I can't quite recall how E-Commerce looked back in '97, so it's a bit beyond me to judge the innovation this patent may or may not have been. Considering even you (a seeming patent supporter) finds this patent "pretty obvious" in this time and age, tell me, what would you think about limiting a patent's lifespan to five, maybe ten years. In technology (which is the sector most patents are filed), this is a huge amount of time (Google grew from nothing to a several-hundred-billion dollar project in 9 years. Microsoft's Windows evolved from version 95 to (almost) Vista. Average internet conn speeds increased by two to three orders of magnitude). This might be, as far as I can imagine, the best way to encourage innovation for everyone. Oh and while we're on it, the bar to actually get a patent could be raised by a tiny little bit. Especially when it comes to potentially obvious patents.
I, too, disagree with Amazon's behaviour in patents, yet won't cancel my account because:
Amazon does have the best prices for books, period. Until recently, book prices round here were even regulated and could could easily be double what Amazon asks for. As soon as my disposable income rises to amounts allowing me to not care about this, I may or may not stop shopping at Amazon.
Amazon does have the greatest selection of all bookstores near me. I see it's not a fair comparison, but ordering at Amazon will usually be just as or sometimes even faster than backordering at a local bookstore. If I need a fun read to pass some time, I'll happily shop local, but for programming references and the like, bookstores just don't cut it.
Amazon delivers to my doorstep. Some local stores will do that too, but with Amazon it tends to be quicker and easier.
I'm using the "I really like this idea and would love to see it in more products to the benefit of us consumers." As previously noted, I don't have the actual patent text here, but am pretty sure the patent was filed in the 80s or 90s. If the patent system was to be changed to protect an idea for five or ten years and then turn it over to the public domain (that's still a long time), innovators would have an incentive to invent and patent their innovations but continuing development wouldn't be handicapped so badly.
Still nothing fresh, though.
You'll have to blow it out of space to shut the damn thing down!
Or you'd just hit whatever kind of receiver it's talking to on earth with a hammer a few times. However remote or secure a datacentre is, there is going to be a weak point and it's usually the power or network connection(s).
Can't cite any sources on that, but as far as I know, "putting mini-games into load sequences to avoid user boredom" has been patented at least once. Way to go for innovation, dear patent system.
Not anymore, it doesn't. With CRTs one could save a few watts by changing the picture to all black, current LCDs, however, use one to two or four fixed-brightness sources and coloured pixels. Some modern TVs increase their colour range with coloured LEDs behind different areas of the screen (I think Phillips calls it AmbiLight II or something to that extent), which may in the future lead to some energy savings. Don't expect too much though, as there'd probably need be a 5 cm circle of pure black to even dim that region's backlighting.
I agree on the better ease of reading, though. And it looks way cool, given enough screens and compiz effects you almost feel like in a bad Hollywood movie.
This may seem strange to the average Slashdotter, but a large percentage of humanity actually enjoys and participates in sexual intercourse, popularly also referred to as "fucking". I even recall at least one slashdot editor (CmdrTaco) posting stories and/or comments (a few weeks back with all the/. anniversary goodness) emphasizing his fondness of his rather new offspring which was quite probably conceived due to some fucking of his with his wife. Offensive seeming terminology isn't always that offensive, you see?
Have you tried "free" yet? Ought to be installed everywhere, so just try it (-m outputs in megabytes for nice readability. Especially check the -/+ buffers/cache line.)
It's the other way round. Computer-illiterate Fred's computers get infected, work slower or stop working alltogether, Jack, who knows a bit about computers is called up (friends, family or geek squad), fixes it, receives money. After a few of said encounters, Jack possesses lots of money while Fred's really poor. Jack then gets to have loads of unprotected sex with lots and lots of supermodels, producing a filthy rich uber-generation of semi-computer-savvy children while Fred's happy to be able to afford a microwave dinner every few days. He can't afford two microwave dinners per day though, so he'll stay single and won't reproduce. done.
Strange. I remember, not too long ago, Tom's Hardware to be as Intel-friendly as it possibly could get. This time, AMD spent their marketing money in the right places, it seems.
We've heard that before! Okay, AMD has done something pretty clever with making the chips compatible across the board..
If we leave gaming/enthusiast and CAD/3D markets out, Intel has been doing just that for years. Coupled with their love for open source drivers, Intel-only systems are a great way to ensure linux compatibility. Nice example: Lenovo's X61: lspci lists 23 devices, of which only the cardbus bridge, firewire and sd card reader (i.e. stuff not critical to system functionality) are not made by Intel.
Since THG managed to inflate this a wee bit too much, here's a quick summary of what's new:
- Up to eight processing cores (one quadcore cpu, four single-core graphics cards)
- Targeted, of course, at the enthusiast market.
- Weird bug when running >2.3 GHz. Top-End model (Phenom 9700) not available until very later on. Disabling L3 Translation Lookaside Buffer fixes this and costs some 10% performance.
- (According to THG) processors some 13% slower and cheaper than corresponding Intel models. Graphcis performance has more variations, nVidia stays undisputed performance king, with it's relatively new 8800 GT being arguably the best midrange choice.
- Up to 42 PCIe 2.0 lanes total; Graphics via 2x16 or 4x8.
- Power-efficient Northbridge (some 10 Watts of usage) and GPUs (especially in 2D mode which is, thanks to Aero, Aqua and Compiz, slowly disappearing)
- Lots of critizism for stability problems in testing systems (not too troubling) four days before launch (troubling).
Long story short: AMD, thank you very much for trying, I'll stay with, and continue recommending, Intel/nVidia.
they would have to charge you the same amount you would pay without insurance plus a little for overhead and profit.
Yeah. But if you're one of 500 people with a.2% chance of having X, you might end up paying.25% of X's cure costs over the lifespan of your insurance policy for the security of knowing if you actually do get X, it won't ruin you financially. It's like playing the lottery. X people pay amount Y, Z (lucky in the case of lottery, unlucky when it comes to health problems) people receive X*Y/Z-overhead.
Fortunately all this genetic analysis doesn't tell you what's going to happen but gives you an estimate of your risk. Suppose we let the free market rule, insurances may just calculate how expensive you'll probably be and determine your individual rates that way. If you've got a 12.7% chance of getting X which costs $100k to cure (on average), your rate over the expected lifespan of your policy will be $12.5k higher than an otherwise identical person with 0.2% chance of getting X sometime.
Savings thru the insurance-typical denying-game are probably about balanced out with additional cost for all the insurances work, so this way you ought to be able to choose between safety for a price or feeling lucky and saving said price (and maybe catching whatever sickness you're genetically predestined for, not being able to pay the huge medical bills and dieing in agony).
The trouble with that solution is that participants are treated as unequals for things they can't affect. Which sucks. Especially if you've got a 50% chance of some day getting cancer or whatever may be considered an extremely expensive-to-cure disease and thus can't afford to even get insured. But there's a simple solution for that, too: (very basic) socialized medicine with everything on top working as explained above. The basic insurance would either be priced the same for everybody or scale along each person's income and purposely suck really bad. It might only cover life-endangering diseases, have large deductibles (it'd be about saving lives from death or bankrupcy, period) and so on, but it would make sure even a high-risk person is insured enough to be kept alive. Paying the free market's rate for nicer hospital rooms, less deductibles, coverage of minor incidents and prettier nurses would then be yours to take or leave.
Thanks to all the in-depth probability calculations possible with a proper gene sequence, those "bonus" plans could even be customized down to the last detail (Joe Blow's 30% chance of diabetes would make the luxury plan a bit too expensive if everything's included. If diabetes remains covered by the basic insurance and everything else's upgraded to "luxury", however, the price might just work out ok and he'll get the nicest service around without any deductibles except for diabetes-related incidents.)
Two possible outcomes:
1: Mine collapses, buries everything under millions of tons of rocks and stuff, Blackboxes and cabling survives, Sun market's "the world's most secure datacenter".
2: Mine collapses, buries everything under millions of tons of rocks and stuff, Blackboxes and/or cabling gets scratched and/or really damaged, Sun hires Godzilla (this is Japan, where Godzilla's big in, remember?) to smash away them rocks and free the mine once again.
According to TFA, $9M could be saved on electricity when using 30'000 server cores. Also according to TFA, 10'000 cores are planned with a $405M budget. If power demand scales directly with the number of cores, this would equate savings of $3M annually. Based only on these savings (which of course won't be the only factor, but since TFS and TFA single them out so clearly), this project breaks even after a measly 135 years or about five and a half times Sun's current age.
And as a spanish speaker, I feel that it has taken faaar too long to get the "ñ" in domain names.
I disagree on that one. Written language (I speak german and french, so äöü and àèéêîôç are kinda common to me) may sometimes rely on "funny" letters, but using them in domain names is hugely impractical for everybody with the wrong keyboard layout (and it tends to make stuff harder to find). The internet is, by it's nature, an international idea and to preserve this international accessibility, it might just be a good idea to stick to the lowest common denominator.
which means/. loses ad revenue and will stop posting them
Negative. Posting a single story doesn't cost them jack. If you actually wanted your message to stand out, you'd have to get lots of people to stop reading slashdot alltogether. Which they want because parts of the content are interesting. Your idea may work for print-style media where every square millimeter of (actual redactional) content is lost advertising money, but in this case it simply won't work.
I disagree. If we leave OSX86 out of the equation, not a single one of the mentioned sales has increased OS X marketshare in any way whatsoever. While 50% of all sold boxed OSs surely sounds nice, there's not much competition out there. Linux' box sales are more or less inexistant (Ubuntu, the most popular desktop distribution, ships CDs for free, most any major distribution is downloadable freely and easily, especially in broadband-spoiled communities like Japan). Windows usually isn't bought "boxed", either. Volume licensing and preinstalls probably account for an 90%+ share, with a large chunk of individually sold copies made up of sysbuilder versions. Don't forget about the rampant piracy, either.
It's *going* to be fit into planes as soon as we run out of mineral oil. You won't be able to stow it away, though. And there won't be any more sleeping on long flights, it'll all be exercising.:)
Cycling to work, climbing stairs and running a few blocks every now and then sure are nice ideas, but all you're really going to tone with 'em are your legs. If you're going for the healthy living, don't forget about the "Get a hobby" part or add half an hour of pushups and/or situps before and/or after work.
This may just be me, but I'd rather use an antigravitational switch for that. Locking the magnet to "on" might crush whomever's between magnet and load while "off" would crush the person underneath it. Hovering seems the best alternative to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't quite recall how E-Commerce looked back in '97, so it's a bit beyond me to judge the innovation this patent may or may not have been. Considering even you (a seeming patent supporter) finds this patent "pretty obvious" in this time and age, tell me, what would you think about limiting a patent's lifespan to five, maybe ten years. In technology (which is the sector most patents are filed), this is a huge amount of time (Google grew from nothing to a several-hundred-billion dollar project in 9 years. Microsoft's Windows evolved from version 95 to (almost) Vista. Average internet conn speeds increased by two to three orders of magnitude). This might be, as far as I can imagine, the best way to encourage innovation for everyone. Oh and while we're on it, the bar to actually get a patent could be raised by a tiny little bit. Especially when it comes to potentially obvious patents.
I'm using the "I really like this idea and would love to see it in more products to the benefit of us consumers." As previously noted, I don't have the actual patent text here, but am pretty sure the patent was filed in the 80s or 90s. If the patent system was to be changed to protect an idea for five or ten years and then turn it over to the public domain (that's still a long time), innovators would have an incentive to invent and patent their innovations but continuing development wouldn't be handicapped so badly.
Still nothing fresh, though.
Can't cite any sources on that, but as far as I know, "putting mini-games into load sequences to avoid user boredom" has been patented at least once. Way to go for innovation, dear patent system.
I agree on the better ease of reading, though. And it looks way cool, given enough screens and compiz effects you almost feel like in a bad Hollywood movie.
From which provider did you get that again? I'd love to know who supplies you with free bandwidth (even if it's limited to Wikipedia).
This may seem strange to the average Slashdotter, but a large percentage of humanity actually enjoys and participates in sexual intercourse, popularly also referred to as "fucking". I even recall at least one slashdot editor (CmdrTaco) posting stories and/or comments (a few weeks back with all the /. anniversary goodness) emphasizing his fondness of his rather new offspring which was quite probably conceived due to some fucking of his with his wife. Offensive seeming terminology isn't always that offensive, you see?
Have you tried "free" yet? Ought to be installed everywhere, so just try it (-m outputs in megabytes for nice readability. Especially check the -/+ buffers/cache line.)
It's the other way round. Computer-illiterate Fred's computers get infected, work slower or stop working alltogether, Jack, who knows a bit about computers is called up (friends, family or geek squad), fixes it, receives money. After a few of said encounters, Jack possesses lots of money while Fred's really poor. Jack then gets to have loads of unprotected sex with lots and lots of supermodels, producing a filthy rich uber-generation of semi-computer-savvy children while Fred's happy to be able to afford a microwave dinner every few days. He can't afford two microwave dinners per day though, so he'll stay single and won't reproduce. done.
Strange. I remember, not too long ago, Tom's Hardware to be as Intel-friendly as it possibly could get. This time, AMD spent their marketing money in the right places, it seems.
Since THG managed to inflate this a wee bit too much, here's a quick summary of what's new:
- Up to eight processing cores (one quadcore cpu, four single-core graphics cards)
- Targeted, of course, at the enthusiast market.
- Weird bug when running >2.3 GHz. Top-End model (Phenom 9700) not available until very later on. Disabling L3 Translation Lookaside Buffer fixes this and costs some 10% performance.
- (According to THG) processors some 13% slower and cheaper than corresponding Intel models. Graphcis performance has more variations, nVidia stays undisputed performance king, with it's relatively new 8800 GT being arguably the best midrange choice.
- Up to 42 PCIe 2.0 lanes total; Graphics via 2x16 or 4x8.
- Power-efficient Northbridge (some 10 Watts of usage) and GPUs (especially in 2D mode which is, thanks to Aero, Aqua and Compiz, slowly disappearing)
- Lots of critizism for stability problems in testing systems (not too troubling) four days before launch (troubling).
Long story short: AMD, thank you very much for trying, I'll stay with, and continue recommending, Intel/nVidia.
Fortunately all this genetic analysis doesn't tell you what's going to happen but gives you an estimate of your risk. Suppose we let the free market rule, insurances may just calculate how expensive you'll probably be and determine your individual rates that way. If you've got a 12.7% chance of getting X which costs $100k to cure (on average), your rate over the expected lifespan of your policy will be $12.5k higher than an otherwise identical person with 0.2% chance of getting X sometime.
Savings thru the insurance-typical denying-game are probably about balanced out with additional cost for all the insurances work, so this way you ought to be able to choose between safety for a price or feeling lucky and saving said price (and maybe catching whatever sickness you're genetically predestined for, not being able to pay the huge medical bills and dieing in agony).
The trouble with that solution is that participants are treated as unequals for things they can't affect. Which sucks. Especially if you've got a 50% chance of some day getting cancer or whatever may be considered an extremely expensive-to-cure disease and thus can't afford to even get insured. But there's a simple solution for that, too: (very basic) socialized medicine with everything on top working as explained above. The basic insurance would either be priced the same for everybody or scale along each person's income and purposely suck really bad. It might only cover life-endangering diseases, have large deductibles (it'd be about saving lives from death or bankrupcy, period) and so on, but it would make sure even a high-risk person is insured enough to be kept alive. Paying the free market's rate for nicer hospital rooms, less deductibles, coverage of minor incidents and prettier nurses would then be yours to take or leave.
Thanks to all the in-depth probability calculations possible with a proper gene sequence, those "bonus" plans could even be customized down to the last detail (Joe Blow's 30% chance of diabetes would make the luxury plan a bit too expensive if everything's included. If diabetes remains covered by the basic insurance and everything else's upgraded to "luxury", however, the price might just work out ok and he'll get the nicest service around without any deductibles except for diabetes-related incidents.)
Two possible outcomes:
1: Mine collapses, buries everything under millions of tons of rocks and stuff, Blackboxes and cabling survives, Sun market's "the world's most secure datacenter".
2: Mine collapses, buries everything under millions of tons of rocks and stuff, Blackboxes and/or cabling gets scratched and/or really damaged, Sun hires Godzilla (this is Japan, where Godzilla's big in, remember?) to smash away them rocks and free the mine once again.
According to TFA, $9M could be saved on electricity when using 30'000 server cores. Also according to TFA, 10'000 cores are planned with a $405M budget. If power demand scales directly with the number of cores, this would equate savings of $3M annually. Based only on these savings (which of course won't be the only factor, but since TFS and TFA single them out so clearly), this project breaks even after a measly 135 years or about five and a half times Sun's current age.
It's *going* to be fit into planes as soon as we run out of mineral oil. You won't be able to stow it away, though. And there won't be any more sleeping on long flights, it'll all be exercising. :)
Cycling to work, climbing stairs and running a few blocks every now and then sure are nice ideas, but all you're really going to tone with 'em are your legs. If you're going for the healthy living, don't forget about the "Get a hobby" part or add half an hour of pushups and/or situps before and/or after work.
You know what's weird? There's kill switches (yea, it's not pc, who cares?) but no taze (bro) switches. Stupid lethal force.
This may just be me, but I'd rather use an antigravitational switch for that. Locking the magnet to "on" might crush whomever's between magnet and load while "off" would crush the person underneath it. Hovering seems the best alternative to me.