Only using one half of one percent of the theoretical bandwidth is not that bad. A better comparison would be current realized bandwidth : current maximum realizable bandwidth : someday maximum realizable bandwidth. Theoretical maximum bandwidth doesn't mean much. Show me the Mr. Fusion first!
They look too small to be PDA's, yet too big to be telephones. If I'm correctly interpreting them anyway. Very cool, but in terms of usefulness? I guess with a hands-free set you could hold one out in front of you, but in all they seem to defeat both the small form factor and the convenience of a mobile phone.
No, you're right. I remembered that shortly after posting, and posted to ignore myself under that. But before I was moderated up, so that part isn't my fault, at least!
This application is for a method for correcting data provided by a customer using server-side and client-side scripting languages.
Customers are provided a "form" that they must fill in. A scripting langauge is used to perform validity checks to make sure data is present and properly formatted, before it is accepted and entered into a database. If data is missing or is improperly formatted, the customer is asked to correct the data or fill in the missing data.
Not covered in this patent are the methods of having the database backend perform validity checks, or of using a compiled helper application perform validity checks.
I got the impression from the article that only Motorola two way radio users are affected. People using cell phones, Macintoshes, etc. are safe, at least for now. That makes sense to me; Motorola is a very large company, and it is quite possible that one part does something that another part doesn't know about/ doesn't care about/ would be horrified by.
From a marketing view, as the article says, they probably want to pursue customers directly, without a retailer in the middle. This improves revenue. As for selling the list, that isn't Motorola's business, and they probably don't want to piss off the customers they are pursuing. So the customer isn't too badly off here, mostly they are screwing the retailer.
I still think it's a bad thing, but the actions that can be taken are quite different. If you use two way radios, just buy from someone else. If you don't, then you can write them letters if you are really concerned, but don't boycott them without telling them why, as most of the company probably doesn't even know about this.
This doesn't look to me like a government being a corporate pushover. Instead, it appears to be just another rule that is no longer valid today. Times change, and governments are slow to adapt.
Corporations raise money selling stock options. When they sell options to employees at a fixed price, they get less money, hence the deduction. This used to work just fine, because the exercising of stock options wasn't very significant, and wasn't planned for in the company's revenue flow.
The difference now is that companies like the two mentioned can issue stock options as a way to pay employees for free, and then claim it as a tax writeoff.
Really, this isn't a good thing; it should stop. Instead, they should be taxed on... well, ok, I don't know what really should be the solution. But I think that charging American governments of being corporate pushovers on this accout is giving them credit for more intelligence than they actually have.
This could be a tremendous environmental boon. One of the big costs of fuel cells is the titanium catalyst. If the price were brought down a lot, that would probably speed development and acceptance of fuel cell cars, not to mention the possibilities for other devices... I wonder if they would be cheap enough to replace the UPS on my computer. Or if not, at least the 20 or so UPS's on the computers at my old workplace. One car-sized fuel cell could easily power that many, and might be easier to have installed then a gasoline or diesel generator in an office building.
For most Internet related business, hardware is a minor cost. The major expenses associated with hardware are downtime when it breaks and people to run it. If you want to win this one, show that Apache has less downtime. Then show that your administrative staff knows Linux and doesn't know NT. Then show that the people developing it prefer Perl & friends to ASP & company. If you can't show these things, then you probably should be running IIS.
This is one of the sillier things I've seen posted on Slashdot. Face it, there isn't any cultural significance to software release cycles... even if it's for a very different version or what have you. Despite the involvement of everyone money could buy, the Windows 95 launch wasn't a cultural event. Despite Steve Jobs' involvement, the Mac OS X release isn't a cultural event.
Looks to me like this could be a valid patent. It isn't just CVS; it includes built in editing and communication facilities, plus it's a publishing system, which makes it sound like it covers more than CVS.
Of course, it seems a silly idea to patent collaborative software like that. If you want to get around it, I'd suggest adding or removing functionality. Varying the number of keywords supported should be just as valid as varying the number of clicks required to buy.
No, interesting that you choose to ignore the irony. As that implies, I meant exactly what I wrote. Red Hat dropped the sparc port for lack of demand. One might then expect that there is a lack of demand, but, ironically, SuSE, one of the few other major commercial Linux vendors, has decided in the very recent past to expand their product line to include a sparc port. Perhaps you would prefer the irony in Microsoft investing in Corel, and obtaining a Linux distribution thereby? It does more easily compare with the quote you have favoured, although I would argue less correctly. Anyway, I shouldn't argue English with myself, for I would be sure to lose.
The link didn't contain any information more than the writeup (same information in fewer lines), but scrolling down a bit, it looks like SuSE picked up support for sparc architecture just two weeks before Red Hat dropped it. That's just a bit ironic, I think.
I suppose this isn't the time to mention my own preference for Debian, which has supported sparc for a while and will continue to do so...
That's an interesting question. While I don't have all the answers, here is what a quick trip through my mind reveals:
When someone sticks something on the Internet, common objectives include ease of posting, capability of other people to access it, security and anonymity. They will probably use the medium that they know of that most suits their specific goals.
Lets examine, say, Napster. It's easy to use, has decent anonymity (supposing I lie on all the forms, they can track me down by IP, but it's more difficult, and not everyone knows it is possible). It has high availability to other people, while your computer is online. So it makes a good distribution method for illegal mp3's, and once people are using it, for legal ones as well. If no one uses it, it fails on availability, so at first the big draw is probably anonymity, and there is little reason to post legal content until there is an astablished userbase.
The easiest place to post something is on the WWW. It's also easily accessible to almost anyone, and searching and linking tools are very useful. The drawbacks are a lack of anonymity, and it being easy to take down because the content is centralized. It makes sense that most legal stuff would go there. Experience seems to bear this out, as that is the major Internet location for most large corporations, and most of my professors post their papers, course notes, etc. there. Of course, if you need anonymity it isn't useful. Most (not all, of course) legal stuff that is posted doesn't need anonymity, however most people posting things illegaly would prefer anonymity.
Which brings us to Gnutella... its main benefit is anonymity, and its main drawbacks are lack of availability to users (due to the low number of users, less efficient searching and linking, the online/ offline thing, and now network difficulties), and being harder to use. It IS much more general than Napster, though. I would expect to find mostly illegal content, all the same, though. Perhaps even more than Napster, because suppose you post to Gnutella your complaint about unsafe working conditions, it is much less likely to be found than if you post your unknown band's mp3 on Napster. For it to contain mostly legal content (and I think it could, if the conditions were met) it would need to have much better searching capabilities, and a much higher user base.
I'm sure there is some legal content on Gnutella, contrary to any claims of ONLY carrying illegal content, but at this stage, I think the motivation to post illegal content is much higher than the motivation to post legal content, most of which is more suitably placed elsewhere.
They can't make it a national historical site! They don't own the moon, I do!
And from now on, I declare that you must call RF/Moon, so that everyone will know the great effort I put into making it available in the sky for the good of all humanity.
Because it's a scripting language... quick and dirty. Really only for making short programs. Designed to be used by people who can't (or won't) ever write real programs, more than by actual coders.
And not really that bad... I hear that people who use Perl get brain-damaged also!
That's silly. Transmeta only has a five year lead if Intel or AMD wanted to copy them. In terms of high performance processors, the x86 giants have the lead.
This is like me claiming I have a three year lead in a computer engineering degree over a physics major... so what? Transmeta is just trolling, and I'm sure their competitors will continue to ignore them most of the time, as well they should.
I read somewhere that half of Playstation 2's are sold as DVD players, rather than game consoles. For a super-multifunction device, that seems reasonable. The difference is Sony has content developers as well... I really doubt Indrema can break into the console market. Without games, all they have is what they have out of the box, and I'm sure everyone who buys one will know that. That said, it might make a nice DVD player/ VCR for you peoples who watch TV.
They have good responses to the questions posed, and concerns raised. Still, I can't get over the feeling that they are lying through their teeth. "Trust me" sounds much better when it comes from someone that I trust.
It actually is logical to allow patents on hardware and not software. Generally, taking hardware to market takes much longer and costs much more money, hence protection of the initial investment is more important
That said, I think software patents are still a good thing, although not in their current incarnation. I think patent offices should recognize the differences between hardware and software, and allow patents of software and mathematical algorithms for much shorter periods of time.
I also agree that dumb patents don't deserve to live. However, instead of making us challenge all of them individually, shortening the time period to maybe three or five years would make the problem disappear quickly enough that in many cases it would not be worth the bother, either to fight the patent, or even obtain it in the first place.
One of the big problems I see with mp3 is that it basically plays whore to the record companies et al. Sure, they don't get money, but they still provide almost all the trash you find out there. The reason, I think, is that instead of allowing people to find new artists, you search for "Bobby Bigname - Yet Another Hit.mp3", but never "Unknown Artist - Song I Don't Know.mp3".
If you had a format as he suggests, you could pick by genre, and have no name artists coming directly to you without having to do lots of searching and sampling. I'm sure the generic, commercial music would still be there, and I'm sure that there would be people with all Madonna-all the time formats, but at least I would be able to choose a balance of new and familiar stuff that I was comfortable with.
This reminds me of the times I fought with my brothers when I was younger:
"Mom, Raymond's punching my face!"
"Don't punch your brother in the face!"
"Mom, Raymond's kicking my leg!"
"Don't kick your brother in the leg!"
"Mom, Raymond's biting my foot!"
etc.
I fully support copyright holders who want some compensation for what they own, but this is getting ridicuolous. Whining to governments to put in new laws for every stupid situation that comes up is unworkable, and at this point they are making life difficult for everyone, even the people who fully respect them and have no intent of abuse. If their business model no longer works, they need to change it. These legal contortions will only annoy people, and will not extend their lifetime for very long.
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Only using one half of one percent of the theoretical bandwidth is not that bad. A better comparison would be current realized bandwidth : current maximum realizable bandwidth : someday maximum realizable bandwidth. Theoretical maximum bandwidth doesn't mean much. Show me the Mr. Fusion first!
Of course violent video games don't make people kill other people. To kill someone, you have to look away from your computer.
They look too small to be PDA's, yet too big to be telephones. If I'm correctly interpreting them anyway. Very cool, but in terms of usefulness? I guess with a hands-free set you could hold one out in front of you, but in all they seem to defeat both the small form factor and the convenience of a mobile phone.
No, you're right. I remembered that shortly after posting, and posted to ignore myself under that. But before I was moderated up, so that part isn't my fault, at least!
Customers are provided a "form" that they must fill in. A scripting langauge is used to perform validity checks to make sure data is present and properly formatted, before it is accepted and entered into a database. If data is missing or is improperly formatted, the customer is asked to correct the data or fill in the missing data.
Not covered in this patent are the methods of having the database backend perform validity checks, or of using a compiled helper application perform validity checks.
From a marketing view, as the article says, they probably want to pursue customers directly, without a retailer in the middle. This improves revenue. As for selling the list, that isn't Motorola's business, and they probably don't want to piss off the customers they are pursuing. So the customer isn't too badly off here, mostly they are screwing the retailer.
I still think it's a bad thing, but the actions that can be taken are quite different. If you use two way radios, just buy from someone else. If you don't, then you can write them letters if you are really concerned, but don't boycott them without telling them why, as most of the company probably doesn't even know about this.
Corporations raise money selling stock options. When they sell options to employees at a fixed price, they get less money, hence the deduction. This used to work just fine, because the exercising of stock options wasn't very significant, and wasn't planned for in the company's revenue flow.
The difference now is that companies like the two mentioned can issue stock options as a way to pay employees for free, and then claim it as a tax writeoff.
Really, this isn't a good thing; it should stop. Instead, they should be taxed on... well, ok, I don't know what really should be the solution. But I think that charging American governments of being corporate pushovers on this accout is giving them credit for more intelligence than they actually have.
I really should check my facts before posting.
This could be a tremendous environmental boon. One of the big costs of fuel cells is the titanium catalyst. If the price were brought down a lot, that would probably speed development and acceptance of fuel cell cars, not to mention the possibilities for other devices... I wonder if they would be cheap enough to replace the UPS on my computer. Or if not, at least the 20 or so UPS's on the computers at my old workplace. One car-sized fuel cell could easily power that many, and might be easier to have installed then a gasoline or diesel generator in an office building.
For most Internet related business, hardware is a minor cost. The major expenses associated with hardware are downtime when it breaks and people to run it. If you want to win this one, show that Apache has less downtime. Then show that your administrative staff knows Linux and doesn't know NT. Then show that the people developing it prefer Perl & friends to ASP & company. If you can't show these things, then you probably should be running IIS.
For all of us who think that "Aibo" has too many vowels.
This is one of the sillier things I've seen posted on Slashdot. Face it, there isn't any cultural significance to software release cycles... even if it's for a very different version or what have you. Despite the involvement of everyone money could buy, the Windows 95 launch wasn't a cultural event. Despite Steve Jobs' involvement, the Mac OS X release isn't a cultural event.
Of course, it seems a silly idea to patent collaborative software like that. If you want to get around it, I'd suggest adding or removing functionality. Varying the number of keywords supported should be just as valid as varying the number of clicks required to buy.
No, interesting that you choose to ignore the irony. As that implies, I meant exactly what I wrote. Red Hat dropped the sparc port for lack of demand. One might then expect that there is a lack of demand, but, ironically, SuSE, one of the few other major commercial Linux vendors, has decided in the very recent past to expand their product line to include a sparc port. Perhaps you would prefer the irony in Microsoft investing in Corel, and obtaining a Linux distribution thereby? It does more easily compare with the quote you have favoured, although I would argue less correctly. Anyway, I shouldn't argue English with myself, for I would be sure to lose.
I suppose this isn't the time to mention my own preference for Debian, which has supported sparc for a while and will continue to do so...
When someone sticks something on the Internet, common objectives include ease of posting, capability of other people to access it, security and anonymity. They will probably use the medium that they know of that most suits their specific goals.
Lets examine, say, Napster. It's easy to use, has decent anonymity (supposing I lie on all the forms, they can track me down by IP, but it's more difficult, and not everyone knows it is possible). It has high availability to other people, while your computer is online. So it makes a good distribution method for illegal mp3's, and once people are using it, for legal ones as well. If no one uses it, it fails on availability, so at first the big draw is probably anonymity, and there is little reason to post legal content until there is an astablished userbase.
The easiest place to post something is on the WWW. It's also easily accessible to almost anyone, and searching and linking tools are very useful. The drawbacks are a lack of anonymity, and it being easy to take down because the content is centralized. It makes sense that most legal stuff would go there. Experience seems to bear this out, as that is the major Internet location for most large corporations, and most of my professors post their papers, course notes, etc. there. Of course, if you need anonymity it isn't useful. Most (not all, of course) legal stuff that is posted doesn't need anonymity, however most people posting things illegaly would prefer anonymity.
Which brings us to Gnutella... its main benefit is anonymity, and its main drawbacks are lack of availability to users (due to the low number of users, less efficient searching and linking, the online/ offline thing, and now network difficulties), and being harder to use. It IS much more general than Napster, though. I would expect to find mostly illegal content, all the same, though. Perhaps even more than Napster, because suppose you post to Gnutella your complaint about unsafe working conditions, it is much less likely to be found than if you post your unknown band's mp3 on Napster. For it to contain mostly legal content (and I think it could, if the conditions were met) it would need to have much better searching capabilities, and a much higher user base.
I'm sure there is some legal content on Gnutella, contrary to any claims of ONLY carrying illegal content, but at this stage, I think the motivation to post illegal content is much higher than the motivation to post legal content, most of which is more suitably placed elsewhere.
And from now on, I declare that you must call RF/Moon, so that everyone will know the great effort I put into making it available in the sky for the good of all humanity.
And not really that bad... I hear that people who use Perl get brain-damaged also!
This is like me claiming I have a three year lead in a computer engineering degree over a physics major... so what? Transmeta is just trolling, and I'm sure their competitors will continue to ignore them most of the time, as well they should.
I read somewhere that half of Playstation 2's are sold as DVD players, rather than game consoles. For a super-multifunction device, that seems reasonable. The difference is Sony has content developers as well... I really doubt Indrema can break into the console market. Without games, all they have is what they have out of the box, and I'm sure everyone who buys one will know that. That said, it might make a nice DVD player/ VCR for you peoples who watch TV.
Wouldn't it be fun if they developed it, marketed it, then it was declared illegal in the United States?
They have good responses to the questions posed, and concerns raised. Still, I can't get over the feeling that they are lying through their teeth. "Trust me" sounds much better when it comes from someone that I trust.
That said, I think software patents are still a good thing, although not in their current incarnation. I think patent offices should recognize the differences between hardware and software, and allow patents of software and mathematical algorithms for much shorter periods of time.
I also agree that dumb patents don't deserve to live. However, instead of making us challenge all of them individually, shortening the time period to maybe three or five years would make the problem disappear quickly enough that in many cases it would not be worth the bother, either to fight the patent, or even obtain it in the first place.
One of the big problems I see with mp3 is that it basically plays whore to the record companies et al. Sure, they don't get money, but they still provide almost all the trash you find out there. The reason, I think, is that instead of allowing people to find new artists, you search for "Bobby Bigname - Yet Another Hit.mp3", but never "Unknown Artist - Song I Don't Know.mp3".
If you had a format as he suggests, you could pick by genre, and have no name artists coming directly to you without having to do lots of searching and sampling. I'm sure the generic, commercial music would still be there, and I'm sure that there would be people with all Madonna-all the time formats, but at least I would be able to choose a balance of new and familiar stuff that I was comfortable with.
This reminds me of the times I fought with my brothers when I was younger:
"Mom, Raymond's punching my face!"
"Don't punch your brother in the face!"
"Mom, Raymond's kicking my leg!"
"Don't kick your brother in the leg!"
"Mom, Raymond's biting my foot!"
etc.
I fully support copyright holders who want some compensation for what they own, but this is getting ridicuolous. Whining to governments to put in new laws for every stupid situation that comes up is unworkable, and at this point they are making life difficult for everyone, even the people who fully respect them and have no intent of abuse. If their business model no longer works, they need to change it. These legal contortions will only annoy people, and will not extend their lifetime for very long.