Oracle... How about Ellison in front of a stargate with one of those Ori staffs from SG-1? Or maybe with the other kind of staff in front of the wall of fire....
For Microsoft... Inspector Gadget as a borg? Or maybe Jar Jar....
Sorry to have to break it to you, but jokes about Facebook are too subtle for Slashdot.
For people who missed it, the founder of Facebook is from Harvard, and there's a long-running complaint among Facebook users that there should be a "dislike" button, basically the same as the like button in terms of showing camaraderie with the poster, but applied to a negative post.
Prior to the official name announcements, I've been jokingly calling every upcoming Mac OS X release ocelot for several releases now. I keep hoping someday the right people will overhear me and the name will stick....
There's something truly sadistic about control-C as the keystroke for copying... when you've just typed the last line in a twenty-line command in a terminal window SSHed to a UNIX box.:-)
Fascinating. By contrast, even though I frequently take a cynical view of situations, I find that I'm right about eighty to ninety percent of the time. Maybe it's not that you were too cynical before, but rather that others have just gotten better at fooling you.:-D
But seriously, normal people take an optimistic view when it comes to their friends and a cynical view about the motives of their enemies, and a semi-cynical view of the motives of strangers. The first two are generally right, the third is out of an abundance of caution, and depending on whether the cynical view was right or not, those people get lumped into one of the first two after a period of time. It's just the way our brains work. To me, it sounds less like you are no longer taking a cynical view and more like you've finally relaxed and gotten comfortable with lumping certain people into your "friends" pile.
On the other hand, in my experience, the hotels with the DSL line and a Netgear base station tend to have more reliable service (albeit slower) than those unholy captive-portal-based services.
Correct. Toughened glass has much more impact resistance than ordinary glass. It is also not as hard (and is thus easier to scratch). It does, however, have a tendency to disintegrate when shattered rather than breaking into large pieces, due to its uniformity, which may be what the GP was thinking of.
I think you touched on a really important point there. Phones are pretty much the only devices on the planet where people attempt to use them while they are still in cases.
That said, most of this has more to do with the fact that you are carrying them around all day whether you are using it or not. This makes the expected accident rate much higher than with, for example, a musical instrument, in which you use it only for a short time in a controlled environment (theoretically, I say as I recall a time in which my old trombone got a nasty slide dent from a flying can of soda).
Secondarily, no device likes to be sat upon, and since phones don't generally provide any useful hardware for attaching a belt clip without first wrapping them in a case, this greatly increases the need for a case. In effect, a lot of people use cases for phones for precisely the same reason that they use cases for laptops---the only difference, of course, being that you don't have to suddenly answer your laptop. And this, in turn, is why so many phones are used while in cases. It's not because they are fragile, but rather because you can't feasibly carry them in a safe way without a case, and because it's easier to quickly get your phone ready to use if you don't have to take it out of that case.
What does this mean? Cellular phones should have standardized hardware for mounting a belt clip... say, a T-nut inset into the back.... Just my $0.02.
Better yet, make it so that the user can pop a catch somewhere and remove the entire faceplate for easy replacement, customization, etc. You'd have all the advantages of polycarbonate (resistance to cracking, etc.) without the problems of it getting too scratched up. (Scarred faceplate? Replace it with a new Hello Kitty faceplate for $15, or a new Star Wars themed faceplate for $20, or buy it in classic black for $10.)
There's no reason you should have to choose between resistance to scratching and resistance to breakage. Just make it easy and cheap to replace the faceplate, and the whole issue becomes moot.
All of you lack the experience or the memory to say how obvious it would be ON THE HARDWARE AVAILABLE THEN.
Video decompression had been done with GPU assist (including decoding the motion compensation information) for at least a year by NVIDIA hardware before this patent was filed, and maybe earlier. Are you saying that reversing the process---moving from decoding to encoding---is so fundamentally different that it isn't an obvious thing to do? That seems like a prima facie absurd argument that demands extraordinary proof.
What, precisely, about this patent was novel, unobvious, and useful in 2004? Because I just don't see it.
Fair enough about the motion compensation part. There are two basic components to the patent: mapping the motion compensation and mapping the image compression. The former is based on old assumptions that no longer apply to modern GPUs, and thus that part of the patent is useless before it was even approved; the latter should have been thrown out as obvious. Either way, the patent is crap.
Except that conceptually, it's a trivial extension of texture compression, which video cards have supported natively since at least the late 1990s. The only reason we weren't doing video compression is that the video cards weren't fast enough and/or were too power hungry to offer an advantage over CPUs. The patent office should not be awarding patents for discoveries, and that's all GPU-based video decompression really is---discovering that suddenly GPUs are faster than CPUs and things that were impractical (but widely discussed) years before are now practical.
I've only skimmed patent, so it's possible that the summary sucks and that there's something novel and unobvious here, but at a glance, this patent really does look like an explanation for a straightforward mapping of video compression onto a GPU which with the possible exception of the motion estimation would have been obvious a decade ago. For that matter, if you had asked somebody "how would you do motion estimation on a GPU" a decade ago, they probably would have come up with a similar solution.
Then again, it's a software patent, and the design process for nearly all software is obvious to someone with suitable skills in the field, which is why these patents are almost universally crap anyway.
You're being sarcastic, right? Why would a glorified vector engine be useful for doing video compression, which is basically lots and lots of vector math? It's so obvious that anybody with even basic knowledge of video compression would immediately understand how the two problem spaces map onto one another with no instruction whatsoever.
It's so obvious that ATI released software to do it within a year of when that patent was first filed, which means they were working on it at least a year before that, which means that multiple people independently came up with the idea at the same time, which means it is obvious.
Heck, other companies had already been doing this, and even held patents on it five years earlier. Okay, so texture compression and video compression aren't quite the same thing. One deals with a single image, one deals with compressing a series of images.... Yeah, that's not obvious to anyone who has never seen someone make a flipbook during class in elementary school.
Writing a contract that guarantees that the manufacturer will continue to manufacture the part that you require for a specified period of time and having a plan in place to substitute a different part when that period of time expires,
Writing a contract in which the dies are owned by the government so that they can continue to fabricate them after the product is discontinued, or
Writing a contract in which the company is required to notify the government in advance of discontinuing the product and required to allow the government to purchase as many of the product as needed at that time, coupled with the government calculating the expected lifespan of the part in question and the expected lifespan of whatever the part is attached to, then purchasing enough to guarantee that they won't run out.
Paying someone an extortionate fee solely because of our government's inability to plan more than a few weeks in advance is anything but reasonable. In fact, it's flat out incompetent. It may, indeed, be the best that they could do under the circumstances, but that only (maybe) absolves the individual who made the call from being labeled incompetent, not the organization as a whole.
Not to mention that the signal levels at the required altitude would be way below the white noise floor for pretty much everything from the microphones to the amplifier stages.
Say, wasn't there a South Park... no, never mind....
No, you just need to calculate the distance between you and someone on the opposite side of the stadium, then put a speaker over there with a phase inverter and a fixed digital delay to make the times match. Won't be perfect, but should be good enough since neither your voice nor the inverted copy will carry to the opposite side of the stadium.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, Microsoft Office is American. Maybe they should call it "Unamerican Office". Make Joseph McCarthy the official icon. :-D
Oracle... How about Ellison in front of a stargate with one of those Ori staffs from SG-1? Or maybe with the other kind of staff in front of the wall of fire....
For Microsoft... Inspector Gadget as a borg? Or maybe Jar Jar....
Sorry to have to break it to you, but jokes about Facebook are too subtle for Slashdot.
For people who missed it, the founder of Facebook is from Harvard, and there's a long-running complaint among Facebook users that there should be a "dislike" button, basically the same as the like button in terms of showing camaraderie with the poster, but applied to a negative post.
Prior to the official name announcements, I've been jokingly calling every upcoming Mac OS X release ocelot for several releases now. I keep hoping someday the right people will overhear me and the name will stick....
On the flip side, when you're talking about engineers, that's frequently because they didn't arrive until noon.... :-D
There's something truly sadistic about control-C as the keystroke for copying... when you've just typed the last line in a twenty-line command in a terminal window SSHed to a UNIX box. :-)
Fascinating. By contrast, even though I frequently take a cynical view of situations, I find that I'm right about eighty to ninety percent of the time. Maybe it's not that you were too cynical before, but rather that others have just gotten better at fooling you. :-D
But seriously, normal people take an optimistic view when it comes to their friends and a cynical view about the motives of their enemies, and a semi-cynical view of the motives of strangers. The first two are generally right, the third is out of an abundance of caution, and depending on whether the cynical view was right or not, those people get lumped into one of the first two after a period of time. It's just the way our brains work. To me, it sounds less like you are no longer taking a cynical view and more like you've finally relaxed and gotten comfortable with lumping certain people into your "friends" pile.
At least the iPhone camera will prevent them from texting the money shot....
On the other hand, in my experience, the hotels with the DSL line and a Netgear base station tend to have more reliable service (albeit slower) than those unholy captive-portal-based services.
Correct. Toughened glass has much more impact resistance than ordinary glass. It is also not as hard (and is thus easier to scratch). It does, however, have a tendency to disintegrate when shattered rather than breaking into large pieces, due to its uniformity, which may be what the GP was thinking of.
I think you touched on a really important point there. Phones are pretty much the only devices on the planet where people attempt to use them while they are still in cases.
That said, most of this has more to do with the fact that you are carrying them around all day whether you are using it or not. This makes the expected accident rate much higher than with, for example, a musical instrument, in which you use it only for a short time in a controlled environment (theoretically, I say as I recall a time in which my old trombone got a nasty slide dent from a flying can of soda).
Secondarily, no device likes to be sat upon, and since phones don't generally provide any useful hardware for attaching a belt clip without first wrapping them in a case, this greatly increases the need for a case. In effect, a lot of people use cases for phones for precisely the same reason that they use cases for laptops---the only difference, of course, being that you don't have to suddenly answer your laptop. And this, in turn, is why so many phones are used while in cases. It's not because they are fragile, but rather because you can't feasibly carry them in a safe way without a case, and because it's easier to quickly get your phone ready to use if you don't have to take it out of that case.
What does this mean? Cellular phones should have standardized hardware for mounting a belt clip... say, a T-nut inset into the back.... Just my $0.02.
Better yet, make it so that the user can pop a catch somewhere and remove the entire faceplate for easy replacement, customization, etc. You'd have all the advantages of polycarbonate (resistance to cracking, etc.) without the problems of it getting too scratched up. (Scarred faceplate? Replace it with a new Hello Kitty faceplate for $15, or a new Star Wars themed faceplate for $20, or buy it in classic black for $10.)
There's no reason you should have to choose between resistance to scratching and resistance to breakage. Just make it easy and cheap to replace the faceplate, and the whole issue becomes moot.
Video decompression had been done with GPU assist (including decoding the motion compensation information) for at least a year by NVIDIA hardware before this patent was filed, and maybe earlier. Are you saying that reversing the process---moving from decoding to encoding---is so fundamentally different that it isn't an obvious thing to do? That seems like a prima facie absurd argument that demands extraordinary proof.
What, precisely, about this patent was novel, unobvious, and useful in 2004? Because I just don't see it.
Fair enough about the motion compensation part. There are two basic components to the patent: mapping the motion compensation and mapping the image compression. The former is based on old assumptions that no longer apply to modern GPUs, and thus that part of the patent is useless before it was even approved; the latter should have been thrown out as obvious. Either way, the patent is crap.
Except that conceptually, it's a trivial extension of texture compression, which video cards have supported natively since at least the late 1990s. The only reason we weren't doing video compression is that the video cards weren't fast enough and/or were too power hungry to offer an advantage over CPUs. The patent office should not be awarding patents for discoveries, and that's all GPU-based video decompression really is---discovering that suddenly GPUs are faster than CPUs and things that were impractical (but widely discussed) years before are now practical.
I've only skimmed patent, so it's possible that the summary sucks and that there's something novel and unobvious here, but at a glance, this patent really does look like an explanation for a straightforward mapping of video compression onto a GPU which with the possible exception of the motion estimation would have been obvious a decade ago. For that matter, if you had asked somebody "how would you do motion estimation on a GPU" a decade ago, they probably would have come up with a similar solution.
Then again, it's a software patent, and the design process for nearly all software is obvious to someone with suitable skills in the field, which is why these patents are almost universally crap anyway.
You're being sarcastic, right? Why would a glorified vector engine be useful for doing video compression, which is basically lots and lots of vector math? It's so obvious that anybody with even basic knowledge of video compression would immediately understand how the two problem spaces map onto one another with no instruction whatsoever.
It's so obvious that ATI released software to do it within a year of when that patent was first filed, which means they were working on it at least a year before that, which means that multiple people independently came up with the idea at the same time, which means it is obvious.
Heck, other companies had already been doing this, and even held patents on it five years earlier. Okay, so texture compression and video compression aren't quite the same thing. One deals with a single image, one deals with compressing a series of images.... Yeah, that's not obvious to anyone who has never seen someone make a flipbook during class in elementary school.
The microphones are already there in the podia, IIRC. All you have to do is a little rewiring. Hmm. Wow. This suddenly seems like a great idea.
At which point the old fleet is beyond its design lifetime and should be either massively renovated or mothballed.
The spring-loaded ones will....
No, reasonable is one of the following:
Paying someone an extortionate fee solely because of our government's inability to plan more than a few weeks in advance is anything but reasonable. In fact, it's flat out incompetent. It may, indeed, be the best that they could do under the circumstances, but that only (maybe) absolves the individual who made the call from being labeled incompetent, not the organization as a whole.
If anyone was at all surprised by any of this, I have a bridge to sell them.
Not to mention that the signal levels at the required altitude would be way below the white noise floor for pretty much everything from the microphones to the amplifier stages.
Say, wasn't there a South Park... no, never mind....
No, you just need to calculate the distance between you and someone on the opposite side of the stadium, then put a speaker over there with a phase inverter and a fixed digital delay to make the times match. Won't be perfect, but should be good enough since neither your voice nor the inverted copy will carry to the opposite side of the stadium.
Just like Congress!
And, to be back on topic, referees.
The whole federal government is a porky pig. I'm not sure why you'd expect the USPTO to be different.