a) modern LCD panels do not have a square pulse. In order to achieve fast switching times, the frame-to-frame differences are actually overdriven. Say you are currently at pixel value 100, and want to go to 150. You would actually drive the pixel at 170 or so, such that at the end of the new frame, the time-averaged transmission over the frame interval is the desired 150. The numbers are made up of course, but the principle holds.
b) CRT phosphors have a non-zero decay period, but they are actually fairly fast. So much so, that you can measure easily where the electron gun is at any given point in time. This is how light pens work (used to be the input device of choice before the mouse and touchscreens, now http://www.fastpoint.com/ seems to be the only manufacturer), or how security researchers manage to read the screen content from a reflection on the wall: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf
You can write in your standard contract whatever you want, people will still call your service hotline. And of course they will swear that they did not make any modifications whatsoever, no sir. If you don't believe that, just go around and read recommendations made in slashdot articles like this one http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=248323&c id=19824055
With cars, you have the advantage that you pretty mach have to take it back to the dealership to get any service done. The expectations for electronic devices are different, especially when it is a suspected software problem.
Yeah right. Commercial GPU vendors have thousands of hardware designers and architects, and the resources to fill these positions with top people that have years of experience. Not only that, but the big players have a 10+ year headstart in designing GPUs, in an industry that heavily relies on experience and trade secrets rather than published textbook solutions.
OGP is an admirable effort, but it will be years before they get anywhere close to developing seriously competitive hardware. And that is if they manage to work around all the existing patents, which is at least questionable.
In the case of universities, it gets worse. A lot of universities both in North America and in Europe have policies that all code developed by faculty or students belongs to the university (as an employer), but may be released as open source if the author desires.
So say I (as a university employee) am working on a small part of a large open source project. Unknown to me, some other person adds code to another part of the project, which violates one of my universities' patents or copyrights. Since I I am not aware of this, I redistribute that code along with my own changes. The university is now a contributor (it owns the code I write) to the project, and has redistributed (through university servers) code that contains code voids one of its patents.
How long do you think it will take universities to implement policies that are more restrictive in terms of contributions to open source projects? What do you think the impact will be on the progress of open source projects if university contributions slow down?
The problem is, under GPLv3, you can't prevent people form installing their own versions of things, even if you use the unmodified samba. Allowing people to install their own stuff is a maintencance nightmare, and will kill a small business.
For some reason, Big Blue seems to have decided to side with the public good rather than fear open-source as most corporations do. I don't fully understand how a monster company like IBM can act like this, while virtually every other huge corporation out there seems to be guided by Dilbert's boss. IBM is still a corporation, and is therefore legally bound to maximize shareholder value. So you can bet that they see benefits for their own business, although the "public good" may be a nice side effect.
So what might the benefits befor IBM? Well, IBM probably realizes that, unlike Microsoft, they are not is a position to shove proprietary formats and "standards" down people's throat. If they were to introduce "standards" with patent-protected components, then the industry would just simply develop alternative solutions, thereby creating new standards that IBM would most likely end up having to adopt eventually. Making their IP available is nothing more than IBM's attempt to get their own formats accepted as the de-facto standards in the industry, which gives IBM a nice head-start over everybody else.
So with this, and the PR they get over this move, it seems like IBM does gain quite a bit from this step. That doesn't mean it isn't a good move for all of us (it is), but there you go.
Sigh. I never said anything about "drain on society" or anything like that. Look, you can do with your own time whatever you please, but why on earth would you keep up a business relationship with a company that forces you to make dozens of phone calls instead of spending the time with your kids? If it was me, I would have stopped calling after 2 attempts, and send them up to 3 registered mail letters (first explaining the problem and setting a deadline for its resolution, second reminder and warning of cancellation, third notice of cancellation). Then you cancel your direct deposit, and bingo, you are out of there. Instead of you suing them, they'd have to sue you at that point, and you'd be in a good position if you kept records of all communications.
That company is essentially forcing you to work to get your money back, except they pay less than minimum wage. Think about it. You'd be better off forgetting about the extra charges and instead working at starbucks for a few hours. I am not suggesting that is what you should do, but if you look at it this way, it is just patently clear that you want to stay away from that company.
It was dozens of calls a month. Calls to fix errors and calls to ask why the promised changes weren't done. As for switching? Not many alternatives, and I didn't want to get screwed by an ETF. Well, aren't you glad that they are cancelling for you, then?
Yeah, great, I guess I'll let any company just fuck me in the ass only a little. You are already fucked if you are willing to waste your time on an activity that is neither fun nor lucrative (I assume you aren't making the phone calls for fun. If you are a phone-fetishist, then by all means go for it).
OK, so you had to call once a month for 6 months. Honestly, if the services is that crappy, you should switch to another provider, but that is besides the point. The point is: once a month is very much less than an average of 25 times a month.
Put this in perspective: 25 calls a month for 6 months is 150 calls, or a call per dollar you would have saved. You are probably spending at least 10 minutes on each call (waiting, then explaining the situation, then them looking up the file, or possibly passing you on to somebody else). That would be less than minimum wage, i.e. really not worth your time!
I agree with the gist of your comment, but:
-it has a very similar social, economic, and political environment to the US which makes it good for business Actually, the social and political environment is rather different from the US - Canada (and especially the Vancouver area) is way more liberal even though the current government is "conservative" (they are not by US standards).
Microsoft is clearly opening shop in Vancouver since the two universities (UBC and SFU) produce excellently trained individuals, and the city is just 2 hours from Redmond. It would be kind of silly for MS to move to Canada for cost savings, given the higher taxes here and the current weakness of the US dollar.
Hardware doesn't "drive" software, but it enables it. Trust me, there are plenty of things people would like to do, except they are to expensive right now. If you take a game engine and reimplement it to use full ray-traced global illumination rather than Direct X, you'll easily absorb a factor 20-100 increase in compute power.
Oh, and if you increase the screen resolution that much, you're going to be talking about a $20,000 monitor. Actually, I paid around $10k for a 9 MPixel IBM Big Bertha display in 2000. And that cost would come down quite a bit once economies of scale kick in. It is not fundamentally more expensive to manufacture a 24'' diagonal display with 300DPI resolution than it is to manufacture a 24'' 75DPI display, since most of the manufacturing cost depends on the screen area, not the pixel count. The reason why high resolution displays are more expensive right now is that there is no market, which in turn is because you pretty much need multiple graphics cards to serve that display with any kind of decent refresh rate. As a result, the only customers for these displays are research labs and other specialty users. Once you have the compute power to do 3D graphics with a cheapish GPU on such displays, demand will go up drastically, and prices will come down.
Once you have compute power, you'll find a way to use it. If you are a gamer, then this kind of performance gain will be used to roll the GPU back into the CPU, increase your screen resolution to 10-20 MPixels, increase the rendering quality, and improve the game AI.
Once you are done with all that, you are going to be back asking for more.
Downloading music is a form of protest, and the school has given in to the enemy of the students' freedoms because it will save them some money on bandwidth, or so someone has convinced them. Nonsense. The vast majority of people download music because it saves them money, not because they have any illusions of staging a protest. But even if you were right, downloading copyrighted material is illegal, and nobody, including a university, is obliged to cover your ass when you break a law.
The University benefits financially if it scares the students into not downloading anything in the future. Don't for one moment think that this isn't the exact and only reason why they've surrendered. Is the university worried about money? Of course they are, and for good reason! I am not donating to UW since I have no affilation with it. I am, however donating to my formeralma mater. If I learned that they wasted my donations for supporting illegal file sharing, then I'd stop my donations immediately, simple as that!
The fact remains that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution openly declare that GOD and God alone gave you your freedoms, they are only protecting them. This is a violation of those God-given freedoms, for the sake of profit. 1) you are not really furthering your argument by resorting to superstitions.
2) your opinion that copyright law violates the US constitution is not supported by any evidence. Certainly the legal expertes do not seem to agree with this statement. Now, you are free to have your own opionions on this, but independent of your beliefs you are still subject to the law as it stands. If you ignore that, you suffer the consequences. Tough luck.
On first sight, the situation may seem positive, but unfortunatly the quality of the "prior art" submissions is dysmal.
For example, if you read even just the intro of "Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process", it is immediately clear that the authors use the term "process" in a non-software meaning (i.e. a production process or something similar - they use a power plant as an example). Yet two of the supposed prior art submissions refer to operating system process monitors (one wanker actually uploaded a.exe file). Most of the other "prior art" submission have already been rebuked by other participants.
I predict a very fast end to this pilot test unless the quality improves drastically. If you are gonna comment, you should at least bother reading the patent, for christ sake.
You are right in that GPL and Open Source in general do not require you to distribute your work to everybody. You could definitely restrict distribution to paying customers as you say.
However, even in this case you would not have control over what that paying customer does that code. They would in fact be free to redistribute the code to anybody else. So as soon as you give the code to one party under an Open Source license, ypu kind of have let the genie out of the bottle, and the work is for all practical purposes publicly available.
What on earth are you talking about? Patent applications are already published on the USPTO website. The whole idea behind the patenting process is that the full method needs to be disclosed at a level suficient for reproduction. If you want a trade secret then don't patent waht you are doing!
Re:Why this will never be available ...
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 1
And what makes you think that MS didn't buy alicense to SIFT like so many other companies?
I think part of the problem is that in the IT world, the organizational structure creates a conflict of interest for IT professionals: the same people who are responsible for helping users and providing services are also responsible for security. Everywhere else in the corporate world those two jobs are separated. For good reason: the people who provide services should have only the benefit of the user/customer in mind, while the security people need to be able to get nast when bad things happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, you are wrong on two counts:
a) modern LCD panels do not have a square pulse. In order to achieve fast switching times, the frame-to-frame differences are actually overdriven. Say you are currently at pixel value 100, and want to go to 150. You would actually drive the pixel at 170 or so, such that at the end of the new frame, the time-averaged transmission over the frame interval is the desired 150. The numbers are made up of course, but the principle holds.
b) CRT phosphors have a non-zero decay period, but they are actually fairly fast. So much so, that you can measure easily where the electron gun is at any given point in time. This is how light pens work (used to be the input device of choice before the mouse and touchscreens, now http://www.fastpoint.com/ seems to be the only manufacturer), or how security researchers manage to read the screen content from a reflection on the wall: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf
You can write in your standard contract whatever you want, people will still call your service hotline. And of course they will swear that they did not make any modifications whatsoever, no sir. If you don't believe that, just go around and read recommendations made in slashdot articles like this one http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=248323&c id=19824055
With cars, you have the advantage that you pretty mach have to take it back to the dealership to get any service done. The expectations for electronic devices are different, especially when it is a suspected software problem.
Yeah right. Commercial GPU vendors have thousands of hardware designers and architects, and the resources to fill these positions with top people that have years of experience. Not only that, but the big players have a 10+ year headstart in designing GPUs, in an industry that heavily relies on experience and trade secrets rather than published textbook solutions.
OGP is an admirable effort, but it will be years before they get anywhere close to developing seriously competitive hardware. And that is if they manage to work around all the existing patents, which is at least questionable.
In the case of universities, it gets worse. A lot of universities both in North America and in Europe have policies that all code developed by faculty or students belongs to the university (as an employer), but may be released as open source if the author desires.
So say I (as a university employee) am working on a small part of a large open source project. Unknown to me, some other person adds code to another part of the project, which violates one of my universities' patents or copyrights. Since I I am not aware of this, I redistribute that code along with my own changes. The university is now a contributor (it owns the code I write) to the project, and has redistributed (through university servers) code that contains code voids one of its patents.
How long do you think it will take universities to implement policies that are more restrictive in terms of contributions to open source projects? What do you think the impact will be on the progress of open source projects if university contributions slow down?
The problem is, under GPLv3, you can't prevent people form installing their own versions of things, even if you use the unmodified samba. Allowing people to install their own stuff is a maintencance nightmare, and will kill a small business.
So what might the benefits befor IBM? Well, IBM probably realizes that, unlike Microsoft, they are not is a position to shove proprietary formats and "standards" down people's throat. If they were to introduce "standards" with patent-protected components, then the industry would just simply develop alternative solutions, thereby creating new standards that IBM would most likely end up having to adopt eventually. Making their IP available is nothing more than IBM's attempt to get their own formats accepted as the de-facto standards in the industry, which gives IBM a nice head-start over everybody else.
So with this, and the PR they get over this move, it seems like IBM does gain quite a bit from this step. That doesn't mean it isn't a good move for all of us (it is), but there you go.
That company is essentially forcing you to work to get your money back, except they pay less than minimum wage. Think about it. You'd be better off forgetting about the extra charges and instead working at starbucks for a few hours. I am not suggesting that is what you should do, but if you look at it this way, it is just patently clear that you want to stay away from that company.
Put this in perspective: 25 calls a month for 6 months is 150 calls, or a call per dollar you would have saved. You are probably spending at least 10 minutes on each call (waiting, then explaining the situation, then them looking up the file, or possibly passing you on to somebody else). That would be less than minimum wage, i.e. really not worth your time!
Microsoft is clearly opening shop in Vancouver since the two universities (UBC and SFU) produce excellently trained individuals, and the city is just 2 hours from Redmond. It would be kind of silly for MS to move to Canada for cost savings, given the higher taxes here and the current weakness of the US dollar.
IANAL, but I'd wager a guess that you'd need an ISBN or ISSN number for your publication for it to be counted as such.
Once you are done with all that, you are going to be back asking for more.
2) your opinion that copyright law violates the US constitution is not supported by any evidence. Certainly the legal expertes do not seem to agree with this statement. Now, you are free to have your own opionions on this, but independent of your beliefs you are still subject to the law as it stands. If you ignore that, you suffer the consequences. Tough luck.
For example, if you read even just the intro of "Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process", it is immediately clear that the authors use the term "process" in a non-software meaning (i.e. a production process or something similar - they use a power plant as an example). Yet two of the supposed prior art submissions refer to operating system process monitors (one wanker actually uploaded a .exe file). Most of the other "prior art" submission have already been rebuked by other participants.
I predict a very fast end to this pilot test unless the quality improves drastically. If you are gonna comment, you should at least bother reading the patent, for christ sake.
However, even in this case you would not have control over what that paying customer does that code. They would in fact be free to redistribute the code to anybody else. So as soon as you give the code to one party under an Open Source license, ypu kind of have let the genie out of the bottle, and the work is for all practical purposes publicly available.
Should the equation: sum(1..n) = (n^2-n)/2 be something someone can own, just because it requires some creativity to prove it?
;-)
Sure, you can own that one, as long as I can own sum(1..n) = (n^2+n)/2
What on earth are you talking about? Patent applications are already published on the USPTO website. The whole idea behind the patenting process is that the full method needs to be disclosed at a level suficient for reproduction. If you want a trade secret then don't patent waht you are doing!
And what makes you think that MS didn't buy alicense to SIFT like so many other companies?
Do you find that this approach has worked for you?
That's because nobody really ever fully plans a very large network. They start small, and then they grow.
I think part of the problem is that in the IT world, the organizational structure creates a conflict of interest for IT professionals: the same people who are responsible for helping users and providing services are also responsible for security. Everywhere else in the corporate world those two jobs are separated. For good reason: the people who provide services should have only the benefit of the user/customer in mind, while the security people need to be able to get nast when bad things happen.