Their own OS? I don't think Google really needs one, but I agree it would be a step in the right direction. The main reason why Microsoft are so against openness in anything is that the fewer reasons there are to tie people to a specific OS, the fewer people will stick with that OS. We already have alternatives to Microsoft's offerings, so useful applications that work on anything are the what we need more than anything else at this point.
Who knows why they took so long. Still, the patent will expire in a couple of years, so if they want to milk people for cash they have to do it now. Anyone who creates similar software is going to have to watch out for the next couple of years.
Anyhow, the patent is regarding "separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document." That's so hopelessly vague it's not even a joke. That's a patent that will affect every document format known to man. How on earth can this patent be a novel solution, then? Human brains work exactly the same way. We learn and absorb information, and then process it and work with it without modifying the architecture of our brains. Can I have a patent on that?
Err, no, I wasn't being funny. Look at this article:
While the data on the USB stick was encrypted, the password to access the data was attached to the drive on a Post-it note, a Central Lancashire Primary Care Trust (PCT) spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Monday.
The UK Government loses lots of disks. Many of them are encrypted. Unfortunately, they usually have the password written on a post-it stuck on the drive when it is lost.
Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.
For the X-15 series, you might just be right. But the proposed X-20 was the plane that eventually got the chop. This one had a rocket too, which essentially made it a prototype space shuttle. Reusable. What's more, the Titan rockets they wanted for it had 2.5 million pounds of thrust (11,100,000 force newtons) compared with the Mercury-Atlas' 367,000 (1,600,000). What made them cut the project was that the Atlas rockets were already available whereas the more powerful Titan rockets were still four years away.
Indeed, good example. Although lot of the 1960's stuff wasn't exactly rocket science....for example, the Saturn V's had a problem with instabilities building up on the face of the combustion plate due to the pattern of holes that the fuel/oxidiser was sprayed through. In the end they got a bunch of blank combustion plates and drilled holes at random until they found one that worked without blowing the rocket to smithereens....or at least worked for the eight minutes or so that it took to get to orbit.
People forget that the Apollo project killed off the much more reasonable X-plane development, one of which by 1962 was already flying at an altitude of sixty miles. Progression to space travel was seen as the logical next step. But when JFK decided "HOLY FUCK WE GOTTA GO TO THE MOON!", and the developers told him it might be possible to do deep space stuff by the seventies, he opted to kill the project and go for Wernher von Braun's batshit insane rockets instead.
I've always thought the arguments made about people requiring special training to learn how to use a new computer OS are more than a little bit bogus. Applications>Office>OpenOffice Word Processor. How difficult can it possibly be?
According to here, looks like the police chaps agree.
Conventional wisdom dictates that user training should accompany new software deployments. However, the Gendarmerie figured that people knew âoehow to operate a web browserâ and opted not to provide training for any of the new apps.
Happily, they were proven right with the vast range of users effortlessly picking up the new office suite, web browser and mail program.
Internet cafes are useful, but beware: many European internet cafes use completely gimped terminals that srsly affect your ability to do anything useful at all, except browse. I went to some place in Hamburg once that denied me access to gmail, I mean, wtf. If you happen to be calling anyplace in China, then you can pick up extremely cheap USB dongles with SIM cards that apparently allows pretty good access--some even work in other places. I've never bought one, but I have used one to talk on Skype for over five hours before.
I've been pilfering the mp3 collections of everyone I know via meatspace for some time now, and have a pretty massive collection stored over several drives. I call it my INFINITY JUKEBOX! People come to me when they want music, rather than get it online. I've given complete mirror images of the drives to a couple of people already. When it gets to the stage where all this data can fit on to a single shitty card, hell, I'll hand them out in the street for free.
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Their own OS? I don't think Google really needs one, but I agree it would be a step in the right direction. The main reason why Microsoft are so against openness in anything is that the fewer reasons there are to tie people to a specific OS, the fewer people will stick with that OS. We already have alternatives to Microsoft's offerings, so useful applications that work on anything are the what we need more than anything else at this point.
Who knows why they took so long. Still, the patent will expire in a couple of years, so if they want to milk people for cash they have to do it now. Anyone who creates similar software is going to have to watch out for the next couple of years.
Anyhow, the patent is regarding "separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document." That's so hopelessly vague it's not even a joke. That's a patent that will affect every document format known to man. How on earth can this patent be a novel solution, then? Human brains work exactly the same way. We learn and absorb information, and then process it and work with it without modifying the architecture of our brains. Can I have a patent on that?
The UK Government loses lots of disks. Many of them are encrypted. Unfortunately, they usually have the password written on a post-it stuck on the drive when it is lost.
Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.
For the X-15 series, you might just be right. But the proposed X-20 was the plane that eventually got the chop. This one had a rocket too, which essentially made it a prototype space shuttle. Reusable. What's more, the Titan rockets they wanted for it had 2.5 million pounds of thrust (11,100,000 force newtons) compared with the Mercury-Atlas' 367,000 (1,600,000). What made them cut the project was that the Atlas rockets were already available whereas the more powerful Titan rockets were still four years away.
Indeed, good example. Although lot of the 1960's stuff wasn't exactly rocket science....for example, the Saturn V's had a problem with instabilities building up on the face of the combustion plate due to the pattern of holes that the fuel/oxidiser was sprayed through. In the end they got a bunch of blank combustion plates and drilled holes at random until they found one that worked without blowing the rocket to smithereens....or at least worked for the eight minutes or so that it took to get to orbit.
People forget that the Apollo project killed off the much more reasonable X-plane development, one of which by 1962 was already flying at an altitude of sixty miles. Progression to space travel was seen as the logical next step. But when JFK decided "HOLY FUCK WE GOTTA GO TO THE MOON!", and the developers told him it might be possible to do deep space stuff by the seventies, he opted to kill the project and go for Wernher von Braun's batshit insane rockets instead.
According to here, looks like the police chaps agree.
And if something really pisses you off, you can nuke it from orbit.
They're stealing valuable ip, non-random ones and zeros, and all sorts of other stuff. Stop it, please. We only have infinity of them left :(
Internet cafes are useful, but beware: many European internet cafes use completely gimped terminals that srsly affect your ability to do anything useful at all, except browse. I went to some place in Hamburg once that denied me access to gmail, I mean, wtf. If you happen to be calling anyplace in China, then you can pick up extremely cheap USB dongles with SIM cards that apparently allows pretty good access--some even work in other places. I've never bought one, but I have used one to talk on Skype for over five hours before.
I've been pilfering the mp3 collections of everyone I know via meatspace for some time now, and have a pretty massive collection stored over several drives. I call it my INFINITY JUKEBOX! People come to me when they want music, rather than get it online. I've given complete mirror images of the drives to a couple of people already. When it gets to the stage where all this data can fit on to a single shitty card, hell, I'll hand them out in the street for free.
I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.