I've got the dinovo for a while too (with the MX900/bluetooth), and been very happy with the keyboard especially. I hardly use the keypad (the screen would be nice if only it worked under linux, and the integrated calculator is ok, but a bit limited) The MX900 mouse is a bit heavy and doesn't always recharge properly - I'll probably buy a wired mouse soon.
But the keyboard is top notch. Feels like it's very good quality (for the price, it better be). I prefer the soft/shallow keys of this keyboard, over the typewriter heavy/deep/IBM keys, so that's something you might want to consider. And it's bluetooth, so I can use it with my laptop too, and probably even with my Nokia 770 (haven't tried this yet though)
I like them a lot, too bad about the F-keys though, I'd want them to be actual separate keys since I do use them a lot.
Re:Everyone loves to hate patents, but...
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Upto your Kodak example, you're basically arguing:
"Patents are good, because you need patents to defend yourself against patents"
See the circular logic here? If there were no patents there would be no problem in the first place.
As for your point about "protecting intellectual property" - I'd echo the sentiment that other people had - you could steal other companies' ideas too, and the advances in your field would actually advance much faster! Don't forget you're standing on the shoulder of giants - in science you use other people's innovations all the time. I'm willing to bet it's exactly like that with engineering too - the more components a system has, the more likely it is you're going to want to use someone else's techniques. That's why software patents make the problem so apparent - software is "cheap" (no materials, no tolerances,...), so it's not surprising to see hundreds of modules/components/techniques/interactions in one software package (also a reason why there's so many bugs in comparison with the hardware world, but that's a different discussion).
What patents basically do is slowing the rate of progress - people and companies have to watch out for a minefield of techniques they can't use for 10-20 years, even though it would make complete sense to do it from a technical standpoint. That also means, that if you're not using these techniques, you're not going to build on them or evolve them. You're either going to work around it (re-invent the wheel) - badly in some cases - or you're just going to drop it. That's progress with its hands tied!
As to your final point: yes, I have known people that used ideas of mine, and made a nice profit of them, and basically my reaction was: good for them! Having ideas is cheap, doing the work and taking the risk to bring them to fruition is the hard (99%) work. Another thing you might notice about ideas is that very often they're the product of the environment you're in. The technology is finally ready to do this or that, we have finally enough bandwith for an application like this, CPU power is now cheap enough that we can do this, etc etc - and that's also why it often seems a lot of people have the same or similar ideas at about the same time. I'd be way more pissed if I couldn't work out an idea because some twit patented it, than if I found out someone was "inspired by" (or in your words: "stole") an idea of mine (or even more likely: "came up with the same idea independently").
You could argue: "yes but, ideas have value - if you choose not to capitalize on it that's your problem". Well, the only reason ideas have value, is because of the artificial scarcity created by patent law. This is not automatically bad, but I believe in this case it is. Patent law is a delicate balance - the advantage of encouraging inventions with monetary rewards vs. the disadvantage of stopping other inventors from using certain ideas. I believe in the case of patents the disadvantage far outweighs the advantage, because I think a lot more harm is done by stopping others from using certain ideas (even if it is only temporarily) than from the very few inventors who would stop inventing because there's more risk to make it into a profitable product to recoup the cost of inventing.
You are correct - people will game any system, including the system. I apply the same test as with law proposals "One should always judge laws by their potential for abuse, not by their proclaimed benefits".
That's true, but the extension (and possibly the graphics hardware) could handle the resizing/viewport (and even rotating etc) operations for you too. Of course, I understand that it might be difficult to integrate such an API in Moz's codebase - I just don't know.
if it's done on the server-side, it's probably also easier to take advantage of fancy graphics hardware. Imagine a graphics card that is able to decompress JPEGs on the fly, for instance (considering pixel shaders in current 3D hardware, it's not too far fetched).
it's not just the amount of space it takes in RAM and HD, but also the amount of time it takes to transport something that's 5.5x bigger. Have you seen hard drives become 5.5x faster recently? Or even RAM?
At the same time, rendering/decompressing an image might be quite self-contained, and running 50 self-contained instances of that CPU-hogging old JPEG algorithm might parallellize quite easily, so would scale with the current trends in CPU development (more parallel - just throw more chips/cores/DSPs/GPUs at it).
Just imagine trying to take advantage of graphics hardware that can decode JPEGs in hardware.
He gives three possibilities: storing it uncompressed in the server, storing it uncompressed in the client, and storing it compressed in the client (and uncompressing it on the fly).
I wonder if it might be interesting and worthwile to have an X extension to store it compressed on the server? That way there's a lot less X traffic, and potentially a lot more applications could make use of it.
The only condition is that you don't need to decompress in Moz, and recompress it to send to the X server, but just pass along the compressed data (there's some security implications with that though, but I guess they could be dealt with).
I didn't mean Ryan specifically, what I meant was that the icculus site was probably a good way to find more information, or even a porter. Like you said, "he does seem to be a touchstone of modern porting efforts"
If the cost to "productize" and maintain the software is higher than what you'll get from the pessimistic scenario (according to you, 20 x 10k + whatever you could get from selling support), then it's a risk probably not worth taking, so opensourcing it will only bring benefits (goodwill, possibly selling support, and possibly sharing the maintenance costs with other companies).
However, if there's a good chance you might net more by selling than you might save (or net) by opensourcing, I believe it would be unreasonable to ignore this.
If I were you I'd prepare a few scenarios (opensource, optimistic sales, pessimistic sales, etc), where you show the variables over time: - projected sales income (none if opensourced) - projected support income - maintenance costs (possibly lowering faster over time if opensourced) - the one-time costs for productizing it (if you're selling it, people will hold it to higher standards) - the (one-time?) costs for opensourcing it (cleaning up code to avoid embarassement, community building, communication, etc) - mention the goodwill/brand recognition/good pr you might get from opensourcing, but it's hard to put a number on that. That's for the marketing guys to figure out, I guess.
The point is, give your bosses the right tools to make an informed decision. Chances are they'll proceed to make the right one!
If you don't know, how would he know what he's talking about?
I do both, and let me tell you it's more like 30% than 1% - and I'm not even doing everything. Not that it's not enjoyable, but proper sysadmining is a really important job, it's making sure everyone else is working smoothly. If it's badly done, the productivity of all these 30 employees will be affected.
Re:Java's biggest hole is in the embedded market.
on
Open source Java?
·
· Score: 1
Yea, and to add insult to injury, even the PPC you mentioned doesn't have adequate support (no sun j2re) if you stray from MacOSX.
I'm quite interested in such a system. However, for a true decentralized system you need to put trust metrics at the core of the system, because cheating would just be too easy otherwise.
With a client/server model, you can just say: "everyone trusts what the server says, what the server says goes". With a P2P model you have no such easy way out.
Anyway, I'll be very closely watching this - the only distributed system that comes close is opencroquet, but that's not really suitale for a real-time environment.
While they might not necessarily succeed, it'll be very interesting to see their experience and conclusions once their prototypes start being used.
Quake2 is GPL'ed Quake3 will probably be in the near future, and has a very active community of modders/tools/information/...
Cube (and nextgen Sauerbraten) are zlib licensed: http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/ fun for its realtime ingame editor iirc
Ogre is LGPL'ed and also very active community http://www.ogre3d.org/... well you get the idea. With a bit of searching I think you must be able to find some decent open source stuff.
Yeah, but the fact that happy iMac owners could _only_ use USB peripherals really made USB gadgets take off. Until then consumers had little reason to get the more expensive USB stuff because they had ADB or PS/2 or serial on PC, and manufacturers couldn't get the volume to get the prices down.
Before the iMac, PC's had USB for quite a long time (I think they came standard on most motherboards since intel introduced them as a standard feature on their 430HX chipsets), but they just ended up gathering dust. However, since noone thought they needed it, and the usb devices were more expensive, mass migration to USB just didn't happen until those ugly transparent plastic devices built to match the iMac.
Are you sure about this? Drivers in x.org are MIT/X licenced iirc, and that means there's no obligation to open source the derivative like with copyleft (GPL/LGPL) licenses.
Or do you mean the linux kernel framebuffer driver? (which, as it's part of linux is likely licensed under the GPL)
hardware RAID has these advantages: 1) offloads operations to the controller, so eats less CPU/IO bandwidth. 2) can have battery backed cache 3) often looks like "just a scsi controller" to linux and the boot loaders, so booting from f.e. a RAID5 set is often easier.
software RAID has these advantages 1) is cheaper 2) CPU time lost makes hardly any difference 3) has well-tested and supported tools to manage your raid setup. (imagine if you could only set up your raid sets by rebooting and entering the raid bios) 4) disk-layout is non-proprietary (controller died? don't have the same brand lying around? manufacturer left the market? no problem!) - so all-around more flexibility.
Look here for properly supported sata disk controllers: http://linux.yyz.us/sata/
Some of these cards come with BIOS smarts that provides you with software raid which offer you the advantage of point 3) of hardware raid, ie: bios and boot loader support for your raid.
however, this does mean that the on-disk layout has to be recognized in linux, so linux can make sense of it and set up the raid sets properly. In linux 2.4 there were some drivers that did that themselves, however for linux 2.6 there's now a little userspace program that recognizes a whole bunch of on-disk layouts, and sets them up using the device-mapper facility (part of LVM2).
The advantage of this is that you can use the same well-tested and -supported linux drivers mentioned on http://linux.yyz.us/sata/ , but still use the (bios) facilities provided by the hardware. Another advantage is that this program will probably be used by all ATARAID ("mostly-software-raid") devices on linux, so it is, or will be well-tested and -supported in itself.
You can find this program, called DMRAID here: http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/
So if you decide to go the SW-RAID way, think and decide if you want the advantage of dmraid. I haven't tried this myself yet, and the only aspect I'm unsure of is the management aspect of it (like with HW-RAID drivers) - DMRAID doesn't use MDADM, so how can you properly monitor, hot-add,... your raid sets? I don't know, you'll have to investigate this yourself.
MDADM itself isn't going away any time soon either, if I understand correctly. (And even if it does, it's probably very likely that they'll make DMRAID understand the MDADM on-disk layout to provide an upgrade path.)
If however you decide to go the HW-RAID way, make sure you get a reliable and reputable manufacturer - with open source drivers (!), preferably with a known on-disk layout, and be prepared to spend money. I've heard a lot about 3ware, but I have no direct experience with them myself, so I can't vouch for them.
Well, I agree up to a point. OS X is better than any other commercial system, that's true.
However, as someone thoroughly familiar and comfortable with Debian/Linux, I don't feel quite at home in OS X land. It seems navigating my files with the Finder just takes so much effort, I find it very unnatural compared to MC and even Nautilus. Also, the culture of shareware is quite alien, when you know there's a lot of perfectly adequate open source tools. However, I never got used to fink (too fidgety and brittle) or opendarwin (while better, requires compiling everything, and is a bit of a hassle to configure).
So I end up running Debian on my iBook - with the only downside being that my stupid broadcom wireless isn't supported. Aside from that it's the perfect machine for me.
I do sometimes wish for a Debian port for OSX, for all the Apples around here that are being used in OSX. But I'm already grateful for Debian-powerpc.
Make use of the draconian copyright protections you guys have over there. His parents should sue the state for copyright infringement;-)
Hell, you might even use several provisions of the DMCA, because DNA is digital information after all.
What? you're reverse-engineering our 'leet basepair encoding? Off to jail with you! (well, it worked for Sklyrarov, right?)
Of course, if his parents died a long time ago, his DNA might be out of copyright and in the public domain, but of course, thanks to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act there's no way such a thing can happen anymore.;-)
Our local cinema has one theatre with digital, and I've seen a number of movies on it already.
Let me tell you - the picture quality is absolutely atrocious! I'm sure the resolution is much better than DVD's, but on such a huge screen you need ALOT more. You see the atrocious aliasing the best with text.
It's a damn shame - I'm usually all for these kinds of technology, but not at the expense of so much quality. I haven't noticed compression artifacts, however.
One advantage is that it opens the theatre up for non-movie content, like live events etc (I wouldn't mind playing doom 3 on such a screen:) )
One should always look at laws - or in this case, state-sanctioned time-limited monopolies - not in light of what their potential benefit might be, but in light of its potential for abuse. Patents are most definately not something natural, they're a privilege given so as to make sure that inventors don't keep their inventions secret.
However if in certain areas they cause more harm than good, the governement should simply not issue them. I think in the case of software, a good case can be made that copyright protection is more than adequate. If a game company (id software) makes their living on selling their engines - basically novel algorithms - but still feels that they not only don't need to file for patents to protect their business, but doesn't even need to keep their techniques secret, then I don't see what other algorithms _do_ need patent protection.
I'm pretty much convinced that the software industry would not collapse or even be hindered by the absence of patent protection for their field. I even doubt much would be kept secret, because come on, how many of these things are truly novel? For every truly novel application, there's probably 100 obvious ones. So I think it's only right to ask if there's a societal benefit.
My impression is that most software patents these days are filed for defensive purposes, or cartel-forming (cross-licencing).
It just seems to be an impediment to free market economies.
I'd like to see hooks in Gecko to be able to use the underlying toolkit (GTK) or rendering subsystem (Cairo, Quartz) for the general HTML layout and rendering primitives. That way we could take advantage of the hardware acceleration (Cairo on OpenGL), and expose the actual structure of the webpage, so we could for instance get a vector-based representation of the webpage if we need it.
Native support for SVG would tie in nicely with that too.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with parent.
I've got the dinovo for a while too (with the MX900/bluetooth), and been very happy with the keyboard especially. I hardly use the keypad (the screen would be nice if only it worked under linux, and the integrated calculator is ok, but a bit limited) The MX900 mouse is a bit heavy and doesn't always recharge properly - I'll probably buy a wired mouse soon.
But the keyboard is top notch. Feels like it's very good quality (for the price, it better be). I prefer the soft/shallow keys of this keyboard, over the typewriter heavy/deep/IBM keys, so that's something you might want to consider. And it's bluetooth, so I can use it with my laptop too, and probably even with my Nokia 770 (haven't tried this yet though)
I like them a lot, too bad about the F-keys though, I'd want them to be actual separate keys since I do use them a lot.
Upto your Kodak example, you're basically arguing:
...), so it's not surprising to see hundreds of modules/components/techniques/interactions in one software package (also a reason why there's so many bugs in comparison with the hardware world, but that's a different discussion).
"Patents are good, because you need patents to defend yourself against patents"
See the circular logic here? If there were no patents there would be no problem in the first place.
As for your point about "protecting intellectual property" - I'd echo the sentiment that other people had - you could steal other companies' ideas too, and the advances in your field would actually advance much faster! Don't forget you're standing on the shoulder of giants - in science you use other people's innovations all the time. I'm willing to bet it's exactly like that with engineering too - the more components a system has, the more likely it is you're going to want to use someone else's techniques. That's why software patents make the problem so apparent - software is "cheap" (no materials, no tolerances,
What patents basically do is slowing the rate of progress - people and companies have to watch out for a minefield of techniques they can't use for 10-20 years, even though it would make complete sense to do it from a technical standpoint. That also means, that if you're not using these techniques, you're not going to build on them or evolve them. You're either going to work around it (re-invent the wheel) - badly in some cases - or you're just going to drop it. That's progress with its hands tied!
As to your final point: yes, I have known people that used ideas of mine, and made a nice profit of them, and basically my reaction was: good for them! Having ideas is cheap, doing the work and taking the risk to bring them to fruition is the hard (99%) work. Another thing you might notice about ideas is that very often they're the product of the environment you're in. The technology is finally ready to do this or that, we have finally enough bandwith for an application like this, CPU power is now cheap enough that we can do this, etc etc - and that's also why it often seems a lot of people have the same or similar ideas at about the same time. I'd be way more pissed if I couldn't work out an idea because some twit patented it, than if I found out someone was "inspired by" (or in your words: "stole") an idea of mine (or even more likely: "came up with the same idea independently").
You could argue: "yes but, ideas have value - if you choose not to capitalize on it that's your problem". Well, the only reason ideas have value, is because of the artificial scarcity created by patent law. This is not automatically bad, but I believe in this case it is. Patent law is a delicate balance - the advantage of encouraging inventions with monetary rewards vs. the disadvantage of stopping other inventors from using certain ideas. I believe in the case of patents the disadvantage far outweighs the advantage, because I think a lot more harm is done by stopping others from using certain ideas (even if it is only temporarily) than from the very few inventors who would stop inventing because there's more risk to make it into a profitable product to recoup the cost of inventing.
You are correct - people will game any system, including the system. I apply the same test as with law proposals "One should always judge laws by their potential for abuse, not by their proclaimed benefits".
That's true, but the extension (and possibly the graphics hardware) could handle the resizing/viewport (and even rotating etc) operations for you too. Of course, I understand that it might be difficult to integrate such an API in Moz's codebase - I just don't know.
One thing I forgot:
if it's done on the server-side, it's probably also easier to take advantage of fancy graphics hardware. Imagine a graphics card that is able to decompress JPEGs on the fly, for instance (considering pixel shaders in current 3D hardware, it's not too far fetched).
it's not just the amount of space it takes in RAM and HD, but also the amount of time it takes to transport something that's 5.5x bigger. Have you seen hard drives become 5.5x faster recently? Or even RAM?
At the same time, rendering/decompressing an image might be quite self-contained, and running 50 self-contained instances of that CPU-hogging old JPEG algorithm might parallellize quite easily, so would scale with the current trends in CPU development (more parallel - just throw more chips/cores/DSPs/GPUs at it).
Just imagine trying to take advantage of graphics hardware that can decode JPEGs in hardware.
He gives three possibilities: storing it uncompressed in the server, storing it uncompressed in the client, and storing it compressed in the client (and uncompressing it on the fly).
I wonder if it might be interesting and worthwile to have an X extension to store it compressed on the server? That way there's a lot less X traffic, and potentially a lot more applications could make use of it.
The only condition is that you don't need to decompress in Moz, and recompress it to send to the X server, but just pass along the compressed data (there's some security implications with that though, but I guess they could be dealt with).
I didn't mean Ryan specifically, what I meant was that the icculus site was probably a good way to find more information, or even a porter. Like you said, "he does seem to be a touchstone of modern porting efforts"
Ask Icculus.
Ryan C Gordon is the one to thank for the Unreal ports, and a Linux game porter community surely exists at his site.
Check out http://icculus.org/
If the cost to "productize" and maintain the software is higher than what you'll get from the pessimistic scenario (according to you, 20 x 10k + whatever you could get from selling support), then it's a risk probably not worth taking, so opensourcing it will only bring benefits (goodwill, possibly selling support, and possibly sharing the maintenance costs with other companies).
However, if there's a good chance you might net more by selling than you might save (or net) by opensourcing, I believe it would be unreasonable to ignore this.
If I were you I'd prepare a few scenarios (opensource, optimistic sales, pessimistic sales, etc), where you show the variables over time:
- projected sales income (none if opensourced)
- projected support income
- maintenance costs (possibly lowering faster over time if opensourced)
- the one-time costs for productizing it (if you're selling it, people will hold it to higher standards)
- the (one-time?) costs for opensourcing it (cleaning up code to avoid embarassement, community building, communication, etc)
- mention the goodwill/brand recognition/good pr you might get from opensourcing, but it's hard to put a number on that. That's for the marketing guys to figure out, I guess.
The point is, give your bosses the right tools to make an informed decision. Chances are they'll proceed to make the right one!
> Stand out of the crowd by what you do, not what you look like.
Maybe you should judge people on what they do, and not what they look like.
If you don't know, how would he know what he's talking about?
I do both, and let me tell you it's more like 30% than 1% - and I'm not even doing everything. Not that it's not enjoyable, but proper sysadmining is a really important job, it's making sure everyone else is working smoothly. If it's badly done, the productivity of all these 30 employees will be affected.
Yea, and to add insult to injury, even the PPC you mentioned doesn't have adequate support (no sun j2re) if you stray from MacOSX.
Write once run anywhere my ass.
I'm quite interested in such a system. However, for a true decentralized system you need to put trust metrics at the core of the system, because cheating would just be too easy otherwise.
With a client/server model, you can just say: "everyone trusts what the server says, what the server says goes". With a P2P model you have no such easy way out.
Anyway, I'll be very closely watching this - the only distributed system that comes close is opencroquet, but that's not really suitale for a real-time environment.
While they might not necessarily succeed, it'll be very interesting to see their experience and conclusions once their prototypes start being used.
Quake2 is GPL'ed
... well you get the idea. With a bit of searching
Quake3 will probably be in the near future, and has a very active community of modders/tools/information/...
Cube (and nextgen Sauerbraten) are zlib licensed:
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
fun for its realtime ingame editor iirc
Ogre is LGPL'ed and also very active community
http://www.ogre3d.org/
I think you must be able to find some decent open source stuff.
Yeah, but the fact that happy iMac owners could _only_ use USB peripherals really made USB gadgets take off. Until then consumers had little reason to get the more expensive USB stuff because they had ADB or PS/2 or serial on PC, and manufacturers couldn't get the volume to get the prices down.
Before the iMac, PC's had USB for quite a long time (I think they came standard on most motherboards since intel introduced them as a standard feature on their 430HX chipsets), but they just ended up gathering dust. However, since noone thought they needed it, and the usb devices were more expensive, mass migration to USB just didn't happen until those ugly transparent plastic devices built to match the iMac.
Are you sure about this? Drivers in x.org are MIT/X licenced iirc, and that means there's no obligation to open source the derivative like with copyleft (GPL/LGPL) licenses.
Or do you mean the linux kernel framebuffer driver? (which, as it's part of linux is likely licensed under the GPL)
hardware RAID has these advantages:
/
... your raid sets? I don't know, you'll have to investigate this yourself.
1) offloads operations to the controller, so eats less CPU/IO bandwidth.
2) can have battery backed cache
3) often looks like "just a scsi controller" to linux and the boot loaders, so booting from f.e. a RAID5 set is often easier.
software RAID has these advantages
1) is cheaper
2) CPU time lost makes hardly any difference
3) has well-tested and supported tools to manage your raid setup. (imagine if you could only set up your raid sets by rebooting and entering the raid bios)
4) disk-layout is non-proprietary (controller died? don't have the same brand lying around? manufacturer left the market? no problem!) - so all-around more flexibility.
Look here for properly supported sata disk controllers:
http://linux.yyz.us/sata/
Some of these cards come with BIOS smarts that provides you with software raid which offer you the advantage of point 3) of hardware raid, ie: bios and boot loader support for your raid.
however, this does mean that the on-disk layout has to be recognized in linux, so linux can make sense of it and set up the raid sets properly. In linux 2.4 there were some drivers that did that themselves, however for linux 2.6 there's now a little userspace program that recognizes a whole bunch of on-disk layouts, and sets them up using the device-mapper facility (part of LVM2).
The advantage of this is that you can use the same well-tested and -supported linux drivers mentioned on http://linux.yyz.us/sata/ , but still use the (bios) facilities provided by the hardware. Another advantage is that this program will probably be used by all ATARAID ("mostly-software-raid") devices on linux, so it is, or will be well-tested and -supported in itself.
You can find this program, called DMRAID here:
http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid
So if you decide to go the SW-RAID way, think and decide if you want the advantage of dmraid. I haven't tried this myself yet, and the only aspect I'm unsure of is the management aspect of it (like with HW-RAID drivers) - DMRAID doesn't use MDADM, so how can you properly monitor, hot-add,
MDADM itself isn't going away any time soon either, if I understand correctly. (And even if it does, it's probably very likely that they'll make DMRAID understand the MDADM on-disk layout to provide an upgrade path.)
If however you decide to go the HW-RAID way, make sure you get a reliable and reputable manufacturer - with open source drivers (!), preferably with a known on-disk layout, and be prepared to spend money. I've heard a lot about 3ware, but I have no direct experience with them myself, so I can't vouch for them.
Well, I agree up to a point. OS X is better than any other commercial system, that's true.
However, as someone thoroughly familiar and comfortable with Debian/Linux, I don't feel quite at home in OS X land. It seems navigating my files with the Finder just takes so much effort, I find it very unnatural compared to MC and even Nautilus. Also, the culture of shareware is quite alien, when you know there's a lot of perfectly adequate open source tools. However, I never got used to fink (too fidgety and brittle) or opendarwin (while better, requires compiling everything, and is a bit of a hassle to configure).
So I end up running Debian on my iBook - with the only downside being that my stupid broadcom wireless isn't supported. Aside from that it's the perfect machine for me.
I do sometimes wish for a Debian port for OSX, for all the Apples around here that are being used in OSX. But I'm already grateful for Debian-powerpc.
yeah, ICANN's record really is _so_ much better.
not.
Make use of the draconian copyright protections you guys have over there. His parents should sue the state for copyright infringement ;-)
;-)
Hell, you might even use several provisions of the DMCA, because DNA is digital information after all.
What? you're reverse-engineering our 'leet basepair encoding? Off to jail with you! (well, it worked for Sklyrarov, right?)
Of course, if his parents died a long time ago, his DNA might be out of copyright and in the public domain, but of course, thanks to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act there's no way such a thing can happen anymore.
Our local cinema has one theatre with digital, and I've seen a number of movies on it already.
:) )
Let me tell you - the picture quality is absolutely atrocious! I'm sure the resolution is much better than DVD's, but on such a huge screen you need ALOT more. You see the atrocious aliasing the best with text.
It's a damn shame - I'm usually all for these kinds of technology, but not at the expense of so much quality. I haven't noticed compression artifacts, however.
One advantage is that it opens the theatre up for non-movie content, like live events etc (I wouldn't mind playing doom 3 on such a screen
One should always look at laws - or in this case, state-sanctioned time-limited monopolies - not in light of what their potential benefit might be, but in light of its potential for abuse. Patents are most definately not something natural, they're a privilege given so as to make sure that inventors don't keep their inventions secret.
However if in certain areas they cause more harm than good, the governement should simply not issue them. I think in the case of software, a good case can be made that copyright protection is more than adequate. If a game company (id software) makes their living on selling their engines - basically novel algorithms - but still feels that they not only don't need to file for patents to protect their business, but doesn't even need to keep their techniques secret, then I don't see what other algorithms _do_ need patent protection.
I'm pretty much convinced that the software industry would not collapse or even be hindered by the absence of patent protection for their field. I even doubt much would be kept secret, because come on, how many of these things are truly novel? For every truly novel application, there's probably 100 obvious ones. So I think it's only right to ask if there's a societal benefit.
My impression is that most software patents these days are filed for defensive purposes, or cartel-forming (cross-licencing).
It just seems to be an impediment to free market economies.
I'd like to see hooks in Gecko to be able to use the underlying toolkit (GTK) or rendering subsystem (Cairo, Quartz) for the general HTML layout and rendering primitives. That way we could take advantage of the hardware acceleration (Cairo on OpenGL), and expose the actual structure of the webpage, so we could for instance get a vector-based representation of the webpage if we need it.
Native support for SVG would tie in nicely with that too.
Well, cardbus was exactly like hot-swap pci for laptops too, so the only real difference is the addition of a USB bus.
And yes, the drivers of a cardbus card and a compact-pci or pci card are almost identical.