That's quite aside from the issue that software should never be patentable.
There's an extremely small difference between software, and firmware.
Do you really believe that a software MP3 player shouldn't be patentable, but the same software, in the firmware of an MP3 player SHOULD be? Because that is currently the situation in countries without software patents.
I'd be happy to hear any justification for that, or a good solid explanation for where the line SHOULD be, instead.
Yes, well, since you admit to living where it never snows you can be forgiven for not understanding that snow and ice at -20F are a hell of a lot less slippery than continually melting and re-freezing snow and ice at or around freezing point.
I remain unconvinced by your unsupported assertion that your world doesn't follow the basic principles of physics, and therefore you've got it so much harder than the rest of the world...
You didn't answer ANY of them the first time around. You simply dismiss them out-of-hand based on faulty logic. In essence, you REPEATEDLY keep saying that company X doesn't do it now, therefore it's impossible. If company Y does it, it won't be a computer, because only what company X makes are true(tm) computers.
The fact that Dell isn't selling $5 computers doesn't change the fact that you can make a computer for $5. The fact that Dell isn't selling Z80s doesn't change the fact that you CAN BUY THEM, so your claim that you "can't"... "for any price" is patently false.
The fact that $400 computers aren't as simple as $5 calculators doesn't preclude a (simple) $5 computer from working just fine. Relegating your claim of "a certain minimum cost to any manufacturing process" to about $1 overhead.
And you certainly didn't address the fact that there are $200 laptops all over the place, yet they aren't "damned popular".
If that were true, IBM would still be making 8088-based PCs and selling them for a few bucks. (Take the $2K 1981 price and divide by 2 about 15 times.)
The fact that nobody wants 8088s is quite relevant. Nobody uses 5.25" floppies. Instead, people who need something with specs similar to an 8088 DO buy boards with microcontrollers and solid-state storage for a couple bucks.
Instead, you can't buy a new 8088-based system for any price -- it's not worth Intel's while to even manufacture the chip, never mind somebody else to build a system around it.
Ummm... Z-80 anyone? Still cranking 'em out.
There's always a certain minimum cost to any manufacturing process. Scaling up reduces costs, and so does Moore's law, but only to a point. You'll always have to pay for materials, factory space, workers, shipping, marketing, etc. Some of these things are cheaper outside the U.S., but again, only to a point.
Yes, but I can buy a calculator for $5... A very low-spec computer, which also needs all of the things you've listed.
Of course, even a $200 laptop would be damned popular. And a couple years after they come out, you'll be able to buy used ones on eBay for a pittance.
There are low-end laptops all over the place now for $200. The fact you haven't noticed suggests they really haven't taken the world by storm.
IMHO, $100 computers are perfectly feasible. In fact I'd love to have little $20 handheld with tiny character-based B&W LCD screen, bubble keyboard, running a stripped version of Unix.
How can you justify a huge fleet of salt trucks, snow plows, people, and training for something that only happens rarely? How can you expect 5 million people to have snow chains, etc when they might use them once every 10 years? The answer is that you don't - everyone just rushes home and the whole city takes a day or two off, then resumes business as normal when things thaw.
I have snow chains, and I live in Southern California, down where it NEVER snows. I bought them after the ONE TIME I did end up driving on the freeway through a couple inches of snow and ice in a mountain-pass. I've only used them once since, but they stay in the back of my car through winter, on the off chance there's a patch of snow or ice anywhere I need to go. They aren't expensive, so I don't see the difficulty, just a lot of people with an terrible mindset.
And what's more, snow chains really aren't required. My relatives way, way, way up north don't even have a set for any of their cars, despite routine heavy snow and common -20F temperatures. The difference is learning how to drive. Admittedly, you don't expect someone who has never seen snow to drive well in it the first time around, but after the second snow day, the majority of the population should be able to handle the spinning wheels, and actually driving carefully.
Energy-dense storage media have been the missing link in a lot of relatively clean energy generation schemes.
No. Pumped hydro is about the simplest technology you can get, and it can get extremely high efficiency. And all without a massive bank of consumable batteries.
The only thing holding back solar and wind is that it's not as cheap as coal, and the impetus for using it hasn't been around long enough that anyone has had a chance to build out. Plans for solar power plants in CA are going up like wildfire, but it's going to take many years before enough of them are constructed to make a notable dent in our overall power usage.
Though they don't make it as clear as they could, here are some selected quotes from Sam on the Maradns mailing list:
Bottom line: People, by and large, don't pay me for MaraDNS development. I also haven't gotten enough goodwill and fame developing MaraDNS to get my dream job in Silicon Valley (I did get an interview with Google, but they never hired me). So, alas, fixing Windows Server 2003 issues is a little beyond my budget right now.:(
I can also fix the issue for the 1.2 branch of MaraDNS for $100 (assuming I can share the fix with the world; if you want me to make changes to MaraDNS that are private, please hire me with a living wage)
Essentially the usual short-sighted greed over quarterly profits amongst companies will cause them to push the situation until it breaks.
The MPEG-LA has been around for over a decade. How many years are you planning on?
It may take a few years but eventually the very greed that made a patent encumbered format the de-facto standard is the same greed that will kill it.
It's NOT greed that drives adoption of the technically superior format. Self-interest, OTOH, is a desirable trail, which resulted in many good technical standard.
Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?
A) When you signed on the dotted-line that says "I swear under penalty of perjury that the above is true and correct" you'd better have been damn sure everything you wrote was accurate. If not, a $400,000 fine could be the least of your problems.
B) Penalties require intent, not accidents.
C) YES. Even Indie musicians can be jackasses. If they're going around sending legal notices to everyone who uses 5sec of their songs, they too do indeed deserve a hefty fine. It certainly costs those on the receiving end, so you should be paying for you ill-conceived actions.
You're just demonstrating your inability to read at this point...
those 2 countries are leaders in 'net bandwidth to the home.
A) That doesn't mean it's cheap. I'd be inclined to view inexpensive internet access (even if quite slow) to be the most beneficial to the general public. B) I specifically excluded "to the home". If "infrastructure" to you means only "last-mile", then you have to explain EXACTLY why that's beneficial
Let's see you prove it - since proof seems to be so important to you.
I've reduced this conversation to waiting for evidence because you've shown you can only speak in vague assertions, with no specific knowledge or even LOGIC to your statements. So until you've got something, ANYTHING, I'll continue to dismiss, out-of-hand, your fantasies disguised as assertions.
And no, since you can't back-up your blanket assertions, I feel no need to respond with the easily accessible information you're too lazy to search for.
Don't need to transport HDDs. You just need a big fat fiber-optic connection.
While I'm as big a fan of rsync as any, if latency isn't a major issue, a van full of tapes is very likely faster and cheaper.
And for archiving, often on-line storage just isn't practical or otherwise doesn't make sense, so are you going to trust those platters in a box to spin-up after 20 years sitting on a shelf?
Tapes' domain has vastly shrunk, but it still has a pretty major seat in the world of data.
It looks like tape is going to be able to keep up for some time to come. Optical disks, OTOH, are too damn small.
Who actually WANTS a "major" release? If RH can keep everything compatible, they should, and continue to have each release being only a minor update from the last. 5.5, here I come!
Think of open source coding as a demonstration of your skill, that will get your foot in the door of almost any company you want to work for.
I'm not so sure about that. The creator and basically sole developer of MaraDNS has lamented how little his project has helped him finding work. In fact he's a somewhat regular/. reader, so he might chime-in about now.
That only applies industries where the public is largely unaware of accidents and failures.
Okay. Commercial airlines then... Why is it that the public at large has no idea of the relative safety records of the different carriers, or of the different brand and model of jet? Why don't those with a poor safety record go out of business in short order?
In his example of the "Home" button, the icon doesn't actually look much like a house. We recognize it so easily because we mentally match it to what we expect might be there. Someone with no computer background would recognize a picture of a house before a small, distorted outline. Ditto for a "smiley face". It's a deeply embedded cultural thing that a cirle with 2 dots and a line in it represents a face, but the others are really vasly more recognizable. It would be a better graphic if the faces didn't get angrier and uglier as they got more realistic... This seems to weight the issue incorrectly.
The reason the icon looks better than the photo in the example is simple straw man. OS X uses a silhouette of a house, while the photo was a house in perspective, in color, and most importantly, so SMALL it isn't really recognizable. Try a photo of one side of a real house, and it can work just as well as the sideways arrow. Ditto for the camera. But also, if you only have 32x32 pixels to work with, photo realistic is obviously a bad idea. If you have the room, however, it can work much better.
The photo of the toggle switch looks better, IMHO, than the "optimal" drawing. It's much more clear from the perspective and shadows in the photo which position it's in, and what other options are. In a configuration dialog, I'd likely click on a photo of a switch next to a label... A rectangle with a box in it? That would take me longer to figure out. A ratio box would probably be better than either, though....
So while his fundamental point is at least true in a nutshell, that too much detail is distraction, he seems to use the most horrible examples possible, and errs FAR too much on the "simple" side of things, as if the concepts he's accustomed to are universal, and not the learned concepts they clearly are...
Right, because it is so profitable to be known as a company that kills your passengers.
Yes, it is! History has shown, time and time again, that safety is more expense than it's worth. Go back to seat belts in the 70s, or even Toyota's recent scuffle, where they avoided a recall until forced to do so...
This design relies on electric motors. These remain efficient regardless of their size, whereas internal combustion engines become less efficient the smaller they are. As such, electric aircraft can use small motors while generating impressive propulsion--the Puffin can lift a person with just 60 horsepower.
At up to 95 percent efficiency, electric motors are far more efficient than internal combustion engines, which only rate some 18 to 23 percent.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an extremely small difference between software, and firmware.
Do you really believe that a software MP3 player shouldn't be patentable, but the same software, in the firmware of an MP3 player SHOULD be? Because that is currently the situation in countries without software patents.
I'd be happy to hear any justification for that, or a good solid explanation for where the line SHOULD be, instead.
Ah yes, good old isolationism. Because that's worked out so incredibly well throughout history, right??? Am I right???
I remain unconvinced by your unsupported assertion that your world doesn't follow the basic principles of physics, and therefore you've got it so much harder than the rest of the world...
You didn't answer ANY of them the first time around. You simply dismiss them out-of-hand based on faulty logic. In essence, you REPEATEDLY keep saying that company X doesn't do it now, therefore it's impossible. If company Y does it, it won't be a computer, because only what company X makes are true(tm) computers.
The fact that Dell isn't selling $5 computers doesn't change the fact that you can make a computer for $5. The fact that Dell isn't selling Z80s doesn't change the fact that you CAN BUY THEM, so your claim that you "can't" ... "for any price" is patently false.
The fact that $400 computers aren't as simple as $5 calculators doesn't preclude a (simple) $5 computer from working just fine. Relegating your claim of "a certain minimum cost to any manufacturing process" to about $1 overhead.
And you certainly didn't address the fact that there are $200 laptops all over the place, yet they aren't "damned popular".
The fact that nobody wants 8088s is quite relevant. Nobody uses 5.25" floppies. Instead, people who need something with specs similar to an 8088 DO buy boards with microcontrollers and solid-state storage for a couple bucks.
Ummm... Z-80 anyone? Still cranking 'em out.
Yes, but I can buy a calculator for $5... A very low-spec computer, which also needs all of the things you've listed.
There are low-end laptops all over the place now for $200. The fact you haven't noticed suggests they really haven't taken the world by storm.
IMHO, $100 computers are perfectly feasible. In fact I'd love to have little $20 handheld with tiny character-based B&W LCD screen, bubble keyboard, running a stripped version of Unix.
There's that fag-talk we talked about.
I have snow chains, and I live in Southern California, down where it NEVER snows. I bought them after the ONE TIME I did end up driving on the freeway through a couple inches of snow and ice in a mountain-pass. I've only used them once since, but they stay in the back of my car through winter, on the off chance there's a patch of snow or ice anywhere I need to go. They aren't expensive, so I don't see the difficulty, just a lot of people with an terrible mindset.
And what's more, snow chains really aren't required. My relatives way, way, way up north don't even have a set for any of their cars, despite routine heavy snow and common -20F temperatures. The difference is learning how to drive. Admittedly, you don't expect someone who has never seen snow to drive well in it the first time around, but after the second snow day, the majority of the population should be able to handle the spinning wheels, and actually driving carefully.
To the average person, there's no obvious difference between perpetual motion devices, and solar panels...
My mistake, you did indeed say "in decimal" (not hex).
No. Pumped hydro is about the simplest technology you can get, and it can get extremely high efficiency. And all without a massive bank of consumable batteries.
The only thing holding back solar and wind is that it's not as cheap as coal, and the impetus for using it hasn't been around long enough that anyone has had a chance to build out. Plans for solar power plants in CA are going up like wildfire, but it's going to take many years before enough of them are constructed to make a notable dent in our overall power usage.
Though they don't make it as clear as they could, here are some selected quotes from Sam on the Maradns mailing list:
My point, exactly.
Though it's irrelevant to the point, if you really want to know, Comair (Delta Connection) has a far more abhorrent record than ValuJet ever did.
Except of course it doesn't...
$ echo -e \x70\x85\x67\x75 | hexdump -C
00000000 70 85 67 75 0a |p.gu.|
F-U-C-K would be: 46.55.43.4b
Obviously, the "b" makes it an invalid IP address.
"8675, 309" is a line repeated in a very famous (old) song. Ostensibly a phone number: 867-5309. It's a major cultural reference.
The MPEG-LA has been around for over a decade. How many years are you planning on?
It's NOT greed that drives adoption of the technically superior format. Self-interest, OTOH, is a desirable trail, which resulted in many good technical standard.
A) When you signed on the dotted-line that says "I swear under penalty of perjury that the above is true and correct" you'd better have been damn sure everything you wrote was accurate. If not, a $400,000 fine could be the least of your problems.
B) Penalties require intent, not accidents.
C) YES. Even Indie musicians can be jackasses. If they're going around sending legal notices to everyone who uses 5sec of their songs, they too do indeed deserve a hefty fine. It certainly costs those on the receiving end, so you should be paying for you ill-conceived actions.
And Microsoft seems to be little more than the most successful (so far) software company on the planet.
You're just demonstrating your inability to read at this point...
A) That doesn't mean it's cheap. I'd be inclined to view inexpensive internet access (even if quite slow) to be the most beneficial to the general public.
B) I specifically excluded "to the home". If "infrastructure" to you means only "last-mile", then you have to explain EXACTLY why that's beneficial
I've reduced this conversation to waiting for evidence because you've shown you can only speak in vague assertions, with no specific knowledge or even LOGIC to your statements. So until you've got something, ANYTHING, I'll continue to dismiss, out-of-hand, your fantasies disguised as assertions.
And no, since you can't back-up your blanket assertions, I feel no need to respond with the easily accessible information you're too lazy to search for.
While I'm as big a fan of rsync as any, if latency isn't a major issue, a van full of tapes is very likely faster and cheaper.
And for archiving, often on-line storage just isn't practical or otherwise doesn't make sense, so are you going to trust those platters in a box to spin-up after 20 years sitting on a shelf?
Tapes' domain has vastly shrunk, but it still has a pretty major seat in the world of data.
It looks like tape is going to be able to keep up for some time to come. Optical disks, OTOH, are too damn small.
Who actually WANTS a "major" release? If RH can keep everything compatible, they should, and continue to have each release being only a minor update from the last. 5.5, here I come!
I'm not so sure about that. The creator and basically sole developer of MaraDNS has lamented how little his project has helped him finding work. In fact he's a somewhat regular /. reader, so he might chime-in about now.
Okay. Commercial airlines then... Why is it that the public at large has no idea of the relative safety records of the different carriers, or of the different brand and model of jet? Why don't those with a poor safety record go out of business in short order?
I'm very interested...
I've got some complaints about the article...
In his example of the "Home" button, the icon doesn't actually look much like a house. We recognize it so easily because we mentally match it to what we expect might be there. Someone with no computer background would recognize a picture of a house before a small, distorted outline. Ditto for a "smiley face". It's a deeply embedded cultural thing that a cirle with 2 dots and a line in it represents a face, but the others are really vasly more recognizable. It would be a better graphic if the faces didn't get angrier and uglier as they got more realistic... This seems to weight the issue incorrectly.
The reason the icon looks better than the photo in the example is simple straw man. OS X uses a silhouette of a house, while the photo was a house in perspective, in color, and most importantly, so SMALL it isn't really recognizable. Try a photo of one side of a real house, and it can work just as well as the sideways arrow. Ditto for the camera. But also, if you only have 32x32 pixels to work with, photo realistic is obviously a bad idea. If you have the room, however, it can work much better.
The photo of the toggle switch looks better, IMHO, than the "optimal" drawing. It's much more clear from the perspective and shadows in the photo which position it's in, and what other options are. In a configuration dialog, I'd likely click on a photo of a switch next to a label... A rectangle with a box in it? That would take me longer to figure out. A ratio box would probably be better than either, though....
So while his fundamental point is at least true in a nutshell, that too much detail is distraction, he seems to use the most horrible examples possible, and errs FAR too much on the "simple" side of things, as if the concepts he's accustomed to are universal, and not the learned concepts they clearly are...
Yes, it is! History has shown, time and time again, that safety is more expense than it's worth. Go back to seat belts in the 70s, or even Toyota's recent scuffle, where they avoided a recall until forced to do so...
A + B + C = X.
No, YOU are simply focusing on the wrong part of the story...
How many people would recognize the reference? Far fewer, I'd say.
From TFA: