According to United States law, you can't patent algorithms for the same reason that you can't patent blueprints, i.e., patents apply to useful inventions, to things that work in the world, as opposed to abstract ideas.
To get a sense of the distinction, it may be helpful to think about the Supreme Court's *other* big patent ruling today, i.e., Microsoft v. Alcatel-Lucent. In this case, both companies admitted that Windows infringes on Lucent's speech recognition patents. Normally, these patents would not apply to products in other countries, which are governed by their own patent laws. This explicitly includes cases in which somebody sells a blueprint to somebody else in another country, who then uses that blueprint to manufacture a product that infringes on a US patent. The exception in US law is if you ship components of an infringing product overseas and then have them assembled over there. Congress correctly perceived such an act as an attempted end-run around US patent laws and said that, whether or not it is assembled in the US, a product that is manufactured in the United States and infringes on US patents is subject to US patent law.
Microsoft ships a master DVD overseas, where it is duplicated and installed on computers there. Alcatel-Lucent argued that this is fundamentally similar to assembling a US-manufactured product overseas and that Microsoft should pay damages. (A lower court awarded them $1.5 billion.) Microsoft argued, however, that shipping a master DVD is more like sending a blueprint for products that are then manufactured overseas. The Supreme Court concurred, ruling in favor of Microsoft 8-1.
Now here's the key twist. In an Amicus brief that was probably not appreciated by Microsoft and apparently not embraced by the court, the SFLC argued that *all* software is like a blueprint or an algorithm, as this weird test case of installing it overseas versus installing it domestically demonstrates (in their view). Therefore, software should be fundamentally unpatentable.
Oops! Sorry, the NY Times article wasn't the one I was thinking of. The contrasting view I meant to post was "Educational Games Don't Have To Stink!", (also requiring registration), which argues that games don't teach; they just "illustrate."
Personally, I think Koster is closer to the mark. Games teach something, but they may not be very good at teaching the sorts of things that are often crammed into eduware.
I recently blogged a short review of this book from the perspective of somebody in the online learning business. What's interesting to me is that Koster believes "fun" is an evolutionary adaptation to reward learning. Fun comes with mastery of skills, he suggests. So when you hear somebody say that a game is "better than sex," it's possible that there's more to it than a game geek whose memory of sex is somewhat...hazy.
Also interesting is Koster's comparison of what games can teach versus what stories can teach. He believes that games teach abstract pattern recognition. You beat the game by grokking the pattern. The fact that the obstacles you have to eliminate happen to be human beings...well, games aren't so good at getting you to empathize. Stories do that much better (he claims).
In fact, there's good reason to think that larger projects, having more resources available, would be much more likely to host their projects themselves. Mozilla and CVS come to mind, for example.
faster than Java, nice looking than Java, and has all the power of a serverside script without all the page reloads....NICE!!!!
Exactly. Let me add a couple of more reasons to this list.
There's a relatively unified platform to write to. Forget browser-delivered client-side Java. It's way too much work and too heavy a download for the typical online learning application. And Javascript and DHTML vary according to browser. For some kinds of functionality, you can actually get broader compatibility with Flash, since it has come bundled with Windows and Mac browsers for ages now.
It's the right trade-off between functionality and required programmer skill level. You don't need a full-blown Turing-complete object-oriented language for interactive online learning. Forcing yourself to write everything in Java is silly. On the other hand, being able to write a relatively rich (and stateful) client-side web app *is* helpful. With Flash, I have a tool that gives me the right level of power without having to find (and pay) programmers with more skill than necessary to use a tool that has more power (and overhead) than necessary.
You guys who live in the world of the command line are very comfortable with plain text. Thus, you assume that everything is best presented to everyone in plain text. The fact of the matter is that people have different cognitive styles. If you're developing something to teach people, at least some of your audience will learn better through diagrams, pictures, simulations, and other sort of participatory (i.e., interactive) exercise. Flash can be very useful for this sort of application, particularly now that it has a real scripting language behind it, can use XML, and has some real interface widgets available to programmers.
Apple currently has roughly 5% market share. (It varies a bit depending on whose numbers you believe.) If they are able to get an extra.5% through a combination of converting PC users (who, by the way, do not need to throw out their PCs in order to buy a Mac) and adding first-time buyers, they will grow their user base by 10%. Likewise, a 1% growth in total market share gives them 20% growth of user base.
Now think about the market segments where Apple has or is gaining momentum. They own about half of the schools market, but they also have the strongest laptop offering for schools. (Laptops are by far the hottest category here.) They're adding users in the Unix-using community, and many of these folks (particularly labs and universities) can easily buy Macs without throwing out their x86 machines. They're gaining ground in higher end video production. This may not be a huge market, but each shop buys a relatively large number of machines. And they may be gaining just a little ground in home and small business purchases (though it's difficult to tell at this point).
If Apple is able to move the fence-sitters in each of these categories, that may add up to the.5% - 1% market share I'm sure they'd like to add in the next 12-18 months.
From what I can tell based on the (very short) article, RedHat is *not* porting a full distro to PowerPC. They are porting an Altivec-enabled cross-compiler and something called a GNUPro Linux toolchain. (I'm not sure what the latter is, but I'm sure some other/.er can fill in the details.
At any rate, this is not really a desktop-focused announcement. It's about the embedded market. Moto wants embedded Linux to be developed for use on PPC-backed set-top boxes, Internet appliances, network appliances, etc. It may have some positive repercussions for Unix on PPC desktop as well, but since Apple is already hard at work making the gcc work well for PPC and OS X, I'm not clear on exactly what those benefits might be.
Could it be that the reason they're doing the FreeBSD port is Mac OS X? Assuming that OS X is going to be the most widely distributed *NIX variant on the planet, they're going after the biggest market share?
This worries me greatly. I suspect that Microsoft does *not* plan on bringing.NET to Linux (although it remains to be seen how hard they will fight other people who want to try to do so). By going for FreeBSD (and FreeBSD only), they get to:
Claim that they have ported.NET to an Open Source *nix
Gain access to the second-largest consumer OS
Use Apple's Darwin to claim access from another Open Source *nix
Make a point of not going to Linux so they can say, "See? We play nice. We just don't want to catch that nasty viral license."
Through no fault of their own, Apple may have created a tool that Microsoft can use to try to drive a wedge into Open Source.
Could it be that the reason they're doing the FreeBSD port is Mac OS X? Assuming that OS X is going to be the most widely distributed *NIX variant on the planet, they're going after the biggest market share?
This worries me greatly. I suspect that Microsoft does *not* plan on bringing.NET to Linux (although it remains to be seen how hard they will fight other people who want to try to do so). By going for FreeBSD (and FreeBSD only), they get to:
Claim that they have ported.NET to an Open Source *nix
Gain access to the second-largest consumer OS
Use Apple's Darwin to claim access from another Open Source *nix
Make a point of not going to Linux so they can say, "See? We play nice. We just don't want to catch that nasty viral license."
Through no fault of their own, Apple may have created a tool that Microsoft can use to try to drive a wedge into Open Source.
Do you have any idea the amount of time/money those students who had to take summer school lost? Add all of those together and this becomes a lot more serious.
I guess that the fact that several high-quality administrators who were getting results (including one of the better chancellors of NYC schools in recent history) were fired because the tests didn't show the results they were getting is somewhat less serious.
Yeesh.
Online course content vs. real distance learning
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 1
FWIW, this white paper specifically addresses why MIT's gesture is a wonderful one and why this isn't the same as effective distance learning. (Believe it or not, there is such a thing. In fact, that's the point of the white paper.)
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I work for the OTTER Group.
If you find the white paper interesting, (and you hopefully will if you are interested in teaching and learning online), then come back in a week or two, when we'll have the site set up to take public comments on the paper.
I have to say, you guys are blowing an opportunity here. Somebody comes to/. asking about how to comply with Open Source licenses. Helpful informational answers might increase the likelihood that the poster will contribute to the community, or at least, that he will not abuse the rights of the community (wittingly or unwittingly). Answers about what's legal would be helpful. Answers about gray areas would be helpful. Answers about how to approach the owner of the code in the spirit of cooperation that Open Source tries to foster would be helpful.
Instead, we get attacks on the poster's integrity. We get flame wars about whether GPL is good or bad. We get moral diatribes. None of these help this guy do the right thing or promote wider use of Open Source code. If I were the original poster, I would have tuned out this conversation in disgust about 100 posts ago.
If you feel passionate about Open Source--as many of you obviously do--then you would do well to remember that/. is a highly public forum. Every time you post, you have an opportunity to be an ambassador for the Open Source community to the rest of the world.
Now, if you don't want to take that opportunity, that's fine. I'm not questioning your right to free speech here. I'm just saying that, given the way the community is responding to questions from potential allies outside the community, don't be surprised if the world isn't ready to embrace Open Source with open arms.
Slashdot Mirror
According to United States law, you can't patent algorithms for the same reason that you can't patent blueprints, i.e., patents apply to useful inventions, to things that work in the world, as opposed to abstract ideas.
To get a sense of the distinction, it may be helpful to think about the Supreme Court's *other* big patent ruling today, i.e., Microsoft v. Alcatel-Lucent. In this case, both companies admitted that Windows infringes on Lucent's speech recognition patents. Normally, these patents would not apply to products in other countries, which are governed by their own patent laws. This explicitly includes cases in which somebody sells a blueprint to somebody else in another country, who then uses that blueprint to manufacture a product that infringes on a US patent. The exception in US law is if you ship components of an infringing product overseas and then have them assembled over there. Congress correctly perceived such an act as an attempted end-run around US patent laws and said that, whether or not it is assembled in the US, a product that is manufactured in the United States and infringes on US patents is subject to US patent law.
Microsoft ships a master DVD overseas, where it is duplicated and installed on computers there. Alcatel-Lucent argued that this is fundamentally similar to assembling a US-manufactured product overseas and that Microsoft should pay damages. (A lower court awarded them $1.5 billion.) Microsoft argued, however, that shipping a master DVD is more like sending a blueprint for products that are then manufactured overseas. The Supreme Court concurred, ruling in favor of Microsoft 8-1.
Now here's the key twist. In an Amicus brief that was probably not appreciated by Microsoft and apparently not embraced by the court, the SFLC argued that *all* software is like a blueprint or an algorithm, as this weird test case of installing it overseas versus installing it domestically demonstrates (in their view). Therefore, software should be fundamentally unpatentable.
Oops! Sorry, the NY Times article wasn't the one I was thinking of. The contrasting view I meant to post was "Educational Games Don't Have To Stink!", (also requiring registration), which argues that games don't teach; they just "illustrate."
Personally, I think Koster is closer to the mark. Games teach something, but they may not be very good at teaching the sorts of things that are often crammed into eduware.
I recently blogged a short review of this book from the perspective of somebody in the online learning business. What's interesting to me is that Koster believes "fun" is an evolutionary adaptation to reward learning. Fun comes with mastery of skills, he suggests. So when you hear somebody say that a game is "better than sex," it's possible that there's more to it than a game geek whose memory of sex is somewhat...hazy.
Also interesting is Koster's comparison of what games can teach versus what stories can teach. He believes that games teach abstract pattern recognition. You beat the game by grokking the pattern. The fact that the obstacles you have to eliminate happen to be human beings...well, games aren't so good at getting you to empathize. Stories do that much better (he claims).
For a contrasting view, you might want to check out "Is Instructional Video Game an Oxymoron?" in this week's New York Times (registration required).
In fact, there's good reason to think that larger projects, having more resources available, would be much more likely to host their projects themselves. Mozilla and CVS come to mind, for example.
faster than Java, nice looking than Java, and has all the power of a serverside script without all the page reloads....NICE!!!!
Exactly. Let me add a couple of more reasons to this list.
You guys who live in the world of the command line are very comfortable with plain text. Thus, you assume that everything is best presented to everyone in plain text. The fact of the matter is that people have different cognitive styles. If you're developing something to teach people, at least some of your audience will learn better through diagrams, pictures, simulations, and other sort of participatory (i.e., interactive) exercise. Flash can be very useful for this sort of application, particularly now that it has a real scripting language behind it, can use XML, and has some real interface widgets available to programmers.
Do the math.
.5% through a combination of converting PC users (who, by the way, do not need to throw out their PCs in order to buy a Mac) and adding first-time buyers, they will grow their user base by 10%. Likewise, a 1% growth in total market share gives them 20% growth of user base.
.5% - 1% market share I'm sure they'd like to add in the next 12-18 months.
Apple currently has roughly 5% market share. (It varies a bit depending on whose numbers you believe.) If they are able to get an extra
Now think about the market segments where Apple has or is gaining momentum. They own about half of the schools market, but they also have the strongest laptop offering for schools. (Laptops are by far the hottest category here.) They're adding users in the Unix-using community, and many of these folks (particularly labs and universities) can easily buy Macs without throwing out their x86 machines. They're gaining ground in higher end video production. This may not be a huge market, but each shop buys a relatively large number of machines. And they may be gaining just a little ground in home and small business purchases (though it's difficult to tell at this point).
If Apple is able to move the fence-sitters in each of these categories, that may add up to the
From what I can tell based on the (very short) article, RedHat is *not* porting a full distro to PowerPC. They are porting an Altivec-enabled cross-compiler and something called a GNUPro Linux toolchain. (I'm not sure what the latter is, but I'm sure some other /.er can fill in the details.
At any rate, this is not really a desktop-focused announcement. It's about the embedded market. Moto wants embedded Linux to be developed for use on PPC-backed set-top boxes, Internet appliances, network appliances, etc. It may have some positive repercussions for Unix on PPC desktop as well, but since Apple is already hard at work making the gcc work well for PPC and OS X, I'm not clear on exactly what those benefits might be.
Could it be that the reason they're doing the FreeBSD port is Mac OS X? Assuming that OS X is going to be the most widely distributed *NIX variant on the planet, they're going after the biggest market share?
This worries me greatly. I suspect that Microsoft does *not* plan on bringing .NET to Linux (although it remains to be seen how hard they will fight other people who want to try to do so). By going for FreeBSD (and FreeBSD only), they get to:
Through no fault of their own, Apple may have created a tool that Microsoft can use to try to drive a wedge into Open Source.
Could it be that the reason they're doing the FreeBSD port is Mac OS X? Assuming that OS X is going to be the most widely distributed *NIX variant on the planet, they're going after the biggest market share?
This worries me greatly. I suspect that Microsoft does *not* plan on bringing .NET to Linux (although it remains to be seen how hard they will fight other people who want to try to do so). By going for FreeBSD (and FreeBSD only), they get to:
Through no fault of their own, Apple may have created a tool that Microsoft can use to try to drive a wedge into Open Source.
Do you have any idea the amount of time/money those students who had to take summer school lost? Add all of those together and this becomes a lot more serious. I guess that the fact that several high-quality administrators who were getting results (including one of the better chancellors of NYC schools in recent history) were fired because the tests didn't show the results they were getting is somewhat less serious. Yeesh.
FWIW, this white paper specifically addresses why MIT's gesture is a wonderful one and why this isn't the same as effective distance learning. (Believe it or not, there is such a thing. In fact, that's the point of the white paper.)
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I work for the OTTER Group.
If you find the white paper interesting, (and you hopefully will if you are interested in teaching and learning online), then come back in a week or two, when we'll have the site set up to take public comments on the paper.
I have to say, you guys are blowing an opportunity here. Somebody comes to /. asking about how to comply with Open Source licenses. Helpful informational answers might increase the likelihood that the poster will contribute to the community, or at least, that he will not abuse the rights of the community (wittingly or unwittingly). Answers about what's legal would be helpful. Answers about gray areas would be helpful. Answers about how to approach the owner of the code in the spirit of cooperation that Open Source tries to foster would be helpful.
/. is a highly public forum. Every time you post, you have an opportunity to be an ambassador for the Open Source community to the rest of the world.
Instead, we get attacks on the poster's integrity. We get flame wars about whether GPL is good or bad. We get moral diatribes. None of these help this guy do the right thing or promote wider use of Open Source code. If I were the original poster, I would have tuned out this conversation in disgust about 100 posts ago.
If you feel passionate about Open Source--as many of you obviously do--then you would do well to remember that
Now, if you don't want to take that opportunity, that's fine. I'm not questioning your right to free speech here. I'm just saying that, given the way the community is responding to questions from potential allies outside the community, don't be surprised if the world isn't ready to embrace Open Source with open arms.