In the manufacture of Diesel engine pistons, which are cast, a soluble ring of high melting point salts has long been used to form the internal oil gallery. And I am sure that this technique did not originate with pistons. The problem is that the patent office now allows inventions to be "something A which already exists + something B which already exists", without any actual inventive step.
As an example, I am a little sorry for Trevor Bayliss who never really made any money out of his wind up radio, but given hand cranked magneto telephones had been around for many years, the idea of a hand cranked magneto radio set really should not be patentable. It is just another communications device with a hand charger.
In that case it's solving a different problem. The problem with 3D printing is that in most methods it's put down layer by layer. Thus, any "stalactites" are impossible to build without putting a support under them. There are a variety of ways to solve this; they are using a particular dissolvable-yet-printable material to solve it. Would it be immediately obvious to you which material to pick that can be deposited by a 3D printer and be structurally sound yet dissolved away?
There is a lot of solid invention that's been done over the last dozen years in the field. Ever seen InvisAlign, the invisible plastic braces? They've done all their molds with 3D Systems' stereolithography machines since 1999 and also have a bunch of patents on 3D printing mass-production/mass-customization. They spent millions developing ways to produce tens of thousands of unique, precise pieces of plastic a day, and have had issues with competitors trying to cut out all the R&D costs and undersell them.
Patents should work like trademarks: Use them or lose them. These sneak attacks long after the fact suck.
Well, 3D Systems has been in the 3D printing equipment business since the 90's, and is one of the biggest innovators of the technology. So I'm not sure I see your point.
Here is the crux of the first claim: "1. A computer-implemented method comprising: selecting a file having a path name in a distributed file system, wherein the file is divided into a plurality of chunks that are distributed among a plurality of servers, wherein each chunk has a modification time indicating when the chunk was last modified, and wherein at least two of the modification times are different; identifying a user profile associated with the file; determining a memory space storage quota usage for the user profile; deriving a file time to live for the file from the path name; determining a weighted file time to live for the file by reducing the file time to live by an offset, where the offset is determined by multiplying the file time to live by a percentage of memory space storage quota used by the user profile; selecting a latest modification time from the modification times of the plurality of chunks; determining that an elapsed time based on the latest modification time is equal to or exceeds the weighted file time to live; and deleting all of the chunks of the file responsive to the determining."
Can we please have an end to the stupid articles where someone intentionally mis-interprets the abstract or even just the title of a patent and pretends it's some simple thing that's been done for decades to try to drum up anti-patent sentiment? There seems to be one a week or so.
Back in the early 1990s, complex vector graphics frequently didn't resolve to screen graphics in real time. You may be forgetting how much slower CPUs were.
They use Lua for the non-performance effecting parts of games. They'd never consider using it in the graphics code, which is the bottleneck.
Does World of Warcraft lay out its entire UI with LUA? Then render the actual 3D graphics with C/C++? Isn't that exactly like what we're talking about here for drivers-- high-level control in LUA and the heavy lifting in C?
Patents are for methods. Fighting cancer by affecting this gene's expression is a method. My understanding is that that's why it's patentable under current law. If you discovered that this gene also coded for lollipops, using it to manufacture lollipops would be separately patentable by my understanding.
The goals of patents are twofold: 1. Allow one to recoup investment in research, and 2. Give an incentive to fully share information instead of keeping it as trade secrets. One might argue that in this case it did neither (since the research was separately funded and the scientific publication system already incentivized sharing), but any change in the law to exclude this case should still try to protect those two principles, IMHO.
If this were the iOS or Windows Phone stores, then yes, that would be true. But with Google Play, the developer actually IS the merchant. The Play Store itself is only an intermediary. The system is setup like any other online store where there are "ordered" and goods are "shipped". Blame the fact that Google basically grafted the paid Android store onto a system that was meant for real-world goods.
Honestly though, this isn't news. Every Android developer has known this for YEARS. And this is no different than any other online store out there.
Apple does not give you a 1099-- you are the seller, and Apple is acting only as an intermediary. That being said, Apple does not share ANY of this information with publishers. Even magazine sellers via Newsstand on an iOS device can only receive customer information if the customer opts-in to it. Apple's profit model is to sell more devices, and keeping strict privacy guarantees for customers helps sell devices. Google's profit model is to sell advertising, so people expect far less protection from Android. But legally they're both intermediaries between the buyers and the sellers.
Is there anyone who was working in software in 1999 who WASN'T spending a lot of time considering Y2K issues? We had to upgrade most of the software stack from our servers at the time and put in the approved two-digit rounding code to the UI date parsing. Not exactly heroic, but I'm not aware of a single piece of server software that required no modifications for Y2K. Everyone was involved in a thousand tiny ways.
My guess is that the reason there's not a lot of blogs and personal stories is that it was mind-numbing work that did not lend itself to narrative.
Yes, but maybe not in the way you think. It's possible Christian Scientists are some of the few folks in the developed world that actually DO have selective pressure on their genes... I would expect their descendants to be fewer but have more natural immunities in the short term, but after all bacteria become antibiotic-resistant, who knows which gene pool will win? Speaking not for individuals but for the gene pool, diversity seems like a good thing not just in terms of base pairs, but in the methods for how the next generation are selected.
Check me if I wrong, but hasn't the iPhone always been behind on features? I mean, how many years did it take just to get copy / paste.
The iPhone was never about features, it was about style and ease of use. The problem is that they set the standard and the other companies have finally caught up.
I wouldn't state it quite like that, but YES. Woz is not and never has been the target market for the iPhone, except in the beginning when no other alternatives existed. The iPhone is for people who want an easy, out-of-the-box device they never have to mess with and helps them do other stuff. Android is for tinkerers, cheap folks, and folks who easily succumb to marketing (Samsung alone spends 15x Apple's budget on marketing), and Windows Mobile is for Microsoft employees and people who want to be different. BlackBerry is for people whose company gives them a BlackBerry and makes them use it.
If you are comparing features on a bulleted list, the iPhone looks mediocre. If you're actually using it in your daily life, it's great. The iPhone isn't about checking off features on a list and never has been.
I'm not arguing that it's a defensible patent, but it's also not patenting what the summary or TFA claims. Here's the #1 core claim of the patent:
1. A computer-implemented method for providing recurring delivery of products, the method comprising performing instructions under the control of a computer system for: receiving at the computer system a designation of a delivery slot and a recurring delivery list comprising one or more list items, each of the one or more list items identifying a product, a quantity to deliver, and a frequency of delivery; periodically generating, by the computer system, an order having a date and time for delivery based on a next occurrence of the delivery slot, the order being generated in advance of the date and time for delivery such that the order has a period of time of pendency prior to the delivery; creating, by the computer system, one or more order items for the order based on a last delivery date and the frequency of delivery of each list item in the recurring delivery list; receiving at the computer system a change made to a first list item of the recurring delivery list during the period of time of pendency of the order; in response to receiving the change, determining, by the computer system, whether the order includes an order item corresponding to the first list item; in response to determining that the order includes an order item corresponding to the first list item, modifying, by the computer system, the order item corresponding to the first list item based on the change made to the first list item of the recurring delivery list; and providing, by the computer system, the order to an order fulfillment system capable of causing the one or more order items to be delivered substantially on the date and time for delivery.
In other words, it's a particular implementation of a subscription system that has to include every element in the above list in order to infringe. It would be easy to work around this in implementing a subscription system. It's also not generally how milkmen used to operate. It's also PROBABLY covered by prior art, but whenever I hear "X just patented Y that's stupid LOLOL!" I have to go to the claims, and I usually see that, no, only a particular implementation/method for accomplishing Y is covered.
You mean a machine looked at my email so it could insert ads that it calculated I might respond to? Horrors!
Are you suggesting Microsoft does not do that?
Yes, a machine indexed the content of your gmail to find ways you might be vulnerable to persuasion by a company's marketing. No, Microsoft does not do that.
It also trades back and forth with C as the single most popular programming language in the world, on which huge amounts of server software is written-- almost twice as popular as C++, which is what most of LibreOffice is actually written in and three times more popular than C#, its biggest competitor in the bytecode-on-virtual-machine environment.
I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between GPL and MPLv2 - can anyone help explain, or link me to a resource that's more helpful than the ones I've found?
It's true, and I think it first really hit home with most people when Business Insider posted their "Microsoft Operating Profit By Division" chart about 3 years ago. Since then the XBox group has had some profitable quarters and some losses (a big one last spring), but is still down a couple billion. If you're "genuinely interested" in the exact amount, just open Excel and type in the numbers from all of Microsoft's quarterly reports for the last decade to get an exact amount-- the numbers aren't secret.
Ah I see. I clicked on the article and video started playing so I closed it. I hate that. The MSM infotainment providers I saw the story on this morning either didn't go into the "why" or they went all crazy about value judgments about monarchies as a political system blah blah blah.
Your use of "MSM" and inability to relay facts in the article you're actually discussing -- facts that are also included in every other news account I've read -- leads me to believe you probably get your news from one particular (in fact, the MOST "mainstream" and popular of them) cable news service, and should probably just stick to that instead of coming here to post...
As the original poster replied to the first of the dozen people who suggested this... if you require a data plan for support, they'll sign up for a data plan, get support, then immediately cancel the data plan. The only way to recoup costs in a consistent manner is just require certain things for certain devices to be on the network. No one is forcing you to use either the device or the network, so you're welcome to take your business elsewhere...
Indeed... Microsoft Excel was refining itself on the Mac when Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS was the primary spreadsheet for the business world in the 80's. It wasn't until OS/2's failure in the early 90's (when the other office software had generally gone the OS/2 path) that Office-on-Windows really picked up steam. Each version of Word was ported to Windows from the Mac until the much-maligned 5.0 version when they tried to reverse it and failed badly. The question in the late 90's, though, was whether Microsoft would cancel the Mac version of Office entirely or keep it going. The fact that it was always profitable probably helped the decision, but in promising to do so and investing $150M they got out of a huge number of lawsuits they probably would have lost.
Seriously, the processor powering the computer most are using to read the statement about the lack of invention is the result of dozens of fundamental discoveries and inventions over the last decade.
I'm actively developing OpenGL ES 2.0 for android and one constant source of frustration is the quality of tools, documentation and examples. The tools are really bad since the nearest thing to syntax hilighting is the standard C editor and there is no way of telling if a shader will work or not without trial and error. The problem with documentation and examples is of another issue - there are so many different versions, bindings and implementations of OpenGL that it is very hard to find what you want in all the noise. You might come across a seemingly good example and discover it's no use because it's fixed function or uses the wrong version of GL.
iOS has some really nice development tools. I don't port to Android, but for those that do I've heard an iOS-first, Android-second strategy can produce better Android apps because the toolset on iOS helps debug and optimize the software faster and better. It might be worth looking into.
Things don't have to be either-or. The email system can route both userid@domain.tld and First.Last@domain.tld (with First.M.Last for conflicts, and shortened forms for very long names if desired, or omitted at the user's discretion) to the proper users. There's no reason to restrict each user to one and only one address. I think most Western non-geeks would prefer First.Last where possible, and forcing people to remember some jumble of userid letters seems like a system designed for the ease of the implementors instead of the users.
You're kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Apple didn't write MacOS X from the ground up. Most of it is NeXT with a different GUI, and which in the beginning had an integrated old-school Mac API grafted on ("Carbon", which has mostly been deprecated in favor of the NeXT's traditional API). NeXT chose BSD because it was done by Avie Tenavian, whose CMU work on the Mach kernel (which used BSD) became the core of NeXT's OS. They chose BSD because Linux didn't exist yet and everything else was locked down pretty tightly. So you're talking about an OS with roots in the mid to late 80's and decisions inherited from that time. It's probably on a short list for being among the longest-surviving continuously maintained OS in common usage today, predating NT, Linux, Solaris, and many others.
A factory worker in China can make up to as much as a pilot. A unionized pilot in USA for one of the big airlines makes $250k to $500k.
[citation needed]. Most pilots earn US$20-50K a year in the US, and a captain at one of the big airlines (which is the pinnacle of the profession for only the most elite) can earn 3-4x that. I've never heard of a pilot earning US$250K, let alone over that.
Slashdot Mirror
In the manufacture of Diesel engine pistons, which are cast, a soluble ring of high melting point salts has long been used to form the internal oil gallery. And I am sure that this technique did not originate with pistons. The problem is that the patent office now allows inventions to be "something A which already exists + something B which already exists", without any actual inventive step.
As an example, I am a little sorry for Trevor Bayliss who never really made any money out of his wind up radio, but given hand cranked magneto telephones had been around for many years, the idea of a hand cranked magneto radio set really should not be patentable. It is just another communications device with a hand charger.
In that case it's solving a different problem. The problem with 3D printing is that in most methods it's put down layer by layer. Thus, any "stalactites" are impossible to build without putting a support under them. There are a variety of ways to solve this; they are using a particular dissolvable-yet-printable material to solve it. Would it be immediately obvious to you which material to pick that can be deposited by a 3D printer and be structurally sound yet dissolved away?
There is a lot of solid invention that's been done over the last dozen years in the field. Ever seen InvisAlign, the invisible plastic braces? They've done all their molds with 3D Systems' stereolithography machines since 1999 and also have a bunch of patents on 3D printing mass-production/mass-customization. They spent millions developing ways to produce tens of thousands of unique, precise pieces of plastic a day, and have had issues with competitors trying to cut out all the R&D costs and undersell them.
Patents should work like trademarks: Use them or lose them. These sneak attacks long after the fact suck.
Well, 3D Systems has been in the 3D printing equipment business since the 90's, and is one of the biggest innovators of the technology. So I'm not sure I see your point.
Here is the crux of the first claim: "1. A computer-implemented method comprising: selecting a file having a path name in a distributed file system, wherein the file is divided into a plurality of chunks that are distributed among a plurality of servers, wherein each chunk has a modification time indicating when the chunk was last modified, and wherein at least two of the modification times are different; identifying a user profile associated with the file; determining a memory space storage quota usage for the user profile; deriving a file time to live for the file from the path name; determining a weighted file time to live for the file by reducing the file time to live by an offset, where the offset is determined by multiplying the file time to live by a percentage of memory space storage quota used by the user profile; selecting a latest modification time from the modification times of the plurality of chunks; determining that an elapsed time based on the latest modification time is equal to or exceeds the weighted file time to live; and deleting all of the chunks of the file responsive to the determining."
Can we please have an end to the stupid articles where someone intentionally mis-interprets the abstract or even just the title of a patent and pretends it's some simple thing that's been done for decades to try to drum up anti-patent sentiment? There seems to be one a week or so.
Back in the early 1990s, complex vector graphics frequently didn't resolve to screen graphics in real time. You may be forgetting how much slower CPUs were.
Funny, NeXTstep seemed pretty real time to me.
They use Lua for the non-performance effecting parts of games. They'd never consider using it in the graphics code, which is the bottleneck.
Does World of Warcraft lay out its entire UI with LUA? Then render the actual 3D graphics with C/C++? Isn't that exactly like what we're talking about here for drivers-- high-level control in LUA and the heavy lifting in C?
Patents are for methods. Fighting cancer by affecting this gene's expression is a method. My understanding is that that's why it's patentable under current law. If you discovered that this gene also coded for lollipops, using it to manufacture lollipops would be separately patentable by my understanding.
The goals of patents are twofold: 1. Allow one to recoup investment in research, and 2. Give an incentive to fully share information instead of keeping it as trade secrets. One might argue that in this case it did neither (since the research was separately funded and the scientific publication system already incentivized sharing), but any change in the law to exclude this case should still try to protect those two principles, IMHO.
If this were the iOS or Windows Phone stores, then yes, that would be true. But with Google Play, the developer actually IS the merchant. The Play Store itself is only an intermediary. The system is setup like any other online store where there are "ordered" and goods are "shipped". Blame the fact that Google basically grafted the paid Android store onto a system that was meant for real-world goods.
Honestly though, this isn't news. Every Android developer has known this for YEARS. And this is no different than any other online store out there.
Apple does not give you a 1099-- you are the seller, and Apple is acting only as an intermediary. That being said, Apple does not share ANY of this information with publishers. Even magazine sellers via Newsstand on an iOS device can only receive customer information if the customer opts-in to it. Apple's profit model is to sell more devices, and keeping strict privacy guarantees for customers helps sell devices. Google's profit model is to sell advertising, so people expect far less protection from Android. But legally they're both intermediaries between the buyers and the sellers.
Is there anyone who was working in software in 1999 who WASN'T spending a lot of time considering Y2K issues? We had to upgrade most of the software stack from our servers at the time and put in the approved two-digit rounding code to the UI date parsing. Not exactly heroic, but I'm not aware of a single piece of server software that required no modifications for Y2K. Everyone was involved in a thousand tiny ways.
My guess is that the reason there's not a lot of blogs and personal stories is that it was mind-numbing work that did not lend itself to narrative.
It sounds like you are describing evolution.
Yes, but maybe not in the way you think. It's possible Christian Scientists are some of the few folks in the developed world that actually DO have selective pressure on their genes... I would expect their descendants to be fewer but have more natural immunities in the short term, but after all bacteria become antibiotic-resistant, who knows which gene pool will win? Speaking not for individuals but for the gene pool, diversity seems like a good thing not just in terms of base pairs, but in the methods for how the next generation are selected.
Check me if I wrong, but hasn't the iPhone always been behind on features? I mean, how many years did it take just to get copy / paste.
The iPhone was never about features, it was about style and ease of use. The problem is that they set the standard and the other companies have finally caught up.
I wouldn't state it quite like that, but YES. Woz is not and never has been the target market for the iPhone, except in the beginning when no other alternatives existed. The iPhone is for people who want an easy, out-of-the-box device they never have to mess with and helps them do other stuff. Android is for tinkerers, cheap folks, and folks who easily succumb to marketing (Samsung alone spends 15x Apple's budget on marketing), and Windows Mobile is for Microsoft employees and people who want to be different. BlackBerry is for people whose company gives them a BlackBerry and makes them use it.
If you are comparing features on a bulleted list, the iPhone looks mediocre. If you're actually using it in your daily life, it's great. The iPhone isn't about checking off features on a list and never has been.
I'm not arguing that it's a defensible patent, but it's also not patenting what the summary or TFA claims. Here's the #1 core claim of the patent:
In other words, it's a particular implementation of a subscription system that has to include every element in the above list in order to infringe. It would be easy to work around this in implementing a subscription system. It's also not generally how milkmen used to operate. It's also PROBABLY covered by prior art, but whenever I hear "X just patented Y that's stupid LOLOL!" I have to go to the claims, and I usually see that, no, only a particular implementation/method for accomplishing Y is covered.
You mean a machine looked at my email so it could insert ads that it calculated I might respond to? Horrors!
Are you suggesting Microsoft does not do that?
Yes, a machine indexed the content of your gmail to find ways you might be vulnerable to persuasion by a company's marketing. No, Microsoft does not do that.
Once again, I think you underestimate just how deep and dark these projects sometimes are.
That we know this much about the project means it's not one of the projects that are THAT deep and dark.
It also trades back and forth with C as the single most popular programming language in the world, on which huge amounts of server software is written-- almost twice as popular as C++, which is what most of LibreOffice is actually written in and three times more popular than C#, its biggest competitor in the bytecode-on-virtual-machine environment.
I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between GPL and MPLv2 - can anyone help explain, or link me to a resource that's more helpful than the ones I've found?
Also note that LGPL is very different from GPL...
It's true, and I think it first really hit home with most people when Business Insider posted their "Microsoft Operating Profit By Division" chart about 3 years ago. Since then the XBox group has had some profitable quarters and some losses (a big one last spring), but is still down a couple billion. If you're "genuinely interested" in the exact amount, just open Excel and type in the numbers from all of Microsoft's quarterly reports for the last decade to get an exact amount-- the numbers aren't secret.
Ah I see. I clicked on the article and video started playing so I closed it. I hate that. The MSM infotainment providers I saw the story on this morning either didn't go into the "why" or they went all crazy about value judgments about monarchies as a political system blah blah blah.
Your use of "MSM" and inability to relay facts in the article you're actually discussing -- facts that are also included in every other news account I've read -- leads me to believe you probably get your news from one particular (in fact, the MOST "mainstream" and popular of them) cable news service, and should probably just stick to that instead of coming here to post...
The Soviets also gave them MiGs, so I'm sure they (or some of them) probably had to learn Russian, too.
Possibly. But after the first Gulf War we found an awful lot of Soviet munitions with English instruction manuals among the Iraqi arsenal.
As the original poster replied to the first of the dozen people who suggested this... if you require a data plan for support, they'll sign up for a data plan, get support, then immediately cancel the data plan. The only way to recoup costs in a consistent manner is just require certain things for certain devices to be on the network. No one is forcing you to use either the device or the network, so you're welcome to take your business elsewhere...
Indeed... Microsoft Excel was refining itself on the Mac when Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS was the primary spreadsheet for the business world in the 80's. It wasn't until OS/2's failure in the early 90's (when the other office software had generally gone the OS/2 path) that Office-on-Windows really picked up steam. Each version of Word was ported to Windows from the Mac until the much-maligned 5.0 version when they tried to reverse it and failed badly. The question in the late 90's, though, was whether Microsoft would cancel the Mac version of Office entirely or keep it going. The fact that it was always profitable probably helped the decision, but in promising to do so and investing $150M they got out of a huge number of lawsuits they probably would have lost.
Seriously, the processor powering the computer most are using to read the statement about the lack of invention is the result of dozens of fundamental discoveries and inventions over the last decade.
I'm actively developing OpenGL ES 2.0 for android and one constant source of frustration is the quality of tools, documentation and examples. The tools are really bad since the nearest thing to syntax hilighting is the standard C editor and there is no way of telling if a shader will work or not without trial and error. The problem with documentation and examples is of another issue - there are so many different versions, bindings and implementations of OpenGL that it is very hard to find what you want in all the noise. You might come across a seemingly good example and discover it's no use because it's fixed function or uses the wrong version of GL.
iOS has some really nice development tools. I don't port to Android, but for those that do I've heard an iOS-first, Android-second strategy can produce better Android apps because the toolset on iOS helps debug and optimize the software faster and better. It might be worth looking into.
Things don't have to be either-or. The email system can route both userid@domain.tld and First.Last@domain.tld (with First.M.Last for conflicts, and shortened forms for very long names if desired, or omitted at the user's discretion) to the proper users. There's no reason to restrict each user to one and only one address. I think most Western non-geeks would prefer First.Last where possible, and forcing people to remember some jumble of userid letters seems like a system designed for the ease of the implementors instead of the users.
You're kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Apple didn't write MacOS X from the ground up. Most of it is NeXT with a different GUI, and which in the beginning had an integrated old-school Mac API grafted on ("Carbon", which has mostly been deprecated in favor of the NeXT's traditional API). NeXT chose BSD because it was done by Avie Tenavian, whose CMU work on the Mach kernel (which used BSD) became the core of NeXT's OS. They chose BSD because Linux didn't exist yet and everything else was locked down pretty tightly. So you're talking about an OS with roots in the mid to late 80's and decisions inherited from that time. It's probably on a short list for being among the longest-surviving continuously maintained OS in common usage today, predating NT, Linux, Solaris, and many others.
A factory worker in China can make up to as much as a pilot. A unionized pilot in USA for one of the big airlines makes $250k to $500k.
[citation needed]. Most pilots earn US$20-50K a year in the US, and a captain at one of the big airlines (which is the pinnacle of the profession for only the most elite) can earn 3-4x that. I've never heard of a pilot earning US$250K, let alone over that.