taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Patents: The varchars.com scraped RSS feeds now include new patent grants and applications by certain companies! Interesting, although given that most developers are advised not to look, not advisable ;)

However, I glanced at the MS one — and immediately spotted this gem: US Patent 6,775,781, filed by Microsoft, is a patent on the concept of ‘a process configured to run under an administrative privilege level’ which, based on authorization information ‘in a data store’, may perform actions at administrative privilege on behalf of a ‘user process’.

This, and the patent claims, perfectly describe the operation of sudo, fundamentally as it’s operated since running on a 4.1BSD VAX-11/750 in 1980.

20 years head start on a patent application — surely that must qualify as prior art ;)

Tags: authorization, com, concept, gem, level, microsoft, patent, patents, privilege, process, rss

Marc Canter blogs about QuickThread, one of the new services at Steve Yost’s QuickTopic.

It’s a great concept. Want to take a thread offline, or share it as a dedicated forum of its own, without losing the concept flow? Just select all the context messages, forward as attachments by mail to the QT site, and it’ll create a new thread with that context intact. Totally simple. (see the Pictures).

Science: In this interview with Matt Ridley at edge.org, Matt notes:

… There’s another phenomenon going on too, which is equally important and which again people in these kinds of debates over human nature have missed. … behavior affects genes. It doesn’t change the code of the gene, and it doesn’t change the encoded genome … what I’m talking about is changing the expression of genes through things you do in your life.

(for example:) … When you’re under stress, the physiological result is that cortisol increases in your body and has a lot of effects. Cortisol is a transcription factor; it actually alters the expression of certain genes. It does so largely in the immune system, which results in the suppression of immune activity.

Wow. I never realised hormones could have that effect. Good article, as usual…

Tags: concept, context, cortisol, expression, forum, offline, quickthread, quicktopic, thread, want