xwwt - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google and Apple spent more on Patents than R&D last year (nytimes.com)

Submitted by parallel_prankster on Monday October 08, 2012 @11:38AM

parallel_prankster writes: NYTimes has an interesting article about how patents are really stiffling inovation in the tech industry. Today, almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles. Of course, the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits. At a technology conference this year, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had “kind of gotten crazy.” It is a complaint heard throughout the industry. The increasing push to assert ownership of broad technologies has led to a destructive arms race, engineers say. Some point to so-called patent trolls, companies that exist solely to sue over patent violations. Others say big technology companies have also exploited the system’s weaknesses. “There are hundreds of ways to write the same computer program,” said James Bessen, a legal expert at Harvard. And so patent applications often try to encompass every potential aspect of a new technology. When such applications are approved, Mr. Bessen said, “the borders are fuzzy, so it’s really easy to accuse others of trespassing on your ideas.” The number of patent applications, computer-related and otherwise, filed each year at the United States patent office has increased by more than 50 percent over the last decade to more than 540,000 in 2011. Google has received 2,700 patents since 2000, according to the patent analysis firm M-CAM. Microsoft has received 21,000.

Submission + - Activision Blizzard secretly watermarking World of Warcraft users. (ownedcore.com)

Submitted by

kgkoutzis

on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @09:34AM

kgkoutzis writes: "A few days ago I noticed some weird artifacts covering the screenshots I captured using the WoW game client application. I sharpened the images and found a repeating pattern secretly embedded inside. I posted this information on the OwnedCore forum and after an amazing 3 day cooperation marathon, we managed to prove that all our WoW screenshots, since at least 2008, contain a custom watermark inside. This watermark includes our userIDs, the time the screenshot was captured and the IP address of the server we were on at the time. It can be used to track down activities which are against Blizzard's Terms of Service, like hacking the game or running a private server. The users were never notified by the ToS that this watermarking was going on so, for four years now, we have all been publicly sharing our account and realm information for hackers to decode and exploit. You can find more information on how to access the watermark in the aforementioned forum post which is still quite active."

Comment Submit problem (Score 1) 1

by xwwt on Thursday June 14, 2012 @11:56AM (#40323417) Attached to: I can't submit anything !

Looking into this now. Anytime you see something wonky feel free to send along to feedback@slashdot.org. It is monitored more closely.

Journal Journal: Copyright For Dummies

Journal by kodiaktau on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @12:53PM

An interesting video was passed to a friend of a friend who subsequently passed it on to me about the original intent and virtues of copyright in America. Not surprisingly the video outlines the original intent of copyright to encourage the creators to bring new content and protect them for a period of time. As the video points out one of the largest instigators of the new rules on time privilege for creators was the Disn

Submission + - User Journal Quantum Random Numbers (anu.edu.au)

Submitted by

tqft

on Friday April 13, 2012 @09:07AM

tqft writes: "What the world needs is more truly random sources of numbers. Here are some more:

" We do this by splitting a beam of light into two beams and then measuring the power in each beam. Because light is quantised, the light intensity in each beam fluctuates about the mean. Those fluctuations, due ultimately to the quantum vacuum, can be converted into a source of random numbers. Every number is randomly generated in real time and cannot be predicted beforehand. So if you need some really random numbers, use the link below!"

http://photonics.anu.edu.au/qoptics/Research/qrng.php

http://150.203.48.55/Matrix.php"

Submission + - Mitch Altman parts ways with Maker Fair over DARPA Grant (facebook.com)

Submitted by

SWroclawski

on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @12:48PM

SWroclawski writes: "Well known hacker and hackerspace advocate, Mitch Altman has decided to temporarily part ways with Maker Faire over their involvement with DARPA (as reported on Twitter and Facebook). This public parting of ways raises the question of what role government, especially the military, should play in working alongside hackers and educators."

Comment Re:Brings a tear to my eye (Score 1) 342

by xwwt on Monday April 02, 2012 @03:24PM (#39552171) Attached to: 25 Years of IBM's OS/2

Agreed. The 1.1 and 1.3 versions of OS/2 were really like the Windows product. OS/2 was really stunning when we moved to 3.x and 4.0 Warp. It was still a heck of a lot easier to program for the interface using the ICLUI tool set than anything MS had at the time. I remember Borland coming out with OWL for Windows in a parallel timeframe - it tried to mimic ICLUI but was really a pain to develop with.

Comment Re:Brings a tear to my eye (Score 2) 342

by xwwt on Monday April 02, 2012 @10:17AM (#39548459) Attached to: 25 Years of IBM's OS/2

Funny thing happened on my way to the forum. A few years back I had to get some information out of a OS/2 help file, and had no install. I ended up downloading a copy of the OS from the internet to quickly get access - I did end up uninstalling as I had no other use for the install. Still I wonder if it is worth having a box laying around to tinker with. http://archive.org/details/OS2Warp

Comment Brings a tear to my eye (Score 3, Interesting) 342

by xwwt on Monday April 02, 2012 @09:46AM (#39548167) Attached to: 25 Years of IBM's OS/2

I spent may hours working in the ICLUI interface building apps for OS/2. For the most part it was good at memory management, tools were mature and the interface was object oriented. I was always frustrated about the MS & IBM split on the interface and I think MS took the wrong route in getting to Windows. Had the alliance stuck around who knows what would have happened to this OS.

Submission + - Wil Wheaton New Show Tabletop (typepad.com)

Submitted by xwwt on Monday March 19, 2012 @04:23PM

xwwt writes: Wil Wheaton is working with Felicia Day on a new show called Tabletop on the YouTube Channel Geek and Sundry. The show will be about board games and gaming in general.
The first show airs April 2nd.

Submission + - Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces to Reveal How Dumb Our Intelligence Is (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @12:33PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style naughty list. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven’t really got much of it."

Submission + - Russian Scientists Revive Plant From 30,000-Year-Old Seeds (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20, 2012 @06:16PM

An anonymous reader writes: It was an Ice Age squirrel’s treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species. The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. ... 'The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,' said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. 'It’s a natural cryobank.'

Submission + - Paper alloy to replace plastic (geek.com)

Submitted by xwwt on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @05:04PM

xwwt writes: In response to a paper by Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, PEGA Design & Engineering has developed a new product that is intended to replace plastic shell material in computer equipment and electronics.

The product contains a combination of paper and polypropylene (PP) which aids in recycling efforts and is intended to keep non-recyclable materials out of landfills. The PP should breakdown in sunlight and can be reclaimed. There is concern that polypropylene cannot be separated from the paper fiber and brings into question how the material will be recycled. As poster Paul Davis points out, it might have been better to use polylactic acid. Ultimately it begs the question, is this truly a recyclable material?

Comment Re:Always a niche (Score 1) 317

by xwwt on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @05:22PM (#38959713) Attached to: How long until the (first-world) classroom education model is obsolete?

There is a fair amount of conversation and research into this practice. Most disruptive research points at the classroom of the future being "facilitated" by someone with a liberal or general education background. This would mean in K-12 setting a class room might have 20-30 terminals with students learning from on-line courseware/remote instruction while there is a general practitioner or some facilitator there to answer questions. There is a good book by Horn & Johnson on this topic, I think it is called Disrupting Class. It is a really insightful piece of work - I liked it so much I shared it with our local superintendent of schools.

I think we are already seeing distance education in higher ed heading in this direction. You don't really need to sit in a lecture hall if you can get the same info in a web cast from someone who is an expert in the subject. Cohorts can have virtual meetings and whiteboard over the internet. TAs can be available anywhere. We will see more of this transition, esp. when the education bubble hits us in the next few years. (Young adults who have gone to school b/c no work, fewer students affording education, institutions cutting costs and closing buildings, forced retirement of instructors due to budget cuts, etc.)

There is a nice little interview with Christensen, Horn and Johnson at HBS on this subject too - take a look!. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5978.html

Comment Re:Partial Credit to Me? (Score 3, Insightful) 4

by xwwt on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @03:47PM (#38958381) Attached to: They fixed it!!

Often times mistakes are made in porting and this one was a big miss. We thought that all the items had been covered in development but there are still some open issues with ops in some of the .pl - which we missed. We found that Apache 1.3 was processing .pl scripts differently than 2.2 processes them (fundamental differences) that was missed in the port. Should we have caught it? Yeah. There is no real excuse for the miss other than we thought we had all of these items buttoned down. The developers will be continuing to work through these as we move along.

Like a lot of light teams we rely on peer review for QC. (If you code it - you don't QC it; a buddy does that work.) We use our internal development team, editorial staff and other members of Geeknet to help in testing. (And sometimes users!) We have been working on a plan to have some automated build testing using hudson or some other automated process to help at least sanity check some key areas of the site on deploy. If you have suggestions on a tool please let me know.

I guess I can only boil it down to: a huge port that had been put off for over 5 years and we broke something - that is to be expected. Not everyone uses the ops in .pl so it doesn't get a lot of attention. As a retrospective (and we have known this is an issue) we need to spend more time on the QC process. As a second retrospective and reviewing the code around this issue, I believe some of the way ops were handled is not secure and should be reviewed.

As a side, in my past experience I have found QC/QA to be one of those things that needs to be approached as a role and not as a person. We are working to foster more of this mindset in our team. QC folks know the product inside and out and (hopefully) don't know the code. (I have found non-programmers to be better at QC.)

We do rely on our community to help us with feedback. If you see something broken, please, raise your hand. Email feedback. Let me know directly (wtapp@geek.net). When we know of an issue it goes on the list and we make decisions from week to week on what the biggest pain points are and then fix those items in addition to other work. Not everything gets addressed - some of it goes to the back burner. Often times we have to hold items because we are in the middle of a sprint. Believe me, our goal is not to reduce functionality of the site, on the contrary we want to make it functional for lots of different users (although there is a significant amount of bloat from 15 years of coding). The team moves from project to project quickly and we try to keep the lid on any issues we do know about including things users like/dislike. For instance, some of our users hate the social media icons - we get it, not everyone wants to play in that environment. Others insist on those interfaces to FB, G+ and Twitter - so we balance and try to make changes and respond so that the site is useful for all.

Please, "directly and openly bitch about" problems. The more we know about issues that the community feels strongly about the more responsive we can be to user needs. Personally I would prefer constructive criticism, if it isn't constructive I can take that too. All I ask is that you make sure I or one of the team see the issue. We don't read every comment, every day and don't want to miss something that is important. In other words, just because you post to the site doesn't mean we know there is an issue. In this instance we happened to know about this by checking Journals.

It is my goal to make sure that you and others understand that we do care about the broad community that comes to Slashdot. The development team is deeply invested in this product and does care about community. I am hoping to be able to pull some project time together for a feedback portion of the site where folks can talk about Slashdot directly and hopefully we can foster more conversation around the site (/woodshed?). We try to do our best to provide a quality site where users can come, read the news, share ideas and thoughts openly and have a little fun too.

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