. The flint axe clearly has had a much bigger impact on mankind than the computer.
I agree. Flint tools did provide just about everything people needed for thousands of years, and might even have led to the discovery of fire. (Making flint tools does create sparks after all)
The thing is that just about anything you can make is technology. Sometimes crude technology but technology nonetheless. You can't simply point at a flint axe and claim that it isn't technology.
Bows and arrows and snare traps are definately technological solutions to problems. It took centuries for mankind to develop those simple tools.
That said, I agree that there is a lot to be said for a simpler life, and anyone who can survive with just what they can make themselves certainly deserves respect. Just don't go claiming that all technology is evil
Go back to reading your Rousseau and living in an unheated cabin, wearing bear skins if you're so against technology.
Umm.... But without technology, how is the Rouseau book going to be printed? Even ink is technology. So is an axe (Not to mention the materials its made from), so a cabin can't be built. And how could you kill the bear to get its skin.
I challenge y'all to come up with something that isn't in one of these categories.
Well, I'm feeling picky, so... Superconductors, railway networks, and anything to do with aviation apart from planes. I think that exhausts everything. It truly is ultra genralised. Why didn't they just play Civilization and go for the modern advances from that?
Re:I will summarise in 3 lines.
on
Motif's Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
I agree. I love the Be API. I wonder whether releasing a version for a rival OS would improve or damage sales of BeOS. Although Qt for Be would be quite nice too.
I really don't think kicking people off of Napster or suing them is the best way of going about doing it,
I disagree. It's direct action against people who they consider to be harming them directly. It reduces the amount of Metallica songs on the servers for at least a short time. This discourages Metallica fans from Napster
Well, yeah, if it's his right not to hire anyone if he decides he doesn't like them. This means that he can refuse to hire people based on how they drive, age, sex, race, eye colour, name or anything he wants. On the other hand, he has no objection to hiring somebody who only ever speeds in states that don't put it on a criminal record.
What does Australian law say about Databases? In Europe, the information HAS to be accurate, but I think European Data laws are more strict than anywhere else. It would also probably be illegal to refuse someone for a job based on a completely unrelated criminal offence. In the US I get the impression that anything goes. Australia is most likely different from both.
Sometimes it isn't possible to find a substitution though. In this case, someone can licence the patent only to themselves, and keep all competitors out of the market. If the competitors manage to find a way to dramatically improve the invention then (as far as I understand patent law) the original patent can still be used to prevent the improved invention from competing. Maybe they could modify the existing anti-competition laws to prevent inventors from producing good using a patent for less than the cost of a licence. The obvious solution would be to force licencing at a consistent rate, but then there would stil be problems. For example, I might consider waiving all fees for use in a pump when it was used for a well in a starving country, but would charge a lot for it if it was used in a car engine.
Well, yes, GIF was based on LZW, but at a time when nobody was collecting royalties. Although LZW isn't as bad as most patents. It is at least quite clever, and useful. The problem is the draconian licencing that is used. It would have been possible for LZW to have been at least slightly profitable and not remain a trade secret simply by producing it as a library, and selling licences for that. There would only have been a few months of protection until the algorithm was reverse engineered and duplicated, but several months of monopoly of an algorithm in software is quite a long time.
I believe there was a story about penecillin being delayed as a commercial drug because it wasn't patented. The problem is that drugs are expensive and slow to start producing because they need to be tested. Tests take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, and the drug is quite likely to be banned before production even starts. If it is found to be safe, and a company has no patent protection, then a rival can easily produce an identical product at no cost. Patents could only safely be revoked for drugs if there was a means of making the tests free. This argument doesn't apply to all other patentable inventions though. Especially software. Software can be released as soon as it is written. For a rival to use identical algorithms, they would not be able to use your code because of copyright laws, so they would have to produce the software from scratch. This would take several months for any non-trivial algorithm, and by this time, the rival should already have a good head start.
Ballpark figures put the total cost in the order of $5 000-$50 000 including legal fees. Actual filing costs are around $1 000
I think it would be possible to make all patents free until they start producing revenue. At this point they should charge a proportion until a set limit is reached (Say about $5000). What we really need for this to work is a way to prevent companies from using patents to stifle competition. Some sort of enforced licencing. Okay, this needs some more thought because I can't think of a way of preventing ludicrous licencing fees (e.g. $100 000 000 000 per use).
LZW is patented, so there is a move towards other compression algorithms, many of which are better in a general case. This suggests that progress was promoted. This is of course not how it was meant to work. The purpose is to allow other people to produce works based on the patented technology. This doesn't seem to be happening.
It seems that the patent holder has too much control over how their patents are used. In the past this didn't matter so much. Producing a machine costs money. A small surcharge from the inventor of the machine wouldn't affect this significantly. If the inventor asks for a fair price then everybody's happy.
The system breaks down when the patent owner uses the patent to prevent competition. Either by refusing to let anyone use the technology, or by charging too much to allow certain groups to use it. Because software can be produced on a shoestring budget, the latter is often unintentionally the case.
Oh, I see. It looks like I missed your point entirely. Sorry. I hadn't thought of it like that. I guess you could be right. It depends on the wording of the patent and the interpretation of whether using an algorithm to produce unchanged data counts as use.
You aren't using LZW. The LZW algorithm doesn't have anything to do with how its packed, just how higher values are used. It's uncompressed because it doesn't use these higher values. Its just using 9 bits to represent 8 bit values.
Re:Well, they don't make you buy a Windows license
on
Super Tiny Espresso PC
·
· Score: 1
Yes. A bare formatted hard drive costs a whopping minus $83
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's nothing wrong with pinching the good bits from MS stuff. Unfortunately KDE does seem to have a habit of pinching the bad bits as well.
Most people upgrade based on the assumption that any 0.0.01 improvement must be a huge difference.
I still use a 2.2.9 kernel because I can't quite stop feeling that kernel 2.2.15 should come halfway between 2.2.1 and 2.2.2
. The flint axe clearly has had a much bigger impact on mankind than the computer.
I agree. Flint tools did provide just about everything people needed for thousands of years, and might even have led to the discovery of fire. (Making flint tools does create sparks after all)
The thing is that just about anything you can make is technology. Sometimes crude technology but technology nonetheless. You can't simply point at a flint axe and claim that it isn't technology.
Bows and arrows and snare traps are definately technological solutions to problems. It took centuries for mankind to develop those simple tools.
That said, I agree that there is a lot to be said for a simpler life, and anyone who can survive with just what they can make themselves certainly deserves respect. Just don't go claiming that all technology is evil
Then you get problems with the idiots who fill up their horses on leaded petrol.
Go back to reading your Rousseau and living in an unheated cabin, wearing bear skins if you're so against technology.
Umm.... But without technology, how is the Rouseau book going to be printed? Even ink is technology. So is an axe (Not to mention the materials its made from), so a cabin can't be built. And how could you kill the bear to get its skin.
I challenge y'all to come up with something that isn't in one of these categories.
Well, I'm feeling picky, so... Superconductors, railway networks, and anything to do with aviation apart from planes. I think that exhausts everything. It truly is ultra genralised. Why didn't they just play Civilization and go for the modern advances from that?
I don't like pinball simulations.
I agree. I love the Be API. I wonder whether releasing a version for a rival OS would improve or damage sales of BeOS. Although Qt for Be would be quite nice too.
I really don't think kicking people off of Napster or suing them is the best way of going about doing it,
I disagree. It's direct action against people who they consider to be harming them directly. It reduces the amount of Metallica songs on the servers for at least a short time. This discourages Metallica fans from Napster
Well, yeah, if it's his right not to hire anyone if he decides he doesn't like them. This means that he can refuse to hire people based on how they drive, age, sex, race, eye colour, name or anything he wants. On the other hand, he has no objection to hiring somebody who only ever speeds in states that don't put it on a criminal record.
What does Australian law say about Databases? In Europe, the information HAS to be accurate, but I think European Data laws are more strict than anywhere else. It would also probably be illegal to refuse someone for a job based on a completely unrelated criminal offence. In the US I get the impression that anything goes. Australia is most likely different from both.
Sometimes it isn't possible to find a substitution though. In this case, someone can licence the patent only to themselves, and keep all competitors out of the market. If the competitors manage to find a way to dramatically improve the invention then (as far as I understand patent law) the original patent can still be used to prevent the improved invention from competing. Maybe they could modify the existing anti-competition laws to prevent inventors from producing good using a patent for less than the cost of a licence. The obvious solution would be to force licencing at a consistent rate, but then there would stil be problems. For example, I might consider waiving all fees for use in a pump when it was used for a well in a starving country, but would charge a lot for it if it was used in a car engine.
Well, yes, GIF was based on LZW, but at a time when nobody was collecting royalties. Although LZW isn't as bad as most patents. It is at least quite clever, and useful. The problem is the draconian licencing that is used. It would have been possible for LZW to have been at least slightly profitable and not remain a trade secret simply by producing it as a library, and selling licences for that. There would only have been a few months of protection until the algorithm was reverse engineered and duplicated, but several months of monopoly of an algorithm in software is quite a long time.
I believe there was a story about penecillin being delayed as a commercial drug because it wasn't patented. The problem is that drugs are expensive and slow to start producing because they need to be tested. Tests take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, and the drug is quite likely to be banned before production even starts. If it is found to be safe, and a company has no patent protection, then a rival can easily produce an identical product at no cost. Patents could only safely be revoked for drugs if there was a means of making the tests free. This argument doesn't apply to all other patentable inventions though. Especially software. Software can be released as soon as it is written. For a rival to use identical algorithms, they would not be able to use your code because of copyright laws, so they would have to produce the software from scratch. This would take several months for any non-trivial algorithm, and by this time, the rival should already have a good head start.
who does a system like that really help?
Amazon's competitors.
Ballpark figures put the total cost in the order of $5 000-$50 000 including legal fees. Actual filing costs are around $1 000
I think it would be possible to make all patents free until they start producing revenue. At this point they should charge a proportion until a set limit is reached (Say about $5000). What we really need for this to work is a way to prevent companies from using patents to stifle competition. Some sort of enforced licencing. Okay, this needs some more thought because I can't think of a way of preventing ludicrous licencing fees (e.g. $100 000 000 000 per use).
LZW is patented, so there is a move towards other compression algorithms, many of which are better in a general case. This suggests that progress was promoted. This is of course not how it was meant to work. The purpose is to allow other people to produce works based on the patented technology. This doesn't seem to be happening.
It seems that the patent holder has too much control over how their patents are used. In the past this didn't matter so much. Producing a machine costs money. A small surcharge from the inventor of the machine wouldn't affect this significantly. If the inventor asks for a fair price then everybody's happy.
The system breaks down when the patent owner uses the patent to prevent competition. Either by refusing to let anyone use the technology, or by charging too much to allow certain groups to use it. Because software can be produced on a shoestring budget, the latter is often unintentionally the case.
they can also make fake RADARs out of microwave ovens,
And if they get hit by a missile, your potatoes are baked even more quickly.
Surely if someone was a true luddite then they would be too frightened of techy jamming equipment to actually use it.
I can't be sure of this though, I've never actually been to Lud.
Why start with Mary Queen of Scots?
I'm sure Julias Caesar used a simple substitution code based on a->d, b->e etc.
Oh, I see. It looks like I missed your point entirely. Sorry. I hadn't thought of it like that. I guess you could be right. It depends on the wording of the patent and the interpretation of whether using an algorithm to produce unchanged data counts as use.
You aren't using LZW. The LZW algorithm doesn't have anything to do with how its packed, just how higher values are used. It's uncompressed because it doesn't use these higher values. Its just using 9 bits to represent 8 bit values.
Yes. A bare formatted hard drive costs a whopping minus $83
But this is much cuter. The BookPC looks like a small PC. The Espresso looks like it should actually be in a living room. Pricey though.