for legislative/equal-ops reasons we had to identify more than just Male and Female as possible genders; at the time there were 7 legally recognised genders, I believe we're up to 11 now
(FX:Head hits desk with a thud)
What? 11 genders? I give up...
Your idea of a separate table is similar to his initial reccomendation of separate tables, just without the supplementary tables to identify rows that would have had null values in them for that column.
Yeah. I just can't work out why his way of doing is any more useful than mine. Oh, well.
Well, with Novell now throwing its substantial patent portfolio behind open source, and Microsoft having promised they won't use their patents to crush open source, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.
That's an entirely separate issue, about protecting OSS from claims of patent infringement.
This article, on the other hand, is about changing the way software patents are issued in order to make them more fair. And believe me, they aren't fair at the moment, because the inventions are usually described in extremely vague terms that inventors in other fields would not be allowed to get away with (and are usually required to produce detailed engineering drawings, etc, of the invention).
One should not be forced to supplement confidential product plans or company "trade secret" in order to apply for a patent.
Err, that's exactly how the patent system is _supposed_ to work. In order to get a patent you supply your "trade secret" details of how your invention works to the patent office, and they give you a patent in exchange for the right to publish those secrets.
A ridiculous idea. Say that the MPLA (who arrange licensing of patents on MPEG) set the royalty for licensing MPEG2 at 5%. They also set the royalty for licensing MPEG4 at 5%.
I now create two products, a media player than can play MPEG2 content, and an extended one that can play both MPEG2 _and_ MPEG4 content.
I price the first at $200, so MPLA get $10 per unit. I price the second at $300, because it's a lot better. MPLA get $30 per unit.
Why do they get 3 times as much money when I've only used twice as much of their IP?
They can get the source. They still need to pay for the patent license if they want to use it for anything other than personal non-commercial research.
He expects us to believe that he doesn't realize that "a keen young programmer" hasn't got the tens of K dollars to get a patent
I believe you're out by an order of magnitude. You don't _have_ to hire a patent attorney to get a patent. It only improves the chance of being successful, as they know how to phrase them to get them through.
and certainly hasn't got the millions of dollars needed to defend a patent against wilful infringers.
At this point, he would show his patent and the infringer to potential investors. Sooner or later, one would say, "yeah, looks like you can nail those bastards" and agree to finance him for a hefty cut of the proceeds. It might work.
How can you have an 'open source' implementation of something which is patented?
If it's patented, you'd need a license to develop the program further. You'd need a license just to run it.
How is that 'open source'?
Patented inventions can be used for 'experimental non-commercial' purposes (e.g. educational use) without a licence. It isn't open source in the way we currently understand it, but there is scope for this to be useful.
This is based on the D programming language suggested by Date and Darwen in their 1995 paper (presented to ACM), The Third Manifesto. I suggest the digital mars people ought to have done some research instead, if they're even slightly bothered.
SQL won't allow you to store a relation inside a cell of a relation, and then perform operations on that during a select.
Not that I'm saying this project can -- it's using bdb as its storage engine, which isn't capable of that either, but in theory the language its implementing can.
If you felt that null values not being picked up by clauses like "x != 'y'" then you can always lobby for an ammendment to the SQL standard to define Null as a value that does not equal anything, i.e. "x != 'y'" returns true when x is Null.
The SQL committee is unlikely to make such a major change at this stage. The time for that lobbying would have been before the language was standardised. As it stands at the moment, this would break many thousands of applications.
I have to admit not understanding his approach to avoiding nulls (despite the fact he gave that same talk back when I was at warwick in '96). If I wanted to achieve similar results to current SQL NULL systems without using NULL columns, I would define a table for the nullable values (e.g. "create table employee_salary ( id int primary key references employee, salary decimal(9,2) not null )") and then not add a row to it for any item where I would normally use null. It's a little inconvenient (in SQL; I would hope that in D there were language constructs to make dealing with it easier), but it works. I see no need for any more tables than this.
Virgin's site: "Currently this site experiences heavy traffic. Please try again at a later time." Kind of like their trains, really...
Presumably this product is primarily aimed at the UK market, which has always been Virgin's primary turf, and where the iPod isn't quite as popular as it is in the USA. Probably because iTMS hasn't been available here until recently.
There's a lot of information in Date & Darwen's paper entitled "The Third Manifesto". Unfortunately, I can't find a copy online, unless you happen to be an ACM member.
Mainly they had problems with a number of operations that were difficult to perform with SQL. I remember from a presentation that I saw Hugh Darwen giving back in '96 that they believed nulls to be evil and counter-intuitive.
When I saw Hugh Darwen speaking about this a few years back (guess it would have been '96 or thereabouts), he just called it 'D'. Since then somebody else has come along and taken that name for another language that has become semi-popular (a C replacement, in case you haven't seen it), so I guess they had to do something to change it...
Indeed. The Win2K machine I'm writing this from has been up since 30 June, and sees daily heavy use. Windows' reliability problems have been wildly exaggerated for the last 4 years, at least.
PearPC is free/FREE, though, and I only use it for Safari compatibility testing, so its speed isn't a major issue for me.
Err.. doesn't safari use the KHTML rendering engine? Wouldn't you therefore be better off just testing against konqueror, as anything that works in one will therefore work in the other?
Kernel pre-empt is only really useful if you are doing something with your PC that is highly sensitive to latency. Example applications that benefit are real-time audio processing (taking sound in one sound card channel, processing it, then outputing it on another immediately), video capture with high frame rates, running a VOIP/ISDN exchange, or similar I/O intensive time-critical operations.
For desktop use you're unlikely to notice much difference. Improved disk cacheing/swap management is a much more critical feature for this case.
Of course not. It _is_ however, a victory for those of us who believed that the RIAA's approach to the entire affair shouldn't be allowed. Essentially, a subpoena is a court document used to extract information. There should be judicial oversight to ensure that that process is not being abused. That's what this is about.
An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
for legislative/equal-ops reasons we had to identify more than just Male and Female as possible genders; at the time there were 7 legally recognised genders, I believe we're up to 11 now
(FX:Head hits desk with a thud)
What? 11 genders? I give up...
Your idea of a separate table is similar to his initial reccomendation of separate tables, just without the supplementary tables to identify rows that would have had null values in them for that column.
Yeah. I just can't work out why his way of doing is any more useful than mine. Oh, well.
Well, with Novell now throwing its substantial patent portfolio behind open source, and Microsoft having promised they won't use their patents to crush open source, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.
That's an entirely separate issue, about protecting OSS from claims of patent infringement.
This article, on the other hand, is about changing the way software patents are issued in order to make them more fair. And believe me, they aren't fair at the moment, because the inventions are usually described in extremely vague terms that inventors in other fields would not be allowed to get away with (and are usually required to produce detailed engineering drawings, etc, of the invention).
One should not be forced to supplement confidential product plans or company "trade secret" in order to apply for a patent.
Err, that's exactly how the patent system is _supposed_ to work. In order to get a patent you supply your "trade secret" details of how your invention works to the patent office, and they give you a patent in exchange for the right to publish those secrets.
A ridiculous idea. Say that the MPLA (who arrange licensing of patents on MPEG) set the royalty for licensing MPEG2 at 5%. They also set the royalty for licensing MPEG4 at 5%.
I now create two products, a media player than can play MPEG2 content, and an extended one that can play both MPEG2 _and_ MPEG4 content.
I price the first at $200, so MPLA get $10 per unit. I price the second at $300, because it's a lot better. MPLA get $30 per unit.
Why do they get 3 times as much money when I've only used twice as much of their IP?
They can get the source. They still need to pay for the patent license if they want to use it for anything other than personal non-commercial research.
He expects us to believe that he doesn't realize that "a keen young programmer" hasn't got the tens of K dollars to get a patent
I believe you're out by an order of magnitude. You don't _have_ to hire a patent attorney to get a patent. It only improves the chance of being successful, as they know how to phrase them to get them through.
and certainly hasn't got the millions of dollars needed to defend a patent against wilful infringers.
At this point, he would show his patent and the infringer to potential investors. Sooner or later, one would say, "yeah, looks like you can nail those bastards" and agree to finance him for a hefty cut of the proceeds. It might work.
How can you have an 'open source' implementation of something which is patented?
If it's patented, you'd need a license to develop the program further. You'd need a license just to run it.
How is that 'open source'?
Patented inventions can be used for 'experimental non-commercial' purposes (e.g. educational use) without a licence. It isn't open source in the way we currently understand it, but there is scope for this to be useful.
This is based on the D programming language suggested by Date and Darwen in their 1995 paper (presented to ACM), The Third Manifesto. I suggest the digital mars people ought to have done some research instead, if they're even slightly bothered.
RPG? Rocket Propelled Grenade?
SQL won't allow you to store a relation inside a cell of a relation, and then perform operations on that during a select.
Not that I'm saying this project can -- it's using bdb as its storage engine, which isn't capable of that either, but in theory the language its implementing can.
Well, they've been promoting this idea for 9 years now, so it's obviously not going to happen overnight.
If you felt that null values not being picked up by clauses like "x != 'y'" then you can always lobby for an ammendment to the SQL standard to define Null as a value that does not equal anything, i.e. "x != 'y'" returns true when x is Null.
The SQL committee is unlikely to make such a major change at this stage. The time for that lobbying would have been before the language was standardised. As it stands at the moment, this would break many thousands of applications.
I have to admit not understanding his approach to avoiding nulls (despite the fact he gave that same talk back when I was at warwick in '96). If I wanted to achieve similar results to current SQL NULL systems without using NULL columns, I would define a table for the nullable values (e.g. "create table employee_salary ( id int primary key references employee, salary decimal(9,2) not null )") and then not add a row to it for any item where I would normally use null. It's a little inconvenient (in SQL; I would hope that in D there were language constructs to make dealing with it easier), but it works. I see no need for any more tables than this.
Virgin's site: "Currently this site experiences heavy traffic. Please try again at a later time." Kind of like their trains, really...
Presumably this product is primarily aimed at the UK market, which has always been Virgin's primary turf, and where the iPod isn't quite as popular as it is in the USA. Probably because iTMS hasn't been available here until recently.
Ever watched how flies react to it? It's like nerve gas, it looks like an excruciatingly painful way to die.
It's not like nerve gas. It _is_ nerve gas. The most common modern pesticides block a reaction that is critical for neural activity in insects.
That said, it is (theoretically) a relatively painless way to go, because they ought to feel incredibly numb before anything else happens to them.
Not sure what book you're talking about but metallic hydrogen has been around for quite a while.
There's a lot of information in Date & Darwen's paper entitled "The Third Manifesto". Unfortunately, I can't find a copy online, unless you happen to be an ACM member.
Mainly they had problems with a number of operations that were difficult to perform with SQL. I remember from a presentation that I saw Hugh Darwen giving back in '96 that they believed nulls to be evil and counter-intuitive.
When I saw Hugh Darwen speaking about this a few years back (guess it would have been '96 or thereabouts), he just called it 'D'. Since then somebody else has come along and taken that name for another language that has become semi-popular (a C replacement, in case you haven't seen it), so I guess they had to do something to change it...
Indeed. The Win2K machine I'm writing this from has been up since 30 June, and sees daily heavy use. Windows' reliability problems have been wildly exaggerated for the last 4 years, at least.
PearPC is free/FREE, though, and I only use it for Safari compatibility testing, so its speed isn't a major issue for me.
Err.. doesn't safari use the KHTML rendering engine? Wouldn't you therefore be better off just testing against konqueror, as anything that works in one will therefore work in the other?
I don't believe FreeBSD runs on dead badgers. You'd probably have to install Linux and then use Bochs to run it.
Now where did I leave that reanimation scroll...?
Kernel pre-empt is only really useful if you are doing something with your PC that is highly sensitive to latency. Example applications that benefit are real-time audio processing (taking sound in one sound card channel, processing it, then outputing it on another immediately), video capture with high frame rates, running a VOIP/ISDN exchange, or similar I/O intensive time-critical operations.
For desktop use you're unlikely to notice much difference. Improved disk cacheing/swap management is a much more critical feature for this case.
I'm sure you two have been around here for long enough to have this argument a thousand times over. Stop already. We're bored of it. ;)
Of course not. It _is_ however, a victory for those of us who believed that the RIAA's approach to the entire affair shouldn't be allowed. Essentially, a subpoena is a court document used to extract information. There should be judicial oversight to ensure that that process is not being abused. That's what this is about.
An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it.
Anybody else feel buzzword overload coming on?
How does it handle run time exceptions, like sticky wickets?
That's actually a bowl-time exception. The bowler tripping the batsman over is a run-time exception.