For a desktop app, I look for what items are in menus. It tells me which functionality is available and whether it is easily accessible. I also look for whether dialog boxes are decent and easy to use. There are also apps like Firefox where GUI can be adjusted. In those cases I also look for a few example of extremes to which I can push the GUI. In the case of desktop environments, it is much the same but I look for the most and the least cluttered layouts and whether transparency is available. For instance, if all screenshots show two bars going across the desktop (say, one with app launcher and the other with pager) then I know I won't be using that desktop (I prefer minimalist). For game screenshots, I look for eye candy. I try to find hard to render things: water (still not realistic even with best and fanciest GPUs - physics matters, water still looks like jelly even in still screenshots), vegetation (polygon count still is a couple of orders of magnitude too low for decent vegetation), human skin and overall posture. Truth be told, you really want to see a demo or a movie of a game to evaluate it, since a screenshot is not so representative.
This is the first time I see English translation, having read this in Russian. The Russian version of poem in 'g' made more sense: Gruzniy Gen'ka generator grozno gryz goroh gortsyami
In general, the feel is different. My guess is that the beauty of Lem was the fact that his writing was universal yet allowed for fine tuning to any culture via translations. I think he was the greatest SF writer ever, but all the same my hat is off to his translators.
Wow! Just wow. Whoever designed that website should be shot, no strike that, they should be skinned alive and a video of that should be made into an intro sequence to the website. I gave up looking for a way to buy their stuff once it started to give me a headache. That said, thanks for the link. I do like their stuff, esp. their shoes. But that's without knowing the prices because I can't find that info anywhere on the damn website. I do know they sell through Bloomies and Macys so they probably are expensive but not out of this world expensive. Now that I think about it, it's just as well that their website sucks: I wouldn't buy clothing online anyway so they just need to have pretty pictures and look stylish which the website does. However even finding physical store locations is painful. Damn I hate that site. Oh the headache.
I have posted here before being generally critical of many "nano" results as bullshit or hype, however these results here are for real, they are a big deal, and they do legitimately go under the moniker of nanotechnology. One of the few times when the public gets fed stuff as exciting hype and it is actually exciting underneath.
Well, the self-funded Ross Perot was probably the only one who could propose such a thing but even if he were elected, my guess is this proposal would never clear congress.
You know, I like meat. And so to be true to myself I did in the past watch videos from slaughterhouses to see if my mind would change. Nope. I do sometimes get hungry watching birds and cows getting killed. I remember having this argument with a coworker of mine who was a kind of PETA nutjob. I used to tease him for weeks with a jesture of smacking a chicken against a wall. This circa two years ago so it is unlikely that my vews have changed or the video test got old. BTW, cruelty to animals usually makes the resulting meat taste worse. Best farms kill animals fast, along the lines of steel rod fired into skull all of a sudden or a guillotine.
The thing about drugs is that generics often have slightly different performance than brand names since they are not made by the same facility and often even with deviations in manufacturing protocols. Your home-made version will likely differ even more. Now the prescribed dosage will become uncertain. It becomes tricky when a tiny tweak can cost someone their life. One can flip this problem. Herceptin has a known side-effect of cardiac failure (esp. in older people). Now, who do you sue if your relative has died due to slight overdose of herceptin? Normally you'd sue the doctor for malpractice or the drug maker, but in this case you cannot. I know that this is a screwed up view from the midst of the most litiguous society the world has ever known but, given the system, it pays to take into account all the things that go into risk management.
A program which is a world in itself should take care of everything. For instance, emacs has its own memory management - it does not entirely trust the OS. Guess what a tool that is the center of the user's world should do: it's own window management - relying on some other graphical layer is a shitty solution. If you assume that a tool is so important that people will buy computers just to run that one tool, then the tool must do everything to make the user more productive. You wouldn't buy a major database without native storage management layer, so how could a tool requiring good GUI for productivity not provide an end-to-end GUI solution?
0. The 10K is not the cost of USPTO processing. A few years ago when I went through the patenting, a simple patent was about 3K to file and 3K to prosecute - fees for a reputable but not top IP firm. BTW, prosecute refers to the stage where you are convincing the patent office that your patent is valid and has nothing to do with criminal prosecution. My 10K is a bit high but I was assuming the prices went up in the last 10 years. See, most people who come up with new ideas are real bad at communicating them, putting them on paper, and in some cases are even bad at coming up with the preferred embodiment. So for most people, a patent attorney is a necessity. I initially considered including a point about USPTo providing free patent writing service, but then I realized that it would not just cost the payroll for technical writers, but it would also cost the state money to pay for lawsuits when the patent was written in an unclear way and caused no protection for the core idea. If the state has to pay damages for this kind of stuff, then the entire budget of the US of A would not be enough.
1. If patent review gets done in 1 year, then that leaves people four years to make a buck, and that's if they choose to start their commercialization efforts only after they get the patent granted. The point is to allow people to make a little money from their invention but yank their monopoly just as the product becomes truly popular, so that the IP monopoly does not hold up progress. Remember, the point of IP laws is not to provide a business plan for corporations, it is to promote progress, i.e. increase the IP which is in the commons (unencumbered).
2. Reforming the patent system will cost money. Paying examiners more and having the best engineers in private sector do reviews and brainstorming sessions on a contractual basis will cost too. This is a much better investment though than say the war. If we can spend close to a hundred billion a year for war, we should be able to spend similar amount for IP reform.
2a. The point of patents is to facilitate progress (see Constitution). If there is a problem, and someone realizes this is a problem before others do that does not facilitate progress. Why? Because when it does become an issue, people will figure out ways of dealing with it. Following the language of the Constitution, patents should only be allowed when they help us move forward where we were already stuck. So if there is a technical problem and people don't know how to do it and were battling this for years, then your solution would surely qualify for a patent protection. Otherwise - sorry, no dice.
3. OK, here you are right and I was very loose with words. What I meant to say was that there are many cases where prior art is close but not clearly the same. The bias should be to disallow such claims.
4. No, no committees here. Watchdog groups work autonomously, and do not cost much. All you have to do is invite people to submit prior art examples and make feedback possible via internet and regular mail. The resources for this would be minimal. You would need people at USPTO to hold patent tribunals, where they take all objections at the end of one year (after patent was granted) and decide whether the prior art was relevant. But you need that no matter how you look at it - cutting corners the way we do now is what allows for so many bad or marginal patents. Getting a patent should be really hard. Coming up with something truly, without a doubt, absolutely, positively new is hard.
5. Spend the money. You can get a lot of good people if you give them high six figure salaries and 20% of their time to play with their own ideas. And you can afford a lot of people like that if you spend that tenth of a trillion wisely. Heck, recruit patent clerk out of senior engineers and give them enough money that people would look at patent clerk work as prestigeous, a culmination of a career. Kinda like serving on the supreme court is culmination of being a lawyer, though the pay there is as much in power and influence as it is in real money.
Right now the main problems are: high cost and slow ands bad processing. The cost, btw, while high is relatively fixed and is usually below 10K for a simple US patent. What this does is takes the cost out of USPTO and moves it to courtroom but you just know this will be more expensive. For that money you may or may not get a better patent examination and this will then depend on how good a lawyer you can afford. End result: full valid patent will cost more, be obtained as slowly or slower (our courts aren't the fastest beasts) and bad patents will still get through except now they will be easier to link to the better law firms.
What we do need to do: 1. Reduce all patent validity to 4-5 years. 2. Introduce peer review where every patent is taken through a double blind test: you give qualified engineers a spec and see if they propose something like the patent, in which case it is obvious to one skilled in the art. 3. Make it possible for people to submit prior art within one year of patent being granted and make a committee explicitly biased to reject anything that even remotely looks like it is in prior art. 4. Sponsor watchdog groups which will organize engineers to do peer review in 3. 5. Introduce limits on examiner workload and make sure their pay is higher than in the industry to attract the best.
It would be nice also for the bar association to put pressure on patent attorneys to litigate IP cases for poor clients on a flat fee basis. There is already pro bono system but I have not heard of IP cases being tried pro bono. We need an intermediate solution where a lawyer gets paid something but the client can know his costs in advance.
Funny, the poster just before you said that this was "enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life". Conversely, this is enough for twice the pr0n you could possibly watch (assuming you sleep and eat).
The grandparent poster was kind of right. Netscape took on Mosaic which became IE. After a brief success, it lost, begat Mozilla and started a long guerilla war. Quite similar to how Unix took on VMS which became Win NT. After some not so brief success of Unix, Win NT started to kick Unix' butt. Unix begat several OSS children (Linux having highest profile). Unix was never quite defeated so the war is more of an open combat type today.
We seem to have rather similar needs and prefs. As for NI, last time I checked, IMAQ was not available for Linux. Let's start with that. If we are talking about things we want and not merely OS'es then I also want Labview to convert diagrams into normal code and vice versa. Why the hell is cross-platform too much to ask for? Sure, they cannot take care of Windows specific calls but why does their API or ABI or whatever have to change? WTF? You get all the wonderful speed of java with none of the portability? And it's not like this stuff is cheap (though our.edu does have a site license so to us it is kinda cheap). As for Matlab, I am a big Matlab junky. I coded a lot of data analysis for the labs where I worked in Matlab and I take pride in my optimization abilities with it. That said, I do not care about widgets or other crap. Give me vi to edit m files and a prompt to run scripts and I am happy.
1. CAD and 3D modeling software (basically all of Autodesk portfolio: AutoCAD, 3DS, Inventor).
2. Office (yes MS Office : Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Visio)
3. Film recording and editing (a port of Final Cut Studio would be a start).
4. Scientific analysis tools (Origin and Labview come to mind. Well, Labview itself is available but many little things like drivers aren't, which for Labview is a deathknell. Also, Labview code compiled for Windows will not run on other platforms without recompile even if you only make calls to Labview libraries. That needs to be fixed. If WINE can do it, then NatInst has no excuse.)
5. The entire Adobe portfolio. (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Golive, Premiere, LiveCycle, AfterEffects, Flash, Acrobat and others).
Oops, that's more than 10. And that's just off the top of my head. As far as I am personally concerned, as soon as Office, Origin, Labview with all drivers, and Illustrator are ported, I will be able to switch to Linux at work. Basically, the guys they should go after are Adobe and Autodesk, with Apple and Microsoft right behind. Good luck with that:).
Well, the real problem is that there is no money. The beginning of the twentieth century saw a great expansion of funding for science, thus great projects, great advancement and little competition (as compared to today at least). Part of the reason competition was not as vicious was that the number of people in science did not catch up to the available funding. That changed in the seventies and pain began. It got real bad in the beginning of the nineties in physics when Congress cancelled the superconducting supercollider. Now it is getting bad in biology (where Clinton infused some money and kept it happier for a while). The last few years have seen major research efforts caught mired in fraud (Schon and Hwang are just two biggest stories) and it is only going to get worse. I predict that what will happen after a few years/decades is that the limited amount of funding will go to a few groups with reputation and science will become a small community again, just like before the twentieth century, but with government as a sponsor. There will be no opportunities for young scientists to start independent careers, the pay will dwindle by about a factor of two (not accounting for inflantion), there will be a great outflux of people from science and eventually things will stabilize, the rate of progress will slow to a crawl, and we will have to wall ourselves from the rest of the world because most people will be ardently following some cult or another (oops, did I say cult, I meant organized religion). This generation of young scientists may still have a chance to start their own groups but do not take it for granted. Face it, we are approaching the new Dark Ages and there is nothing we can do about it. It is just like Asimov's Nightfall, except we don't have to go mad, just broke, broken and unhappy./biophysics postdoc
No, what we have learned is that most people need two computers: an internet facing box with a browser and email and one box for all their real work (balancing their books with GNUcash or Money, office work, playing games etc.). Importantly, the box for work must be physically disconnected from the net, not even via sneakernet. This is at home. At work, the same is needed, except the work boxes may be wired into a network which is still in no way connected to the net. It may even be a good idea to make net facing boxes a few per floor unless people need the internet a lot. Security does not seem to be achievable via software. It is not a coincidence that the OS many people think is easiest to use is the one that is least secure. Administrative controls are needed and they need to be loud and clear even if they represent a complete rewiring of the building and doubling the number of boxes.
I think if a corporation made a game, spent money promoting it (like getting coverage in major gaming magazines and websites), got the product packaged and sold at $50 per box in brick and mortar gaming stores (at least in the US but really globally) then it would be very hard for this Thomson guy to claim it is not a real game. Anything short could legitimately be called an amateur attempt. Basically he calims that the gaming industry would not target itself, so it is reasonable for him to ask for a serious development and promotion effort (on par with GTA franchise). The word "industry" does imply major funding, not a small-time operation. It's like when you say "movie industry" you mean major Hollywood studios, not backyard movies, not even the small budget director making his labor of love movie. I may not like this Thomson fellow (I believe in free speech and thus free access to ALL information by ALL people, regardless of age or mental capacity) but his argument on the donation is valid.
It is possible but you have to hunt for a deal. I looked at fatwallet and it seems that once or twice a year the rebates align so you can get say a 160 GB hard drive for $10. So 4 TB would only be $250. What you would probably want to do is run these in a homemade enclosure with cheapo chinese EIDE to USB converters. You could probably have 25 of those at less than $50 total and then you only need a few USB hubs daisy chained. On the plus side: $300 for 4 TB. On the minus : labor cost, slow as shit.
Right now a dual layer DVD blank costs about $2 (if you find a good sale and stock up). So that's 4.5 Gigs per buck. The best HDD sales I have seen get you something like 3 Gigs per buck so dual layer wins. Here's what I expect: blu-ray camp counts on playstation to penetrate into homes. HD-DVD battles back with low prices (even announced hardware was half the price of announced blu-ray analogs). There is a chance that I'll be able to buy a dual layer HD disk for $2-3 within a year or two. If so then this is likely to beat the pants off of hard drives since their capacity and price seem to have stagnated.
On the other hand, one could argue that each art piece should stand on its own. One always imagines western civilization failing or being overrun by some modern equivalent of barbarians with the net result being that a few thousand or tens of thousand years from now most works of art will be stripped of their context and will have to stand on their own. Imagine knowing the date of Rembrandts's paintings to the nearest thousand years.
Now with this in mind, it makes sense to evaluate art as standalone pieces without context, not even authorship attribution. Thus, it is entirely unclear why a fake Rembrandt is any worse than a real one, provided that an obersver cannot tell the difference.
Dude, I suggest you end this discussion right here. This law____ guy is arguing with you over some stuff that I posted and he claims those are your arguments. He clearly has zero observation skills, zero ability to put stuff together, and a huge trolling capacity. I suggest we give him a break. After all, the next discussion surely will be that Al Gore is a visionary and he did invent the internet:).
Found it. Wikipedia says that the first cloverleaf was patented in Maryland in 1916. Same article suggests that the first ones to be built were in the USA and their primary purpose was to relieve congestion from expanding automobile use in the USA. This country was not then preparing for war (this is pre-depression, economy is good, Europeans are those weirdos with their own problems somewhere far away, except they dump all those rotten immigrants here - that kind of mentality). Commerce driven for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
For a desktop app, I look for what items are in menus. It tells me which
functionality is available and whether it is easily accessible. I also
look for whether dialog boxes are decent and easy to use.
There are also apps like Firefox where GUI can be adjusted. In those
cases I also look for a few example of extremes to which I can push
the GUI.
In the case of desktop environments, it is much the same but I look for
the most and the least cluttered layouts and whether transparency is
available. For instance, if all screenshots show two bars going across
the desktop (say, one with app launcher and the other with pager) then
I know I won't be using that desktop (I prefer minimalist).
For game screenshots, I look for eye candy. I try to find hard to
render things: water (still not realistic even with best and
fanciest GPUs - physics matters, water still looks like jelly even
in still screenshots), vegetation (polygon count still is a couple of
orders of magnitude too low for decent vegetation), human skin and
overall posture. Truth be told, you really want to see a demo or a
movie of a game to evaluate it, since a screenshot is not so
representative.
This is the first time I see English translation, having read this in
Russian. The Russian version of poem in 'g' made more sense:
Gruzniy Gen'ka generator
grozno gryz goroh gortsyami
In general, the feel is different. My guess is that the beauty of Lem was the fact
that his writing was universal yet allowed for fine tuning to any culture
via translations. I think he was the greatest SF writer ever, but all
the same my hat is off to his translators.
Wow! Just wow. Whoever designed that website should be shot, no strike
that, they should be skinned alive and a video of that should be made
into an intro sequence to the website. I gave up looking for a way to
buy their stuff once it started to give me a headache.
That said, thanks for the link. I do like their stuff, esp. their shoes.
But that's without knowing the prices because I can't find that info
anywhere on the damn website. I do know they sell through Bloomies and
Macys so they probably are expensive but not out of this world
expensive. Now that I think about it, it's just as well that their
website sucks: I wouldn't buy clothing online anyway so they just need
to have pretty pictures and look stylish which the website does. However
even finding physical store locations is painful. Damn I hate that
site. Oh the headache.
I have posted here before being generally critical of many "nano"
results as bullshit or hype, however these results here are for real,
they are a big deal, and they do legitimately go under the moniker of
nanotechnology. One of the few times when the public gets fed stuff as
exciting hype and it is actually exciting underneath.
Well, the self-funded Ross Perot was probably the only one who could
propose such a thing but even if he were elected, my guess is this
proposal would never clear congress.
You know, I like meat. And so to be true to
myself I did in the past watch videos from
slaughterhouses to see if my mind would change.
Nope. I do sometimes get hungry watching
birds and cows getting killed. I remember
having this argument with a coworker of mine
who was a kind of PETA nutjob. I used to
tease him for weeks with a jesture of
smacking a chicken against a wall.
This circa two years ago so it is
unlikely that my vews have changed or the
video test got old.
BTW, cruelty to animals usually makes the
resulting meat taste worse. Best farms
kill animals fast, along the lines of
steel rod fired into skull all of a sudden or a guillotine.
The thing about drugs is that generics often have slightly different
performance than brand names since they are not made by the same
facility and often even with deviations in manufacturing protocols.
Your home-made version will likely differ even more. Now the prescribed
dosage will become uncertain. It becomes tricky when a tiny tweak can
cost someone their life.
One can flip this problem. Herceptin has a known side-effect of cardiac
failure (esp. in older people). Now, who do you sue if your relative has
died due to slight overdose of herceptin? Normally you'd sue the doctor
for malpractice or the drug maker, but in this case you cannot. I know
that this is a screwed up view from the midst of the most litiguous
society the world has ever known but, given the system, it pays to
take into account all the things that go into risk management.
A program which is a world in itself should take care
of everything. For instance, emacs has its own memory
management - it does not entirely trust the OS. Guess
what a tool that is the center of the user's
world should do: it's own window management - relying
on some other graphical layer is a shitty solution.
If you assume that a tool is so important that people
will buy computers just to run that one tool, then
the tool must do everything to make the user more
productive. You wouldn't buy a major database without
native storage management layer, so how could a tool
requiring good GUI for productivity not provide an
end-to-end GUI solution?
0. The 10K is not the cost of USPTO processing. A few years ago when I
went through the patenting, a simple patent was about 3K to file and
3K to prosecute - fees for a reputable but not top IP firm. BTW, prosecute
refers to the stage where you are convincing the patent office that your
patent is valid and has nothing to do with criminal prosecution.
My 10K is a bit high but I was assuming the prices went up in the last
10 years. See, most people who come up with new ideas are real bad at
communicating them, putting them on paper, and in some cases are even
bad at coming up with the preferred embodiment. So for most people,
a patent attorney is a necessity.
I initially considered including a point about USPTo providing free
patent writing service, but then I realized that it would not just
cost the payroll for technical writers, but it would also cost the
state money to pay for lawsuits when the patent was written in an
unclear way and caused no protection for the core idea. If the state
has to pay damages for this kind of stuff, then the entire budget of
the US of A would not be enough.
1. If patent review gets done in 1 year, then that leaves people
four years to make a buck, and that's if they choose to start their
commercialization efforts only after they get the patent granted.
The point is to allow people to make a little money from their
invention but yank their monopoly just as the product becomes truly
popular, so that the IP monopoly does not hold up progress.
Remember, the point of IP laws is not to provide a business plan for
corporations, it is to promote progress, i.e. increase the IP which
is in the commons (unencumbered).
2. Reforming the patent system will cost money. Paying examiners more
and having the best engineers in private sector do reviews and
brainstorming sessions on a contractual basis will cost too. This is
a much better investment though than say the war. If we can spend
close to a hundred billion a year for war, we should be able to spend
similar amount for IP reform.
2a. The point of patents is to facilitate progress (see Constitution).
If there is a problem, and someone realizes this is a problem
before others do that does not facilitate progress. Why? Because when
it does become an issue, people will figure out ways of dealing with
it. Following the language of the Constitution, patents should only
be allowed when they help us move forward where we were already stuck.
So if there is a technical problem and people don't know how to do it
and were battling this for years, then your solution would surely
qualify for a patent protection. Otherwise - sorry, no dice.
3. OK, here you are right and I was very loose with words. What I meant
to say was that there are many cases where prior art is close but not
clearly the same. The bias should be to disallow such claims.
4. No, no committees here. Watchdog groups work autonomously, and do
not cost much. All you have to do is invite people to submit prior
art examples and make feedback possible via internet and regular
mail. The resources for this would be minimal. You would need people
at USPTO to hold patent tribunals, where they take all objections
at the end of one year (after patent was granted) and decide whether
the prior art was relevant. But you need that no matter how you look
at it - cutting corners the way we do now is what allows for so many
bad or marginal patents. Getting a patent should be really hard. Coming
up with something truly, without a doubt, absolutely, positively new
is hard.
5. Spend the money. You can get a lot of good people if you give them
high six figure salaries and 20% of their time to play with their own
ideas. And you can afford a lot of people like that if you spend that
tenth of a trillion wisely. Heck, recruit patent clerk out of senior
engineers and give them enough money that people would look at patent
clerk work as prestigeous, a culmination of a career. Kinda like
serving on the supreme court is culmination of being a lawyer, though
the pay there is as much in power and influence as it is in real money.
Right now the main problems are: high cost and
slow ands bad processing. The cost, btw, while
high is relatively fixed and is usually below
10K for a simple US patent.
What this does is takes the cost out of USPTO
and moves it to courtroom but you just know
this will be more expensive. For that money
you may or may not get a better patent examination
and this will then depend on how good a
lawyer you can afford.
End result: full valid patent will cost more,
be obtained as slowly or slower (our courts
aren't the fastest beasts) and bad patents
will still get through except now they will
be easier to link to the better law firms.
What we do need to do:
1. Reduce all patent validity to 4-5 years.
2. Introduce peer review where every patent
is taken through a double blind test: you
give qualified engineers a spec and see if
they propose something like the patent, in
which case it is obvious to one skilled in
the art.
3. Make it possible for people to submit
prior art within one year of patent being
granted and make a committee explicitly
biased to reject anything that even
remotely looks like it is in prior art.
4. Sponsor watchdog groups which will organize
engineers to do peer review in 3.
5. Introduce limits on examiner workload
and make sure their pay is higher than in
the industry to attract the best.
It would be nice also for the bar association
to put pressure on patent attorneys to
litigate IP cases for poor clients on a flat
fee basis. There is already pro bono system
but I have not heard of IP cases being tried
pro bono. We need an intermediate solution
where a lawyer gets paid something but the
client can know his costs in advance.
I pity you.
Funny, the poster just before you said that this was
"enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life".
Conversely, this is enough for twice the pr0n you could
possibly watch (assuming you sleep and eat).
The grandparent poster was kind of right. Netscape took on Mosaic
which became IE. After a brief success, it lost, begat Mozilla and
started a long guerilla war.
Quite similar to how Unix took on VMS which became Win NT. After
some not so brief success of Unix, Win NT started to kick Unix' butt.
Unix begat several OSS children (Linux having highest profile).
Unix was never quite defeated so the war is more of an open combat
type today.
We seem to have rather similar needs and .edu does have a site license so to us
prefs. As for NI, last time I checked,
IMAQ was not available for Linux. Let's
start with that.
If we are talking about things we want
and not merely OS'es then I also want
Labview to convert diagrams into normal
code and vice versa.
Why the hell is cross-platform too
much to ask for? Sure, they cannot
take care of Windows specific calls
but why does their API or ABI or
whatever have to change? WTF? You get
all the wonderful speed of java with
none of the portability? And it's not
like this stuff is cheap (though our
it is kinda cheap).
As for Matlab, I am a big Matlab junky.
I coded a lot of data analysis for the
labs where I worked in Matlab and I take
pride in my optimization abilities with
it. That said, I do not care about widgets
or other crap. Give me vi to edit m files
and a prompt to run scripts and I am happy.
1. CAD and 3D modeling software (basically all of Autodesk portfolio:
:).
AutoCAD, 3DS, Inventor).
2. Office (yes MS Office : Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Visio)
3. Film recording and editing (a port of Final Cut Studio would be a
start).
4. Scientific analysis tools (Origin and Labview come to mind. Well,
Labview itself is available but many little things like drivers aren't, which for Labview is a deathknell. Also, Labview code compiled
for Windows will not run on other platforms without recompile even if you only make calls to Labview libraries. That needs to be fixed.
If WINE can do it, then NatInst has no excuse.)
5. The entire Adobe portfolio.
(Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Golive, Premiere, LiveCycle,
AfterEffects, Flash, Acrobat and others).
Oops, that's more than 10. And that's just off the top of my head.
As far as I am personally concerned, as soon as Office, Origin,
Labview with all drivers, and Illustrator are ported, I will be able
to switch to Linux at work.
Basically, the guys they should go after are Adobe and Autodesk, with
Apple and Microsoft right behind. Good luck with that
Well, the real problem is that there is no money. The beginning of /biophysics postdoc
the twentieth century saw a great expansion of funding for science,
thus great projects, great advancement and little competition
(as compared to today at least). Part of the reason competition was
not as vicious was that the number of people in science did not
catch up to the available funding. That changed in the seventies and
pain began. It got real bad in the beginning of the nineties in
physics when Congress cancelled the superconducting supercollider.
Now it is getting bad in biology (where Clinton infused some money
and kept it happier for a while). The last few years have seen major
research efforts caught mired in fraud (Schon and Hwang are just two
biggest stories) and it is only going to get worse. I predict that
what will happen after a few years/decades is that the limited amount
of funding will go to a few groups with reputation and science will
become a small community again, just like before the twentieth
century, but with government as a sponsor. There will be no opportunities
for young scientists to start independent careers, the pay will
dwindle by about a factor of two (not accounting for inflantion),
there will be a great outflux of people from science and eventually
things will stabilize, the rate of progress will slow to a crawl, and
we will have to wall ourselves from the rest of the world because
most people will be ardently following some cult or another (oops,
did I say cult, I meant organized religion). This generation of
young scientists may still have a chance to start their own groups
but do not take it for granted.
Face it, we are approaching the new Dark Ages and there is nothing we
can do about it. It is just like Asimov's Nightfall, except we don't
have to go mad, just broke, broken and unhappy.
Would you say they should close the business and return the money to the shareholders?
In that case, why involve Deutsche Telekom? Or rather, why did
Deutsche Telekom get involved?
No, what we have learned is that most people need two computers:
an internet facing box with a browser and email and one box
for all their real work (balancing their books with GNUcash or
Money, office work, playing games etc.). Importantly, the box
for work must be physically disconnected from the net, not even
via sneakernet.
This is at home.
At work, the same is needed, except the work boxes may be wired into
a network which is still in no way connected to the net. It may
even be a good idea to make net facing boxes a few per floor
unless people need the internet a lot.
Security does not seem to be achievable via software. It is not a
coincidence that the OS many people think is easiest to use is the
one that is least secure. Administrative controls are needed and
they need to be loud and clear even if they represent a complete
rewiring of the building and doubling the number of boxes.
I think if a corporation made a game, spent money promoting it (like
getting coverage in major gaming magazines and websites), got the
product packaged and sold at $50 per box in brick and mortar gaming
stores (at least in the US but really globally) then it would be very
hard for this Thomson guy to claim it is not a real game. Anything short
could legitimately be called an amateur attempt.
Basically he calims that the gaming industry would not target itself, so
it is reasonable for him to ask for a serious development and
promotion effort (on par with GTA franchise). The word "industry" does
imply major funding, not a small-time operation.
It's like when you say "movie industry" you mean major Hollywood
studios, not backyard movies, not even the small budget director making
his labor of love movie.
I may not like this Thomson fellow (I believe in free speech and thus
free access to ALL information by ALL people, regardless of age or
mental capacity) but his argument on the donation is valid.
It is possible but you have to hunt for a deal. I looked at fatwallet
and it seems that once or twice a year the rebates align so you can
get say a 160 GB hard drive for $10. So 4 TB would only be $250.
What you would probably want to do is run these in a homemade
enclosure with cheapo chinese EIDE to USB converters. You could
probably have 25 of those at less than $50 total and then you
only need a few USB hubs daisy chained.
On the plus side: $300 for 4 TB.
On the minus : labor cost, slow as shit.
Right now a dual layer DVD blank costs about $2 (if you find a good
sale and stock up). So that's 4.5 Gigs per buck. The best HDD sales
I have seen get you something like 3 Gigs per buck so dual layer
wins.
Here's what I expect: blu-ray camp counts on playstation to penetrate
into homes. HD-DVD battles back with low prices (even announced hardware
was half the price of announced blu-ray analogs). There is a chance
that I'll be able to buy a dual layer HD disk for $2-3 within a year
or two. If so then this is likely to beat the pants off of hard drives
since their capacity and price seem to have stagnated.
On the other hand, one could argue that each art piece should
stand on its own. One always imagines western civilization
failing or being overrun by some modern equivalent of barbarians
with the net result being that a few thousand or tens of
thousand years from now most works of art will be stripped of
their context and will have to stand on their own. Imagine knowing
the date of Rembrandts's paintings to the nearest thousand years.
Now with this in mind, it makes sense to evaluate art as standalone
pieces without context, not even authorship attribution. Thus,
it is entirely unclear why a fake Rembrandt is any worse than
a real one, provided that an obersver cannot tell the difference.
Dude, I suggest you end this discussion :).
right here. This law____ guy is arguing
with you over some stuff that I posted
and he claims those are your arguments.
He clearly has zero observation skills,
zero ability to put stuff together, and
a huge trolling capacity. I suggest we give
him a break. After all, the next discussion
surely will be that Al Gore is a visionary
and he did invent the internet
Found it. Wikipedia says that the first
cloverleaf was patented in Maryland in 1916.
Same article suggests that the first ones
to be built were in the USA and their primary
purpose was to relieve congestion from
expanding automobile use in the USA. This
country was not then preparing for war (this
is pre-depression, economy is good, Europeans
are those weirdos with their own problems
somewhere far away, except they dump all those
rotten immigrants here - that kind of
mentality). Commerce driven for sure.