake was making the transport very expensive to assemble. The head drum in Betamax needed careful alignment just like the U-Matic machine it was patterned after. JVC solved that problem by machining a self aligning drop-on head assembly for VHS which made them cheaper to make. Otherwise, VHS was a crudely inferior device.
...license fees which add no real value to the product...
It's a horrendous minefield we've created with the patent system and it does make it difficult to develop new ideas - but that doesn't mean you get to steal them. License fees add nothing to a product. Stolen technologies add a great deal to the product. The people who created the original technologies aren't typically in the donation game, especially with competitors who deploy new ideas that aren't their own.
Hmmm...
1) Hacker sets up server with a big trap door
2) Hacker takes the machine he wants to win and drives the browser through the big trap door
3) Hacker willingly executes the instructions he set up in the big trap door
4) Hacker wins a new MacBook Pro
That doesn't sound like a random attack in the wild to me. Compare that to MS servers sitting in a room somewhere minding their own business with absolutely no human interaction. They get hacked if you just wait long enough.
"Click Here to See the Dancing Monkeys" is self inflicted "hacking".
Facts are a little shallow today. Look up the Dynabook idea from 1968, published by Xerox PARC as a research project in 1972. That's really the first concept tablet by Alan Kay(pro) who later became an Apple Fellow in 1984. Guess what he had a hand in there? The Apple Newton came out in 1993, as flawed as that was (if the Nokia N800 was a tablet, then so was the Newton).
The Microsoft/HP/Compaq tablet concepts showed up way after that in 2001. They were a joke relative to what we're seeing today - they were the concrete patio tile of portable computing. That form factor never took off as a must-have product with the general public but it did find uses in industrial applications. Ok, so it was just a laptop with a screen that swivels and a stylus to tap on it.
There was no thunderous stampede to make anything like tablets until the iPad.
Maybe Apple is tired of everyone riding their coattails. What ...and everyone else thought of the form factor for these compelling phones and tablets first? Not one manufacturer has demonstrated an original thought beyond copying Apple with the exception of Microsoft. Sure, the knockoffs have some minutia as differentiators, but come up with something different if you can, knockoff manufacturers.
It'll work great until Epson figures out how to keep them from refilling the ink cartridges...
Kegogi tastes like a wet dog smells, apparently.
Someone already beat you to it. What was I thinking?
Yes.... using kbps would have been clearer.
It did pretty well. The recording was from 1967 (Herbert von Karajan) and the pressing probably didn't use re-grind. The pressing itself was from about 1974 and was never played until about 1979. It was mostly played with a Dynavector MC pickup with 1/2 gram tracking force, silver Litz wire in the tone arm, Mission turntable and preamp, Yamaha FET power amp and Acoustat electrostatic speakers. That setup showed you everything wrong with your audio. You could play a record, play it again and hear the difference. If you didn't let vinyl "rest" between plays, there were distortions and deformities in the grooves that took a day to return to normal. I know... bullshit, right? I thought the same thing after hearing stories from the audiophile who owned all this stuff, then I heard it for myself. It's all voodoo. The more you did to your turntable setup, the more it drove you crazy because it sounded a little different each time. CDs put an end to that and I was able to test the differences when I got the same recording on a CD years later.
The 96kHz data rate referenced above is the clock rate of the finished data stream, not the audio sample rate or the upper frequency limit.
In terms of reproducing accurate waveforms, harmonics which extend well beyond what we can hear as pure tones play a very important role. A digital system like a CD may test as perfect in every way but there are subtleties which are selectively compromised to make it possible to create CDs. Recreating supersonic harmonic components is one of the compromises. Back when I was involved with making DVD-A disks, the differences between the 192kHz 24bit PCM stereo tracks from the master and the resultant 44.1kHz 16 bit tracks was astonishing. I don't think there's a measure for "clarity" or "accuracy", but those elements become clear once you've been able to A/B the two systems.