Is there software for generating needlework designs? Both repetitive patterns, and rendering of scanned pictures? The problems of arranging circuits on chips and displaying words & pictures with pixels seem similar. Software can handle those problems quite well, sometimes better than any human can.
In some societies, privacy is a matter of politeness. Lots of things happen where everyone can see them, it's just rude to see things you're not supposed to.
If all info was available to everyone, you could legislate the same sort of politeness: spamming is illegal, following people who have asked for you not to follow them is illegal, identity theft is illegal, that sort of thing. Everyone would know everything, yet everyone would have an imitation of privacy.
1. On-the-fly completion was really neat the first time I saw that. Ross Comer implemented it in junior high for has ABSTAR program (absent/tardy) in 1982 (1981?) that he sold to all the Ohio schools. It would on-the-fly guess a student's name (first match in alphabetical order) as you typed it in. Written in QBASIC, I think. He went on to work for Microsoft, on Excel.
2. Autocompletion in most popular order, rather than alphabetical order. Looks new and useful to me. That approach will autocomplete sooner. You could sort your whole index that way. Changes in ranking would reorder high level branches of the index, which is kind of weird, but I think it would still allow updates with good efficiency and concurrency. There's the issue of whether you want the most likely next letter, or the most likely entire completion. I'd have to test both methods to be sure, but my guess is the most likely entire completion is more useable, which is what Amazon patented. Autocompletions that partially but don't entirely match what I want to type sometimes throw me off.
Unless there's prior art on #2, it looks like a valid patent to me.
(I agree that the world would be better off if this, and every other software innovation, wasn't patentable. Patents just hold back progress.)
Engineering requires the problem at hand to be much better defined and analyzed than what we typically are up against in software. That extra definition and understanding makes specifications, methodologies, and even fixed qualifying exams useful. Once a software problem is that well understood, we've written a tool based on that understanding to do it, so we move on and program something different.
Nobody guarantees that Usenet is accurate, or the web. They capture any garbage anyone ever produces, and Google indexes it for everyone. The reader knows this, and distinguishing wheat from chaff is usually possible, and not too hard.
If I have a mark on my record that I killed my great-great-grampa, followed by some authoritative marks that I really didn't and that first mark was in error, that looks fair to me. Not editing history is a good thing.
I haven't seen much bias in favor of C over scripts.
However, I have often seen insistence on either buying prepackaged commercial solutions, or doing all the work by hand. Sometimes they standardize on prepackaged commercial solutions that don't have a text interface, forcing everything else to be done manually.
The article rings a bell for me. Not only do I remember thinking everyone else must be from another planet in 7th grade, I remember thinking in 10th grade how stupid it was that homework was all thrown away in the end.
I told my dad it would be better if students could actually accomplish something, maybe write programs or fill out living trusts. He asked, "What could students do so well that we wouldn't have to throw away the results?" I wasn't sure how to answer that.
So. What purpose can high school and junior high school students serve? Especially nerds, who as the article points out, would really like to be doing some real work, not just makework homework?
I think we're moving toward a society where some information is private (only you know it), but anything that is vaguely public is in a massive database and indexed.
My initial take on this it's OK with me if all my movements are indexed, provided it's indexed by Google, not just the US government. Anything the government has access to, I want access to too.
A black box is something you don't know anything about. You make it not a black box by learning something about it. Most of software development is spent learning about the system (reading documents, searching indexes, walking through code with a debugger). How much you can get done is determined by how little you can get away with learning before fixing a problem.
That's not universal, it might not be the case with the shuttle software, but it's true for a lot of software. It's definitely true for my job.
Reversibility -- for singlethreaded, something just about as good would be to dump the state of the program at some chosen point and be able to reload it at that point. The real gain of reversibility is you don't have to spend the hour setting up the problem.
The first thing I do already when debugging something is whittle down the testcase to make the overhead of reproducing it as small as possible.
You've already covered this. The local newspapers should have an editor in their entertainment department whose sole job is to maintain and promote a site that puts the local bands online.
How to capture the will of the voters... well that's easy. Measure how happy every voter is with every candidate (for example on a scale of 0 to 10), sum, and the highest sum wins. The answer follows straight from the question.
I think defining an architecture for GUI design should be a matter of finding/writing the right tools.
HTML is a huge improvement over writing C code for every window individually. Style sheets are a large improvement over using <font> all over the place in HTML. LEX and YACC are improvements over coding parsers by hand.
Shouldn't all the drawings have two elevators, one going up, one going down, with the cars being transferred one to the other at the endpoints? Two-way traffic on a single string would be a pain. The redundancy wouldn't hurt either. Heck, why not have a dozen elevators all within a stone's throw of one another.
We should send all our old cell phones to the Middle East. Cell phones and the Internet have been big heros in the last couple international turmoils. (Remember 9/11?) With the US preparing to topple the Iraqi government, which will destabilize Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and many other nearby countries, we're sure to have a bunch of turmoil coming up. Give the people cell phones, and the resulting politics are likely to be a bit more sane.
After claiming that Earth had a second moon that was bounced around by the earth's, moon's, and sun's gravity in a complicated horseshoe-shaped orbit, the BBC pointed to my web site for reference. Zoom, traffic shot up from 740 visits a day to 20,000. It's back down to about normal now.
That's neat. Before the web there was a firm distinction between what was published and what was not. Published work could only reference published work. Getting something published took a huge effort. No longer.
(No, Cruithne is not a moon, its orbit is a simple ellipse around the sun, but its orbit is in a 1::1 resonance with earth. Nothing like misinformation to capture the imagination. Also, the BBC really should have pointed to Paul Wiegert's site instead.)
Additionally, while you can use the patent search systems to see about patents that are issued - patent lawyers have their own mechanisms and can often do a much better job of the process.
... and...
So they seek definitions, and they use those definitions to ensure that your unique, and if your not unique, they get you to redefine it until you are. A pretty valuable service if you ask me.
It seems to me that what's being said here is, the patent office has a patent compiler, and if you want to submit a patent it will be rejected if it doesn't compile.
So. Any open-source and non-patent-encumbered tools to compile patents out there?
I was reading "Kanzi". Pygmy chimps have sex constantly. They do it as often as people give hugs at a Christian fundamentalist revival festival. It's speculated that we would be the same way if we didn't realize that having sex leads to children, and that we WERE the same way before we invented language.
Which is relevant because if they had AIDS, they'd all be infected in no time. It's not like they have monogamy to keep them safe.
My personal experience is, when designing code, I prefer to work 6 or 7 hour days. When debugging new code I prefer to work 12 hour days. I never work weekends; working weekends burns me out by Tuesday and I get nothing done Wednesday through Sunday.
I've never succeeded in doing 15 hour days for any length of time. I spend at least 8 hours sleeping (9 or 10 when designing something hard) and 2 hours eating every day. That rules out 15 hours days right there. (I do a lot of design work in my sleep or half-sleep. I often wake up at 4am to do algebra on paper when I realize I can't handle the math in my head.)
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Is there software for generating needlework designs? Both repetitive patterns, and rendering of scanned pictures? The problems of arranging circuits on chips and displaying words & pictures with pixels seem similar. Software can handle those problems quite well, sometimes better than any human can.
Engines of Creation, and Atlas Shrugged. I leave it to you whether those qualify as scifi-hacker books.
In some societies, privacy is a matter of politeness. Lots of things happen where everyone can see them, it's just rude to see things you're not supposed to.
If all info was available to everyone, you could legislate the same sort of politeness: spamming is illegal, following people who have asked for you not to follow them is illegal, identity theft is illegal, that sort of thing. Everyone would know everything, yet everyone would have an imitation of privacy.
1. On-the-fly completion was really neat the first time I saw that. Ross Comer implemented it in junior high for has ABSTAR program (absent/tardy) in 1982 (1981?) that he sold to all the Ohio schools. It would on-the-fly guess a student's name (first match in alphabetical order) as you typed it in. Written in QBASIC, I think. He went on to work for Microsoft, on Excel.
2. Autocompletion in most popular order, rather than alphabetical order. Looks new and useful to me. That approach will autocomplete sooner. You could sort your whole index that way. Changes in ranking would reorder high level branches of the index, which is kind of weird, but I think it would still allow updates with good efficiency and concurrency. There's the issue of whether you want the most likely next letter, or the most likely entire completion. I'd have to test both methods to be sure, but my guess is the most likely entire completion is more useable, which is what Amazon patented. Autocompletions that partially but don't entirely match what I want to type sometimes throw me off.
Unless there's prior art on #2, it looks like a valid patent to me.
(I agree that the world would be better off if this, and every other software innovation, wasn't patentable. Patents just hold back progress.)
Engineering requires the problem at hand to be much better defined and analyzed than what we typically are up against in software. That extra definition and understanding makes specifications, methodologies, and even fixed qualifying exams useful. Once a software problem is that well understood, we've written a tool based on that understanding to do it, so we move on and program something different.
Nobody guarantees that Usenet is accurate, or the web. They capture any garbage anyone ever produces, and Google indexes it for everyone. The reader knows this, and distinguishing wheat from chaff is usually possible, and not too hard.
If I have a mark on my record that I killed my great-great-grampa, followed by some authoritative marks that I really didn't and that first mark was in error, that looks fair to me. Not editing history is a good thing.
I haven't seen much bias in favor of C over scripts.
However, I have often seen insistence on either buying prepackaged commercial solutions, or doing all the work by hand. Sometimes they standardize on prepackaged commercial solutions that don't have a text interface, forcing everything else to be done manually.
The article rings a bell for me. Not only do I remember thinking everyone else must be from another planet in 7th grade, I remember thinking in 10th grade how stupid it was that homework was all thrown away in the end.
I told my dad it would be better if students could actually accomplish something, maybe write programs or fill out living trusts. He asked, "What could students do so well that we wouldn't have to throw away the results?" I wasn't sure how to answer that.
So. What purpose can high school and junior high school students serve? Especially nerds, who as the article points out, would really like to be doing some real work, not just makework homework?
I think we're moving toward a society where some information is private (only you know it), but anything that is vaguely public is in a massive database and indexed.
My initial take on this it's OK with me if all my movements are indexed, provided it's indexed by Google, not just the US government. Anything the government has access to, I want access to too.
A black box is something you don't know anything about. You make it not a black box by learning something about it. Most of software development is spent learning about the system (reading documents, searching indexes, walking through code with a debugger). How much you can get done is determined by how little you can get away with learning before fixing a problem.
That's not universal, it might not be the case with the shuttle software, but it's true for a lot of software. It's definitely true for my job.
Reversibility -- for singlethreaded, something just about as good would be to dump the state of the program at some chosen point and be able to reload it at that point. The real gain of reversibility is you don't have to spend the hour setting up the problem.
The first thing I do already when debugging something is whittle down the testcase to make the overhead of reproducing it as small as possible.
Some of the other good things (C, debuggers, the Unix command-line interface) were there before 25 years ago.
Some things have been steps backwards:
And some bad things were already there 25 years ago (unrealistic schedules, buzzwords, complexity).
You've already covered this. The local newspapers should have an editor in their entertainment department whose sole job is to maintain and promote a site that puts the local bands online.
How to capture the will of the voters ... well that's easy. Measure how happy every voter is with every candidate (for example on a scale of 0 to 10), sum, and the highest sum wins. The answer follows straight from the question.
I think defining an architecture for GUI design should be a matter of finding/writing the right tools.
HTML is a huge improvement over writing C code for every window individually. Style sheets are a large improvement over using <font> all over the place in HTML. LEX and YACC are improvements over coding parsers by hand.
This would let us put cows in orbit! Imagine, fresh milk in space.
Shouldn't all the drawings have two elevators, one going up, one going down, with the cars being transferred one to the other at the endpoints? Two-way traffic on a single string would be a pain. The redundancy wouldn't hurt either. Heck, why not have a dozen elevators all within a stone's throw of one another.
We should send all our old cell phones to the Middle East. Cell phones and the Internet have been big heros in the last couple international turmoils. (Remember 9/11?) With the US preparing to topple the Iraqi government, which will destabilize Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and many other nearby countries, we're sure to have a bunch of turmoil coming up. Give the people cell phones, and the resulting politics are likely to be a bit more sane.
Would Mrs. Field's cookies (using the chain-mail recipe) be more appropriate?
After claiming that Earth had a second moon that was bounced around by the earth's, moon's, and sun's gravity in a complicated horseshoe-shaped orbit, the BBC pointed to my web site for reference. Zoom, traffic shot up from 740 visits a day to 20,000. It's back down to about normal now.
That's neat. Before the web there was a firm distinction between what was published and what was not. Published work could only reference published work. Getting something published took a huge effort. No longer.
(No, Cruithne is not a moon, its orbit is a simple ellipse around the sun, but its orbit is in a 1::1 resonance with earth. Nothing like misinformation to capture the imagination. Also, the BBC really should have pointed to Paul Wiegert's site instead.)
It seems to me that what's being said here is, the patent office has a patent compiler, and if you want to submit a patent it will be rejected if it doesn't compile.
So. Any open-source and non-patent-encumbered tools to compile patents out there?
I was reading "Kanzi". Pygmy chimps have sex constantly. They do it as often as people give hugs at a Christian fundamentalist revival festival. It's speculated that we would be the same way if we didn't realize that having sex leads to children, and that we WERE the same way before we invented language.
Which is relevant because if they had AIDS, they'd all be infected in no time. It's not like they have monogamy to keep them safe.
My personal experience is, when designing code, I prefer to work 6 or 7 hour days. When debugging new code I prefer to work 12 hour days. I never work weekends; working weekends burns me out by Tuesday and I get nothing done Wednesday through Sunday.
I've never succeeded in doing 15 hour days for any length of time. I spend at least 8 hours sleeping (9 or 10 when designing something hard) and 2 hours eating every day. That rules out 15 hours days right there. (I do a lot of design work in my sleep or half-sleep. I often wake up at 4am to do algebra on paper when I realize I can't handle the math in my head.)
Monopoly, chess, cops-n-robbers, ring-around-the-rosie.
What is it, exactly, that they are calling algebra?
1 + 2 = x, solve for x?
3x + 2 = 14, solve for x?
ax+by=m, cx+dy=n, solve xy in terms of abcdmn?
x^n+y^n=z^n, n>2, xyz integers, solve for xyzn?