A quick hack would probably be possible so that, in the event of a file being clobbered, the current version is automatically checked in (together with some sort of 'was clobbered' note).
You'd need a 'ignore clobber' lock to allow this to be bypassed.
Just a thought. (Think of this as analogous to copy on write if it's any help.)
They're taking the appearance of security seriously: whether or not the security is real is effectively irrelevant to those who can't tell the difference. (It's a matter of who they listen to, and whether that 'who' is Micro$oft.)
A though. Owning an emergency siren or light shouldn't be illegal. Fitting it to an ordinary car and then driving that car on the public highway should be illegal. Not having emergency light stuff without proper authorisation should disqualify your car from being allowed on the road (just like the lack of MOT on a car over 3 years old disqualifies the car from being road-legal.)
Possibly more that, if approaching you at more than 50mph, you'll be too slow to react to the siren when you register it as being close. (In general, if a siren is distant, you'll ignore it until it isn't... just possibly keeping a mental note that it's there and keeping an eye out, but not always...)
That is, how far will the ambulance get in the time it takes you to register that it wants to get past you, to the time that you get out of its way to let it.
And DON'T PULL OVER if there isn't a sensible place to do so: KEEP GOING UNTIL THERE IS, THEN PULL OVER. The most important thing is that the emergency vehicle is impeded as little as possible (and that you respect this in a safe manner.)
The number of times I've seen a fire engine have to wait because someone's pulled over where there isn't room for the fire engine to get past.
I'll begin by confessing that I'm not an expert in the field of graphic design or 3D design or any real kind of design. Now...
A quick glance at the current array of 3D applications and one thing tends to strike you: hardly any of the interfaces of the major applications work all that much like the environment in which the application is being run. (That is, Lightwave is quite unlike Truespace is quite unlike Maya is quite unlike Blender. Ok, this may be an exaggeration, but you get the picture.)
Is this good? Is it bad? There is UI design article after article that says that consistency across applications is key to a good UI. So what's up with all these fancy looking 3D applications that work completely differently?
The answer IMO is all to do with how these applications are used. The question of consistency should be thought of in context of 'consistency with what?' In practice all the various components (e.g. modeller, animator, etc.) are consistent with each other within a given application and that is enough.
I'll refer to the 3D design applcation as the 'main application' in what follows.
Think about it: major design studios tend to almost specify and 'build' a computer/workstation around the one main application (at least it seems that way.) A designer has his workstation, and spends most of his time in one particular application, and far less time outside it. For running M$ Word or whatever, there is little difference between running it on the workstation and sticking it on a PC next door. It is quite possibly more cost effective to have a PC sitting next to the workstation for doing 'everything else' (is this what happens in the real world? The reasoning goes that there is little to interfere with the main application, and the less the better here.)
When doing 3D work, interoperating with M$ Word and friends is hardly important. An easy to pick up system that a casual user can play with is not really all that important either. Any serious 3D designer can be assumed to have worked past the learning curve of the application so far as how it is used is concerned.
In short: you 'immerse' yourself in one single application for a large part of the time and the application is designed with the assumption that this is the case. You don't need to take intuitive concepts you learned from Word or IE or whatever into your main application, nor do you really need to take them back out.
There are many other examples I could use to illustrate this point, but 3D applications do the job nicely.
There are various places, e.g. cleartype, where simply rendering to a texture and applying it in a resolution independant way will not work. Font rendering at small sizes tends to need to be closely tied to the underlying pixel grid. Thus I don't think that Longhorn is quite doing what you are describing.
What is sorely needed in the current system is a method for peer review to be brought in early. The patent examiner should do very brief checks that the patent isn't completely stupid, before granting a 'preliminary patent' thingy. This thing should not be enough to force licensing or stuff, but should be made public so that companies can see that the patent application is there.
Exactly how the procedure should work is not entirely clear, but this is the though I have every time I see a stupid patent. (Think what happens to quack-mathematical papers or reports on the already-known dressed up as new science.)
I think the idea is that it will be an interpreted language, extending the usual command line one, such that most of the complicated things are done by.Net components within the CLR.
There are many open source (under varying licenses) collaborative systems, each with different principles of operation and rules about what can and can't be done.
What is needed, and this goes back in part to the problem of documentation in the open source/free software arena, is a review of what has been done, advantages, disadvantages, etc. of the various systems. What is also needed is a review of what people want these systems to do. This, together with the requisite organisation to get things done, will allow ideas to be carried from one product to another efficiently, for people to get a quick and clear overview of the state of play in collaborative document systems, and many other things.
There are rather small attempts at this sort of thing on a few of the wiki systems out there, but a comprehensive review of the state of play in collaborative document systems is sorely needed.
If you consider the above unnecessary, observe the interest that was perked up by the/. post, together with the number of posters saying X does this sort of thing, Y does that, Z has been doing this for ages.
Unless you print out the source code, bind it together, and read it in bed before going to sleep... I don't think that applies.
This is, in my opinion, one of the major challenges for online collaborative document systems. If, for example, one want to extract what e.g. Wikipedia contains about complexity theory, and put it into a (treeware) form that can be read in the absence of an internet connection, possibly in the absence of any form of computer (in paticular, read it in bed before going to sleep,) there is little to help you. Furthermore, if you are starting a collaborative document system such as is being tried with 3D17, there is little to help with effective presentation of the material as it accumulates.
I imagine it would be useful to think about such online document production as not necessarily something you do with a web browser. Think of making a good general document collaboration protocol for which applications can be built (and can be integrated with e.g. OpenOffice among other things) and then put together a web front end. (Possibly, build a mozilla component to help out.)
Mind you, the above could just be aimless mindless thinking...
The tracker is a single point of failure for those who've yet to download. You need a large number of trackers so as to be robust to attack, and there is no way to share the load between trackers.
Alternatively, have the files stored in the US and stick the tracker in Russia or somewhere.
Like many say: the RIAA and the MPAA support free speech. They really do...
...so long as it's their speech and no-one else's.
They believe in the inalienable right to do what you're told (by them,) and the right to enjoy paying them money for whatever they want you to pay for. They believe in all kinds of freedom and free speech...
...in fact they believe in all the freedom and free speech that allows things to work in their direction. The problem is that they believe in no other freedoms and no other form of free speech...
In short: Life (so as to be productive to them), liberty (to do what you're told) and the pursuit of happiness (where happiness is defined by you-know-who and no-one else.) Hmmmm... Brave New World anyone?
For those who've never read Terry Pratchett, I'll quote a quick description of the democracy in Ankh-Morpork (the setting for many of the books.)
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.
-- Discworld politics explained (Terry Pratchett, Mort)
I imagine that the mere existence of such an e-book would make the existence of clit legal. That said, if a publisher then rounded up all 'editions' and republished them in such a way as the ebook's read-aloud function worked, clit would then become illegal and have to be destroyed. After that, the read-aloud versions will get dropped for commercial reasons and clit will become legit again. It all reminds me of Henry VIII's changing of sides as to which church was heretical and which was the official church in england...
Just one quick point. The letter is a memorandum of understanding. It does not 'terminate' the derivative works clause, it just states what AT&T and IBM agree it means. The actual legalese is still in the original license agreement, this letter just states that AT&T is not claiming ownership of the modifications, only the rights to restrict modified versions of UNIX being distributed other than under the conditions stipulated in the original contract.
I've read nothing much yet, but from my position, I agree with AOL interfering with users' PC's. I do not think this sets a good precedent, in fact I do not think it should set a precedent. That said, taking it in isolation, it is better that AOL interfere in order to prevent a greater harm. (As an analogy, I am comparing AOL's actions with those that are justified as reasonable force in defense of someone else.)
In short: I do not agree with ANY precedent set by AOL's actions, but as an isolated action with a good justification (which mainly affects those that aren't savvy enough to sort things out for themselves) I agree with AOL's action.
Quote from the RH website (the RHEL page that gives 3 reasons why you may still prefer 2.1...):
To handle these situations, customers who purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux may download either version 2.1 and/or version 3, depending on their requirements. Note that all Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions include the right to upgrade to new versions at no additional cost.
So, there's this notion of what's resilient enough and what's your recovery time.
And a commercial solution, due to its obligation to its shareholders, cannot spend a great deal on redundancy. Look at your electricity system: redundancy has been shelved in favour of lower electricity charges but higher risk of system failure. A commercial root name service will be forced along similar lines.
(Anyway, how's progress on independant internet naming systems?)
The problem is the root-delegation-only option. ISPs are using this as an easy way of doing the above. The problem is that then you have to explicitly name all TLD's that are allowed to do things other than delegation.
The.name letter asks for the root-delegation-only option to be removed (so that delegation-only must be used to explicitly name those TLDs for which sitefinder like stuff is disabled.)
Claims are INDEPENDANT! As I've said elsewhere, to infringe on the patent, you need only infringe 1 valid claim. (This includes claim 1, until such time as claim 1 is declared invalid in a sufficiently powerful court.)
Only claim 4 (and dependants) clearly states that it covers implementations with HTML forms.
How it works: If I claim, for example: 1. A flobberworm comprising:
a. thingy 1
b. thingy 2 2. The method of claim 1 in which
a. thingy 1 is red
b. thingy 2 is yellow 3. The flobberworm of claim 1, further comprising
a. thingy 3
Then: an object which comprises (includes) thingy 1 and thingy 2 falls within the bounds of claim 1, thus infringes the patent.
Claims 2 and 3 are fallbacks in case claim 1 is declared invalid. In that case, an object comprising a red thingy 1 and a yellow thingy 2 would infringe claim 2 and thus infringe the patent. Similarly, an object comprising a thingy 1, a thingy 2 and a thingy 3 would infringe claim 3 and hence infringe the patent.
The claims are arranged so that the broadest possible valid claims are staked. Thus if 1 is invalid, 2 may not be, if 2 is invalid, 3 may not be, etc., etc..
Q: Is Infringement OK As Long As
Not All the Claims Are Infringed?
A: No -- infringement of even one valid claim results in liability.
Doing it without HTML will infringe all valid claims except 4 and any that reference (directly or indirectly) claim 4.
These may be invalide, but also note:
A defendant can avoid liability by proving that every infringed claim is invalid. It is the defendant's burden of proof; the patent owner need not prove that the infringed claims are valid.
This last bit is one of the biggest problems with the current patent system: it requires financial and legal resources to prove that a patent claim is invalid, and individuals and small organisations facing patent claims may not have access to this, even though the patents are stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick hack would probably be possible so that, in the event of a file being clobbered, the current version is automatically checked in (together with some sort of 'was clobbered' note).
You'd need a 'ignore clobber' lock to allow this to be bypassed.
Just a thought. (Think of this as analogous to copy on write if it's any help.)
John.
They're taking the appearance of security seriously: whether or not the security is real is effectively irrelevant to those who can't tell the difference. (It's a matter of who they listen to, and whether that 'who' is Micro$oft.)
Exactly. (I'm usually terrible at getting to the point.)
A though. Owning an emergency siren or light shouldn't be illegal. Fitting it to an ordinary car and then driving that car on the public highway should be illegal. Not having emergency light stuff without proper authorisation should disqualify your car from being allowed on the road (just like the lack of MOT on a car over 3 years old disqualifies the car from being road-legal.)
Possibly more that, if approaching you at more than 50mph, you'll be too slow to react to the siren when you register it as being close. (In general, if a siren is distant, you'll ignore it until it isn't... just possibly keeping a mental note that it's there and keeping an eye out, but not always...)
That is, how far will the ambulance get in the time it takes you to register that it wants to get past you, to the time that you get out of its way to let it.
Just a guess.
And DON'T PULL OVER if there isn't a sensible place to do so: KEEP GOING UNTIL THERE IS, THEN PULL OVER. The most important thing is that the emergency vehicle is impeded as little as possible (and that you respect this in a safe manner.)
The number of times I've seen a fire engine have to wait because someone's pulled over where there isn't room for the fire engine to get past.
I'll begin by confessing that I'm not an expert in the field of graphic design or 3D design or any real kind of design. Now...
A quick glance at the current array of 3D applications and one thing tends to strike you: hardly any of the interfaces of the major applications work all that much like the environment in which the application is being run.
(That is, Lightwave is quite unlike Truespace is quite unlike Maya is quite unlike Blender. Ok, this may be an exaggeration, but you get the picture.)
Is this good? Is it bad? There is UI design article after article that says that consistency across applications is key to a good UI. So what's up with all these fancy looking 3D applications that work completely differently?
The answer IMO is all to do with how these applications are used. The question of consistency should be thought of in context of 'consistency with what?' In practice all the various components (e.g. modeller, animator, etc.) are consistent with each other within a given application and that is enough.
I'll refer to the 3D design applcation as the 'main application' in what follows.
Think about it: major design studios tend to almost specify and 'build' a computer/workstation around the one main application (at least it seems that way.) A designer has his workstation, and spends most of his time in one particular application, and far less time outside it. For running M$ Word or whatever, there is little difference between running it on the workstation and sticking it on a PC next door. It is quite possibly more cost effective to have a PC sitting next to the workstation for doing 'everything else' (is this what happens in the real world? The reasoning goes that there is little to interfere with the main application, and the less the better here.)
When doing 3D work, interoperating with M$ Word and friends is hardly important. An easy to pick up system that a casual user can play with is not really all that important either. Any serious 3D designer can be assumed to have worked past the learning curve of the application so far as how it is used is concerned.
In short: you 'immerse' yourself in one single application for a large part of the time and the application is designed with the assumption that this is the case. You don't need to take intuitive concepts you learned from Word or IE or whatever into your main application, nor do you really need to take them back out.
There are many other examples I could use to illustrate this point, but 3D applications do the job nicely.
There are various places, e.g. cleartype, where simply rendering to a texture and applying it in a resolution independant way will not work. Font rendering at small sizes tends to need to be closely tied to the underlying pixel grid. Thus I don't think that Longhorn is quite doing what you are describing.
What is sorely needed in the current system is a method for peer review to be brought in early. The patent examiner should do very brief checks that the patent isn't completely stupid, before granting a 'preliminary patent' thingy. This thing should not be enough to force licensing or stuff, but should be made public so that companies can see that the patent application is there.
Exactly how the procedure should work is not entirely clear, but this is the though I have every time I see a stupid patent. (Think what happens to quack-mathematical papers or reports on the already-known dressed up as new science.)
We're talking the radio broadcast in 1938, not Jeff Wayne's musical interpretation that was much later.
I think the idea is that it will be an interpreted language, extending the usual command line one, such that most of the complicated things are done by .Net components within the CLR.
There are many open source (under varying licenses) collaborative systems, each with different principles of operation and rules about what can and can't be done.
/. post, together with the number of posters saying X does this sort of thing, Y does that, Z has been doing this for ages.
What is needed, and this goes back in part to the problem of documentation in the open source/free software arena, is a review of what has been done, advantages, disadvantages, etc. of the various systems. What is also needed is a review of what people want these systems to do. This, together with the requisite organisation to get things done, will allow ideas to be carried from one product to another efficiently, for people to get a quick and clear overview of the state of play in collaborative document systems, and many other things.
There are rather small attempts at this sort of thing on a few of the wiki systems out there, but a comprehensive review of the state of play in collaborative document systems is sorely needed.
If you consider the above unnecessary, observe the interest that was perked up by the
This is, in my opinion, one of the major challenges for online collaborative document systems. If, for example, one want to extract what e.g. Wikipedia contains about complexity theory, and put it into a (treeware) form that can be read in the absence of an internet connection, possibly in the absence of any form of computer (in paticular, read it in bed before going to sleep,) there is little to help you. Furthermore, if you are starting a collaborative document system such as is being tried with 3D17, there is little to help with effective presentation of the material as it accumulates.
I imagine it would be useful to think about such online document production as not necessarily something you do with a web browser. Think of making a good general document collaboration protocol for which applications can be built (and can be integrated with e.g. OpenOffice among other things) and then put together a web front end. (Possibly, build a mozilla component to help out.)
Mind you, the above could just be aimless mindless thinking...
The tracker is a single point of failure for those who've yet to download. You need a large number of trackers so as to be robust to attack, and there is no way to share the load between trackers.
Alternatively, have the files stored in the US and stick the tracker in Russia or somewhere.
Like many say: the RIAA and the MPAA support free speech. They really do...
...so long as it's their speech and no-one else's.
They believe in the inalienable right to do what you're told (by them,) and the right to enjoy paying them money for whatever they want you to pay for. They believe in all kinds of freedom and free speech...
...in fact they believe in all the freedom and free speech that allows things to work in their direction. The problem is that they believe in no other freedoms and no other form of free speech...
In short: Life (so as to be productive to them), liberty (to do what you're told) and the pursuit of happiness (where happiness is defined by you-know-who and no-one else.) Hmmmm... Brave New World anyone?
For those who've never read Terry Pratchett, I'll quote a quick description of the democracy in Ankh-Morpork (the setting for many of the books.)
I imagine that the mere existence of such an e-book would make the existence of clit legal. That said, if a publisher then rounded up all 'editions' and republished them in such a way as the ebook's read-aloud function worked, clit would then become illegal and have to be destroyed. After that, the read-aloud versions will get dropped for commercial reasons and clit will become legit again. It all reminds me of Henry VIII's changing of sides as to which church was heretical and which was the official church in england...
Tutor B mup sgottie was that? I'm a little deaf in my left microphone.
IANAL...
Just one quick point. The letter is a memorandum of understanding. It does not 'terminate' the derivative works clause, it just states what AT&T and IBM agree it means. The actual legalese is still in the original license agreement, this letter just states that AT&T is not claiming ownership of the modifications, only the rights to restrict modified versions of UNIX being distributed other than under the conditions stipulated in the original contract.
(That's my take anyhow)
I've read nothing much yet, but from my position, I agree with AOL interfering with users' PC's. I do not think this sets a good precedent, in fact I do not think it should set a precedent. That said, taking it in isolation, it is better that AOL interfere in order to prevent a greater harm. (As an analogy, I am comparing AOL's actions with those that are justified as reasonable force in defense of someone else.)
In short: I do not agree with ANY precedent set by AOL's actions, but as an isolated action with a good justification (which mainly affects those that aren't savvy enough to sort things out for themselves) I agree with AOL's action.
Quote from the RH website (the RHEL page that gives 3 reasons why you may still prefer 2.1...):
To handle these situations, customers who purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux may download either version 2.1 and/or version 3, depending on their requirements. Note that all Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions include the right to upgrade to new versions at no additional cost.
So, there's this notion of what's resilient enough and what's your recovery time.
And a commercial solution, due to its obligation to its shareholders, cannot spend a great deal on redundancy. Look at your electricity system: redundancy has been shelved in favour of lower electricity charges but higher risk of system failure. A commercial root name service will be forced along similar lines.
(Anyway, how's progress on independant internet naming systems?)
How many long term stable internet/networking standards have been governed by commercial organisations? Hmmm... Lets see...
(The best I can think of is Netware.)
In short, the internet NEEDS basic infrastructure that is not governed by commercial interests.
In any case, who is working towards alternative naming systems?
The problem is the root-delegation-only option. ISPs are using this as an easy way of doing the above. The problem is that then you have to explicitly name all TLD's that are allowed to do things other than delegation.
.name letter asks for the root-delegation-only option to be removed (so that delegation-only must be used to explicitly name those TLDs for which sitefinder like stuff is disabled.)
The
Personally I agree with that much.
Claims are INDEPENDANT! As I've said elsewhere, to infringe on the patent, you need only infringe 1 valid claim. (This includes claim 1, until such time as claim 1 is declared invalid in a sufficiently powerful court.)
Only claim 4 (and dependants) clearly states that it covers implementations with HTML forms.
How it works:
If I claim, for example:
1. A flobberworm comprising:
a. thingy 1
b. thingy 2
2. The method of claim 1 in which
a. thingy 1 is red
b. thingy 2 is yellow
3. The flobberworm of claim 1, further comprising
a. thingy 3
Then:
an object which comprises (includes) thingy 1 and thingy 2 falls within the bounds of claim 1, thus infringes the patent.
Claims 2 and 3 are fallbacks in case claim 1 is declared invalid. In that case, an object comprising a red thingy 1 and a yellow thingy 2 would infringe claim 2 and thus infringe the patent. Similarly, an object comprising a thingy 1, a thingy 2 and a thingy 3 would infringe claim 3 and hence infringe the patent.
The claims are arranged so that the broadest possible valid claims are staked. Thus if 1 is invalid, 2 may not be, if 2 is invalid, 3 may not be, etc., etc..
From lawnotes:
Doing it without HTML will infringe all valid claims except 4 and any that reference (directly or indirectly) claim 4.These may be invalide, but also note:
A defendant can avoid liability by proving that every infringed claim is invalid. It is the defendant's burden of proof; the patent owner need not prove that the infringed claims are valid.
This last bit is one of the biggest problems with the current patent system: it requires financial and legal resources to prove that a patent claim is invalid, and individuals and small organisations facing patent claims may not have access to this, even though the patents are stupid.