What a comic! You should give up your day job as a troll!
Science and Technology graduates per thousand in the 20-29 age group. Ireland 23.2 France 19.6 UK 16.2 USA 10.2 Germany 8.2 Portugal 6.3 Netherlands 5.8
I think a company taking out a full page AD in The Economist with a 'crackpot' claim challenging the accepted fundamental laws of physics is newsworthy. If for nothing else, then just for the sheer audacity of the act.
I have direct personal information that these guys *believe* their own claim. It is not a hoax, nor anything to do with Halo or Xbox. They are not actors. Ireland is a small country and they will have to eat copious servings of humble pie in public if nothing whatsoever comes from this.
My own reaction is that it is too good to be true, and that there will have to be a catch somewhere along the line. Proving once again that there is no free lunch.
> I mean, we all like java, but have you ever seen a normal user application (with a GUI) written in java that is even a bit fast?
Yes, I don't know whether you could call it 'a normal user application' but I use the Eclipse IDE on win2k every day, and it is indistinguishable from a native program in terms of speed.
I have written programs using the Eclipse SWT GUI library (which wraps native widgets) and their interface also performs just as fast as native.exe apps.
The concept is good, but I think the implementation could be Java - if IBM succeed in their current effort to convince Sun to open-source Java.
Bob Sutor of IBM said, in regards to open source java "If you could get every Linux distribution with an official, certified Java implementation where you could count on what it did, what its characteristics were, that would be a very powerful thing,"
On the GUI front, Eclipse SWT is an open source cross-platform native-gui-widget api for Java. It has a GTK implementation on Linux. Interestingly there is also a QT implementation - but due to licensing issues Eclipse have not released it - yet.
I hope IBM succeed in their twisting of Sun's arm on this issue. With Eclipse, and the vast array of open source java libraries available, java is a good platform for developing on linux, and other platforms.
But in addition to SUSE, the desktop-centric distros ; Lindows, Mandrake, Xandros, Lycoris et al have all favoured KDE.
This will be a tricky one for Novell to handle, because it is more than just some developers at SUSE who would be upset if they dropped KDE as their preferred desktop.
In the interest of desktop Linux generally it would probably be good for adoption and growth to have consolidation on the desktop.
It would be dissapointing though, if it was a company who ended up have the largest influence on that outcome because of a purchase they made, rather than consolodation through evolutionary growth based on merit alone.
I am an owner of one of those "lamp" computers, the 17" LCD iMac.
We bought it because my girlfriend does graphic work and needed the colors on the screen to match the colors coming out of the printer (something which was giving trouble on our , admittedly cheap, pc and monitor that we had before.)
I have to say that one the whole, despite being wowed by the sheer beauty of the machine and the interface, I am dissapointed with our purchase.
The performance is certainly slower than an equivalently priced PC - even my XP Pro laptop, which was only couple of hundred $ more than the iMac blows it away in terms of overall performance. This seems to be because of OS X (Jaguar) because when we boot into OS 9 it is much faster. I hear that Panther has improved performance, but I will feel a bit robbed if I end up paying another $140 for an upgrade to a system that is very new, and was already highly priced.
I think that it will take time for Linux desktop distro solutions to mature to the point where they have the software choices and ease of use that matches Windows/Mac, but when that day comes it will be good for users in general. When Linux has a 30% desktop share, it will keep Apple and Microsoft on their toes. We may look back on a time when trying to charge $140 for an OS upgrade every couple of years seems inconceivable.
Clearly this article illuminates some of the practical/political and economic problems that need to be addressed with the electricity grid. But what about security?
It seems to me from reading the article (and looking at the nice maps of the elecricity flow) that you do not need to be a rocket scientist to make a good attempt at prompting a blackout through sabotage.
Consider these facts: Transmission lines often go through remote areas. It is not infeasible to deliberately short circuit these lines. The system has been proven to be fragile. There is a lot of information in the public domain about how power is transmitted.
How do you design a grid that is tolerant against faults that may be planned as opposed to accidental?
The property laws were created by the people, for the people. They decided that it was in everyone's mutual interest to have intellectual property laws that could provide some guarantee against the initial investment of the innovator, and an opportunity for profit.
I think most people on/. agree with this fundamental principle. It's when there is a hijacking of the obvious (requiring little or no investment on behalf of the patentee) that people here get annoyed.
I could have invented the one-click thing in about 10 seconds. Put a plan on paper in a few hours - using standard computer science practices and tools for its implementation. Where's the innovative development effort in that?
It hurts smart *innovative* individuals and companies, when they can't utilise their common sense and common knowledge to create ideas and wealth - because someone else had the money for lawyers to put barriers in their way.
IP laws should encourage innovation without stifling valid competition.
Also, I hate to rant or go off topic but..
"In an unfree society (e.g. the Soviet Union, Europe, etc"
Isn't the point of intellectual property rights (as alluded to by Jefferson in the quote you gave) to encourage innovation?
Individuals or companies won't expend the effort and capital risk required to develop new inventions, if they know that the fruits of their effort and capital can be exploited immediately by the anyone else.
The purpose of IP rights (granted for a limited term) is to protect and encourage that kind of investment, but this is where the problem arises with cases like this - how much investment of effort or capital is required to apply common-knowledge techniques to a straight-forward problem?
At some point, you begin to stifle innovation and progress if you prohibit the use of common-knowledge or obvious techniques.
Checksums are just a commonly used tool in computer science. If that's the core of this patent, it probably took this company about five minutes to come up with the general idea of using them to monitor web pages for changes. How much of an investment is that?...
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What a comic! You should give up your day job as a troll!
Science and Technology graduates per thousand in the 20-29 age group.
Ireland 23.2
France 19.6
UK 16.2
USA 10.2
Germany 8.2
Portugal 6.3
Netherlands 5.8
Source - IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, 2006
I think a company taking out a full page AD in The Economist with a 'crackpot' claim challenging the accepted fundamental laws of physics is newsworthy. If for nothing else, then just for the sheer audacity of the act.
I have direct personal information that these guys *believe* their own claim. It is not a hoax, nor anything to do with Halo or Xbox. They are not actors. Ireland is a small country and they will have to eat copious servings of humble pie in public if nothing whatsoever comes from this.
My own reaction is that it is too good to be true, and that there will have to be a catch somewhere along the line. Proving once again that there is no free lunch.
Can't believe chonky:
http://www.insaneclips.com/chonky.php
isn't on the list
It's great that there is a free (as in speech) iTunes. But will it work with my free (as in beer) iPod??
> I mean, we all like java, but have you ever seen a normal user application (with a GUI) written in java that is even a bit fast?
.exe apps.
Yes, I don't know whether you could call it 'a normal user application' but I use the Eclipse IDE on win2k every day, and it is indistinguishable from a native program in terms of speed.
I have written programs using the Eclipse SWT GUI library (which wraps native widgets) and their interface also performs just as fast as native
The concept is good, but I think the implementation could be Java - if IBM succeed in their current effort to convince Sun to open-source Java.
Bob Sutor of IBM said, in regards to open source java "If you could get every Linux distribution with an official, certified Java implementation where you could count on what it did, what its characteristics were, that would be a very powerful thing,"
On the GUI front, Eclipse SWT is an open source cross-platform native-gui-widget api for Java. It has a GTK implementation on Linux. Interestingly there is also a QT implementation - but due to licensing issues Eclipse have not released it - yet.
I hope IBM succeed in their twisting of Sun's arm on this issue. With Eclipse, and the vast array of open source java libraries available, java is a good platform for developing on linux, and other platforms.
-f
>Sun and RedHat are both using GNOME now
But in addition to SUSE, the desktop-centric distros ; Lindows, Mandrake, Xandros, Lycoris et al have all favoured KDE.
This will be a tricky one for Novell to handle, because it is more than just some developers at SUSE who would be upset if they dropped KDE as their preferred desktop.
In the interest of desktop Linux generally it would probably be good for adoption and growth to have consolidation on the desktop.
It would be dissapointing though, if it was a company who ended up have the largest influence on that outcome because of a purchase they made, rather than consolodation through evolutionary growth based on merit alone.
-f
I am an owner of one of those "lamp" computers, the 17" LCD iMac.
We bought it because my girlfriend does graphic work and needed the colors on the screen to match the colors coming out of the printer (something which was giving trouble on our , admittedly cheap, pc and monitor that we had before.)
I have to say that one the whole, despite being wowed by the sheer beauty of the machine and the interface, I am dissapointed with our purchase.
The performance is certainly slower than an equivalently priced PC - even my XP Pro laptop, which was only couple of hundred $ more than the iMac blows it away in terms of overall performance. This seems to be because of OS X (Jaguar) because when we boot into OS 9 it is much faster. I hear that Panther has improved performance, but I will feel a bit robbed if I end up paying another $140 for an upgrade to a system that is very new, and was already highly priced.
I think that it will take time for Linux desktop distro solutions to mature to the point where they have the software choices and ease of use that matches Windows/Mac, but when that day comes it will be good for users in general. When Linux has a 30% desktop share, it will keep Apple and Microsoft on their toes. We may look back on a time when trying to charge $140 for an OS upgrade every couple of years seems inconceivable.
Clearly this article illuminates some of the practical/political and economic problems that need to be addressed with the electricity grid. But what about security?
It seems to me from reading the article (and looking at the nice maps of the elecricity flow) that you do not need to be a rocket scientist to make a good attempt at prompting a blackout through sabotage.
Consider these facts: Transmission lines often go through remote areas. It is not infeasible to deliberately short circuit these lines. The system has been proven to be fragile. There is a lot of information in the public domain about how power is transmitted.
How do you design a grid that is tolerant against faults that may be planned as opposed to accidental?
-f
Wearing a tie will make you go blind... and the New Scientist are reporting that masturbation is
good for you.
The property laws were created by the people, for the people. They decided that it was in everyone's mutual interest to have intellectual property laws that could provide some guarantee against the initial investment of the innovator, and an opportunity for profit. /. agree with this fundamental principle. It's when there is a hijacking of the obvious (requiring little or no investment on behalf of the patentee) that people here get annoyed.
I think most people on
I could have invented the one-click thing in about 10 seconds. Put a plan on paper in a few hours - using standard computer science practices and tools for its implementation. Where's the innovative development effort in that?
It hurts smart *innovative* individuals and companies, when they can't utilise their common sense and common knowledge to create ideas and wealth - because someone else had the money for lawyers to put barriers in their way.
IP laws should encourage innovation without stifling valid competition.
Also, I hate to rant or go off topic but..
"In an unfree society (e.g. the Soviet Union, Europe, etc"
Europe, etc?!?
What planet are you on mate?
Isn't the point of intellectual property rights (as alluded to by Jefferson in the quote you gave) to encourage innovation? Individuals or companies won't expend the effort and capital risk required to develop new inventions, if they know that the fruits of their effort and capital can be exploited immediately by the anyone else. The purpose of IP rights (granted for a limited term) is to protect and encourage that kind of investment, but this is where the problem arises with cases like this - how much investment of effort or capital is required to apply common-knowledge techniques to a straight-forward problem? At some point, you begin to stifle innovation and progress if you prohibit the use of common-knowledge or obvious techniques. Checksums are just a commonly used tool in computer science. If that's the core of this patent, it probably took this company about five minutes to come up with the general idea of using them to monitor web pages for changes. How much of an investment is that? ...