I had to go through a fairly extensive medical as part of my US immigration. I had to fly down to london to meet with their embassy doctor. I had to bring my full vaccination records (and catch up on a couple of late ones), i was checked for HIV and possibly other blood diseases and I was given a chest x-ray to check for tb.
I'm probably better vaccinated than most US citizens:)
I think I got my first programming book for my 5th birthday.
Back then it was BASIC and I'm sure I wrote some pretty crappy code. The good thing was that by the time I hit university i had 12 years of learning syntax and programming in basic, C, pascal and assembly. That meant I could focus on algorithms and not be dragged down by the dull stuff like making code actually compile.
I think, from observing my classmates, that those who learned syntax + algorithms at the same time performed significantly worse than those of us who had syntax figured out. It remains to be seen how that will play our in careers - but i'm not doing too badly.
It does a very good job of what Windows uesrs would call 'Roaming Profiles', and if your SA has set up firefox, openoffice and evolution for you then you turn it on and go.
I'm sure that a poorly set up linux distribution is worse than a poorly set up windows one, but when they are well set up then it's hard to differentiate the user experience.
My wife and I probably watch about 10 hours of tv a week between us. Cable costs us about $10/month or roughly 25c/hr and tivo costs another $7 iirc.
If we could download those shows (even if it were 50c/hr) then we'd probably do that instead. It will obviously hurt the local affliates, but it could make financial sense for those producing the programs.
However, it would be easy for the system that calls you to use your banks 1800 and even include a message about how you can call the number on your card if you have any doubts.
Obviously in your case it was real, but it's entirely possible that scammers could dial you faking the caller ID of a real bank.
For big consumers there are probably better option
on
Store Your Own Juice
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· Score: 1
Most homeowners who have monumental energy bills are those who have electric heat.
When I lived in Britain, we had a system of "Storage Heaters" which were electric heaters with concrete blocks in them. They'd power on for 8 hours a day at the power company's convenience and by heating up the concrete they'd be able to store enough heat to run warm all day.
Scottish HydroElectric had a better way of doing this. Rather than reducing your billing rate between say 11pm and 7am, you'd have two meters. A black meter that runs 24/7 and runs all your lights/outlets, and a White meter that is toggled by radio and runs for about 8 hours a day (I think they provided longer runtime in the winter).
That way they had a lot more adaptability to peaks and troughs in demand as they could switch on and off the white meters in each different geographic region.
Imagine that Intel, AMD and IBM not only patented everything imaginable in the uProcessor space, but that they got together and cross-licensed all that tech.
On the face of it, this sounds advantageous. It allows more cool features in processors and alleviates those three companies from having to worry about getting involved in frivolous lawsuits with their main competitors.
Now perhaps Intel patented the XOR operation. Sure the patent is blatantly unfair, but since IBM and AMD can already use it then they have no need to fight intel's patent. THe only person who would want to fight it would be some new player in that space, but who'd have the resources?
If large corporations start broadly cross-licensing technologies then it'll effectively kill the little guy and sew up the market.
I suspect i've seen more people who've lost their personal data to hardware failure in my life, than you'll see people who have given up crucial information to google in your life.
It'd be a lot better to educate people about backing up, and hopefully get them to encrypt whatever they send to these services.
For certain industries you probably do need a patent to recoup your development costs. The drug industry certainly springs to mind.
I feel there may need to be a variation in patent length based on industry. 25 years is a lifetime in the high tech industry, but if patents were valid for say 4 years and only granted to non-obvious ideas then they could help the industry. As it happens right now, many technologies are obsolete before their patents are granted.
I'm not trying to argue that one-click was worthy of a patent, but it's hard to know what would be appropriate.
Would the first web browser have been eligible for a patent.. it combined a number of existing technologies into something that really was new and revolutionary.
What about tivo.. nothing new there but still a great product that they probably should be allowed to profit from.
I'm pretty sure you could get a patent on a vending machine that read Ez-Pass or RFID credit cards.
I feel, like you, that these are obvious applications of technology however the patent office seems to disagree. My point was really that this does happen in both the real world and the software world. It's just that given the rate of progess in computer software it's easier to file massive numbers of obvious patents.
If a vending machine identified you, and automatically debited the card it kept on file when you pressed the "Diet Pepsi" button then it certainly would be patentable.
However the non-trivial idea would be a vending machine that identified the user, something that's a very common feature on websites.
I'm sure they can figure out a one way algorithm that the phone can implement that would make human voice unrecognizable but in such a way that you could run the doritos commerical through the same algorithm and look for the signature.
You could probably just notch filter the typical range of the human voice and still have enough data left over to recognize just about any music or commerciall.
OTOH why not just have a device that records throuhgout the day and that the participants upload via their broadband connection at night.
It would seem that if you intercept a set of keys that specify a certain quasar and a certain start time then you could establish a geographic region that encompassed both the sender and receiver.
I grew up in Scotland and for some reason i ended up making a bet with a friend that I could learn the names of all 50 states by the next morning. Wasn't really very difficult.
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I had to go through a fairly extensive medical as part of my US immigration. I had to fly down to london to meet with their embassy doctor. I had to bring my full vaccination records (and catch up on a couple of late ones), i was checked for HIV and possibly other blood diseases and I was given a chest x-ray to check for tb.
:)
I'm probably better vaccinated than most US citizens
I think I got my first programming book for my 5th birthday.
Back then it was BASIC and I'm sure I wrote some pretty crappy code. The good thing was that by the time I hit university i had 12 years of learning syntax and programming in basic, C, pascal and assembly. That meant I could focus on algorithms and not be dragged down by the dull stuff like making code actually compile.
I think, from observing my classmates, that those who learned syntax + algorithms at the same time performed significantly worse than those of us who had syntax figured out. It remains to be seen how that will play our in careers - but i'm not doing too badly.
In a large deployment, Linux is great.
It does a very good job of what Windows uesrs would call 'Roaming Profiles', and if your SA has set up firefox, openoffice and evolution for you then you turn it on and go.
I'm sure that a poorly set up linux distribution is worse than a poorly set up windows one, but when they are well set up then it's hard to differentiate the user experience.
My wife and I probably watch about 10 hours of tv a week between us. Cable costs us about $10/month or roughly 25c/hr and tivo costs another $7 iirc.
If we could download those shows (even if it were 50c/hr) then we'd probably do that instead. It will obviously hurt the local affliates, but it could make financial sense for those producing the programs.
However, it would be easy for the system that calls you to use your banks 1800 and even include a message about how you can call the number on your card if you have any doubts.
Consumer Caller ID is easily faked
http://www.spoofcard.com/
Obviously in your case it was real, but it's entirely possible that scammers could dial you faking the caller ID of a real bank.
Most homeowners who have monumental energy bills are those who have electric heat.
When I lived in Britain, we had a system of "Storage Heaters" which were electric heaters with concrete blocks in them. They'd power on for 8 hours a day at the power company's convenience and by heating up the concrete they'd be able to store enough heat to run warm all day.
Scottish HydroElectric had a better way of doing this. Rather than reducing your billing rate between say 11pm and 7am, you'd have two meters. A black meter that runs 24/7 and runs all your lights/outlets, and a White meter that is toggled by radio and runs for about 8 hours a day (I think they provided longer runtime in the winter).
That way they had a lot more adaptability to peaks and troughs in demand as they could switch on and off the white meters in each different geographic region.
"Nice application you've got there... wouldn't want anything bad to happen to it, would you?"
For the low price of $100k/year you can be covered in case you've accidentally violated one of our patents.
Few of the main investors there are famous for levelling the playing field.
Imagine that Intel, AMD and IBM not only patented everything imaginable in the uProcessor space, but that they got together and cross-licensed all that tech.
On the face of it, this sounds advantageous. It allows more cool features in processors and alleviates those three companies from having to worry about getting involved in frivolous lawsuits with their main competitors.
Now perhaps Intel patented the XOR operation. Sure the patent is blatantly unfair, but since IBM and AMD can already use it then they have no need to fight intel's patent. THe only person who would want to fight it would be some new player in that space, but who'd have the resources?
If large corporations start broadly cross-licensing technologies then it'll effectively kill the little guy and sew up the market.
I think it was quite a smart idea
Maybe cost 5 grand to do and got coverage in most of the tech press. You'd struggle to get that kind of exposure with a press release.
Still we used to at least be able to hope that the submitter would read the article before writing the summary.
If you are the least bit familiar with the company, then it's clear that schwartz is simply too young. He was probably 15 or 16 when Sun was founded.
Schwartz is not a co-founder of Sun - He joined the company in 1996!
z .html
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/mgt_schwart
I suspect i've seen more people who've lost their personal data to hardware failure in my life, than you'll see people who have given up crucial information to google in your life.
It'd be a lot better to educate people about backing up, and hopefully get them to encrypt whatever they send to these services.
I was actually thinking of ice
I've got a machine in my kitchen that can make water into a unwet state
For certain industries you probably do need a patent to recoup your development costs. The drug industry certainly springs to mind.
I feel there may need to be a variation in patent length based on industry. 25 years is a lifetime in the high tech industry, but if patents were valid for say 4 years and only granted to non-obvious ideas then they could help the industry. As it happens right now, many technologies are obsolete before their patents are granted.
Would it be possible for another company to produce any automatically monitored minibar without infringing on any of the claims in that patent?
I doubt it, even though there is almost certainly prior art.
I'm not trying to argue that one-click was worthy of a patent, but it's hard to know what would be appropriate.
Would the first web browser have been eligible for a patent.. it combined a number of existing technologies into something that really was new and revolutionary.
What about tivo.. nothing new there but still a great product that they probably should be allowed to profit from.
I'm pretty sure you could get a patent on a vending machine that read Ez-Pass or RFID credit cards.
I feel, like you, that these are obvious applications of technology however the patent office seems to disagree. My point was really that this does happen in both the real world and the software world. It's just that given the rate of progess in computer software it's easier to file massive numbers of obvious patents.
And it's patent pending....
http://tinyurl.com/rl2jn
If a vending machine identified you, and automatically debited the card it kept on file when you pressed the "Diet Pepsi" button then it certainly would be patentable.
However the non-trivial idea would be a vending machine that identified the user, something that's a very common feature on websites.
I'm sure they can figure out a one way algorithm that the phone can implement that would make human voice unrecognizable but in such a way that you could run the doritos commerical through the same algorithm and look for the signature.
You could probably just notch filter the typical range of the human voice and still have enough data left over to recognize just about any music or commerciall.
OTOH why not just have a device that records throuhgout the day and that the participants upload via their broadband connection at night.
It would seem that if you intercept a set of keys that specify a certain quasar and a certain start time then you could establish a geographic region that encompassed both the sender and receiver.
I grew up in Scotland and for some reason i ended up making a bet with a friend that I could learn the names of all 50 states by the next morning. Wasn't really very difficult.