But from the article's description, RazorBack2 does seem to be host to all sorts of unsavory content
According to TFA they didn't host any content savory or otherwise, they just indexed what was available elsewhere. Kind of like a search engine does. . .
It's the only way the little guy can win against those who would use their stuff w/o asking.
But what exactly was the "stuff" that is being used? There's a lot of posts implying that Microsoft stole his code. If this was the case we'd be looking at a copyright infrigment case, not patent infringment. Sounds to me like some very effective spinning of the facts has been going on here.
All that Microsoft has done is write some of their own code that achieves the same (very basic) thing - ie copying data between access and Excel. Doing this might have been an abuse of their monopoly if it killed the guy's business, but that in no way justifies the insane concept of sotware patents. We need more laws to control large Corporations and Monopolies, not laws that allow people remove our right to implement ideas.
Do you really believe one person should own the idea of copying data from a spreadsheet to a database?? That's an obvious idea and anyone in the world should be free to implement it.
For the record, all my liberal friends tell me constantly that Fox News is oh-so-biased and CNN is oh-so-great, without EVER citing a single example for either case.
If you make any effort to look examples aren't hard to find. Here's a couple
There is also of course the documentary OutFoxed. It clearly has an agenda but it makes a pretty strong case with interviews with ex fox people.
The most frightening bit I remember from that was the survey of people's basic knowledge of current affairs. The results were split by the what the respondants cited as their main news source. I forget the precise figures, but huge percentages of fox viewers believed that WMD's had been found in Iraq and that Saddam was linked to 9/11.
The other easy source of examples of bias is Fox itself. I'm genuinely confused by all the posts questioning if fox news really is biased. I don't see much of fox, but when I do the bias just screams at you. How can you miss it? It's not subtle. They don't even try and pretend in any serious fashion.
Now think of yourself as Microsoft, publisher of the biggest word processor of them all. Are you going to let yourself be hamstrung by "standards" which force your users to *not* use the full capabilities of the format?
Sorry but how is this insightful? Microsoft's stated reason for not supporting an open document standard is very transparently not the actual reason.
The last time I checked it was entirely possible to read and write ascii text and Microsoft Works documents from within Word, neither of which allow you to embed Audio or Video (ok, I'm just guessing this is the case with Works. With ascii I'm pretty damm sure though).
Providing support for a format does not tie you to that format's limitations, it just means you can read and write it. If your users choose not to use that format all the features are still available to them.
Microsoft isn't going to support it for political reasons, not technical ones. They have a monopoly and a widely adopted open format would threaten that monopoly.
Given the odds, you can expect perhaps 10-20 cases of CFD in Europe in the next 50 years, unless the victims dies in a car accident beforehand, which is much more likely.
Since 1990 the number of deaths from definite or probable vCJD is 150.
This is for the UK only (not the whole of Europe), is a figure for deaths rather than just cases and for a period of much less than 50 years. The figure does include deaths that are not confirmed to be new variant CJD, but I assume this means they may be from a different CJD varient rather than something else totally unrelated. The number of definitely confirmed deaths is 107.
I'm not sure why they would demand the right to access encryption keys when they already appear to have the power through Section III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
let's not be obtuse - we know there are vulnerabilities, MSFT just doesn't want to fix them in a way that won't let them steal the underlying patents from the public and others.
?
If you can describe a mechanism by which fixing a bug in my code can result in me owning a patent I'd love to here about it.
if ( i = 0 )
apply magically process x and it becomes . ..
if ( i == 0 )
. ..and I now own the patent to creating documents by typing.
Software patents are pure evil, but they've got nothing to do with this.
Pull an old pentium box out of one of the skips at the university (in my day they were always ripe with 386s) and stick one of the million linux firewall distros on, or my personal favourite m0n0wall, which is FreeBSD based.
Your question is chillingly basic however. I'm a programmer rather than a sysadmin, and even I can select and set up a firewall without having to ask slashdot.
Perhaps you should request some training for yourself and the sysadmins in Liberal arts. Seriously, this would be a good first step to securing your network.
I have begun to think that most, if not all, free software applications ought to be written in Java or a reasonable facsimile. Ideally, a common language and runtime that all free software could target would be available that would allow immediate porting to take place.
Currently java would not be such a good choice for that due to the lack of a full free (as in freedom) implementation of the api.
I'm sorry, how does reproducing Unix, 40 year old technology, justify your claim that the software industry is innovative?
Interesting.
You completely fail to respond to any of the points I did make, then start arguing instead about a claim I didn't make. Well, you've convinced me. Clearly copyright is pure evil and we need more of these patents things.
You seem to completely confuse copyright and patent..
Um no, I am very clear on both thank you. Perhaps you'd like to clairfy waht I'm confused about?
The patent shouldn't be able to prevent amateur/small business from competing. The reason that this is possible is because the patent system has been broken. You shouldn't be able to patent something obvious, something non-unique, or something that isn't a mechanism. A formula/algorithm is just not a mechanism.
So we're both agreed that allowing software patents in Europe would be a very bad thing then?
Problems with copyright vs. patent are simple. Patents still expire in a period of time as to make the invention still useful to the public. Copyrights last for more than 100 years.
I still don't see how this causes any problems. As long as no patents are preventing me or soemone else from implemented the same functionality as a piece of software, I couldn't care less that I am not able to legally copy someone elses implementation of that function.
For films and novels, which are essentially pure art, it is important that they eventually they move into the public domain. Software (with the possible exception of games) is not pure art. It is functional. The implementation is unimportant and this is all that copyright protects. The ideas behind it on teh other hand are hugely important, and should not be owned by anyone.
A better question would be when was the last time I didn't? Because our industry is so unprofessional that the idea that someone would actually put a warrentee on a piece of software or seriously sell it with the claim that it was bug free (like they do cars and planes) so yes, just about every piece of software I use was written by an amateur, or someone who acted like one. I don't consider this a good thing, why do you?
The answer to that question would probably be "today" unless you've somehow managed to avoid all of microsoft's products in your workplace.
You obviously have an issue with how things are done in the software industry and you clearly don't work in or purchase safety critical systems. The professionalism you're banging on about does exist in the software industry, just not where it isn't cost effective. This is how capitalism works, like it or not.
You also equate small business and amateurs with lack of quality. This link doesn't neccesarily exist at all. Plenty of very high quality software has been produced this way (see the various free flavours of unix).
How exactly does locking developers out of the market with software patents achieve your apparent goal of bug free software? If we allow legal monopolies where is the incentive for those monopolies to produce good software?
Personally, I'd like to see the copyright system not be applied to software
Why???? What problems do you see caused by the copyrighting of code?
I can see a lot of advantages - it's a system to ensure I receive credit for my creative works, and enables me to exploit them for financial gain if I see fit. If I create them for reasons other than financial gain it allows me to do that and still exert control over their use in ways I see fit - eg the GPL which is built on top of copyright.
As for your assertion that there's nothing wrong with software patents and we just all need to "grow up" and hire armies of lawyers to challenge the broad ones, this is essentially one strand of the argument that is made against software patents. The only people that can compete in that market are large corporations with lots of lawyers, eveyone else is locked out.
This does not mean the amature programmer has to suffer. Free and Open Source Software can continue to produce new and innovative things, just like amatures do in automobile, aerospace, radio and other industries already covered by international patents
When was the last time you bought a car or jumbo jet bult by an amateur or small business?
When was the last time you used a piece of software written by an amateur or small business?
Do you get it yet?
Unlike most other industries, in sofware amateurs can realistically compete with the corporations. Software patents provide the mechansim for the corporations to prevent that.
Why did MacArthur give Japan only three days to respond after Hiroshima? Why not at least a week?
The explaination I've heard floating around is that they wanted to do a "live" test of their plutonium bomb (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a Uranium one).
A bit of random googling turned this up
http://www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrentev en ts/warpeacediplomacyorforeignaid/ethicswar.shtml Belatedly it has been discovered that seven months before it [the atomic bomb] was dropped, in January 1945, President Roosevelt received via General Mac Arthur's headquarters an offer by the Japanese Government to surrender on terms virtually identical to those accepted by the United States after the dropping of the bomb: In July 1945, as we know, Roosevelt's successor, President Truman, discussed with Stalin at Bebelsburg the Japanese offer to surrender.
I'm no historian so I've no idea what eveidence there is to support this, but if it's true then I don't see how anyone can view Nagasaki as anything but a war crime.
The active agent is attached to a particle which is more likely to be absorbed by a cancerous cell than a non-cancerous one. So it's probably best described as slightly targetted. Plenty of healthy cells are also going to absorb the drug. If that wasn't the case someone would be getting very very rich off this soon as they'd have just discovered the holy magic cancer bullet.
This isn't the first targetted drug delivery system. They've been around for ages - I vaguely remeber studying this stuff at university in the 90s and I don't think it was particularly new then.
You'd normally expect the cancerous cells to pick up more of a given drug than normal cells anyway as they're growing faster. TFA says they're getting 10 times more adsorption into cancerous cells than healthy ones though which sounds pretty impressive.
I was really excited about this, until I read that it's a swaploit
So you got excited over the "Sony PSP 1.50" part of the title, took a short rest then got all down after you'd chugged through the last couple of words?
It's kind of worrying though that it's considered normal to have to resort to some sort of hack to run the code you choose on a programmable device that you own.
Anyone ever wonder what the world would be like if we'd all grown up with BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Amigas etc that only ran code someone else had approved?
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I've not tried Dvorak so I can't comment one way or another on whether it's any good or not, but I don't understand everyones obessions with WPM.
If you're cutting code then the bottleneck isn't how fast you can type, it's how fast you can think. If it's not then you're either
a) A genius b) A really poor typist c) Producing really bad code
I don't think this is limited to coders either. Twenty odd years ago most people sat at keyboard were copy or audio typists and WPM really mattered. These days most people are doing something beyound just raw typing. As long as they're not thumping away with two fingers speed is of little importance. If my typing speed is limiting me I need a code generator for the boiler plate code I must be typing, not a new keyboard.
All the other benefits that people are putting forward for Dvorak sound great however, but I don't think I'll be making the switch unless my wrists start hurting.
Guess who got re-shuffled straight back into the Home Secretary seat after the general election?
None other than David "That's not my baby" Blunkett, of course.
If you're going to rant about current affairs at least, you know, watch the news or something.
And there was me thinking he was work and pensions secretary.
If you're going to try and correct people's rants on current affairs don't you think you should at least, you know, watch the news or something?
Wonder how long you've got before it topples./glad I'm european.
Thinks aren't exactly all rosey across Europe either.
Here in the UK we've only recently got rid of our raving mad home secretery David blunket a big fan of a two tier legal system.
In the one tier we had the rule of law, and in the other tier the rule of David - lock em up with no charge or access to evidence. The general idea seemed to be that the Home Secretary would get to pick which tier you went down presumably based on whether he was having a bad day or not and if anyone had shouted terrorist at you recently.
He's gone now of course. And why did we get rid of him? Beacuse this was clearly a violation of basic human rights? No, because he rushed through a visa application for his Nanny's lover (yes really).
And who did we replace him with? Charles Clarke, more of the same but smoother. We're looking forward to those ID cards we're all apparently desperate for.
Ok, we do everything on a smaller scale (hey we're British) but we're doing the lot of the same things as the US.
Slashdot Mirror
But from the article's description, RazorBack2 does seem to be host to all sorts of unsavory content
According to TFA they didn't host any content savory or otherwise, they just indexed what was available elsewhere. Kind of like a search engine does. . .
----
http://www.jarfinder.com/
I have resorted to pigeons. This post was sent via a pigeon which flew to India where my outsourced-poster hit the submit button
Forget pigeons, harness the awesome bandwith of snails with SNAP.
http://www.notes.co.il/benbasat/10991.asp/
-----
http://www.jarfinder.com/
According to TFA they'll be shipping "later this year".
This seems somewhat unlikely, but would be cool if it was true. High speed USB pendrive anyone?
Little short on technical detail though. How many read-write cycles can these things do?
--
http://www.jarfinder.com/
It's the only way the little guy can win against those who would use their stuff w/o asking.
But what exactly was the "stuff" that is being used? There's a lot of posts implying that Microsoft stole his code. If this was the case we'd be looking at a copyright infrigment case, not patent infringment. Sounds to me like some very effective spinning of the facts has been going on here.
All that Microsoft has done is write some of their own code that achieves the same (very basic) thing - ie copying data between access and Excel. Doing this might have been an abuse of their monopoly if it killed the guy's business, but that in no way justifies the insane concept of sotware patents. We need more laws to control large Corporations and Monopolies, not laws that allow people remove our right to implement ideas.
Do you really believe one person should own the idea of copying data from a spreadsheet to a database?? That's an obvious idea and anyone in the world should be free to implement it.
--
http://www.jarfinder.com/
For the record, all my liberal friends tell me constantly that Fox News is oh-so-biased and CNN is oh-so-great, without EVER citing a single example for either case.
If you make any effort to look examples aren't hard to find. Here's a couple
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1072/
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1158/
And wikipedia has a summary of some of the same studies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOX_News/
There is also of course the documentary OutFoxed. It clearly has an agenda but it makes a pretty strong case with interviews with ex fox people.
The most frightening bit I remember from that was the survey of people's basic knowledge of current affairs. The results were split by the what the respondants cited as their main news source. I forget the precise figures, but huge percentages of fox viewers believed that WMD's had been found in Iraq and that Saddam was linked to 9/11.
The other easy source of examples of bias is Fox itself. I'm genuinely confused by all the posts questioning if fox news really is biased. I don't see much of fox, but when I do the bias just screams at you. How can you miss it? It's not subtle. They don't even try and pretend in any serious fashion.
How are they going to earn that back from a "free" VoIP service?
e _spam/
According to The Register one of their ideas is to sell skype customer's details on to direct marketers so they can send them voice spam.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/ebay_skyp
That should be pretty popular.
Ok, so I read the article and it's fairly light. The question I have is how do we get the hydrogen back out?
According to the diagram on their site, it uses some unamed catalyst.
Now think of yourself as Microsoft, publisher of the biggest word processor of them all. Are you going to let yourself be hamstrung by "standards" which force your users to *not* use the full capabilities of the format?
Sorry but how is this insightful? Microsoft's stated reason for not supporting an open document standard is very transparently not the actual reason.
The last time I checked it was entirely possible to read and write ascii text and Microsoft Works documents from within Word, neither of which allow you to embed Audio or Video (ok, I'm just guessing this is the case with Works. With ascii I'm pretty damm sure though).
Providing support for a format does not tie you to that format's limitations, it just means you can read and write it. If your users choose not to use that format all the features are still available to them.
Microsoft isn't going to support it for political reasons, not technical ones. They have a monopoly and a widely adopted open format would threaten that monopoly.
Given the odds, you can expect perhaps 10-20 cases of CFD in Europe in the next 50 years, unless the victims dies in a car accident beforehand, which is much more likely.
I hope this is true, but the figures from the CJD observation unit don't back it up. http://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/figures.htm
Since 1990 the number of deaths from definite or probable vCJD is 150.
This is for the UK only (not the whole of Europe), is a figure for deaths rather than just cases and for a period of much less than 50 years. The figure does include deaths that are not confirmed to be new variant CJD, but I assume this means they may be from a different CJD varient rather than something else totally unrelated. The number of definitely confirmed deaths is 107.
I'm not sure why they would demand the right to access encryption keys when they already appear to have the power through Section III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
n _regulation_powers_expire/
I think these powers expired earlier this year.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/26/encryptio
Doesn't this qualify as blasphemy?
Not when it's God talking.
?
If you can describe a mechanism by which fixing a bug in my code can result in me owning a patent I'd love to here about it.
Software patents are pure evil, but they've got nothing to do with this.
Pull an old pentium box out of one of the skips at the university (in my day they were always ripe with 386s) and stick one of the million linux firewall distros on, or my personal favourite m0n0wall, which is FreeBSD based.
http://m0n0.ch/wall/
Your question is chillingly basic however. I'm a programmer rather than a sysadmin, and even I can select and set up a firewall without having to ask slashdot.
Perhaps you should request some training for yourself and the sysadmins in Liberal arts. Seriously, this would be a good first step to securing your network.
I have begun to think that most, if not all, free software applications ought to be written in Java or a reasonable facsimile. Ideally, a common language and runtime that all free software could target would be available that would allow immediate porting to take place.
Currently java would not be such a good choice for that due to the lack of a full free (as in freedom) implementation of the api.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
A Java GUI app is also a big turn off for anyone with an older machine.
Personally I have begun to think that most, if not all, free software ought to be written in the language most appropriate for the job it's doing.
I'm sorry, how does reproducing Unix, 40 year old technology, justify your claim that the software industry is innovative?
Interesting.
You completely fail to respond to any of the points I did make, then start arguing instead about a claim I didn't make. Well, you've convinced me. Clearly copyright is pure evil and we need more of these patents things.
You seem to completely confuse copyright and patent..
Um no, I am very clear on both thank you. Perhaps you'd like to clairfy waht I'm confused about?
The patent shouldn't be able to prevent amateur/small business from competing. The reason that this is possible is because the patent system has been broken. You shouldn't be able to patent something obvious, something non-unique, or something that isn't a mechanism. A formula/algorithm is just not a mechanism.
So we're both agreed that allowing software patents in Europe would be a very bad thing then?
Problems with copyright vs. patent are simple. Patents still expire in a period of time as to make the invention still useful to the public. Copyrights last for more than 100 years.
I still don't see how this causes any problems. As long as no patents are preventing me or soemone else from implemented the same functionality as a piece of software, I couldn't care less that I am not able to legally copy someone elses implementation of that function.
For films and novels, which are essentially pure art, it is important that they eventually they move into the public domain. Software (with the possible exception of games) is not pure art. It is functional. The implementation is unimportant and this is all that copyright protects. The ideas behind it on teh other hand are hugely important, and should not be owned by anyone.
A better question would be when was the last time I didn't? Because our industry is so unprofessional that the idea that someone would actually put a warrentee on a piece of software or seriously sell it with the claim that it was bug free (like they do cars and planes) so yes, just about every piece of software I use was written by an amateur, or someone who acted like one. I don't consider this a good thing, why do you?
The answer to that question would probably be "today" unless you've somehow managed to avoid all of microsoft's products in your workplace.
You obviously have an issue with how things are done in the software industry and you clearly don't work in or purchase safety critical systems. The professionalism you're banging on about does exist in the software industry, just not where it isn't cost effective. This is how capitalism works, like it or not.
You also equate small business and amateurs with lack of quality. This link doesn't neccesarily exist at all. Plenty of very high quality software has been produced this way (see the various free flavours of unix).
How exactly does locking developers out of the market with software patents achieve your apparent goal of bug free software? If we allow legal monopolies where is the incentive for those monopolies to produce good software?
Personally, I'd like to see the copyright system not be applied to software
Why???? What problems do you see caused by the copyrighting of code?
I can see a lot of advantages - it's a system to ensure I receive credit for my creative works, and enables me to exploit them for financial gain if I see fit. If I create them for reasons other than financial gain it allows me to do that and still exert control over their use in ways I see fit - eg the GPL which is built on top of copyright.
As for your assertion that there's nothing wrong with software patents and we just all need to "grow up" and hire armies of lawyers to challenge the broad ones, this is essentially one strand of the argument that is made against software patents. The only people that can compete in that market are large corporations with lots of lawyers, eveyone else is locked out.
This does not mean the amature programmer has to suffer. Free and Open Source Software can continue to produce new and innovative things, just like amatures do in automobile, aerospace, radio and other industries already covered by international patents
When was the last time you bought a car or jumbo jet bult by an amateur or small business?
When was the last time you used a piece of software written by an amateur or small business?
Do you get it yet?
Unlike most other industries, in sofware amateurs can realistically compete with the corporations. Software patents provide the mechansim for the corporations to prevent that.
Why did MacArthur give Japan only three days to respond after Hiroshima? Why not at least a week?
v en ts/warpeacediplomacyorforeignaid/ethicswar.shtml
The explaination I've heard floating around is that they wanted to do a "live" test of their plutonium bomb (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a Uranium one).
A bit of random googling turned this up
http://www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrente
Belatedly it has been discovered that seven months before it [the atomic bomb] was dropped, in January 1945, President Roosevelt received via General Mac Arthur's headquarters an offer by the Japanese Government to surrender on terms virtually identical to those accepted by the United States after the dropping of the bomb: In July 1945, as we know, Roosevelt's successor, President Truman, discussed with Stalin at Bebelsburg the Japanese offer to surrender.
I'm no historian so I've no idea what eveidence there is to support this, but if it's true then I don't see how anyone can view Nagasaki as anything but a war crime.
The active agent is attached to a particle which is more likely to be absorbed by a cancerous cell than a non-cancerous one. So it's probably best described as slightly targetted. Plenty of healthy cells are also going to absorb the drug. If that wasn't the case someone would be getting very very rich off this soon as they'd have just discovered the holy magic cancer bullet.
This isn't the first targetted drug delivery system. They've been around for ages - I vaguely remeber studying this stuff at university in the 90s and I don't think it was particularly new then.
You'd normally expect the cancerous cells to pick up more of a given drug than normal cells anyway as they're growing faster. TFA says they're getting 10 times more adsorption into cancerous cells than healthy ones though which sounds pretty impressive.
I was really excited about this, until I read that it's a swaploit
So you got excited over the "Sony PSP 1.50" part of the title, took a short rest then got all down after you'd chugged through the last couple of words?
It's kind of worrying though that it's considered normal to have to resort to some sort of hack to run the code you choose on a programmable device that you own.
Anyone ever wonder what the world would be like if we'd all grown up with BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Amigas etc that only ran code someone else had approved?
Ok, I've not tried Dvorak so I can't comment one way or another on whether it's any good or not, but I don't understand everyones obessions with WPM.
If you're cutting code then the bottleneck isn't how fast you can type, it's how fast you can think. If it's not then you're either
a) A genius
b) A really poor typist
c) Producing really bad code
I don't think this is limited to coders either. Twenty odd years ago most people sat at keyboard were copy or audio typists and WPM really mattered. These days most people are doing something beyound just raw typing. As long as they're not thumping away with two fingers speed is of little importance. If my typing speed is limiting me I need a code generator for the boiler plate code I must be typing, not a new keyboard.
All the other benefits that people are putting forward for Dvorak sound great however, but I don't think I'll be making the switch unless my wrists start hurting.
Guess who got re-shuffled straight back into the Home Secretary seat after the general election? None other than David "That's not my baby" Blunkett, of course. If you're going to rant about current affairs at least, you know, watch the news or something.
And there was me thinking he was work and pensions secretary.
If you're going to try and correct people's rants on current affairs don't you think you should at least, you know, watch the news or something?
Wonder how long you've got before it topples. /glad I'm european.
Thinks aren't exactly all rosey across Europe either.
Here in the UK we've only recently got rid of our raving mad home secretery David blunket a big fan of a two tier legal system.
In the one tier we had the rule of law, and in the other tier the rule of David - lock em up with no charge or access to evidence. The general idea seemed to be that the Home Secretary would get to pick which tier you went down presumably based on whether he was having a bad day or not and if anyone had shouted terrorist at you recently.
He's gone now of course. And why did we get rid of him? Beacuse this was clearly a violation of basic human rights? No, because he rushed through a visa application for his Nanny's lover (yes really).
And who did we replace him with? Charles Clarke, more of the same but smoother. We're looking forward to those ID cards we're all apparently desperate for.
Ok, we do everything on a smaller scale (hey we're British) but we're doing the lot of the same things as the US.
At least we still have a free mainstream media however. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Imagine what would happen to a nation if most of its population got its news via fox . . .
What kind of developers, Windows or otherwise, can't learn how to write PHP or Qt/GTKmm based C++?
VB developers.