first, the phrase "to steal his discovery" makes no sense literally.
second, showing.9_ = 1 is easy.
Let x = 0.999999999999...
10x = 9.99999999...
10x - x = 9.99999... - 0.9999...
10x - x = 9.0 (since there are infinite 9's after
the decimal point, so they all cancel out)
9x = 9
x = 1, qed.
Slashdot editors turned 30 seconds of their time toward making sure people can read the articles.
With that said, you can see a/summary/ at least of the article by going to pnas.org and clicking "Microfluidic networks solve computationally hard problems" near the center of the screen. (gets you here).
I don't know much of the specifics, but this doesn't seem to be an incredibly interesting development. Since "three-dimensional microfluidic networks" are not quantum-mechanical in nature, at best whatever they can do is to more/efficiently/ solve what we already can solve. Remember, people, NP stands for "non-polynomial[time]." In other words, as a given 'n' for the some measure of the complexity of the type of problem (such as n=6 for the specific achievement this article heralds) increases, the amount of computation (or compatational "time") increases at a rate greater than a polynmolial...in other words, at exponential or greater rates and not at something you can express in terms of O(x^n) with n fixed.
What does this mean for you? That this evolution is not interesting and does not shed new light on anything in the physical or mathematical world: nowhere does the article say that this system will solve in polynomial time the maximum clique problem. NP doesn't mean a problem is unsolvable: just that it becomes increasingly and increasingly difficult to solve as the size of it increases. Here is an introduction to the idea of NP. The clay institute is offering $1m for anyone that can solve NP, so I doubt this article claims to do anything of the sort, although, as we've all by now noticed, I can't actually see the article itself. Not worth $5 if you ask me.
Here is an article that already proposes DNA computing. (.gz, and probably not worth a d/l)
And here are some other NP problems
[Man, what a bitch it would be to try to code in Magyar...]
This is not as difficult as it seems. Hungarian actually developed from the C language group. (That's why it's not an indo-european language).
Here is a typical letter,
3#15#2001
intmain Barat,
Intmain baratom++ [hung. for !--helps against lameness filter also] Hogy vagy+?+?+? En jol; [hungarian for.
" is hungarian for a comma, >> and <<, as in French, for quotations]. En nagyon jol vagyok "koszonom" de nem ertek egy dolgot a leveledbol; Hiszen "irod" >>nem ertem a leveledet<< "holott en nem kuldtem egyaltalan neked levelet; e-mellet "ha kuldtem volna" meg vagyok gyozve hogy ertheto lett volna++;
Egyelore ennyit; haliho+
This letter, copied literally, does not illustrate the hungarian use of { and } for paranthesis before large clauses and longer paragraphs.
Other aspects of Hungarian orthography are not of interst.
Machine code? Geez, you wanna go part-time on us, you just say the word...
I hand-filed gears, sprockets, cogs and pistons for my own Babbage Difference Engine, arranged for shipping for thirteen metric tonnes of high-grade coal from China, and blew my own glass cooling jackets from Nova Scotia beach sand. The result is the fastest goddamned shopping cart program on the net.
Wheels and gears? Bah! I have ancient texts filled with speels and incantations to do my problems. Other answers can be found in tea leaves, wax, reading sticks tossed on the ground, or in tarot cards.
TAROT CARDS! absolutely BRILLIANT! Once you get beyond a certain range, you can have a 55-billion-row database you're querying, and your TaRot (R) (from Monty Carlo, Inc) component serving you the result in linear time will outperform on a 286 what ten clustured Quad Xeon machines are crunching through in ten times as long! No caching, no scanning, no nothing. Pure speed. Sir, I applaud you.
Has it ever struck anything else that it makes perfect sense to allow anyone to patent anything, whether or not they have enough ligitimacy to actually enforce it -- if a case ever comes up, proving prior art, and the existing widespread implementation of what you/.'ers might consider a patent that never should have been given, is all it takes to get it thrown out. If anyone can patent anything, then the people who invent something new can patent it, and afterwards enforce it, and anything that hasn't been patented by its creaters will, at worst, have a 'default' patent of whatever company happens to have too much money on it's hands. Think about it! There are only a finite number of existing Stuff, and isn't it cool if you can refer, in whatever scholarly article you're writing, to each and every individual practice or principle that's conceivably patentable, under a convenient US patent number? There's NO downside to overpatenting stuff: would you rather have the big money sponsoring more Bushes? That, and if enough silly patents start coming up, the patent disputing process will be revised into something sensible.
Just a thought.
Well, how about forget all hard information?
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 1
"I don't think you *can* scramble a CDROM can you? the data is physically burnt in the substrate. Anything magentic could be affected though. But I would have thought optical storage would survive anything but direct physical damage."
I bet there are lots of textbooks and just plain printed-out code in archives that we'd re-use, too, from the way the post was originally phrased.
But I think we should pretend, for the sake of discussion, that the question read something like "what if we suddenly found, for whatever unstated reason, that all recorded information about the computer industry for the past fifty years useless had become unavailable to us" -- that is, if we had to use what we know to develop better things from the bottom up. Also, we can assume that all the people who wrote technical papers still remember their shit, so we can still use all that hard CS information to better design the new systems we design to get us back on our feet. Deal?
Now, of course, it becomes a lot more interesting. How would you even spread the news? (Dust off the ole' Guttenburg presses, eh? hehe. [I bet no modern printing facility exists that does not use electronics.] I call dibs on the English majors for scribes.:] )
"Damnit Silverman, I *told* you to print hard copies of all your code!"
("Yeah-but, there's sixty four thousand lines of it in seven concurrent source trees. Also, there's no more compiler--remember, all the world's electronics have been lost") Well place a purchase order for a new one. Use your head, Silverman: we have deadlines to meet!!
(mumbles):"Damn imbeciles".
[...]
(overheard from the next room) "**Whaddaya mean there's no TV???!!**... Has ops gotten our internet connection back up??...huh?...Well SOMEBODY had better tell me our stock price within the next five minutes if they know what's good for them -- what kind of insane assylum are we running here anyway?? ...Alright, that's it, I'm taking tomorrow off again.[sic]"
Re:This won't work for matriarchal aliens
on
Anticryptography
·
· Score: 1
Come on, you guys with girlfriends[...] /me checks URL. Yep,/. /me notices banner. Yep...of 200k/year l33tists who still see naked chicks and get fired.
No, my friend, these guys have no girlfriends...
Re:This project is irresponsible
on
Anticryptography
·
· Score: 1
Re:Wouldn't it be easier to use The Bible
on
Anticryptography
·
· Score: 1
Wouldn't it be easier to use The Bible as an encoding table?
How about Shakespeare? Now there was a genius. Religions fade and fall away, but can you imagine any time some sappy English major won't have to struggle her way through Titus Andronicus?
Scary thought. I don't think could sleep in a world like that. Plus, with no more English majors, who'll take my order?
KDE stands for "Kid: DAMN Excellent!!"[1]
At least it does in this release =)))
Now if only I can get at the binaries!!! You call those mirrors?? Where's instantly indexing, synchronistically diffuse P2P when you freakin' need it??!! Pshaw. In my day, we could sneaker' a new rpg around the earth faster than than the time it takes to get kde.org to freakin' resolve (yeah, I mean DNS), let alone let us peek at the dough. My God, what is this world coming to?
-
3-state.
ps. "Linux", FYI, is a flavor of power known to the geniuses among us simply as Catharsis. You try spending seven hours of your night recompiling your kernel and tell me that doesn't get your mind off your ex. Go on. I dare ya'. I tell you, that CPU just hums smoother when it's running rock-hard code.
[1] is "kid" for "dude" solely a Bostonism? It sounds perfectly normal to me...
One important consideration....
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 2
"
This second major release of the KDE 2 series is a real improvement in
terms of stability, performance
and features," said David Faure, release manager for KDE 2.1 and
KDE Representative at
Mandrakesoft.
"KDE 2 has
now matured into a solid, intuitive and complete desktop for daily use.
Konqueror is a full-featured and robust web browser
and important applications like the mail client (KMail) have greatly
improved.
The multimedia architecture has made great strides and
this release inaugurates the new media player noatun,
which has a modular, plugin design for playing the latest audio and
video formats.
For development, KDE 2.1 for the first time is bundled
with KDevelop, an outstanding IDE/RAD which will be comfortably familiar to
developers with Windows development backgrounds.
In short, KDE 2.1
is a state-of-the-art desktop and development environment,
and positions Linux/Unix to make significant inroads in the home and
enterprise."
"KDE 2.1 opens the door to widespread adoption of the Linux desktop
and will help provide the success on the desktop that Linux already
enjoys in the server space," added Dirk Hohndel, CTO of
Suse AG.
"With its intuitive
interface, code maturity and excellent development tools and environment, I am
confident that enterprises and third party developers will realize
the enormous potential KDE offers and will migrate their workstations
and applications to Linux/KDE."
"KDE boasts an outstanding graphical design and robust functionality," said
Sheila Harnett, Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM's Linux Technology
Center.
"KDE 2.1 significantly raises the bar for Linux desktop
functionality, usability and quality in virtually every aspect of the
desktop."
Trying to find a cool JAVA applet that will interpret some for me, so I can put in two freakin' lines of code and see what it comes up with.
Reading a very interesting, scholarly article about encapsulating perl in java applets. (The whole of which could be summed up as: "yeah, that would be cool")
Realized I should just download a dang interpretter.
Installing really, really easy-to-use perl software on my computer. (ActiveState, if you must know).
Composing the following lines, so I could just alt-tab and press a key to see what my changes have wrought:
@echo off
cls :1
echo Running %1...
echo ------------ Started. ------------
perl %1
echo ------------ Finished. ------------
echo.
echo.
echo Any key to run again.
pause > discard.t
cls
goto:1
My first program? ('s third compile?)
# YES!!//more !s, but lameness filter on/.
print STDERR "This is a test.\n";
$tt = "111";
print STDERR "alas is: ", $tt, "\n";
$email = "c^h&ea^ld45';)(@;)(&^ya^ho'o.com";
print STDERR "orig email is: ", $email, "\n";
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@\.]//g;
print STDERR "real email is: ", $email, "\n";
In other words, thank you dude. Seeing two really, really cool-looking lines of code (and ones that are clearly, from what I knew of perl, common to the language--I knew both what the lines were perl, and exactly what they did) and not being able to cut-and-paste and compile them in a a C++ project literally has just gotten me a new language for the cost of two hours I probably would have spent reading lame/. commnets:). Lemme tell you, that's one damn good feeling.
Oh man, does anyone else damn near/hear/ in this guy's voice just how red in the face he is, or is it just my poor dietary habit? (Hey, you'd be on edge too, if/you/ had Uncle Morb's Spicy Surprise--let's just say 'bean supper' is understatement like electoral clownshow).
Oh, yes, the obligatory Slashdot appeasement:
"Some readers think that I am proposing having applications, which could be launched by a button press (as with the Commodore CBM Plus4, Palm). I am not proposing anything of the sort"
In other words, all those poor users who accidentally stumbled upon what the Big Mean Power Users call "shortcut keys" (or "hotkeys", if you're in Gatesville) have finally gotten the best of poor old Raskin. Oh well. Glad/my/ desktop -- uh, *O* *S*, let's me set things the way I want.
Cheers.
Oh, and obligatory Informative links: Further information about Raskin. Information about nearly Raskin.
Yeah, and look where it got us. You push a person with half his weight and unless he's expecting to actively compensate for it, he falls over. Pshaw.
"incremental changes" only hack a solution into working, such as Humans, but result in a design that on a basic level could possibly be much better if you knew from the get-go where you wanted to end up, and designed around the best implementation of/that/.
. . . . . . Confessions of an MCSE . . . . . ..
Once upon a midnight quite particularly dreary
Since I chanced upon a net node that illuminated clearly
How to scrounge and hack together former CPU's that yearly
lose all function and so merely
waste the space upon your floor,
Since I chanced upon this web site that had promised so much more,
for the price of a For Dummy's book and a drive to the all-night store,
(for we all know that King Amazon ships slowly from off-shore),
then I swallowed hard, and knowing that what sleep I'd had before
would have to do for a day or two, as I readied to explore
this strange book, why then, astonished, on the cover this I saw: How too bild a Beowulf clust-or
I dropped my jaw.
What's the meaning of a spelling that so liberally spews
anti-publishing convention, anti-literally views
as early as the title-page?! With what shall I excuse
such an idiotic purchase?....or is it but a rouse
through the value of its shocking to get you to peruse
its contents? Who can know? I turned the page.
A CD-ROM! How helpful! I checked my former rage.
Reading on, I noticed these directions for the disk:
"Put it in, and execute drive-letter-setup-exec.
But do so at your personal and solitary risk."
That is all.
Alright, I said, that's clear enough, and further then I read.
but instead of more instructions, there was the same, in Spanish instead.
On I flipped, through German, French, and Chinese simplified
on through Russian, Japanese and Netherlandy Dutch beside,
on I flipped through all the Slavics, nay, all Indo-European
languages, then other groups, like Ugro-finnish Hungarean,
On through japanese, swahili, even African Tschadide
as escape I vainly tried,
but there was no end, until, at last, I reached: About the Authors.
So was this some get-rich scam meant but to fill the writers' coffers?
No returns on midnight offers.
Well, I sighed and looked again at that mysterious cd
I guess it could not hurt just to browse it for to see
whether any use in it at all there actually can be.
So I popped it in the drive-door,
browsed on over, and, well, gee:
One file was all there was: setup-dot-e-x-e.
Six hundred megs. I switched from root
to users more restricted
I went and clicked the execute
clutter-clutter, on it shifted!
my cd-rom, up,up it sped
my hard-drive whirled, and flashed its red
my system cluttered, clunked, and crappled,
as with this "huge" file it grappled
(what, you really don't suppose,
that the system slowness these expose,
isn't natural with the computer speed woes
that only clustering overthrows?)
So it thrashed and scuttled, a quarter hour,
When with an effort it found the power
to treat this MCSE dummy to an explanation
of why he could not yet achieve his clustering elation:
"OS not supported"
It dutifully reported.
Now it doesn't take my well-earned MCSE
To realize that Linux is bullshitting me
Windows 2000, you see,
Is our hallmark, it supports damn near every
worthwhile application:
And this then was my salvation.
At 4 AM I concluded
The merits of clustering had been refuted.
I'm 27 and have pissed my life away doing nothing. I want to kill myself.
There is not a man in the world who has not pissed his life away doing nothing. You and each of us are to the galaxy the equivilant of one atom in one grain of sand among all the beaches of the world. What's the use then? Unlike that one atom, you are literate and can wield a BR tag. You can get drunk, and you can rock. Who fsking cares about anything else? Learn a good multiplayer game. There is always some community, and that is the only reason anyone chooses to remain alive on this Earth. Your pals are just too damn intertaining, and they appreciate you: even if it's just fizpuppy3902 on acrophobia.com
Clients. Lusers.
I mean software clients of course--and if you're not using real or media player, your customer's browser is NOT going to have it. Sure you can reasonably ask a luser to spend half an hour installing flash/real/an adobe pdf viewer, but the same does NOT hold for no-name asiaware. If it's not really, really (and exclusively) cool/important, your customers will not bother with it. Period.
Honestly, it's not a matter of suing them. You have no damages. Just show them the law, if they see that they are obliged to credit you, then they will credit you. It is definitely not worth it for them to say "No. We understand that we are acting illegally, but we refuse to stop crediting someone who contributed very little of the code instead of you who contributed the vast majority."
In conclusion: get a lawyer only if you can't find the law (although I would think it's a very general IP issue to not credit the creator of a work, and therefore should not be difficult to find), not to try to sue them for money. You and I both know you're not suffering great damages. Just find a law (like the one I quoted) and throw it at them. If they still remain asses get a lawyer with a contingent fee to write them something nasty about suing them if they blatantly continue to act illegally. (If it's really a large corporation ignoring a clear law, they can be penalized even if you don't suffer many damages, you know, just for their breaking the law and refusing to stop). Start by writing them a letter, it doesn't change anything! You're not going to get money from them by waiting and suing them...they'll just say they didn't know. Let them know! Like I just said, they won't say "uh, no, we think we prefer to continue illegally not crediting you.". Type up that email bro! There's/no/ downside to "jumping in head first". (You don't deserve money from them right now just for their not putting your name on, so you can't honestly be 'ruining anything' by not doing what legally has the most potential money behind it in a lawsuit type situation.)
You don't mention asking your former employer about adding your name as a contributor. I know you say you "parted on pretty bad terms", but I would still send them a nice request to allow you to see your name on the work you are proud of and spent energy on, before resorting to legal measures.
After all, it can't hurt. What employer wouldn't be glad to hear an employee is proud of software work he/she developed for the company, implying genuine hard work? Even before you start looking for 'legal recourse', definitely try a plain old request. If you parted on bad enough terms, you might be met with a 'no', but it doesn't hurt to ask. Your letter might run somesomething like:
Sir,
I realize we have had our differences, but I am writing only with respect to the professional issue that I would like to see my name on the ~~~ product (for instance, at this location), on which I spent considerable time and work at <your former company>, and in which I do take some pride. (then some anal thank you and goodluck goodluck or hope your products are doing well or whatever.).
If you really want to imply a legal recourse, after 'I would like to see my name on --', put in "which is the legally established convention for credited work (you do include <name of other dude> with whom I worked), even in the case of when a company holds the exclusive copyright.", which is only vaguely true per the above post's reference to legal code. I say this because this (linked in an above post) says:
In my essay on Copyright Law,
I asserted that the USA does not recognize
"moral rights" of authors that are included in article 6bis
of the Berne Convention, despite the claim of the USA that it adheres
to the Berne Convention. These moral rights include:
the right of integrity: mutilation or distortion that would
prejudice the author's honor or reputation is not permitted.
In French law, this right is called "droit au respect de l'oeuvre"
and is mentioned in Article6 of the French Law No. 57-298
of 11 March 1957.
the right of attribution: the true author has the right to have
his/her name on the work, and a non-authors are prevented from having
their names attached to the author's work.
In French law, this right is called "droit à la paternité"
and is mentioned in Article6 of the French Law No. 57-298
of 11 March 1957.
In other words, the US does not honor formally (or de facto, depending on how you interpret the above) the right to see attributement (when you don't hold the copyright), and indeed the caselaw (still from here) says:
Smith v. Montoro, 648 F.2d 602 (9thCir. 1981) (removal of actor's name from film credits was valid claim under Lanham Act).
Now I wasn't sure what this meant, so I found this on the "Lanham (Trademark) Act (15 U.S.C.)" including the preamble:
The Lanham Act is found in Title 15 of the U.S. Code and contains the federal statutes governing trademark law in the United States. However, this act is not the exclusive law governing U.S. trademark law, since both common law and state statutes also control some aspects of trademark protection. This index contains links to each of the sections of the Lanham, and was last updated in March, 2000.
1125. False designations of origin and false descriptions forbidden
(a)
Civil action.
(1)
Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which--
(A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or
(B)
in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial activities,
shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
In other words (the bold above is mine), despite what the above essay said about our not respecting authorial attributement as the French do, in letter at least this Lanham Act seems to mean that you're fairly well covered in saying the legal convention is behind you. If you say "convention", it implies that that's how it's done to be sure to be legal, and is not as overtly negative as if you had said the law requires this.
In any case, first a nice letter, with a vague allusion to law, then if your former employer refuses to add your name, dig around this Lanham Act business a bit and send him chapter and verse (section and paragraph:]) along with a nice hyperlink so he can check out his legal obgligations. Either way, you seem covered. Good luck!
Naturally we shouldn't be overly concerned that Athena doesn't meet a "proven" (here, POSIX) standard--we aren't all using FORTRAN or writing real-time [deterministic-time] algorithms, are we?--, but shouldn't we take a moment to consider the fact that Athena's
FAQ says:
["Does the Pandora Engine support POSIX compliancy?"]
"No. It's not practical, or even possible to implement most of the POSIX standard" (my bold)
because:
"POSIX was designed for procedural systems, so given that the Pandora Engine is object based..."
Now, it is of course a Good Thing (for easy, modular programming) to have a heavily OOP'd, high-level 'environment', (we can't even say OS anymore[1]) that can easily optimize later whatever tasks it does allow the application to run. However, the fact should worry us that the developers say it is not "possible" to run functions on a low enough level to ensure any kind of guaranteed (or "realtime":) operational behavior on ANY level of what you're doing...short of writing bits out to a file (but you're getting nowhere near the FS--or any hardware for that matter). Forget HAL: this is HAL:THISMACHINE:HARDWARE:PERIPHERALS:OUTPUT:VISIBL E:MONITORS:ENVIRONMENT:WINDOWS:MYWINDOW:PLEASE:PRE TTY:PLEASE:LET:ME:NEAR:A:SET:METHOD(&MyAthenaApp.m ywindow.mypallette.color, GREEN); Not that this isn't useful, but what if their idea of green isn't your idea of green? Just dig around the standard, right, it's bound to be there somewhere?
"Pandora does not use a separate interface for game development (such as a DirectX style API)"..."Currently we are missing 3D support (OpenGL for example)"...Hmmmm...correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that their "object based" methods are the only things programmers will have available, without even the Standardizd (eg OpenGL) niceties we can use to get around protected architectures once they're implemented?
Oh well: "there are plenty of existing engines that can be ported when the need for a 3D engine arises."
But I wonder...does "can be ported" mean "We can't exactly use them, because of how commercial we are, and we're not allowed to port GNU stuff, but, we assure you, we'll have really, really similar-sounding naming schemes...";-)
Anyone see a different take on this?
[1] Athena on BeOs on WIN2K on Linux??? Oh the thngs we do.:)
Voltaire did not actually say that, but while you're up, say "disagree", which makes a sronger statement than MAY not agree with.
Quoteland.com gives "disapprove":
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course, once we may edit, I should think it more powerful to say:
"I disagree vehemently with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it."
Slashdot Mirror
first, the phrase "to steal his discovery" makes no sense literally. .9_ = 1 is easy.
second, showing
Let x = 0.999999999999...
10x = 9.99999999...
10x - x = 9.99999... - 0.9999...
10x - x = 9.0 (since there are infinite 9's after
the decimal point, so they all cancel out)
9x = 9
x = 1, qed.
- People read the articles before posting.
- Slashdot editors turned 30 seconds of their time toward making sure people can read the articles.
With that said, you can see aI don't know much of the specifics, but this doesn't seem to be an incredibly interesting development. Since "three-dimensional microfluidic networks" are not quantum-mechanical in nature, at best whatever they can do is to more
What does this mean for you? That this evolution is not interesting and does not shed new light on anything in the physical or mathematical world: nowhere does the article say that this system will solve in polynomial time the maximum clique problem. NP doesn't mean a problem is unsolvable: just that it becomes increasingly and increasingly difficult to solve as the size of it increases. Here is an introduction to the idea of NP. The clay institute is offering $1m for anyone that can solve NP, so I doubt this article claims to do anything of the sort, although, as we've all by now noticed, I can't actually see the article itself. Not worth $5 if you ask me.
Here is an article that already proposes DNA computing. (.gz, and probably not worth a d/l)
And here are some other NP problems
Either that, or have the postmaster forward him all bounced emails.
Here is a typical letter, .
3#15#2001
intmain Barat,
Intmain baratom++ [hung. for !--helps against lameness filter also] Hogy vagy+?+?+? En jol; [hungarian for
" is hungarian for a comma, >> and <<, as in French, for quotations]. En nagyon jol vagyok "koszonom" de nem ertek egy dolgot a leveledbol; Hiszen "irod" >>nem ertem a leveledet<< "holott en nem kuldtem egyaltalan neked levelet; e-mellet "ha kuldtem volna" meg vagyok gyozve hogy ertheto lett volna++;
Egyelore ennyit; haliho+
This letter, copied literally, does not illustrate the hungarian use of { and } for paranthesis before large clauses and longer paragraphs.
Other aspects of Hungarian orthography are not of interst.
Ha!
Has it ever struck anything else that it makes perfect sense to allow anyone to patent anything, whether or not they have enough ligitimacy to actually enforce it -- if a case ever comes up, proving prior art, and the existing widespread implementation of what you /.'ers might consider a patent that never should have been given, is all it takes to get it thrown out. If anyone can patent anything, then the people who invent something new can patent it, and afterwards enforce it, and anything that hasn't been patented by its creaters will, at worst, have a 'default' patent of whatever company happens to have too much money on it's hands. Think about it! There are only a finite number of existing Stuff, and isn't it cool if you can refer, in whatever scholarly article you're writing, to each and every individual practice or principle that's conceivably patentable, under a convenient US patent number? There's NO downside to overpatenting stuff: would you rather have the big money sponsoring more Bushes?
That, and if enough silly patents start coming up, the patent disputing process will be revised into something sensible.
Just a thought.
I bet there are lots of textbooks and just plain printed-out code in archives that we'd re-use, too, from the way the post was originally phrased.
But I think we should pretend, for the sake of discussion, that the question read something like "what if we suddenly found, for whatever unstated reason, that all recorded information about the computer industry for the past fifty years useless had become unavailable to us" -- that is, if we had to use what we know to develop better things from the bottom up. Also, we can assume that all the people who wrote technical papers still remember their shit, so we can still use all that hard CS information to better design the new systems we design to get us back on our feet. Deal?
Now, of course, it becomes a lot more interesting. How would you even spread the news? (Dust off the ole' Guttenburg presses, eh? hehe. [I bet no modern printing facility exists that does not use electronics.] I call dibs on the English majors for scribes. :] )
"Damnit Silverman, I *told* you to print hard copies of all your code!" ... Has ops gotten our internet connection back up??...huh?...Well SOMEBODY had better tell me our stock price within the next five minutes if they know what's good for them -- what kind of insane assylum are we running here anyway??
...Alright, that's it, I'm taking tomorrow off again.[sic]"
("Yeah-but, there's sixty four thousand lines of it in seven concurrent source trees. Also, there's no more compiler--remember, all the world's electronics have been lost")
Well place a purchase order for a new one. Use your head, Silverman: we have deadlines to meet!!
(mumbles):"Damn imbeciles".
[...]
(overheard from the next room) "**Whaddaya mean there's no TV???!!**
/me notices banner. Yep...of 200k/year l33tists who still see naked chicks and get fired.
No, my friend, these guys have no girlfriends...
Your sig is by JFK, in his inaugaral address.
How about Shakespeare? Now there was a genius. Religions fade and fall away, but can you imagine any time some sappy English major won't have to struggle her way through Titus Andronicus?
Scary thought. I don't think could sleep in a world like that.
Plus, with no more English majors, who'll take my order?
What's KDE? What's Linux?
KDE stands for "Kid: DAMN Excellent!!"[1]At least it does in this release =)))
Now if only I can get at the binaries!!! You call those mirrors?? Where's instantly indexing, synchronistically diffuse P2P when you freakin' need it??!! Pshaw. In my day, we could sneaker' a new rpg around the earth faster than than the time it takes to get kde.org to freakin' resolve (yeah, I mean DNS), let alone let us peek at the dough.
My God, what is this world coming to?
-
3-state.
ps. "Linux", FYI, is a flavor of power known to the geniuses among us simply as Catharsis. You try spending seven hours of your night recompiling your kernel and tell me that doesn't get your mind off your ex. Go on. I dare ya'. I tell you, that CPU just hums smoother when it's running rock-hard code.
[1] is "kid" for "dude" solely a Bostonism? It sounds perfectly normal to me...
"
This second major release of the KDE 2 series is a real improvement in terms of stability, performance and features," said David Faure, release manager for KDE 2.1 and KDE Representative at Mandrakesoft. "KDE 2 has now matured into a solid, intuitive and complete desktop for daily use. Konqueror is a full-featured and robust web browser and important applications like the mail client (KMail) have greatly improved. The multimedia architecture has made great strides and this release inaugurates the new media player noatun, which has a modular, plugin design for playing the latest audio and video formats. For development, KDE 2.1 for the first time is bundled with KDevelop, an outstanding IDE/RAD which will be comfortably familiar to developers with Windows development backgrounds. In short, KDE 2.1 is a state-of-the-art desktop and development environment, and positions Linux/Unix to make significant inroads in the home and enterprise."
"KDE 2.1 opens the door to widespread adoption of the Linux desktop and will help provide the success on the desktop that Linux already enjoys in the server space," added Dirk Hohndel, CTO of Suse AG. "With its intuitive interface, code maturity and excellent development tools and environment, I am confident that enterprises and third party developers will realize the enormous potential KDE offers and will migrate their workstations and applications to Linux/KDE."
"KDE boasts an outstanding graphical design and robust functionality," said Sheila Harnett, Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM's Linux Technology Center. "KDE 2.1 significantly raises the bar for Linux desktop functionality, usability and quality in virtually every aspect of the desktop."
"- Crash-learning the basics of perl.
- Trying to find a cool JAVA applet that will interpret some for me, so I can put in two freakin' lines of code and see what it comes up with.
- Reading a very interesting, scholarly article about encapsulating perl in java applets. (The whole of which could be summed up as: "yeah, that would be cool")
- Realized I should just download a dang interpretter.
- Installing really, really easy-to-use perl software on my computer. (ActiveState, if you must know).
- Composing the following lines, so I could just alt-tab and press a key to see what my changes have wrought:
:1 . . :1
- My first program? ('s third compile?)
/.
In other words, thank you dude. Seeing two really, really cool-looking lines of code (and ones that are clearly, from what I knew of perl, common to the language--I knew both what the lines were perl, and exactly what they did) and not being able to cut-and-paste and compile them in a a C++ project literally has just gotten me a new language for the cost of two hours I probably would have spent reading lame@echo off
cls
echo Running %1...
echo ------------ Started. ------------
perl %1
echo ------------ Finished. ------------
echo
echo
echo Any key to run again.
pause > discard.t
cls
goto
# YES!!//more !s, but lameness filter on
print STDERR "This is a test.\n";
$tt = "111";
print STDERR "alas is: ", $tt, "\n";
$email = "c^h&ea^ld45';)(@;)(&^ya^ho'o.com";
print STDERR "orig email is: ", $email, "\n";
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@\.]//g;
print STDERR "real email is: ", $email, "\n";
Oh man, does anyone else damn near /hear/ in this guy's voice just how red in the face he is, or is it just my poor dietary habit? (Hey, you'd be on edge too, if /you/ had Uncle Morb's Spicy Surprise--let's just say 'bean supper' is understatement like electoral clownshow).
Oh, yes, the obligatory Slashdot appeasement: /my/ desktop -- uh, *O* *S*, let's me set things the way I want.
"Some readers think that I am proposing having applications, which could be launched by a button press (as with the Commodore CBM Plus4, Palm). I am not proposing anything of the sort"
In other words, all those poor users who accidentally stumbled upon what the Big Mean Power Users call "shortcut keys" (or "hotkeys", if you're in Gatesville) have finally gotten the best of poor old Raskin. Oh well. Glad
Cheers.
Oh, and obligatory Informative links:
Further information about Raskin.
Information about nearly Raskin.
Some people don't get humor. Whence my :))?
Yeah, and look where it got us. You push a person with half his weight and unless he's expecting to actively compensate for it, he falls over. Pshaw. /that/.
"incremental changes" only hack a solution into working, such as Humans, but result in a design that on a basic level could possibly be much better if you knew from the get-go where you wanted to end up, and designed around the best implementation of
. . . . . . Confessions of an MCSE . . . . . . .
Once upon a midnight quite particularly dreary
Since I chanced upon a net node that illuminated clearly
How to scrounge and hack together former CPU's that yearly
lose all function and so merely
waste the space upon your floor,
Since I chanced upon this web site that had promised so much more,
for the price of a For Dummy's book and a drive to the all-night store,
(for we all know that King Amazon ships slowly from off-shore),
then I swallowed hard, and knowing that what sleep I'd had before
would have to do for a day or two, as I readied to explore
this strange book, why then, astonished, on the cover this I saw:
How too bild a Beowulf clust-or
I dropped my jaw. What's the meaning of a spelling that so liberally spews
anti-publishing convention, anti-literally views
as early as the title-page?! With what shall I excuse
such an idiotic purchase?....or is it but a rouse
through the value of its shocking to get you to peruse
its contents? Who can know? I turned the page.
A CD-ROM! How helpful! I checked my former rage.
Reading on, I noticed these directions for the disk:
"Put it in, and execute drive-letter-setup-exec.
But do so at your personal and solitary risk."
That is all.
Alright, I said, that's clear enough, and further then I read.
but instead of more instructions, there was the same, in Spanish instead.
On I flipped, through German, French, and Chinese simplified
on through Russian, Japanese and Netherlandy Dutch beside,
on I flipped through all the Slavics, nay, all Indo-European
languages, then other groups, like Ugro-finnish Hungarean,
On through japanese, swahili, even African Tschadide
as escape I vainly tried,
but there was no end, until, at last, I reached: About the Authors.
So was this some get-rich scam meant but to fill the writers' coffers?
No returns on midnight offers.
Well, I sighed and looked again at that mysterious cd
I guess it could not hurt just to browse it for to see
whether any use in it at all there actually can be.
So I popped it in the drive-door,
browsed on over, and, well, gee:
One file was all there was: setup-dot-e-x-e.
Six hundred megs. I switched from root
to users more restricted
I went and clicked the execute
clutter-clutter, on it shifted!
my cd-rom, up,up it sped
my hard-drive whirled, and flashed its red
my system cluttered, clunked, and crappled,
as with this "huge" file it grappled
(what, you really don't suppose,
that the system slowness these expose,
isn't natural with the computer speed woes
that only clustering overthrows?)
So it thrashed and scuttled, a quarter hour,
When with an effort it found the power
to treat this MCSE dummy to an explanation
of why he could not yet achieve his clustering elation:
"OS not supported"
It dutifully reported.
Now it doesn't take my well-earned MCSE
To realize that Linux is bullshitting me
Windows 2000, you see,
Is our hallmark, it supports damn near every
worthwhile application:
And this then was my salvation.
At 4 AM I concluded
The merits of clustering had been refuted.
I'm 27 and have pissed my life away doing nothing. I want to kill myself.
There is not a man in the world who has not pissed his life away doing nothing. You and each of us are to the galaxy the equivilant of one atom in one grain of sand among all the beaches of the world. What's the use then? Unlike that one atom, you are literate and can wield a BR tag. You can get drunk, and you can rock. Who fsking cares about anything else? Learn a good multiplayer game. There is always some community, and that is the only reason anyone chooses to remain alive on this Earth. Your pals are just too damn intertaining, and they appreciate you: even if it's just fizpuppy3902 on acrophobia.com
This has been a public service.
Clients. Lusers. I mean software clients of course--and if you're not using real or media player, your customer's browser is NOT going to have it. Sure you can reasonably ask a luser to spend half an hour installing flash/real/an adobe pdf viewer, but the same does NOT hold for no-name asiaware. If it's not really, really (and exclusively) cool/important, your customers will not bother with it. Period.
Honestly, it's not a matter of suing them. You have no damages. Just show them the law, if they see that they are obliged to credit you, then they will credit you. It is definitely not worth it for them to say "No. We understand that we are acting illegally, but we refuse to stop crediting someone who contributed very little of the code instead of you who contributed the vast majority." /no/ downside to "jumping in head first". (You don't deserve money from them right now just for their not putting your name on, so you can't honestly be 'ruining anything' by not doing what legally has the most potential money behind it in a lawsuit type situation.)
In conclusion: get a lawyer only if you can't find the law (although I would think it's a very general IP issue to not credit the creator of a work, and therefore should not be difficult to find), not to try to sue them for money. You and I both know you're not suffering great damages. Just find a law (like the one I quoted) and throw it at them. If they still remain asses get a lawyer with a contingent fee to write them something nasty about suing them if they blatantly continue to act illegally. (If it's really a large corporation ignoring a clear law, they can be penalized even if you don't suffer many damages, you know, just for their breaking the law and refusing to stop). Start by writing them a letter, it doesn't change anything! You're not going to get money from them by waiting and suing them...they'll just say they didn't know. Let them know! Like I just said, they won't say "uh, no, we think we prefer to continue illegally not crediting you.". Type up that email bro! There's
After all, it can't hurt. What employer wouldn't be glad to hear an employee is proud of software work he/she developed for the company, implying genuine hard work? Even before you start looking for 'legal recourse', definitely try a plain old request. If you parted on bad enough terms, you might be met with a 'no', but it doesn't hurt to ask. Your letter might run somesomething like:
Sir,
I realize we have had our differences, but I am writing only with respect to the professional issue that I would like to see my name on the ~~~ product (for instance, at this location), on which I spent considerable time and work at <your former company>, and in which I do take some pride. (then some anal thank you and goodluck goodluck or hope your products are doing well or whatever.).
If you really want to imply a legal recourse, after 'I would like to see my name on --', put in "which is the legally established convention for credited work (you do include <name of other dude> with whom I worked), even in the case of when a company holds the exclusive copyright.", which is only vaguely true per the above post's reference to legal code. I say this because this (linked in an above post) says:
In my essay on Copyright Law, I asserted that the USA does not recognize "moral rights" of authors that are included in article 6bis of the Berne Convention, despite the claim of the USA that it adheres to the Berne Convention. These moral rights include:
In other words, the US does not honor formally (or de facto, depending on how you interpret the above) the right to see attributement (when you don't hold the copyright), and indeed the caselaw (still from here) says:
Smith v. Montoro, 648 F.2d 602 (9thCir. 1981) (removal of actor's name from film credits was valid claim under Lanham Act).
Now I wasn't sure what this meant, so I found this on the "Lanham (Trademark) Act (15 U.S.C.)" including the preamble:
The Lanham Act is found in Title 15 of the U.S. Code and contains the federal statutes governing trademark law in the United States. However, this act is not the exclusive law governing U.S. trademark law, since both common law and state statutes also control some aspects of trademark protection. This index contains links to each of the sections of the Lanham, and was last updated in March, 2000.
Now Title VIII - False Designations Of Origin And False Descriptions Forbidden says:
1125. False designations of origin and false descriptions forbidden
(a)
Civil action.
(1)
Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which--
(A)
is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or
(B)
in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial activities, shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
In other words (the bold above is mine), despite what the above essay said about our not respecting authorial attributement as the French do, in letter at least this Lanham Act seems to mean that you're fairly well covered in saying the legal convention is behind you. If you say "convention", it implies that that's how it's done to be sure to be legal, and is not as overtly negative as if you had said the law requires this. :]) along with a nice hyperlink so he can check out his legal obgligations. Either way, you seem covered. Good luck!
In any case, first a nice letter, with a vague allusion to law, then if your former employer refuses to add your name, dig around this Lanham Act business a bit and send him chapter and verse (section and paragraph
Naturally we shouldn't be overly concerned that Athena doesn't meet a "proven" (here, POSIX) standard--we aren't all using FORTRAN or writing real-time [deterministic-time] algorithms, are we?--, but shouldn't we take a moment to consider the fact that Athena's FAQ says: :) operational behavior on ANY level of what you're doing...short of writing bits out to a file (but you're getting nowhere near the FS--or any hardware for that matter). Forget HAL: this is HAL:THISMACHINE:HARDWARE:PERIPHERALS:OUTPUT:VISIBL E:MONITORS:ENVIRONMENT:WINDOWS:MYWINDOW:PLEASE:PRE TTY:PLEASE:LET:ME:NEAR:A:SET:METHOD(&MyAthenaApp.m ywindow.mypallette.color, GREEN); Not that this isn't useful, but what if their idea of green isn't your idea of green? Just dig around the standard, right, it's bound to be there somewhere? ;-)
:)
["Does the Pandora Engine support POSIX compliancy?"]
"No. It's not practical, or even possible to implement most of the POSIX standard" (my bold)
because:
"POSIX was designed for procedural systems, so given that the Pandora Engine is object based..."
Now, it is of course a Good Thing (for easy, modular programming) to have a heavily OOP'd, high-level 'environment', (we can't even say OS anymore[1]) that can easily optimize later whatever tasks it does allow the application to run. However, the fact should worry us that the developers say it is not "possible" to run functions on a low enough level to ensure any kind of guaranteed (or "realtime"
"Pandora does not use a separate interface for game development (such as a DirectX style API)"..."Currently we are missing 3D support (OpenGL for example)"...Hmmmm...correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that their "object based" methods are the only things programmers will have available, without even the Standardizd (eg OpenGL) niceties we can use to get around protected architectures once they're implemented?
Oh well: "there are plenty of existing engines that can be ported when the need for a 3D engine arises."
But I wonder...does "can be ported" mean "We can't exactly use them, because of how commercial we are, and we're not allowed to port GNU stuff, but, we assure you, we'll have really, really similar-sounding naming schemes..."
Anyone see a different take on this?
[1] Athena on BeOs on WIN2K on Linux??? Oh the thngs we do.
Quoteland.com gives "disapprove":
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course, once we may edit, I should think it more powerful to say:
"I disagree vehemently with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it."