No you can't. One thing you can patent, though, is a physical device, and this is often used as a loophole by which patent rights are claimed on an algorithm or idea. If you look at all of the "algorithm patents", almost all of them, if not all, start with something to the effect of, "A system comprised of a computer and software, where the software..." and then describes the algorithm. Unfortunately, the government has turned a blind eye to this sort of abuse of the system, failing to see that the only novel portion of the patent is in the algorithm, which by itself is not patentable.
MP3 is lossy compression, and thus the encoder has to make a decision about which information to keep and which to throw away. Some encoders make better decisions than others.
How are you going to determine what the potential customer's mailserver is? You can't just ask him for his e-mail address and then strip the "username@"; a lot of mail services (especially massive, quasi-anonymous ones like Hotmail or Netaddress) don't run SMTP on the machine whose name is after the @ in the address -- if a machine with that name even exists
You can look up the MX record(s) for the domain after the @; this will give you the mail server(s). If you couldn't determine the mail server automatically from the address, the e-mail wouldn't be deliverable.
Even though you may not need 64-bit addressing for only one gigabyte of physical RAM, it still helps. With a 32-bit virtual address space, all of the following would need to be mapped at some point in time: the virtual memory of the process, the physical RAM in the system, and I/O space. If they can all be mapped simultaneously, that will provide a speedup as mappings do not have to be changed nearly as often. Suppose a process is using around 1GB of virtual memory on a machine with 1GB of physical RAM. That's half the address space already. Now add, say, a 2GB memory mapped file. Oops, the address space is all gone. Now, suppose this program is multithreaded, with very unpredictable stack sizes. Wouldn't it be nice to have lots of virtual address space to allocate to each thread's stack just in case it needs it? With a virtual address space substantially larger than 4GB, this is no longer an issue.
Get this thing fixed already 2.3.x is very much faster than 2.2 and im sick of using buggy software
So fix it, use 2.2 until 2.4 is actually released (and preferably a few service packs... er... point releases after), or use a different OS. Prerelease software generally tends to be buggy. If you've been running 2.3.x for "a long time now" then you should know this.
These patents are little better than normal (pay for any license) software patents. For software licensing, such things as the GPL can be good, as they encourage more software to be free without limiting the freedom of programmers to release their code in whatever manner they wish. If they don't want to release under the GPL, then they don't incorporate already GPLed code into their software. With patents, no such option exists. Even if the subject of one of these patents were independently developed, the author would be prevented not only from releasing proprietary code (while open source is preferable, it should remain the author's choice), but also from releasing it as less restrictive free software.
Patents on algorithms are wrong, unless they are licensed to everybody for free use as they see fit, especially with the lifetime of patents being effectively forever compared to the rate of progress in the computing industry.
And dynamically linked libraries tend to get linked at run-time, not at compile-time. Thus, they are distributed separately. Statically linking against a GPLed library would be unacceptable for non-GPLed software, but that wasn't what was being discussed.
No, it is not just as simple. You need to not only download in advance the rpms you want, but also all of the dependencies. If you skip the dependencies and rely on the "--force --nodeps", don't expect the installed packages to work.
Or are you suggesting that one do this on the RPMS directory on the CD? What if one does not want to install all of the packages on the CD? What if one does not even have a CD?
Furthermore, why would you use "--force --nodeps" to begin with? The only legitimate use I can think of for that (in the absence of broken packages) is if the dependencies were met in a way that rpm does not know about, such as installing RPMs on a Debian system, or software that was compiled from source.
How are either of these methods simpler than just typing "apt-get install <list-of-packages-you-want>"?
"Orgazmo" is supposedly a screamingly funny movie, but it is next to impossible to find and pretty much never showed anywhere--because it got the NC-17 Mark of Death from the MPAA ratings board
Indeed, Orgazmo is quite hilarious. Here in Pittsburgh, it's readily available for rental (and not thrown in with the pornos) at (at least) one local rental store, and it was on some pay cable channel a couple of weeks ago.
It would be nice, though, if more filmmakers simply accepted the NC-17 on mainstream films; if enough of them did this then there would be more of an economic incentive for theaters, rental places, etc. to not blindly shun a film because of the rating. Of course, it'll probably never happen, as the losses would be to high on the first several films to do so.
No, I wouldn't. Linux, though far better than Windows, has its share of problems as well, and calling attention to them in a reasonable way is not flameworthy. Besides, it's perfectly reasonable to poke fun at software one does not like; it helps relieve the stress of having to put up with it.
While in many instances this is the application's fault, have you ever clicked the details button when the "Illegal Operation" box comes up? Quite often, you'll see some Windows system DLL in there. It could be functions being misused by the application... or it could be a buggy library.
In addition, not all illegal page faults and GPFs happen in userspace. The kernel can follow bad pointers too, giving that lovely blue and white screen we all know and hate.
In any case, the hostility is quite unwarranted. Anonymity is not an excuse for being an asshole, despite what some around here seem to think.
Can I extend it to run on currently unsupported platforms? Can I extend it to fix bugs?
I did a search on MSDN, but couldn't find anything useful, other than some stuff about embedding IE controls in other apps, which certainly won't help with either of the things I mentioned. In fact, it wouldn't help with much of anything but sticking a new user interface on it, or using its rendering for non-browser apps.
I suspect that this has to do with the competing real-time system on linux, RTAI. Which is far better than RTLinux and doesn't suffer of having a benevolent dictator as a leader.... Did you know these guys can make user-processes become hard real-time with a single call? Try to beat that...
Umm... no, it can't. All RTAI tasks are kernel modules.
While I have no problems with defensively acquiring patents as a way to fight back against abusers of the patent system, this isn't the way to do it. To truly serve this purpose, it should be licensed royalty-free to anyone who either doesn't file for patents on software or things which are not genuinely novel, or who licenses all such patents in a similar defensive manner. It should not matter whether the software is Linux or not, or even whether it is open or not (people should have the right to license their software as they choose, even if many of us (myself included) prefer open software. If the users of the software don't want the problems associated with closed software, they don't have to buy/use it). As is, this patent is no better than the LZW patent, as it serves to restrict use strictly to those pieces of software the patent holder likes.
As for the content of the patent, running an OS as a process of another OS is nothing new, and making the host OS a real-time OS is, IMAO, an obvious extension of that concept.
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Re:Why not just use the Crusoe as a G4?
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Darwin on Crusoe?
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Eg, not all instructions are 32 bits ( as par ALPHA and 64 bit constant loading, etc ).
On alpha, all instructions are 32 bits. 64-bit constants are loaded on alpha just as 32 bit constants are on almost all RISC architectures: by either loading the data from memory (usually the global table) or by constructing them from smaller constants.
Additionally, the number of instructions is once again sky rocketing in these post-modern CISC chips.
The "reduced" in RISC refers to reduced complexity of the instructions, not simply fewer of them. Even though modern RISC chips are not "true" RISC chips as originally conceptualized, I would not call them CISC chips. They still have fixed length (size in memory, not number of cycles) and comparatively simple (relative to something like x86, especially if you look at addressing) instructions.
IIRC that rule was added to encourage people to format their code in "interesting" ways (like one of last years winners that was a flight sim with the code formatted as an airplane, or the one from a while back which was a circle and calculated PI by reading its own source), rather than one big blob.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but it can't protect the system from being run beyond its rated speed.
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No you can't. One thing you can patent, though, is a physical device, and this is often used as a loophole by which patent rights are claimed on an algorithm or idea. If you look at all of the "algorithm patents", almost all of them, if not all, start with something to the effect of, "A system comprised of a computer and software, where the software..." and then describes the algorithm. Unfortunately, the government has turned a blind eye to this sort of abuse of the system, failing to see that the only novel portion of the patent is in the algorithm, which by itself is not patentable.
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You can't get a public defender to sue someone; you can only get one to defend yourself in a criminal case. That's why they're called defenders.
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You can look up the MX record(s) for the domain after the @; this will give you the mail server(s). If you couldn't determine the mail server automatically from the address, the e-mail wouldn't be deliverable.
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So fix it, use 2.2 until 2.4 is actually released (and preferably a few service packs... er... point releases after), or use a different OS. Prerelease software generally tends to be buggy. If you've been running 2.3.x for "a long time now" then you should know this.
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Patents on algorithms are wrong, unless they are licensed to everybody for free use as they see fit, especially with the lifetime of patents being effectively forever compared to the rate of progress in the computing industry.
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Or are you suggesting that one do this on the RPMS directory on the CD? What if one does not want to install all of the packages on the CD? What if one does not even have a CD?
Furthermore, why would you use "--force --nodeps" to begin with? The only legitimate use I can think of for that (in the absence of broken packages) is if the dependencies were met in a way that rpm does not know about, such as installing RPMs on a Debian system, or software that was compiled from source.
How are either of these methods simpler than just typing "apt-get install <list-of-packages-you-want>"?
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Try Debian and apt-get.
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Indeed, Orgazmo is quite hilarious. Here in Pittsburgh, it's readily available for rental (and not thrown in with the pornos) at (at least) one local rental store, and it was on some pay cable channel a couple of weeks ago.
It would be nice, though, if more filmmakers simply accepted the NC-17 on mainstream films; if enough of them did this then there would be more of an economic incentive for theaters, rental places, etc. to not blindly shun a film because of the rating. Of course, it'll probably never happen, as the losses would be to high on the first several films to do so.
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What's to keep real from adding lines such as 'audio/x-wav: rvplayer %s'?
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In addition, not all illegal page faults and GPFs happen in userspace. The kernel can follow bad pointers too, giving that lovely blue and white screen we all know and hate.
In any case, the hostility is quite unwarranted. Anonymity is not an excuse for being an asshole, despite what some around here seem to think.
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I did a search on MSDN, but couldn't find anything useful, other than some stuff about embedding IE controls in other apps, which certainly won't help with either of the things I mentioned. In fact, it wouldn't help with much of anything but sticking a new user interface on it, or using its rendering for non-browser apps.
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Seriously, though, I doubt the source would be much better. :-P
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Great idea! You can decompile the binary into something that we can work with; we'll do the rest.
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28,000 bugs in the code,
28,000 bugs,
fix one bug,
try it again,
28,001 bugs in the code.
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Umm... no, it can't. All RTAI tasks are kernel modules.
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As for the content of the patent, running an OS as a process of another OS is nothing new, and making the host OS a real-time OS is, IMAO, an obvious extension of that concept.
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On alpha, all instructions are 32 bits. 64-bit constants are loaded on alpha just as 32 bit constants are on almost all RISC architectures: by either loading the data from memory (usually the global table) or by constructing them from smaller constants.
Additionally, the number of instructions is once again sky rocketing in these post-modern CISC chips.
The "reduced" in RISC refers to reduced complexity of the instructions, not simply fewer of them. Even though modern RISC chips are not "true" RISC chips as originally conceptualized, I would not call them CISC chips. They still have fixed length (size in memory, not number of cycles) and comparatively simple (relative to something like x86, especially if you look at addressing) instructions.
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