As long as ZFS licensing is incompatible with the GPL it's never going in. The person from that blog you linked understood something you clearly did not.
"The only way I'm seeing ZFS on the Linux kernel is to convince Sun to dual-license ZFS under the GPL and the CDDL."
You might not like the GPL but suggesting Linux developers should ignore it is not informative, it's completely retarded.
Shared memory is a fine way to communicate, having a language make it the default that you can simultaneously access all shared data is what's the problem.
Pure functional programming with only implicit parallelism (no message passing) might be relatively straightforward and it's true that parallelism is easier to extract automatically than with procedural languages... but this only allows for a subset of parallel algorithms.
Transactional memory already allows for a little more.
With message passing (ie. Erlang) you finally have the full deal. Removing aliasing from the equation removes a lot of very nasty problems, but some remain. Deadlock, starvation, livelock (with priorities making all those problems more likely to occur too). In fact Erlang is really too lax a language to be automatically checked for those problems (mostly because of the use of asynchronous message passing).
Modern Occam is better in that regard, although I wouldn't say that makes parallel programming easy either... it's just as good as it gets.
At least in the US... it just takes a decade or so to earn back the necessary investments.
These are not interesting investment for the oil giants, for one thing they want short term profits and for another a swift increase in alternative energy decreases the value of the remaining oil they have the rights to. There is a sweet spot for them to really get behind alternative energy... that sweet spot hasn't been reached yet. The commercial sweet spot is very unlikely to be the same as the social sweet spot though.
The US is in a very good position Solar wise, it could at present technological levels construct enough solar energy plants at a couple 100 billion to generate it's electricity needs. So basically put the stimulus toward solar power and you have free electricity...
There's two ways to generate the keys... you generate a number, salt it and encrypt it. Or if you don't want to rely on encryption, you random generate it. Either way you just store it in a database afterwards to indicate it's a valid key which can still be redeemed. These systems if implemented correctly are are both secure and have negligible hardware costs for the database in question (small amount of data and easy searches).
The use of a system which activates the cards is only so the shops don't have to pre-purchase the cards at their retail value (in which case they would want bigger margins) and so they have no value to thieves. It has little bearing on key generation or the security thereof.
Instead of having 2 databases you could also simply have 1 with 1 bit of mutable data per key.
Passkey hash + 1 bit times a billion, 400 bucks worth of memory. System capable of performing radix searches to match the hash to the correct entry millions of times per second, 4000 bucks. Avoiding a headache from having to spend 2 minutes not being an idiot... priceless
If this kind of stuff gives you a headache then you should not be a programmer working on a system which pushes through more than a billion dollars worth of revenue a year!
At present level of technology it would be possible for the US to build enough solar plants to fill it's entire electricity needs (requires lots of investment, but the money required is in the same order of magnitude as the Iraq war). It would only take a small part of the deserts and salt flats in the US (environmentalists would be pissed off, but they are perpetually pissed off).
Nuclear is still slightly cheaper, but with such a scale project I doubt that advantage would survive. Also it's a lot easier to ramp up the building of these because they require less expertise and security than a nuclear plant.
Of course with a ~25% round trip efficiency from electricity->hydrogen->electricity hydrogen is still not that great a way of storing energy.
The problem with the JPEG patent was it's non enforcement for all those years.
AFAICS the inventor in question was the first to combine RLE+VLC coding and the first to use zigzag scanning of DCT coefficients. Both pretty inventive steps for which I see no real prior art at the time. Nothing at the time could get anywhere close to his results.
Although I'm opposed to software patents in general, I think this one was more deserved than most.
Patents should reward putting your invention out in the open. Having a huge period in which to do secret development is the anti-thesis to what patents should reward.
The only problem with first to file is that there is no grace period.
Lawyers hate grace periods, because if a paper without a million of legalese claims holds any value in court that diminishes their contribution to patents... they see the exact wording of those legalese claims as somehow more important than the subject covered. Which is ridiculous... in the areas I'm an expert I can recognize the innovative parts of a paper better than a lawyer can capture it in claims.
I think the first to file vs first to invent difference is just being played up by lawyers to disguise the fact that the real thing they want to get rid of is the grace period.
Shallow copies are the rule, so we use smart pointers...
The problem that for right or wrong a lot of people using C++ don't want a GC, creating a language you think will better suit their needs but which they won't use is not terribly useful.
That's all fine and well, but AC is not an option without superconducting cables and you don't want 1000s of KM of superconducting cable.
Anyway taking Wikipedia at face value transformer stations for HDVC conversion capable of delivering say UK's peak consumption (~40 GW) would cost ~2 billion pounds. Economic stimulus package in the UK is at a trillion at the moment.
If we really wanted to start doing electricity generation in the Sahara it would be both technically and economically viable right now. Also everyone wants to do big public works now too... looks like a perfect opportunity to me.
There are too many mosquitoes who are either resistant or have latent genes which confer resistance. Any widespread eradication program will create a resistant population in no time flat.
Really though, you'd think Intel would negotiate an IP license which would allow them to release good drivers. It seems IMG should be getting ready to release some sort of Linux drivers around this time though... perhaps this will address the GMA500 situation too?
I'd rather the money for those placebos go to real medical practitioners, rather than fuelling an industry bent on eroding the public's capability of rational thought. "This is a real medicine and it will help" is better than "those doctors are blinded by science, our philosophy based on traditions you can trust will make you better".
As for herbal medicine, when it's proven to work and manufactured with processes which guarantee consistent concentrations of active ingredients then it's not alternative medicine... it's simply over the counter drugs with a marketing shtick aimed at new age idiots. In the US it's simply a completely unpredictable broth with a marketing shtick aimed at new age idiots.
We are open minded... if someone could come up with non anecdotal evidence and show the use of clinical trials and other scientific methods in those schools of chiropractic care you are talking about we could simply accept it as plain medicine. Alternative medicine is quackery which sometimes gets things right by accident.
Abandoning the scientific method is abandoning progress... chiropractic care will never progress, it will remain in the realm of quackery.
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As long as ZFS licensing is incompatible with the GPL it's never going in. The person from that blog you linked understood something you clearly did not.
"The only way I'm seeing ZFS on the Linux kernel is to convince Sun to dual-license ZFS under the GPL and the CDDL."
You might not like the GPL but suggesting Linux developers should ignore it is not informative, it's completely retarded.
Shared memory is a fine way to communicate, having a language make it the default that you can simultaneously access all shared data is what's the problem.
Pure functional programming with only implicit parallelism (no message passing) might be relatively straightforward and it's true that parallelism is easier to extract automatically than with procedural languages ... but this only allows for a subset of parallel algorithms.
Transactional memory already allows for a little more.
With message passing (ie. Erlang) you finally have the full deal. Removing aliasing from the equation removes a lot of very nasty problems, but some remain. Deadlock, starvation, livelock (with priorities making all those problems more likely to occur too). In fact Erlang is really too lax a language to be automatically checked for those problems (mostly because of the use of asynchronous message passing).
Modern Occam is better in that regard, although I wouldn't say that makes parallel programming easy either ... it's just as good as it gets.
At least in the US ... it just takes a decade or so to earn back the necessary investments.
These are not interesting investment for the oil giants, for one thing they want short term profits and for another a swift increase in alternative energy decreases the value of the remaining oil they have the rights to. There is a sweet spot for them to really get behind alternative energy ... that sweet spot hasn't been reached yet. The commercial sweet spot is very unlikely to be the same as the social sweet spot though.
The US is in a very good position Solar wise, it could at present technological levels construct enough solar energy plants at a couple 100 billion to generate it's electricity needs. So basically put the stimulus toward solar power and you have free electricity ...
There's two ways to generate the keys ... you generate a number, salt it and encrypt it. Or if you don't want to rely on encryption, you random generate it. Either way you just store it in a database afterwards to indicate it's a valid key which can still be redeemed. These systems if implemented correctly are are both secure and have negligible hardware costs for the database in question (small amount of data and easy searches).
The use of a system which activates the cards is only so the shops don't have to pre-purchase the cards at their retail value (in which case they would want bigger margins) and so they have no value to thieves. It has little bearing on key generation or the security thereof.
The existing POS software doesn't run on a Mac?
Instead of having 2 databases you could also simply have 1 with 1 bit of mutable data per key.
Passkey hash + 1 bit times a billion, 400 bucks worth of memory. System capable of performing radix searches to match the hash to the correct entry millions of times per second, 4000 bucks. Avoiding a headache from having to spend 2 minutes not being an idiot ... priceless
If this kind of stuff gives you a headache then you should not be a programmer working on a system which pushes through more than a billion dollars worth of revenue a year!
On the other hand, I could imagine the record companies to have a good case against Apple ... because they left the door right open if this is true.
Since Carver management forced Carver himself out they deserved it as well ... so all's well that ends well.
At present level of technology it would be possible for the US to build enough solar plants to fill it's entire electricity needs (requires lots of investment, but the money required is in the same order of magnitude as the Iraq war). It would only take a small part of the deserts and salt flats in the US (environmentalists would be pissed off, but they are perpetually pissed off).
Nuclear is still slightly cheaper, but with such a scale project I doubt that advantage would survive. Also it's a lot easier to ramp up the building of these because they require less expertise and security than a nuclear plant.
Of course with a ~25% round trip efficiency from electricity->hydrogen->electricity hydrogen is still not that great a way of storing energy.
Patent validity and applicability is proven in Texas courts, not by the patent office.
The mere existence of a patent says just about jack shit nowadays.
The problem with the JPEG patent was it's non enforcement for all those years.
AFAICS the inventor in question was the first to combine RLE+VLC coding and the first to use zigzag scanning of DCT coefficients. Both pretty inventive steps for which I see no real prior art at the time. Nothing at the time could get anywhere close to his results.
Although I'm opposed to software patents in general, I think this one was more deserved than most.
Netscape made money!
Would the situation today be better if they had a monopoly position? For them, sure ... for me? Oh hell no.
Patents should reward putting your invention out in the open. Having a huge period in which to do secret development is the anti-thesis to what patents should reward.
The only problem with first to file is that there is no grace period.
Lawyers hate grace periods, because if a paper without a million of legalese claims holds any value in court that diminishes their contribution to patents ... they see the exact wording of those legalese claims as somehow more important than the subject covered. Which is ridiculous ... in the areas I'm an expert I can recognize the innovative parts of a paper better than a lawyer can capture it in claims.
I think the first to file vs first to invent difference is just being played up by lawyers to disguise the fact that the real thing they want to get rid of is the grace period.
Not in the US maybe ... but in say Canada they could get in real trouble with selective enforcement.
Shallow copies are the rule, so we use smart pointers ...
The problem that for right or wrong a lot of people using C++ don't want a GC, creating a language you think will better suit their needs but which they won't use is not terribly useful.
From a pragmatist point of view it is the standard.
That's all fine and well, but AC is not an option without superconducting cables and you don't want 1000s of KM of superconducting cable.
Anyway taking Wikipedia at face value transformer stations for HDVC conversion capable of delivering say UK's peak consumption (~40 GW) would cost ~2 billion pounds. Economic stimulus package in the UK is at a trillion at the moment.
If we really wanted to start doing electricity generation in the Sahara it would be both technically and economically viable right now. Also everyone wants to do big public works now too ... looks like a perfect opportunity to me.
You could get electricity from the Sahara to Europe with HVDC cables at less than 10% losses.
That is for a Texas jury to decide, not you.
Not in the way it worked for the US.
There are too many mosquitoes who are either resistant or have latent genes which confer resistance. Any widespread eradication program will create a resistant population in no time flat.
The opportunity has past.
Really though, you'd think Intel would negotiate an IP license which would allow them to release good drivers. It seems IMG should be getting ready to release some sort of Linux drivers around this time though ... perhaps this will address the GMA500 situation too?
http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard/browse_thread/thread/ec1427fdb8f9ef8d/14af5abb79383525?lnk=gst&q=POWERVR#14af5abb79383525
That said, the guys who developed KeyKOS did it (and patented it) a long time before they did.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/
I'd rather the money for those placebos go to real medical practitioners, rather than fuelling an industry bent on eroding the public's capability of rational thought. "This is a real medicine and it will help" is better than "those doctors are blinded by science, our philosophy based on traditions you can trust will make you better".
As for herbal medicine, when it's proven to work and manufactured with processes which guarantee consistent concentrations of active ingredients then it's not alternative medicine ... it's simply over the counter drugs with a marketing shtick aimed at new age idiots. In the US it's simply a completely unpredictable broth with a marketing shtick aimed at new age idiots.
We are open minded ... if someone could come up with non anecdotal evidence and show the use of clinical trials and other scientific methods in those schools of chiropractic care you are talking about we could simply accept it as plain medicine. Alternative medicine is quackery which sometimes gets things right by accident.
Abandoning the scientific method is abandoning progress ... chiropractic care will never progress, it will remain in the realm of quackery.