The first thing that springs to my mind when I read those words is the Infocom Z-Machine, which has been around since 1979 and I'm sure there are examples of lots of stuff like it even earlier than that.
In other words, this virtual machine stuff has been around and been well-known for quite a while.
The author should get more than anyone else, since without them the rest would languish and die.
Primary producers seem to get the short end a lot. The most common example being farmers -- where would middlemen like Cargill be without farmers? But who's making the big bucks on grain shipments? (Hint: Not the farmers.)
What possible reason is there for releasing this stuff anyway? Does it make anyone safer? Unlikely.
On the contrary, the answer is "possibly". If I know the nature of a security hole in Program X, I might be able to find a way to substitute, sandbox or discontinue Program X in my own workflow and thereby become safer.
Since location look-ups on IP addresses from the two main ISP's here resolve to the nearest much larger city (where the ISP's are actually located), I doubt something like that would work even if it was available. All of those online geolocation things tell me that I'm in the city, not here. They have a much larger theatre in the city than mine, too.
Advertising on/through Google may work fine in larger places, but I live in a town of 5000 people and provide a service that's of interest only locally. (I own a movie theatre.) My main advertising is sending a flyer out in the mail.
they never tried to foist PDFs on subscribers instead of HTML
Among other things, I am the "computer guy" for a small publishing company which offers online subscriptions to the paper as well as printed copies.
The online paper is behind a paywall; subscribers actually pay what I consider to be a fairly high amount of money for the content.
When I first set up the online paper (several years ago) I offered it as html files similar to how a website is laid out -- index page, click on the section that you want to read.
To my surprise, I got a lot of feedback from the subscribers asking for a version that they could download and read offline, so I started creating a pdf version of the online paper as well.
The server logs show me that about 80% of the subscribers read the html version of the paper and the pdf version is downloaded by about 35% of the subscribers.
Side note: Around the beginning of this year I started also creating a "mobile version" of the paper for folks with Blackberries and the like -- just the content with no graphics, etc. I see more and more of the subscribers are reading the "mobile version" as time goes by; their user strings show that they use mostly Blackberry and Samsung phones for that.
I suspect that at least part of the reason for the popularity of the pdf version of the paper is that many/most of the primary subscribers are farmers who may be on dial-up or satellite Internet.
If you can take an idea for a piece of software to any software engineer and say "Here, program this for me" and they can program it for you, it isn't an innovative enough idea for a patent. If you take it to an engineer and they say "How the hell am I supposed to do that?" then you have something special. After you get the patent, that same engineer should be able to read your patent and say "Oh, that makes sense" and write the program.
Your solution doesn't cover the situation where someone thinks of doing something that has never been thought of before.
I have a fire burning. If I poke a stick into the campfire, I have a torch that I can use to transfer the fire to a new location!
If nobody thought of poking a stick into a fire before, is that an innovation? Particularly if the question wasn't phrased as "move the fire from point A to point B" because nobody ever considered moving it before?
I don't know.. that might be a bad example. What I'm trying to express is a situation where someone solves a problem that nobody actually realized was a problem before the solution is presented.
I like Mickey Spillane's books; he is a wonderful author in my opinion. His opinion of himself, though, is: "I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book."
Also, "I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."
So you can see where he's coming from. Writing for him was just a job. According to Wikipedia, "In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the U.S."
I set up the computers and provide technical support for a small publishing company that prints two weekly classified ad papers (place your classified ads for free, the paper is sold at gas stations and convenience stores); about 15,000 physical papers are printed weekly. Plus there is an online subscription available for people to purchase
The software is a combination of stuff that I wrote myself (the ad database, the program to create the plates for the press, etc) and Scribus, Gimp, and OpenOffice. LTSP is used to support thin client terminals for the staff that enter the ads into the database. Apache and sendmail for their web/email server.
The whole operation runs on Centos 5.
No worries about Windows viruses and everyting runs on automatic pilot as far as I'm concerned, most of the time.
A couple of years ago I called 911 to report a burglary in progress across the street. I got PUT ON HOLD for a few minutes before I could talk to anyone at all. "All of our lines are busy, please hold..." and so on.
I used to think that "You know you're having a bad day when... you call 911 and they put you on hold." was a joke. Apparently it's not.
I wrote a letter of complaint about this matter to the City Council, but nothing was ever done other than sending me back an acknowledgment of receipt.
I hear that if you get a 220V light bulb it has a thicker filament on it and will last virtually forever.
If you run a 220v light bulb on 110v it should indeed last a very long time. But you will get a lot less light out of it than you will with a 110v bulb, so the trade-off is increased power use.
I actually looked into this several years ago for bulbs to illuminate my EXIT signs, but the power required to generate enough light with a 220v bulb was a lot more (triple? I can't remember) than it was worth.
I now have LED bulbs in my EXIT signs that use 3 watts and are supposed to last 20 years running 24 hours a day.
Global Vision 2020 is doing something similar to this, creating eyeglasses for people in third-world countries.
They have glasses with special lenses that can be filled with oil. The oil changes the shape of the lens.
The client puts the glasses on and fills the lens with oil until he can see clearly. Then the technician seals the glasses so the amount of oil (and shape of the lenses) won't change any further.
$10 per set of glasses, and no optometrist required to issue them.
If you're looking for a worthwhile charity to donate to, this may be one to consider.
I use a colour laser printer to print labels for bags of candy that I sell in my theatre concession. (I buy big bins of candy and pack them into smaller bags and seal them and label them.)
A friend of mine (actually the guy that I hire to do carpentry work for me once in a while) sells baked goods at flea markets. He prints labels for his products (his logo and address, ingredients, best-before, etc.) on his colour laser printer too. He used to do it on an inkjet until I wised him up as to the cost difference between that and a colour laser.
I own and operate a small business in Canada as a sole proprietorship and have two official, registered business names. For each one, I filled out a form and sent the provincial government $50 (or was that $100, I can't remember) and they sent me back a form approving the name. I had to show that form to the bank when I went to open an account under my business name.
I get a renewal notice in the mail about every 5 years asking for another $50 to continue the registration for another 5 years.
The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time.
With the advances in printing technology you'd think it would'nt have gone up at much or even at all, but it's a buck now.
I subscribe to the daily paper (only 6 days per week, no Sunday paper here) and it costs close to $300/year for it.
Every time I renew it I debate whether it's really worth the money. One of these years I'll convince myself that it's not.
I just have a particular time of day that I always sit and read the paper and I'm such a creature of habit that it would be traumatic to change that. So I keep avoiding it and just renew the paper every year. So far...
The problem is that social networking websites make their money by undermining user privacy;
Since the only exposure that I have had to Facebook and the like is comments on Slashdot and I have never knowingly visited the Facebook website, your comment here strikes me as very odd.
Isn't the POINT of Facebook to get yourself "out there" and be-your-own-celebrity? If so, isn't it contradictory to say "OMG they are stealingj/invading my privacy!" since that's the point of the website in the first place. After all, the only information that they have to "make public" is information that you have voluntarily provided to them for that exact purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
running of code in a bytecode virtual-machine
The first thing that springs to my mind when I read those words is the Infocom Z-Machine, which has been around since 1979 and I'm sure there are examples of lots of stuff like it even earlier than that.
In other words, this virtual machine stuff has been around and been well-known for quite a while.
Is this another 1-click style patent fight?
The author should get more than anyone else, since without them the rest would languish and die.
Primary producers seem to get the short end a lot. The most common example being farmers -- where would middlemen like Cargill be without farmers? But who's making the big bucks on grain shipments? (Hint: Not the farmers.)
What possible reason is there for releasing this stuff anyway? Does it make anyone safer? Unlikely.
On the contrary, the answer is "possibly". If I know the nature of a security hole in Program X, I might be able to find a way to substitute, sandbox or discontinue Program X in my own workflow and thereby become safer.
Good example of this - ... I'm typing this on a 745 that has a "Assembled in the USA" sticker on it)
I don't know if your example is all that good.
You do realize that there is a huge difference between "Assembled in the USA" and "Made in the USA", right?
Since location look-ups on IP addresses from the two main ISP's here resolve to the nearest much larger city (where the ISP's are actually located), I doubt something like that would work even if it was available. All of those online geolocation things tell me that I'm in the city, not here. They have a much larger theatre in the city than mine, too.
Advertising on/through Google may work fine in larger places, but I live in a town of 5000 people and provide a service that's of interest only locally. (I own a movie theatre.) My main advertising is sending a flyer out in the mail.
they never tried to foist PDFs on subscribers instead of HTML
Among other things, I am the "computer guy" for a small publishing company which offers online subscriptions to the paper as well as printed copies.
The online paper is behind a paywall; subscribers actually pay what I consider to be a fairly high amount of money for the content.
When I first set up the online paper (several years ago) I offered it as html files similar to how a website is laid out -- index page, click on the section that you want to read.
To my surprise, I got a lot of feedback from the subscribers asking for a version that they could download and read offline, so I started creating a pdf version of the online paper as well.
The server logs show me that about 80% of the subscribers read the html version of the paper and the pdf version is downloaded by about 35% of the subscribers.
Side note: Around the beginning of this year I started also creating a "mobile version" of the paper for folks with Blackberries and the like -- just the content with no graphics, etc. I see more and more of the subscribers are reading the "mobile version" as time goes by; their user strings show that they use mostly Blackberry and Samsung phones for that.
I suspect that at least part of the reason for the popularity of the pdf version of the paper is that many/most of the primary subscribers are farmers who may be on dial-up or satellite Internet.
If you can take an idea for a piece of software to any software engineer and say "Here, program this for me" and they can program it for you, it isn't an innovative enough idea for a patent. If you take it to an engineer and they say "How the hell am I supposed to do that?" then you have something special. After you get the patent, that same engineer should be able to read your patent and say "Oh, that makes sense" and write the program.
Your solution doesn't cover the situation where someone thinks of doing something that has never been thought of before.
I have a fire burning. If I poke a stick into the campfire, I have a torch that I can use to transfer the fire to a new location!
If nobody thought of poking a stick into a fire before, is that an innovation? Particularly if the question wasn't phrased as "move the fire from point A to point B" because nobody ever considered moving it before?
I don't know.. that might be a bad example. What I'm trying to express is a situation where someone solves a problem that nobody actually realized was a problem before the solution is presented.
Isn't that internally inconsistent? Public domain is public domain. If it's only available to a subset of "everyone", then it's something else.
I like Mickey Spillane's books; he is a wonderful author in my opinion. His opinion of himself, though, is: "I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book."
Also, "I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."
So you can see where he's coming from. Writing for him was just a job. According to Wikipedia, "In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the U.S."
I set up the computers and provide technical support for a small publishing company that prints two weekly classified ad papers (place your classified ads for free, the paper is sold at gas stations and convenience stores); about 15,000 physical papers are printed weekly. Plus there is an online subscription available for people to purchase
The software is a combination of stuff that I wrote myself (the ad database, the program to create the plates for the press, etc) and Scribus, Gimp, and OpenOffice. LTSP is used to support thin client terminals for the staff that enter the ads into the database. Apache and sendmail for their web/email server.
The whole operation runs on Centos 5.
No worries about Windows viruses and everyting runs on automatic pilot as far as I'm concerned, most of the time.
Don't know if I'd call that free. He did pay to have those clothes made, didn't he?
Does he sell retail? (I have no idea.) If not, then he's not the one bearing the cost of the shoplifted item -- the retailer is.
If they signed off on it, they are responsible for it.
So I personally don't blame any of the engineers for this mess.
If they are engineers, they signed off on the project.
If they signed off on it, they are for it.
Period.
That's why engineers get the fancy stamp.
A couple of years ago I called 911 to report a burglary in progress across the street. I got PUT ON HOLD for a few minutes before I could talk to anyone at all. "All of our lines are busy, please hold..." and so on.
I used to think that "You know you're having a bad day when... you call 911 and they put you on hold." was a joke. Apparently it's not.
I wrote a letter of complaint about this matter to the City Council, but nothing was ever done other than sending me back an acknowledgment of receipt.
Firefox 3.6.4 just showed up as an update to RHEL 5 / Centos 5.
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0501.html
There is both a x86_64 version and a i386 version available on the update mirrors.
Up to now, the latest Firefox on Centos 5 has been 3.0.something, so this is a big update.
I hear that if you get a 220V light bulb it has a thicker filament on it and will last virtually forever.
If you run a 220v light bulb on 110v it should indeed last a very long time. But you will get a lot less light out of it than you will with a 110v bulb, so the trade-off is increased power use.
I actually looked into this several years ago for bulbs to illuminate my EXIT signs, but the power required to generate enough light with a 220v bulb was a lot more (triple? I can't remember) than it was worth.
I now have LED bulbs in my EXIT signs that use 3 watts and are supposed to last 20 years running 24 hours a day.
Once again there is no 64-bit Linux version of Firefox available on the official download site.
Sigh...
Global Vision 2020 is doing something similar to this, creating eyeglasses for people in third-world countries.
They have glasses with special lenses that can be filled with oil. The oil changes the shape of the lens.
The client puts the glasses on and fills the lens with oil until he can see clearly. Then the technician seals the glasses so the amount of oil (and shape of the lenses) won't change any further.
$10 per set of glasses, and no optometrist required to issue them.
If you're looking for a worthwhile charity to donate to, this may be one to consider.
for the few things you actually want color for.
I use a colour laser printer to print labels for bags of candy that I sell in my theatre concession. (I buy big bins of candy and pack them into smaller bags and seal them and label them.)
A friend of mine (actually the guy that I hire to do carpentry work for me once in a while) sells baked goods at flea markets. He prints labels for his products (his logo and address, ingredients, best-before, etc.) on his colour laser printer too. He used to do it on an inkjet until I wised him up as to the cost difference between that and a colour laser.
Most people don't have that feature on their Dlink and Linksys home routers and if they do, they don't know how to configure it anyway.
I own and operate a small business in Canada as a sole proprietorship and have two official, registered business names. For each one, I filled out a form and sent the provincial government $50 (or was that $100, I can't remember) and they sent me back a form approving the name. I had to show that form to the bank when I went to open an account under my business name.
I get a renewal notice in the mail about every 5 years asking for another $50 to continue the registration for another 5 years.
That's literally all there was to that.
No more 64-bit Linux version:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html
The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time.
With the advances in printing technology you'd think it would'nt have gone up at much or even at all, but it's a buck now.
I subscribe to the daily paper (only 6 days per week, no Sunday paper here) and it costs close to $300/year for it.
Every time I renew it I debate whether it's really worth the money. One of these years I'll convince myself that it's not.
I just have a particular time of day that I always sit and read the paper and I'm such a creature of habit that it would be traumatic to change that. So I keep avoiding it and just renew the paper every year. So far...
The problem is that social networking websites make their money by undermining user privacy;
Since the only exposure that I have had to Facebook and the like is comments on Slashdot and I have never knowingly visited the Facebook website, your comment here strikes me as very odd.
Isn't the POINT of Facebook to get yourself "out there" and be-your-own-celebrity? If so, isn't it contradictory to say "OMG they are stealingj/invading my privacy!" since that's the point of the website in the first place. After all, the only information that they have to "make public" is information that you have voluntarily provided to them for that exact purpose.
What am I failing to understand about this issue?