I used to work in the electronics industry. The patents there seemed to actually work to allow innivation. For example - our chip used S3's texture compression algorithms. For this, we paid a reasonable licence fee. The methods used were non-obvious and there was clearly no prior art for this exact mechanism. Also the documentation allowed an engineer with a general knowledge of computer graphics to understand how to implement the compression algorithm.
A lot of patents were pretty much the same. Patents can work effectively. We just need better lgislation to prevent obvious patents, and avoid onerous licnce fees.
The seller might have been legitimate. There's a well known scam for this sort of thing...
The buyer offers to pay with a bankers draft for above the amount agreed, and asks for the seller to refund the difference. The seller pays it into their account, and sees the money on their statement, assumes its all above board, and then sends the excess. After a few months, the cheque turns out to be a forgery, so the money is deducted from the seller's account.
There's a certain benefit to a business to portray themselves as a reputable safe company with which to do business. Once they lose public trust, legitimate buyers and sellers will stop using the site.
Except that doesn't always work. It's possible for a licencing company to have no products, but simply a portfolio of patents. As such, they can't be sued for patent infringement. Seems counterproductive for MS to lobby for patents since they are more likely to be sued than to sue.
But presumably the requirement unus of proof is on the court to prove contempt. Sharman have a fairly solid argument that they made a good faith attempt to filter the keywords by the date required, and on realising they didn't, blocked downloads in Australia, therefore effectively going considerably further than the court order.
Not sure you can really call MS Flight Simulator a game. It certainly wasn't marketted at the game playing crowd. Still, MS did publish a number of games in 1996 and bought a couple of studios that are more established than Sony's video games arm, so unless the guy has 9 fingers on his hand he's wrong. And besides - 5 years is a long time in the games industry.
Well, the revolution may surprise us. I certainly like the look of the controller, and Nintendo have had some innovation before, but I think we're still just going to be seeing some incremental improvements.
There hasn't been a proper next generation since the Sega Saturn. Everything else has just been an incremental improvement in graphics and storage. The XBox 360 has all these fantastic specs on paper, but in practice, you'll see the same games, with the same sound, the same online capabilities and the same premise but with a few more polygons and a higher resolution. All very nice, I'm sure, but hardly a revolution in gaming.
and a long-term energy generator like a nuclear power plant
But why lug one with you when there's a huge great fusion generator in the middel of the solar system? How far can we get before a solar panel is no longer viable?
Someone I used to work with wanted to skip that iteration and go for entirely procedural 3d objects. Currently not possible until someone actually works out a decent way to represent them, but would be nice if it could be done.
They were arrested because the might have thought about perhaps committing a crime in the future? That's a different interpretation of "innocent until proven guilty" than I usually have.
No. They were arrested because they had committed a crime and were planning worse crimes. Remember, I'm using a hypothetical possible situation here. I just want to point out that its conceivable that some attacks have been foiled, but we didn't hear about them because they didn't happen.
Western governments have failed to stop major terrorist attacks in the US, Spain, the UK and elsewhere, despite having later found numerous clues that might have tipped them off to some of these attacks. I'd say we're already at the point where the signal-to-noise ratio is beyond their ability to handle reliably.
What about the attempted bomb plant on the New York underground last week? Didn't hear about it? That's because the suspected perpetrators were arrested a year ago before they even considered planning it. Or maybe they wouldn't.
But I would like a requirement that this law is repealed unless there is an increase in prosecutions of terrorists or at least one attack is foiled as a direct result of this legislation.
This will only have an effect if, either we can persuade so many people to boycott the record industry, that the record industry is no longer viable, or we can demonstrate that the reason for the downturn is because of the boycott. I don't think either of these is possible, and the boycott would mean I'd have to go without the tacky commercial drivel that I like.
I object to this. I have a geek card, and I run Windows. And Linux, BSD, BeOS, and AmigaOS from time to time. I also have FreeDOS kicking about somewhere. Windows is a nice platform for 3D graphics.
I don't think Apple wants to offer non-DRM music. DRM gives them pretty effective control over the market for music downloads (which doesn't make them a lot of profit), but that means they have a stranglehold on the music player market (which does).
Re:Stupid new buzzword
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nothing wrong with LAMP. It's just a convenient acronym. This is what acronyms are there for. It's a lot easier than saying a Linux/Apache server with MySQL and web applications written in PHP.
Some of these TV shows have had problems with the aftermath of these sort of twisted humiliation programs. I have heard of a suicide that was linked to this sort of TV humiliation, and I think jerry springer was linked to some murder, all sorts of law suits with that transexual miriam thing, etc....
To be fair, they do seem to have gone to great pains to make sure their victims are emotionally stable and will appreciate the joke.
People can be amazingly gullible. Brass Eye demonstrated this. They got famous celebrities and politicians to say all sorts of things. e.g. Paedophiles have more in common with crabs than humans. There is a new drug called "Cake" (and they had some cake crumbs in a bag to demonstrate this). One MP asctually raised a question about it in the house of commons. And how many people have fallen for the most ludicrous of April fools?
By usability. If an application isn't immediately usable, then I'm generally not interested. I don't want to spend time learning to use a new environment. If I'm using something as trivial as a text editor, the actual task I'm involved in is more important than learning to use an editor. Using non-standard look and feel makes applications less usable.
Mac users don't want to learn. They want a tool to do what they want it to do.
I agree with this phoilosophy. The computer is my slave. Not the other way around. I could learn all the arbitrary key bindings and configuration of emacs, but why should I? I could spend the time learning a new programming language instead, and have a more generally useful skill.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work in the electronics industry. The patents there seemed to actually work to allow innivation. For example - our chip used S3's texture compression algorithms. For this, we paid a reasonable licence fee. The methods used were non-obvious and there was clearly no prior art for this exact mechanism. Also the documentation allowed an engineer with a general knowledge of computer graphics to understand how to implement the compression algorithm.
A lot of patents were pretty much the same. Patents can work effectively. We just need better lgislation to prevent obvious patents, and avoid onerous licnce fees.
No idea. I'm only vaguely aware of how these things operate. Here's some examples of this sort of scam though http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Nigerian/niger ian_auction_scams.htm. Presumably it relies on people being way to naive to consider it might be a scam.
The seller might have been legitimate. There's a well known scam for this sort of thing...
The buyer offers to pay with a bankers draft for above the amount agreed, and asks for the seller to refund the difference. The seller pays it into their account, and sees the money on their statement, assumes its all above board, and then sends the excess. After a few months, the cheque turns out to be a forgery, so the money is deducted from the seller's account.
There's a certain benefit to a business to portray themselves as a reputable safe company with which to do business. Once they lose public trust, legitimate buyers and sellers will stop using the site.
Except that doesn't always work. It's possible for a licencing company to have no products, but simply a portfolio of patents. As such, they can't be sued for patent infringement. Seems counterproductive for MS to lobby for patents since they are more likely to be sued than to sue.
But presumably the requirement unus of proof is on the court to prove contempt. Sharman have a fairly solid argument that they made a good faith attempt to filter the keywords by the date required, and on realising they didn't, blocked downloads in Australia, therefore effectively going considerably further than the court order.
Not sure you can really call MS Flight Simulator a game. It certainly wasn't marketted at the game playing crowd. Still, MS did publish a number of games in 1996 and bought a couple of studios that are more established than Sony's video games arm, so unless the guy has 9 fingers on his hand he's wrong. And besides - 5 years is a long time in the games industry.
Well, the revolution may surprise us. I certainly like the look of the controller, and Nintendo have had some innovation before, but I think we're still just going to be seeing some incremental improvements.
There hasn't been a proper next generation since the Sega Saturn. Everything else has just been an incremental improvement in graphics and storage. The XBox 360 has all these fantastic specs on paper, but in practice, you'll see the same games, with the same sound, the same online capabilities and the same premise but with a few more polygons and a higher resolution. All very nice, I'm sure, but hardly a revolution in gaming.
and a long-term energy generator like a nuclear power plant
But why lug one with you when there's a huge great fusion generator in the middel of the solar system? How far can we get before a solar panel is no longer viable?
Someone I used to work with wanted to skip that iteration and go for entirely procedural 3d objects. Currently not possible until someone actually works out a decent way to represent them, but would be nice if it could be done.
They were arrested because the might have thought about perhaps committing a crime in the future? That's a different interpretation of "innocent until proven guilty" than I usually have.
No. They were arrested because they had committed a crime and were planning worse crimes. Remember, I'm using a hypothetical possible situation here. I just want to point out that its conceivable that some attacks have been foiled, but we didn't hear about them because they didn't happen.
Western governments have failed to stop major terrorist attacks in the US, Spain, the UK and elsewhere, despite having later found numerous clues that might have tipped them off to some of these attacks. I'd say we're already at the point where the signal-to-noise ratio is beyond their ability to handle reliably.
What about the attempted bomb plant on the New York underground last week? Didn't hear about it? That's because the suspected perpetrators were arrested a year ago before they even considered planning it. Or maybe they wouldn't.
But I would like a requirement that this law is repealed unless there is an increase in prosecutions of terrorists or at least one attack is foiled as a direct result of this legislation.
This will only have an effect if, either we can persuade so many people to boycott the record industry, that the record industry is no longer viable, or we can demonstrate that the reason for the downturn is because of the boycott. I don't think either of these is possible, and the boycott would mean I'd have to go without the tacky commercial drivel that I like.
We're geeks. We're sad and pethetic and we like technology. What's your point?
Than a chick with a high poly count.
Except we can't get to the moon.
Well, how about the ISS. Doesn't seem to bad, but seems a little cramped.
Ah. Going way too fast and too high for SS1.
Perhaps we can see some satellites? No? Too low?
So this is a flight, up... And down again.
I object to this. I have a geek card, and I run Windows. And Linux, BSD, BeOS, and AmigaOS from time to time. I also have FreeDOS kicking about somewhere. Windows is a nice platform for 3D graphics.
I don't think Apple wants to offer non-DRM music. DRM gives them pretty effective control over the market for music downloads (which doesn't make them a lot of profit), but that means they have a stranglehold on the music player market (which does).
Nothing wrong with LAMP. It's just a convenient acronym. This is what acronyms are there for. It's a lot easier than saying a Linux/Apache server with MySQL and web applications written in PHP.
Some of these TV shows have had problems with the aftermath of these sort of twisted humiliation programs. I have heard of a suicide that was linked to this sort of TV humiliation, and I think jerry springer was linked to some murder, all sorts of law suits with that transexual miriam thing, etc....
To be fair, they do seem to have gone to great pains to make sure their victims are emotionally stable and will appreciate the joke.
People can be amazingly gullible. Brass Eye demonstrated this. They got famous celebrities and politicians to say all sorts of things. e.g. Paedophiles have more in common with crabs than humans. There is a new drug called "Cake" (and they had some cake crumbs in a bag to demonstrate this). One MP asctually raised a question about it in the house of commons. And how many people have fallen for the most ludicrous of April fools?
I do wonder how they explained away the huge smoke cloud visible across large swathes of England at the moment though.
They don;t need to. They're miles away from the fire. England isn't that small.
By usability. If an application isn't immediately usable, then I'm generally not interested. I don't want to spend time learning to use a new environment. If I'm using something as trivial as a text editor, the actual task I'm involved in is more important than learning to use an editor. Using non-standard look and feel makes applications less usable.
Mac users don't want to learn. They want a tool to do what they want it to do.
I agree with this phoilosophy. The computer is my slave. Not the other way around. I could learn all the arbitrary key bindings and configuration of emacs, but why should I? I could spend the time learning a new programming language instead, and have a more generally useful skill.