I've got one of these homes, and it's a BOCA. That means the value increases with time.
The reason most trailer homes lose value is the same reason they burn down quickly. (Your average singlewide will burn down in 11 minutes from initial flame.) They're not BOCA-compliant.
Apparantly, the value of a house has something to do with its safety and how well it's lasted the years.
Since I'm not creative enough to come up with ideas for current games try this:
Let's say Dune II was released under the GPL, with the content protected under a different license. Somebody decides to add selection of multiple units, support for antialiasing and higher resolutions...and ten years later, someone writes an OpenGL 3D system to play the game through instead of the standard 2D interface.
If the game itself was good enough, you'd find people still paying for the original content, but playing it with newer engines.
Another example: What if the Quake engine had been initially released under the GPL (impossible, I know, 'cause id licenses the source for $$ for a few years)...GL support could have come a lot sooner, and the NetQuake protocol might still rule the net, with some of the same enhancements that id put in the QuakeWorld protocol, only sooner.
It brings a Microsoftesque flavor, too. Flood the market with your product (that keeps getting improved, with no effort on your part), and competitors will have to produce something a quantom leap ahead of your product, if they want any market interest.
Come to think of it, should patent lengths be contested, another factor must be taken into account: How and why a patent is profitable to the patent holder.
If the judge finds it reasonable to believe that the patent holder is holding the patent so he doesn't have to put more money into R&D--that stifles innovation, and therefore flouts the purpose of patents in the first place.
If a patent clerk can use his judgement on whether or not something is patentable, wouldn't he be able to take into account the rate of technology advancement as well?
It doesn't matter if the occasional clerk's judgement is just as poor...Companies sue over whether something is patentable, so they'll also be able to sue over whether something is patentable for so long.
Actually, Cobra was from the GI Joes in the 80s. One could say they were dynamically linked, as the links would be broken as soon you tossed a grenade in their direction.
As far as Microsoft and your average PHB (as well as the general public):
If Microsoft does it, it's necessary.
It's an old argument but think of it this way: The only people who have problems with what Microsoft does are those who get trodden on. In the mean time, they were taking advantage of other people being trodden on, without realizing it.
Methinks tags are more intuitive. How many eight-year-olds can look at your average C utility, then look at its code, and be able to figure out what does what?
I've always wanted to say this where someone would believe me. (It's amazing how many people would rather bury their heads in the sand.)
It's not about the government not being interested in you or I right now, it's about the future. The more police powers the government has, the more likely those powers are to be abused. The farther technology progresses (without simultaneous attention to personal security), the easier it becomes for the government to abuse those powers.
We have proof that the US government cannot self-regulate itself sufficiently to prevent abuse of its power, no matter how temporarily it occurs.
For example, the Alien and Sedition Acts were blatant(though not flagrant) violations of personal freedoms. Take the time to read the Alien Act, and tell me the government isn't doing exactly what it made legal, right now. And notice that both laws were later struck down as unconstitutional. If you look it up, you'll find that at least one very prominent politician (a member of an opposition party) was jailed for violating the Sedition act.
For more proof, just dig deeply into the activities of the FBI during the thirties.
The government is perfectly capable of regulating itself, but only after it has made a mistake. It has no mechanism in place (aside from the common-law nature of Congress, but political parties took care of that "problem") to prevent mistakes before they occur. Hence the Alien and Sedition Acts. Hence the DMCA. Hence the Patriot Act.
I've heard it mentioned, and I'll repeat it: Laws and acts by the Legislative and Executive branches of government need to be reviewed by the other two branches. Not necessarily before they take effect, but soon after. (If they had to be reviewed before they took effect, "red tape" would become a "red swamp." McCarthy would have loved it.)
I wonder why the clueless press does not do a wee bit of research and discover the obvious impotence of these "narrowed by argument" patents instead of issuing simple minded alarmist headlines proclaiming the "patenting of hyperlinking" controversy.
It's a cascade of a couple issues.
A media distribution point (television channel, newspaper, magazine) has to put out a great deal of information in order to maintain its viewership/readership. Journalists only have so much time to find a story, research it, put it together, and pass it on to their editor. In times of economic boom, (like the 90s,) there's plenty of money to go towards paying for writers and reporters. Now, there are fewer resources, fewer journalists, and less time for each journalist to put his story together.
That's why in the 90s everyone knew about the Microsoft antitrust case through television, but now only the really big newspapers (like the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or USA Today), or the specialized news services (Wired, The Register, Slashdot) have stories on these issues.
With the current economic drought, nobody's going to waste resources on stories that aren't the most newsworthy, or the simplest. The reporters at NYT and WP that do these stories are probably close to being laid off, as is.
Take it from me, I've held both levels of authority(writer, editor) at my old high school's paper, during well-staffed and understaffed times. I know what it's like to whip together a story in three or four hours.
My eye-controlling muscles move much faster than my hand-controlling muscles, and I'm a fast typist. This would mean that I could type faster, just by looking at the screen, or, possibly, at a little card below the screen.
It would be especially useful for writers, demilenization victims, people with advanced muscular distrophy(like Stephen Hawking), or even for people with arthritis. All they'd need would be a visible list of commonly used words, and another list of letters. This would be somewhat like DVORAK. (Indeed, I can see how DVORAK could become popular in the mainstream, this way.)
But when it comes to someone with ADD or simaler (like me), if there's any textual distractions, they're going to be constantly undoing what they've already typed. For public-access terminals, this would be a nightmare. Poorly thought-out handicap laws may one day require this sort of technology at public terminals, for people with disabilities.
The "System" that failed may refer to the overall system, not necessarily the stability of the OS. Several things that could cause this:
Buggy control software
Quite often, the same software compiled for Linux, and then compiled for Windows, won't work the same way. Unless you use something like MinGW or Cygwin, you run the risk of the w32(Read, MSVC++) compiler not interpereting certain functions (especially preprocessor and low-level compiler functions) the same way as they would be under Linux with GNU tools.
[Buggy] [system] library used by the control software
Microsoft's C/C++ libraries often take different arguments, or even return different results (like a different return value code system) than GNU libraries for Linux.
Either of the two above options would require IBM to spend a good deal of time rewriting portions of their software, which, after assessing the market condition, they may have decided wasn't worth it.
Hardware drivers
Vendor-provided drivers rarely have the "many-eyes" debugging system that OSS software has. This becomes especially evident with hardware drivers, which thousands of computer-literate (in the case of Linux users) people use. Score one for OSS!
Realtime dependance
While there are patches to make Linux certifiably a Real Time OS, Microsoft Windows has no such patches. Even NT can freeze, should a userland software loop get out of control. (Trust me, I had it happen yesterday here at work.)
Software licensing issues
Yes, even licenses can cause unexpected downtime. For example, lets presume IBM's automation system accounted for glitches such as those that might require ghosting (restoring a binary image to a hard drive). If they had tried, say, XP Server, as their controlling OS, XP would have to contact Microsoft for license verification, before continuing to run. Suddenly, Internet congestion, and glitches in Microsoft's system, all become factors. The master control system mail decide that subordinate X has been down too long for it to be an automatically fixable problem, and then have to take the entire system down for symmetry and stability.
God, I sound like Richard Stallman. How the hell did that happen?
I'm not so sure about the "better on older hardware" thing anymore.
Sure, Linux never drops support for hardware, but the distributions, at least, grow to depend on more resources.
I'm trying to install Debian on a 486 right next to me, and dselect's been loading the package database for an hour. (I intend to use the machine as a NAT gateway.)
"Amazing" advances in the uses of Linux happen fairly often. What's interesting about this advance is it requires the application of realtime processing, which Linux doesn't natively support.
So, my question is, what realtime extension system are they using? I know there's RTLinux, but are there any other options?
Have you ever compared software-rendered GL (read, Mesa) to even an old Voodoo1? The difference in time required is staggering. I always knew when my GL drivers weren't working right because it took 15 seconds to render one frame.
Now scoot ahead to five years from now, when 3d accelerators take their data in the form of some.pov/.diff hybrid, or a.pov derivitive with motion thrown in. These new, cutting edge video cards are *capable* of onboard reytracing at 16000x12000. (sic) Suddenly, rendering Toy Story III in native IMAX sounds real good right now...
(On a side note... throw in dedicated mass-spring simulation hardware for fluid and materials emulation. [drool])
I had assumed that no CPU company was stupid enough to allow their CPU's performance-to-clockspeed ratio to drop below the traditional level. I suspect that a lot of slashdotters had this affliction, too.
Why else would the original story ever have been posted on Slashdot? Not only would the/. employee have to find it newsworthy, but a reader would have had to consider it so, before submitting it as a potential story.
Change "clockspeed" in the first paragraph to "assumed clockspeed," and you'll immediately see what the next CPU lawsuit is going to be about.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got one of these homes, and it's a BOCA. That means the value increases with time.
The reason most trailer homes lose value is the same reason they burn down quickly. (Your average singlewide will burn down in 11 minutes from initial flame.) They're not BOCA-compliant.
Apparantly, the value of a house has something to do with its safety and how well it's lasted the years.
Any non-geek females want to comment? Any non-geek females on slashdot, period?
...
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
There's something wrong, here...
...the camera doesn't work.
Since I'm not creative enough to come up with ideas for current games try this:
Let's say Dune II was released under the GPL, with the content protected under a different license. Somebody decides to add selection of multiple units, support for antialiasing and higher resolutions...and ten years later, someone writes an OpenGL 3D system to play the game through instead of the standard 2D interface.
If the game itself was good enough, you'd find people still paying for the original content, but playing it with newer engines.
Another example: What if the Quake engine had been initially released under the GPL (impossible, I know, 'cause id licenses the source for $$ for a few years)...GL support could have come a lot sooner, and the NetQuake protocol might still rule the net, with some of the same enhancements that id put in the QuakeWorld protocol, only sooner.
It brings a Microsoftesque flavor, too. Flood the market with your product (that keeps getting improved, with no effort on your part), and competitors will have to produce something a quantom leap ahead of your product, if they want any market interest.
Come to think of it, should patent lengths be contested, another factor must be taken into account: How and why a patent is profitable to the patent holder.
If the judge finds it reasonable to believe that the patent holder is holding the patent so he doesn't have to put more money into R&D--that stifles innovation, and therefore flouts the purpose of patents in the first place.
If a patent clerk can use his judgement on whether or not something is patentable, wouldn't he be able to take into account the rate of technology advancement as well?
It doesn't matter if the occasional clerk's judgement is just as poor...Companies sue over whether something is patentable, so they'll also be able to sue over whether something is patentable for so long.
Actually, Cobra was from the GI Joes in the 80s. One could say they were dynamically linked, as the links would be broken as soon you tossed a grenade in their direction.
I know most "would this work" posts are ignored, but...
Would it make sense for the patent office to set a limit on a patent's life span based on the rate of technology progression in that field?
As far as Microsoft and your average PHB (as well as the general public):
If Microsoft does it, it's necessary.
It's an old argument but think of it this way: The only people who have problems with what Microsoft does are those who get trodden on. In the mean time, they were taking advantage of other people being trodden on, without realizing it.
Sounds like spa
Methinks tags are more intuitive. How many eight-year-olds can look at your average C utility, then look at its code, and be able to figure out what does what?
It's a three-dimensional image. Don't forget time. :) Finally, animation whose most useful application doesn't involve a male's fifth appendage.
Due to the nature of the community, you can often replace "the government" with "a malicious party."
I've always wanted to say this where someone would believe me. (It's amazing how many people would rather bury their heads in the sand.)
It's not about the government not being interested in you or I right now, it's about the future. The more police powers the government has, the more likely those powers are to be abused. The farther technology progresses (without simultaneous attention to personal security), the easier it becomes for the government to abuse those powers.
We have proof that the US government cannot self-regulate itself sufficiently to prevent abuse of its power, no matter how temporarily it occurs.
For example, the Alien and Sedition Acts were blatant(though not flagrant) violations of personal freedoms. Take the time to read the Alien Act, and tell me the government isn't doing exactly what it made legal, right now. And notice that both laws were later struck down as unconstitutional. If you look it up, you'll find that at least one very prominent politician (a member of an opposition party) was jailed for violating the Sedition act.
For more proof, just dig deeply into the activities of the FBI during the thirties.
The government is perfectly capable of regulating itself, but only after it has made a mistake. It has no mechanism in place (aside from the common-law nature of Congress, but political parties took care of that "problem") to prevent mistakes before they occur. Hence the Alien and Sedition Acts. Hence the DMCA. Hence the Patriot Act.
I've heard it mentioned, and I'll repeat it: Laws and acts by the Legislative and Executive branches of government need to be reviewed by the other two branches. Not necessarily before they take effect, but soon after. (If they had to be reviewed before they took effect, "red tape" would become a "red swamp." McCarthy would have loved it.)
I'm more interested in transmitting to the device.
A parabolic dish should be sufficient for two-way communication. (Return via eye muscles.)
And, yes, anti-troll moderator, this has serious potential to be abused.
Interesting what an EMP blast would do, though...
I wonder why the clueless press does not do a wee bit of research and discover the obvious impotence of these "narrowed by argument" patents instead of issuing simple minded alarmist headlines proclaiming the "patenting of hyperlinking" controversy.
It's a cascade of a couple issues.
A media distribution point (television channel, newspaper, magazine) has to put out a great deal of information in order to maintain its viewership/readership. Journalists only have so much time to find a story, research it, put it together, and pass it on to their editor. In times of economic boom, (like the 90s,) there's plenty of money to go towards paying for writers and reporters. Now, there are fewer resources, fewer journalists, and less time for each journalist to put his story together.
That's why in the 90s everyone knew about the Microsoft antitrust case through television, but now only the really big newspapers (like the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or USA Today), or the specialized news services (Wired, The Register, Slashdot) have stories on these issues.
With the current economic drought, nobody's going to waste resources on stories that aren't the most newsworthy, or the simplest. The reporters at NYT and WP that do these stories are probably close to being laid off, as is.
Take it from me, I've held both levels of authority(writer, editor) at my old high school's paper, during well-staffed and understaffed times. I know what it's like to whip together a story in three or four hours.
My eye-controlling muscles move much faster than my hand-controlling muscles, and I'm a fast typist. This would mean that I could type faster, just by looking at the screen, or, possibly, at a little card below the screen.
It would be especially useful for writers, demilenization victims, people with advanced muscular distrophy(like Stephen Hawking), or even for people with arthritis. All they'd need would be a visible list of commonly used words, and another list of letters. This would be somewhat like DVORAK. (Indeed, I can see how DVORAK could become popular in the mainstream, this way.)
But when it comes to someone with ADD or simaler (like me), if there's any textual distractions, they're going to be constantly undoing what they've already typed. For public-access terminals, this would be a nightmare. Poorly thought-out handicap laws may one day require this sort of technology at public terminals, for people with disabilities.
Oh GOD!
I'm AVERAGE !
noooooo!
Quite often, the same software compiled for Linux, and then compiled for Windows, won't work the same way. Unless you use something like MinGW or Cygwin, you run the risk of the w32(Read, MSVC++) compiler not interpereting certain functions (especially preprocessor and low-level compiler functions) the same way as they would be under Linux with GNU tools.
Microsoft's C/C++ libraries often take different arguments, or even return different results (like a different return value code system) than GNU libraries for Linux.
Either of the two above options would require IBM to spend a good deal of time rewriting portions of their software, which, after assessing the market condition, they may have decided wasn't worth it.
Vendor-provided drivers rarely have the "many-eyes" debugging system that OSS software has. This becomes especially evident with hardware drivers, which thousands of computer-literate (in the case of Linux users) people use. Score one for OSS!
While there are patches to make Linux certifiably a Real Time OS, Microsoft Windows has no such patches. Even NT can freeze, should a userland software loop get out of control. (Trust me, I had it happen yesterday here at work.)
Yes, even licenses can cause unexpected downtime. For example, lets presume IBM's automation system accounted for glitches such as those that might require ghosting (restoring a binary image to a hard drive). If they had tried, say, XP Server, as their controlling OS, XP would have to contact Microsoft for license verification, before continuing to run. Suddenly, Internet congestion, and glitches in Microsoft's system, all become factors. The master control system mail decide that subordinate X has been down too long for it to be an automatically fixable problem, and then have to take the entire system down for symmetry and stability.
God, I sound like Richard Stallman. How the hell did that happen?
Read "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
Goes into detail what would happen if Scientists ruled.
I'm not so sure about the "better on older hardware" thing anymore.
Sure, Linux never drops support for hardware, but the distributions, at least, grow to depend on more resources.
I'm trying to install Debian on a 486 right next to me, and dselect's been loading the package database for an hour. (I intend to use the machine as a NAT gateway.)
I've always wondered if thick (1 cm) waveguide tubes would be sufficient to pipe wireless signals through or around blocking walls.
Any comments, people?
"Amazing" advances in the uses of Linux happen fairly often. What's interesting about this advance is it requires the application of realtime processing, which Linux doesn't natively support.
So, my question is, what realtime extension system are they using? I know there's RTLinux, but are there any other options?
Capturing FPS play would be absolutely perfect for all the mod developers out there for whom still-picture screenshots don't do their mod justice.
Have you ever compared software-rendered GL (read, Mesa) to even an old Voodoo1? The difference in time required is staggering. I always knew when my GL drivers weren't working right because it took 15 seconds to render one frame.
.pov/.diff hybrid, or a .pov derivitive with motion thrown in. These new, cutting edge video cards are *capable* of onboard reytracing at 16000x12000. (sic) Suddenly, rendering Toy Story III in native IMAX sounds real good right now...
Now scoot ahead to five years from now, when 3d accelerators take their data in the form of some
(On a side note... throw in dedicated mass-spring simulation hardware for fluid and materials emulation. [drool])
I had assumed that no CPU company was stupid enough to allow their CPU's performance-to-clockspeed ratio to drop below the traditional level. I suspect that a lot of slashdotters had this affliction, too.
/. employee have to find it newsworthy, but a reader would have had to consider it so, before submitting it as a potential story.
Why else would the original story ever have been posted on Slashdot? Not only would the
Change "clockspeed" in the first paragraph to "assumed clockspeed," and you'll immediately see what the next CPU lawsuit is going to be about.