The specific innovation in this patent is that after the client "phones home", the server can request additional data. I didn't see that in a cursory scan of the linked IBM paper.
As usual, slashdot is making a patent sound broader than it is.
Why is it suddenly alright to do the same thing with open-source vendors and projects?
Because the proposed regulation qualifies the goods the government will purchase, not the vendor from whom government will purchase. If the Navy decides to buy a zillion gallons of gray paint, and Acme Corp only makes purple paint, Acme does not have a legitimate grievance. The Army mandates that all wooden products they purchase, if made from certain kinds of trees, must be completely free of bark. Again, this doesn't "exclude" any particular vendor, because they can just comply with the regulation. They can bid on the article requested, or not bid at all. This is a step towards making government software purchases as fair, transparent and accessible as most government purchases.
You have a preformed belief system, and you are defending it at all costs. Opening yourself up to the world of observation and reasoning based upon evidence is foreign to you.
Ooh, relish the smugness. You brave, bold pioneer who threw off all preformed belief systems and exposed yourself to the world of observation and reasoning, you. Given today's orthodoxies, it's quite possible that the person to whom you're replying is actually more open than you to data which contradict his theories.
"Belief" is childish, but it becomes unbearable when it takes on the patina of science. One who believes in a scientific theory (such as Evolution) with the fervor of religion disgraces science.
You should file a patent application, and then put the blueprints on your website. They're going to be on USPTO's website anyway, or didn't you know that? Then when you show it to investors, there is no need for "serious control". The whole point of patents is that novel ideas are publicly disclosed, and yet protected.
I mean come on, I know it's Slashdot, but let's be serious for a minute...
OK, let's be serious. You're not making electricity from dirt. You have some mildly interesting idea, which may be useful and novel. But if you ask around the industry, you'll probably find it was tried already.
The difference between you and the parent poster? Let me guess - number of servers. When the servers are few and physically accessible, Windows is probably a shorter path to the finish line than learning Linux intricacies. Those check-box admins are annoying, but for a lot of basic, unambitious stuff they get the job done.
Good points. X is actually very fast, especially on the local machine. To get the best performance out of X, the programmer must understand and use the X API. Obvious example: use XDrawLine to draw a line, rather than implementing your own Bresenham algorithm and plotting pixels. Less obvious: use XDrawLines to draw multiple lines, rather than calling XDrawLine repeatedly. Create the right number of GC's (graphics contexts) and switch between them, rather than modifying one GC.
All of this is hard to abstract. Once you build a "toolkit" atop X, it's quite possible that some performance will be lost. I suspect this is what happened with GTK and QT.
Then there are apps/toolkits implementing features that really should be in the windowing system, like enhanced font rendering or translucent backgrounds. These are sometimes implemented by rendering on the client side and sending images to the X Server. Naturally, that's slow. I think X is getting the extensions to make this unneccessary.
Ideally, all humans would speak the same language. For a while there was a big Esperanto fad. (Actually I prefer it the way it is - fragmented.)
As for dependencies, the evolution of software leads to more libraries, not just in GUI but all aspects of computing. Maybe it's time to accept this and move to a distro that manages those dependencies well. Distro not mentioned to avoid charges of advocacy, but since moving to it I have stopped knowing or caring about dependencies.
I kind of agree, but there are counterpoints. The toolkit space has matured considerably - do you expect substantial further progress? Now might be the right time to build in a toolkit. When Internet Protocol was new, there were other networking standards. But now IP dominates. We like having IP in the kernel rather than userspace. Toolkit integration could mean much lower bandwidth utilization since higher level messages could be passed.
Also, I'm not sure about the Darwinism. I don't really like GTK and QT - apps written with them always seem slow. But maybe that's because modern programmers suck. Apps written with Athena widgets are usually fast, and more configurable with X Resources. None of which bodes well for the built-in toolkit. Given the current trend it will somehow suck more than GTK/QT.
I realize almost nobody agrees with me about the slowness, but I think that on a modern computer, having a perceptible lag while creating or erasing a dialog box is completely unacceptable. What's worse, those who notice the slowness frequently blame X, when X is actually blazingly fast.
Huh? Then what exactly do you call all the partnerships, preferred providers, mergers, etc. that happen all the time in the business world?
The fact that businesses sometimes form alliances does not mean that all businesses are allied. There are corporations that have a lot of clout with the media: record companies, movie companies, PR companies that control access to important people, and of course big advertisers. By the same token, there are corporations to which the media owes nothing. I think Diebold falls into the latter, much larger category.
If the media is slow to respond then why is it reporting RIAA lawsuits as they happen...
I haven't followed the story in detail, but I think all the RIAA lawsuits constitute a single "meme" for the media, and they took a while to wake up to the meme. Once a story is on the front burner, new developments are reported more quickly.
The RIAA lawsuits are a good example, actually: they're reporting them, but they're doing so in such a way that it makes the RIAA look good (or at least not look bad).
I don't have TV, but I've read a couple of RIAA stories in the local papers, and they are not making the RIAA look good. The stories usually stress the poverty of the defendant. But maybe you are looking for a totally biased screed, like a slashdot posting? The media doesn't work that way. You're probably going to respond to that point with sarcasm, but it's true - a reporter would not interject his personal feelings into a story about a RIAA lawsuit. There may be bias in which stories a media outlet covers, and which sources it cites, but there is almost never the overt, propagandistic bias one sees on slashdot.
I disagree, how can they both not be technically interesting.
Actually, in my hypothetical scenario one of the implementations was interesting and one not.
imgine knowing how the original UNIX was developed. How can you say that is not interesting?
I guess there's more than one definition of "interesting". Is the Watt steam engine technically interesting? Sure, to a student or hobbyist. But engineers at Honda are unlikely to care, because it isn't advancing the current state of the art. That's what I think the original poster was saying about Linux - that because it's a reimplementation of an old standard, it's not an advance on the state of the art. I disagree with that idea, because a 2003 Honda Accord is also basically a reimplementation of an interface standard. Same basic seats and controls as a car of 20 years ago (the human interface), adapted to run on the same roads and similar fuel. The advancement is inside.
I can think of a few reasons. First, it may be that we have 100x as many guys who drive around crushing people as we have virus writers. But we don't hear about the crushers because their actions are local. They can only crush so many in one day. Therefore, penalizing them can both deter (by example) and prevent (by taking away their license) such actions. But one virus-writer can affect the whole world. This fundamentally alters the picture. With the crushers, we can define an enforcement level that's "adequate" because "only" x% of the population is crushed each year. But with viruses, we can't because statistically there will always be a virus writer out there.
Second, the crusher cannot work from outside US jurisdiction and crush people in the US. But virus writers can be anywhere. So a safety plan based on deterring these guys will not work.
So if you want to be realistic, you have to view computer viruses as a natural, ongoing phenomenon, not a criminal aberration.
If a company makes a car that has a button on the hood, and pressing that button makes the car explode, you can blame the kid who presses the button, but after the 100th time you might want to put the burden on the manufacturer to remove that button.
I think you're saying that Linux is not technically interesting because it's a Unix clone. Howerver, "Unix clone" is merely a description of the interface presented by the kernel, not how it works internally. You could have two implementations of Unix, both 100% POSIX compliant, and one could be technically interesting inside while the other isn't. Then again, maybe you're not saying that.
But nothing in your post explains why the media would look out for Diebold, a maker of banking and security equipment. You seem to be going on the assumption that corporations just like to help each other out, but that same short-sighted greedy nature you correctly identified means that corporations generally don't help each other out, even when it would be easy or beneficial.
The media has covered (to death) lots of stories that hurt corporations, big and small. Alar? Firestone tires? Faked truck explosion?
If you take off the biased glasses, you'll see that the media is just dumb and slow to respond. Eventually some lazy, plagiarizing journalist will copy the story from Salon and Wired, and it will trickle through the normal channels. About six months after you're completely sick of it. See RIAA lawsuits for another example.
But why is this thing restricted to Windows and Mac? Is it using some weird driver? I would think it would appear as a firewire storage device, and thus be OS-independent. A bit of searching shows that people are using these with Linux, but I don't know if they're really a good idea yet.
I second that recommendation. Skimmed it in the bookstore. Among other things, women must not be portrayed cooking or cleaning. The word "warrior" is banned. No wonder they managed to sap the life out of inherently interesting topics like colonial America.
That raises a cool idea. Lower withholding so everyone ends up owing some tax. Instead of writing one big check to the IRS, you divide it up into one check per vote based on a schedule they'll publish. The check's memo field says which candidate you voted for. Or maybe you write the check to the candidate himself, and he is responsible for delivering the money to the IRS.
OK, it's half-baked, but it could focus our admirable concern with money on the voting process.
I think that's partly because artists like to clearly understand the rules of the game. How much came from the tools and how much from the artist. When the rools are rapdily changing, it's hard for one artist to assess the work of another.
I guess photography was upsetting because it threatened to cheapen representation. Once photography became fairly standard, the rules of the game were obvious and we could seriously compare the efforts of different photographers.
Another, subtler aspect is the creator's refusal to be overwhelmed by his tools. The tools should be quiet, neutral, responsive to the vision of the creator. They should not bear their own personality.
But one of the problems Dickinson mentioned in the article was a bunch of quotation marks magically appearing in the wrong font. It would take great stoicism to ignore this and keep writing, even though you know the audience will never see that.
Only as long as the number of discontents is managable, once everyone is discontent, then you need a police state to watch the whole population.
Don't you think more people would vote and write to their representatives before risking their lives to overturn the government? In countries where people are really oppressed, they have risked their lives just to vote. Here, most of us don't even bother. If there was so much discontent, wouldn't Nader or someone get more votes?
Ha, ha... idiot. Children vote too.
That is news to me. I thought voters had to be 18. Can you cite a link?
The idea is that the DRM machine lives inside the general purpose machine. Normal content (like old mp3s) is not affected by the DRM machine. DRM content can only be accessed through the DRM machine. If you don't have any DRM content, you won't even notice the DRM machine is there.
That idea would do more harm than good. Did you read the article about Hilary Rosen's retirement party? (Forgot the URL). One of the points was that increasing churn in Congress has made lobbyists more powerful. When congressmen serve for a long time, some become powerful committe chairs, effectively the most powerful people in the US on their particular topic. With more churn, the power goes to lobbyists, because they are the only enduring legislative specialists in their areas. Hilary Rosen is a good example of this new breed of lobbyist who is more powerful than a legislator.
So basically, you're an angst-ridden young man who sees doom and disaster everywhere. And when you try to educate people with your doom-ridden viewpoint, they just shrug it off - they're still not clued in. What to do?
Remember when you were a little kid, and some toy or piece of candy was the most important thing in the universe? You've come a long way since then, so long that you probably can't really remember what it was like. Well the same thing is going to happen again. You'll become middle-aged and all these worries about the state of the world will just elicit a nostalgic chuckle.
However, I think it's gone far past this now, and it's time to bring power back to the people. I say this because any civil war in the united states will affect the lives of everyone on this planet, directly or indirectly.
That's amusing. At some level you must realize that the majority is not with you, so "the people" really means "the discontented." So you're going to form a band of malcontents to start a civil war? You wouldn't be the first. Long before you can do anything, the FBI will infiltrate your group. Eventually you'll be sent to prison on weapons and conspiracy charges before firing a single shot. As an old, gray inmate you will have little recollection of the angsty young man you once were.
Meanwhile the sinister cabal that has always ruled the world will continue to do so. They are called parents, and they vote.
You also seem to disregard that ATMs are deployed in a closed network system, and are not transmitting validations over the Internet... I feel sorry for the company that is employing you. Ignorance with arrogance is a dangerous thing for a person in a decision making position.
Others have pointed out that some ATMs communicate over the internet. I agree with your second comment, however.
Slashdot Mirror
The specific innovation in this patent is that after the client "phones home", the server can request additional data. I didn't see that in a cursory scan of the linked IBM paper.
As usual, slashdot is making a patent sound broader than it is.
Because the proposed regulation qualifies the goods the government will purchase, not the vendor from whom government will purchase. If the Navy decides to buy a zillion gallons of gray paint, and Acme Corp only makes purple paint, Acme does not have a legitimate grievance. The Army mandates that all wooden products they purchase, if made from certain kinds of trees, must be completely free of bark. Again, this doesn't "exclude" any particular vendor, because they can just comply with the regulation. They can bid on the article requested, or not bid at all.
This is a step towards making government software purchases as fair, transparent and accessible as most government purchases.
Ooh, relish the smugness. You brave, bold pioneer who threw off all preformed belief systems and exposed yourself to the world of observation and reasoning, you. Given today's orthodoxies, it's quite possible that the person to whom you're replying is actually more open than you to data which contradict his theories.
"Belief" is childish, but it becomes unbearable when it takes on the patina of science. One who believes in a scientific theory (such as Evolution) with the fervor of religion disgraces science.
Nor would Job have been afflicted. Unless the God they worship is a bit more complex than the god you deride.
OK, let's be serious. You're not making electricity from dirt. You have some mildly interesting idea, which may be useful and novel. But if you ask around the industry, you'll probably find it was tried already.
The difference between you and the parent poster? Let me guess - number of servers. When the servers are few and physically accessible, Windows is probably a shorter path to the finish line than learning Linux intricacies. Those check-box admins are annoying, but for a lot of basic, unambitious stuff they get the job done.
- The version you're running is more than five weeks old! Upgrade!
- You wouldn't have this problem if you were doing everything exactly like I do it.
- It's open source. Get hacking!
All perfectly valid, yet equivalent to "Go away".Good points. X is actually very fast, especially on the local machine. To get the best performance out of X, the programmer must understand and use the X API. Obvious example: use XDrawLine to draw a line, rather than implementing your own Bresenham algorithm and plotting pixels. Less obvious: use XDrawLines to draw multiple lines, rather than calling XDrawLine repeatedly. Create the right number of GC's (graphics contexts) and switch between them, rather than modifying one GC.
All of this is hard to abstract. Once you build a "toolkit" atop X, it's quite possible that some performance will be lost. I suspect this is what happened with GTK and QT.
Then there are apps/toolkits implementing features that really should be in the windowing system, like enhanced font rendering or translucent backgrounds. These are sometimes implemented by rendering on the client side and sending images to the X Server. Naturally, that's slow. I think X is getting the extensions to make this unneccessary.
Ideally, all humans would speak the same language. For a while there was a big Esperanto fad. (Actually I prefer it the way it is - fragmented.)
As for dependencies, the evolution of software leads to more libraries, not just in GUI but all aspects of computing. Maybe it's time to accept this and move to a distro that manages those dependencies well. Distro not mentioned to avoid charges of advocacy, but since moving to it I have stopped knowing or caring about dependencies.
I kind of agree, but there are counterpoints. The toolkit space has matured considerably - do you expect substantial further progress? Now might be the right time to build in a toolkit. When Internet Protocol was new, there were other networking standards. But now IP dominates. We like having IP in the kernel rather than userspace. Toolkit integration could mean much lower bandwidth utilization since higher level messages could be passed.
Also, I'm not sure about the Darwinism. I don't really like GTK and QT - apps written with them always seem slow. But maybe that's because modern programmers suck. Apps written with Athena widgets are usually fast, and more configurable with X Resources. None of which bodes well for the built-in toolkit. Given the current trend it will somehow suck more than GTK/QT.
I realize almost nobody agrees with me about the slowness, but I think that on a modern computer, having a perceptible lag while creating or erasing a dialog box is completely unacceptable. What's worse, those who notice the slowness frequently blame X, when X is actually blazingly fast.
The fact that businesses sometimes form alliances does not mean that all businesses are allied. There are corporations that have a lot of clout with the media: record companies, movie companies, PR companies that control access to important people, and of course big advertisers. By the same token, there are corporations to which the media owes nothing. I think Diebold falls into the latter, much larger category.
I haven't followed the story in detail, but I think all the RIAA lawsuits constitute a single "meme" for the media, and they took a while to wake up to the meme. Once a story is on the front burner, new developments are reported more quickly.
Actually, in my hypothetical scenario one of the implementations was interesting and one not.
I guess there's more than one definition of "interesting". Is the Watt steam engine technically interesting? Sure, to a student or hobbyist. But engineers at Honda are unlikely to care, because it isn't advancing the current state of the art. That's what I think the original poster was saying about Linux - that because it's a reimplementation of an old standard, it's not an advance on the state of the art. I disagree with that idea, because a 2003 Honda Accord is also basically a reimplementation of an interface standard. Same basic seats and controls as a car of 20 years ago (the human interface), adapted to run on the same roads and similar fuel. The advancement is inside.
I can think of a few reasons. First, it may be that we have 100x as many guys who drive around crushing people as we have virus writers. But we don't hear about the crushers because their actions are local. They can only crush so many in one day. Therefore, penalizing them can both deter (by example) and prevent (by taking away their license) such actions. But one virus-writer can affect the whole world. This fundamentally alters the picture. With the crushers, we can define an enforcement level that's "adequate" because "only" x% of the population is crushed each year. But with viruses, we can't because statistically there will always be a virus writer out there.
Second, the crusher cannot work from outside US jurisdiction and crush people in the US. But virus writers can be anywhere. So a safety plan based on deterring these guys will not work.
So if you want to be realistic, you have to view computer viruses as a natural, ongoing phenomenon, not a criminal aberration.
If a company makes a car that has a button on the hood, and pressing that button makes the car explode, you can blame the kid who presses the button, but after the 100th time you might want to put the burden on the manufacturer to remove that button.
I think you're saying that Linux is not technically interesting because it's a Unix clone. Howerver, "Unix clone" is merely a description of the interface presented by the kernel, not how it works internally. You could have two implementations of Unix, both 100% POSIX compliant, and one could be technically interesting inside while the other isn't.
Then again, maybe you're not saying that.
But nothing in your post explains why the media would look out for Diebold, a maker of banking and security equipment. You seem to be going on the assumption that corporations just like to help each other out, but that same short-sighted greedy nature you correctly identified means that corporations generally don't help each other out, even when it would be easy or beneficial.
The media has covered (to death) lots of stories that hurt corporations, big and small. Alar? Firestone tires? Faked truck explosion?
If you take off the biased glasses, you'll see that the media is just dumb and slow to respond. Eventually some lazy, plagiarizing journalist will copy the story from Salon and Wired, and it will trickle through the normal channels. About six months after you're completely sick of it. See RIAA lawsuits for another example.
But why is this thing restricted to Windows and Mac? Is it using some weird driver? I would think it would appear as a firewire storage device, and thus be OS-independent. A bit of searching shows that people are using these with Linux, but I don't know if they're really a good idea yet.
I second that recommendation. Skimmed it in the bookstore. Among other things, women must not be portrayed cooking or cleaning. The word "warrior" is banned. No wonder they managed to sap the life out of inherently interesting topics like colonial America.
That raises a cool idea. Lower withholding so everyone ends up owing some tax. Instead of writing one big check to the IRS, you divide it up into one check per vote based on a schedule they'll publish. The check's memo field says which candidate you voted for. Or maybe you write the check to the candidate himself, and he is responsible for delivering the money to the IRS.
OK, it's half-baked, but it could focus our admirable concern with money on the voting process.
I think that's partly because artists like to clearly understand the rules of the game. How much came from the tools and how much from the artist. When the rools are rapdily changing, it's hard for one artist to assess the work of another.
I guess photography was upsetting because it threatened to cheapen representation. Once photography became fairly standard, the rules of the game were obvious and we could seriously compare the efforts of different photographers.
Another, subtler aspect is the creator's refusal to be overwhelmed by his tools. The tools should be quiet, neutral, responsive to the vision of the creator. They should not bear their own personality.
But one of the problems Dickinson mentioned in the article was a bunch of quotation marks magically appearing in the wrong font. It would take great stoicism to ignore this and keep writing, even though you know the audience will never see that.
Don't you think more people would vote and write to their representatives before risking their lives to overturn the government? In countries where people are really oppressed, they have risked their lives just to vote. Here, most of us don't even bother. If there was so much discontent, wouldn't Nader or someone get more votes?
That is news to me. I thought voters had to be 18. Can you cite a link?
The idea is that the DRM machine lives inside the general purpose machine. Normal content (like old mp3s) is not affected by the DRM machine. DRM content can only be accessed through the DRM machine. If you don't have any DRM content, you won't even notice the DRM machine is there.
That idea would do more harm than good. Did you read the article about Hilary Rosen's retirement party? (Forgot the URL). One of the points was that increasing churn in Congress has made lobbyists more powerful. When congressmen serve for a long time, some become powerful committe chairs, effectively the most powerful people in the US on their particular topic. With more churn, the power goes to lobbyists, because they are the only enduring legislative specialists in their areas. Hilary Rosen is a good example of this new breed of lobbyist who is more powerful than a legislator.
Remember when you were a little kid, and some toy or piece of candy was the most important thing in the universe? You've come a long way since then, so long that you probably can't really remember what it was like. Well the same thing is going to happen again. You'll become middle-aged and all these worries about the state of the world will just elicit a nostalgic chuckle.
That's amusing. At some level you must realize that the majority is not with you, so "the people" really means "the discontented." So you're going to form a band of malcontents to start a civil war? You wouldn't be the first. Long before you can do anything, the FBI will infiltrate your group. Eventually you'll be sent to prison on weapons and conspiracy charges before firing a single shot. As an old, gray inmate you will have little recollection of the angsty young man you once were.
Meanwhile the sinister cabal that has always ruled the world will continue to do so. They are called parents, and they vote.
Others have pointed out that some ATMs communicate over the internet. I agree with your second comment, however.