The truly sinister precedent has been going on for a while:
1. Patent the obvious. 2. Enforce the patent thereby achieving a monopoly for 20 years. Drive all competition out of business. 3. Profit!!!
Notice there's no "???" step in this one.
Abusing the USPTO for fun and profit will be to the 2000's what pillaging S&L's was in the 80's and shady accounting was in the 90's.
The problem with capitalism is that a very small number of evil people will screw it up for the rest of us, while Congress is trying to stick fingers in the dike, which sprouts new holes every day, (assuming they aren't actively contributing to the problem).
Actually, when you get down to it, a few number of evil people is the problem with any system of economics or government. Communism could never work unless everyone were perfectly honest. Capitalism is better in that regard, but we are still struggling with modern-day robber barons.
1. Get hired to transcribe tapes at 40$CAN/tape. 2. Buy a Dvorak keyboard (cost: probably $200CAN minimum) 3. Spend a year getting really proficient with a new layout 4. Whip through those transcriptions like it ain't nobody's business. 5. ??? 6. Profit.
...when someone obtains a ridiculous patent, gets some goofy Federal judge (and there are plenty of those) to uphold it in such a way to completely devastate an industry or even adversly affect the whole American economy.
It's like the Iraq WMD situation... except this time they're waiting for someone to drop the Big One before doing something about it.
Of course if I'm the one with the patent, then everything will be OK.;-)
The fact that educated native speakers of American English in 2004 use lanuage differently than educated native speakers of American English in 1804 is hardly reason to dispair.
It is a reason to despair when allegedly educated native speakers of American English in 2004 use language differently than the standards I learned in 1974. That's a big difference. I get a little tired of the "language is defined as solely how we use it crowd"... why then do we teach grammar? If there is no standard then we can't communicate well. That kind of sloppiness may pass muster in Time Magazine, but try it in a legal contract. The fact that editors are unable or unwilling to exercise middle-school-level grammar rules (as they exist today!) when they write is, in fact, very disturbing to me. If you can't be bothered to use the language correctly, what kind of attitude do you have when it comes to verifying your facts?
You're right about Kenedy, although I give Bush more credit that you do. Along with Reagan, I think Kennedy was the best speaker of the Presidents in the last 50 years. Not because of his "pahk the cah in the gahden" diction but what he said: Simple, profound and to the point. Clinton was a good speaker from a speaking point of view, IMO, but his content was particularly soporific, mostly because he never knew when to shut up. I think Bush has gotten back to that short, sweet and to the point style that made people like Kennedy and Lincoln so good. He may not do so well "off the cuff" (you know, speaking spontaneatively), but I think his speeches are among the better ones I've heard from Presidents.
p.s. As a bit of Grammar Nazi myself, I wouldn't hate myself based on hearing verbal blunders from the President, just the ubiquity of the decline in level of grammar usage. Pick up any book written in the 1800's and compare it to almost anything written today. Modern langauge is much looser and less formal, and almost universally, full of mistakes (I'm sure I've made a few even here). I can hardly read a newspaper or magazine and not see glaring grammatical (not to mention factual...) errors. Listening to TV newscasters is even worse. But of course, this is the age where journalism has become a catch-all for people who are too lazy or stupid to communicate well or challenge themselves in their education... and the true and good journalists are becoming rarer and rarer and eloquent writing is becoming harder and harder to find.
I disagree. I think Kennedy got the credit he deserved for establishing his challenge to put a man on the Moon in the 1960's. I don't ever recall hearing Nixon being the Moonshot President because he happened to be in office when the event finally occurred.
There is no doubt that there could be a political motivation for doing this, but the potential for applied science and engineering is incredible... far more than anyone who doesn't follow the Space Program closely would ever realize.
However, to suggest that Bush is doing this to score points with the electorate is pretty naive. Hell, I would bet a majority of people believe that silly Fox TV show calling into question that the original Moon landings ever happened.
Remember, a large portion of the population still believes in things like horoscopes, the psychic hotline, and the daVinci code. We are not, as a whole, very good at critical thinking.
Oh, I used to run Win2k with 64MB of RAM. It ran fine, as long as you didn't load more than one big program at once.
You're right. I use compilers, memory-intensive games, graphics manipulation programs, stuff like that, and I tend to have a bazillion windows open at once, so memory matters to me.
I know Win2k & XP have almost the same core, but still a good idea to go up to XP.
That assumes you've got the hardware for it. Win2k runs acceptably well on an old PPro 200 with 96 MB of RAM that I have. XP was almost unusable on it.
XP (and presumably every subsequent version) seriously jacks up the hardware requirements to run it well. It's kind of a Moore's law... every new version of a Microsoft OS requires twice the power to do the same thing.
NT 4.0 ran fine in 128MB. Win2k really needs 256MB. I run XP on my laptop with 768MB, and I wouldn't want to try it with much less.
Well, people have been suffering under Windows 98 for years. Microsoft oughta be stuck supporting the crap they served us in the first place.
Just desserts, man.
I'm in the process of helping the parish office at my church to upgrade to Windows 2000, because their Windows 98 network gets screwed up about once a month. I want Microsoft to feel some of my pain, since it's their fault in the first place.
MS, You made your crap, now sleep in it.
This is good news because I figure it's much less likely for them to pull support for Win2k any time soon, which is actually decently stable. Anyone who needs a reliable system should upgrade from Windows 98 because it's crap, but I see no little or compelling reason to upgrade Windows 2000. Therefore, I was expecting MS to drop it like a hot potato to force upgrades. The problem with Win98 is that a lot of people are using it because they can't afford to upgrade. Therefore, MS shouldn't screw these people by forcing an expense on them they aren't willing to support this dog.
I expect Windows 2000 will be used for a long, long time.
OK, LEDs add a nice atmosphere to this place, but the Spiderman poster and the life-size cardboard Xena cutout have to go. And I don't believe there's such a thing as "load-bearing pizza box", so get shovelling.
Posted by ConceptJunkie on 83-05-31 3:51 Thanks to Byte magazine for its article covering the unveiling of a new version of its utility called Copy II PC at this year's Comdex show in Chicago. This commercially-sold floppy disk backup option claims: "You no longer need to fear losing your expensive PC software collection to bad or erased floppy disks... Now you can simply back them up and put the expensive original in a safe place, and the backup will work on your PC just like the original." The maker of this soon-to-launch utility, Central Point Software, has faced lawsuits previously regarding its Copy II PC software, and a prominently marketed, software backup product is sure to cause sparks - the Byte article writer comments: "No matter how much Central Point claims that users with the most honorable intentions are its target market, it's easy to see where it would be the perfect item for unscrupulous people to copy software to give to or trade with their friends. It goes against everything the industry has been fighting against."
We see how much illegal copying has devastated the software industry so far. No one could ever make a hundred-million-dollar company in such a crook-friendly climate. Besides, selling replacements discs is a legitimate means of revenue for companies. I had to pay $5 for a replacement copy of Autoduel for my Amiga. It's my fault the floppy was damaged.
The worst part about is that the one manager with whom I did have an affinity with at this place told me they had no idea what they were getting into when they hired me based on my resume. These folks ran a real brute-force grunt shop and he knew when he saw my resume, which emphasizes the fact that I create things from scratch, improve things and generally try to make the best code possible, he knew there would be problems.
When I left (laid off), he was being shuffled around for daring to suggest the project be planned.
That's always the problem when management doesn't know the job as well as the workers. They only want opinions that agree with them, regardless of reality. And furthermore, I'm going to choke the next person who praises "Thinking outside of the box" because all that ever does is scare and/or anger people.
Of course, there are many decent, intelligent managers out there, but I have found an inverse correlation between company size and manager quality: The bigger the company the more clueless management tends to be.
Small companies cannot afford dead-weight... otherwise they fail. But once you reach a certain size, it is impossible to maintain as high a standard with employees... there aren't that many around, so you end up with less than ideal people. Once the company is large, you can pretty much counting on finding people who get paid just to breathe somewhere.
Tell me about it. My 16 years of experience made me a shoo-in to get hirted at my last job, but the moment I started working it was a liability.
They wanted an assembly-line grunt worker who did brute-force unintelligent development and didn't ask questions. Any time I stepped out of line (by suggesting more efficient ways of doing things, suggesting anticipating performance issues rather than ignoring them until it was too late, or generally attempting to use any software development idea invented in the last 20 years) I was shot down quickly and harshly. It was probably a mistake to suggest they could easily eliminate half the development staff on the project by working intelligently, because that means billing fewer hours.
When it comes to hourly contract work, efficiency is verboten.
This is not a company that's gone good all of a sudden, they're just doing this because they know that this will make you guys buy iRivers instead of iPods.
Nothing's wrong with that. Making your product more desireable to customers is what makes capitalism work. I wish the RIAA understood that. If you sell people what they want for a price they are willing to pay then you are doing good.
I started reripping my music collection to OggVorbis in anticipation of this release (which was announced a couple months ago). However, I have an iMP-350 which is one of the CD-based players, and for now, there isn't Ogg support for that model. I hope they add this support to all their players.
p.s. As a satisfied customer, I would recommend the iMP-350.
Anyhow, you are right... whenever I watch FotR now I can clearly see that Ian McKellan is pulling a dummy in through the window and onto the desk.
However, it doesn't really ruin the illusion for me since so much of that movie was visualized exactly how I would have visualized it. It seems to me there is more than just good cinematography to that. Peter Jackson really grokked the story well enough that he could visualize it in a way that I would find meeting my expectations every time.
Real sucks. Real has always sucked. It is nearly impossible to get it to install correctly on Windows on the first try (and I've tried on several machines under different versions of Windows, including CE, which never worked for me ever).
You have to wade through tons of screens to find all the hidden spyware features that can be turned off, and as far as I know, there aren't any free tools to convert real media into a format that intelligent people would actually choose to use.
The DVD extras on "The Fellowship of the Ring" were awesome. All that stuff about the design and creation of the weapons, armor, wardrobe, etc. were fascination. The pieces showing the camera trickery, props and forced perspective used to the make the actors change sizes was extremely interesting.
One thing I get tired of is featurettes describing the graphics, which invariably show some pasty-faced geek (like me) sitting in front of a computer all day making digital jellyfish or something. Once you've seen one, you've seen 'em all, but FotR didn't dwell on that topic. They gave you the really interesting background of making the movie and you come away appreciating was an incredible amount of work went into the making of it.
I haven't dug into the extras on TTT, but I expect they'll be of the same caliber.
Another DVD with good extras was "Heartbreakers" because it had the entire performance by Sigourney Weaver singing "Back in the U.S.S.R." in a fake Russian accent, which was worth the price of the movie by itself. Actually, I found some of the cut scenes in that movie to be quite good. Often you will notice little continuity errors, or apparent callbacks to something that doesn't exist which make a lot more sense when you see the extra scenes.
Having said that though, I agree with the poster that most DVD extras aren't worth the price. I often purchase used movies from the video store, and when given the choice between VHS for $5 and DVD for $12, I invariably go for the VHS, since the DVD extras are seldom compelling. Of course, the better picture quality, etc, of DVD's is worth something too, but if I'm that interested, I've probably already bought it new.
I have found that the novelty DVD extras is wearing off and that many of these extras aren't worth the effort. However, one thing I do really enjoy is the audio commentary. For instance, the audio commentary for "Evolution" was particularly entertaining because in addition to David Duchovney and Orlando Bloom busting on each other on screen, they were also doing it in the commentary and it was quite amusing. It's obvious they were having a lot of fun and it was enjoyable to hear. The audio commentary for the Simpsons DVD's is also really excellent because you learn a lot of background behind the show. Unfortunately, for Futurama, by season 2 it became painfully obvious that they'd run out of stuff to talk about, although the presence of the actors was a great addition.
Slashdot Mirror
The truly sinister precedent has been going on for a while:
1. Patent the obvious.
2. Enforce the patent thereby achieving a monopoly for 20 years. Drive all competition out of business.
3. Profit!!!
Notice there's no "???" step in this one.
Abusing the USPTO for fun and profit will be to the 2000's what pillaging S&L's was in the 80's and shady accounting was in the 90's.
The problem with capitalism is that a very small number of evil people will screw it up for the rest of us, while Congress is trying to stick fingers in the dike, which sprouts new holes every day, (assuming they aren't actively contributing to the problem).
Actually, when you get down to it, a few number of evil people is the problem with any system of economics or government. Communism could never work unless everyone were perfectly honest. Capitalism is better in that regard, but we are still struggling with modern-day robber barons.
So, you're saying the process is:
1. Get hired to transcribe tapes at 40$CAN/tape.
2. Buy a Dvorak keyboard (cost: probably $200CAN minimum)
3. Spend a year getting really proficient with a new layout
4. Whip through those transcriptions like it ain't nobody's business.
5. ???
6. Profit.
Besides, from listening to what he has to say these days, he could probably do a better job himself.
...when someone obtains a ridiculous patent, gets some goofy Federal judge (and there are plenty of those) to uphold it in such a way to completely devastate an industry or even adversly affect the whole American economy.
;-)
It's like the Iraq WMD situation... except this time they're waiting for someone to drop the Big One before doing something about it.
Of course if I'm the one with the patent, then everything will be OK.
Of course he's out for votes. But I don't believe this is the primary motivation behind the new space initiatives.
I think that spammers are a species of scum a notch above lawyers. Or is it below...you get the idea :)
Below.
You can find honest lawyers who is doing it for the public good, to uphold the Law and Justice.
Spammers, by definition, try to make money buy harassing people. Period.
p.s. IANAL and generally don't hold them in high regard, but realize far from all of them are bad.
The fact that educated native speakers of American English in 2004 use lanuage differently than educated native speakers of American English in 1804 is hardly reason to dispair.
It is a reason to despair when allegedly educated native speakers of American English in 2004 use language differently than the standards I learned in 1974. That's a big difference. I get a little tired of the "language is defined as solely how we use it crowd"... why then do we teach grammar? If there is no standard then we can't communicate well. That kind of sloppiness may pass muster in Time Magazine, but try it in a legal contract. The fact that editors are unable or unwilling to exercise middle-school-level grammar rules (as they exist today!) when they write is, in fact, very disturbing to me. If you can't be bothered to use the language correctly, what kind of attitude do you have when it comes to verifying your facts?
You're right about Kenedy, although I give Bush more credit that you do. Along with Reagan, I think Kennedy was the best speaker of the Presidents in the last 50 years. Not because of his "pahk the cah in the gahden" diction but what he said: Simple, profound and to the point. Clinton was a good speaker from a speaking point of view, IMO, but his content was particularly soporific, mostly because he never knew when to shut up. I think Bush has gotten back to that short, sweet and to the point style that made people like Kennedy and Lincoln so good. He may not do so well "off the cuff" (you know, speaking spontaneatively), but I think his speeches are among the better ones I've heard from Presidents.
p.s. As a bit of Grammar Nazi myself, I wouldn't hate myself based on hearing verbal blunders from the President, just the ubiquity of the decline in level of grammar usage. Pick up any book written in the 1800's and compare it to almost anything written today. Modern langauge is much looser and less formal, and almost universally, full of mistakes (I'm sure I've made a few even here). I can hardly read a newspaper or magazine and not see glaring grammatical (not to mention factual...) errors. Listening to TV newscasters is even worse. But of course, this is the age where journalism has become a catch-all for people who are too lazy or stupid to communicate well or challenge themselves in their education... and the true and good journalists are becoming rarer and rarer and eloquent writing is becoming harder and harder to find.
At best he'll get a footnote.
I disagree. I think Kennedy got the credit he deserved for establishing his challenge to put a man on the Moon in the 1960's. I don't ever recall hearing Nixon being the Moonshot President because he happened to be in office when the event finally occurred.
There is no doubt that there could be a political motivation for doing this, but the potential for applied science and engineering is incredible... far more than anyone who doesn't follow the Space Program closely would ever realize.
However, to suggest that Bush is doing this to score points with the electorate is pretty naive. Hell, I would bet a majority of people believe that silly Fox TV show calling into question that the original Moon landings ever happened.
Remember, a large portion of the population still believes in things like horoscopes, the psychic hotline, and the daVinci code. We are not, as a whole, very good at critical thinking.
Oh, I used to run Win2k with 64MB of RAM. It ran fine, as long as you didn't load more than one big program at once.
You're right. I use compilers, memory-intensive games, graphics manipulation programs, stuff like that, and I tend to have a bazillion windows open at once, so memory matters to me.
I know Win2k & XP have almost the same core, but still a good idea to go up to XP.
That assumes you've got the hardware for it. Win2k runs acceptably well on an old PPro 200 with 96 MB of RAM that I have. XP was almost unusable on it.
XP (and presumably every subsequent version) seriously jacks up the hardware requirements to run it well. It's kind of a Moore's law... every new version of a Microsoft OS requires twice the power to do the same thing.
NT 4.0 ran fine in 128MB. Win2k really needs 256MB. I run XP on my laptop with 768MB, and I wouldn't want to try it with much less.
So I made a typographical error on /.
Wow, you've really done the world a service by pointing this out.
I hope someone mods you up to reflect the significance of your accomplishment.
Well, people have been suffering under Windows 98 for years. Microsoft oughta be stuck supporting the crap they served us in the first place.
Just desserts, man.
I'm in the process of helping the parish office at my church to upgrade to Windows 2000, because their Windows 98 network gets screwed up about once a month. I want Microsoft to feel some of my pain, since it's their fault in the first place.
MS, You made your crap, now sleep in it.
This is good news because I figure it's much less likely for them to pull support for Win2k any time soon, which is actually decently stable. Anyone who needs a reliable system should upgrade from Windows 98 because it's crap, but I see no little or compelling reason to upgrade Windows 2000. Therefore, I was expecting MS to drop it like a hot potato to force upgrades. The problem with Win98 is that a lot of people are using it because they can't afford to upgrade. Therefore, MS shouldn't screw these people by forcing an expense on them they aren't willing to support this dog.
I expect Windows 2000 will be used for a long, long time.
Hmmm.... "Female Eye for the Nerd Guy"
OK, LEDs add a nice atmosphere to this place, but the Spiderman poster and the life-size cardboard Xena cutout have to go. And I don't believe there's such a thing as "load-bearing pizza box", so get shovelling.
Copy II PC Stirs Backup Controversy
Posted by ConceptJunkie on 83-05-31 3:51
Thanks to Byte magazine for its article covering the unveiling of a new version of its utility called Copy II PC at this year's Comdex show in Chicago. This commercially-sold floppy disk backup option claims: "You no longer need to fear losing your expensive PC software collection to bad or erased floppy disks... Now you can simply back them up and put the expensive original in a safe place, and the backup will work on your PC just like the original." The maker of this soon-to-launch utility, Central Point Software, has faced lawsuits previously regarding its Copy II PC software, and a prominently marketed, software backup product is sure to cause sparks - the Byte article writer comments: "No matter how much Central Point claims that users with the most honorable intentions are its target market, it's easy to see where it would be the perfect item for unscrupulous people to copy software to give to or trade with their friends. It goes against everything the industry has been fighting against."
We see how much illegal copying has devastated the software industry so far. No one could ever make a hundred-million-dollar company in such a crook-friendly climate. Besides, selling replacements discs is a legitimate means of revenue for companies. I had to pay $5 for a replacement copy of Autoduel for my Amiga. It's my fault the floppy was damaged.
Plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose.
Two words: Government contract
Efficiency and reducing billable hours aren't the strategy when you're milking that cow.
It's not like they're gonna outsource DoD work to India.
The worst part about is that the one manager with whom I did have an affinity with at this place told me they had no idea what they were getting into when they hired me based on my resume. These folks ran a real brute-force grunt shop and he knew when he saw my resume, which emphasizes the fact that I create things from scratch, improve things and generally try to make the best code possible, he knew there would be problems.
When I left (laid off), he was being shuffled around for daring to suggest the project be planned.
That's always the problem when management doesn't know the job as well as the workers. They only want opinions that agree with them, regardless of reality. And furthermore, I'm going to choke the next person who praises "Thinking outside of the box" because all that ever does is scare and/or anger people.
Of course, there are many decent, intelligent managers out there, but I have found an inverse correlation between company size and manager quality: The bigger the company the more clueless management tends to be.
Small companies cannot afford dead-weight... otherwise they fail. But once you reach a certain size, it is impossible to maintain as high a standard with employees... there aren't that many around, so you end up with less than ideal people. Once the company is large, you can pretty much counting on finding people who get paid just to breathe somewhere.
Tell me about it. My 16 years of experience made me a shoo-in to get hirted at my last job, but the moment I started working it was a liability.
They wanted an assembly-line grunt worker who did brute-force unintelligent development and didn't ask questions. Any time I stepped out of line (by suggesting more efficient ways of doing things, suggesting anticipating performance issues rather than ignoring them until it was too late, or generally attempting to use any software development idea invented in the last 20 years) I was shot down quickly and harshly. It was probably a mistake to suggest they could easily eliminate half the development staff on the project by working intelligently, because that means billing fewer hours.
When it comes to hourly contract work, efficiency is verboten.
This is not a company that's gone good all of a sudden, they're just doing this because they know that this will make you guys buy iRivers instead of iPods.
Nothing's wrong with that. Making your product more desireable to customers is what makes capitalism work. I wish the RIAA understood that. If you sell people what they want for a price they are willing to pay then you are doing good.
I started reripping my music collection to OggVorbis in anticipation of this release (which was announced a couple months ago). However, I have an iMP-350 which is one of the CD-based players, and for now, there isn't Ogg support for that model. I hope they add this support to all their players.
p.s. As a satisfied customer, I would recommend the iMP-350.
Oops! My bad.
Anyhow, you are right... whenever I watch FotR now I can clearly see that Ian McKellan is pulling a dummy in through the window and onto the desk.
However, it doesn't really ruin the illusion for me since so much of that movie was visualized exactly how I would have visualized it. It seems to me there is more than just good cinematography to that. Peter Jackson really grokked the story well enough that he could visualize it in a way that I would find meeting my expectations every time.
Real sucks. Real has always sucked. It is nearly impossible to get it to install correctly on Windows on the first try (and I've tried on several machines under different versions of Windows, including CE, which never worked for me ever).
You have to wade through tons of screens to find all the hidden spyware features that can be turned off, and as far as I know, there aren't any free tools to convert real media into a format that intelligent people would actually choose to use.
The DVD extras on "The Fellowship of the Ring" were awesome. All that stuff about the design and creation of the weapons, armor, wardrobe, etc. were fascination. The pieces showing the camera trickery, props and forced perspective used to the make the actors change sizes was extremely interesting.
One thing I get tired of is featurettes describing the graphics, which invariably show some pasty-faced geek (like me) sitting in front of a computer all day making digital jellyfish or something. Once you've seen one, you've seen 'em all, but FotR didn't dwell on that topic. They gave you the really interesting background of making the movie and you come away appreciating was an incredible amount of work went into the making of it.
I haven't dug into the extras on TTT, but I expect they'll be of the same caliber.
Another DVD with good extras was "Heartbreakers" because it had the entire performance by Sigourney Weaver singing "Back in the U.S.S.R." in a fake Russian accent, which was worth the price of the movie by itself. Actually, I found some of the cut scenes in that movie to be quite good. Often you will notice little continuity errors, or apparent callbacks to something that doesn't exist which make a lot more sense when you see the extra scenes.
Having said that though, I agree with the poster that most DVD extras aren't worth the price. I often purchase used movies from the video store, and when given the choice between VHS for $5 and DVD for $12, I invariably go for the VHS, since the DVD extras are seldom compelling. Of course, the better picture quality, etc, of DVD's is worth something too, but if I'm that interested, I've probably already bought it new.
I have found that the novelty DVD extras is wearing off and that many of these extras aren't worth the effort. However, one thing I do really enjoy is the audio commentary. For instance, the audio commentary for "Evolution" was particularly entertaining because in addition to David Duchovney and Orlando Bloom busting on each other on screen, they were also doing it in the commentary and it was quite amusing. It's obvious they were having a lot of fun and it was enjoyable to hear. The audio commentary for the Simpsons DVD's is also really excellent because you learn a lot of background behind the show. Unfortunately, for Futurama, by season 2 it became painfully obvious that they'd run out of stuff to talk about, although the presence of the actors was a great addition.
Actually, I was trying to remember his newer name, but couldn't.
Of course, we can always hope for cameos by the Rhino and the Kangaroo.
Next up, Spiderman 3.. Introducing Venom!
Rats! I'm still holding out for Paste-Pot Pete.