My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT (I ended up becoming a software engineer, and part-owner of a startup). Will always feel grateful to the designers of the 8-bit micros that started all this...

Oh, and I still remember my first hack - dissassembling JetPac and finding the POKE that gave me infinite lives. Now *that* was fun :-)

HeapCheck, Electric fence, Dmalloc and all memory debuggers in general, are basically replacing the allocation functions in the executable with their own version.

The "extra" stuff that the patent proposes, is a BOOLEAN flag, that HeapCheck functions would check upon entry (at runtime) - therefore allowing the developer to control (ON/OFF) the machinery at runtime. For example, the substitute allocation function can check a registry setting, to decide whether the functionality is on or off, and a separate utility GUI can toggle this registry setting on/off (I believe Microsoft's PageHeap has something exactly like that).

So tell me, do you REALLY consider this addendum - a boolean flag, for pitty's sake - enough "innovation", to warrant the term "invention"? Patentable "invention"?

Er... let me get this straight:

You are actually arguing... that adding a boolean flag, controlled at runtime - a BOOLEAN flag! - constitutes enough... innovation, to make this... a completely new invention, worthy of patenting?

That is, if the allocation function checks e.g. a registry setting upon entry, and a GUI application simply sets this registry entry to True/False.... then suddenly the contribution is so enormous, to warrant the label of "new invention"?

Really? Are you serious?

I am a coder, not a lawyer - and from reading the patent's claims, I can see only one thing that was not in HeapCheck, but which DID exist in Electric Fence: the ability to enable heap checks at runtime, without recompilation. Electric Fence allowed one to do that via LD_PRELOAD, so I am sorry, but I stand by what I said - I can see nothing in there that didn't exist in either Efence or my HeapCheck.

I only take an issue with your last paragraph - I certainly didn't leave the code in a graveyard, I released it with an open source license, so that anyone could use it and make his life a bit better. The fact that 10 years later, someone else has now patented the ideas in Electric Fence and HeapCheck, and can now sue me and everyone else using it, is what got me mad (hence the "trolls" comment).

The method, invented by either Bruce Perens or someone before him - we are into 1993 or earlier here - and implemented by me (in 2001, under Win32) and I am sure by many others, is about placing an inaccessible page (4K) right before or after your just malloc-ed region. This way, if the user code reads or writes beyond the boundary, an exception is raised. In the case of my implementation, the "before" or "after" was a compile-time switch. In the case of Bruce Peren's Efence, it was an environment variable. Having that in mind, can anyone see any improvements in any of the claims?

Run Firefox4 and Chrome9 on your machine, and report back... :-)

I am a newbie, Javascript-wise - so if this is true, it was purely coincidental :-)

It's just plain math and a "plotpixel" function... so I'd be happy to know what to change to make it run faster in other browsers - any suggestions?

(the good thing about Javascript - the code is open-source by nature)

Verified with my SW-only Javascript 3D renderer, try it on your own here, or just look at the submitted benchark results:

On my aging PentiumD/2.8GHz:

• 13 frames per second with Firefox 3.6
• 18 frames per second with Chrome 7
• 27 frames per second with Opera 10.6
• 44 frames per second with Firefox 4.0beta

Thank you - and as for CUDA, I imagine it will take some time :-) Seriously though, WebGL will do just fine :-)

I, too, saw the speed of Firefox 4 in a pretty simple, math-only benchmark that rotated a 3D object. Run it for yourself and/or see the gathered statistics (bottom of the page). Here is the Reddit discussion where many people run it and confirmed Firefox 4 supremacy.

My naive Python simulator of gravity (200 lines) reached the same conclusion - expansion occurs. See the video and get the code from here: http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/gravity.html

Which UPnP server SW did you use under your Linux?