Processes can be patented, so why not patent the process for making whatever medicine that comes out of the gene research?
Companies innovate because they can make money by coming up with something new. Patents only (unreasonably so) grant a company a monopoly and in the end stiffle innovation by other companies.
Anyway, history has shown that just because something is not patentable, that doesn't mean that no one will innovate in that area. Patents are a relatively new concept, and plenty of innovation took place prior to the idea of patents.
Like I said in the other thread, although the characters and items were 2D sprites, the actual map you ran around in was drawn with a (albeit software) 3D renderer.
This should be moderated past the top. Very informative, and good advice. If it's against your ethics, quit. If you are a competant sysadmin, you will have no problem finding another job, and make sure you tell your new company why you quit the other one!
Actually the term "2 1/2 d" refers to the fact that although Wolf, Doom and Duke may have used 2D sprites for their characters and items, the sprites were projected into a rendered 3D world.
I agree with your point, which is still the same: Microsoft didn't invent 3D:)
Posted that lastone when I was only halfway done flaming:
There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
That's funny... I remember playing Wolf3D and DOOM before Direct3D was even a glimmer in Microsoft's eyes.
People use Glide rather than D3D 'cos it's way faster. Speed really is all that matters...
You've got to be kidding. Would you mind explaining how one API can be faster than another? Sure, a driver or hardware can be faster, but an API is just a specification. People use whatever API that will get the job done. If the job is to only support 3DFX cards, they use Glide. If the job is to support a number of cards, they use D3D. If the job is for portability, the use OpenGL.
If that's the case then they probably wont get far out of the "startup" phase. The cost of an upstream provider to give customers 10Mbit speeds to the internet would quickly run them out of business.
If your response wasn't so well-written and thought out, I would have immediately dismissed it as FUD. You make some good points but let me point out a few important things you miss:
companies with millions in revenue and hundreds of employees to support will not be able to build a credible business case for engineering based on a concept that boils down to "whatever innovations we create will be made immediately available to our competitors.
The whole point of open-source is you totally get away from that mindset. You no longer sit in your cathedral, paying internal programmers to come up with something, and then "release it to your competitors." Open source is not about giving away research and innovation. It's about not investing in the first place--using what is already there, adding to it, and integrating innovations that you and others come up with.
I'd never recommend a company to invest millions of dollars into a software and then just "give it away." The point is to start with existing code, and an existing developer/user-base, and work from there.
Contrary to popular myth, companies that open source their product line don't survive in this industry (in any meaningful way). They simply cannot generate the revenue required to compete with all the companies that retain their competitive advantage.
Please tell this to RedHat. They are doing it right. RedHat doesn't slave away creating huge monstrous projects then just releasing them for free! They take what is out there, add value and support, and sell the added value and support. True, they also contribute code, but this is only part of their overall strategy.
At the point a 20 person team is required to engineer, distribute, and support a Linux app, you'll quickly see how little of it ends up being open sourced simply due to the economics.
There are far too many examples of open-source projects that defy this assertion to even list. The point is, none of these projects are developed in a closed, in-house way. I agree... Anyone who invests in engineers, QA, testers and distributors, and then gives their product away is a fool. But on the other hand, if you use the open-source model the way it is intended, it makes good business sense.
1. Portability. Across different OS platforms and architectures. This one's a must. No excuse in this day and age for any library, GUI or not, to only run on Wintel.
2. Language independance. I want perl bindings, C bindings, your-language-here bindings. I don't care if you wrote the GUI interface in C++, just don't make me use the bloody language if I don't want to.
3. Simplicity. I want a toolkit, not a whole platform. Let me define my own data structures. Don't try to get me to use YourToolkitULONG when unsigned long works just fine. One thing that's annoyed me about some toolkits is that they want to "take over" the whole program in that way.
Owners of the Matrox G-series video tools will soon have support for video capture on Linux. The driver is nearing "alpha" quality and is available here.
The point is, with library that has language bindings, the option is there to use whatever language you want. I have seen VERY few C++ based libraries that had bindings for any language besides C++.
We may be able to see in the future GTK+ becoming the defacto standard cross-platform GUI toolkit. It is fairly easy to program, and has lots of language bindings. Thats one key aspect. You don't need to use C++ to program GTK+. This more than anything will draw developers to the toolkit.
What surprises me is that 26.8% of the respondants have never heard of GTK+, Qt, Motif, or Swing, or they don't even know what toolkit they want to use.
Does anyone know where most of the money from a successful game goes? That's right, it goes not to the people who made the game... It goes to the publishers first, then the distributors, then what is left over trickles into the hands of the developers.
In this way, the once exciting art of making a game has gone the way of TV, movies, and to a certain extent, books.
Until publishers stop insisting on being able to make the creative decisions AND swallowing up all the profits, the game industry will continue to go the way it has been: Hundreds of crappy games, all clones of each other, competing for space on a ten foot long shelf.
I concede from a system integrator's standpoint, the availability of an AGP port at the expense of a PCI slot sucks. I try to steer clear of motherboard manufacturers who do this.
But on the other point you are incorrect. Video card manufacturers are choosing AGP not because they are scared of Intel, but because you can do a whole lot more with AGP, and in order to keep up with the competition performance-wise they need to use it.
There are simply some things hardware-wise you just cannot do with PCI.
You make it quite clear in your post that you have no idea what benefits AGP gives to a video system, and are in general quite clueless about the things you are trying to talk about.
In what way exactly is it less "versitile"? AGP in fact is more versitile than PCI from a technical standpoint, given its ability to make use of system DRAM more efficiently than PCI. That along with sidebanding and write-combining makes AGP much better a choice than PCI for anything (not just video cards) that has high bandwith requirements and/or memory requirements.
Most of the people disappointed with _Blair Witch Project_ probably went into it with a lot of expectations, and/or a closed mind. They were expecting to see _Alien_ or _Terminator_, and were disappointed because BWP was not what they were used to. BWP was a horror film, not a thriller, not an action movie, not a slasher.
Think about it this way. A person who uses Windows their entire life, dips his toe in the water and tries Linux, and instantly hates it. Why? It's not as candy-coated as they expect. All these magazines touting Linux as new and improved, with a great new UI, but really it is still a primarily command-line oriented OS (a good thing IMHO). Linux is an operating system. Not a game, not an application, not a toy.
The point is, advertisements may have made BWP seem to be some kind of blockbuster summer thriller, when all it really was and all it was meant to be was a spooky story. If you expected the movie to spoon-feed you your emotions, you would have been better off going to see _Runaway Bride_.
Replace all occurrances of the word "criminal" with "citizen" and "terrorist" with "law abiding American" and you will see what the US government is really concerned with--tracking ordinary people to sell their information to the corporations who are really holding the strings.
But this application of them looks promising. I was in the DSP business for a while, and we used FPGA's on our boards. Unfortunately it is still pretty expensive technology, but give it time.
Slashdot Mirror
Processes can be patented, so why not patent the process for making whatever medicine that comes out of the gene research?
Companies innovate because they can make money by coming up with something new. Patents only (unreasonably so) grant a company a monopoly and in the end stiffle innovation by other companies.
Anyway, history has shown that just because something is not patentable, that doesn't mean that no one will innovate in that area. Patents are a relatively new concept, and plenty of innovation took place prior to the idea of patents.
Like I said in the other thread, although the characters and items were 2D sprites, the actual map you ran around in was drawn with a (albeit software) 3D renderer.
This should be moderated past the top. Very informative, and good advice. If it's against your ethics, quit. If you are a competant sysadmin, you will have no problem finding another job, and make sure you tell your new company why you quit the other one!
Actually the term "2 1/2 d" refers to the fact that although Wolf, Doom and Duke may have used 2D sprites for their characters and items, the sprites were projected into a rendered 3D world.
:)
I agree with your point, which is still the same: Microsoft didn't invent 3D
Posted that lastone when I was only halfway done flaming:
There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
That's funny... I remember playing Wolf3D and DOOM before Direct3D was even a glimmer in Microsoft's eyes.
People use Glide rather than D3D 'cos it's way faster. Speed really is all that matters
You've got to be kidding. Would you mind explaining how one API can be faster than another? Sure, a driver or hardware can be faster, but an API is just a specification. People use whatever API that will get the job done. If the job is to only support 3DFX cards, they use Glide. If the job is to support a number of cards, they use D3D. If the job is for portability, the use OpenGL.
There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
That's funny... I remember playing Wolf3D and DOOM before Direct3D was even a glimmer in Microsoft's eyes.
If that's the case then they probably wont get far out of the "startup" phase. The cost of an upstream provider to give customers 10Mbit speeds to the internet would quickly run them out of business.
There are people getting GTK+ working on Windows and BeOS, if you want a portable GUI toolkit.
If your response wasn't so well-written and thought out, I would have immediately dismissed it as FUD. You make some good points but let me point out a few important things you miss:
companies with millions in revenue and hundreds of employees to support will not be able to build a credible business case for engineering based on a concept that boils down to "whatever innovations we create will be made immediately available to our competitors.
The whole point of open-source is you totally get away from that mindset. You no longer sit in your cathedral, paying internal programmers to come up with something, and then "release it to your competitors." Open source is not about giving away research and innovation. It's about not investing in the first place--using what is already there, adding to it, and integrating innovations that you and others come up with.
I'd never recommend a company to invest millions of dollars into a software and then just "give it away." The point is to start with existing code, and an existing developer/user-base, and work from there.
Contrary to popular myth, companies that open source their product line don't survive in this industry (in any meaningful way). They simply cannot generate the revenue required to compete with all the companies that retain their competitive advantage.
Please tell this to RedHat. They are doing it right. RedHat doesn't slave away creating huge monstrous projects then just releasing them for free! They take what is out there, add value and support, and sell the added value and support. True, they also contribute code, but this is only part of their overall strategy.
At the point a 20 person team is required to engineer, distribute, and support a Linux app, you'll quickly see how little of it ends up being open sourced simply due to the economics.
There are far too many examples of open-source projects that defy this assertion to even list. The point is, none of these projects are developed in a closed, in-house way. I agree... Anyone who invests in engineers, QA, testers and distributors, and then gives their product away is a fool. But on the other hand, if you use the open-source model the way it is intended, it makes good business sense.
If she asks you to buy her a drink, instead say "Why dont YOU buy ME a drink?"
I guarantee it will turn away 100% of the golddiggers.
1. Portability. Across different OS platforms and architectures. This one's a must. No excuse in this day and age for any library, GUI or not, to only run on Wintel.
2. Language independance. I want perl bindings, C bindings, your-language-here bindings. I don't care if you wrote the GUI interface in C++, just don't make me use the bloody language if I don't want to.
3. Simplicity. I want a toolkit, not a whole platform. Let me define my own data structures. Don't try to get me to use YourToolkitULONG when unsigned long works just fine. One thing that's annoyed me about some toolkits is that they want to "take over" the whole program in that way.
Read it again. At a production cost of $50, you will expect to pay at least $500-$600 for one of these as a consumer.
:)
Not that that's bad for 2 terrabytes!
Think of how many people's browsers default to Microsoft, AOL, or Netscape's homepage.
Yea, I thought so...
Owners of the Matrox G-series video tools will soon have support for video capture on Linux. The driver is nearing "alpha" quality and is available here.
The point is, with library that has language bindings, the option is there to use whatever language you want. I have seen VERY few C++ based libraries that had bindings for any language besides C++.
We may be able to see in the future GTK+ becoming the defacto standard cross-platform GUI toolkit. It is fairly easy to program, and has lots of language bindings. Thats one key aspect. You don't need to use C++ to program GTK+. This more than anything will draw developers to the toolkit.
Can you explain how an operating system "likes to programmed with C++"?
What surprises me is that 26.8% of the respondants have never heard of GTK+, Qt, Motif, or Swing, or they don't even know what toolkit they want to use.
Who the heck is responding to this poll?
Does anyone know where most of the money from a successful game goes? That's right, it goes not to the people who made the game... It goes to the publishers first, then the distributors, then what is left over trickles into the hands of the developers.
In this way, the once exciting art of making a game has gone the way of TV, movies, and to a certain extent, books.
Until publishers stop insisting on being able to make the creative decisions AND swallowing up all the profits, the game industry will continue to go the way it has been: Hundreds of crappy games, all clones of each other, competing for space on a ten foot long shelf.
I concede from a system integrator's standpoint, the availability of an AGP port at the expense of a PCI slot sucks. I try to steer clear of motherboard manufacturers who do this.
But on the other point you are incorrect. Video card manufacturers are choosing AGP not because they are scared of Intel, but because you can do a whole lot more with AGP, and in order to keep up with the competition performance-wise they need to use it.
There are simply some things hardware-wise you just cannot do with PCI.
You make it quite clear in your post that you have no idea what benefits AGP gives to a video system, and are in general quite clueless about the things you are trying to talk about.
In what way exactly is it less "versitile"? AGP in fact is more versitile than PCI from a technical standpoint, given its ability to make use of system DRAM more efficiently than PCI. That along with sidebanding and write-combining makes AGP much better a choice than PCI for anything (not just video cards) that has high bandwith requirements and/or memory requirements.
Most of the people disappointed with _Blair Witch Project_ probably went into it with a lot of expectations, and/or a closed mind. They were expecting to see _Alien_ or _Terminator_, and were disappointed because BWP was not what they were used to. BWP was a horror film, not a thriller, not an action movie, not a slasher.
Think about it this way. A person who uses Windows their entire life, dips his toe in the water and tries Linux, and instantly hates it. Why? It's not as candy-coated as they expect. All these magazines touting Linux as new and improved, with a great new UI, but really it is still a primarily command-line oriented OS (a good thing IMHO). Linux is an operating system. Not a game, not an application, not a toy.
The point is, advertisements may have made BWP seem to be some kind of blockbuster summer thriller, when all it really was and all it was meant to be was a spooky story. If you expected the movie to spoon-feed you your emotions, you would have been better off going to see _Runaway Bride_.
They are rare, and in my experience they tend to make themselves equally as unavailable as male hackers make themselves.
Replace all occurrances of the word "criminal" with "citizen" and "terrorist" with "law abiding American" and you will see what the US government is really concerned with--tracking ordinary people to sell their information to the corporations who are really holding the strings.
But this application of them looks promising. I was in the DSP business for a while, and we used FPGA's on our boards. Unfortunately it is still pretty expensive technology, but give it time.