The 36 bits were all data. The printers of that day used only 6 bits for a character (A-Z, 0-9, a few punctuation marks, a few control characters). So the 36 bit word could hold 6 characters, or 9 binary-coded-decimal digits, or the equivalent of more than 10 digits in binary. It was a pretty useful word size until people started insisting on having lower case letters and all the other symbols you'd find on a typewriter.
I don't know if this relates, but the standard (IBM) punchcards had 12 x 80 hole locations. The 12 possible holes for one symbol were encoded with a rather sparse encoding scheme -- numbers were a single punch in the 0 - 9 rows. Letters were one punch in the X, Y, or 0 row, plus another in the 1-9 rows. Punctuation was 3 punches. Usually these were translated into a 6 bit code when read, but if you wanted to just read it straight in without translation, then a divisible-by-12 word size came in handy. And it was possible to use those cards to store plain binary, up to 12 bits per column...
Alta Vista's press releases seem to claim that they own the concept of indexing the web -- analogous to Whitney claiming to own the concept of removing seeds by machine.
By the way -- my experience in using A-V for searches indicates that any narrowly defined patents they have probably cover algorithms no one would want to imitate.
Ah, good. Thanks for explaining that. But then I often see press releases that must be based on the (ridiculously over broad) abstract. Of course, one reason for these press releases is to attract investors, and the broader the claim the better, but isn't this skirting on fraud?
On the searches I have tried on Alta Vista, their relevance ranking absolutely s*cks. So maybe this patent could be invalidated for lack of utility? But I'm kind of hoping this one patent will stick sufficiently to persuade other search engines to use a different method.
Corporations may be necessary to collect the investment capital needed for medium to large businesses, but there is a problem -- the shareholding model leaves no one morally responsible. The CEO will tell you that he's not personally responsible for shafting the employees and customers because he is answerable to the shareholders for profitability. And the shareholders don't need to know how the company is run. So you quite often get corporate behavior that very few people could stomach if they were sole owners.
Holding companies just add one more layer of insulation between the shareholders and the actual working businesses. They also add one more layer of ignorance, which seems to be in point with these claims about their patents. (Not to be confused with "patent claims".)
I'm pretty sure that Knuth described spidering in the 70's. Maybe even the 60's. Of course this was on interlinked data within one computer, not on the web. So it sounds like Alta Vista's biggest claim (spidering) assumes that taking a well known technique and applying it to the web makes it patentable. IANAL, but I don't think so. Under that reasoning, the first guy to invent the hacksaw (wood saws having been around for millenia) could have patented the idea of sawing metal, rather than just a particular sort of saw. I think that to make a claim that broad you have to do a lot more than just apply an old tool to a new job.
No doubt there are a lot of specific algorithms that A-V did use first, and narrowly defined patents covering these would be valid. There might even be cases where their code is the best possible, so other search engines would have to license it or settle for inferior performance. But they are claiming a lot more than that -- I don't know if they are trying to run up the stock price or just bluff others into paying without testing the patents in court.
Suggested addition to patent law -- you can pay royalties into an escrow account and keep on using the allegedly infringing technology until the case is litigated.
Eli Whitney did not take out a patent on removing cotton seeds by machine. He took out a patent on a particular machine for removing cotton seeds. It did not prevent others from inventing a better machine -- although if patent laws had been enforceable at that time, he would have been able to act against machines that used parts of his design.
Alta Vista's press releases are worded to give the impression that they have 38 patents on indexing by computer. I certainly don't want to read all 38, and IANAL, but since there were computerized literature indexes in the 1970's and patents only run 17 or 20 years, I suspect that any valid patents they have (after considering prior art or obviousness) are just on certain techniques for indexing by computer.
I especially like this one: "Adding new entry to web page table upon receiving web page including link to another web page not having corresponding entry in web page table"
Come on, now. Unless this actually just protects a very specific method of following the link (so you can avoid infringement just by using any other method), it won't stand a court challenge even if the average IQ of judge and jury is 80.
This is bizarre. The company firewall blocks Babelfish. "You are not authorized to view this page." The rest of Alta Vista seems to be accessible, just this one page is blocked.
It sounds like they plan on ejecting an instrument satellite package before lighting the rocket for the final burn. So this will be trailing along behind, taking pictures and spectrographs, and sending them to Earth. (The spectrograph will read the chemical composition of the superheated gasses blasted out of the comet.) I expect they'll also try to put an accelerometer (at least) in the half-ton projectile itself, to transmit readings to the satellite for as long as the antenna lasts -- a few milliseconds of data from this will reveal where the comet ranks on a hardness scale from fluffy snow to solid granite.
Nuclear physicists quite routinely ask the government for extremely large amounts of money to build an accelerator out of exotic materials, just to smash something. Sounds like NASA wants to get into that game. 8-)
Seriously, they want to see what's inside the comet. The surface doesn't seem stable enough to land a drilling rig, and it's probably not safe to even fly near the comet (pieces keep breaking off). So instead, you shoot a hole in it from a safe distance.
Why copper? The projectile materials are going to show up in the readings, so you use something that is quite unlikely to actually be in there to start with. Not iron, that's a common component of rocks. You don't use platinum or uranium because their presence in the comet even in minute quantities would be quite interesting. You don't use lead because sometimes lead traces are a product of the radioactive decay of uranium, and so you need to measure the ratio of lead to uranium if possible. Copper is the most reasonably priced dense metal left.
If there is a power plant close enough, you can also use the waste heat from that to heat buildings. Since less than 40% of the total heat from burning fuel at a steam plant gets turned into electricity, this can make quite a difference.
At Northwestern Michigan College in the 60's and 70's, the faculty had keys to the steam tunnels and routinely used them to go between buildings without going outside in the winter. You could comfortably walk single file down those tunnels. Students weren't supposed to use them (liability issues if some idiot ran his head into a pipe bracket, and the tunnels just weren't big enough for the between-classes rush), but sometimes snuck in. The steam pipes were over a foot in diameter; water, drains, and electricity were also routed through there.
"I do NOT see that much of the story is in Ender's head." Yes, but without what's in Ender's head, you've got:
*Horrible, systematic, gov't-sponsored child abuse.
*The hero beating another little kid to death. Maybe this is right down Hollywood's alley. 8-(
*Zero-g scenes that can only be done well in animation.
*The actual battles (where Ender is controlling a fleet of ships) are hardly described in the book, and I would expect a decent presentation of them to be beyond most people's comprehension. (Including me -- I cannot visualize 3D.)
*Genocide
Don't blame Star Wars and Alien for that, it's been that way since the 30's (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and horror flicks). Give Hollywood a book that contains both blowing things up and parts that actually make people think and all that makes it into the film is blowing things up. Give them a purely cerebral book and... 2001 was the only one that I can remember actually getting made. And Kubrick is dead. (Not that he didn't make his share of dogs. Eyes Wide Shut: a gigantic orgy that is as stimulating as a high church service. No way all those old VIP's could actually get it up under those conditions.)
You definitely couldn't kill a tank with present laser technology -- maybe you'd scorch the paint and burn off the radio antenna. You probably couldn't do much damage to a fighter plane. But it could do a real number on any human who was looking the wrong way when the laser fired, and to many sensor systems as well.
I doubt we ever will see a laser that is effective against armor on a battlefield. Lasers are inherently rather inefficient -- that means, you get more waste heat at the laser than you get heat delivered to the target. When you use a laser in the machine shop to cut steel, it works because you've got a few tons of laser & cooling apparatus focused down on a few hundredths of an inch of steel -- the heat is concentrated. But you can't focus that tightly on a distant target, so the only thing that will make it work is to have the vehicle carrying the laser much, much bigger than the target. E.g., 747 versus a piece of lightweight sheet metal on a missile weighing only a few hundred pounds overall. Maybe they can improve the technology enough that a 747 could burn a hole in a tank from a few miles away, but that 747 would be making itself too easy of a target, and you cannot afford to trade 747's for tanks.
Well, yes it is, in a way. 10,000 years ago assholes like the ones operating these credit agancies would probably be tossed out of the tribe to die... And those idiotic enough to listen to them would starve to death through being too dumb to catch any food.
Maybe we need the equivalent of a credit reporting bureau to find out about the corporations we are about to deal with...
... Sold 100 million copies of defective software. Made it's customers pay again to buy the "uprgrade" with the bug fix. Introduced new bugs..." ...Credited Joe Schmoe's deposits to the wrong account, then bounced his checks, ruined his credit rating, and made his life miserable. Took 3 months to correct the original mistake and never has fixed the bounced checks...
I could go on, but if you are over 25 you already know dozens more examples.
Rho, do you mean to say that you never, ever did something you could be arrested for, if you got caught? If that's true, I hope you never have to take a lie detector test, because they rely on asking things like that to calibrate your response when lying. 8-)
The real issue in many of the stories on this article is the lack of any sense of proportion in evaluating the reported problems. One bit of hooliganism at 16 is something to take into account, but it's hardly an automatic reason to reject a job candidate. Likewise, banks rejecting loans that would make them thousands of dollars because of a disputed report of a $100 debt -- it doesn't make sense.
Speaking of teenage hooligans, now we've got a President who got arrested 3 times (that we know about) -- malicious destruction of property and theft while a student, drunk driving at about 30. That is a lot more reason to disqualify anyone -- getting caught 3 times means you are as dumb as a rock!
Slashdot Mirror
The 36 bits were all data. The printers of that day used only 6 bits for a character (A-Z, 0-9, a few punctuation marks, a few control characters). So the 36 bit word could hold 6 characters, or 9 binary-coded-decimal digits, or the equivalent of more than 10 digits in binary. It was a pretty useful word size until people started insisting on having lower case letters and all the other symbols you'd find on a typewriter.
I don't know if this relates, but the standard (IBM) punchcards had 12 x 80 hole locations. The 12 possible holes for one symbol were encoded with a rather sparse encoding scheme -- numbers were a single punch in the 0 - 9 rows. Letters were one punch in the X, Y, or 0 row, plus another in the 1-9 rows. Punctuation was 3 punches. Usually these were translated into a 6 bit code when read, but if you wanted to just read it straight in without translation, then a divisible-by-12 word size came in handy. And it was possible to use those cards to store plain binary, up to 12 bits per column...
Alta Vista's press releases seem to claim that they own the concept of indexing the web -- analogous to Whitney claiming to own the concept of removing seeds by machine.
By the way -- my experience in using A-V for searches indicates that any narrowly defined patents they have probably cover algorithms no one would want to imitate.
Ah, good. Thanks for explaining that. But then I often see press releases that must be based on the (ridiculously over broad) abstract. Of course, one reason for these press releases is to attract investors, and the broader the claim the better, but isn't this skirting on fraud?
On the searches I have tried on Alta Vista, their relevance ranking absolutely s*cks. So maybe this patent could be invalidated for lack of utility? But I'm kind of hoping this one patent will stick sufficiently to persuade other search engines to use a different method.
Corporations may be necessary to collect the investment capital needed for medium to large businesses, but there is a problem -- the shareholding model leaves no one morally responsible. The CEO will tell you that he's not personally responsible for shafting the employees and customers because he is answerable to the shareholders for profitability. And the shareholders don't need to know how the company is run. So you quite often get corporate behavior that very few people could stomach if they were sole owners.
Holding companies just add one more layer of insulation between the shareholders and the actual working businesses. They also add one more layer of ignorance, which seems to be in point with these claims about their patents. (Not to be confused with "patent claims".)
I'm pretty sure that Knuth described spidering in the 70's. Maybe even the 60's. Of course this was on interlinked data within one computer, not on the web. So it sounds like Alta Vista's biggest claim (spidering) assumes that taking a well known technique and applying it to the web makes it patentable. IANAL, but I don't think so. Under that reasoning, the first guy to invent the hacksaw (wood saws having been around for millenia) could have patented the idea of sawing metal, rather than just a particular sort of saw. I think that to make a claim that broad you have to do a lot more than just apply an old tool to a new job.
No doubt there are a lot of specific algorithms that A-V did use first, and narrowly defined patents covering these would be valid. There might even be cases where their code is the best possible, so other search engines would have to license it or settle for inferior performance. But they are claiming a lot more than that -- I don't know if they are trying to run up the stock price or just bluff others into paying without testing the patents in court.
Suggested addition to patent law -- you can pay royalties into an escrow account and keep on using the allegedly infringing technology until the case is litigated.
Eli Whitney did not take out a patent on removing cotton seeds by machine. He took out a patent on a particular machine for removing cotton seeds. It did not prevent others from inventing a better machine -- although if patent laws had been enforceable at that time, he would have been able to act against machines that used parts of his design.
Alta Vista's press releases are worded to give the impression that they have 38 patents on indexing by computer. I certainly don't want to read all 38, and IANAL, but since there were computerized literature indexes in the 1970's and patents only run 17 or 20 years, I suspect that any valid patents they have (after considering prior art or obviousness) are just on certain techniques for indexing by computer.
I especially like this one: "Adding new entry to web page table upon receiving web page including link to another web page not having corresponding entry in web page table"
Come on, now. Unless this actually just protects a very specific method of following the link (so you can avoid infringement just by using any other method), it won't stand a court challenge even if the average IQ of judge and jury is 80.
This is bizarre. The company firewall blocks Babelfish. "You are not authorized to view this page." The rest of Alta Vista seems to be accessible, just this one page is blocked.
Artist A makes art. "Artist" B spends all his time buttering up politicians. Who do you think gets ALL the cash?
Well, if the comet dodges, then we'll have learned something really important. 8-)
It sounds like they plan on ejecting an instrument satellite package before lighting the rocket for the final burn. So this will be trailing along behind, taking pictures and spectrographs, and sending them to Earth. (The spectrograph will read the chemical composition of the superheated gasses blasted out of the comet.) I expect they'll also try to put an accelerometer (at least) in the half-ton projectile itself, to transmit readings to the satellite for as long as the antenna lasts -- a few milliseconds of data from this will reveal where the comet ranks on a hardness scale from fluffy snow to solid granite.
Nuclear physicists quite routinely ask the government for extremely large amounts of money to build an accelerator out of exotic materials, just to smash something. Sounds like NASA wants to get into that game. 8-)
Seriously, they want to see what's inside the comet. The surface doesn't seem stable enough to land a drilling rig, and it's probably not safe to even fly near the comet (pieces keep breaking off). So instead, you shoot a hole in it from a safe distance.
Why copper? The projectile materials are going to show up in the readings, so you use something that is quite unlikely to actually be in there to start with. Not iron, that's a common component of rocks. You don't use platinum or uranium because their presence in the comet even in minute quantities would be quite interesting. You don't use lead because sometimes lead traces are a product of the radioactive decay of uranium, and so you need to measure the ratio of lead to uranium if possible. Copper is the most reasonably priced dense metal left.
1) Another reason for tort reform.
2) "Think of it as evolution in action." (Niven & Pournelle, Oath of Fealty.)
If there is a power plant close enough, you can also use the waste heat from that to heat buildings. Since less than 40% of the total heat from burning fuel at a steam plant gets turned into electricity, this can make quite a difference.
At Northwestern Michigan College in the 60's and 70's, the faculty had keys to the steam tunnels and routinely used them to go between buildings without going outside in the winter. You could comfortably walk single file down those tunnels. Students weren't supposed to use them (liability issues if some idiot ran his head into a pipe bracket, and the tunnels just weren't big enough for the between-classes rush), but sometimes snuck in. The steam pipes were over a foot in diameter; water, drains, and electricity were also routed through there.
"I do NOT see that much of the story is in Ender's head." Yes, but without what's in Ender's head, you've got:
*Horrible, systematic, gov't-sponsored child abuse.
*The hero beating another little kid to death. Maybe this is right down Hollywood's alley. 8-(
*Zero-g scenes that can only be done well in animation.
*The actual battles (where Ender is controlling a fleet of ships) are hardly described in the book, and I would expect a decent presentation of them to be beyond most people's comprehension. (Including me -- I cannot visualize 3D.)
*Genocide
Don't blame Star Wars and Alien for that, it's been that way since the 30's (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and horror flicks). Give Hollywood a book that contains both blowing things up and parts that actually make people think and all that makes it into the film is blowing things up. Give them a purely cerebral book and ... 2001 was the only one that I can remember actually getting made. And Kubrick is dead. (Not that he didn't make his share of dogs. Eyes Wide Shut: a gigantic orgy that is as stimulating as a high church service. No way all those old VIP's could actually get it up under those conditions.)
You definitely couldn't kill a tank with present laser technology -- maybe you'd scorch the paint and burn off the radio antenna. You probably couldn't do much damage to a fighter plane. But it could do a real number on any human who was looking the wrong way when the laser fired, and to many sensor systems as well.
I doubt we ever will see a laser that is effective against armor on a battlefield. Lasers are inherently rather inefficient -- that means, you get more waste heat at the laser than you get heat delivered to the target. When you use a laser in the machine shop to cut steel, it works because you've got a few tons of laser & cooling apparatus focused down on a few hundredths of an inch of steel -- the heat is concentrated. But you can't focus that tightly on a distant target, so the only thing that will make it work is to have the vehicle carrying the laser much, much bigger than the target. E.g., 747 versus a piece of lightweight sheet metal on a missile weighing only a few hundred pounds overall. Maybe they can improve the technology enough that a 747 could burn a hole in a tank from a few miles away, but that 747 would be making itself too easy of a target, and you cannot afford to trade 747's for tanks.
Why not? GW Bush did.
Because corporations don't prosecute crimes.
Well, yes it is, in a way. 10,000 years ago assholes like the ones operating these credit agancies would probably be tossed out of the tribe to die... And those idiotic enough to listen to them would starve to death through being too dumb to catch any food.
Maybe we need the equivalent of a credit reporting bureau to find out about the corporations we are about to deal with...
... Sold 100 million copies of defective software. Made it's customers pay again to buy the "uprgrade" with the bug fix. Introduced new bugs..."
...Credited Joe Schmoe's deposits to the wrong account, then bounced his checks, ruined his credit rating, and made his life miserable. Took 3 months to correct the original mistake and never has fixed the bounced checks...
I could go on, but if you are over 25 you already know dozens more examples.
You screwed up one customer account, once, so you are out of business. 8-)
Rho, do you mean to say that you never, ever did something you could be arrested for, if you got caught? If that's true, I hope you never have to take a lie detector test, because they rely on asking things like that to calibrate your response when lying. 8-)
The real issue in many of the stories on this article is the lack of any sense of proportion in evaluating the reported problems. One bit of hooliganism at 16 is something to take into account, but it's hardly an automatic reason to reject a job candidate. Likewise, banks rejecting loans that would make them thousands of dollars because of a disputed report of a $100 debt -- it doesn't make sense.
Speaking of teenage hooligans, now we've got a President who got arrested 3 times (that we know about) -- malicious destruction of property and theft while a student, drunk driving at about 30. That is a lot more reason to disqualify anyone -- getting caught 3 times means you are as dumb as a rock!