I am conceited (in the way most geeks are) but I try not to under-value my coworkers who are what you call the achievers. I don't like doing the repetitive tasks so I do think it helps me a lot to have others around to do those tasks. On my own I'm highly creative and a perfectionist (to things geeky at least) so I can solve problems in elegant ways on a frequent basis but left to a long dull project by myself I might tend to just spin my wheels because I keep getting ideas as I go along and each time I do I have to mentally file it away and that is distracting.
I guess my point is that I'm not really conceited so much as confident of what I can and can't do well. Being confident does in general make me somewhat brash but I don't think it's the same thing as looking down my nose at people. I'm generally a pretty good teacher of newbies and I hope that those I teach find me enthusiastic rather than snooty. The only people that I really look down on are those that refuse to even try to learn. I don't believe that there is anybody that can't do it (it being anything imaginable).. there are just people who doubt their own abilities or lacking the desire to try.
I tend to be called gungho.. there is nothing I think I can't do. Give me a task and come heaven or hell I'll do it even if it isn't technically possible. On the flip side of that I rarely admit if something is out of my reach (say if my manager doesn't want to give me 6 months to do it) and tend to make way overly hopeful projections on how long things will take. Of course some of those overly optimistic time projections are because my managers won't let me work around the clock until the job is done. At times I've been ordered to take breaks, go home, etc. Oh well.. lossing track of my point.. just ranting a lil on the difference between confidence and enthusiasm and being conceited.:)
It's not as if the canidates don't usually lie to get elected anyway. At least those that are usually successful do so. You can't vote for them by what they say so that reduces to voting for people psuedo-randomly. This guy has money, that woman has a cute ass, that one was funny on Jay Leno.. sadly that is what American politics boils down to. The one benefit to people running for office again and again is that it's possible, with more effort than most American's want to make, to get an idea of what that canidate will really do in office. Obviously since we're trying to pick any half assed canidate we can get over the current politician we don't think much of what we know about him.:)
I'd vote for Georgy cus she is cute, at least something of a geek, and she is at least different enough from the standard canidate to give us a little bit of a change. Sadly, most people would rather not face change so I doubt she has much of a chance to win.
I'd assume that you learn to mentally fingerprint the owner of code also. Even in strict languages you usually get something of unique styles of solving problems. After seeing a few examples of different people's code you can usually guess who wrote what code without being told. Or is that not yet true of students that are just learning?
I'm a geek and usually I always passed by the slimist possible margin but often the professors would ask me questions if they got lost. I'd do poorly because #1 I was bored, #2 I found homework an utter waste of time, #3 I found tests an equal waste of time, and #4 I consider myself to busy learning and doing to time out to prove myself. The few courses that graded on real life knowledge I always scored 4.0 or higher (extra credit) but anything that expected you just to do the classwork for your grade I did horrible at. Also I tend to argue with the professors and books if I think they're wrong.. at times I had all out competitions with them.
Professionally, I still am much the same. Given difficult problems I can whip out good solutions quickly.. and forsee problems.. on the flip side I think people who just do the coursework are better at doing the boring grunt work. Instead of inventing new ways to do things more effeciently they just get done that needs done. Combined into teams these personalities can greatly help each other. I can force myself to do the grunt work but I think it's a waste of my talents.
Flywheels interest me as an alternative to batteries for an alternative power source but I want to know why they don't just encourage everyone to have their own power sources (wind, hydro, solar, bio, whatever) that generates most of what they need including storage for off-hours but draw extra need from the grid and return extra produced to the grid. In most states you can already do that.. so it'd be pretty easy to setup if the power companies weren't trying to stop it.
I wish OS's would auto-update any critical patches by default. It'd be quite easy to do in either Linux or Windows with the already existing software. I assume most other modern OS's could also do it. Sure I'd want that feature to be easy to disable (but not so easy as to be an accident) but it'd still be an excellent default. Obviously it's not a default very often given the way these worms tend to spread like fire on oil.
This is probably better than the alternative ways to get attention. A massive worm that made the systems randomly try to dial '911' would be far more destructive. If someone really wanted to do some cyber-warefare on Americans that'd be a good start. There was a couple viruses that did that but they were never that wide-spread.. a worm version though could cause chaos.
Of course it'd be rather funny if the worm had a list of phone numbers for the RIAA and proceeded to make every computer in America start calling them endlessly 24/7.
I agree that any worm seems bad but as you say there are so many people that don't know how to patch their own machines or are just to lazy. Since the worms are hurting the Net as a community doesn't the community have some right to force people to protect themselves? I for one would find it acceptable if all worms would be followed by counter-worms that patched systems infected or at risk. Obviously, if you were a careful admin of your systems you'd already be patched and therefore at no risk of this inoculation. I would however be annoyed if these forced patches started happening before there was an evil counterpart using the exploit.. as I have reasons for sometimes delaying patches.
You've obviously not configured many things if you think Windows is overall easier than Linux. Clicking your way through pretty menus is a lot more effort than paging through a config file. Either way if you don't know what the options mean you're most likely going to get less than optimal results.:)
Not that I'm against making things easy to configure.. I just don't think Windows manages to live up to that hope. As for myself I'm mostly interested in making tools that makes it easy to configure and manage large numbers of machines from a single interface on a single machine. Even ssh'ing into different machines is a pain if you have to do it to often. Also I like to have server options abstracted so that they are the same regardless of the product be used to provide the service. ie I want to be able to configure all web servers with the same config spec, all email servers, etc.
So the simple solution would be to make your own devices.. something that i already becoming quite popular. If you design it and license it free of cost you'll have somebody willing to manufacter and sale it.. and obviously if you design it then you can make the device drivers for it.;)
There is something to be said for your argument in the short term but I don't think that cloning Windows is going to get Linux the user base it needs to get these drivers. Instead we need to be lobbying the large companies that have a Linux interest for their support.. IBM, HP, etc.
I have no desire to kill Windows or MacOS or win all their customers over. I want a tool designed specific to my needs. That's how Linux got to be so good in the first place. Changing our methodology to try to win your average users will hurt us in the end. If there is a feature of Windows or MacOS you truely like then add it but don't go out of your way to clone those interfaces. If those users like what you've done they'll use your interface.. if not maybe they'll stick to what they already know. It does little good to have choices in which tool you use if all the tools are exactly alike.
I still believe in the answer that was always given for id games when asked when they'll release the product.. "When it's done." I think that applies to opensource even more.
Besides we shouldn't be competing with MacOS or Windows. We don't need to clone those OS's or desktops. We need to create our own desktop that is unique. Make it work.. don't make it just to attract Windows and Mac users.
It actually sounds to me like a drunk redneck with a shotgun in a black panthers convention. He starts pointing his gun around and letting his mouth off and he's gonna get his ass whooped real good. Sure he might get a couple good shots in first but there is no way his sorry ass is gonna win the fight.
Are you saying that if you rent a laptop and are asked not to put any software on it that it would be okay to like download your porn collection? Somehow I don't think that is what they mean. So my answer is yes, I think they are asking you not to put any files on the computer.
Funny. I happen to have thought about this issue a lot as I write a lot of software that exists merely to process data of every kind. That leads to working with a lot of file formats, writing compilers, etc.. which leads me to know that there is no difference between software and data.
"red, red, green, red, blue, green, blue, red, green" is exactly an instruction set. If you think programs require function calls in their syntax or even human-readable syntax at all then you know nothing about programming. For that matter I've used programming languages that were nothing more than just that except that they defined each pixel color in hex. Are you telling me that that isn't software? When ran through the interpreter it sure executed with the right result.
A rock is only a machine if you can do something mechanical with it. Drop a stick over it and then yes it is a machine. Look in most science books and you'll find this listed as a lever. A rock by itself is not a machine because it does not do anything. You could possibly say it is a tool though as you can use a rock to smush bugs, pound nails, etc.
Machines are a subset of matter and software is a subset of data.. but digital data is almost the same subset of data as software. There is some digital data that is not software.. anything that is random and never used as an instruction set. What use such data would be I couldn't say but it does exist at times. When you partially delete files and things like that such data may be left behind by accident.
I am clearly sepperating hardware and software. Or were you claiming that data is hardware?
I'm not denying at all that data can at times replace equivilant hardware. I'm claiming that all data can replace equivilant hardware. I could wire a circuit that would output an image. A jpeg image file just happens to be software that can create such an image much easier.
When computers started processing data then yes indeed there was software.. it's just that nobody understood the full power of the concept yet. The formal invention of software was important because people were beginning to understand how flexible computers could be.
Exactly. Which I guess is why I suggested debugging it in the more protected mode and when it is worked out then rewrite it for the less protected mode. Sure you may introduce bugs during this rewrite but they should be far less than would otherwise exist. I guess I'm just a lil nutty for thinking anything that goes in the kernel should be well tested first. Damn me for disliking crashes.:)
It wouldn't make it crashproof but it'd make driver development easier and make support for devices from any OS possible. It would help drivers crash less though as it could put driver programming at a level above messing with pointers and such basic things (where human error is easy). Instead it'd be more like programming the drivers in Java (though I'd use a specialized language.. not Java) and then compiled down to native code by the host OS. In the same manner it'd help security as many basic security issues could be implemented by the compiler so that the driver programmer didn't have to worry about it.
I'm surprised that the kernel developers of Linux, BSD, etc haven't gotten together and made such a system. I'm sure they could use this method to at least come up with drivers that could be compiled for all of their OS's which in itself would no doubt cut down on development effort. It might take some tuning to make the drivers run as well as those coded in C/Asm but eventually it could even be faster in some cases again due to the removal of human error.:)
You can write user-mode drivers in Linux (and most other OS's?) for most things and if they crashed they shouldn't take down the system. Obviously running code in such a way will reduce the performance somewhat but it's possible. For many things (those 101 devices that don't release specs or Linux drivers) I'd think that'd be the ideal way to write the drivers.. only rewriting them for the kernel when you have them well debugged.
They could always push driver developers to open source their code. Then Microsoft or any other user could audit and fix the code.. of course if they did that there would suddenly be a lot more devices supported in MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc. Whereas Apple and the Linux community lack the power to convince most companies to release their driver specs and source I'd imagine Microsoft has plenty of power to convince them.. if they wanted to.
Nobody has yet to convince me on the downside of releasing specs and source. Any trade secrets held in there must be pretty lame if that all that sepperates their product from the competition.
In fact I think we need a driver definition language that can be compiled into some abstract form (bytecodes) and put on each device. Then the OS could use a single known method (similar to PnP) to download those drivers and compile them into real code that will work for the given OS. Obviously driver updates would be written directly to the devices themselves and the OS could keep a cache of the drivers that are already known and current. They already have tools to make driver programming portable.. you'd just have to make it standard. For old devices without the ability to contain their own drivers you could just have them available as normal excepting that they'd work for any OS.
There are many things with more than one word. The difference between software and data is all in how the user is thinking about the subject. It's the difference between rain and a downpour. All data is software but software is data that is thought of as software. You also have to note that data is a word in it's own right outside of computers which is why I said that all 'digitized' data is software and not just that all data is software.
I'm not robbing any words of meaning. You obviously just haven't properly considered the meaning of the words before. Any list of instructions that can be carried out by a computer is software. Digitized data is software if anybody ever uses it to instruct a computer. Data that does not instruct a computer in any way is pretty much useless to have because there would be no way to get it out again.
The word software was clearly invented to sepperate the concept of software from hardware. It's quite clear that software is data that can (with the help of hardware) complete a function. Hardware obviously consists of physical circuits that also complete their given functions.
Douglas Adams estate will no doubt sue me over the patent for the meaning of life. I'll take a trick out of their own book though and time travel back to the past and file the patent before he wrote the book.
Cheaper isn't always better but things that are getting better often get cheaper as they are being produced in greater numbers and are fine tuning their design so that cruft gets tossed out.
I think services are fundamentally different than products.. especially mass produced products. Expense often, but not always, relates positively to quality of services rendered. For products I'd say it's inversed.. expense often, but not always, relates negatively to the quality of the product.
In the case of old (more expensive) technology against newer (cheaper) technology you very well might not have known the old sucked (as it was the best at the time). Still I think with more demand for high-tech tools for drug design and production we'll be seeing those R&D and production costs dropping. Things like high power computers, genetics, and nanotech will certainly bring those prices down a lot.:)
If I wanted to make an image format that could do 2-way communication with the web browser then I certainly could. Maybe something as lame as most applets.. just make bits of the image transition on mouse overs. That'd only be a slight modification to the concept of animations which GIF can (poorly) handle.
They'd have to keep developing because if they stopped they'd simply go out of business eventually. It'll take time for competitors to make their own knockoffs (especially if the druig company doesn't publish the exact details) and the knockoffs would still have to go through FDA testing which is in itself a slow and expensive process. Perhaps the company would have to make itself more effecient to stay ahead of the game but I'm sure most could manage. Simply knowing how something is done doesn't make it into an instant product. I know how to make root beer but I'm not currently putting A&W out of business.
Suits would have to learn to change their business strategies but technology would keep advancing and people would keep buying and selling.
I'd also have to point out that technology has the constant effect of making expensive things cheaper. The more competition you have in an area the faster technology advances. The faster it advances the cheaper things get. So more competition in the pharmaceutical industry would make producing new drugs cheaper. Cheaper R&D and production means there is less cost to recover. Some of that savings might even make it to the customers pocket with any decent amount of competitition going on. It would be a shock to the monolithing industries used to not having to work very hard but overall it'd be good.
Sure if somebody can think of something really new then I guess they can patent it. IMO that does not include stamping 'Internet' on a real world concept or taking something everyone is already doing and putting a patent on it. You get stupid things like companies patenting the way clicking on a toolbar works. If you devise an algorithm that can sort any array of any length in 3 seconds then that might be patentable. Of course those things are exactly the things we don't want patented because it hurts the community as a whole.
The little guy is protected from the big guy? Hardly. The big guy can squish the little guy under so much paperwork that it's almost impossible for the little guy to ever get anything from the big guy. The big guy just uses their massive legal department to file a patent on any stupid idea anyone can ever think up and then uses those to squish the little guys.
Nobody is asking you to work for free. I just have severe doubts that patents are putting food on your table or a roof over your head.. especially software patents. Hell, I'm going to patent the number 42. That is afterall the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.:)
If it tells a computer how to do something it's software. All software is data and all data is software. In almost all cases you'll need to combine data with some sort of interpreter to cause the computer to understand the data as software but that is just as true for Perl programs as jpeg images.
All matter is hardware? In a sense yes. I don't really see how 'all matter is hardware' relates to 'all digitized data is software'. Random 1's and 0's on your hard drive would be software if you had other software that'd interpret them to fulfill a logic role. Maybe such as a random number generator.
You honestly think companies would stop making things just because they lacked patent protection? Oh lets just all close shop forever because we might have a lil competition.. how can you have business with competition!? You don't leave multi-billion dollar businesses because you get competition. Instead you ring up your marketing department and have them whip up lots of ads with some unlikely looking young woman selling your superior products.
The only people who might actually be influenced by the availability of patents would be individual inventors and small companies.. the problem there is that patents cost something of a lot to file with no garantee whatsoever of earning back your investment.. and large companies with lots of lawyers can still use brute force to rip you off most of the time. Better to use your size as a benefit and be a quick mover. Get in, make some money, and then jump to the next project before the big companies notice the market you were just in. If you're any good maybe one of those big companies will do business with you. Contract law still holds so you can work on deals without being ripped off anymore than you could be without patents.
Software especially shouldn't be patentable because I've yet to see a software patent that wasn't so mind numbingly obvious as to be unworth stating. All these stupid Internet-related software patents are especially retarded. Most of this stuff I'd figured out by the time I was 15 and had already used in my own sites, BBS's, etc and a couple years later here comes tons of people smacking patents on. Why didn't I patent them first? #1 cus 15yo's don't typically have money, #2 cus 15yo's don't typically think about patenting lame ideas they have, and #3 cus patents suck. I can't believe people patent such stupid things as 'one click shopping' and 'online auctions'.
I'd make everything free and open if it was within my power. Actually that is one of my projects.. don't expect to see it available to the masses for a while yet. You have to be a member to get free stuff and being a member means you have to produce something for the group for free.;)
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I am conceited (in the way most geeks are) but I try not to under-value my coworkers who are what you call the achievers. I don't like doing the repetitive tasks so I do think it helps me a lot to have others around to do those tasks. On my own I'm highly creative and a perfectionist (to things geeky at least) so I can solve problems in elegant ways on a frequent basis but left to a long dull project by myself I might tend to just spin my wheels because I keep getting ideas as I go along and each time I do I have to mentally file it away and that is distracting.
:)
I guess my point is that I'm not really conceited so much as confident of what I can and can't do well. Being confident does in general make me somewhat brash but I don't think it's the same thing as looking down my nose at people. I'm generally a pretty good teacher of newbies and I hope that those I teach find me enthusiastic rather than snooty. The only people that I really look down on are those that refuse to even try to learn. I don't believe that there is anybody that can't do it (it being anything imaginable).. there are just people who doubt their own abilities or lacking the desire to try.
I tend to be called gungho.. there is nothing I think I can't do. Give me a task and come heaven or hell I'll do it even if it isn't technically possible. On the flip side of that I rarely admit if something is out of my reach (say if my manager doesn't want to give me 6 months to do it) and tend to make way overly hopeful projections on how long things will take. Of course some of those overly optimistic time projections are because my managers won't let me work around the clock until the job is done. At times I've been ordered to take breaks, go home, etc. Oh well.. lossing track of my point.. just ranting a lil on the difference between confidence and enthusiasm and being conceited.
I want the legal right to get married to as many women as I can get drunk at the same time. Sure it'd be a short marriage but wow what a honeymoon.
It's not as if the canidates don't usually lie to get elected anyway. At least those that are usually successful do so. You can't vote for them by what they say so that reduces to voting for people psuedo-randomly. This guy has money, that woman has a cute ass, that one was funny on Jay Leno.. sadly that is what American politics boils down to. The one benefit to people running for office again and again is that it's possible, with more effort than most American's want to make, to get an idea of what that canidate will really do in office. Obviously since we're trying to pick any half assed canidate we can get over the current politician we don't think much of what we know about him. :)
I'd vote for Georgy cus she is cute, at least something of a geek, and she is at least different enough from the standard canidate to give us a little bit of a change. Sadly, most people would rather not face change so I doubt she has much of a chance to win.
I'd assume that you learn to mentally fingerprint the owner of code also. Even in strict languages you usually get something of unique styles of solving problems. After seeing a few examples of different people's code you can usually guess who wrote what code without being told. Or is that not yet true of students that are just learning?
I'm a geek and usually I always passed by the slimist possible margin but often the professors would ask me questions if they got lost. I'd do poorly because #1 I was bored, #2 I found homework an utter waste of time, #3 I found tests an equal waste of time, and #4 I consider myself to busy learning and doing to time out to prove myself. The few courses that graded on real life knowledge I always scored 4.0 or higher (extra credit) but anything that expected you just to do the classwork for your grade I did horrible at. Also I tend to argue with the professors and books if I think they're wrong.. at times I had all out competitions with them.
Professionally, I still am much the same. Given difficult problems I can whip out good solutions quickly.. and forsee problems.. on the flip side I think people who just do the coursework are better at doing the boring grunt work. Instead of inventing new ways to do things more effeciently they just get done that needs done. Combined into teams these personalities can greatly help each other. I can force myself to do the grunt work but I think it's a waste of my talents.
Flywheels interest me as an alternative to batteries for an alternative power source but I want to know why they don't just encourage everyone to have their own power sources (wind, hydro, solar, bio, whatever) that generates most of what they need including storage for off-hours but draw extra need from the grid and return extra produced to the grid. In most states you can already do that.. so it'd be pretty easy to setup if the power companies weren't trying to stop it.
I wish OS's would auto-update any critical patches by default. It'd be quite easy to do in either Linux or Windows with the already existing software. I assume most other modern OS's could also do it. Sure I'd want that feature to be easy to disable (but not so easy as to be an accident) but it'd still be an excellent default. Obviously it's not a default very often given the way these worms tend to spread like fire on oil.
This is probably better than the alternative ways to get attention. A massive worm that made the systems randomly try to dial '911' would be far more destructive. If someone really wanted to do some cyber-warefare on Americans that'd be a good start. There was a couple viruses that did that but they were never that wide-spread.. a worm version though could cause chaos.
Of course it'd be rather funny if the worm had a list of phone numbers for the RIAA and proceeded to make every computer in America start calling them endlessly 24/7.
I agree that any worm seems bad but as you say there are so many people that don't know how to patch their own machines or are just to lazy. Since the worms are hurting the Net as a community doesn't the community have some right to force people to protect themselves? I for one would find it acceptable if all worms would be followed by counter-worms that patched systems infected or at risk. Obviously, if you were a careful admin of your systems you'd already be patched and therefore at no risk of this inoculation. I would however be annoyed if these forced patches started happening before there was an evil counterpart using the exploit.. as I have reasons for sometimes delaying patches.
You've obviously not configured many things if you think Windows is overall easier than Linux. Clicking your way through pretty menus is a lot more effort than paging through a config file. Either way if you don't know what the options mean you're most likely going to get less than optimal results. :)
Not that I'm against making things easy to configure.. I just don't think Windows manages to live up to that hope. As for myself I'm mostly interested in making tools that makes it easy to configure and manage large numbers of machines from a single interface on a single machine. Even ssh'ing into different machines is a pain if you have to do it to often. Also I like to have server options abstracted so that they are the same regardless of the product be used to provide the service. ie I want to be able to configure all web servers with the same config spec, all email servers, etc.
So the simple solution would be to make your own devices.. something that i already becoming quite popular. If you design it and license it free of cost you'll have somebody willing to manufacter and sale it.. and obviously if you design it then you can make the device drivers for it. ;)
There is something to be said for your argument in the short term but I don't think that cloning Windows is going to get Linux the user base it needs to get these drivers. Instead we need to be lobbying the large companies that have a Linux interest for their support.. IBM, HP, etc.
I have no desire to kill Windows or MacOS or win all their customers over. I want a tool designed specific to my needs. That's how Linux got to be so good in the first place. Changing our methodology to try to win your average users will hurt us in the end. If there is a feature of Windows or MacOS you truely like then add it but don't go out of your way to clone those interfaces. If those users like what you've done they'll use your interface.. if not maybe they'll stick to what they already know. It does little good to have choices in which tool you use if all the tools are exactly alike.
I still believe in the answer that was always given for id games when asked when they'll release the product.. "When it's done." I think that applies to opensource even more.
Besides we shouldn't be competing with MacOS or Windows. We don't need to clone those OS's or desktops. We need to create our own desktop that is unique. Make it work.. don't make it just to attract Windows and Mac users.
It actually sounds to me like a drunk redneck with a shotgun in a black panthers convention. He starts pointing his gun around and letting his mouth off and he's gonna get his ass whooped real good. Sure he might get a couple good shots in first but there is no way his sorry ass is gonna win the fight.
Are you saying that if you rent a laptop and are asked not to put any software on it that it would be okay to like download your porn collection? Somehow I don't think that is what they mean. So my answer is yes, I think they are asking you not to put any files on the computer.
Funny. I happen to have thought about this issue a lot as I write a lot of software that exists merely to process data of every kind. That leads to working with a lot of file formats, writing compilers, etc.. which leads me to know that there is no difference between software and data.
"red, red, green, red, blue, green, blue, red, green" is exactly an instruction set. If you think programs require function calls in their syntax or even human-readable syntax at all then you know nothing about programming. For that matter I've used programming languages that were nothing more than just that except that they defined each pixel color in hex. Are you telling me that that isn't software? When ran through the interpreter it sure executed with the right result.
A rock is only a machine if you can do something mechanical with it. Drop a stick over it and then yes it is a machine. Look in most science books and you'll find this listed as a lever. A rock by itself is not a machine because it does not do anything. You could possibly say it is a tool though as you can use a rock to smush bugs, pound nails, etc.
Machines are a subset of matter and software is a subset of data.. but digital data is almost the same subset of data as software. There is some digital data that is not software.. anything that is random and never used as an instruction set. What use such data would be I couldn't say but it does exist at times. When you partially delete files and things like that such data may be left behind by accident.
I am clearly sepperating hardware and software. Or were you claiming that data is hardware?
I'm not denying at all that data can at times replace equivilant hardware. I'm claiming that all data can replace equivilant hardware. I could wire a circuit that would output an image. A jpeg image file just happens to be software that can create such an image much easier.
When computers started processing data then yes indeed there was software.. it's just that nobody understood the full power of the concept yet. The formal invention of software was important because people were beginning to understand how flexible computers could be.
Exactly. Which I guess is why I suggested debugging it in the more protected mode and when it is worked out then rewrite it for the less protected mode. Sure you may introduce bugs during this rewrite but they should be far less than would otherwise exist. I guess I'm just a lil nutty for thinking anything that goes in the kernel should be well tested first. Damn me for disliking crashes. :)
It wouldn't make it crashproof but it'd make driver development easier and make support for devices from any OS possible. It would help drivers crash less though as it could put driver programming at a level above messing with pointers and such basic things (where human error is easy). Instead it'd be more like programming the drivers in Java (though I'd use a specialized language.. not Java) and then compiled down to native code by the host OS. In the same manner it'd help security as many basic security issues could be implemented by the compiler so that the driver programmer didn't have to worry about it.
:)
I'm surprised that the kernel developers of Linux, BSD, etc haven't gotten together and made such a system. I'm sure they could use this method to at least come up with drivers that could be compiled for all of their OS's which in itself would no doubt cut down on development effort. It might take some tuning to make the drivers run as well as those coded in C/Asm but eventually it could even be faster in some cases again due to the removal of human error.
You can write user-mode drivers in Linux (and most other OS's?) for most things and if they crashed they shouldn't take down the system. Obviously running code in such a way will reduce the performance somewhat but it's possible. For many things (those 101 devices that don't release specs or Linux drivers) I'd think that'd be the ideal way to write the drivers.. only rewriting them for the kernel when you have them well debugged.
They could always push driver developers to open source their code. Then Microsoft or any other user could audit and fix the code.. of course if they did that there would suddenly be a lot more devices supported in MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc. Whereas Apple and the Linux community lack the power to convince most companies to release their driver specs and source I'd imagine Microsoft has plenty of power to convince them.. if they wanted to.
Nobody has yet to convince me on the downside of releasing specs and source. Any trade secrets held in there must be pretty lame if that all that sepperates their product from the competition.
In fact I think we need a driver definition language that can be compiled into some abstract form (bytecodes) and put on each device. Then the OS could use a single known method (similar to PnP) to download those drivers and compile them into real code that will work for the given OS. Obviously driver updates would be written directly to the devices themselves and the OS could keep a cache of the drivers that are already known and current. They already have tools to make driver programming portable.. you'd just have to make it standard. For old devices without the ability to contain their own drivers you could just have them available as normal excepting that they'd work for any OS.
There are many things with more than one word. The difference between software and data is all in how the user is thinking about the subject. It's the difference between rain and a downpour. All data is software but software is data that is thought of as software. You also have to note that data is a word in it's own right outside of computers which is why I said that all 'digitized' data is software and not just that all data is software.
I'm not robbing any words of meaning. You obviously just haven't properly considered the meaning of the words before. Any list of instructions that can be carried out by a computer is software. Digitized data is software if anybody ever uses it to instruct a computer. Data that does not instruct a computer in any way is pretty much useless to have because there would be no way to get it out again.
The word software was clearly invented to sepperate the concept of software from hardware. It's quite clear that software is data that can (with the help of hardware) complete a function. Hardware obviously consists of physical circuits that also complete their given functions.
Douglas Adams estate will no doubt sue me over the patent for the meaning of life. I'll take a trick out of their own book though and time travel back to the past and file the patent before he wrote the book.
:)
Cheaper isn't always better but things that are getting better often get cheaper as they are being produced in greater numbers and are fine tuning their design so that cruft gets tossed out.
I think services are fundamentally different than products.. especially mass produced products. Expense often, but not always, relates positively to quality of services rendered. For products I'd say it's inversed.. expense often, but not always, relates negatively to the quality of the product.
In the case of old (more expensive) technology against newer (cheaper) technology you very well might not have known the old sucked (as it was the best at the time). Still I think with more demand for high-tech tools for drug design and production we'll be seeing those R&D and production costs dropping. Things like high power computers, genetics, and nanotech will certainly bring those prices down a lot.
If I wanted to make an image format that could do 2-way communication with the web browser then I certainly could. Maybe something as lame as most applets.. just make bits of the image transition on mouse overs. That'd only be a slight modification to the concept of animations which GIF can (poorly) handle.
They'd have to keep developing because if they stopped they'd simply go out of business eventually. It'll take time for competitors to make their own knockoffs (especially if the druig company doesn't publish the exact details) and the knockoffs would still have to go through FDA testing which is in itself a slow and expensive process. Perhaps the company would have to make itself more effecient to stay ahead of the game but I'm sure most could manage. Simply knowing how something is done doesn't make it into an instant product. I know how to make root beer but I'm not currently putting A&W out of business.
:)
Suits would have to learn to change their business strategies but technology would keep advancing and people would keep buying and selling.
I'd also have to point out that technology has the constant effect of making expensive things cheaper. The more competition you have in an area the faster technology advances. The faster it advances the cheaper things get. So more competition in the pharmaceutical industry would make producing new drugs cheaper. Cheaper R&D and production means there is less cost to recover. Some of that savings might even make it to the customers pocket with any decent amount of competitition going on. It would be a shock to the monolithing industries used to not having to work very hard but overall it'd be good.
Sure if somebody can think of something really new then I guess they can patent it. IMO that does not include stamping 'Internet' on a real world concept or taking something everyone is already doing and putting a patent on it. You get stupid things like companies patenting the way clicking on a toolbar works. If you devise an algorithm that can sort any array of any length in 3 seconds then that might be patentable. Of course those things are exactly the things we don't want patented because it hurts the community as a whole.
The little guy is protected from the big guy? Hardly. The big guy can squish the little guy under so much paperwork that it's almost impossible for the little guy to ever get anything from the big guy. The big guy just uses their massive legal department to file a patent on any stupid idea anyone can ever think up and then uses those to squish the little guys.
Nobody is asking you to work for free. I just have severe doubts that patents are putting food on your table or a roof over your head.. especially software patents. Hell, I'm going to patent the number 42. That is afterall the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
If it tells a computer how to do something it's software. All software is data and all data is software. In almost all cases you'll need to combine data with some sort of interpreter to cause the computer to understand the data as software but that is just as true for Perl programs as jpeg images.
All matter is hardware? In a sense yes. I don't really see how 'all matter is hardware' relates to 'all digitized data is software'. Random 1's and 0's on your hard drive would be software if you had other software that'd interpret them to fulfill a logic role. Maybe such as a random number generator.
You honestly think companies would stop making things just because they lacked patent protection? Oh lets just all close shop forever because we might have a lil competition.. how can you have business with competition!? You don't leave multi-billion dollar businesses because you get competition. Instead you ring up your marketing department and have them whip up lots of ads with some unlikely looking young woman selling your superior products.
;)
The only people who might actually be influenced by the availability of patents would be individual inventors and small companies.. the problem there is that patents cost something of a lot to file with no garantee whatsoever of earning back your investment.. and large companies with lots of lawyers can still use brute force to rip you off most of the time. Better to use your size as a benefit and be a quick mover. Get in, make some money, and then jump to the next project before the big companies notice the market you were just in. If you're any good maybe one of those big companies will do business with you. Contract law still holds so you can work on deals without being ripped off anymore than you could be without patents.
Software especially shouldn't be patentable because I've yet to see a software patent that wasn't so mind numbingly obvious as to be unworth stating. All these stupid Internet-related software patents are especially retarded. Most of this stuff I'd figured out by the time I was 15 and had already used in my own sites, BBS's, etc and a couple years later here comes tons of people smacking patents on. Why didn't I patent them first? #1 cus 15yo's don't typically have money, #2 cus 15yo's don't typically think about patenting lame ideas they have, and #3 cus patents suck. I can't believe people patent such stupid things as 'one click shopping' and 'online auctions'.
I'd make everything free and open if it was within my power. Actually that is one of my projects.. don't expect to see it available to the masses for a while yet. You have to be a member to get free stuff and being a member means you have to produce something for the group for free.