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https://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf Not necessarily,

Check Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair website, he's been inventing stuff for decades. http://www.tinaja.com/

Anyone remember Don Lancaster's tinaja quests and Postscript contests?

To quote Don Lancaster on this subject: "Ideas are worth less than a dime a bale, in ten bale lots." http://www.tinaja.com/glib/cas...

Postscript itself can be fun and interesting. Many folks have taken it well beyond a page description language. Don Lancaster has been using it as a general purpose programming language for years: http://www.tinaja.com/post01.s...

How about a Postscript web server? http://www.pugo.org:8080/

Don Lancaster never wanted to go corporate. He likes his independent life. He wrote a book about how to do it yourself: The Incredible Secret Money Machine. The second edition of the book is available as a PDF download on his web site: http://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/i...

Geez, was this Don Lancaster's printer? It makes sense though, Postscript has to do a lot of math.

http://www.tinaja.com/post01.s...

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/hac...

http://www.tinaja.com/ismm01.s...

Ismm is available as a free ebook here.

Please read a little before spouting nonsence. Note that the article is written in 1990, but phenomena it described are known almost to everyone today and have gotten only worse.

Actually, that's a lousy average. If the standard is 1 good, money-making book per three-hundred, then you can expect to waste 250 hours sorting through trash to find a good moneymaker. Then, assuming that you don't miss it -- which I suspect happens at least 3 times in 4, putting you up at perhaps 1000 hours now -- you can capitalize on it, and make some money.

That 1000 hours has to be split with other duties, so you're talking about one new find every 3 or four years, per reviewer.

Throw each and every one in the waste bin, unopened, eand you're down to one new find every, what, 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years? You haven't given a criteria of acceptance, and therefore it'll take however long it takes for you to learn that it was you, yourself, who was stupid.

Here's the criteria that publishers use, according to one respected, published, source:

A book publisher is more likely to publish something by someone who has already written a couple years' of articles for magazines.

A magazine publisher is more likely to publish magazine articles if the topic meets the criteria of interest of their special magazine.

There are over a million special interest catered to by magazines. Write for those.

A magazine publisher is more likely to publish something by a person with a higher degree (MS or PHD) in the field of study, or who is earning that higher degree.

They are also more likely to publish something by someone who has a venue in another media, like radio. Nowadays, possibly a blogger with a huge twitter following might also get published.

There's your algorithm. It works pretty well.
It increases the hit rate.

The parent's post only increases the hit rate of egos. Which, admittedly, in this day and age is great for getting government funding, which in turn is more and more critical to the appearance of success, since the economy is going away.

If you seriously think that the "weekend builders" win from patents, you're delusional.

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf

"Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink." http://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf

"Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink." http://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf

...and nothing changed since the 80s"

and just when it catches up and start making real money, see Google make the *very exact same thing*

Ok, here goes:

2. You hire a law firm with 6 layers, who ask a modest compensation of $200/hour * 6, and go to court

3. Google claims that they do not infringe because you patented "something great made out of steel" and their thing is "made out of steel with plastic inserts". They happen to have 20 lawyers on the case who know exactly what they are doing. Sorry!

4. Google counter-sues to recoup their expenses to feed 20 lawyers, plus finds about 15 patents where your "something great" infringed.

5. You file for bankruptcy

6. Google buys your patent at the auction. You know, just in case.

In addition, Marcia does have some suggestions about car stereo speaker orientation that are useful for winter driving :-^

The amount of money to apply for a patent is small. The amount it takes to be granted one is a lot more complicated. One of my ideas was patented by the startup employer I had at the time, Wireless burstable communications repeater. Almost all the actual money involved in applying for it went to Hoffmann & Baron, LLP. If you think you're going to get a useful patent granted without an experienced patent attorney firm like that, you're being quite optimistic. I can't even imagine how much time it would have taken to duplicate the patent industry specific parts of the argument with the patent office that they managed, doing it myself instead. The prior art search alone found dramatically more things to reference than I had--while running up a five-figure bill. I am certain the patent would have been rejected as "already covered by #XYZ123" without that input. I had to carefully rewrite our original patent text to distinguish exactly what ways it was different from every one of those, and even after that the patent office spat out another half dozen to address. Responding to the initial rejection letter usefully is another difficult task that I doubt would have been successful without input from the lawyers.

Having done it once successfully, I wouldn't dream of trying to get a tech industry patent again as an individual if I didn't have a bare minimum of $100K to burn along the way. The only thing more expensive than hiring patent attorneys is how expensive it would be to do that yourself instead--presuming that as an inventor your time is actually worth something. Don Lancaster's Patent Avoidance Library is filled with horror stories about small companies trying to do useful things with patents. About the only thing that's changed since he wrote those is the idea that companies don't buy patents. Now they do, but only in bulk. You need to have a large pile of them before you have decent odds of doing anything with them.

Software patents?

Patent/copyright abuse goes way beyond that including the genes in your own body which may be the property of some corporation. And how can a corporation copyright a 400 year old music score and extort money from those who simply want a look? And when taxpayers fund a discovery made by university employees and students, why does a corporation get to take the patent and all the profit?

Patents and copyrights are critical to drive research and new ideas but there has to be a sensible limit. With software patents in particular and the outrageous lawsuits, patents are serving to stifle innovation. Only a very well funded corporation can afford to cope with the problems, and the small inventor/programmer is at the mercy of attorneys.

I defer to Don Lancaster, an early protester of patents who offers thought provoking ideas on the subject:
http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp
Thanks for your patience with this rant

Don Lancaster has released a free PDF of his classic RTL Cookbook. No catch, you can just download it. (I learned about it from Jeff Duntemann, editor of PC Tech Journal, which you probably read too (and at whose feet I learned my craft); Jeff still blogs.)

I'm not sure what happened to David Ahl, but it's likely that some of my friends are in touch. Wayne Rash might know.

It's nice that you want to know. I tend to imagine that nobody cares about us old fart journalists.

As far as copyright and patent laws go, in the U.S., they are there only and specifically to implement the U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8, Cls. 8

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This is the sole raison d'être for copyright and patent laws on the U.S. books. If those laws poorly support their mission as outlined in the Constitution, they should be repealed and replaced by laws that do the job right. It is my view, that the copyright and patent laws on the books do little to nothing to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyright protection lasts too long, and patent laws do little to promote progress as written.

The blatant opportunist makes a case for U.S. patents to make economic sense if sales are to exceed 12M USD. I agree with him, and he further shows that for most small businesses patents make no sense whatsoever. This is reason enough, for me, to argue that patent laws as written don't do the job they are supposed to do. Either we claim small businesses do nothing to further the "Progress of Science and useful Arts", and thus they need no protection by limited-duration exclusivity, or the laws are missing their Constitutional Target.

As far as copyright and patent laws go, in the U.S., they are there only and specifically to implement the U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8, Cls. 8

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This is the sole raison d'être for copyright and patent laws on the U.S. books. If those laws poorly support their mission as outlined in the Constitution, they should be repealed and replaced by laws that do the job right. It is my view, that the copyright and patent laws on the books do little to nothing to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyright protection lasts too long, and patent laws do little to promote progress as written.

The blatant opportunist makes a case for U.S. patents to make economic sense if sales are to exceed 12M USD. I agree with him, and he further shows that for most small businesses patents make no sense whatsoever. This is reason enough, for me, to argue that patent laws as written don't do the job they are supposed to do. Either we claim small businesses do nothing to further the "Progress of Science and useful Arts", and thus they need no protection by limited-duration exclusivity, or the laws are missing their Constitutional Target.

Read his entire site

Sadly, tunnels large enough to carry trains, as modern subways will prove, are prohibitivley expensive.

however, compressed air is a good energy storage medium.

Assuming a 900 foot by 300 foot by 300 foot cavern was filled with compressed air with a pressure of 300 bars, would have a potential energy of roughly 50 gigawatt hours. (source: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf) Or enough to run the entire united states for about an hour. This is a massive pool of energy, and significantly more cost effective than a battery.

HOWEVER, there lies a rub. When you compress air, you generate a massive amount of heat as the thermal energy stored in the air is highly compressed. This heat energy, unless properly reclaimed and stored (I.E. In a molten salt bath) just leaks away, stealing a huge chunk of the potential energy with it. When the air is uncompressed, there is significantly less heat energy stored in the air, and thus the expanded gas is very cold. This limits how far it can expand again, and creates a formidable problem in the form of condensation.

What you need to do to get EFFICENT compressed air storage, is either store the heat in an efficent manner, and add it back to the compressed air. OR you can gradually warm it back up to room temperature through a heat exchanger as it expands.

All in all, the challenges to attaining decent efficency are considerable.

What might be an easier way to achieve the same energy storage using similar principles, is to turn that same cavern they created into a giant hydro dam. Basically, create an enclosure of equal size below it. When energy needs to be stored, pump the water up to the higher cavern. When energy needs to be released, release it through hydro turbines into the lower cavern.

Postscript can definitely be hand coded. Using it to produce a complete document is not for the faint of heart but it's no worse than writing Lisp. Once you have a library of layout routines set up it is pretty easy to do. There is a gentleman, Don Lancaster, who has been putting out newsletters for years using handwritten code. Here are some examples.

And to the other responder. PDF may carry over the Postscript concept of a "form" as a macro but I was referring to "form entry" which has long been a part of PDF and it predates the inclusion of Javascript. There's nothing precluding the use of a limited subset of Postscript as a validation language. You wouldn't need to have support for any of the graphical operators or file I/O. The core Postscript interpreter is far simpler and hence easier to secure than Javascript.

Postscript can definitely be hand coded. Using it to produce a complete document is not for the faint of heart but it's no worse than writing Lisp. Once you have a library of layout routines set up it is pretty easy to do. There is a gentleman, Don Lancaster, who has been putting out newsletters for years using handwritten code. Here are some examples.

And to the other responder. PDF may carry over the Postscript concept of a "form" as a macro but I was referring to "form entry" which has long been a part of PDF and it predates the inclusion of Javascript. There's nothing precluding the use of a limited subset of Postscript as a validation language. You wouldn't need to have support for any of the graphical operators or file I/O. The core Postscript interpreter is far simpler and hence easier to secure than Javascript.

If you're going to make money, it'd be best to have product to sell, and use the blog to get information to people who might want your product. Read Don Lancaster's, "Incredible Secret Money Machine", available at http://www.tinaja.com/

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf is a good read by Don Lancaster (writer of the "TTL Cookbook" - yeah, that Don Lancaster) and why he considers the patent system to be a games that is stacked against the small player.

Stirling engines will never be economical.

Engineering Ratholes.pdf
"there is a key component to a Stirling engine that nobody - but
nobody - has figured out how to build yet. It is called a
regenerator. Any regenerator has to be long and thin and
short and fat. Not to mention being an excellent insulator
and a superb conductor." -Don Lancaster

Also see www.tinaja.com/glib/hack64.pdf for a review of the dismal Carnot efficiency of modest temperature drops.
You can get hot water from cooling PVs, but running heat engines is impractical unless they're really, really cheap.

JS in PDFs is silly IMO, but I have to point out that PS (but not PDF) is a Turing-complete language.

http://www.tinaja.com/post01.asp

Also, Don Lancaster has some useful stuff in his links section http://www.tinaja.com/

Looks like most slash-dotters don't understand why PV are not going to be powering the grid any time soon. If you really want to understand, I advise going to http://www.tinaja.com/ and search on PV.

In the mean time - this struck me as being on the same level of wasting recourses as the failed pig-iron production of the communist era. Some things don't do well on the small scale (small is often not at all beautiful if you have any hope of being practical).

The very best in PV are tying to get to $1/watt (not there). The reality is they will not be practical unless they can reach $0.10/watt. This magnitude of improvement has fundamentals to overcome.

See http://www.tinaja.com/glib/morenrgf.pdf for a tutorial the underlying math. And why today's pv panels are TOTALLY POINTLESS in that they clearly remain net energy sinks. At present, the cost of the synchronous inverter alone will often consume more than 100 percent of the value of the electricity fed through it. Assuming a panel cost of ZERO.

Most of the kits you find at Radio Shack are firmly rooted in the 60's and 70's, where the most high tech item in the kit is the venerable old 555 timer and maybe a transistor plus 50 cents worth of resisters and a couple capacitors and an LED or two.

One who dismisses discrete electronics in favor of microcontrollers and other "high tech items" has left the path of enlightenment. At some point, you are going to want to use that microcontroller to actually control something.

Want to interface with a $5 surplus LCD display? No problem with an Arduino. Try that with a 555 timer. Want to interface with a cheap GPS module? No problem with an Arduino. Let's see you do that with discrete components.

Learning electronics is about having fun, and with microcontrollers you can have lots of fun fast. And you don't have to give up making spaceship sounds with a 555 timer, either. You can just add the sounds to your spokePOV and really impress your neighbors (and your kids). :-)

Most of the kits you find at Radio Shack are firmly rooted in the 60's and 70's, where the most high tech item in the kit is the venerable old 555 timer and maybe a transistor plus 50 cents worth of resisters and a couple capacitors and an LED or two.

One who dismisses discrete electronics in favor of microcontrollers and other "high tech items" has left the path of enlightenment. At some point, you are going to want to use that microcontroller to actually control something.

Want to interface with a $5 surplus LCD display? No problem with an Arduino. Try that with a 555 timer. Want to interface with a cheap GPS module? No problem with an Arduino. Let's see you do that with discrete components.

Learning electronics is about having fun, and with microcontrollers you can have lots of fun fast. And you don't have to give up making spaceship sounds with a 555 timer, either. You can just add the sounds to your spokePOV and really impress your neighbors (and your kids). :-)

There is, however, a significant difference between using two point and four point barbed wire for speaker cables. Per http://www.tinaja.com/glib/marcia.pdf

Also, here's a site that has 15 points against using hydrogren as fuel. Number 7 is really interesting.

7. There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen.

"The Art of Electronics" is great. You might also want to look up Nuts and Volts magazine http://www.nutsvolts.com/, Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, http://www.circellar.com/ and pick up a couple of Don Lancaster's "Cookbook" series http://www.tinaja.com/. Steve and Don are hardware gurus that have been around since the beginning of home computers, and there is much insight to be gained. It is an odd thing, but often older books on 'obsolete' technology are easier to grasp, and give background no longer explained in modern volumes. For instance, I have a circa 1920's transformer handbook that speaks clearly on topics that are either glossed over, or not covered at all in many newer introductory texts.

You're correct, but the history books I had in school didn't spend too much time on invention, mostly they were about politics.

For an excellent history lesson about inventions, check out James Burke's connections http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206710516&sr=8-1 either the book, or the DVD set.

The books we read in school were very dry and didn't emphasis the interconnectedness of all inventions. Even your summary of what Edison did, left out the fact that he had a lab employing hundreds of people. Edison didn't try tens of thousands of materials, he had assistants doing most of the work, while he supervised. Even though Edison disdained "book learning", he employed many PhDs to help with the process.

You're right about the many people who may have made wires glow, but didn't capitalize on it. Hero had invented a steam engine in ancient Greece, but didn't put it to any practical use.

Also check out the writing of Don Lancaster. http://tinaja.com/ He says that ideas used to be dime a dozen, but now they are penny a pound in hundred pound lots. His point is that people think that their ideas are worth something when it's the implementation that makes a great product. Myths about the invention process are what fuels patent trolls. They seem to think that because they have a great idea on paper, they should be able to sue the people who actually put the work into turning an idea into a product. The invention myths need to be dispelled so that judges and juries will send the trolls packing.

When I'm doing quick and dirty stuff I use PDF, but when I want real publication-quality material nothing but postscript will do the trick.

When I'm doing quick and dirty stuff I use PDF, but when I want real publication-quality material nothing but postscript will do the trick.

http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp

Anyone who has a basic knowledge of physics knows hydrogen is stupid. If you have electricity, use batteries - you can skip the 400 pounds of ice and twenty five other major problems with trying to convert good electricity into hydrogen and back again. It will never work for terrestrial applications. See: http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2005/12/hydrogen-a gain-tweedle-dumb-and.html and http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp Hydrogen is dumb. Hydrogen is a bad idea.

Lancaster. Don Lancaster. The Hackintosh guy?

Don has already figured that out. Years ago.

http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp

A third is that the economic breakeven needed to recover patent costs
is something between $12,000,000.00 and $40,000,000 in gross sales.

It is ludicrously absurd to try and patent a million dollar idea.

If the likes of MS or Adobe are the ones doing the reverse engineering, the answer is "not much". A patent only gives you the ability to sue others for using your invention. It doesn't mean you are going to prevail when the large corporate drags things out for years. Don Lancaster has a different take on being anti-patent than the typical slashdotter. He basically maintains that for most inventions it isn't worth it. Because of the legal costs of defending it even a "million dollar idea" isn't worth patenting. A 50 million dollar idea MIGHT be worth patenting.

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf

As an EE who started off with one of those 50-in-one kits when I was 8, I have a few recommendations. I had a 200-in-one, but the more impressive projects on it required so many wires it was nigh-impossible to get things to stay working. Put one in and two fall out.

You can start with one of those kits, but once you get to the point where you'll really learn what you're doing, go look for books and kits separately. Look for books by Forrest Mims III and Don Lancaster (TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook are classics). Check their sites out as well.

As for parts sources, for online shopping, I'd recommend Digi-Key. Jameco is a little pricey, but they have some really interesting parts, including a lot of older stuff. All Electronics is a place I used to buy from a lot; they have a lot of manufacturer surplus parts, so it's kind of like shopping in a flea market or surplus auction. Another surplus shop is MPJA. Newark and Mouser are good places to look when you want some specific part that Digi-Key doesn't have.

For starters, you'll want to buy a modular breadboard, and one of the pre-cut wire kits for them. Or, if you want to blow some more dough, you might want to get one of the Analog Design Lab or Digital Design Lab things that has a bunch of things like power supplies, LEDs, and switches integrated into it already. Also look for parts assortments, like resistor and capacitor assortments (e.g. Digi-Key items RS125-ND and PHD1-KIT-ND). If you're going to be doing digital work, you'll probably want to get lots (20 or so) of 10K resistors (for pullups) and 0.1 uF capacitors (for decoupling).

Radio Shack is where you go as a last resort. Their selection is lousy and prices are worse.

Nothing is wrong with having ideas, but they're just not that valuable. The people who come up with the ideas are far more valuable, but a lot of them don't even get off the ground because they do self-defeating things like (for example) insisting on confidentiality that job applicants (or worse, investors) sign NDAs prior to an interview/sales pitch.

Another common mistake is to get patents, only to find out that people violate your patents anyway, and you can't afford to prosecute them, because you don't have any revenue, because you spent too much of your time and money on getting the patents rather than on developing a product that actually sells.

and at least half my stuff was working to some degree by the time I was almost 13 and killing transistors.

the demise of popular electronics and the slate of similar magazines, in which you had both semi-interesting one or two element circuits to learn off of as welll as more advanced functional items is badly missed. as is heathkit. junko heathkits like the $8 learn to solder kit are selling at a 2-1/2 times premium unopened on eBay. items like the SB-2xx ham linear amps, unopened, sell well over a thousand bucks. the "220" was a $350 kit back in the day.

there are plenty of sites with a little information, but it's not pulled together like it once was. the guru's lair site, http://www.tinaja.com/default.asp , last redoubt of the venerable don lancaster, has some interesting stuff, but mostly it's his experiments on postscript and stuff like that from almost 20 years back.

mostly what's out there new and fresh is basic stamp and PIC projects. advanced stuff at www.circuitcellar.com , which should be familiar to those old Byte-hounds in the audience.

no good parts sources in the twin cities, for instance, that you can rely on, since AEI moved out of downtown mpls. you have to use www.digikey.com and www.mouser.com for much of anything, as well as specialty places like www.rfparts.com and www.tubesandmore.com .

The biggest thing hindering the development of a "Santa Claus machine" http://www.tinaja.com/santa01.html imho is design. The biggest problem with the design side of things is user interface.

If I were talking to a custom furniture maker I would be gesticulating. This device plus a holograph might provide an awesome way to design furniture. eg. I want it this high. Like this? No, a little lower. Like this? Can we slope the armrest down a bit here? Like this? etc. etc.

The other problem is that most rapid prototyping machines work with only one material and most of the things we use are made of several materials. That's another problem though. I still see the user interface as being the hardest problem.

I worked for Pacific Press Service in Tokyo developing photo copyright and library tech until 94. I first saw a photograph search engine developed by Fujitsu around 92-93 I believe. It required the user to draw the type of image composition very roughly with a mouse and paintbox. So you would draw a horizon line, fill the bottom with blue and draw a yellow circle above if you wanted photos of the sea and sun. No wavelets at that time.

I then corresponded briefly with Ingrid Daubechies of AT&T who brought wavelets to the U.S., and was kind enough to send some of her papers. Wavelets are neat because it is like getting a paintbox full of different waveforms, localized as another poster mentions not just a fourier of the entire image. Anyway they are much better known now, so you can find it on the net.

This is not really the same as Barnsley's fractal compression one startup worked on around that time IIRC. They basically had a library of fractals which would be matched to image features, and once you had covered the entire image with them you would be able to zoom into it infinitely, since fractals are self-similar. You wouldn't necessarily get new detail but it would fool you into thinking you were. (I wonder if they liscensed it to anyone). They claimed 400:1 compression, etc. I don't know if they were the basis of LivePicture or if that was wavelet based.

These technologies all have two things in common, which is selecting an algorithmic strategy for talking about images, and storing it so efficiently that the data can be found quickly. The old Fujitsu system ran on a NEWS workstation IIRC, and it was blisteringly fast compared to any system I have ever seen. Only problem is doodles all look pretty much the same unless you are talented and patient.

It seems PNI (Picture Network Interactive)'s natural language recognition text searching for photos was the best, it was just text but used software supposedly developed for the White House. Only thing was they wanted to take over the entire industry with online contracts (this was around 1993) so everyone hated them. Nice tech though.

Anyway, wavelets may not be the entire solution but certainly they are a very useful way to describe data (not just a photo) and undoubtedly have lots of potential applications that just haven't materialized yet. Here's some tidbits Lancaster's links ImgSeek
  Perl Haar decomposition and seeking
  Blitzwave lib
  wvlt
  wvlt #2
  Wavelet.org
  WSQ used for FBI fingerprinting