For the record, this kind of behavior bothers me. But, they really are within the confines of the patent system.
All the prior art examples I've seen posted have been about autocompletion or searching a users previously entered text. They are taking this and expanding it to search the entered text of a group of users, giving the benefit of possible autocompetion of text you may have never typed.
Patents are supposed to do this. They exist so that someone can take someone's idea and exand on it. That's what they are doing. There very well me prior art on *their* idea, but so far all prior art has been on standalone autocomplete.
And now...I should say that this is just plain stupid. I never thought something like this should be patentable, but it is. It's the system's fault, and it needs to be fixed. And although they are within the confines of the system, they are just contributing to it's failings. Of course, that could have the effect of more evidence to its demise and rethinking by providing even more examples of misuse of the system.
"...even the most stringent fair-use advocates have to admit that the itunes store is the current high water mark for selling music on the internet without Draconian restrictions."
emusic.com offers unlimited downloads of 128kb/s mp3s with no DRM at all for $10/mo
I've actually been a very happy emusic.com user for more than nine months now. Their download manager puts nice properly labeled 128kb/s mp3s with no DRM into properly labeled subdirectories on my machine. I record them to minidisc (using Sony's crappy DRM-full software), CD, and share them among all the machines in my house. All this for $10/mo, and they have a great selection of the kind of music I listen to (mostly electronica and indie rock). Their suggestions aren't perfect, but will turn up some nice gems every once in a while. I haven't touched Kazaa for nine months, and I've only baught one CD in nine months. Bringing my total spent on music to $108 and access to (counting folders now) 120 albums I downloaded since.
I read (and sometimes post) on rec.games.roguelike.nethack and comp.lang.java.gui and a few others and I get to know the same people posting interesting and intelligent things over and over. When I have a question, I search groups.google.com and I don't find anything I post. Most of the time I can guess who in the group will answer. So even though Usenet is huge (which it is), individual groups (minus porn, warez, etc) tend to be on a few hundred active posters scale.
This is all true. But I will make an ass of myself and say that the ability for anyone with the will and meager means to post their ideas is indeed a good thing. I don't want the internet to become a place where everything I read has been approved by someone, anyone. Who would do the approving?
I don't see too many adds during my browsing. I find a lot of the content worth my while comes from sites that I (or someone I am affiliated with) pays for. As for the remaining sites--a lot of which also have information worth my while--Opera won't display popup windows and banner ads really don't bother me all that much.
Information wants to be free. By that I mean free as in speach and not necessarily free as in beer all the time
Remember: we conquered Iraq. We could either abanon them to the winds, absorb them, or set up an interim government to replace the one we just took out, leave, and let them replace the interim government on their own."
I personally don't consider setting up IP laws part of setting up an interim government. We should be giving them the bare minimum: a constitution, a bill of rights, and a system of government including a house and senate and the like, plus ways for them to write their own laws and get out.
I can only assume that having IP laws written for them is our administration's attempt to stiffle their economy, keep them down, and make sure they become our market with no chance to really become part of the world economy. Unless our administration can come up with some really good reasons, what else am I to assume? It's what we've done elsewhere in the past with the IMF and World Bank to take two examples.
But perhaps I am just bitter because Rosen bothers me.
I never realized that HP calculators died? Have they stopped selling them? Granted I've had my 48gx since 1995 and never looked at another calculator since then. What do people use these days? I've actually seen fewer calculators used as they get replaced with Matlab or Maple or Mathematica being more and more at hand for people, but I still find myself reaching for my 48gx even when I am near a computer just because they're so convenient.
Yes, it seems pretty nice on the surface. The issue I have with this is that all that already exists and can be used today as part of HTTP today. If you've ever monitored a modern browser talking to a modern web server, they use one TCP connection for everything. Compression is only going to benefit a few things since most content that you spend most of your time waiting is already compressed. Caching is about the one area where they seemed to have made any sort of improvement.
And also, they seemed to have focused their efforts only on browsing the web.
Oh, I was not aware--nor could I find mention of on their webpage--that it ran on any incarnation of Windows. I use Solaris, Linux, and Windows throughout the course of a regular day so the first requirement I listed was that I needed something cross platform.
What I would love to see (and will start writing myself when I have some extra time in a few months unless someone starts before me) is a cross platform, centralized data, M2-like (M2 is Opera 7's client with heavy use of virtual folders a la Evolution), easy to use mail client that supports flowed text, does not display the HTML version of email if a text part is available, does not download images unless I tell it to (on a per-message basis), syncronizes with Palm devices, has a spell checker and has PGP or GPG integration. And a full featured address book is a must as well, that also syncronizes with Palm devices. Calendar and todo list are secondary, but also welcome additions. I guess I am really looking for the offsping of M2 and Outlook.
If something like that exists, please let me know. The closes I found so far is M2.
I once worked for a factory automation shop. The program that controlled the robots was an old hag. She was originally written on a PDP-11. Then ported to VMS to run on various vaxen. Then ported to AIX. Then sometimes run on a POSIX layer on OpenVMS on new alpha boxes (since the real VMS code didn't have the new features). When I was leaving the company, it was in the process of being (finally) ported to NT after over 20 years.
That was some really crufty code. Millions of lines. Nobody understood it other than the few parts they worked on in the last year. Typical jobs involved reading code and documentation for four to six weeks, make changes for a few days, test for a week, document for a week.
What really shocked me was that NT was finally stable enough for this company to take 20 years of crufty code with #define PDP11's still in there and move it once again. Of course, that was just pressure from customers, but up until then I never really considered NT an option for a project like that.
I have noticed one interesting trend in how desktop configuration patterns evolve with a person's involvment in desktop environments. I exhibit these trends as well.
First, people tend to not customize anything in their desktop, mostly because they are afraid they might break something. Then, when they become more comfortable, they learn that they can change thing and the floodgates open. They customize *everything* they can get their hands on. Then, either they get bored, or they become so involved in technology (most developers, admins, etc) that it becomes impractical to do any customization.
I use many different boxes throughout my typical day. In my lab, I have a bunch of SuSE boxes running KDE (all sharing home directories so I have the same environment on each) and an XP box for doing some MS only things. When I need cadence to do some hardware design, I do it on a Sun and my desktop environment there is CDE. My laptop, which I use in the coffee shop when I want to get away runs XP. And we'll ignore the IRIX box and HP-UX box for now. Crap, I forgot that our main cluster is AIX, but I only use that for Maple, Matlab, and a few other things. I find that if I were to tweak each and every machine to be *exactly* the way I want, it would take far too much of my time. I do the tweaks that directly effect my productivity (emacs colors, make bash default shell, and a few eye candy things like wallpaper, colors, or somesuch when I find something irritates me).
Of course, what we need is an open, cross platform way to define desktop properties and interface preferences like key bindings to common functions (God-damn that stupid ctrl-A select all thing), store it in some protable device. Perhaps store it in a mobile phone, email/SMS it to customize-me@machine after you log in, and off you go. Someone slap me and wake me up.
"In communist regimes, [Kozlovski] says, the state would assign watchers to follow every citizen, who would pass incriminating information on to the authorities. Now the state doesn't have to do a thing. People come to it of their own free will. This is also the case for eBay, which exploits its stature in the market to have users accept contracts that strip them of their privacy. Perhaps the regime is different, but the outcome is most assuredly the same."
I used to live under a communist regime, and I think now I much prefer neighbors invading my privacy to get some extra food stamps to feed their children than a huge compnay like eBay appeasing the government a bit too much to get favorable regulation with which to make even more money.
Yes, I know I can just avoid eBay--and I do, so it's not really a great comparison. It just bothers me when people think that capitalism is the panacea for the world's ills and like to point out where it fails.
Have a good Non Disclosure Agreement. When you get them to sign an NDA, they can not discuss your idea with anyone else (or use your idea for their gain) without your permission. It says "I agree to listen to you idea, but I can not do anything with it unless you tell me to." I am not sure of any good sources of sample NDAs, but I am sure they can be found in any law library or such.
What I gather is, that they are not patenting a processor to run other processors' instruction sets. The host processesor, which does run the other intruction sets, already exists (maybe a previous patent of their's, though might have been patented by someone else), and they are creating an apparatus that allows that host processor to store the state of the processors it emulates. Well, that's my short take, I have not yet looked through the referenced patents to get more information though.
Slashdot Mirror
If she used correct grammer, I'd give her some credit.
For the record, this kind of behavior bothers me. But, they really are within the confines of the patent system.
All the prior art examples I've seen posted have been about autocompletion or searching a users previously entered text. They are taking this and expanding it to search the entered text of a group of users, giving the benefit of possible autocompetion of text you may have never typed.
Patents are supposed to do this. They exist so that someone can take someone's idea and exand on it. That's what they are doing. There very well me prior art on *their* idea, but so far all prior art has been on standalone autocomplete.
And now...I should say that this is just plain stupid. I never thought something like this should be patentable, but it is. It's the system's fault, and it needs to be fixed. And although they are within the confines of the system, they are just contributing to it's failings. Of course, that could have the effect of more evidence to its demise and rethinking by providing even more examples of misuse of the system.
I agree with what you say, except:
emusic.com offers unlimited downloads of 128kb/s mp3s with no DRM at all for $10/mo
I've actually been a very happy emusic.com user for more than nine months now. Their download manager puts nice properly labeled 128kb/s mp3s with no DRM into properly labeled subdirectories on my machine. I record them to minidisc (using Sony's crappy DRM-full software), CD, and share them among all the machines in my house. All this for $10/mo, and they have a great selection of the kind of music I listen to (mostly electronica and indie rock). Their suggestions aren't perfect, but will turn up some nice gems every once in a while. I haven't touched Kazaa for nine months, and I've only baught one CD in nine months. Bringing my total spent on music to $108 and access to (counting folders now) 120 albums I downloaded since.
I read (and sometimes post) on rec.games.roguelike.nethack and comp.lang.java.gui and a few others and I get to know the same people posting interesting and intelligent things over and over. When I have a question, I search groups.google.com and I don't find anything I post. Most of the time I can guess who in the group will answer. So even though Usenet is huge (which it is), individual groups (minus porn, warez, etc) tend to be on a few hundred active posters scale.
This is all true. But I will make an ass of myself and say that the ability for anyone with the will and meager means to post their ideas is indeed a good thing. I don't want the internet to become a place where everything I read has been approved by someone, anyone. Who would do the approving?
I don't see too many adds during my browsing. I find a lot of the content worth my while comes from sites that I (or someone I am affiliated with) pays for. As for the remaining sites--a lot of which also have information worth my while--Opera won't display popup windows and banner ads really don't bother me all that much.
Information wants to be free. By that I mean free as in speach and not necessarily free as in beer all the time
I personally don't consider setting up IP laws part of setting up an interim government. We should be giving them the bare minimum: a constitution, a bill of rights, and a system of government including a house and senate and the like, plus ways for them to write their own laws and get out.
I can only assume that having IP laws written for them is our administration's attempt to stiffle their economy, keep them down, and make sure they become our market with no chance to really become part of the world economy. Unless our administration can come up with some really good reasons, what else am I to assume? It's what we've done elsewhere in the past with the IMF and World Bank to take two examples.
But perhaps I am just bitter because Rosen bothers me.
I never realized that HP calculators died? Have they stopped selling them? Granted I've had my 48gx since 1995 and never looked at another calculator since then. What do people use these days? I've actually seen fewer calculators used as they get replaced with Matlab or Maple or Mathematica being more and more at hand for people, but I still find myself reaching for my 48gx even when I am near a computer just because they're so convenient.
Yes, it seems pretty nice on the surface. The issue I have with this is that all that already exists and can be used today as part of HTTP today. If you've ever monitored a modern browser talking to a modern web server, they use one TCP connection for everything. Compression is only going to benefit a few things since most content that you spend most of your time waiting is already compressed. Caching is about the one area where they seemed to have made any sort of improvement.
And also, they seemed to have focused their efforts only on browsing the web.
Oh, I was not aware--nor could I find mention of on their webpage--that it ran on any incarnation of Windows. I use Solaris, Linux, and Windows throughout the course of a regular day so the first requirement I listed was that I needed something cross platform.
"And it was bombed by the US in the first Gulf War when it reported the killing of civilians in a supposedly military target."
Do you have documentation of this? From what I understand al-Jazeera was founded from the ashes of BBC Arabic in 1996 and went on the air in 1997.
What I would love to see (and will start writing myself when I have some extra time in a few months unless someone starts before me) is a cross platform, centralized data, M2-like (M2 is Opera 7's client with heavy use of virtual folders a la Evolution), easy to use mail client that supports flowed text, does not display the HTML version of email if a text part is available, does not download images unless I tell it to (on a per-message basis), syncronizes with Palm devices, has a spell checker and has PGP or GPG integration. And a full featured address book is a must as well, that also syncronizes with Palm devices. Calendar and todo list are secondary, but also welcome additions. I guess I am really looking for the offsping of M2 and Outlook.
If something like that exists, please let me know. The closes I found so far is M2.
So should I start citing my cite information like the ISBN, author, title, etc? I always thought that knowledge was public.
I once worked for a factory automation shop. The program that controlled the robots was an old hag. She was originally written on a PDP-11. Then ported to VMS to run on various vaxen. Then ported to AIX. Then sometimes run on a POSIX layer on OpenVMS on new alpha boxes (since the real VMS code didn't have the new features). When I was leaving the company, it was in the process of being (finally) ported to NT after over 20 years.
That was some really crufty code. Millions of lines. Nobody understood it other than the few parts they worked on in the last year. Typical jobs involved reading code and documentation for four to six weeks, make changes for a few days, test for a week, document for a week.
What really shocked me was that NT was finally stable enough for this company to take 20 years of crufty code with #define PDP11's still in there and move it once again. Of course, that was just pressure from customers, but up until then I never really considered NT an option for a project like that.
- Use some form of multicast packets.
- Share the AI computation (and broadcasting) among the clients.
Of course that would require trusted clients, which in most cases you don't want to do.I have noticed one interesting trend in how desktop configuration patterns evolve with a person's involvment in desktop environments. I exhibit these trends as well.
First, people tend to not customize anything in their desktop, mostly because they are afraid they might break something. Then, when they become more comfortable, they learn that they can change thing and the floodgates open. They customize *everything* they can get their hands on. Then, either they get bored, or they become so involved in technology (most developers, admins, etc) that it becomes impractical to do any customization.
I use many different boxes throughout my typical day. In my lab, I have a bunch of SuSE boxes running KDE (all sharing home directories so I have the same environment on each) and an XP box for doing some MS only things. When I need cadence to do some hardware design, I do it on a Sun and my desktop environment there is CDE. My laptop, which I use in the coffee shop when I want to get away runs XP. And we'll ignore the IRIX box and HP-UX box for now. Crap, I forgot that our main cluster is AIX, but I only use that for Maple, Matlab, and a few other things. I find that if I were to tweak each and every machine to be *exactly* the way I want, it would take far too much of my time. I do the tweaks that directly effect my productivity (emacs colors, make bash default shell, and a few eye candy things like wallpaper, colors, or somesuch when I find something irritates me).
Of course, what we need is an open, cross platform way to define desktop properties and interface preferences like key bindings to common functions (God-damn that stupid ctrl-A select all thing), store it in some protable device. Perhaps store it in a mobile phone, email/SMS it to customize-me@machine after you log in, and off you go. Someone slap me and wake me up.
"In communist regimes, [Kozlovski] says, the state would assign watchers to follow every citizen, who would pass incriminating information on to the authorities. Now the state doesn't have to do a thing. People come to it of their own free will. This is also the case for eBay, which exploits its stature in the market to have users accept contracts that strip them of their privacy. Perhaps the regime is different, but the outcome is most assuredly the same."
I used to live under a communist regime, and I think now I much prefer neighbors invading my privacy to get some extra food stamps to feed their children than a huge compnay like eBay appeasing the government a bit too much to get favorable regulation with which to make even more money.
Yes, I know I can just avoid eBay--and I do, so it's not really a great comparison. It just bothers me when people think that capitalism is the panacea for the world's ills and like to point out where it fails.
Have a good Non Disclosure Agreement. When you get them to sign an NDA, they can not discuss your idea with anyone else (or use your idea for their gain) without your permission. It says "I agree to listen to you idea, but I can not do anything with it unless you tell me to." I am not sure of any good sources of sample NDAs, but I am sure they can be found in any law library or such.
What I gather is, that they are not patenting a processor to run other processors' instruction sets. The host processesor, which does run the other intruction sets, already exists (maybe a previous patent of their's, though might have been patented by someone else), and they are creating an apparatus that allows that host processor to store the state of the processors it emulates. Well, that's my short take, I have not yet looked through the referenced patents to get more information though.