It's unclear from the description what this actually does. I don't think they claim that it reads electrical signals from the brain directly. There are lots of other electrical signals that it might be reading.
Of course, whatever it reads, it may still be useful.
How much do you want to bet that the fundies will try their hardest to outlaw this research because in their view HIV is God's punishment for homosexual behavior?
I also want to point out that it would be near impossible to make anything but a vaccine out of this discovery.
That's nonsense. If you knew anything about vaccines, you'd know that it's pretty much impossible to make a vaccine out of this discovery. But it might lead to a treatment.
Well, fortunately, there are experts for that sort of thing. They aren't in management, though, and Microsoft management seems too stupid to listen to them.
Oh sure, in the US you don't, assuming that you don't drive, don't have a government ID, don't vote, are unemployed (and not receiving benefits), don't own a house, and are not a male between the ages of 18 and 26.
All you need for any of that is a mailing address, not the place where you actually live.
The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well.
You sound too full of yourself; that alone is a big warning sign.
You could do it in the kernel, but you shouldn't. The kernel keeps track of files using inodes and device numbers, not paths,
The kernel can keep track of files in whatever way it likes, including paths. But I don't see a problem with using inode numbers anyway. I think "preload" is trying a little too hard.
Moreover the act of caching the file is easily accomplished by a low-priority user-space task which speculatively reads the files
These "low-priority user-space tasks" are spreading like a cancer. Linux is turning into a micro-kernel, without the "micro" or the efficient inter-task communication.
since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity
Actually, that is exactly what should happen in a free market. A hundred years ago, electric motors were luxury items, fifty years ago, color televisions were really expensive, 20 years ago, cell phones were very expensive. Most of the companies that made those items are out of business now, and profit margins are razor thin. And wealth is now being made with completely different products.
Destroying markets is a good thing. And open source is winning because it's a free market solution to bringing down production costs, just like assembly line and the mechanical loom were.
...or option 3, they can charge based off of usage (hopefully with a peek/off-peek difference for pricing)
Yes; that's basically what "volume caps" mean: a monthly subscription rate for some base volume, plus the ability to purchase more.
...or option 4, they can reinvest their massive profits into bulking up their infrastructure so they don't have to worry about volume.
There is no way they can keep up. For example, if everybody could actually run 100Mbps in/out of their homes for $30/month, you'd see massive 24/7 HD video streams going all over the place, for all sorts of purposes.
You mean Linux adapted something from Windows instead of the other way around? What's next, a sane proactor i/o api?
Not really. Caching policies like this have been around for longer than Windows has even existed. Most of the things that Linux "adopts" from Windows or Macintosh originally came from UNIX or mainframes. Even in 2008, there is hardly an original idea in any of those operating systems. And preload itself is, of course, older than Vista.
You can be mad at Vista for a number of reasons, but SuperFetch is not one of them - I have noticed a decent speed improvement because of it, and look forward to having something similar in Linux.
It's not clear to me why this should be a separate user process; what it's doing is simple enough that whatever is doing can be done directly by the kernel. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get the same speedups by simply tuning a couple of kernel parameters.
Wrong: Apple didn't lose its case until 1992 and appealed for another ruling in 1994. By that time, all of the other small GUIs had been trampled by Microsoft's PC.
So, you agree then that Apple sued pretty much everybody that they could, and that they lost the lawsuits that they did file.
Wrong again: Xerox attempted to sell its own GUI hardware and later desktop software and failed miserably.
Yes. As did Apple, and for the same reason: they were too expensive. Xerox made the additional mistake of trying to sell entire office systems to companies: networked workstations with file servers. You know, the kind of thing we all take for granted now.
The Mac team introduced a number of clear advances well beyond what had been accomplished at Xerox
The Mac team only introduced one major advance: a substantially lower price. They did that by cutting numerous corners and delivering a horribly architected software platform that made Macs a pain to program from day 1 and caused Apple to hit a major crisis with their OS in the 90's.
But so you want to claim that Apple made substantial contributions to user interfaces. Well, where are the scholarly publications and citations?
Are you thinking of FingerWorks or did you just invent that factoid? Because Apple didn't buy Fingerworks, it hired its employees. That's because Fingerworks was being sued by patent trolls itself, and Apple didn't want to inherit a patent troll lawsuit.
What difference does it make in what form Apple acquired Fingerworks and whether they left a shell of a company behind? And how the hell would you know the details of that transaction anyway, given that Apple isn't talking? The media have reported this as "Apple buying Fingerworks", and for all intents and purposes, that's what they did: you just confirmed it yourself.
Innovating is too much work for Chinese cloners.
It's apparently too much for Apple, too. But I don't really care whether a company innovates anyway; what matters to me is price and functionality.
Good job making up a bunch of bullshit to support your opinions. Do you think everything you invent is a fact?
Oh, stop bullshitting. I actually lived through the 70's and 80's and experienced Apple and the rise of GUIs first hand. It's you who doesn't know what he is talking about. Is your RoughlyDrafted blog a deliberate attempt at spreading disinformation and drumming up business, or do you really believe that nonsense?
Apple didn't sue Atari's TOS, the Commodore Amiga, Berkeley System's GEOS, DRI's GEM/1, Acorn Archimedes or any of the other graphical desktops. It only sued Microsoft and HP, which was selling an add-on for Windows that made it more Mac-like. [1]
That's because Apple was utterly defeated during the first couple of lawsuits.
Apple invested well over $60 million (in early 80s dollars) into developing the Lisa desktop interface, along with the followup Mac desktop in parallel between the late 70s and 1984
So what? That paid for development costs, not the invention of fundamental user interface technologies. Xerox paid many times that to come up with the original technologies.
I was there at the time. I programmed in Smalltalk, Cedar, the Lisa, and the original Mac, and I followed the lawsuits closely. The Mac was an imitation of the Xerox technologies, and not even a very good one.
Apple has to patent its developments to prevent Chinese cloners from dumping cheap imitations on the market,
Why shouldn't Chinese cloners dump cheap imitations on the market? Why should I have to make a choice between getting a single-touch screen running a good OS, and a multitouch screen on an overpriced device running Apple's shiny but cumbersome and locked-down OS?
As far as the iPhone/iPod Touch, nobody has come close to its simple multitouch gestures yet
Well, duh! That's because Apple bought the company producing the multitouch controllers and the company that owns the multitouch patents.
but nobody is going to copy the iPhone and how it works because doing so would require too much investment,
You can't make up your mind, can you? First, you say that Apple is using patents to prevent Chinese cloners, then you say that cloning is too much of an investment.
Microsoft has gotten used to being the one dominant player in the computer industry. Well, times are changing, and there are other big players. They can't dictate everything anymore and they can't do everything anymore. They need to find profitable niches, not world domination.
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It's unclear from the description what this actually does. I don't think they claim that it reads electrical signals from the brain directly. There are lots of other electrical signals that it might be reading.
Of course, whatever it reads, it may still be useful.
How much do you want to bet that the fundies will try their hardest to outlaw this research because in their view HIV is God's punishment for homosexual behavior?
So lesbians are god's chosen people, then?
I also want to point out that it would be near impossible to make anything but a vaccine out of this discovery.
That's nonsense. If you knew anything about vaccines, you'd know that it's pretty much impossible to make a vaccine out of this discovery. But it might lead to a treatment.
And this matters? What's next? Steve Jobs farted, news at 11?
I can see how defining compatibility is not easy.
Well, fortunately, there are experts for that sort of thing. They aren't in management, though, and Microsoft management seems too stupid to listen to them.
Ah, well, a second Internet for all the US-only corporations. All of them. Like there got to be some, right?
Open your source, the we (the rest of the world) can fix your code...
Don't bet on it; it may be beyond repair.
Well, Mr. Ballmer, if you think that adding even more crap to Windows is going to make Windows appeal to Linux users, go right ahead.
When banks deploy inadequate security, they should be liable for the distress and costs they cause their customers.
Cheap fusion is just around the corner--20 years from now. It's been that way for 30 years, and it will continue to be that way for the next 50 years.
And creating a second Internet addresses the problem of different laws around the world... how?
We don't have $150,000 workstations networked like Xerox was selling in the early 80s.
The Xerox 8010 cost around $16k in 1981. The Apple Lisa cost around $10k in 1983. And the Xerox 6085 cost about $6k in 1985.
Among other things, Apple invented Regions, which were critical to auto-updating multiple overlapping windows, something Xerox didn't ever do.
Here is a 1981 promotional video of the Xerox 8010 showing updates in a non-rectangular region in a partially obscured window:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7212449984702486365
Here is a 1982 video about the Bell Labs Blit, showing updates in overlapping windows, with multitasking:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4493242409722668078
Alan Kay may have been the first one to come up with, and implement, overlapping windows, in the early 70's:
http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html
Nobody other than Apple ever bothered with Atkinson regions as far as I know; there were better technologies even then.
and the country learned from that about how democracy and freedom should work
Germany learned from it because the victors required it, and the German democratic system was created under supervision of the victors.
The country has pledged never to let that crap happen again.
Well, in the 19th century, Germans were advocating freedom, tolerance, and liberty, but that didn't keep them from electing Hitler in the 1930's.
Oh sure, in the US you don't, assuming that you don't drive, don't have a government ID, don't vote, are unemployed (and not receiving benefits), don't own a house, and are not a male between the ages of 18 and 26.
All you need for any of that is a mailing address, not the place where you actually live.
The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well.
You sound too full of yourself; that alone is a big warning sign.
Wow, 14M Euro and half a dozen universities to reimplement Miro/Democracy Player and Joost. Not very efficient those Europeans, are they?
You could do it in the kernel, but you shouldn't. The kernel keeps track of files using inodes and device numbers, not paths,
The kernel can keep track of files in whatever way it likes, including paths. But I don't see a problem with using inode numbers anyway. I think "preload" is trying a little too hard.
Moreover the act of caching the file is easily accomplished by a low-priority user-space task which speculatively reads the files
These "low-priority user-space tasks" are spreading like a cancer. Linux is turning into a micro-kernel, without the "micro" or the efficient inter-task communication.
since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity
Actually, that is exactly what should happen in a free market. A hundred years ago, electric motors were luxury items, fifty years ago, color televisions were really expensive, 20 years ago, cell phones were very expensive. Most of the companies that made those items are out of business now, and profit margins are razor thin. And wealth is now being made with completely different products.
Destroying markets is a good thing. And open source is winning because it's a free market solution to bringing down production costs, just like assembly line and the mechanical loom were.
...or option 3, they can charge based off of usage (hopefully with a peek/off-peek difference for pricing)
...or option 4, they can reinvest their massive profits into bulking up their infrastructure so they don't have to worry about volume.
Yes; that's basically what "volume caps" mean: a monthly subscription rate for some base volume, plus the ability to purchase more.
There is no way they can keep up. For example, if everybody could actually run 100Mbps in/out of their homes for $30/month, you'd see massive 24/7 HD video streams going all over the place, for all sorts of purposes.
You mean Linux adapted something from Windows instead of the other way around? What's next, a sane proactor i/o api?
Not really. Caching policies like this have been around for longer than Windows has even existed. Most of the things that Linux "adopts" from Windows or Macintosh originally came from UNIX or mainframes. Even in 2008, there is hardly an original idea in any of those operating systems. And preload itself is, of course, older than Vista.
You can be mad at Vista for a number of reasons, but SuperFetch is not one of them - I have noticed a decent speed improvement because of it, and look forward to having something similar in Linux.
It's not clear to me why this should be a separate user process; what it's doing is simple enough that whatever is doing can be done directly by the kernel. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get the same speedups by simply tuning a couple of kernel parameters.
I'm actually for network neutrality: I think ISPs shouldn't try to manage traffic based on content or destination.
But if they can't cap BitTorrent, they have to cap volume, and I expect that's what's going to happen.
Wrong: Apple didn't lose its case until 1992 and appealed for another ruling in 1994. By that time, all of the other small GUIs had been trampled by Microsoft's PC.
So, you agree then that Apple sued pretty much everybody that they could, and that they lost the lawsuits that they did file.
Wrong again: Xerox attempted to sell its own GUI hardware and later desktop software and failed miserably.
Yes. As did Apple, and for the same reason: they were too expensive. Xerox made the additional mistake of trying to sell entire office systems to companies: networked workstations with file servers. You know, the kind of thing we all take for granted now.
The Mac team introduced a number of clear advances well beyond what had been accomplished at Xerox
The Mac team only introduced one major advance: a substantially lower price. They did that by cutting numerous corners and delivering a horribly architected software platform that made Macs a pain to program from day 1 and caused Apple to hit a major crisis with their OS in the 90's.
But so you want to claim that Apple made substantial contributions to user interfaces. Well, where are the scholarly publications and citations?
Are you thinking of FingerWorks or did you just invent that factoid? Because Apple didn't buy Fingerworks, it hired its employees. That's because Fingerworks was being sued by patent trolls itself, and Apple didn't want to inherit a patent troll lawsuit.
What difference does it make in what form Apple acquired Fingerworks and whether they left a shell of a company behind? And how the hell would you know the details of that transaction anyway, given that Apple isn't talking? The media have reported this as "Apple buying Fingerworks", and for all intents and purposes, that's what they did: you just confirmed it yourself.
Innovating is too much work for Chinese cloners.
It's apparently too much for Apple, too. But I don't really care whether a company innovates anyway; what matters to me is price and functionality.
Good job making up a bunch of bullshit to support your opinions. Do you think everything you invent is a fact?
Oh, stop bullshitting. I actually lived through the 70's and 80's and experienced Apple and the rise of GUIs first hand. It's you who doesn't know what he is talking about. Is your RoughlyDrafted blog a deliberate attempt at spreading disinformation and drumming up business, or do you really believe that nonsense?
Apple didn't sue Atari's TOS, the Commodore Amiga, Berkeley System's GEOS, DRI's GEM/1, Acorn Archimedes or any of the other graphical desktops. It only sued Microsoft and HP, which was selling an add-on for Windows that made it more Mac-like. [1]
That's because Apple was utterly defeated during the first couple of lawsuits.
Apple invested well over $60 million (in early 80s dollars) into developing the Lisa desktop interface, along with the followup Mac desktop in parallel between the late 70s and 1984
So what? That paid for development costs, not the invention of fundamental user interface technologies. Xerox paid many times that to come up with the original technologies.
I was there at the time. I programmed in Smalltalk, Cedar, the Lisa, and the original Mac, and I followed the lawsuits closely. The Mac was an imitation of the Xerox technologies, and not even a very good one.
Apple has to patent its developments to prevent Chinese cloners from dumping cheap imitations on the market,
Why shouldn't Chinese cloners dump cheap imitations on the market? Why should I have to make a choice between getting a single-touch screen running a good OS, and a multitouch screen on an overpriced device running Apple's shiny but cumbersome and locked-down OS?
As far as the iPhone/iPod Touch, nobody has come close to its simple multitouch gestures yet
Well, duh! That's because Apple bought the company producing the multitouch controllers and the company that owns the multitouch patents.
but nobody is going to copy the iPhone and how it works because doing so would require too much investment,
You can't make up your mind, can you? First, you say that Apple is using patents to prevent Chinese cloners, then you say that cloning is too much of an investment.
Microsoft has gotten used to being the one dominant player in the computer industry. Well, times are changing, and there are other big players. They can't dictate everything anymore and they can't do everything anymore. They need to find profitable niches, not world domination.
There are lots of tolerant Muslim people out there.
Of course. But Islam itself is still a fraud, and deeply evil, just like all the Abrahamic religions.