If they're valid assumptions, why not use them to make the study more accurate?
Conversely, if they're invalid assumptions, you should be able to prove them such, and thereby invalidate the entire study (unless parts of it can later be proven to be valid in and of themselves).
Which is exactly why this sort of thing is so important.
Sure, you could probably get it to work even faster with hand-tuned assembly than simply using this library. But programmer time is expensive, and customizing code adds complexity. By reusing optimized code, you can enjoy some of the benefits of SIMD without having to devote the same amount of resources.
Let's be honest, this isn't a silver bullet - this isn't going to speed up code that doesn't use lots of floating-point vectors anyway. But if it does... (nearly) free performance is always a good thing.
Anyway, the trend appears to be creating games that will run on PCs and consoles. Look at Doom3, HL2, Pirates, Battlefield, etc. - all have upcoming console versions. A related trend is the opposite; porting console games to PC (NFS:U2, etc.).
With the rise of standard platforms like Renderware, Unreal, etc., I expect we'll see many games released across multiple platforms and PCs at the same time.
I'm not a lawyer either, but to me, (ii) under the definition of Necessary Claims means that just because MS is giving you a license to the Schemas does not mean that you have a license to any technology which might be needed to utilize the schema. I would say that this includes any other patents MS holds over Office software, but if your software wasn't infringing those patents before, then adding support for WordML (SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, etc.) wouldn't suddenly infringe upon those patents now.
Do we have an actual lawyer around here who can interpret this text for us? I'll agree, you'd be well-advised to have a lawyer look over it before starting your project, but that's just MS covering their asses. Imagine if they tried to put out a plain-English agreement, and someone found a loophole - or even worse, a loophole that granted them rights outside the scope of the agreement, such as the existing patents I mentioned above? If you've got a ton of angry people watching your every move and looking for a chance to trip you up, you're going to be damn careful.
The pre-release docs were available to me in Spring 2004 when I was working on it. (The project was a WordML-iText-PDF converter, though it's a dead project now, I took a different job, and I think the university has an Adobe site license anyway, so no one will ever need me to finish implementing it.)
Well, since I no longer work for the university, and you don't believe me anyway, the only person who could confirm it is my boss. And quite frankly, I don't feel like handing out his contact info just because some schmuck on Slashdot thinks I'm full of shit about what projects I worked on while employed at Purdue. So go ahead, don't believe me. It's not like I'll lose any sleep over it.
Tell you what I'll do, however. Here's a link to a WordML document. It doesn't use any DRM at all - it's just a plain old WordML document, in a file format that anyone can read or write. I think you'll find the content quite familiar - it's the mindless blather you passed off as a post. Take a look and see how much binary there really is in there. Please, point it out to us - since you're such an expert.
I've worked with WordML. The only binary I saw was embedded images, encoded in plain old base64. Everything else was plain text.
Granted, there were features in the DTD that weren't in the spec, but I was using a pre-release documentation set, so hopefully they've gone back and fully updated things. Besides, everything was in the DTD, so if you had to, you could look at how it's supposed to work.
Try reading through the documentation and some WordML files of your own, instead of just talking out of your ass.
Well, yes, the point of a patent is that you agree to let everyone see your work, and in exchange, the government protects it instead of making you protect it yourself (trade secret). However, it's still perfectly acceptable to go it alone, in which case secrecy still applies (since if Alice goes spreading around your trade secrets, as previously mentioned, you have no recourse unless you have a previous agreement with her not to disclose your intellectual property).
I don't think you're necessarily disagreeing with me here, but you are right about patents. They do (by design) control what ideas a person can make use of, though one must consider the gain to society from increasing the profit motive for inventors. There needs to be a careful balance between rewarding someone who invents the mousetrap, and stifling someone who would otherwise build a better mousetrap. This was (IMO) easier in the days of mechanical inventions; I think the idea of software as a device complicates things significantly (it seems to me that ideas that would be obvious to any fairly skilled programmer are being patented). However, I am not a patent lawyer, and I'm not qualified to maintain the aforementioned balance.
That's easy. Don't tell Alice, if she can't (or won't) keep her mouth shut. Which is, of course, exactly what's done in the real world using NDAs. If you won't promise not to tell anyone how my invention works, then I'm not telling you - it's your choice. And if someone breaks their promise, they are solely responsible for taking away your right to control your work.
There is a limit. However, this limit was extended by Congress recently, thanks to the efforts of Disney, whose copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire. This extension was contested in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
Microsoft, as a group of individuals, own the code they write. Sure, the code is also owned by the people who paid for it to be written (shareholders), but MS owns the code they wrote. And since it was their effort that created that code, they should control who owns it (unless you advocate that someone should be forced to give something they create to the public - that's certainly a valid concept, with pros and cons, though I personally object to depriving creators of the right to control their work).
I couldn't care less what histrionics Ballmer goes into on stage - his monkey dance neither amuses nor disturbs me. I judge Microsoft's committment to developers by looking at their current and upcoming tools, their developer resources, etc.. And their committment seems pretty good to me.
The last BSOD I saw was a year ago. I struggled with it for a month before running a RAM tester. I replaced the blown-out stick, and my machine hasn't crashed since.
I realize that anecdotal evidence isn't enough to support an argument, but I'm still waiting to see this massive instability everyone says is present in Windows.
Most people won't update unless you do it for them. Unfortunately, when MS first suggested this, the tinfoil-hat crowd made all kinds of noise about MS taking over their systems.
Hopefully, Firefox is set by default to update itself automatically. Joe Sixpack isn't even aware it needs to be done.
Sure. Just don't bring any food or drink with you. I like to enjoy the food I eat, so don't expect me to whip you up anything inexpensive - you're a customer, not an invited guest, so I'm not feeding you on my nickel. Oh, and the time I spend at the office isn't free, so don't expect the time I spend in the kitchen to be.
Now, if you still want that address....
It's the food service industry. You're giving the customer an experience - the actual product's just a part of it. If someone else provides a better experience than you - well, don't expect a lot of repeat customers.
Actually, I'm not left-leaning - I'm fairly moderate.
As for thinking I'm entitled - what happens if Starbucks covers up their outlets? I'll go somewhere else that doesn't. It's an amenity, like any other, and businesses can choose to differentiate themselves by providing it or deny it to customers in an attempt to save a couple cents. I'm willing to bet that they make more money off the people that come in to juice up than they're losing in utility costs.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure there's a charge on airline tickets paid to airports. So, it's not like they're getting screwed here. Besides, offering amenities to business travelers brings more business into a city, bringing more tax money, which supports the government paying for the airport.
In conclusion, you claim it's stealing, but in reality, they want you there, they want you generating revenue, and if letting you use a few cents worth of electricity helps that along, they'd be stupid not to recognize and encourage this. Taking care of the people responsible for your income is just smart business.
I'm guessing this degree of yours didn't come from a university that made you take marketing courses. The university I'm attending, however, does. Let me assure you that intentionally antagonizing your customers doesn't encourage repeat business.
A key differentiator is to offer a service that your competitor does not - "frying customers' mobile devices" is probably not what my professors were talking about. On the other hand, the coffee shop down the street from yours will get all your former customers who just want a latte and a few minutes of electricity, and without that "burnt computer smell" likely to characterize your establishment.
As has been previously mentioned, electricity is an amenity offered by the facility. It's an incentive to use their coffee shop, as opposed to one who doesn't allow use of the electricity.
Sure, businesses who don't want to provide electricity are going to have to cover up the outlets they don't want customers using, but that's just part of the cost of doing business.
Let me put it this way: if having $0.12 worth of electricity available for my use gets me to hang out and drink a $4.39 cup of coffee, who's losing money here?
I think you're missing the point. Let me break it down for you:
I have a high-end PC and a decent-but-not-spectacular home theater. Both cost around $2000 in parts. When I come home from a long day, I can either sit at my desk and play games on a 17" LCD, or sit on my couch and play on a 47" HDTV with 5.1 surround sound. Which do you think I choose? I'll concede that some people simply can't find the games they want on consoles, but for me, gaming's just more fun on the couch, especially when my friends come over.
Or perhaps we could send a message to other bright, talented individuals that the rest of the world's computers are not their own personal scratch disks.
Besides, just because the guy can exploit a few security holes doesn't make him Albert Fucking Einstein. He's not a genius or a hero; he's just a guy who doesn't understand the idea that you don't just help yourself to others' property because you don't want to pay for it yourself. I mean, he stole storage, for God's sake - yeah, not like you can't get that off the shelf at any fucking CompUSA in the country.
I don't have a problem with this; it forces parents to act as gatekeepers. I'd prefer if there was a consistent scheme for rating content that parents already understood, but it's not the industry's fault if parents are too lazy to read the pamphlet explaining the ratings while waiting in line to buy GTA for their 6-year-old.
This won't stop uninterested parents from handing the kids any game they want to shut them up. Nor will it stop overprotective parents who would just run violent game discs over with the car before giving them back to the kids. This will, however, allow interested parents to be certain that kids are able to play these games when the parents, those ultimately responsible, deem the kids ready.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're valid assumptions, why not use them to make the study more accurate?
Conversely, if they're invalid assumptions, you should be able to prove them such, and thereby invalidate the entire study (unless parts of it can later be proven to be valid in and of themselves).
What's wrong with that? Doesn't MS have the right to try to stop freeloaders from gaining unpaid access to their products?
Which is exactly why this sort of thing is so important.
Sure, you could probably get it to work even faster with hand-tuned assembly than simply using this library. But programmer time is expensive, and customizing code adds complexity. By reusing optimized code, you can enjoy some of the benefits of SIMD without having to devote the same amount of resources.
Let's be honest, this isn't a silver bullet - this isn't going to speed up code that doesn't use lots of floating-point vectors anyway. But if it does... (nearly) free performance is always a good thing.
You get the same stupid joke about his name in ASCII over and over?
That's what I love about the Internet. With more and more people coming online every day, the same tired-ass shit I read 8 years ago is funny to them!
That's what they always say.
Anyway, the trend appears to be creating games that will run on PCs and consoles. Look at Doom3, HL2, Pirates, Battlefield, etc. - all have upcoming console versions. A related trend is the opposite; porting console games to PC (NFS:U2, etc.).
With the rise of standard platforms like Renderware, Unreal, etc., I expect we'll see many games released across multiple platforms and PCs at the same time.
If someone forks their format, and a user complains about incompatibility, who do you think they'll be inclined to blame?
As I said, MS is covering their asses. It's just smart business.
I'm not a lawyer either, but to me, (ii) under the definition of Necessary Claims means that just because MS is giving you a license to the Schemas does not mean that you have a license to any technology which might be needed to utilize the schema. I would say that this includes any other patents MS holds over Office software, but if your software wasn't infringing those patents before, then adding support for WordML (SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, etc.) wouldn't suddenly infringe upon those patents now.
Do we have an actual lawyer around here who can interpret this text for us? I'll agree, you'd be well-advised to have a lawyer look over it before starting your project, but that's just MS covering their asses. Imagine if they tried to put out a plain-English agreement, and someone found a loophole - or even worse, a loophole that granted them rights outside the scope of the agreement, such as the existing patents I mentioned above? If you've got a ton of angry people watching your every move and looking for a chance to trip you up, you're going to be damn careful.
The pre-release docs were available to me in Spring 2004 when I was working on it. (The project was a WordML-iText-PDF converter, though it's a dead project now, I took a different job, and I think the university has an Adobe site license anyway, so no one will ever need me to finish implementing it.)
As for the patent issue, it looks like MS is willing to license patents for complete implentations. Some people wouldn't consider a promise from MS to be worth a damn, but there it is.
Well, since I no longer work for the university, and you don't believe me anyway, the only person who could confirm it is my boss. And quite frankly, I don't feel like handing out his contact info just because some schmuck on Slashdot thinks I'm full of shit about what projects I worked on while employed at Purdue. So go ahead, don't believe me. It's not like I'll lose any sleep over it.
Tell you what I'll do, however. Here's a link to a WordML document. It doesn't use any DRM at all - it's just a plain old WordML document, in a file format that anyone can read or write. I think you'll find the content quite familiar - it's the mindless blather you passed off as a post. Take a look and see how much binary there really is in there. Please, point it out to us - since you're such an expert.
I've worked with WordML. The only binary I saw was embedded images, encoded in plain old base64. Everything else was plain text.
Granted, there were features in the DTD that weren't in the spec, but I was using a pre-release documentation set, so hopefully they've gone back and fully updated things. Besides, everything was in the DTD, so if you had to, you could look at how it's supposed to work.
Try reading through the documentation and some WordML files of your own, instead of just talking out of your ass.
Well, yes, the point of a patent is that you agree to let everyone see your work, and in exchange, the government protects it instead of making you protect it yourself (trade secret). However, it's still perfectly acceptable to go it alone, in which case secrecy still applies (since if Alice goes spreading around your trade secrets, as previously mentioned, you have no recourse unless you have a previous agreement with her not to disclose your intellectual property).
I don't think you're necessarily disagreeing with me here, but you are right about patents. They do (by design) control what ideas a person can make use of, though one must consider the gain to society from increasing the profit motive for inventors. There needs to be a careful balance between rewarding someone who invents the mousetrap, and stifling someone who would otherwise build a better mousetrap. This was (IMO) easier in the days of mechanical inventions; I think the idea of software as a device complicates things significantly (it seems to me that ideas that would be obvious to any fairly skilled programmer are being patented). However, I am not a patent lawyer, and I'm not qualified to maintain the aforementioned balance.
That's easy. Don't tell Alice, if she can't (or won't) keep her mouth shut. Which is, of course, exactly what's done in the real world using NDAs. If you won't promise not to tell anyone how my invention works, then I'm not telling you - it's your choice. And if someone breaks their promise, they are solely responsible for taking away your right to control your work.
There is a limit. However, this limit was extended by Congress recently, thanks to the efforts of Disney, whose copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire. This extension was contested in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
Microsoft, as a group of individuals, own the code they write. Sure, the code is also owned by the people who paid for it to be written (shareholders), but MS owns the code they wrote. And since it was their effort that created that code, they should control who owns it (unless you advocate that someone should be forced to give something they create to the public - that's certainly a valid concept, with pros and cons, though I personally object to depriving creators of the right to control their work).
I couldn't care less what histrionics Ballmer goes into on stage - his monkey dance neither amuses nor disturbs me. I judge Microsoft's committment to developers by looking at their current and upcoming tools, their developer resources, etc.. And their committment seems pretty good to me.
Still waiting....
The last BSOD I saw was a year ago. I struggled with it for a month before running a RAM tester. I replaced the blown-out stick, and my machine hasn't crashed since.
I realize that anecdotal evidence isn't enough to support an argument, but I'm still waiting to see this massive instability everyone says is present in Windows.
So find a new bank, if the one you're dealing with imposes restrictions you can't live with.
Most people won't update unless you do it for them. Unfortunately, when MS first suggested this, the tinfoil-hat crowd made all kinds of noise about MS taking over their systems.
Hopefully, Firefox is set by default to update itself automatically. Joe Sixpack isn't even aware it needs to be done.
Sure. Just don't bring any food or drink with you. I like to enjoy the food I eat, so don't expect me to whip you up anything inexpensive - you're a customer, not an invited guest, so I'm not feeding you on my nickel. Oh, and the time I spend at the office isn't free, so don't expect the time I spend in the kitchen to be.
Now, if you still want that address....
It's the food service industry. You're giving the customer an experience - the actual product's just a part of it. If someone else provides a better experience than you - well, don't expect a lot of repeat customers.
Actually, I'm not left-leaning - I'm fairly moderate.
As for thinking I'm entitled - what happens if Starbucks covers up their outlets? I'll go somewhere else that doesn't. It's an amenity, like any other, and businesses can choose to differentiate themselves by providing it or deny it to customers in an attempt to save a couple cents. I'm willing to bet that they make more money off the people that come in to juice up than they're losing in utility costs.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure there's a charge on airline tickets paid to airports. So, it's not like they're getting screwed here. Besides, offering amenities to business travelers brings more business into a city, bringing more tax money, which supports the government paying for the airport.
In conclusion, you claim it's stealing, but in reality, they want you there, they want you generating revenue, and if letting you use a few cents worth of electricity helps that along, they'd be stupid not to recognize and encourage this. Taking care of the people responsible for your income is just smart business.
I'm guessing this degree of yours didn't come from a university that made you take marketing courses. The university I'm attending, however, does. Let me assure you that intentionally antagonizing your customers doesn't encourage repeat business.
A key differentiator is to offer a service that your competitor does not - "frying customers' mobile devices" is probably not what my professors were talking about. On the other hand, the coffee shop down the street from yours will get all your former customers who just want a latte and a few minutes of electricity, and without that "burnt computer smell" likely to characterize your establishment.
As has been previously mentioned, electricity is an amenity offered by the facility. It's an incentive to use their coffee shop, as opposed to one who doesn't allow use of the electricity.
Sure, businesses who don't want to provide electricity are going to have to cover up the outlets they don't want customers using, but that's just part of the cost of doing business.
Let me put it this way: if having $0.12 worth of electricity available for my use gets me to hang out and drink a $4.39 cup of coffee, who's losing money here?
I think you're missing the point. Let me break it down for you:
I have a high-end PC and a decent-but-not-spectacular home theater. Both cost around $2000 in parts. When I come home from a long day, I can either sit at my desk and play games on a 17" LCD, or sit on my couch and play on a 47" HDTV with 5.1 surround sound. Which do you think I choose? I'll concede that some people simply can't find the games they want on consoles, but for me, gaming's just more fun on the couch, especially when my friends come over.
Or perhaps we could send a message to other bright, talented individuals that the rest of the world's computers are not their own personal scratch disks.
Besides, just because the guy can exploit a few security holes doesn't make him Albert Fucking Einstein. He's not a genius or a hero; he's just a guy who doesn't understand the idea that you don't just help yourself to others' property because you don't want to pay for it yourself. I mean, he stole storage, for God's sake - yeah, not like you can't get that off the shelf at any fucking CompUSA in the country.
I don't have a problem with this; it forces parents to act as gatekeepers. I'd prefer if there was a consistent scheme for rating content that parents already understood, but it's not the industry's fault if parents are too lazy to read the pamphlet explaining the ratings while waiting in line to buy GTA for their 6-year-old.
This won't stop uninterested parents from handing the kids any game they want to shut them up. Nor will it stop overprotective parents who would just run violent game discs over with the car before giving them back to the kids. This will, however, allow interested parents to be certain that kids are able to play these games when the parents, those ultimately responsible, deem the kids ready.