we have a patent/idea review board in place to determine what we would like to spend time on
How about spending your time on developing a business model that uses some other form of IP protection than patent trolling? Or one that uses no protection at all, other than your own agility and willingness to supply what is best for the customer, faster and better than the next guy?
The problem is that there should not be a patent at all. Because patents are just slack for the economy as every economist will tell you. The only leftover the free trade revolution failed to kill in the last century.
Patents for software are in particular dangerous. [stopsoftwarepatents.org]
The fact with patents is that registering a patent is like registering a trade mark. Hire more patent attorneys and you get more patents. And no one asks whether they will produce any return on investment.
An innovative company will bail the lawyers out, invest in real R&D and lobby for patent reform to overcome the madness. Research institutions should not patent at all.
I do not see why your post was moderated flamebait, it seems perfectly well reasoned.
until that happens, play the game the way it needs to be played
Your logical fallacy is called a false dilemma. There are more than two ways to play the game. This would be a fine time to exercise your powers of reason to see what others you can discover.
You should quietly smile at whatever they come up with and fail to participate in it. Patents, and particularly software patents, are a huge drain on tech industry and a net drain on society. Be part of the solution, not the problem.
As for me, I downloaded the PS3 demo last week, found it incredibly dull, deleted it. Disclaimer: I've always been more of a Star Trek fan, anyway.
Well being able to toss junk around and make the bad guys fall down is fun. Too bad you can't move while doing it, that takes a lot of the fun back. Otherwise, this is a really linear romp. Exactly one path through the maze, a stupid reaction puzzle disguised as a chicken walker at the end of the hall. Such high production values, so little game.
The Windows system was just recently updated to double performance again (3 ms per transaction), so it's now 45 times as fast as the unix-based system it replaced.
That smoking hole in the ground was once a very fast rocket:-)
Seriously, if it was a Linux 2.6 system I wager it would be faster on the same hardware, and would not have crashed and burned for an entire trading day.
I can verify that Openoffice starts much faster on my little eee PC than on my Desktop machine with 75 MB/S 7200 RPM WD7500AACS. Or any other desktop I have used for that matter.
It is not just Openoffice of course, but Openoffice being a big pig of an application makes a nice example.
Linus... has... jumped the shark. The number versions... his version control insanities... He's no longer Linux's greatest advantage. He's now doing more to hold back the community than anything else. (dear god this is going to hurt the karma)
Rename article title as "Linus on Crack". You are right, Linus is now only Linux's second greatest advantage, Andrew Morton is the greatest. Linus has always been erratic but great. Lately, he really stepped in it a lot, but he is still maybe the best bug hunter that ever lived. Mind you, he tends to have a large hand in creating the horrible complexities that lead to the need for the bug hunt in the first place, but then if he did not we would never have the pleasure of watching him exercise his art.
is there any politically workable way to change the law and make software unpatentable again? It would be (in the eyes of patent holders at least) the same as throwing all the money invested straight out the window.
And they should have known better instead of being enthusiastically part of the problem. What is the best thing about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer again?
I never said people should be able to take community (GPL) software and hoard that. I said that both have their place.
Indeed, you did not say that, and I now see that you argued in favor of strong copyright laws in the interest of preserving freedom. I overlooked that in my response, mea culpa.
But you omitted the case where a developer should be free to protect their works for the purpose of ensuring that they remain free, which amounts to a false dichotomy between "free to profit from" and "free to use". Your argument will be stronger if you include this case, as it nicely rebuts the frequently cited fallacy that fewer rules equate to more freedom.
I often advocate for the use of OSS, but true freedom is allowing a developer to protect their works and profit from them, or give them openly as they choose to do so.
You are perfectly free to write your own code if you wish to profit from it by hoarding it. It sounds as though you are complaining about the difficulty of hoarding and profiting from the contributed work of others.
Then I would leave e-bay, after being there since 1996
Amen. I personally have experienced the famous Paypal shaft. Froze my account for no reason and blackholed all my communications, just like so many other people. When I finally did get access to my money again after many months of frustration and runaround, I closed the account I was stupid enough to give them access to and left Paypal for good.
JSR-184 seems to be going the same way. The patent holders won't play ball and release the source code. Why can't Java embedded 3D just be a wrapper for OpenGL ES? And what is an "interactive" 3D api anyway? That sounds like a handful of hit detection and pointer conversion functions to me. Kind of surprising there would be anything to patent in there.
We finally decided that the vendor that's involved there just isn't going to play ball and we're rewriting the code from scratch. That's going to be done within the next couple of months. One of the major benefits of releasing something into open source is the volunteer help. Don't hold it back just because a relatively small component needs to be rewritten. Remove the component again, leaving stubs, and just explain what it's supposed to do. For something as major as a GPL Java, the component will be rewritten by volunteers in no time at all, plus a small well defined project like that is a great way to get up to speed on a new code base.
Business users still require VGA for presentations on old projectors. DVI can do both, but it requires an adaptor or special cord, and is more expensive. It's also big, awkward to use and butt ugly, a contender for worst connector ever designed. Maybe hdmi will eventually save us from that idiocy.
With 1GB of RAM in support you can even have two or three programs open at any one time and not encounter any major problems Already been running more than a dozen at a time - ooffice, terminals, firefox, games, video recorder etc - with no problem. People sometimes forget just how much memory a gig really is.
I'll just wait until something interesting pops up used and cheap! I'll probably sell this 900 for about $400 when the 901 becomes available, does that qualify as cheap?...starting to get pretty good at shift-ctrl-fn-end, at least the three shift keys are all in the same place:-)
I bought an XO back in December and love it. I've found a way to type on it that allows me to still type fast enough to get work done. I find I can type pretty close to full speed on the eee keyboard, to my surprise and delight. There are a few compromises, for example, select to end of text which I use often, went from a three key shift-ctrl-end to a nearly unusable four key shift-ctrl-fn-end. I find myself hitting up arrow when I meant to shift, which causes quite a stall as I correct the resulting damage. But I'm getting used to it. It's way way way faster than texting or thumb keyboarding.
This machine is clearly good enough to keep me in the email loop while on the road. It has OpenOffice, incuding impress so I can work on my slide shows on the road, and because of the external VGA I can give the presentation with it too. Openoffice starts considerably faster on the little eee than it does on any of my fire breathing workstations, because of the flash disk of course. Interesting that the disk makes so much more difference than the processor power. The writing is on the wall: rotating disks are going out for personal computers, flash is coming in.
I don't think I'd be too happy actually developing code on this little guy like I manage to to pretty well with a notebook. But let's give it a while and see what happens.
My biggest compliant about the 900 is the fan noise, it's nearly always on even when I'm not doing much. Hopefully the 901 will improve the situation.
Posting this as much to see how this little guy works out as a connectivity tool as anything else. Whoops, there the cursor got onto the wrong line again. Ah well. Better than a UMPC, not something I want to work 8 hours straight on.
Slashdot Mirror
we have a patent/idea review board in place to determine what we would like to spend time on
How about spending your time on developing a business model that uses some other form of IP protection than patent trolling? Or one that uses no protection at all, other than your own agility and willingness to supply what is best for the customer, faster and better than the next guy?
The problem is that there should not be a patent at all. Because patents are just slack for the economy as every economist will tell you. The only leftover the free trade revolution failed to kill in the last century.
Patents for software are in particular dangerous. [stopsoftwarepatents.org]
The fact with patents is that registering a patent is like registering a trade mark. Hire more patent attorneys and you get more patents. And no one asks whether they will produce any return on investment.
An innovative company will bail the lawyers out, invest in real R&D and lobby for patent reform to overcome the madness. Research institutions should not patent at all.
I do not see why your post was moderated flamebait, it seems perfectly well reasoned.
until that happens, play the game the way it needs to be played
Your logical fallacy is called a false dilemma. There are more than two ways to play the game. This would be a fine time to exercise your powers of reason to see what others you can discover.
You should quietly smile at whatever they come up with and fail to participate in it. Patents, and particularly software patents, are a huge drain on tech industry and a net drain on society. Be part of the solution, not the problem.
As for me, I downloaded the PS3 demo last week, found it incredibly dull, deleted it. Disclaimer: I've always been more of a Star Trek fan, anyway.
Well being able to toss junk around and make the bad guys fall down is fun. Too bad you can't move while doing it, that takes a lot of the fun back. Otherwise, this is a really linear romp. Exactly one path through the maze, a stupid reaction puzzle disguised as a chicken walker at the end of the hall. Such high production values, so little game.
The Windows system was just recently updated to double performance again (3 ms per transaction), so it's now 45 times as fast as the unix-based system it replaced.
That smoking hole in the ground was once a very fast rocket :-)
Seriously, if it was a Linux 2.6 system I wager it would be faster on the same hardware, and would not have crashed and burned for an entire trading day.
Thanks for the plug. I will bump fs shrink up to the front of the list, in the spirit of the moment.
Regards,
Daniel
And 128MB ram is the new 2GB.. Actually it seems like it has either 128MB or 64MB, so guess what the cheap model will have...
Either way it's a massive amount of memory.
Hi Harald,
Any plans to bring another keg of beer to OLS next year?
Regards,
Daniel
If you want to ensure license compatibility across your entire codebase, where do you draw the line at supporting (semi-)popular open source licenses?
I suggest drawing the line at wherever the OSI draws it instead of playing favorites, which risks creating the impression of advancing an agenda.
I can verify that Openoffice starts much faster on my little eee PC than on my Desktop machine with 75 MB/S 7200 RPM WD7500AACS. Or any other desktop I have used for that matter.
It is not just Openoffice of course, but Openoffice being a big pig of an application makes a nice example.
Perhaps Vista is destined to become highly collectable like Henry Ford's greatest failure.
Linus... has... jumped the shark. The number versions... his version control insanities... He's no longer Linux's greatest advantage. He's now doing more to hold back the community than anything else. (dear god this is going to hurt the karma)
Rename article title as "Linus on Crack". You are right, Linus is now only Linux's second greatest advantage, Andrew Morton is the greatest. Linus has always been erratic but great. Lately, he really stepped in it a lot, but he is still maybe the best bug hunter that ever lived. Mind you, he tends to have a large hand in creating the horrible complexities that lead to the need for the bug hunt in the first place, but then if he did not we would never have the pleasure of watching him exercise his art.
http://lwn.net/Articles/215868/
And yes, I agree, Linus is on crack about the version numbers. Just drop the 2. at the beginning and it will all be fixed.
is there any politically workable way to change the law and make software unpatentable again? It would be (in the eyes of patent holders at least) the same as throwing all the money invested straight out the window.
And they should have known better instead of being enthusiastically part of the problem. What is the best thing about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer again?
we-could-have-told-you-and-did dept is right
Most insightful comment ever :-)
I never said people should be able to take community (GPL) software and hoard that. I said that both have their place.
Indeed, you did not say that, and I now see that you argued in favor of strong copyright laws in the interest of preserving freedom. I overlooked that in my response, mea culpa.
But you omitted the case where a developer should be free to protect their works for the purpose of ensuring that they remain free, which amounts to a false dichotomy between "free to profit from" and "free to use". Your argument will be stronger if you include this case, as it nicely rebuts the frequently cited fallacy that fewer rules equate to more freedom.
I often advocate for the use of OSS, but true freedom is allowing a developer to protect their works and profit from them, or give them openly as they choose to do so.
You are perfectly free to write your own code if you wish to profit from it by hoarding it. It sounds as though you are complaining about the difficulty of hoarding and profiting from the contributed work of others.
Then I would leave e-bay, after being there since 1996
Amen. I personally have experienced the famous Paypal shaft. Froze my account for no reason and blackholed all my communications, just like so many other people. When I finally did get access to my money again after many months of frustration and runaround, I closed the account I was stupid enough to give them access to and left Paypal for good.
Paypal is an unregulated scam.
This machine is clearly good enough to keep me in the email loop while on the road. It has OpenOffice, incuding impress so I can work on my slide shows on the road, and because of the external VGA I can give the presentation with it too. Openoffice starts considerably faster on the little eee than it does on any of my fire breathing workstations, because of the flash disk of course. Interesting that the disk makes so much more difference than the processor power. The writing is on the wall: rotating disks are going out for personal computers, flash is coming in.
I don't think I'd be too happy actually developing code on this little guy like I manage to to pretty well with a notebook. But let's give it a while and see what happens.
My biggest compliant about the 900 is the fan noise, it's nearly always on even when I'm not doing much. Hopefully the 901 will improve the situation.
Posting this as much to see how this little guy works out as a connectivity tool as anything else. Whoops, there the cursor got onto the wrong line again. Ah well. Better than a UMPC, not something I want to work 8 hours straight on.