The planes flew into the gas, and their engines ignited the gas, blowing them up. Possibly the same scenario with vanishing boats.
Bubbles of methane would drastically reduce the density of the ocean around a ship, causing it to sink... by the time the methane had dissipated into the atmosphere, the hull would already be below the waterline and would be covered by the water filling the holes previously occupied by the gas.
I know that someone somewhere is going to use a box like this - but tell me for what real world application will you use it. (serious question - curious. I want to know the reall apps these are used for)
There are so many real world applications that demand a lot of CPU that it's hard to know where to begin answering your question. For a start, there's the engineering industry. Simulations are a lot cheaper than fabricating mockups and a lot easier to analyze that windtunnel tests - so anyone designing any form of machinery or structure benefits from the raw CPU to run simulations that are closer approximations to reality. Jet engines, cargo ships, skyscrapers, prosthetic joints, microprocessors... pretty much any industrial product.
Next there's the scientific community. There are a who class of problems for which there are no "pure" theoretical solutions, the only way to solve them is to iterate over the data set with an algorithm until it stabilises. The search for new anti-cancer drugs is largely a matter of simulating interations between protein molecules, which requires an enormous amount of processing power to get results in any useful time. Physics research is similar.
Next, there's commerce. Success in business is about getting to market with what the market wants to buy at a price the market is willing to pay. If you can spot trends in billions of transactions (say, you're a mobile phone operator, a credit card provider or an airline) before your competition, you have an edge. When you're analyzing data in 14 or more dimensions, the more memory and CPU you can throw at the problem the better.
That's just off the top of my head. We are a long, long way from the day we can say that we have "enough" processor power.
You need to be running a version of Internet Explorer 5 or higher in order to use Windows Update.
As far as I know, this is because Windows Update runs an applet on your PC to see what patches you already have installed, and needs MSIE to run this code.
Only if the goal of the developer is to create a codec which is closer to the original, rather than one that sounds great. I'd call that one a judgment call, actually.
The question is how close it gets to the original original: not the CD of the symphony, but the live performance the CD is a recording of. It's great if equipment can interpolate and filter to work around the limitations of the original format. But what sounds "better" is in the ear of the listener, it is therefore best to concentrate on reproduction and let the user shape the sound as they see fit *after* it has been converted abck to audio.
The time it takes to design a system and then actually implement that system is so great, that by the time the sytem is complete, the hardware used to make that system is 'obsolete.'
Which is why serious software engineering is done on platforms like the SPARC, where you can guarantee that later CPUs can run earlier code, or on IBM operating systems where everything is a virtual amchine anyway.
So to sum up, everyone who did well because of the internet bubble is having problems now. Quite a few of those companies were also going belly-up because they suddenly were too big after their.COM clients were gone.
Another problem is that a 2 or 3 year old Sun or Cisco is, for most applications, just as capable as one bought brand new today. Why buy new from the manufacturer when you can get almost as good for a fraction of the price from a bankruptcy sale, or on eBay? Suppliers are now competing with their own aftermarket, and even in a fast-moving field like tech, that's very difficult.
SOMEONE must have gotten rich off of the dot-com craze and subsequent bust... was it hardware manufacturers who provided all of the infrastructure for the failed-from-the start companies?
A lot of it went to Herman Miller. A lot more went on advertising, and on subsidizing products to undercut offline retailers. Also, a lot went on salaries, hiring people for much more than they were worth, and buying more equipment that was necessary. And a lot went to bankers arranging IPOs and M&A. It wasn't any one thing, the money just sloshed around and a lot of it got spilled. In the final analysis, it was lots of little things, a restaurant meal on expenses here, an extra web server there, a plane ticket where a conference call would have done, a bigger office for room to expand, that just kept adding up.
Essentially, what happened was that money that would have existed in the future if money in the present was invested in productive activity, was shifted into the present and spent in non-productive ways. The reason there is a recession is because the money that should be there now (now that we are in the future) had already been spent.
and MySQL, for instance, which doesn't use raw disk IO but is still blazingly fast, is turning some of the performance assumptions on their head. But the big guys - Oracle, DB2 and so forth - still prefer it
MySQL is fast because it is simple and can lean on the OS disk cache for sequential reads. But industrial-grade databases don't like OS caches, and prefer to maintain their own caches that they can actively manage in accordance with data access patterns - the more complex SQL you can execute in Oracle means you're more likely to be pulling together data non-sequentially as far as the disk is concerned. So read-ahead and other OS level filesystem performance opimizations don't help. Oracle knows where the data is (indexes store rowids which can be decoded to block addresses) and can tell the disk where to get it more easily than sending the OS to go get a block offset from the start of a datafile.
If data does not exist in the DB cache it will have to be fetched from the disk, and when data is written it has to get to the disk before the transaction can commit - in both cases an OS cache in between the DB and the disk wastes memory and time. This is the reason for the need for "raw" access to the disk.
Shooting off another space mission to take pictures of the landing site from the first space mission isn't going to convince skeptics, who are convinced that all these space missions are big left wing conspiracies. What they need to do is go up there and dust the moon with some colored powder or something.
More likely, establish a (solar powered?) and quite directional radio beacon there, broadcasting a set pattern on a fixed frequency. Then anyone who harbors serious doubts can simply triangulate it from two points on Earth and do the math themselves.
Taxed 3x more than you too, probably even more. Where do you think your "toyz" come from?
That's the problem with public sector work, it decouples productivity from reward. Anyone who has worked in the public sector is perceived as tainted with that ethic, and is "damaged goods" as far as private employers are concerned.
Of course, the reverse is true also. Public sector managers consider private employees to be corrupted by the idea that change and progress are good things, and would rather not hire anyone who would actually work for a living.
Is it just me, or does this look a little bit like some greedy guy who managed to sneak a patent in under everyone's noses during the dot-boom? The timing of this is rather suspect
It's just you. From the article:
he sued eBay in 2001 after negotiations broke down over the auction site's offer to purchase his patents.
The company first contacted Woolston in 2000 with an interest in buying the patents.
In other words, eBay knew about the patent and had read it and knew they wanted to licence it. Then they went ahead and used the technique anyway without completing the negotiation. Remember that a patent documents a single technique in great detail, it cannot be something vague and generic like "auctions" - he must have solved one very specific problem that eBay encountered and could not solve on their own.
If eBay had infinged the patent inadvertantly and had by coincidence come up with something identical, that would be a whole different matter. But that's not what happened here.
You have chosen 8:15pm tonight. Is that correct? Please answer yes or no.
Yes
I did not understand. You have chosen 8:15pm tonight. Is that correct? Please answer yes or no.
Reminds me of a time we were working on a VoxML based application using American voice recognition. It was a hierarchical menu system, you said the number and drilled down to the function you wanted. To get back to the root, the keyword was "top". We're British and we kept saying "top! top!" to no avail. Then a stroke of genius: in the most obnoxious, whiny, nasal American accent possible, "taaarrrhhppp!" and it worked perfectly...
Any Pocket PC could blow those machines away - and yet we see no good packages for pocket devices. You'd think there'd be a need wouldn't you?
Actually, no. Think about the resolution of a PDA screen. To get anywhere near the functionality of a decent science, engineering or finance calculator would require drilling down through several layers of menus to get to the functions. Even if the software was smart enough to move the most-often used features to the top, that's more annoying than anything - people get used to the layouts of their calcs, and don't want to actually have to hunt for a button, and do want to be able to borrow a similar one from time to time with an identical keypad.
The computational power is the easy part. The UI is almost impossible on a current-generation PDA.
However, I will raise a secondary point: if you are attempting to reach the widest audience possible, it would surely make sense to choose a non-proprietary format.
I've yet to see any evidence that the "proprietary-ness" of a format makes any difference to its market share. Real and Windows Media are by far the most popular formats according to that article.
That really pisses me off. Why do videos have to be saved in Real Media format? What's wrong with MPEG? Perhaps I don't want to install RealPlayer on my system?
You know, you don't have a god-granted right to look at other people's work. If it's easier for them to publish in Real format, that's their right to publish in the format that they choose. I just wish these format-snobs would get it into their heads that the world wasn't invented for their personal conveniences.
So, basically, all the people saying "software patents are wrong" are saying that the dozen of us who labored for 4 years coming up with this novel process should have enjoyed no protection from others copying it and profiting from our work, and deserved, essentially, no compensation for our work at all.
Actually, the dirty little secret is that this is precisely what many free software advocates would like to see. Such prominent figures as Stallman make no secret of the fact that they would like to see a software industry in which it is so difficult to make a profit on software products that the only practitioners would be the ones who are in it for the enjoyment of programming, not for financial rewards.
The position might be appealing to those with MacArthur scholarships or the safety of academic tenure, but it is in fact a thinly-disguised power grab. In a commercial environment, the market dictates through purchasing what software will be written. People earn money by writing that software. As such, we all benefit from software that was dull to write but very useful (say, general ledger or inventory management or any of the data-entry and reporting applications used by millions and millions of people every day).
But in the free sofware world, the market loses its power, and is held to ransom by the self-elected software elite, protected from market forces within the academic ivory tower, or writing software as a hobby with no concept of deadlines or the actual end-user's requirements.
For this reason alone, the free software movement is damaging the economy as a whole - not because it removes revenue from software companies (if they can't compete they deserve to go out of business) but because it decouples market forces from production, and shrinks the industry below that necessary to meet the demand for software by reducing the incentives to enter the market or invest in it.
There are many patents which shouldn't have been granted, it's true. But that is a reflection on the quality of implementation, not the quality of the design of the patent system. I suspect that the real impetus behind the free software movement's opposition to patents is that they want to get their hands on the fruits of others labour without paying for it.
All agents need to be able to handle, or contribute to, any type of criminal case, not just the one they have a specialty in. Just becasue you are a computer expert doesn't mean you won't be working a kidnapping or bank robbery.
That's exactly right. Remember that Scully was a fully-qualified MD but she was still expected to show up on field operations carrying a gun.
Have officers with guns do the dirty work and scientists do the research. This is the way law enforcement should work.
"A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools." --Thucydides
They're not just ruling out the fat ones. They're rejecting all the ones that don't have a buff bod and those who wear glasses. Remember, a gentlemen agent not only has to be smart but has to be good looking enough to seduce the sexy Russian and Chinese evil hacker agents that he will undoubtably encounter in exotic locales.
This illustrates the fundamental difference between Kirk and Bond. Bond is suave and impeccably dressed and seduces women to help him complete his mission. Kirk, on the other hand, is fat and dressed in a velour jumpsuit. But he simply sends Spock to complete the mission so he can devote his full attention to the seduction of alien babes.
Sure, I like to build things and wouldn't mind changing the world, where is my 27,000 sq ft mansion? But really, how does this mansion change the world?
From the article:
Jones is the head of Escient Technologies, a company that develops in-home systems that merge Internet power with electronic appliances and devices. His patented voicemail technology is used by the majority of telephone companies throughout the world.
If this techology makes it into everyday homes, then he's changed the world, for the better. What he's doing is just immersive research. And he's paying for it with his own money, which is more than can be said for our luxury-obsessed "leaders" talking about changing the world on their latest taxpayer-funded vacation in Jo'burg.
"If your project isn't done by midnight the day it's due, you're not going to get it done." The meaning being, if you don't have everything done by then the intervening eight or so hours will make little difference
You're assuming that the opportunity to work on the plane hasn't been factored into the plan. In general, it has.
To draw a specific example, "the very latest figures" are probably either hastily done or haven't been error checked or both.
An example of last-minute figures might be a company's quarterly statement filed with the SEC. The client needs the analysis as quickly as possible in order to make a decision. Or maybe the figures are delayed until the last possible moment so they can be error checked more thoroughly. Maybe a competitor has just made an announcement and you need to arrive at head office the next day with a response. These are all very common scenarios.
What matters in business is not just accuracy, but speed. The best analysis in the world is useless if events overtake it.
Yes, I've done business travel. Of course, that assumes you count my ssh packets
So you haven't, then.
I really just don't think that a plane is a good working environment or that wise people would do vital work on the way to an engagement... seems too much like studying for the final as you walk to the exam.
It's not the same thing at all. The material to be examined is known well in advance (it might not even have changed for years). The material you work on onboard a plane often doesn't exist in a usable form beforehand.
Slashdot Mirror
The planes flew into the gas, and their engines ignited the gas, blowing them up. Possibly the same scenario with vanishing boats.
Bubbles of methane would drastically reduce the density of the ocean around a ship, causing it to sink... by the time the methane had dissipated into the atmosphere, the hull would already be below the waterline and would be covered by the water filling the holes previously occupied by the gas.
I know that someone somewhere is going to use a box like this - but tell me for what real world application will you use it. (serious question - curious. I want to know the reall apps these are used for)
There are so many real world applications that demand a lot of CPU that it's hard to know where to begin answering your question. For a start, there's the engineering industry. Simulations are a lot cheaper than fabricating mockups and a lot easier to analyze that windtunnel tests - so anyone designing any form of machinery or structure benefits from the raw CPU to run simulations that are closer approximations to reality. Jet engines, cargo ships, skyscrapers, prosthetic joints, microprocessors... pretty much any industrial product.
Next there's the scientific community. There are a who class of problems for which there are no "pure" theoretical solutions, the only way to solve them is to iterate over the data set with an algorithm until it stabilises. The search for new anti-cancer drugs is largely a matter of simulating interations between protein molecules, which requires an enormous amount of processing power to get results in any useful time. Physics research is similar.
Next, there's commerce. Success in business is about getting to market with what the market wants to buy at a price the market is willing to pay. If you can spot trends in billions of transactions (say, you're a mobile phone operator, a credit card provider or an airline) before your competition, you have an edge. When you're analyzing data in 14 or more dimensions, the more memory and CPU you can throw at the problem the better.
That's just off the top of my head. We are a long, long way from the day we can say that we have "enough" processor power.
You need to be running a version of Internet Explorer 5 or higher in order to use Windows Update.
As far as I know, this is because Windows Update runs an applet on your PC to see what patches you already have installed, and needs MSIE to run this code.
Only if the goal of the developer is to create a codec which is closer to the original, rather than one that sounds great. I'd call that one a judgment call, actually.
The question is how close it gets to the original original: not the CD of the symphony, but the live performance the CD is a recording of. It's great if equipment can interpolate and filter to work around the limitations of the original format. But what sounds "better" is in the ear of the listener, it is therefore best to concentrate on reproduction and let the user shape the sound as they see fit *after* it has been converted abck to audio.
The time it takes to design a system and then actually implement that system is so great, that by the time the sytem is complete, the hardware used to make that system is 'obsolete.'
Which is why serious software engineering is done on platforms like the SPARC, where you can guarantee that later CPUs can run earlier code, or on IBM operating systems where everything is a virtual amchine anyway.
So to sum up, everyone who did well because of the internet bubble is having problems now. Quite a few of those companies were also going belly-up because they suddenly were too big after their .COM clients were gone.
Another problem is that a 2 or 3 year old Sun or Cisco is, for most applications, just as capable as one bought brand new today. Why buy new from the manufacturer when you can get almost as good for a fraction of the price from a bankruptcy sale, or on eBay? Suppliers are now competing with their own aftermarket, and even in a fast-moving field like tech, that's very difficult.
SOMEONE must have gotten rich off of the dot-com craze and subsequent bust... was it hardware manufacturers who provided all of the infrastructure for the failed-from-the start companies?
A lot of it went to Herman Miller. A lot more went on advertising, and on subsidizing products to undercut offline retailers. Also, a lot went on salaries, hiring people for much more than they were worth, and buying more equipment that was necessary. And a lot went to bankers arranging IPOs and M&A. It wasn't any one thing, the money just sloshed around and a lot of it got spilled. In the final analysis, it was lots of little things, a restaurant meal on expenses here, an extra web server there, a plane ticket where a conference call would have done, a bigger office for room to expand, that just kept adding up.
Essentially, what happened was that money that would have existed in the future if money in the present was invested in productive activity, was shifted into the present and spent in non-productive ways. The reason there is a recession is because the money that should be there now (now that we are in the future) had already been spent.
and MySQL, for instance, which doesn't use raw disk IO but is still blazingly fast, is turning some of the performance assumptions on their head. But the big guys - Oracle, DB2 and so forth - still prefer it
MySQL is fast because it is simple and can lean on the OS disk cache for sequential reads. But industrial-grade databases don't like OS caches, and prefer to maintain their own caches that they can actively manage in accordance with data access patterns - the more complex SQL you can execute in Oracle means you're more likely to be pulling together data non-sequentially as far as the disk is concerned. So read-ahead and other OS level filesystem performance opimizations don't help. Oracle knows where the data is (indexes store rowids which can be decoded to block addresses) and can tell the disk where to get it more easily than sending the OS to go get a block offset from the start of a datafile.
If data does not exist in the DB cache it will have to be fetched from the disk, and when data is written it has to get to the disk before the transaction can commit - in both cases an OS cache in between the DB and the disk wastes memory and time. This is the reason for the need for "raw" access to the disk.
Shooting off another space mission to take pictures of the landing site from the first space mission isn't going to convince skeptics, who are convinced that all these space missions are big left wing conspiracies. What they need to do is go up there and dust the moon with some colored powder or something.
More likely, establish a (solar powered?) and quite directional radio beacon there, broadcasting a set pattern on a fixed frequency. Then anyone who harbors serious doubts can simply triangulate it from two points on Earth and do the math themselves.
I'd make a beeline for henan and start a group home for the orphaned children of AIDS victims.
Yeah, and I'd buy puppies for orphans. No, really.
She's paid 3x more than me though :-(
Taxed 3x more than you too, probably even more. Where do you think your "toyz" come from?
That's the problem with public sector work, it decouples productivity from reward. Anyone who has worked in the public sector is perceived as tainted with that ethic, and is "damaged goods" as far as private employers are concerned.
Of course, the reverse is true also. Public sector managers consider private employees to be corrupted by the idea that change and progress are good things, and would rather not hire anyone who would actually work for a living.
It's just you. From the article:
In other words, eBay knew about the patent and had read it and knew they wanted to licence it. Then they went ahead and used the technique anyway without completing the negotiation. Remember that a patent documents a single technique in great detail, it cannot be something vague and generic like "auctions" - he must have solved one very specific problem that eBay encountered and could not solve on their own.
If eBay had infinged the patent inadvertantly and had by coincidence come up with something identical, that would be a whole different matter. But that's not what happened here.
You have chosen 8:15pm tonight. Is that correct? Please answer yes or no.
Yes
I did not understand. You have chosen 8:15pm tonight. Is that correct? Please answer yes or no.
Reminds me of a time we were working on a VoxML based application using American voice recognition. It was a hierarchical menu system, you said the number and drilled down to the function you wanted. To get back to the root, the keyword was "top". We're British and we kept saying "top! top!" to no avail. Then a stroke of genius: in the most obnoxious, whiny, nasal American accent possible, "taaarrrhhppp!" and it worked perfectly...
Any Pocket PC could blow those machines away - and yet we see no good packages for pocket devices. You'd think there'd be a need wouldn't you?
Actually, no. Think about the resolution of a PDA screen. To get anywhere near the functionality of a decent science, engineering or finance calculator would require drilling down through several layers of menus to get to the functions. Even if the software was smart enough to move the most-often used features to the top, that's more annoying than anything - people get used to the layouts of their calcs, and don't want to actually have to hunt for a button, and do want to be able to borrow a similar one from time to time with an identical keypad.
The computational power is the easy part. The UI is almost impossible on a current-generation PDA.
One presumes that this includes MPEG video as well.
Agreed, but there are still an awful lot of RealPlayer's installed.
However, I will raise a secondary point: if you are attempting to reach the widest audience possible, it would surely make sense to choose a non-proprietary format.
I've yet to see any evidence that the "proprietary-ness" of a format makes any difference to its market share. Real and Windows Media are by far the most popular formats according to that article.
That really pisses me off. Why do videos have to be saved in Real Media format? What's wrong with MPEG? Perhaps I don't want to install RealPlayer on my system?
You know, you don't have a god-granted right to look at other people's work. If it's easier for them to publish in Real format, that's their right to publish in the format that they choose. I just wish these format-snobs would get it into their heads that the world wasn't invented for their personal conveniences.
So, basically, all the people saying "software patents are wrong" are saying that the dozen of us who labored for 4 years coming up with this novel process should have enjoyed no protection from others copying it and profiting from our work, and deserved, essentially, no compensation for our work at all.
Actually, the dirty little secret is that this is precisely what many free software advocates would like to see. Such prominent figures as Stallman make no secret of the fact that they would like to see a software industry in which it is so difficult to make a profit on software products that the only practitioners would be the ones who are in it for the enjoyment of programming, not for financial rewards.
The position might be appealing to those with MacArthur scholarships or the safety of academic tenure, but it is in fact a thinly-disguised power grab. In a commercial environment, the market dictates through purchasing what software will be written. People earn money by writing that software. As such, we all benefit from software that was dull to write but very useful (say, general ledger or inventory management or any of the data-entry and reporting applications used by millions and millions of people every day).
But in the free sofware world, the market loses its power, and is held to ransom by the self-elected software elite, protected from market forces within the academic ivory tower, or writing software as a hobby with no concept of deadlines or the actual end-user's requirements.
For this reason alone, the free software movement is damaging the economy as a whole - not because it removes revenue from software companies (if they can't compete they deserve to go out of business) but because it decouples market forces from production, and shrinks the industry below that necessary to meet the demand for software by reducing the incentives to enter the market or invest in it.
There are many patents which shouldn't have been granted, it's true. But that is a reflection on the quality of implementation, not the quality of the design of the patent system. I suspect that the real impetus behind the free software movement's opposition to patents is that they want to get their hands on the fruits of others labour without paying for it.
This is a great site. If anyone wants to learn C# coming from a C/C++ or Java background I send them here.
Much better comparisons here.
All agents need to be able to handle, or contribute to, any type of criminal case, not just the one they have a specialty in. Just becasue you are a computer expert doesn't mean you won't be working a kidnapping or bank robbery.
That's exactly right. Remember that Scully was a fully-qualified MD but she was still expected to show up on field operations carrying a gun.
Have officers with guns do the dirty work and scientists do the research. This is the way law enforcement should work.
"A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools." --Thucydides
They're not just ruling out the fat ones. They're rejecting all the ones that don't have a buff bod and those who wear glasses. Remember, a gentlemen agent not only has to be smart but has to be good looking enough to seduce the sexy Russian and Chinese evil hacker agents that he will undoubtably encounter in exotic locales.
This illustrates the fundamental difference between Kirk and Bond. Bond is suave and impeccably dressed and seduces women to help him complete his mission. Kirk, on the other hand, is fat and dressed in a velour jumpsuit. But he simply sends Spock to complete the mission so he can devote his full attention to the seduction of alien babes.
The moral of this story: be like Kirk.
...as long as you live in a country where you can actually have one of these houses. I don't see the improvement to non-first world countries.
"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong" -- Abraham Lincoln.
From the article:
If this techology makes it into everyday homes, then he's changed the world, for the better. What he's doing is just immersive research. And he's paying for it with his own money, which is more than can be said for our luxury-obsessed "leaders" talking about changing the world on their latest taxpayer-funded vacation in Jo'burg.
"If your project isn't done by midnight the day it's due, you're not going to get it done." The meaning being, if you don't have everything done by then the intervening eight or so hours will make little difference
You're assuming that the opportunity to work on the plane hasn't been factored into the plan. In general, it has.
To draw a specific example, "the very latest figures" are probably either hastily done or haven't been error checked or both.
An example of last-minute figures might be a company's quarterly statement filed with the SEC. The client needs the analysis as quickly as possible in order to make a decision. Or maybe the figures are delayed until the last possible moment so they can be error checked more thoroughly. Maybe a competitor has just made an announcement and you need to arrive at head office the next day with a response. These are all very common scenarios.
What matters in business is not just accuracy, but speed. The best analysis in the world is useless if events overtake it.
Yes, I've done business travel. Of course, that assumes you count my ssh packets
So you haven't, then.
I really just don't think that a plane is a good working environment or that wise people would do vital work on the way to an engagement... seems too much like studying for the final as you walk to the exam.
It's not the same thing at all. The material to be examined is known well in advance (it might not even have changed for years). The material you work on onboard a plane often doesn't exist in a usable form beforehand.