Ok, so does Jim have a personal team of moderators who always give him +5? What gives? Every other article I have to read his.sig advertisement because someone modded his one-sentence statement of (to me) the obvious "+5 insightful". Can we have some down-mods please?
You know it's gonna be stupid when they're not creative enough to come up with a real name, but instead name it after a frickin' programming technique.
You know its gonna be stupid when they aren't creative enough to come up with a name that doesn't include the programming language.
On top of that, it can't even load a file for me. And I do have Firefox, completely unlike its target market, who have used IE all their lives and under no circumstances are going to install some strange piece of software so they can use an unpromising-looking word processor.
A web-distributed app that can only access local documents? What are they thinking?
I'm not a lawyer, exactly, but I have some law school under my belt.
That said, I think the patent in question would be US5845265: "That when a bona fide purchase price is tendered by a participant 900 or another retailer 902 the legal title to a good as represented by the record will transfer to the buyer with an immediate or nearly immediate finality to the transaction." That is, the listing closes the instant the fixed price is met.
Note that this is one of the earlier ones listed; the patent you gave actually references Ebay as prior art.
There are a couple of interesting things here. What I find most unique in MercExchange's patent constellation is the idea of virtual transfer of ownership of items among possibly competing virtual stores which all exist within the same patent system. This would be just like ebay stores, except they would exchange goods electronically between each other and relist them in hopes that better advertising or a new virtual store location will bring a better sale. Also, they have some fairly hilarious stuff about using a "sound blaster" for "audio stream cues" of an actual auctioneer announcing bids. Thanks, but no thanks.
I take the limit price that you mention as a buyer submitting a quantity and maximum price for an item, and if a suitable item is posted at a below price, a buy will automatically take place. This is sort of a reverse auction, not a buy it now.
That aside, I side with Ebay regarding the injunction issue. Companies which purely license patents, as opposed to create products, should not be allowed to halt the businesses of operating companies until the patent dispute is finalized. That's not necessarily how the law sees it, though.
In my quick review I didn't see anything about combining fixed price offerings with auctions, and especially the ebay model of offering the fixed price only until a lower bid is submitting, at which case the fixed price offer is withdrawn and a regular auction continues. I think this makes ebay's system sufficiently unique. I'm sure ebay's lawyers are on top of that one, though.
All that aside, patents suck ass. And it's a slow day at work.
I agree. Give them books they will actually want to read, not books that are on Best Books of all time lists etc. Those books are good too, but that's what the library is for. No one is going to read War and Peace more than twice in their life unless they are a lit. student.
Find something humorous instead. Include the receipt.
Because, it's not about text-mode browsing. It's about low-bandwidth. Loband lets you see images if you have to (and recompresses them for you). The issue isn't having crappy hardware, it's having a flaky 12kbps satellite internet connection and having to use banking software full of javascript, imagemaps, and other accessibility-destroying oddities.
Personally I want both. Only to the/. world would those seem like mutually-exclusive options.
This is totally true. One of the best things to happen to computing in the 0's has been the triumph of standard cheap electronics that aren't ugly. There is a reason Microsoft updates its Windows theme every release. People genuinely enjoy new pretty things.
If you want you can sit at home in your basement with your flourescent duct-taped lights and play with Gnome (which is ugly as shit) on a rackmount black...thing. Even a SunBlade (like the one I'm typing on), a completely tech/research-oriented machine, has a consistent, pleasing aesthetic (FVWM excluded). Just as you (parent of the parent) don't want an MP3 player without USB hard disk, many, many people don't want one that is ugly. For the same reason. BECAUSE THEY WON'T LIKE TO USE IT.
You can buy an ipod and a shuttle box and Windows XP (or a Mac mini) and have an excellent cheap system that is beautiful. I have no idea why this is considered a bad thing.
For the vast majority of normal people "how it looks" is one of the most important features.
What are you talking about? McCarthy unconvered lots of communists. He just uncovered a lot of other people too. What, you think there were absolutely no communists in the entire country and that's why people were so willing to let McCarthy get out of control?
I upgraded the hard drive in a Compaq 1200 the other day for a friend, from a 6 Gig to a 20 Gig, and also added 128 Mb more ram for a total of 156 or something weird like that. All in all it was very easy.
We got the parts off Knowledgemicro.com, total cost $135! Very cheap. If you unscrew all the screws and stick a screw driver under the lip in the front, and carefully slide it back and forth, the panel with the touchpad and the speakers pops out. This releases the keyboard. Once you have those out of the way, just unscrew the metal hard drive frame, and remove the drive from that with a screwdrive made for those star-shaped hex screws.
Slide the new one in, screw (not that way, sicko), connect the IDE cable, and pop everything together.
The Compaq System Restore CD worked great, except the partition it created was slightly small. Just use FIPS or the Mandrake-Linux installer disk to fix that.
Bingo, a $1000 laptop is now worth approximately $1500 configured, for a minimal total cost.
Yes. Religious dogma are religious beliefs. No kidding - try looking it up next time.
PS. Any serious Catholic - in fact, almost any serious Christian - would tell you that that film was extremely offensive. Are you saying Catholics thought they were offended, but were actually mistaken ("typically flew over their head")? I mean, what makes you the arbiter of offense all of a sudden? One would expect that the Catholic Church, since it is Catholicism, can say whether the movie was respectful or not.
Besides, you appear are prejudiced against the Church anyway, so you wouldn't be the greatest judge, I don't think...
Remember, because of the.zip style of compression, minor bit changes across the entire song will result in a very similar "family" of MP3s but radically different.zips, since.zips don't recognize things like least important bits and aren't lossy like MP3s.
MP3's aren't compressed the same way.zips are compressed; that's why you can play a partially downloaded MP3 but can't open a partially downloaded.zip. There should still be some size benefits.
All anyone has to do is compress the file, say, "David Mead - Robert Bradley's Postcard.mp3" with something like PKZip and rename it to "David Mead - Robert Bradley's Postcard.zip.mp3." This will confuse the "fingerprinting" system, and similar versions of a song will have very different fingerprints because of the compression, so they would have to implement a system to unzip or untarball or unbz2 etc. to read them all. It wouldn't be difficult at all to code a mp3 player that would be able to decompress automatically. Think, downloads would be quicker, too!
Of course, there still is the name blocking issue.
I have monitor calibration data from Colorific on Windows for my Samsung. Could you send me your email address so I can get in touch with you if I have problems? It sounds like you know what you're doing.
Incidentally, I (the question poster) have a very new Samsung SyncMaster 950p, which is very nice. They trouble is, when I do Blender work under Linux, I really can't tell what it's going to look like in color-calibrated Windows. And Blender in Windows is significantly slower. My Epson Stylus Color 600 almost matches my Windows monitor display now, it's just a bit warmer. But Linux is nothing like it at all.
Just for comparison, my Celeron 2 800 MHz gets 1599 bogoMIPS, which is very close to these Alphas (1578 or something). I expect a Pentium 3 at about 700 MHz would be comparable, so that gives us a 24,800 MHz Celeron or a 21,700 MHz Pentium 3.
It's fast. I wish I had one for Blender rendering...
Slashdot Mirror
Another mirror:
k ey.mp3
% 20Set.mp3
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~eweaver/stuff/Code%20Mon
Coulton is great; get "Mandelbrot Set" while you're at it:
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~eweaver/stuff/Mandelbrot
Ok, so does Jim have a personal team of moderators who always give him +5? What gives? Every other article I have to read his
Ethan http://www.dont/ advertise in your sig its annoying.info/
You know it's gonna be stupid when they're not creative enough to come up with a real name, but instead name it after a frickin' programming technique.
You know its gonna be stupid when they aren't creative enough to come up with a name that doesn't include the programming language.
On top of that, it can't even load a file for me. And I do have Firefox, completely unlike its target market, who have used IE all their lives and under no circumstances are going to install some strange piece of software so they can use an unpromising-looking word processor.
A web-distributed app that can only access local documents? What are they thinking?
No it doesn't; context is important.
Some one please distribute some clues; the comments so far in this article have been awful.
I'm not a lawyer, exactly, but I have some law school under my belt.
That said, I think the patent in question would be US5845265: "That when a bona fide purchase price is tendered by a participant 900 or another retailer 902 the legal title to a good as represented by the record will transfer to the buyer with an immediate or nearly immediate finality to the transaction." That is, the listing closes the instant the fixed price is met.
Note that this is one of the earlier ones listed; the patent you gave actually references Ebay as prior art.
There are a couple of interesting things here. What I find most unique in MercExchange's patent constellation is the idea of virtual transfer of ownership of items among possibly competing virtual stores which all exist within the same patent system. This would be just like ebay stores, except they would exchange goods electronically between each other and relist them in hopes that better advertising or a new virtual store location will bring a better sale. Also, they have some fairly hilarious stuff about using a "sound blaster" for "audio stream cues" of an actual auctioneer announcing bids. Thanks, but no thanks.
I take the limit price that you mention as a buyer submitting a quantity and maximum price for an item, and if a suitable item is posted at a below price, a buy will automatically take place. This is sort of a reverse auction, not a buy it now.
That aside, I side with Ebay regarding the injunction issue. Companies which purely license patents, as opposed to create products, should not be allowed to halt the businesses of operating companies until the patent dispute is finalized. That's not necessarily how the law sees it, though.
In my quick review I didn't see anything about combining fixed price offerings with auctions, and especially the ebay model of offering the fixed price only until a lower bid is submitting, at which case the fixed price offer is withdrawn and a regular auction continues. I think this makes ebay's system sufficiently unique. I'm sure ebay's lawyers are on top of that one, though.
All that aside, patents suck ass. And it's a slow day at work.
~e
http://www.asta-killer.com/ is a lot better virii wise, although some of the sites it links to in results are shady as all hell.
I agree. Give them books they will actually want to read, not books that are on Best Books of all time lists etc. Those books are good too, but that's what the library is for. No one is going to read War and Peace more than twice in their life unless they are a lit. student.
Find something humorous instead. Include the receipt.
His memory looks good in pictures? Excellent! I'm sure it has something to do with homeland security.
Ah, the perfect plan to create legions of future criminals.
Ah, the jerking knees....
Because, it's not about text-mode browsing. It's about low-bandwidth. Loband lets you see images if you have to (and recompresses them for you). The issue isn't having crappy hardware, it's having a flaky 12kbps satellite internet connection and having to use banking software full of javascript, imagemaps, and other accessibility-destroying oddities.
Personally I want both. Only to the /. world would those seem like mutually-exclusive options.
This is totally true. One of the best things to happen to computing in the 0's has been the triumph of standard cheap electronics that aren't ugly. There is a reason Microsoft updates its Windows theme every release. People genuinely enjoy new pretty things.
If you want you can sit at home in your basement with your flourescent duct-taped lights and play with Gnome (which is ugly as shit) on a rackmount black...thing. Even a SunBlade (like the one I'm typing on), a completely tech/research-oriented machine, has a consistent, pleasing aesthetic (FVWM excluded). Just as you (parent of the parent) don't want an MP3 player without USB hard disk, many, many people don't want one that is ugly. For the same reason. BECAUSE THEY WON'T LIKE TO USE IT.
You can buy an ipod and a shuttle box and Windows XP (or a Mac mini) and have an excellent cheap system that is beautiful. I have no idea why this is considered a bad thing.
For the vast majority of normal people "how it looks" is one of the most important features.
What will you do if he replies, "Because I am a bad writer?"
How come no comments?
What are you talking about? McCarthy unconvered lots of communists. He just uncovered a lot of other people too. What, you think there were absolutely no communists in the entire country and that's why people were so willing to let McCarthy get out of control?
I upgraded the hard drive in a Compaq 1200 the other day for a friend, from a 6 Gig to a 20 Gig, and also added 128 Mb more ram for a total of 156 or something weird like that. All in all it was very easy.
We got the parts off Knowledgemicro.com, total cost $135! Very cheap. If you unscrew all the screws and stick a screw driver under the lip in the front, and carefully slide it back and forth, the panel with the touchpad and the speakers pops out. This releases the keyboard. Once you have those out of the way, just unscrew the metal hard drive frame, and remove the drive from that with a screwdrive made for those star-shaped hex screws.
Slide the new one in, screw (not that way, sicko), connect the IDE cable, and pop everything together.
The Compaq System Restore CD worked great, except the partition it created was slightly small. Just use FIPS or the Mandrake-Linux installer disk to fix that.
Bingo, a $1000 laptop is now worth approximately $1500 configured, for a minimal total cost.
Yes. Religious dogma are religious beliefs. No kidding - try looking it up next time.
PS. Any serious Catholic - in fact, almost any serious Christian - would tell you that that film was extremely offensive. Are you saying Catholics thought they were offended, but were actually mistaken ("typically flew over their head")? I mean, what makes you the arbiter of offense all of a sudden? One would expect that the Catholic Church, since it is Catholicism, can say whether the movie was respectful or not.
Besides, you appear are prejudiced against the Church anyway, so you wouldn't be the greatest judge, I don't think...
Like I said, name-blocking is still an issue.
.zip style of compression, minor bit changes across the entire song will result in a very similar "family" of MP3s but radically different .zips, since .zips don't recognize things like least important bits and aren't lossy like MP3s.
Remember, because of the
MP3's aren't compressed the same way .zips are compressed; that's why you can play a partially downloaded MP3 but can't open a partially downloaded .zip. There should still be some size benefits.
This isn't so spectacular.
All anyone has to do is compress the file, say, "David Mead - Robert Bradley's Postcard.mp3" with something like PKZip and rename it to "David Mead - Robert Bradley's Postcard.zip.mp3." This will confuse the "fingerprinting" system, and similar versions of a song will have very different fingerprints because of the compression, so they would have to implement a system to unzip or untarball or unbz2 etc. to read them all. It wouldn't be difficult at all to code a mp3 player that would be able to decompress automatically. Think, downloads would be quicker, too!
Of course, there still is the name blocking issue.
I have monitor calibration data from Colorific on Windows for my Samsung. Could you send me your email address so I can get in touch with you if I have problems? It sounds like you know what you're doing.
Incidentally, I (the question poster) have a very new Samsung SyncMaster 950p, which is very nice. They trouble is, when I do Blender work under Linux, I really can't tell what it's going to look like in color-calibrated Windows. And Blender in Windows is significantly slower. My Epson Stylus Color 600 almost matches my Windows monitor display now, it's just a bit warmer. But Linux is nothing like it at all.
So? What's your point?
Just for comparison, my Celeron 2 800 MHz gets 1599 bogoMIPS, which is very close to these Alphas (1578 or something). I expect a Pentium 3 at about 700 MHz would be comparable, so that gives us a 24,800 MHz Celeron or a 21,700 MHz Pentium 3.
It's fast. I wish I had one for Blender rendering...