Guess that would give plenty of time to harvest the IP, whilst the pirates end up with gigabytes of useless 1s & 0s....
Downloading a bunch of useless 1s & 0s is not illegal in any way, regardless of how that collection is called. They own the copyright on the meaningful content. Maybe they can sue based on "intent to violate copyright" or so, but you did not violate any copyright downloading that stuff...
On another note i believe in freeom before some stupid book, so if people want to be gay, so long as they arent hurting anyone else why should anyone have the right to tell them what they are doing is wrong or immoral
People are not gay because they "want to be gay", but simply because that's who/how they are.
hy? Because it sets limits on damages for willful and even fraudulent patent infringement so that large corporations will find patents easy to ignore.
They already do so today. The problem with the willful damages is that they kick in as soon as you read a patent, which means there's a huge disincentive to read any patents, reducing their potential value as knowledge source even further (yes, "even further", it's not like e.g. software patents are written to be understood by developers or scientists).
In other words, if you are a big corporations, you might be able to knowingly ignore patents while startups and inventors don't have the same benefit.
Large companies have always been able to do whatever they want thanks to their huge portfolios, see e.g. IBM vs Sun in the eighties.
There are some good improvements in the Patent Reform Act of 2005 but this fundamental flaw is going to hurt innovation by making the patent system benefit a small percentage of companies at everyone else's expense.
I doubt it. Afaik we don't have this willful infringement equals treble damages clause in Europe either, and the patent problem here is less bad than in the US for now. Less chance at a huge payoff may in fact reduce the number of court cases and thus benefit innovation, because more is invested in R&D and useful things, instead of in lawyers.
Maybe it's the open source community that needs to really look at some of the things that MySQL ab has done in the past
Yeah, like say being one of the main funders of the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign in Europe, as well as giving a lot of money to the FFII (which coordinated most of the battle against software patents in Europe).
That's the optimist's view. In reality it's less clear than that. When you see 20+ instructions to handle entry and exit code, then that strikes me as RISC gone wrong.
I really don't see why. If you can win the cost of that (and more) back in the body, then what's the problem? And again, you do not have to save all those registers. You can pretend you're on a register starved architecture and only use 8 registers so you don't have to save much, just like on 80x86. But indeed, compilers do not do that, because it does not result in faster code.
FWIW, the PPC also has an instruction with which you can save an arbitrary number of integer registers (even all of them) in one instruction. It's not used because it's slower than the combination of the individual replacements. Just like on 80x86 things like lodsb, loop and jecxz are slower than the alternatives consisting of more instructions (on modern processors).
As an aside, when you pass parameters in registers you often have to turn around immediately and copy them to different registers or write them out to memory. It's not hard to come up with cases where it's faster to pass parameters on the stack.
To pass them on the stack you often first have to load them from elsewhere in memory first. By passing them via the registers you can distribute the load on the memory interface by scheduling the loads with code at the caller side and the stores by code at the caller side. If you don't have to load them from memory, then you don't have to load them from memory either when passing them via registers.
And in other cases it is not necessary at all to copy them back to memory, so you also win.
On the PPC you potentially have to save and restore a dozen or more registers. I routinely see functions with 48 or more bytes of set-up and tear-down, but it can be much larger.
You don't have to save anything you don't use, and you (the compiler) should only use extra registers if it is advantageous to do so (taking into account the cost to save/restore them). Having more registers available simply gives you more options.
Of course, fat binaries will only add a tiny bit to most programs, since the non-executable resources for most pieces of software are significantly larger than the executable portions.
I'm quite doubtful about whether only the executable part is duplicated, as the input of lipo is two stand-alone binaries (unless it performs optimizations splitting the data in identical parts -like strings- and different parts -like integer constants- and then relocating the hell out of both binaries).
Xcode has supported gcc 2.95/3.0/3.3/4.0 for a while now, so this really isn't anything different from that perspective beyond its name not starting with 'g'....:-)
Unfortunately, that's not true. Several people have already tried to add support for other compilers to Xcode and apart from using script build phases, there doesn't seem to be a solution currently. If you start editing Xcode's gcc description files to change them for working with another compiler (i.e., to expose the command line options via the GUI), you only get Xcode crashes.
Of course, Apple could modify Xcode and add support for ICC, but it's not just a matter of editing some file... Integration in Xcode of compilers other than what Apple supports out-of-the-box is currently a nightmare.
Here's an Easter Egg I haven't been able to find any information on anywhere yet. I used to play Might & Magic III (Dos version) a lot, but never was able to finish it because at one point or another my save game always got corrupted for some reason.
The consequence of this corruption was that when I wandered around outside Fountainhead (the first city in the game, where you start), my party got randomly hit by electricity, poison, fire etc, even though the surroundings look normal. No dungeon or town can be entered anymore once outside, and I could walk over all sorts of water etc.
However, nearby the Temple of Moo on a regular grass or forest square, a dialog box to enter some place would pop up. It did not say what the place was called, only showed a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down".
If answering affirmative, my party would be transported to some dungeon. If I looked at the automap, the name of the place was "It's a secret!". The place contained desks with people carrying the names of the programmers, all saying something funny. It also contained two endless piles of gold, one of which gave you a special item each time and the other giving you 1m gold each time. It could be exited again only through a magic mirror.
However, given the fact that I could not enter any other place anymore (except those directly reachable by magic mirror) when I was able to enter this "It's a secret" place, I could not do much with all that stuff. As soon as I went outside, I again was hit by random poison/electricity/... everywhere and could not enter anything.
I can't find any mention of this on the Internet, and even the official Might & Magic III hint book (which we bought, over 600 pages!) doesn't mention it.
If you get the Mac version of the game, you can easily verify that this "It's a secret" place really exists in the game by opening the main application file with hexedit and searching for "It's a Secret". I guess you can also find it by grepping the Dos version or its data files.
The strings of what the programmers say can also be found in the binary, I've reproduced them below.
However, what I would really like to know is how to get to that place without getting a corrupted save gave.
Benjamin Bent Laugh now monkey boy
Ron Bolinger The writing in this game was awesome.
Andy Caldwell Juuuuuulia.
Mark Caldwell Women!
Mike Clement Trojans are the superior brand.
Richard Espy Poker, anyone?
Douglas Grounds Sit, Toto! Sit!
Dave Hathaway You too shall be honored. . . Boot to the head!
Bonnie Long-Hemsath Remember - reality is user-defined. Go therefore and take responsibility for your reality. If it is not as you would have it, create a new one. It can be done.
Todd Hendrix Lick the Chalice!
Eric Hyman Jay + C = Hap + E
Louis Johnson Where's the nearest jam?
Eric Newhouse Go Crimson!
Rubes, Fitz, Visc, & House: Leverett Hoops '92
Paul Rattner To all my creditors: Don't call me; I'll call you. PS. Your check is in the mail.
Scott T. Smith Debbo-meister.
Allen Treschler FOOL'S MATE 1.) P-KB4 P-K3 2.) P-KN4 Q-R5 mate! is the fastest kill there is.
Jon Van Canegham Life is a game. Let's play!
(actually, by searching for one of those strings I found this page, but I don't read whatever language it's written in and given the number of question marks they don't know either what this is about)
Anyway, based on the english discussion at your other link this does not appear to have any big relevance to the anti-patent issue (my main concern).
That company also owns a couple of software patents. Anyway, the main relevance to software patents is that they are attempting to sue FFII into bankruptcy and that FFII is the main opponent of software patents in Europe. FFII's goals are however broader than just that (e.g. Nutzwerk's attempts to silence all criticism relating to them)
Any chance you could post the court order, or indicate what these 8 items are, or where they can be located online?/blockquote>
Hamburg court order. It's in German though. I don't speak German myself.
or whatever else you can come up with to help clarify the conflict?
Look here. If you follow links to ffii.org pages and they don't work, replace ffii.org with ffii.de to get them to resolve for now.
There may also be a follow-up article about it on news.zdnet.co.uk today.
You misunderstood, we did not miss any "date in court" and we do have a lawyer. It simply took some time to delete all occurrences of 8 particular phrases/expressions from our website we are barred from using due to a preliminary injunction.
There's one thing I can't quite get with this hunger site. If they can afford to give away a little bit of money just because I click on their website, why the hell can't they give away that money if I don't click on their website and so save them a small amount of money on outbound bandwidth, the more expensive kind?
Because their sponsors pay them based on ad impressions.
When the Mac TPM was pure speculation, there were several hundred posts here suggesting alternate theories: custom chipsets, custom firmware
Those were quite uninformed given that Apple has publicly stated nothing will prevent you from running plain Windows on their machines. That would not be possible with stuff like that.
The patent claims cover the mere act of identifying probabilities of some baseball hits to be exciting, not just how to do it. Just like so many software patents, this patents claims the problem and consequently all possible solutions, not just one they devised (apart from the fact that this should not be patentable subject matter in any way, I really fail to see the economic rationale for society granting monopolies on stuff like this)
Triviality is something which only comes into play after it has been established that something actually is patentable subject matter. It is important to keep hammering on that, because many people (especially proponents of ever expanding patentability) tend to forget about that all too often.
Identifying when baseball is exciting is not a trivial task, even for human cognitition.
Neither is it an invention which requires monopoly protection because otherwise science and the useful arts won't advance. Patents aren't intended to cover everything and all that's not trivial for the mere sake that they are not trivial.
I just can't imagine them giving up so soon. As has been stated even before this vote, they will go after more local governments next. Following that, what is to stop them from trying it again later?
What is there to stop us (FFII) from taking the initiative this time? After all, the BSA wrote the previous initial Commission proposal (sorry for the messed up formatting), it's only fair if they'd allow us to write it now:) Seriously, the climate for a proper directive is better than ever.
It was not spammed with amendments in any way. Among those 178 amendments, there was a set of 21 compromise amendments which was tabled 6 times by politicians from different groups. 39 more were amendments approved by the legal affairs committee last month. Then there were also 3 rejection amendments, and one amendment which was identical to one of the 21 compromise amendmnets. So in the end there were only 21 + 1 + 10 = 32 extra amendments tabled for plenary.
Those 21 amendments were tabled by politicians from all different political families, and would provide a basis which allowed excluding software patents. It's because of the widespread support for these amendments that EICTA and the rest of the US lobbying family got scared and started supporting rejection. We supported both rejection and full amending from the start.
The Commission made it clear that it would reject any directive which would not codify the EPO's practice. So in the end, rejection was the only real solution (either now or in third reading). The important signal is that codification of the EPO's practice most definitely did not have a majority in the European Parliament, and that their practice thus has been rejected.
This isn't a "victory over patents", it just means that the situation isn't resolved.
The situation indeed is not resolved, but on the other hand it most certainly is a victory against software patents. The directive was introduced by the BSA and the Commission to codify the EPO's software patent practice, and this codification was now pretty much unanimously rejected by the EP after it turned out there was no way the Commission and Council would ever agree with another directive.
Don't believe EICTA when they say that they are happy with this outcome. You wouldn't if you'd have seen their faces at the press conference following the EP's vote:)
This is not about a software patent, and therefore has nothing to do with the current debate in Europe. It's just a known scammer whining about the fact that he's infringing on someone else's patent, and that the other party is exercising the rights it has as patent owner.
The technical contribution is the set of features by which the scope of the patent claim as a whole is considered to differ from the state of the art.
So it says the the whole difference between the state of the art (i.e., what is known) and the scope of the patent claim is automatically the technical contribution. If you draft the patent so all novelty is non technical, this wording still makes it the technical contribution (although it is later contradicted by the provision that "technical" means "applied natural science", so you get legal uncertainty).
The way to clean this up would be to simply remove the word "technical" from that one sentence.
Regarding article 3:
Again, I must miss something since yours and FFII's comments are pretty negative. Doesn't this article states that the computer-implemented invention has to be technical and make a contribution ?
That article does not say the invention must be technical (fwiw, non-technical inventions do not exist in Europe, an invention by definition has technical character; without technical character, there's no invention). To make something have technical character, it's enough to mention the use of a computer though (since a computer is technical).
It says that there must be a technical contribution, but as mentioned earlier this technical contribution can be entirely non-technical, and this article stresses that fact by stating:
The inventive step is assessed by considering the difference between all of the technical and non-technical features of the patent claim and the state of the art.
I.e., you can pass the non-obviousness (= inventive step) condition using only non-technical features. This means that only non-technical parts of what you claim have to be inventive (such as an inventive business method), the technical parts (computer, network,...) can all be standard and long known stuff.
"Many" is not the same as a "substantial percentage",
I don't see how you can claim with a straight face that "473 companies" is "many companies" (and then you don't even know whether they got them for defensive purposes only, or because they think they would be useful -- I know at least one Belgian SME with a software patent who doesn't like them at all).
and "building a business around a patent" is not the issue at al
It was according to the press release with which the BSA announced the study. They said in it that "in fact 81% depend on one patent" in reference to SMEs.
All I'm saying is that many companies have taken this route and for very legitimate reasons - tax incentives and to aid in achieving funding. Many startup sotware companies need to gain the support of venture capital funds and / or early stage investors if they want to survive, and if patents help attract them, then thats what you do. If they enable you to pocket cash tax free too, all the better.
And others are experiencing problems in their quest for funding because of software patents. And there a a large number of venture capital firms with extensive experience in funding IT companies (the mentioned Benchmark Capital was behind the funding of eBay) who say that software patents actually increase risk.
Of course, if software patents are enforceable, you're generally better off with such patents than without them. And you're right about the tax advantages, but even companies who take advantage of that are not necessarily in favour of software patents.
Software is a business, not a game. There are risks in every business of course, but a good patent search is a small investment to make if you are investing time and money in a project.
This is BS. In the nineties, several large insurance companies offered software patent insurance policies. They'd perform the patent search, estimate the risks of infringement and based on that offered you a policy. According to Ian Lewis of Miller Insurance Ltd (one of the largest insurance companies in the UK), these insurance companies are now running losses of up to 3000% on those policies. Really easy, sure.
And if you're a closed source company, other companies can even patent the stuff you have done after your program is brought to market, since that doesn't count as a publication of the algorithm.
The point is simply that from a small business perspective, in the general case (I'm not claiming there aren't any exceptions) software patents pose much more risks than advantages.
But look at the actual numbers. That's 37% (pure software) out of 50% (European) out of 20% (SMEs) of 17,086 patents. That's about 685 patents. In terms of companies, it's 37% out of 50% out of 2560 SMEs = 473 companies. There are millions of SMEs in Europe (many of which use software in a way they can be sued for based on software patents, e.g. for e-commerce related stuff), and tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) in ICT.
It is simply wrong to claim that a substantial percentage of European SMEs built their business around such a patent.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not (yet) an example of the overworked patent office, as it's just a patent application. I.e., it's not (yet) granted.
FWIW, the PPC also has an instruction with which you can save an arbitrary number of integer registers (even all of them) in one instruction. It's not used because it's slower than the combination of the individual replacements. Just like on 80x86 things like lodsb, loop and jecxz are slower than the alternatives consisting of more instructions (on modern processors).
To pass them on the stack you often first have to load them from elsewhere in memory first. By passing them via the registers you can distribute the load on the memory interface by scheduling the loads with code at the caller side and the stores by code at the caller side. If you don't have to load them from memory, then you don't have to load them from memory either when passing them via registers.And in other cases it is not necessary at all to copy them back to memory, so you also win.
Of course, Apple could modify Xcode and add support for ICC, but it's not just a matter of editing some file... Integration in Xcode of compilers other than what Apple supports out-of-the-box is currently a nightmare.
Here's an Easter Egg I haven't been able to find any information on anywhere yet. I used to play Might & Magic III (Dos version) a lot, but never was able to finish it because at one point or another my save game always got corrupted for some reason.
The consequence of this corruption was that when I wandered around outside Fountainhead (the first city in the game, where you start), my party got randomly hit by electricity, poison, fire etc, even though the surroundings look normal. No dungeon or town can be entered anymore once outside, and I could walk over all sorts of water etc.
However, nearby the Temple of Moo on a regular grass or forest square, a dialog box to enter some place would pop up. It did not say what the place was called, only showed a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down".
If answering affirmative, my party would be transported to some dungeon. If I looked at the automap, the name of the place was "It's a secret!". The place contained desks with people carrying the names of the programmers, all saying something funny. It also contained two endless piles of gold, one of which gave you a special item each time and the other giving you 1m gold each time. It could be exited again only through a magic mirror.
However, given the fact that I could not enter any other place anymore (except those directly reachable by magic mirror) when I was able to enter this "It's a secret" place, I could not do much with all that stuff. As soon as I went outside, I again was hit by random poison/electricity/... everywhere and could not enter anything.
I can't find any mention of this on the Internet, and even the official Might & Magic III hint book (which we bought, over 600 pages!) doesn't mention it.
If you get the Mac version of the game, you can easily verify that this "It's a secret" place really exists in the game by opening the main application file with hexedit and searching for "It's a Secret". I guess you can also find it by grepping the Dos version or its data files.
The strings of what the programmers say can also be found in the binary, I've reproduced them below.
However, what I would really like to know is how to get to that place without getting a corrupted save gave.
(actually, by searching for one of those strings I found this page, but I don't read whatever language it's written in and given the number of question marks they don't know either what this is about)You misunderstood, we did not miss any "date in court" and we do have a lawyer. It simply took some time to delete all occurrences of 8 particular phrases/expressions from our website we are barred from using due to a preliminary injunction.
The patent claims cover the mere act of identifying probabilities of some baseball hits to be exciting, not just how to do it. Just like so many software patents, this patents claims the problem and consequently all possible solutions, not just one they devised (apart from the fact that this should not be patentable subject matter in any way, I really fail to see the economic rationale for society granting monopolies on stuff like this)
Triviality is something which only comes into play after it has been established that something actually is patentable subject matter. It is important to keep hammering on that, because many people (especially proponents of ever expanding patentability) tend to forget about that all too often.
Those 21 amendments were tabled by politicians from all different political families, and would provide a basis which allowed excluding software patents. It's because of the widespread support for these amendments that EICTA and the rest of the US lobbying family got scared and started supporting rejection. We supported both rejection and full amending from the start.
The Commission made it clear that it would reject any directive which would not codify the EPO's practice. So in the end, rejection was the only real solution (either now or in third reading). The important signal is that codification of the EPO's practice most definitely did not have a majority in the European Parliament, and that their practice thus has been rejected.
Don't believe EICTA when they say that they are happy with this outcome. You wouldn't if you'd have seen their faces at the press conference following the EP's vote :)
This is not about a software patent, and therefore has nothing to do with the current debate in Europe. It's just a known scammer whining about the fact that he's infringing on someone else's patent, and that the other party is exercising the rights it has as patent owner.
The way to clean this up would be to simply remove the word "technical" from that one sentence.
Regarding article 3:
That article does not say the invention must be technical (fwiw, non-technical inventions do not exist in Europe, an invention by definition has technical character; without technical character, there's no invention). To make something have technical character, it's enough to mention the use of a computer though (since a computer is technical).It says that there must be a technical contribution, but as mentioned earlier this technical contribution can be entirely non-technical, and this article stresses that fact by stating:
I.e., you can pass the non-obviousness (= inventive step) condition using only non-technical features. This means that only non-technical parts of what you claim have to be inventive (such as an inventive business method), the technical parts (computer, network,Of course, if software patents are enforceable, you're generally better off with such patents than without them. And you're right about the tax advantages, but even companies who take advantage of that are not necessarily in favour of software patents.
This is BS. In the nineties, several large insurance companies offered software patent insurance policies. They'd perform the patent search, estimate the risks of infringement and based on that offered you a policy. According to Ian Lewis of Miller Insurance Ltd (one of the largest insurance companies in the UK), these insurance companies are now running losses of up to 3000% on those policies. Really easy, sure.And if you're a closed source company, other companies can even patent the stuff you have done after your program is brought to market, since that doesn't count as a publication of the algorithm.
The point is simply that from a small business perspective, in the general case (I'm not claiming there aren't any exceptions) software patents pose much more risks than advantages.
But look at the actual numbers. That's 37% (pure software) out of 50% (European) out of 20% (SMEs) of 17,086 patents. That's about 685 patents. In terms of companies, it's 37% out of 50% out of 2560 SMEs = 473 companies. There are millions of SMEs in Europe (many of which use software in a way they can be sued for based on software patents, e.g. for e-commerce related stuff), and tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) in ICT.
It is simply wrong to claim that a substantial percentage of European SMEs built their business around such a patent.