TIFF is about one of the worst formats for archiving images imaginable; I have yet to see two fully interoperable, independent TIFF implementations.
As for "encryption", people change encryption standards not because they like to, but because old encryption gets weak. If you're going to pick an encryption standard and stick with it, you might as well not bother with encryption at all.
more likely this and other cases will make microsoft start patenting more and more trivial crap.
And how is that going to help them? They're still infringing this patent and Vertical isn't interested in cross-licensing. Furthermore, even if patents were better prior art than--well, prior art--even Microsoft doesn't have enough money to patent all the trivial crap in the world.
Getting sued over patent infringement is no reason to go patenting things yourself: you can still be sued for infringement anyway. And I doubt Vertical Computer Systems will be interested in a patent cross-license agreement (and they are monopolistic anyway).
Microsoft patents a lot because they hope to be able to kill open source competition with it--open source competition they have not been able to outcompete otherwise and where their usual monopolistic tricks have failed as well.
Vertical's patent is, of course, bogus. But I do like Microsoft getting hit by these kinds of lawsuits; maybe sooner or later they'll see that software patents aren't the way out for them.
Good insight. Now, rather than whining, do something useful: write a Greasemonkey script that recognizes these common cases and filters them out, leaving the interesting and novel content.
The term "Artificial Intelligence" also includes algorithms that solve problems that are merely difficult - things like combinatorial searches (A* and min/max searches, in particular) - and the general approach of attempting to model an AI character's actions based on their state and their goals, rather than going just for the desired effect of making them reasonably tough game opponents.
Knowing about "A* and min/max searches" is about as useful in AI these days as knowing about relays is for writing Java enterprise applications.
The field has moved forward over the last 40 years. In fact, it's kind of odd, but mainstream computer science is really going gaga over old software techniques developed in AI: garbage collection, AOP, dynamic typing, reflection, IDEs, business rules, ontologies, theorem provers, etc. were largely developed by AI researchers and are only now going mainstream.
As a programmer, I can model a process pretty easily. I can model objects fairly well. What I can't model is something that is nebulous and undefined.
Yes, but that's a problem with the education programmers receive, not with the world. There are good techniques for modeling those processes, you simply weren't taught them.
"Many people who go on murdering rampages play violent video games, therefore we should ban violent video games." (Note: even that assertion is unproven.)
What about...
"Many people who go on murdering rampages were brought up Christian, therefore we should ban Christianity." (Note: even though Christianity proclaims non-violence, it has been one of the most violent and corrupt religions in history.)
"Many people who go on murdering rampages were watching television and movies, therefore we should ban television and movies." (And I suspect Mr. Ed and Teletubbies as dangerous as Lethal Weapon 13; at least the former always want to make me scream.)
So, let's make a deal: I'm OK with banning violent games if at the same time, we ban Christianity, movies, and television. While I don't think the violent game ban will have much effect, banning Christianity, movies, and television will likely be a big improvement for society. What about it?
Airplanes are (supposed to be) private possessions of private companies.
They are privately-owned public places. The "public", in case the meaning of the word eludes you, means that you are in the same place as a lot of other people that you would probably ordinarily not feel comfortable sharing, say, stories of your erectile dysfunction with.
If you don't like a airline that supports cell phone use, you are free to take your business elsewhere.
Fortunately, that won't be necessary because almost no airline supports cell phone use--deliberately. So, if you don't like the fact that you can't talk on airlines, go take your business elsewhere. Or better yet, choose not to fly at all.
Sorry, but noise canceling headphones just don't work on voices. Perhaps you're confusing the switch setting--they actually tend to enhance voices by reducing background noise relative to the voices.
These "oh, and you can run Linux, too" are Microsoft marketing gimmicks that are thrown into the deal. It's easy to tack these onto "oh, we give you $300M and we give you our patents, too" or "let's cross-license, and, oh, that means you can use Linux, too".
Microsoft is trying to create the false impression that there is a significant patent risk when there actually isn't: first of all, any patent infringement that Microsoft were to sue over would be removed immediately, and secondly, the damage from such a lawsuit for Microsoft would be enormous.
In any case, GPLv3 will hopefully stop this nonsense.
A show of hands if you are surprised by dumbass anti-government comments by Slashdot-pseudo-libertarians who haven't read the RTFA.
(Since you probably still haven't read TFA, here's a hint: the corruption is in the companies, not the government. The government--that is, you and me--are getting defrauded.)
The US is doing a good job with making currency hard to forge, subject to the constraints they have to operate under, including a boatload of backwards compatibility requirements.
As for "one standard", you got it backwards: the fewer different documents there are, the easier it is to detect forgeries and the harder it is to forge.
I don't understand how this "observer" would be unbiased. If he sees a grand conspiracy, he's not unbiased.
So, you're saying that anybody who concludes that there is a conspiracy cannot be unbiased? Geez, that reasoning would be great for criminals: "hey, the judge was obviously biased, since he found me guilty". That excuse is as frequent as it is baseless.
Well, that gets into the issue of how you even establish under what license people open open source software.
Courts are likely not to let people get away with deliberate obfuscation or trickery like that. Besides, if the code hasn't changed much, how is the guy even going to prove that?
That law ranks up there with trying to legislate pi to equal 3.
Seriously, people complain about illegal employment, illegal immigration, identity theft, and terrorist watch lists that block people by last name.
Well, guys, if you want to fix that, you need reliable, hard-to-forge identification. And the people who need to carry that identification are the people who are entitled to services and privileges--the citizens.
You're making some huge mistakes. First, the cost of office software is nothing for a corporation, compared to its other expenses (taxes, salaries, hardware, office bills and so on and so on).
$200 saved per employee is $200 saved. Big corporations are as sensitive to that as little corporations.
Second, those Google Apps are suitable for some purposes, but for heavy or advanced usage, they're totally unfit.
Neither is Microsoft Office; Microsoft Office is merely bloated and slow. Most people don't know what "heavy and advanced usage" is (you sure don't), and that is why Google Apps will be good enough for them (Google needs to do a little more work but not a lot), just like Microsoft Office is good enough for them.
So far we're looking at a bunch of online toys trying to pretend they're Office. They will replace Office exactly as the "web OS" sites will replace Windows.
MS Office and MS Windows are already dead, they just don't know it yet. Google isn't the only thing that's killing them, but it is certainly one nail of many in their coffin.
People always post averages like they represent statistics of significant variance.
Variance or spread doesn't matter; asymmetry of a distribution does.
If you take a 100 people and one of them makes a 1000 dollars and the rest make 1 dollar, the total will be 1099, so divided across 100 everyone made 10.99 right?
If you take 100 people, one of them makes 1000 dollars, one of them loses 998 dollars, and the rest make 1 dollar, than the average will be 1.
Slashdot Mirror
TIFF is about one of the worst formats for archiving images imaginable; I have yet to see two fully interoperable, independent TIFF implementations.
As for "encryption", people change encryption standards not because they like to, but because old encryption gets weak. If you're going to pick an encryption standard and stick with it, you might as well not bother with encryption at all.
Chuck Norris's toe nail clippings?
Are you trying to be funny? Microsoft didn't invent any of that (neither did Apple, for that matter).
Furthermore, who are they going to threaten and with what? That company probably doesn't care, they just want money from Microsoft.
more likely this and other cases will make microsoft start patenting more and more trivial crap.
And how is that going to help them? They're still infringing this patent and Vertical isn't interested in cross-licensing. Furthermore, even if patents were better prior art than--well, prior art--even Microsoft doesn't have enough money to patent all the trivial crap in the world.
Getting sued over patent infringement is no reason to go patenting things yourself: you can still be sued for infringement anyway. And I doubt Vertical Computer Systems will be interested in a patent cross-license agreement (and they are monopolistic anyway).
Microsoft patents a lot because they hope to be able to kill open source competition with it--open source competition they have not been able to outcompete otherwise and where their usual monopolistic tricks have failed as well.
Vertical's patent is, of course, bogus. But I do like Microsoft getting hit by these kinds of lawsuits; maybe sooner or later they'll see that software patents aren't the way out for them.
The iPhone has KHTML, and that's powerful enough to display Google Docs. So, it can load, display, and edit Microsoft Office files.
Good insight. Now, rather than whining, do something useful: write a Greasemonkey script that recognizes these common cases and filters them out, leaving the interesting and novel content.
IMO, the problems with real AI actually are not necessarily rooted in the algorithms as much as the languages used to write them
People used to think that. Over the last several decades, they came to realize that you simply cannot "write" AI programs, you have to learn them.
So, the "language of real AI" exists: it's learning algorithms.
The term "Artificial Intelligence" also includes algorithms that solve problems that are merely difficult - things like combinatorial searches (A* and min/max searches, in particular) - and the general approach of attempting to model an AI character's actions based on their state and their goals, rather than going just for the desired effect of making them reasonably tough game opponents.
Knowing about "A* and min/max searches" is about as useful in AI these days as knowing about relays is for writing Java enterprise applications.
The field has moved forward over the last 40 years. In fact, it's kind of odd, but mainstream computer science is really going gaga over old software techniques developed in AI: garbage collection, AOP, dynamic typing, reflection, IDEs, business rules, ontologies, theorem provers, etc. were largely developed by AI researchers and are only now going mainstream.
As a programmer, I can model a process pretty easily. I can model objects fairly well. What I can't model is something that is nebulous and undefined.
Yes, but that's a problem with the education programmers receive, not with the world. There are good techniques for modeling those processes, you simply weren't taught them.
"Many people who go on murdering rampages play violent video games, therefore we should ban violent video games." (Note: even that assertion is unproven.)
What about...
"Many people who go on murdering rampages were brought up Christian, therefore we should ban Christianity." (Note: even though Christianity proclaims non-violence, it has been one of the most violent and corrupt religions in history.)
"Many people who go on murdering rampages were watching television and movies, therefore we should ban television and movies." (And I suspect Mr. Ed and Teletubbies as dangerous as Lethal Weapon 13; at least the former always want to make me scream.)
So, let's make a deal: I'm OK with banning violent games if at the same time, we ban Christianity, movies, and television. While I don't think the violent game ban will have much effect, banning Christianity, movies, and television will likely be a big improvement for society. What about it?
Airplanes are (supposed to be) private possessions of private companies.
They are privately-owned public places. The "public", in case the meaning of the word eludes you, means that you are in the same place as a lot of other people that you would probably ordinarily not feel comfortable sharing, say, stories of your erectile dysfunction with.
If you don't like a airline that supports cell phone use, you are free to take your business elsewhere.
Fortunately, that won't be necessary because almost no airline supports cell phone use--deliberately. So, if you don't like the fact that you can't talk on airlines, go take your business elsewhere. Or better yet, choose not to fly at all.
Sorry, but noise canceling headphones just don't work on voices. Perhaps you're confusing the switch setting--they actually tend to enhance voices by reducing background noise relative to the voices.
These "oh, and you can run Linux, too" are Microsoft marketing gimmicks that are thrown into the deal. It's easy to tack these onto "oh, we give you $300M and we give you our patents, too" or "let's cross-license, and, oh, that means you can use Linux, too".
Microsoft is trying to create the false impression that there is a significant patent risk when there actually isn't: first of all, any patent infringement that Microsoft were to sue over would be removed immediately, and secondly, the damage from such a lawsuit for Microsoft would be enormous.
In any case, GPLv3 will hopefully stop this nonsense.
A show of hands if you are surprised by dumbass anti-government comments by Slashdot-pseudo-libertarians who haven't read the RTFA.
(Since you probably still haven't read TFA, here's a hint: the corruption is in the companies, not the government. The government--that is, you and me--are getting defrauded.)
The US is doing a good job with making currency hard to forge, subject to the constraints they have to operate under, including a boatload of backwards compatibility requirements.
As for "one standard", you got it backwards: the fewer different documents there are, the easier it is to detect forgeries and the harder it is to forge.
I think this is a pretty nifty idea, and I'm surprised it hasn't been done before.
It has. Multiple times over the last several decades.
It also doesn't really work very well for a wide variety of reasons. That's why it's not being used.
I'm sorry, all I could find on that page is a lot of designer mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-science.
Where is the actual evidence that this "maximizes readability"?
I don't understand how this "observer" would be unbiased. If he sees a grand conspiracy, he's not unbiased.
So, you're saying that anybody who concludes that there is a conspiracy cannot be unbiased? Geez, that reasoning would be great for criminals: "hey, the judge was obviously biased, since he found me guilty". That excuse is as frequent as it is baseless.
Well, that gets into the issue of how you even establish under what license people open open source software.
Courts are likely not to let people get away with deliberate obfuscation or trickery like that. Besides, if the code hasn't changed much, how is the guy even going to prove that?
Of course, the device is probably useful, and it's probably not dangeorus.
I'm just saying that the argument "it's non-ionizing, therefore it's harmless" is stupid. Non-ionizing radiation can be very dangerous.
Yes, and, obviously, open source has that part covered, too.
That law ranks up there with trying to legislate pi to equal 3.
Seriously, people complain about illegal employment, illegal immigration, identity theft, and terrorist watch lists that block people by last name.
Well, guys, if you want to fix that, you need reliable, hard-to-forge identification. And the people who need to carry that identification are the people who are entitled to services and privileges--the citizens.
You're making some huge mistakes. First, the cost of office software is nothing for a corporation, compared to its other expenses (taxes, salaries, hardware, office bills and so on and so on).
$200 saved per employee is $200 saved. Big corporations are as sensitive to that as little corporations.
Second, those Google Apps are suitable for some purposes, but for heavy or advanced usage, they're totally unfit.
Neither is Microsoft Office; Microsoft Office is merely bloated and slow. Most people don't know what "heavy and advanced usage" is (you sure don't), and that is why Google Apps will be good enough for them (Google needs to do a little more work but not a lot), just like Microsoft Office is good enough for them.
So far we're looking at a bunch of online toys trying to pretend they're Office. They will replace Office exactly as the "web OS" sites will replace Windows.
MS Office and MS Windows are already dead, they just don't know it yet. Google isn't the only thing that's killing them, but it is certainly one nail of many in their coffin.
People always post averages like they represent statistics of significant variance.
Variance or spread doesn't matter; asymmetry of a distribution does.
If you take a 100 people and one of them makes a 1000 dollars and the rest make 1 dollar, the total will be 1099, so divided across 100 everyone made 10.99 right?
If you take 100 people, one of them makes 1000 dollars, one of them loses 998 dollars, and the rest make 1 dollar, than the average will be 1.