Flywheels have promise as short term energy storage for things like regenerative braking, where the car's energy of motion would go into the flywheel as it slowed down, and then be used to accelerate later.
The gyroscopic forces can be eliminated (mostly) by having two flywheels spinning in opposote directions.
Flywheels can never (IMHO) be a full-time automotive engine for safety reasons. When a flywheel fails, its entire energy is released at once. The more energy a flywheel stores, the faster it has to spin and the shorter the time that its energy will be released in. So you'll have the equivalent energy of a tank of gas being released in about 20 microseconds. BOOM!!
Note that it is irrelevant what the flywheel is made of. Energy is energy, and it has to go somewhere. Unless you can convince me that the energy is in the form of neutrinos (lotsa luck!) it's going to be heat. Basically, in the case of (say) a catastrophic vacuum failure, your flywheel would turn into a ball of very hot plasma.
is the tone of the article. The author of the piece found this sort of corporate intellegence gathering quite disturbing. Remember, this is in Business Week -- about as pro-business as it's possible to get.
Check out how much an obstetrician pays in malpractice insurance. Mind boggling. Any problem with the baby and the parents tend to sue anybody in sight.
We're already seeing one of the main restraints on high-tech medicine like gene therapy. Something goes wrong (hey, it's experimental, after all!) and the lawsuits start flying. The USA's legal system basically allows anybody to sue anybody for anything, any time.
there's no way in Hell that the FAA would approve this. If it works, it means nothing for the FAA. If anything at all goes wrong, they'll get blamed. No vitamins at all for them.
Try it without FAA approval, and he'll spend a *long* time in jail (if he survives, of course). Legally, it would probably be in the same category as shooting a Stinger missle at an airliner.
NASA and the military have a monopoly on rocket flights in the US, and they're going to keep it that way. Look at all the hassles that Orbital Sciences went through to be able to launch their own rockets. Basically, they have to opeaate under the total control of the military.
about regular expressions, configuration management, build management, or testing. Try any of these in Visual C++ and you'll find yourself falling over your own feet. There's also the funky directory structure that VC++ keeps trying to force you into. (Basically, it's a rather deep strict tree, with everything you add as a subtree of whatever you did last.)
Then there's the cost factor. Buy a copy of VC++ (not cheap!) and you're not done. Seems like every time you turn around, you need a new piece of software. The justification, of course, is that a programmer costs (mumble) thousand dollars per year, so a few thousand extra for "productivity tools" is negligible. Sweet deal for Microsoft and friends.
Admittedly, the last big project I did with VC++ was for WinCE (doesn't anybody *look* at these acronyms??). That's guaranteed to leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
Re:What disappoints me...
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
The disappointing thing about cases like this is that the software professionals who write these programs apparently don't consider ethical behavior to be a priority.
The ACM and the IEEE consider user privacy to be so important that it appears in their joint Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice in a number of places, to wit:
Coupla problems:
Not everybody is a member of ACM or IEEE. (IMHO, if you're not a member of both, you're simply not a professional.)
Even for those who are members, not everybody subscribes to the Code of Ethics. You don't have to sign it to join.
The Code is toothless. Violate it and nobody will say "boo" to you.
Most programmers, at some time or other, find themselves in a situation where the boss says "This is *not* unethical. Do it or you're fired". Don't say what you'd do in this situation until it happens....
The biggst point, however, is that there can be honest disagreements about how the Code applies to a particular piece of software. For example, most folks would agree that a Webpage hit counter is not unethical, while mailing a user's address books to the company is unethical. Everything else is in the middle. I'm sure that the Mattel programmers see their spyware as not that much different from a hit counter or a banner ad generator.
It's awfully easy to say "But we would *never* do anything nasty" and look the other way.
Opera will have a problem trying to win against the likes of Mozilla. While Opera is certainly lighter, but I don't see how a closed source and commercial browser can win out against an open source, standards compliant and free browser.
Like what? (dives under desk)
Let's see:
It can be faster
It can be smaller
It can have a better user interface
It can be more configurable
It can crash less
Will Opera for Linux do any of this? We'll see. Will Mozilla? We'll see. Right now, neither of them is ready for prime time.
Netscape isn't making many friends with the 4.x series.
Gotta news flash, Sherlock. Companies don't sponsor events or donate equipment out of altrusim. They're in it for money, and the name of the game is "marketing". While events like this one are obnoxious and worrying, I am even more worried about McDonalds, for example, sponsoring things in elementary schools.
In general, I am worried about the state of universities nowadays. Between corporate sponsorship, governmemt twiddling, funding messes, academic infighting, "publish or perish" and an overall "trade school" mentality, it looks to me like the traditional "university" is simply going away.
Great. Somebody is getting set to collect massive amounts of information from a gazillion PCs and install remote-control software, letting them do essentially anything.
And the only threat that folks see is DDOS? Get real. Denial of service is about as exciting and useful as a traffic jam.
Some crackers with a bit of subtlety could clean up. Lets's see, we could:
Steal everybody's Quicken/TurboTax files and start cleaning out bank accounts
Scan for interesting trade secrets/blackmail info
Plant kiddie porn on people we don't like
Get in interactively and make some subtle changes in documents/spreadsheets/databases
Periodically ping a website to jack up the hit counters.
I'm sure just about any/. poster could come up with enough "interesting" ideas to keep the nice people at the Justice Department awake for a long time.
You know something. I find it very disgusting how so many people who advocate an anonymous internet when it comes to file sharing on Napster, and so forth, but the MINUTE they get spammed, they are all shouting about accountability and how we need better records of who is using the internt.
Reality check here.
There is a *huge* difference between anonymity and forgery. The kind of forgery that spammers do is the corporate version of identity theft, with trademark violation (your domain is your trademark, right?) and libel thrown in.
Legally, nothing is going to be done until some big guys get hurt. Not likely.
The only combat we have against Spammers, is the capitalist approach. Spammers would not be in business, if not for all of the nullheaded PR people who feel they need to mass-market the internet cheaply.
Not likely. Look how many people opened an e-mail attachment called "love-letter-for-you" from a business collegue. Even if nobody replies, all that's necessary for spam to work is for the spammers to convince their sleazeball customers that it works. There's one born every minute.
From a technical standpoint, stopping spam is fairly simple. All you need to do is have mail relays verify that the message is coming from the source listed in the headers. Simple, that is, until you get to the phrase "everybody on the Internet has to...."
I've always thought that the stupid little story lines that go with these games should end with something like "You finish what is possibly the last bottle of Scotch in the universe, make sure your electric wheelchair is fully charged, and start into the tunnel."
Seriously, if a level is named "chemical plant" or "spacecraft hanger" it should look like one, and not just another mass of anonymous tunnels.
Even the most ultra-liberal, pinko, gun-confiscating, bleeding heart liberal has wanted to do this at one time or another.
Reminds me of a story from the Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s. A bunch of student radicals took over the computer center at a large university. If their demands were not met, they would Destroy the Computer, symbol of opression. Admin ignored them. So they tried.
This was a big IBM mainframe. The radicals discovered a number of interesting facts:
The computer center staff had shut the computer down and thoughtfully removed anything that looked like a tool.
They had cut power to the computer from outside the computer center.
All the cases require a special tool to open. The radicals had maybe a screwdriver.
You need a floor sucker to get to any of the cables under the raised floor. The radicals didn't have one.
Hitting the cases with a chair accomplishes nothing. Heavy steel.
Monitors are *very* hard to break.
The only thing you can damage with a pocket knife is the upholstry on the operator's chair.
Setting a fire in the computer room was more dangerous to them than it was to the computer.
However, they did a real job on the console keyboard.
What the study shows is that in areas where Napster is a major source of music procurement sales of albums have gone down.
Huh again???
The study found that sales droppen *most* near campuses where Napster has been banned. I doubt that the music industry people did an analysis of download frequencies before they issued their injunctions. Probably just looked for administrations that could be easily shoved around.
If you want to claim that Napster "caused" the sales to decline, you have to explain how sales declined most where it isn't being used.
Yeah, I know people dumb enough to risk getting kicked out of school for downloading a Metallica album. Not many, tho. Even fewer who also know how to bypass a firewall.
Given a set of numbers, and a target sum, determine if any combination of the numbers add up to the target sum (Subset-sum problem)
??
Isn't this the same as the "knapsack problem", used in some early public-key crypto? I thought that this had been solved. At least the cryptosystems were broken. Too bad -- they're a lot simpler than the DH-RSA stuff.
Note also that a problem in P is not necessarily an easy/fast problem. It just determines how the problem scales as it gets bigger. Even there, if you have a solution that scales as n^1000, it won't buy you much.
Main thing, if a problem is in P, it's worth looking for a simpler solution. Doesn't mean you'll find a usable one.
1) host your own web site. Get a T1 and your own hardware. This puts the responsablity onto your own sholders.
Also consider business-class (as opposed to residential) class DSL. A bit more expensive, but they *expect* you to run servers, plus you deal with people who have at least a minimal clue.
3) If anyone does send you a letter asking you to take stuff down. Talk to your lawyer. Near as I can tell the stuff that they are going after falls into a few very specific catagories. (Copyright violations etc)
*Definitely* talk to a lawyer who knows the subject. The intellectual property thugs expect that anything from a lawyer will get immediate action, no matter how obviously bogus the complaint.
Unfortunately, *all* of the complaints that I have seen claim trademark or copyright violations. The claims may be totally bogus, but the lawyers know how to word the complaints so they *look* legit to an ignorant judge.
I have heard noises from large companies with bored lawyers that they consider *any mention* of their trademarks to be an infringement. This means that if you put up a page criticizing International Brontosaurus, they can claim "trademark violation" and force you to take the page down.
BTW, has anybody ever been charged with perjury for filing a bogus complaint? I suspect not -- you'd have to get a lawyer to file a complaint against another lawyer, and lawyers don't do that.
Don't be silly. Formal methods prove that a formalized version of a program matches a formalized version of a specification. Very good for nice, clean, precise things like floating point algorithms.
Unfortunately, real programs are written in real computer languages from specifications written in real human language. They also have to interact with real operating systems running on real hardware. Don't forget the nice, messy anynchronous "real world" data.
Formal methods are also incredibly complex for any nontrivial program.
Your assignment for Monday is to prove the correctness of the Linux kernel.
Why Am I Thinking of "The Producers"?
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 1
"The Producers" (the movie that put Mel Brooks on the map, and one of the funniest movies ever made) was about a couple of Broadway producers who came up with a sure-fire get rich quick scheme. They sold part shares in a future production that totalled far more than 100%. Then they produced a play that was guaranteed to fail miserably. They pocket the loot, and nobody's the wiser.
So Boo.com gets umpty gazillion pounds for a Web-based business. Then they combine a questionable business model with a totally unusable Web site. Now they're bankrupt. "So sorry, money all gone. Goodbye".
If I had invested in these turkeys, I would want a *really good* look at the books. I'll lay odds that the executives (especially the CEO) aren't going to be sleeping on steam grates....
Developing commercial software for Linux is pretty much the same as developing commercial software for Windoze. Does Word Perfect work any better on Linux than it does on Windoze? Not that I've seen.
The strength of Open Source is in things that are outside of the core business area. If your company needs a program to frob wampuses, and frobbing wampuses is not part of your core business, they'll put a couple of programmers on it. The way these things work, they'll come up with a clunky, limited program that does the job strictly as specified.
Fine. Now what do you do with it? In the "conventional" business model, the suits clutch it to their collective breasts and cackle "Mine!! All Mine!!!" like a miser in a bad movie. The software sits there and festers. It can't be sold (it's outside of the core business, remember) and the programmers move on to other things. Bit rot sets in.
However, suppose the company releases it as open source. Now, anybody else that wants to frob wampuses can grab a copy and hack on it. One guy needs a better user interface. Another needs to handle other types of wampuses. Yet another wants an interface in Turkish. Now, you've got a classic Open Source project, a la tC&tB , and all you have to do is ride it. Your programmers get recognition in the Open Source community and you get a better program, all for less than you'd probably spend on maintenence of the original.
Trying this in a core business area is a recipe for disaster. Mozilla is *how* late now? Why should Joe Programmer spend his spare time hacking your software just so that *you* can make money off of it?
Economics is the best example I know of the Eastern philosophical concept that we "make our own reality". (The stock market, of course, is a microcosm of economics.) It works if and only if we all believe it works. Why does the US economy work? Because everybody believes it does. Why doesn't the Russian economy work? Because everybody believes it doesn't.
All of the little formulas that the "conventional" stock market wonks will show you have no more basis in reality than the latest political poll -- it's what people believe right now, with no other basis.
So, the new companies don't make a "profit"? So? Any corporate accountant worth his green eyeshade can make any amount of "profit" appear and disappear like magic. About the only thing a company can do with "profit" is pay taxes on it. Reinvest cashflow and the company grows, but no "profit". Of course, if a company "makes a profit", its stock goes up, because everybody knows that, the more "profit" a company makes, the more its stock is worth (consensus reality again).
The rules changed in 1913 when the first income tax came in. The stock market wonks are just starting to notice. We will come out of this with a new set of rules, just as soon as everybody can agree on what they are. Whoever guesses right about the "new rules" will make *lots* of money....
They say that the military is always preparing for the last war. For the US, that would be (depending on how you juggle definitions) Korea, Vietnam, or Desert Storm. In all of them, the US was fighting an enemy that was vastly inferior technically, but had a huge advantage in manpower and (in Vietnam) terrain.
So we design weapons and tactics based on high-tech doodads that our enemies (presumably) can't duplicate or counter. IMHO, if we ever have to tangle with anybody anywhere near our technological level, we're screwed. Our gold plated hardware would be sitting ducks for AI controlled robots.
A note -- in the report on the Iranian hostage rescue mission (1979? 1980? sorry, don't have the report handy), two of the main problems they found were failures of high-tech equipment (carbon fiber helicopter rotors with built-in crack detection) and micromanagement enabled by high-tech communications.
Lawyers write the laws. Admittedly, there are areas that are much worse than patents (take a look at the tax laws sometime), but patents are pretty bad.
That said, the biggest problem with the patent system seems to be the extreme overload of the system from gazillions of applications, plus the lack of patent examiners who are remotely familiar with the fields they're working with. "Prior art" nowadays seems to mean looking in the patent system database and nowhere else.
We definately need some new laws to tighten up the requirements for "novelty" and "usefulness". We also need a way of getting the real experts in the fields involved to look at patent applications. Could an "open source" arrangement work? Publish applications on the Web and let everybody make comments? (I rather suspect not; there are just too many applications.)
One reform that the US patent system needs is to move from the "first to invent" system used only in the US to the "first to file" system used everywhere else. "First to file" is trivial to determine -- just look at the postmark on the application. "First to invent" is just another playground for lawyers.
Another reform would be to tighten up the time between publication of an idea and filing for a patent. This is one of the problems with the LZW patents used in GIFs. Unisys filed the patent well after the article describing LZW compression was published. None of the authors of the paper, BTW, had any connection with Unisys. At the very least, any publication of the idea should contain an "intent to file" statement.
But it won't happen. The lawyers in Congress aren't going to do anything that would cut down on their colleagues' incomes, and the Big Money likes things confusing. Neither Congress nor Big Business cares squat about "promoting the progress of science and useful arts".
Hmm. Advertisers use animated GIFs because they jerk your attention to their ads and away from the reason that you're looking at the page in the first place. Netscape and Microsoft aren't going to do anything to piss off advertisers.
On Explorer, go to View -> Internet Options -> Advanced menu. Uncheck the box for Multimedia -> Play Animations. Click OK.
Bleahh. Netscape is just as bad.
Or you can use Opera. Click the little button on the window's title bar and all the images go away. There's another little button that makes all the backgrounds go away (no more dark green on black) and resets the fonts (no more 4 point type).
You have to pay for Opera, but they aren't beholden to banner advertisers for their profit model.
And more to the point, what kind of indemnety is Pinkerton willing to pay for false positives? Say, US$100,000 for each attempted suicide and US$1,000,000 for each successful suicide of any otherwise harmless geek? US$10,000 for each kid that gets beat up as a result of being turned in?
C'mon, Pinkerton -- if you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is, you're just another bunch of snake oil salesmen, trying to suck up to the public trough. Clever racket -- school shootings are so rare that nobody can really tell if your system works. *You* don't care if you ruin a few thousand lives, as long as you get the dough.
If you aren't willing to pay indemnities, then you don't believe in your own system. If you don't believe in it, why should anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
Flywheels have promise as short term energy storage for things like regenerative braking, where the car's energy of motion would go into the flywheel as it slowed down, and then be used to accelerate later.
The gyroscopic forces can be eliminated (mostly) by having two flywheels spinning in opposote directions.
Flywheels can never (IMHO) be a full-time automotive engine for safety reasons. When a flywheel fails, its entire energy is released at once. The more energy a flywheel stores, the faster it has to spin and the shorter the time that its energy will be released in. So you'll have the equivalent energy of a tank of gas being released in about 20 microseconds. BOOM!!
Note that it is irrelevant what the flywheel is made of. Energy is energy, and it has to go somewhere. Unless you can convince me that the energy is in the form of neutrinos (lotsa luck!) it's going to be heat. Basically, in the case of (say) a catastrophic vacuum failure, your flywheel would turn into a ball of very hot plasma.
is the tone of the article. The author of the piece found this sort of corporate intellegence gathering quite disturbing. Remember, this is in Business Week -- about as pro-business as it's possible to get.
Maybe there's hope yet!
Check out how much an obstetrician pays in malpractice insurance. Mind boggling. Any problem with the baby and the parents tend to sue anybody in sight.
We're already seeing one of the main restraints on high-tech medicine like gene therapy. Something goes wrong (hey, it's experimental, after all!) and the lawsuits start flying. The USA's legal system basically allows anybody to sue anybody for anything, any time.
there's no way in Hell that the FAA would approve this. If it works, it means nothing for the FAA. If anything at all goes wrong, they'll get blamed. No vitamins at all for them.
Try it without FAA approval, and he'll spend a *long* time in jail (if he survives, of course). Legally, it would probably be in the same category as shooting a Stinger missle at an airliner.
NASA and the military have a monopoly on rocket flights in the US, and they're going to keep it that way. Look at all the hassles that Orbital Sciences went through to be able to launch their own rockets. Basically, they have to opeaate under the total control of the military.
about regular expressions, configuration management, build management, or testing. Try any of these in Visual C++ and you'll find yourself falling over your own feet. There's also the funky directory structure that VC++ keeps trying to force you into. (Basically, it's a rather deep strict tree, with everything you add as a subtree of whatever you did last.)
Then there's the cost factor. Buy a copy of VC++ (not cheap!) and you're not done. Seems like every time you turn around, you need a new piece of software. The justification, of course, is that a programmer costs (mumble) thousand dollars per year, so a few thousand extra for "productivity tools" is negligible. Sweet deal for Microsoft and friends.
Admittedly, the last big project I did with VC++ was for WinCE (doesn't anybody *look* at these acronyms??). That's guaranteed to leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
The disappointing thing about cases like this is that the software professionals who write these programs apparently don't consider ethical behavior to be a priority.
The ACM and the IEEE consider user privacy to be so important that it appears in their joint Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice in a number of places, to wit:
Coupla problems:
The biggst point, however, is that there can be honest disagreements about how the Code applies to a particular piece of software. For example, most folks would agree that a Webpage hit counter is not unethical, while mailing a user's address books to the company is unethical. Everything else is in the middle. I'm sure that the Mattel programmers see their spyware as not that much different from a hit counter or a banner ad generator.
It's awfully easy to say "But we would *never* do anything nasty" and look the other way.
Like what? (dives under desk)
Let's see:
Will Opera for Linux do any of this? We'll see. Will Mozilla? We'll see. Right now, neither of them is ready for prime time.
Netscape isn't making many friends with the 4.x series.
Gotta news flash, Sherlock. Companies don't sponsor events or donate equipment out of altrusim. They're in it for money, and the name of the game is "marketing". While events like this one are obnoxious and worrying, I am even more worried about McDonalds, for example, sponsoring things in elementary schools.
In general, I am worried about the state of universities nowadays. Between corporate sponsorship, governmemt twiddling, funding messes, academic infighting, "publish or perish" and an overall "trade school" mentality, it looks to me like the traditional "university" is simply going away.
Uhh ... Haven't you been following the reports on all the nasty bugs that live on telephones?
Ship off all the telephone cleaners and we could all be wiped out by a plague.
In this case, we have a ready-made cult. The "Church" of Scientology is probably forcing its members to watch, even as we make fun of it.
Great. Somebody is getting set to collect massive amounts of information from a gazillion PCs and install remote-control software, letting them do essentially anything.
And the only threat that folks see is DDOS? Get real. Denial of service is about as exciting and useful as a traffic jam.
Some crackers with a bit of subtlety could clean up. Lets's see, we could:
I'm sure just about any /. poster could come up with enough "interesting" ideas to keep the nice people at the Justice Department awake for a long time.
You know something. I find it very disgusting how so many people who advocate an anonymous internet when it comes to file sharing on Napster,
...."
and so forth, but the MINUTE they get spammed, they are all shouting about accountability and how we need better records of who is using the internt.
Reality check here.
There is a *huge* difference between anonymity and forgery. The kind of forgery that spammers do is the corporate version of identity theft, with trademark violation (your domain is your trademark, right?) and libel thrown in.
Legally, nothing is going to be done until some big guys get hurt. Not likely.
The only combat we have against Spammers, is the capitalist approach. Spammers would not be in business, if not for all of the nullheaded PR people who feel they need to mass-market the internet cheaply.
Not likely. Look how many people opened an e-mail attachment called "love-letter-for-you" from a business collegue. Even if nobody replies, all that's necessary for spam to work is for the spammers to convince their sleazeball customers that it works. There's one born every minute.
From a technical standpoint, stopping spam is fairly simple. All you need to do is have mail relays verify that the message is coming from the source listed in the headers. Simple, that is, until you get to the phrase "everybody on the Internet has to
I've always thought that the stupid little story lines that go with these games should end with something like "You finish what is possibly the last bottle of Scotch in the universe, make sure your electric wheelchair is fully charged, and start into the tunnel."
Seriously, if a level is named "chemical plant" or "spacecraft hanger" it should look like one, and not just another mass of anonymous tunnels.
Nobody cares about the "story line", anyway.
Reminds me of a story from the Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s. A bunch of student radicals took over the computer center at a large university. If their demands were not met, they would Destroy the Computer, symbol of opression. Admin ignored them. So they tried.
This was a big IBM mainframe. The radicals discovered a number of interesting facts:
However, they did a real job on the console keyboard.
Huh???
What the study shows is that in areas where Napster is a major source of music procurement sales of albums have gone down.
Huh again???
The study found that sales droppen *most* near campuses where Napster has been banned. I doubt that the music industry people did an analysis of download frequencies before they issued their injunctions. Probably just looked for administrations that could be easily shoved around.
If you want to claim that Napster "caused" the sales to decline, you have to explain how sales declined most where it isn't being used.
Yeah, I know people dumb enough to risk getting kicked out of school for downloading a Metallica album. Not many, tho. Even fewer who also know how to bypass a firewall.
"Copyright pirates vs. copyright thugs."
Given a set of numbers, and a target sum, determine if any combination of the numbers add up to the target sum (Subset-sum problem)
??
Isn't this the same as the "knapsack problem", used in some early public-key crypto? I thought that this had been solved. At least the cryptosystems were broken. Too bad -- they're a lot simpler than the DH-RSA stuff.
Note also that a problem in P is not necessarily an easy/fast problem. It just determines how the problem scales as it gets bigger. Even there, if you have a solution that scales as n^1000, it won't buy you much.
Main thing, if a problem is in P, it's worth looking for a simpler solution. Doesn't mean you'll find a usable one.
1) host your own web site. Get a T1 and your own hardware. This puts the responsablity onto your own sholders.
Also consider business-class (as opposed to residential) class DSL. A bit more expensive, but they *expect* you to run servers, plus you deal with people who have at least a minimal clue.
3) If anyone does send you a letter asking you to take stuff down. Talk to your lawyer. Near as I can tell the stuff that they are going after falls into a few very specific catagories. (Copyright violations etc)
*Definitely* talk to a lawyer who knows the subject. The intellectual property thugs expect that anything from a lawyer will get immediate action, no matter how obviously bogus the complaint.
Unfortunately, *all* of the complaints that I have seen claim trademark or copyright violations. The claims may be totally bogus, but the lawyers know how to word the complaints so they *look* legit to an ignorant judge.
I have heard noises from large companies with bored lawyers that they consider *any mention* of their trademarks to be an infringement. This means that if you put up a page criticizing International Brontosaurus, they can claim "trademark violation" and force you to take the page down.
BTW, has anybody ever been charged with perjury for filing a bogus complaint? I suspect not -- you'd have to get a lawyer to file a complaint against another lawyer, and lawyers don't do that.
Don't be silly. Formal methods prove that a formalized version of a program matches a formalized version of a specification. Very good for nice, clean, precise things like floating point algorithms.
Unfortunately, real programs are written in real computer languages from specifications written in real human language. They also have to interact with real operating systems running on real hardware. Don't forget the nice, messy anynchronous "real world" data.
Formal methods are also incredibly complex for any nontrivial program.
Your assignment for Monday is to prove the correctness of the Linux kernel.
"The Producers" (the movie that put Mel Brooks on the map, and one of the funniest movies ever made) was about a couple of Broadway producers who came up with a sure-fire get rich quick scheme. They sold part shares in a future production that totalled far more than 100%. Then they produced a play that was guaranteed to fail miserably. They pocket the loot, and nobody's the wiser.
....
So Boo.com gets umpty gazillion pounds for a Web-based business. Then they combine a questionable business model with a totally unusable Web site. Now they're bankrupt. "So sorry, money all gone. Goodbye".
If I had invested in these turkeys, I would want a *really good* look at the books. I'll lay odds that the executives (especially the CEO) aren't going to be sleeping on steam grates
Developing commercial software for Linux is pretty much the same as developing commercial software for Windoze. Does Word Perfect work any better on Linux than it does on Windoze? Not that I've seen.
The strength of Open Source is in things that are outside of the core business area. If your company needs a program to frob wampuses, and frobbing wampuses is not part of your core business, they'll put a couple of programmers on it. The way these things work, they'll come up with a clunky, limited program that does the job strictly as specified.
Fine. Now what do you do with it? In the "conventional" business model, the suits clutch it to their collective breasts and cackle "Mine!! All Mine!!!" like a miser in a bad movie. The software sits there and festers. It can't be sold (it's outside of the core business, remember) and the programmers move on to other things. Bit rot sets in.
However, suppose the company releases it as open source. Now, anybody else that wants to frob wampuses can grab a copy and hack on it. One guy needs a better user interface. Another needs to handle other types of wampuses. Yet another wants an interface in Turkish. Now, you've got a classic Open Source project, a la tC&tB , and all you have to do is ride it. Your programmers get recognition in the Open Source community and you get a better program, all for less than you'd probably spend on maintenence of the original.
Trying this in a core business area is a recipe for disaster. Mozilla is *how* late now? Why should Joe Programmer spend his spare time hacking your software just so that *you* can make money off of it?
Economics is the best example I know of the Eastern philosophical concept that we "make our own reality". (The stock market, of course, is a microcosm of economics.) It works if and only if we all believe it works. Why does the US economy work? Because everybody believes it does. Why doesn't the Russian economy work? Because everybody believes it doesn't.
....
All of the little formulas that the "conventional" stock market wonks will show you have no more basis in reality than the latest political poll -- it's what people believe right now, with no other basis.
So, the new companies don't make a "profit"? So? Any corporate accountant worth his green eyeshade can make any amount of "profit" appear and disappear like magic. About the only thing a company can do with "profit" is pay taxes on it. Reinvest cashflow and the company grows, but no "profit". Of course, if a company "makes a profit", its stock goes up, because everybody knows that, the more "profit" a company makes, the more its stock is worth (consensus reality again).
The rules changed in 1913 when the first income tax came in. The stock market wonks are just starting to notice. We will come out of this with a new set of rules, just as soon as everybody can agree on what they are. Whoever guesses right about the "new rules" will make *lots* of money
They say that the military is always preparing for the last war. For the US, that would be (depending on how you juggle definitions) Korea, Vietnam, or Desert Storm. In all of them, the US was fighting an enemy that was vastly inferior technically, but had a huge advantage in manpower and (in Vietnam) terrain.
So we design weapons and tactics based on high-tech doodads that our enemies (presumably) can't duplicate or counter. IMHO, if we ever have to tangle with anybody anywhere near our technological level, we're screwed. Our gold plated hardware would be sitting ducks for AI controlled robots.
A note -- in the report on the Iranian hostage rescue mission (1979? 1980? sorry, don't have the report handy), two of the main problems they found were failures of high-tech equipment (carbon fiber helicopter rotors with built-in crack detection) and micromanagement enabled by high-tech communications.
Lawyers write the laws. Admittedly, there are areas that are much worse than patents (take a look at the tax laws sometime), but patents are pretty bad.
That said, the biggest problem with the patent system seems to be the extreme overload of the system from gazillions of applications, plus the lack of patent examiners who are remotely familiar with the fields they're working with. "Prior art" nowadays seems to mean looking in the patent system database and nowhere else.
We definately need some new laws to tighten up the requirements for "novelty" and "usefulness". We also need a way of getting the real experts in the fields involved to look at patent applications. Could an "open source" arrangement work? Publish applications on the Web and let everybody make comments? (I rather suspect not; there are just too many applications.)
One reform that the US patent system needs is to move from the "first to invent" system used only in the US to the "first to file" system used everywhere else. "First to file" is trivial to determine -- just look at the postmark on the application. "First to invent" is just another playground for lawyers.
Another reform would be to tighten up the time between publication of an idea and filing for a patent. This is one of the problems with the LZW patents used in GIFs. Unisys filed the patent well after the article describing LZW compression was published. None of the authors of the paper, BTW, had any connection with Unisys. At the very least, any publication of the idea should contain an "intent to file" statement.
But it won't happen. The lawyers in Congress aren't going to do anything that would cut down on their colleagues' incomes, and the Big Money likes things confusing. Neither Congress nor Big Business cares squat about "promoting the progress of science and useful arts".
Hmm. Advertisers use animated GIFs because they jerk your attention to their ads and away from the reason that you're looking at the page in the first place. Netscape and Microsoft aren't going to do anything to piss off advertisers.
On Explorer, go to View -> Internet Options -> Advanced menu. Uncheck the box for Multimedia -> Play Animations. Click OK.
Bleahh. Netscape is just as bad.
Or you can use Opera. Click the little button on the window's title bar and all the images go away. There's another little button that makes all the backgrounds go away (no more dark green on black) and resets the fonts (no more 4 point type).
You have to pay for Opera, but they aren't beholden to banner advertisers for their profit model.
And more to the point, what kind of indemnety is Pinkerton willing to pay for false positives? Say, US$100,000 for each attempted suicide and US$1,000,000 for each successful suicide of any otherwise harmless geek? US$10,000 for each kid that gets beat up as a result of being turned in?
C'mon, Pinkerton -- if you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is, you're just another bunch of snake oil salesmen, trying to suck up to the public trough. Clever racket -- school shootings are so rare that nobody can really tell if your system works. *You* don't care if you ruin a few thousand lives, as long as you get the dough.
If you aren't willing to pay indemnities, then you don't believe in your own system. If you don't believe in it, why should anyone else?