But this is a way of sending more data. By sending data faster, more is able to be transmitted in a constant time.
What I find most impressive about this is the possibility it has with interstellar communication. (Which of course won't be usefull until we have someone to communicate with, but it's a start.) If a message can be sent faster than light, then one of the bigger problems with exploring anything further away than our solar system would be lessened.
Of course, the real trick would be to figure out how to send solid energy (matter) at such speeds.
"huge moral difference between selling software for a profit (commercial piracy) and providing copies of software and music to other 'fans' for free or in trade for more software.
So you're saying the ends justify the means? If I steal your car and give it away to someone else, that's ok, but if I steal it and sell it then I'm wrong? It doesn't matter what you do with it, stealing is the crime.
It is okay to make copies when you would never have paid for a legitimate version
This is pure bullshit. If you're not willing or able to pay the set price for something, that does not make it ok to steal it. This is especially true for things you don't even need. I could understand a starving man stealing a loaf of bread, not this.
How are you being hurt when I make my own copy of your product instead of buying it?
Well, to be truley nitpicking, a spear is not complex enough to warrant a patent or copyright, but for something more complex that would actaully take a significant effort to create, the person who put in the time and effort to design it owns the rights to it. If you want one and can't afford it, design your own. If you need one and can't afford it, odds are the government will buy it for you.
There are ways to make money off of 'intellectual property' without draconian copyright enforcement. For example, there are bands who give away MP3s of their music, and make their real profits off of the concerts.
That's wonderful, but that doesn't mean everyone has to do that. That's where musicians are lucky. Few people would want to pay to watch a painter paint, and even fewer people would pay to watch a programmer write code.
How is compyright infringment different than stealing? It has a different name, but so does Grand Theft Auto, and that's still illegal. (At least in australia it is) It doesn't matter what you call it, it's still illegal.
I agree that no company is entitled to profits. That's not what I was saying. What I was saying is that if someone creates something and owns the rights to it, then you cannot make an illegal copy of it. If someone works to create something, then that person owns the rights to it. They can decide to give it away, sell it, rent it, or whatever. If they decide to sell it, though, you are not justified in taking an unauthorized copy just because you don't want to pay for it.
Just because something is not physical does not mean that it is without value. While I agree that copyright and patent laws could use some modification, now that information travels much faster than it used to, and the life of information is much shorter, I don't think they should be abolished. Few people are willing to work to create something if they know that they won't be compensated for their time. For some people, a sense of recognition is enough compensation. Others prefer something more monetary. Just look at the whole free software group. How much is out there that the everyday user can and would want to use? So far all I've seen is assorted attempts to provide some of the functionality currently existing in some closed software. People who code for free can't very well make a living off of it, so it's hardly a full time thing, and therefore much slower.
By it's very nature, ametuer products are usually inferior to professional ones, and if you aren't being paid to do something, most people would no longer choose to do it professionally. Money doesn't grow on trees after all, and you need to make a living somehow. Most artist work a full time job in addition to their artwork, as well as most free software proponents, but if all software was written as a hobby, there'd be a lot less done, especially the development intensive ones, and we'd be back to playing hunt the wumpus on 8mHz machines.
And as for the star trek replicator paragraph, if something like that were to come out it would have a huge impact on society, and probably result in a major change in property laws, including these copyright and patent ideas. After all, without scarcity, modern economics is pretty much lost.
It's not my assumption that stealing is wrong. It's a law, one held by pretty much every set of moral beliefs out there. If stealing is ok for you, then you're more than welcome to try and legalize it in whatever country you live in, but I kinda like that law.
You must win a lot of debates if nothing that you don't believe in is not a valid argument. You don't think pirating is stealing, so it's not? First off, it's not a victimless crime. You are stealing revenue from whoever owns the rights to that software. You are taking something that belongs to someone else. It doesn't matter that the original is not destroyed, you're still depriving someone of the revenue that they worked to earn. If you worked for a company for awhile, and then got fired without compensation, I'm sure you'd complain. They aren't stealing anything physical from you, but they did steal your time and effort. Is there no victim there?
While it's true that not everyone feels that stealing is wrong, that's not enough to convince me. Maybe if I knew why you thought stealing should be legal and it was a convincing enough argument I might change my mind.
Do you really think that stealing is illegal for political reasons, or was that just a smoke cloud to make your argument look more reasonable. I know plenty of laws are passed for political reasons, but that doesn't make this one of them. Who lobbied to make stealing against the law? Look it up, it was probably done for a good reason though, not just politics.
And yes, I've already asked whether stealing should be illegal. In my mind, I am 100% for this. I wouldn't want someone stealing the product of my work and then bragging about not getting caught for it. Maybe I'm the only one, but I just can't see any reason not to.
"I only copy one or two games a month and nobody has ever busted me."
The fact that you haven't been caught doesn't make it right. How dare you suggest that stealing "only one or two" is justified?
I know this isn't a perfect world and not every criminal can be caught, but that doesn't mean you should flaunt the fact that you haven't been caught stealing yet. (And not even posting anonymously... there are ways to track you down, especially if/. really does log personal info from users.)
The mistake these guys made was in stealing their first piece of software. They got away with it, but commit a crime enough times and you will and should eventually get caught.
Yes, and by choosing which to relay, they make the "news."
Bad news for windows == Post the story.
Bad news for *nix == Dump the story
It's called reporting, that's why you can't base all your news on one source. News organizations of all kinds only publish what they consider newsworthy. If they don't want the public to know something, they don't publish it.
What's the point of posting an article like this to slashdot, where 99.76% of the readers are so rabidly pro-linux that they aren't even reading the article before flaming the author for posting what must be false information. I don't agree with the number myself (I think it should be much closer to 1%) but at least I'll give it a chance.
I know this is supposed to be funny, but this actually happens. Sometimes it seems like I actually et more emails about spam than I do spam itself. It's an endless cycle it seems, the only solution is violence.
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
If they were typing randomly odds are one of them should have produced the next Hamlet by now.
Well, I havent' installed linux in almost a year, so I don't know how easy it's gotten recently. Hopefully it is getting up there.
I've never had any problems with widnows needing reinstallation though. I've been running off the same install for about 3 years now and have yet to notice any performance degradations.
What I wanted to mention was that I've heard of a pretty good tax program for linux, 'kapitol' I believe it was called. Supposed to be as good as quicken without the bloat. From what I've heard you ought to check it out.
If it's that much more likely to find a place to live, then I'll just be wishing that much more for a mission to go out and find them. Put enough people on a big enough ship and eventually maybe they'll get there. Maybe not in their lifetime, but I'm sure they'll be able to figure out what to do.
Despite all the linux hype, it is still harder to install, maintain, and use than windows is. It is supposedly more reliable, but I've had applications fail in linux time after time because of faulty support, while windows BSOD's occasionally. In my experience, very occasionally. I can't remember the last time windows crashed independant of my tinkering. (i.e., not windows' fault. Even macs crash more frequently when I do think I know I shouldn't)
All that aside, I'd still use linux if it were more supported. For the most part though, nearly ever driver and application has a windows version. Although more and more are supported under linux everyday, or can be emultaed under programs such as wine, its still a long way from being supported even as much as mac's are.
My point, though, is that although it may be just as easy to learn a particular linux bundle as it is to learn windows, until I can do all the things I do under windows, I won't get rid of it, neither will I advise anyone else to.
It's like comparing SUVs to cars to trucks. They're all different, suited to different people's needs.
(A brief example, I'm sure everyone knows each individual point already)
Windows is for the everyday user, who doesn't mind a few crashes here and there if it means all their favorite software will run on it and the whole thing can be as user friendly as possible.
Unix is usefull for those who know what they are doing, and is usually considered faster and more reliable, and is in general more suited to business and (especially) software development.
MacOS combines the two, with a GUI similar to windows (suprise!) and more support for games and home use software, but with a Unix kernel and better reliability. I don't use them much myself, but I hear that mac's are the best choice for multimedia development (graphics especially, but they also seem to have some of the best music editing apps)
I myself prefer Windows for home use (it's all about the games) and Unix (solaris8 to be specific) for work development.
Why compare any of them in general though when they're all suited to different applications?
What? You expect realistic moderation on/.? I like that, if I had moderation points right now I'd slap you with a +1 funny.
I can't say I miss the old days, since moderation was already beyond hope when I got here, but I miss what I've been told the old days were like;-)
Sarcasm aside, while Godel's incompleteness is a bit beyond me, I get the general idea, and just ran into it in a book of short stories I recently finished. Can't remember the author or title (D'oh), but I believe the story was called Godel's Snowflake.
Well, the colony that became Georgia was originally a prison colony. As for the other colonies that became a part of the US, you only had were a few here and there fleeing justice.
I like Australia (need to go again sometime), and Georgia, so maybe if we made the moon a prison colony it'll be a pleaasant place to live in a century or so.
I have so many fond memories of The Bards Tale, the first game I learned to hack;-) I actually had pages of notes on the savegame files and could practically create a new character in a hex editor.
I was also a huge fan of the Starcon and Starflight series, but have never been able to get ahold of a copy of Starcontrol 3. I've only seen it available on mac format, which is really frustrating.
As for the Ultima games, my favorite would be Ultima VI, the last of the pure tile games. It was the first, and still on of very few, games that I have played where you can interact with just about anything. I loved pushing cannons around and firing at whatever I could find. It was also fun carying around a few powder kegs and an invisibility ring for a good old fashioned dragon hunt... I had so many notes for that game, with maps of nearly every dungeon and town. Thank god for extra large graph paper...
One of my favorite games, though, I can't even remember the title of. I played that one so much that I didn't have to refer to the manual for the copy protection. It was a space exploration type game, where your homebase was a triangular formation of starbases. Outside this safe area you had pirate, insect, and robot ships that would attack as you went on misions. One of my favorite aspects is that you could board their ships and tow them back for salvage. I wish I could remember the name, I'd love a chance to play it again.
Well, we've already seen how well NASA does lately. If they mess up the unit conversions on this one we may accidentally lose a city block or something instead of an unmanned mars rover.
Hopefully they'll test a few low power 'tracer' shots before beaming down anything big.
We've been there already, why not go back. We send people out in space stations all the time (relatively), so why not start building a station on the moon. At least we wouldn't have to worry about keeping it in orbit. Maybe sometime in the near future it oculd be liviable, and we could start making plans to actually develop the moon for habitation.
I used to do thios with an old Tandy about 15 years ago... I'd have a boot mode that would create a ram disk out of some of my extra memory, which I used mostly for games and stuff. I even wrote a few batch programs (back in the days of DOS) for some of my favorite games that would copy them to the ram disk and run it from there. A little slow on startup, but once it got going it was blazingly fast.
Eventually I couldn't do that anymore once memory requirements started going up. I've never tried doing it again under Windows, but I guess it's reasonable, since I have half a gig of memory, and windows manages to stay up for about a week or two consistantly.
Well, nothing new is usually cost-effective. The point is, though, that after it's been the expensive high-end for awhile, it'll eventually get cheaper and cheaper to make, and thus sell. Eventually even the cheap motherboards will all be optical. (Assuming that it's sucessfull)
There are reasonably priced motherboards out there, but if you want the latest and greatest technologies, you're going to have to pay for them.
The US stock market does, at least. At least 2 different sites that I know of maintain duplicate copies of all information generated during each trading day. If it had been hit, they probably would have shut it down for awhile for security reasons, but theoretically it could reopen the very next day.
Although this technology can be used to assign function to all ten fingers, it looks like they will only need three or four fingers for the cell phone apps. That's just one hand, so you won't have to put the phone down.
It's still a pain, I'd rather hit one button a few times than try to remember which finger to use to hit the button. (For the record, I use my index finger for typing on a cell phone, I don't see how so many people use their thumb. Must have some big buttons....)
This just seems like too much of a hassle just for entering numbers to the internal phone book, something I do rarely, and for sending emails from a phone, something I never do.
Was he waiting until Yahoo! got so big that he could actually make some money from the lawsuit? He's had plenty of time, I really doubt he just heard of Yahoo last month. Does anyone even know if there's a time limit for making such claims? Or even if a patent held in Australia is a valid claim against an international company.
Besides, everyone know's that the company appends an exclamation mark ('!') at the end of Yahoo, so it's a completely different name!
So if I don't rabidly bash microsoft I must be a troll, eh? Interesting viewpoint.
For the record, though, I don't write windows apps. What point is there? I've thought about it before, but I have yet to think of a project that I can reasonably do for windows that hasn't already been done before.
My programming is mainly just for theoretical purposes, so I don't lose my edge. My last program (still in progress technically) is an AI algorithm experiment, using various methods for training. I've been working out the bugs for a few months now, but it's just a hobby. I also write perl scripts for friends' web pages, mostly small stuff, but a diverting way to spend an afternoon when I'm on my own.
The reason I prefer linux for this is the command line interface. I've used a few different development environments, and ironically enough, the only one I like is for the SunOS, which I use at work. Even that I only use for debugging, I've always prefered having the control of a command line interface (with vi, of course) and a host of makefiles that I can trust. (i.e., no automated crap)
Slashdot Mirror
But this is a way of sending more data. By sending data faster, more is able to be transmitted in a constant time.
What I find most impressive about this is the possibility it has with interstellar communication. (Which of course won't be usefull until we have someone to communicate with, but it's a start.) If a message can be sent faster than light, then one of the bigger problems with exploring anything further away than our solar system would be lessened.
Of course, the real trick would be to figure out how to send solid energy (matter) at such speeds.
"huge moral difference between selling software for a profit (commercial piracy) and providing copies of software and music to other 'fans' for free or in trade for more software.
So you're saying the ends justify the means? If I steal your car and give it away to someone else, that's ok, but if I steal it and sell it then I'm wrong? It doesn't matter what you do with it, stealing is the crime.
It is okay to make copies when you would never have paid for a legitimate version
This is pure bullshit. If you're not willing or able to pay the set price for something, that does not make it ok to steal it. This is especially true for things you don't even need. I could understand a starving man stealing a loaf of bread, not this.
How are you being hurt when I make my own copy of your product instead of buying it?
Well, to be truley nitpicking, a spear is not complex enough to warrant a patent or copyright, but for something more complex that would actaully take a significant effort to create, the person who put in the time and effort to design it owns the rights to it. If you want one and can't afford it, design your own. If you need one and can't afford it, odds are the government will buy it for you.
There are ways to make money off of 'intellectual property' without draconian copyright enforcement. For example, there are bands who give away MP3s of their music, and make their real profits off of the concerts.
That's wonderful, but that doesn't mean everyone has to do that. That's where musicians are lucky. Few people would want to pay to watch a painter paint, and even fewer people would pay to watch a programmer write code.
How is compyright infringment different than stealing? It has a different name, but so does Grand Theft Auto, and that's still illegal. (At least in australia it is) It doesn't matter what you call it, it's still illegal.
I agree that no company is entitled to profits. That's not what I was saying. What I was saying is that if someone creates something and owns the rights to it, then you cannot make an illegal copy of it. If someone works to create something, then that person owns the rights to it. They can decide to give it away, sell it, rent it, or whatever. If they decide to sell it, though, you are not justified in taking an unauthorized copy just because you don't want to pay for it.
Just because something is not physical does not mean that it is without value. While I agree that copyright and patent laws could use some modification, now that information travels much faster than it used to, and the life of information is much shorter, I don't think they should be abolished. Few people are willing to work to create something if they know that they won't be compensated for their time. For some people, a sense of recognition is enough compensation. Others prefer something more monetary. Just look at the whole free software group. How much is out there that the everyday user can and would want to use? So far all I've seen is assorted attempts to provide some of the functionality currently existing in some closed software. People who code for free can't very well make a living off of it, so it's hardly a full time thing, and therefore much slower.
By it's very nature, ametuer products are usually inferior to professional ones, and if you aren't being paid to do something, most people would no longer choose to do it professionally. Money doesn't grow on trees after all, and you need to make a living somehow. Most artist work a full time job in addition to their artwork, as well as most free software proponents, but if all software was written as a hobby, there'd be a lot less done, especially the development intensive ones, and we'd be back to playing hunt the wumpus on 8mHz machines.
And as for the star trek replicator paragraph, if something like that were to come out it would have a huge impact on society, and probably result in a major change in property laws, including these copyright and patent ideas. After all, without scarcity, modern economics is pretty much lost.
It's not my assumption that stealing is wrong. It's a law, one held by pretty much every set of moral beliefs out there. If stealing is ok for you, then you're more than welcome to try and legalize it in whatever country you live in, but I kinda like that law.
You must win a lot of debates if nothing that you don't believe in is not a valid argument. You don't think pirating is stealing, so it's not? First off, it's not a victimless crime. You are stealing revenue from whoever owns the rights to that software. You are taking something that belongs to someone else. It doesn't matter that the original is not destroyed, you're still depriving someone of the revenue that they worked to earn. If you worked for a company for awhile, and then got fired without compensation, I'm sure you'd complain. They aren't stealing anything physical from you, but they did steal your time and effort. Is there no victim there?
While it's true that not everyone feels that stealing is wrong, that's not enough to convince me. Maybe if I knew why you thought stealing should be legal and it was a convincing enough argument I might change my mind.
Do you really think that stealing is illegal for political reasons, or was that just a smoke cloud to make your argument look more reasonable. I know plenty of laws are passed for political reasons, but that doesn't make this one of them. Who lobbied to make stealing against the law? Look it up, it was probably done for a good reason though, not just politics.
And yes, I've already asked whether stealing should be illegal. In my mind, I am 100% for this. I wouldn't want someone stealing the product of my work and then bragging about not getting caught for it. Maybe I'm the only one, but I just can't see any reason not to.
"I only copy one or two games a month and nobody has ever busted me."
/. really does log personal info from users.)
The fact that you haven't been caught doesn't make it right. How dare you suggest that stealing "only one or two" is justified?
I know this isn't a perfect world and not every criminal can be caught, but that doesn't mean you should flaunt the fact that you haven't been caught stealing yet. (And not even posting anonymously... there are ways to track you down, especially if
The mistake these guys made was in stealing their first piece of software. They got away with it, but commit a crime enough times and you will and should eventually get caught.
Yes, and by choosing which to relay, they make the "news."
Bad news for windows == Post the story.
Bad news for *nix == Dump the story
It's called reporting, that's why you can't base all your news on one source. News organizations of all kinds only publish what they consider newsworthy. If they don't want the public to know something, they don't publish it.
What's the point of posting an article like this to slashdot, where 99.76% of the readers are so rabidly pro-linux that they aren't even reading the article before flaming the author for posting what must be false information. I don't agree with the number myself (I think it should be much closer to 1%) but at least I'll give it a chance.
I know this is supposed to be funny, but this actually happens. Sometimes it seems like I actually et more emails about spam than I do spam itself. It's an endless cycle it seems, the only solution is violence.
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
If they were typing randomly odds are one of them should have produced the next Hamlet by now.
Well, I havent' installed linux in almost a year, so I don't know how easy it's gotten recently. Hopefully it is getting up there.
I've never had any problems with widnows needing reinstallation though. I've been running off the same install for about 3 years now and have yet to notice any performance degradations.
What I wanted to mention was that I've heard of a pretty good tax program for linux, 'kapitol' I believe it was called. Supposed to be as good as quicken without the bloat. From what I've heard you ought to check it out.
Well, why don't we go out looking for them ;-)
If it's that much more likely to find a place to live, then I'll just be wishing that much more for a mission to go out and find them. Put enough people on a big enough ship and eventually maybe they'll get there. Maybe not in their lifetime, but I'm sure they'll be able to figure out what to do.
Despite all the linux hype, it is still harder to install, maintain, and use than windows is. It is supposedly more reliable, but I've had applications fail in linux time after time because of faulty support, while windows BSOD's occasionally. In my experience, very occasionally. I can't remember the last time windows crashed independant of my tinkering. (i.e., not windows' fault. Even macs crash more frequently when I do think I know I shouldn't)
All that aside, I'd still use linux if it were more supported. For the most part though, nearly ever driver and application has a windows version. Although more and more are supported under linux everyday, or can be emultaed under programs such as wine, its still a long way from being supported even as much as mac's are.
My point, though, is that although it may be just as easy to learn a particular linux bundle as it is to learn windows, until I can do all the things I do under windows, I won't get rid of it, neither will I advise anyone else to.
It's like comparing SUVs to cars to trucks. They're all different, suited to different people's needs.
(A brief example, I'm sure everyone knows each individual point already)
Windows is for the everyday user, who doesn't mind a few crashes here and there if it means all their favorite software will run on it and the whole thing can be as user friendly as possible.
Unix is usefull for those who know what they are doing, and is usually considered faster and more reliable, and is in general more suited to business and (especially) software development.
MacOS combines the two, with a GUI similar to windows (suprise!) and more support for games and home use software, but with a Unix kernel and better reliability. I don't use them much myself, but I hear that mac's are the best choice for multimedia development (graphics especially, but they also seem to have some of the best music editing apps)
I myself prefer Windows for home use (it's all about the games) and Unix (solaris8 to be specific) for work development.
Why compare any of them in general though when they're all suited to different applications?
What? You expect realistic moderation on /.? I like that, if I had moderation points right now I'd slap you with a +1 funny.
;-)
I can't say I miss the old days, since moderation was already beyond hope when I got here, but I miss what I've been told the old days were like
Sarcasm aside, while Godel's incompleteness is a bit beyond me, I get the general idea, and just ran into it in a book of short stories I recently finished. Can't remember the author or title (D'oh), but I believe the story was called Godel's Snowflake.
Well, the colony that became Georgia was originally a prison colony. As for the other colonies that became a part of the US, you only had were a few here and there fleeing justice.
I like Australia (need to go again sometime), and Georgia, so maybe if we made the moon a prison colony it'll be a pleaasant place to live in a century or so.
Ah the memories....
;-) I actually had pages of notes on the savegame files and could practically create a new character in a hex editor.
I have so many fond memories of The Bards Tale, the first game I learned to hack
I was also a huge fan of the Starcon and Starflight series, but have never been able to get ahold of a copy of Starcontrol 3. I've only seen it available on mac format, which is really frustrating.
As for the Ultima games, my favorite would be Ultima VI, the last of the pure tile games. It was the first, and still on of very few, games that I have played where you can interact with just about anything. I loved pushing cannons around and firing at whatever I could find. It was also fun carying around a few powder kegs and an invisibility ring for a good old fashioned dragon hunt... I had so many notes for that game, with maps of nearly every dungeon and town. Thank god for extra large graph paper...
One of my favorite games, though, I can't even remember the title of. I played that one so much that I didn't have to refer to the manual for the copy protection. It was a space exploration type game, where your homebase was a triangular formation of starbases. Outside this safe area you had pirate, insect, and robot ships that would attack as you went on misions. One of my favorite aspects is that you could board their ships and tow them back for salvage. I wish I could remember the name, I'd love a chance to play it again.
Looks like I've got some web searching to do...
Well, we've already seen how well NASA does lately. If they mess up the unit conversions on this one we may accidentally lose a city block or something instead of an unmanned mars rover.
Hopefully they'll test a few low power 'tracer' shots before beaming down anything big.
We've been there already, why not go back. We send people out in space stations all the time (relatively), so why not start building a station on the moon. At least we wouldn't have to worry about keeping it in orbit. Maybe sometime in the near future it oculd be liviable, and we could start making plans to actually develop the moon for habitation.
I used to do thios with an old Tandy about 15 years ago... I'd have a boot mode that would create a ram disk out of some of my extra memory, which I used mostly for games and stuff. I even wrote a few batch programs (back in the days of DOS) for some of my favorite games that would copy them to the ram disk and run it from there. A little slow on startup, but once it got going it was blazingly fast.
Eventually I couldn't do that anymore once memory requirements started going up. I've never tried doing it again under Windows, but I guess it's reasonable, since I have half a gig of memory, and windows manages to stay up for about a week or two consistantly.
Well, nothing new is usually cost-effective. The point is, though, that after it's been the expensive high-end for awhile, it'll eventually get cheaper and cheaper to make, and thus sell. Eventually even the cheap motherboards will all be optical. (Assuming that it's sucessfull)
There are reasonably priced motherboards out there, but if you want the latest and greatest technologies, you're going to have to pay for them.
The US stock market does, at least. At least 2 different sites that I know of maintain duplicate copies of all information generated during each trading day. If it had been hit, they probably would have shut it down for awhile for security reasons, but theoretically it could reopen the very next day.
Don't worry, lots of people got in their own smart ass remarks for you.
I guess they suspected something was wrong when the first 50 posts all said 'We've seen this before!' instead of a bunch of fp's
A shame, too, I was enjoying the many different ways to express annoyance at redundance. I'd prefer any of them to (-1 Redundant) any day.
Although this technology can be used to assign function to all ten fingers, it looks like they will only need three or four fingers for the cell phone apps. That's just one hand, so you won't have to put the phone down.
It's still a pain, I'd rather hit one button a few times than try to remember which finger to use to hit the button. (For the record, I use my index finger for typing on a cell phone, I don't see how so many people use their thumb. Must have some big buttons....)
This just seems like too much of a hassle just for entering numbers to the internal phone book, something I do rarely, and for sending emails from a phone, something I never do.
Was he waiting until Yahoo! got so big that he could actually make some money from the lawsuit? He's had plenty of time, I really doubt he just heard of Yahoo last month. Does anyone even know if there's a time limit for making such claims? Or even if a patent held in Australia is a valid claim against an international company.
Besides, everyone know's that the company appends an exclamation mark ('!') at the end of Yahoo, so it's a completely different name!
So if I don't rabidly bash microsoft I must be a troll, eh? Interesting viewpoint.
For the record, though, I don't write windows apps. What point is there? I've thought about it before, but I have yet to think of a project that I can reasonably do for windows that hasn't already been done before.
My programming is mainly just for theoretical purposes, so I don't lose my edge. My last program (still in progress technically) is an AI algorithm experiment, using various methods for training. I've been working out the bugs for a few months now, but it's just a hobby. I also write perl scripts for friends' web pages, mostly small stuff, but a diverting way to spend an afternoon when I'm on my own.
The reason I prefer linux for this is the command line interface. I've used a few different development environments, and ironically enough, the only one I like is for the SunOS, which I use at work. Even that I only use for debugging, I've always prefered having the control of a command line interface (with vi, of course) and a host of makefiles that I can trust. (i.e., no automated crap)