Lithium iron phosphate batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery) are supposed to be pretty safe, at the expense of storing a bit less energy per size and weight than current Li-Ion batteries. They are also made from relatively cheap and plentiful raw materials, so I'd expect them to become the most frequently used batteries in electric cars.
In case you didn't notice, GP asserted that there are no worthwhile applications on Linux.
Quote GP:
Dunno wtf you'd use Linux if you wanted to accomplish something...
Unless "accomplishing something" means "fucking around w/ VI editting config files all afternoon".....it's not like there're ANY real applications that you can do anything productive with for working in the REAL world (as opposed to the purple-pie-in-the-sky-world FOSSIES live in)...
Parent was rebuffing him for that, and rightly so. All you have shown is that Vista can also do what parent suggested for Linux. In the case of games, admittedly better (but that is due to the games being written for Windows in the first place).
Good idea. The project could actually keep collecting evidence and list it on a public website. Then everybody who is planning to "infringe" one of the bogus patents on the list could challenge the patent, because his business would be harmed financially.
I think 40GB plain would be quite reasonable for most users, including myself (MMO player and occasional P2P user). It should also be a tad cheaper than the currently popular "unmetered" services because the really excessive downloaders would be removed from the cost calculation.
"Unmetered" in quotation marks because attempts of various providers to sabotage high volume usage are well documented;-)
Of course, "a tad cheaper" than what is currently offered as "unmetered" in the market would be cheap enough that everybody can afford it. So I see little demand for the 5GB only service. Unless they make the 10-, 20-, and 40-gigabyte quotas more expensive than what is currently offered as "unmetered". In which case, I see users taking off for the competition...
Assuming the 40-gigabyte quota is widely accepted, people would still be able to download several movies per month, on top of doing other stuff, without exceeding their quota. I'm assuming a more efficient compression than MPEG-2 here, H.264 for instance will use much less bandwidth.
They do, but in my experience they happen early in the development process.
First, you work on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously) but that is only a small part of the effort. Say 20% as an example.
Second, the Eureka Moment happens.
Third, you do a lot of work to go from the brilliant idea to a marketable product. If you are in a regulated industry, add lots of documentation and approval procedures. In this (somewhat boring) phase the bulk of the work happens.
You'd need a generally accepted micropayment system first, but I could imagine signing up for an email system that takes 5 cents/email from the sender. That should be sufficient to pay for the operating costs. Currently, I'm on a freemailer who spams his customers to pay the bills with the advertising revenue. Getting rid of that would be worth an euro or two per month for me.
Also, the effects on spambot networks and insecure operating systems would be interesting to say the least;-)
While I'm not happy with most anti-virus s/w myself (and use it only when I actually suspect an infection), there are two things have worked well for me in the last 10 years:
1) Don't use Microsoft's browsing and e-mail software. It has a horrible track record in terms of security. To be fair, they seem to have improved in the last years - Outlook for instance is no longer executing VB macros when an email merely shows up in the preview;-) But I still prefer third party software for accessing the internet (Sea Monkey, the former "big" Mozilla suite).
2) Use a router with NAT instead of a modem, and don't forget to set a password for the router. That way, your computer is half-hidden by the NAT mechanism, and incoming hacking attempts will hopefully fail at the router that lacks the vulnerability the hacker tries to exploit in your Windows machine.
As other people have suggested before, old applications could run in a compatibility layer. Having access to all the original Windows source code, Microsoft should be able to do this faster and better that the guys on the WINE project.
A media player (plus a few other bonus applications) should not take up gigabytes of memory on the harddisk. Take stuff like Winamp or the VLC media player as examples for realistic memory requirements, and 200 to 300 megabytes should be enough for a bunch of add-ons.
Both of this problems are solvable even if you drop the old crap code:-)
Re: 2) Both Windows 2000 and XP had problems with driver availability at the start. Also with their resource hunger compared to the predecessor. But I cannot remember as much complaints about user interface (UAC?) and backwards compatibility as with Vista.
Re: 3) There are many reports (admittedly without statistics) of users disliking Vista enough to remove it and install XP instead. This is something I heard last in connection with WinME, which people dumped in favor of Win98.
Re: 4) True, and it will be interesting to see how the numbers change when SP1 is out. At that point, any parallels to Win ME will break down: Windows 2000 was the best way to upgrade from Win ME. Microsoft gave up the Win9x line soon after, introducing XP Home instead. This time, there is no such architecture switch in sight (I assume Windows 7 will take a few more years and won't be released in 2009).
So I think Vista SP1 will make or break Vista in the business world. If Microsoft gets it right, they will get to enjoy their dominant position for a few more years. If it doesn't make much of a difference, I expect more news like this: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/30/2341206&from=rss (French police moving to Linux)
Maybe they fear the court's reaction when they are caught the second time. If the first offense gets you a fine, what about second and third time? Disbarment?
IANALANFWSFL (I am not a lawywer and not familiar with sanctions for lawyers), so could someone comment on this who knows more about it?
I do not have this kind of time anymore. The other day I received an e-mail from a friend. He wanted to know how he could get the absolute most out of his hardware for a very specific game he plays (World of Warcraft). I began with recommending plain old Linux and then installing wine and trying to run it. But I soon realized how hopeless this would be as I think he has a nice ATI card that once was top of the line five months ago.
Ubuntu with WINE would still be worth a try, as it is rather newbie-friendly. And AFAIK it has quite moderate hardware requirements, so if you can run it in WINE performance should be OK, even with a suboptimal driver;-) The two big questions are then: 1) is WINE "compatible enough" ? 2) does Ubuntu make it reasonably easy to install the closed source ATI drivers?
It did for my NVIDIA card BTW, but then I chose it over ATI for NVIDA's much better (at the time) Linux drivers.
Pack it in tinfoil... that won't solve the problem completely, but at least you will only be traceable at the points where you use the thing in question.
But as far as I know, only the inventor has one year to file after the invention being made public. Anybody else who just reads the publication and tries to grab a patent in the innovation is not entitled to the patent.
So you might need to prove you were the original inventor. Easy enough if you wrote the first article in a science journal, but it might become messy end expensive if you did not make your invention public in such an obvious way.
EVE: -click on some object on screen (typically ship in space) and hold mouse button down -several "drop targets" appear around selected object -by "drag and drop" one of these "drop targets" can be selected. Each "drop target" launches a specific activity, like locking weapons on, unlocking target.... "Drag and drop" in parentheses because the selected object is not visibly dragged, only the mouse cursor moves.
Overall, this is not quite the same but might be similar enough to count as prior art. That is, if it was present in EVE before March 29, 2006. Unfortunately others have to confirm or refute this as I started EVE in December 2006, after the date of the patent application:-(
When I took MCSE courses several years ago, even the course materials were full of marketing speak. And some of the technical terminology was different from what I knew from my time at university. It seems that even when people have already decided to go for something Microsoft-based, those guys feel the need to persuade the customer further. Often at the expense of clarity and concise style.
Playing it as economics simulator is one option, but you can also -grind NPCs. Not the most interesting thing for me but it seems to be fine for some players -join an alliance and fight for territory in 0.0 space. EVE supports this by giving some privileges to corporations that manage to dominate a system. Makes for an interesting variety of realm versus realm. -be a griefplayer and shoot newbies that venture into low security space;-)
I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file? I suppose you could, but it's generally not necessary for the coders. My guess is that MS doesn't even have this stuff lying around. They'd probably have to have someone actually piece it together from the code.
At the company I work for, we usually do sit down and document the byte-layout of that file. When this was neglected, it has invariably come round and bit us in the ass;-)
Considering how fast memory becomes cheaper, any respectable workstation will soon come with 8 GByte or more. At that point, Win32 will be unsuitable to use all of the system resources. Which leaves you with three options to make full use of your new machine:
-XP 64 bit: reportedly far from perfect, and might disappear from the market soon. -Vista 64 bit: For all its faults, probably your best bet if you want to stay with Microsoft. But I still don't like it... -Linux 64 bit: mmmh, yes;-)
Interestingly, of late, it is AMD that is trying to create product differentiating by crippling their processors, or at least by selling processors with one core switched off. They're trying to do this by selling "tri-core" processors based on their Barcelona/Phenom cores, which are nothing much an actual quad-core with a core turned off, either deliberately, or because it is defective. They probably want to position this as a mid-range offering, to make it more competitive to Intel's relatively cheaper quad-cores.
I guess it is, first of all, a way to get money for processors that would have to be thrown away otherwise. Some money for a "tri-core" is better than no money for a piece of waste silicone. On top of that, there may be some crippling of intact quad-cores if there is more demand for the cheap "tri-cores". But I doubt that is the main reason.
OK, I can see the necessity of some modest compression in media with narrow dynamic range.
With "stupidity" I meant the "loudness wars" in pop music where the dynamic range is reduced to a point where the music loses a lot of its liveliness (and even the dynamic range of vinyl and radio is underutilized). Perhaps I should have made that more clear.
Its purpose is to make the best use of the available dynamic range. By adjusting the highest peaks to "just below clipping" you avoid using up dynamic range for headroom. Of course this only makes sense if the original recording has a greater dynamic range than the target, otherwise you would just increase the quantization noise along with the audio signal. That is why studios like to use 20 or 24 bit digital equipment.
As an example, assume the sound engineer leaves 10 db of headroom during recording. Then 1) On 16 bit equipment with 96 dB dynamic range, you get an actual S/N ratio of 86 dB. The 10 dB headroom are lost, normalization would be pointless. 2) On 20 bit equipment with 120 dB dynamic range, you get an actual S/N ratio of 110 dB. In this case, you can convert the 20 bit recording to a normalized 16 bit recording that has a S/N ratio of 96 dB. This is how you make the best use of a digital format with limited dynamic range.
On a more personal note, the way you ridicule GP over a few spelling errors deserves modding down as troll. Especially since you obviously don't understand all of the involved concepts yourself.
Yes, but CAN contain (most of) everythign that was in the uncompressed, finely quantized digital master but didn't make it into the MP3 or the dynamic range compressed CD release.
Several years ago, the german HiFi magazine Stereoplay made an experiment to determine if the digitizing as such makes an audible difference. They took a high quality analog recording and played it two different ways: 1) Directly from turntable to amplifier and from there to loudspeaker, no digital equipment involved. 2) Somewhere in between, the signal went into an A/D converter and from there into a D/A converter. The other components were the same as in 1). In a blind test (cannot remember if it was double blind) the test audience could not determine a difference. The equipment was quite high-quality BTW, they definitely used one of the $20.000 or more rigs that are often quoted as being necessary for hearing the differences.
Also, Vinyl is not immune against someone compressing the digital master before the recording is transferred to vinyl. Expect such stupidity to happen shortly;-)
With CO and NO, it is true that the USA starting reducing them much earlier. But Europe has introduced the catalytic converter about 15 years ago, and the emission requirements for cars (except CO2) are now at a point where further reducing them seems pointless - better go after the emissions of oil-fired heatings first, those have no countermeasures so far.
Considering CO2, America always had the bigger and more wasteful cars with CO2 emissions to match. Because CO2 emissions are directly proportional to the amount of fuel you burn. The Kyoto protocol is about reducing CO2 emissions to limit global warming, something the USA are still very reluctant to do. But maybe the $100/barrel price for crude oil will do what US politicians don't want to do.
BTW there is also some controversy in the EU about CO2 emission requirements for cars. The current proposal would be no problem for small cars, but BMW and Daimler with their heavy luxury cars would have a problem. Those companies are opposing CO2 emission requirements as much as a typical conservative US politician.
Please kind people of slashdot, wake up to the fact that Apple is a company without ethics (as all corporations) and just because you want to be released from the Microsoft monopoly doesn't mean the Apple is the saviour!
Most of us know that. But if Apple can knock down Microsoft's market share a notch or two, it means they can attract more software vendors for their platforms, and ultimately more choice for customers. It is called "competition". So even without any noble motives, Apple could be the "saviour" in the desktop OS/application market. Of course, I'd like to see Linux as third, equally strong force there (it already is in the server world).
Things are somewhat different in the market for mobile music players. Here Apple is dominating and if anyone needs be cut down to size, it is Apple. But even so, I think iPod dominance is less of a problem than the almost-monopoly of Windows on the desktop/laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Lithium iron phosphate batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery) are supposed to be pretty safe, at the expense of storing a bit less energy per size and weight than current Li-Ion batteries.
They are also made from relatively cheap and plentiful raw materials, so I'd expect them to become the most frequently used batteries in electric cars.
Quote GP:
Parent was rebuffing him for that, and rightly so.
All you have shown is that Vista can also do what parent suggested for Linux. In the case of games, admittedly better (but that is due to the games being written for Windows in the first place).
Good idea.
The project could actually keep collecting evidence and list it on a public website. Then everybody who is planning to "infringe" one of the bogus patents on the list could challenge the patent, because his business would be harmed financially.
Essentially, his answer to question #3 is "the federal government should leave it to the states". Fair enough for a candidate for a federal office.
But as Serenissima already posted, the answer to question #4 does fail to keep the promise from question #2.
I think 40GB plain would be quite reasonable for most users, including myself (MMO player and occasional P2P user). It should also be a tad cheaper than the currently popular "unmetered" services because the really excessive downloaders would be removed from the cost calculation.
;-)
"Unmetered" in quotation marks because attempts of various providers to sabotage high volume usage are well documented
Of course, "a tad cheaper" than what is currently offered as "unmetered" in the market would be cheap enough that everybody can afford it. So I see little demand for the 5GB only service. Unless they make the 10-, 20-, and 40-gigabyte quotas more expensive than what is currently offered as "unmetered". In which case, I see users taking off for the competition...
Assuming the 40-gigabyte quota is widely accepted, people would still be able to download several movies per month, on top of doing other stuff, without exceeding their quota. I'm assuming a more efficient compression than MPEG-2 here, H.264 for instance will use much less bandwidth.
They do, but in my experience they happen early in the development process.
First, you work on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously) but that is only a small part of the effort. Say 20% as an example.
Second, the Eureka Moment happens.
Third, you do a lot of work to go from the brilliant idea to a marketable product. If you are in a regulated industry, add lots of documentation and approval procedures. In this (somewhat boring) phase the bulk of the work happens.
You'd need a generally accepted micropayment system first, but I could imagine signing up for an email system that takes 5 cents/email from the sender. That should be sufficient to pay for the operating costs.
;-)
Currently, I'm on a freemailer who spams his customers to pay the bills with the advertising revenue. Getting rid of that would be worth an euro or two per month for me.
Also, the effects on spambot networks and insecure operating systems would be interesting to say the least
While I'm not happy with most anti-virus s/w myself (and use it only when I actually suspect an infection), there are two things have worked well for me in the last 10 years:
;-)
1) Don't use Microsoft's browsing and e-mail software. It has a horrible track record in terms of security. To be fair, they seem to have improved in the last years - Outlook for instance is no longer executing VB macros when an email merely shows up in the preview
But I still prefer third party software for accessing the internet (Sea Monkey, the former "big" Mozilla suite).
2) Use a router with NAT instead of a modem, and don't forget to set a password for the router. That way, your computer is half-hidden by the NAT mechanism, and incoming hacking attempts will hopefully fail at the router that lacks the vulnerability the hacker tries to exploit in your Windows machine.
As other people have suggested before, old applications could run in a compatibility layer. Having access to all the original Windows source code, Microsoft should be able to do this faster and better that the guys on the WINE project.
:-)
A media player (plus a few other bonus applications) should not take up gigabytes of memory on the harddisk. Take stuff like Winamp or the VLC media player as examples for realistic memory requirements, and 200 to 300 megabytes should be enough for a bunch of add-ons.
Both of this problems are solvable even if you drop the old crap code
Re: 2) Both Windows 2000 and XP had problems with driver availability at the start. Also with their resource hunger compared to the predecessor. But I cannot remember as much complaints about user interface (UAC?) and backwards compatibility as with Vista.
Re: 3) There are many reports (admittedly without statistics) of users disliking Vista enough to remove it and install XP instead. This is something I heard last in connection with WinME, which people dumped in favor of Win98.
Re: 4) True, and it will be interesting to see how the numbers change when SP1 is out. At that point, any parallels to Win ME will break down:
Windows 2000 was the best way to upgrade from Win ME. Microsoft gave up the Win9x line soon after, introducing XP Home instead. This time, there is no such architecture switch in sight (I assume Windows 7 will take a few more years and won't be released in 2009).
So I think Vista SP1 will make or break Vista in the business world. If Microsoft gets it right, they will get to enjoy their dominant position for a few more years. If it doesn't make much of a difference, I expect more news like this: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/30/2341206&from=rss (French police moving to Linux)
Maybe they fear the court's reaction when they are caught the second time. If the first offense gets you a fine, what about second and third time? Disbarment?
IANALANFWSFL (I am not a lawywer and not familiar with sanctions for lawyers), so could someone comment on this who knows more about it?
Ubuntu with WINE would still be worth a try, as it is rather newbie-friendly. And AFAIK it has quite moderate hardware requirements, so if you can run it in WINE performance should be OK, even with a suboptimal driver
The two big questions are then:
1) is WINE "compatible enough" ?
2) does Ubuntu make it reasonably easy to install the closed source ATI drivers?
It did for my NVIDIA card BTW, but then I chose it over ATI for NVIDA's much better (at the time) Linux drivers.
Pack it in tinfoil...
that won't solve the problem completely, but at least you will only be traceable at the points where you use the thing in question.
Disclaimer: IANAL...
But as far as I know, only the inventor has one year to file after the invention being made public. Anybody else who just reads the publication and tries to grab a patent in the innovation is not entitled to the patent.
So you might need to prove you were the original inventor. Easy enough if you wrote the first article in a science journal, but it might become messy end expensive if you did not make your invention public in such an obvious way.
EVE:
:-(
-click on some object on screen (typically ship in space) and hold mouse button down
-several "drop targets" appear around selected object
-by "drag and drop" one of these "drop targets" can be selected. Each "drop target" launches a specific activity, like locking weapons on, unlocking target....
"Drag and drop" in parentheses because the selected object is not visibly dragged, only the mouse cursor moves.
Overall, this is not quite the same but might be similar enough to count as prior art. That is, if it was present in EVE before March 29, 2006.
Unfortunately others have to confirm or refute this as I started EVE in December 2006, after the date of the patent application
When I took MCSE courses several years ago, even the course materials were full of marketing speak. And some of the technical terminology was different from what I knew from my time at university.
It seems that even when people have already decided to go for something Microsoft-based, those guys feel the need to persuade the customer further. Often at the expense of clarity and concise style.
Playing it as economics simulator is one option, but you can also ;-)
-grind NPCs. Not the most interesting thing for me but it seems to be fine for some players
-join an alliance and fight for territory in 0.0 space. EVE supports this by giving some privileges to corporations that manage to dominate a system. Makes for an interesting variety of realm versus realm.
-be a griefplayer and shoot newbies that venture into low security space
At the company I work for, we usually do sit down and document the byte-layout of that file. When this was neglected, it has invariably come round and bit us in the ass
Considering how fast memory becomes cheaper, any respectable workstation will soon come with 8 GByte or more. At that point, Win32 will be unsuitable to use all of the system resources. Which leaves you with three options to make full use of your new machine:
;-)
-XP 64 bit: reportedly far from perfect, and might disappear from the market soon.
-Vista 64 bit: For all its faults, probably your best bet if you want to stay with Microsoft. But I still don't like it...
-Linux 64 bit: mmmh, yes
I guess it is, first of all, a way to get money for processors that would have to be thrown away otherwise. Some money for a "tri-core" is better than no money for a piece of waste silicone.
On top of that, there may be some crippling of intact quad-cores if there is more demand for the cheap "tri-cores". But I doubt that is the main reason.
OK, I can see the necessity of some modest compression in media with narrow dynamic range.
With "stupidity" I meant the "loudness wars" in pop music where the dynamic range is reduced to a point where the music loses a lot of its liveliness (and even the dynamic range of vinyl and radio is underutilized). Perhaps I should have made that more clear.
I think Wikipedia can explain this one for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_normalization
Its purpose is to make the best use of the available dynamic range. By adjusting the highest peaks to "just below clipping" you avoid using up dynamic range for headroom. Of course this only makes sense if the original recording has a greater dynamic range than the target, otherwise you would just increase the quantization noise along with the audio signal. That is why studios like to use 20 or 24 bit digital equipment.
As an example, assume the sound engineer leaves 10 db of headroom during recording. Then
1) On 16 bit equipment with 96 dB dynamic range, you get an actual S/N ratio of 86 dB. The 10 dB headroom are lost, normalization would be pointless.
2) On 20 bit equipment with 120 dB dynamic range, you get an actual S/N ratio of 110 dB. In this case, you can convert the 20 bit recording to a normalized 16 bit recording that has a S/N ratio of 96 dB. This is how you make the best use of a digital format with limited dynamic range.
On a more personal note, the way you ridicule GP over a few spelling errors deserves modding down as troll. Especially since you obviously don't understand all of the involved concepts yourself.
That is the real problem. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_wars.
If a CD is released without dynamic compression, it will sound fine.
Several years ago, the german HiFi magazine Stereoplay made an experiment to determine if the digitizing as such makes an audible difference. They took a high quality analog recording and played it two different ways:
1) Directly from turntable to amplifier and from there to loudspeaker, no digital equipment involved.
2) Somewhere in between, the signal went into an A/D converter and from there into a D/A converter. The other components were the same as in 1).
In a blind test (cannot remember if it was double blind) the test audience could not determine a difference. The equipment was quite high-quality BTW, they definitely used one of the $20.000 or more rigs that are often quoted as being necessary for hearing the differences.
Also, Vinyl is not immune against someone compressing the digital master before the recording is transferred to vinyl. Expect such stupidity to happen shortly
With CO and NO, it is true that the USA starting reducing them much earlier. But Europe has introduced the catalytic converter about 15 years ago, and the emission requirements for cars (except CO2) are now at a point where further reducing them seems pointless - better go after the emissions of oil-fired heatings first, those have no countermeasures so far.
Considering CO2, America always had the bigger and more wasteful cars with CO2 emissions to match. Because CO2 emissions are directly proportional to the amount of fuel you burn.
The Kyoto protocol is about reducing CO2 emissions to limit global warming, something the USA are still very reluctant to do. But maybe the $100/barrel price for crude oil will do what US politicians don't want to do.
BTW there is also some controversy in the EU about CO2 emission requirements for cars. The current proposal would be no problem for small cars, but BMW and Daimler with their heavy luxury cars would have a problem. Those companies are opposing CO2 emission requirements as much as a typical conservative US politician.
Most of us know that.
But if Apple can knock down Microsoft's market share a notch or two, it means they can attract more software vendors for their platforms, and ultimately more choice for customers. It is called "competition". So even without any noble motives, Apple could be the "saviour" in the desktop OS/application market. Of course, I'd like to see Linux as third, equally strong force there (it already is in the server world).
Things are somewhat different in the market for mobile music players. Here Apple is dominating and if anyone needs be cut down to size, it is Apple. But even so, I think iPod dominance is less of a problem than the almost-monopoly of Windows on the desktop/laptop.