According to the ITU, 4G is a synonym for ITM-Advanced
According to the ITU, they have the authority to decide what is "fourth generation" and what isn't. That is so laughable that it is ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous is that they have busybodies wasting their time coming up with a meaningless meta-standard like ITM-Advanced in the first place, a meta-standard so inconsequential that it will have no real world effect on anyone anywhere.
I thought they were defining what "IMT-2000" and "IMT-Advanced" are. The ITU doesn't have anything formally to do with what "3G" and "4G" are, nor does anyone else. What is particularly ridiculous about this is that IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced aren't really standards at all, but rather standards for standards.
No one in this right mind is going to care which technicality keeps a real standard from being classified as IMT-Advanced, because it has absolutely no bearing on anything in the real world. It is just a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats making up things to do.
The international standards body ITU has ruled that Clearwire's WiMax network and the LTE systems that Verizon and others are just starting to roll out are not in fact 4G services.
Are not "in fact" 4G services? Unless the ITU has some sort of trademark on "4G", that is a ridiculous claim. Ultimately the marketplace will decide what is 4G and what isn't, and at this point it looks like the ITU is up for more ridicule than Sprint / Clearwire.
I understand that LTE is significantly different from its predecessors, which gives it as good a reason as any to claim to be "4G". Is "LTE-Advanced" so different from "LTE" to rationally claim that it should be "4G" and "LTE" not be?
If it was so easy, we wouldn't be reading the article and debating what exactly "invent" means in this case.
The only people who think that this is some sort of invention worthy of a government granted monopoly are either clueless or have a pecuniary interest in destroying the software industry. Ultimately, it is all Congress' fault of course, for being so naive as to establish and promote such a irreparably counterproductive system in the first place. Patents are inextricably evil precisely because the law provides no solid ground to reject trivial "inventions" like this. The only people that benefit in the long run from the practice of granting trivial patents are patent attorneys, leaching off the productive sector like the parasitic creatures of government malfeasance they are.
Used car sales people at least perform a public service. The patent bar, by and large, serves no purpose other than to cripple the progress of science and the useful arts, and make us all poorer, sicker, and less well off than we would be otherwise. Wake up in the morning and consider, how can I impair the economy the most efficiently today? File a patent application of course.
No it doesn't. It is called depreciation and/or capital loss. If the equipment is worthless the real value of capital added is zero. Otherwise you are just engaging in an accounting fiction.
Sometimes it takes a little while for the accountants to catch on. But a typical example would be if the equipment is sold for scrap, or at a major loss. Then a capital loss entry gets entered representing the difference between the cost basis and the sale/scrap value. That is a reduction in the book value of the company, a capital loss, and a reduction in GDP.
That is why the Wikipedia article refers to the "capital consumption" adjustment in the first place. Depreciation counts as capital consumption. If the equipment is only worth a fraction of what was paid for it, properly speaking its book value should be marked down. Normally equipment is depreciated over its useful life, if it has a "useful" life, of course.
Actually, it doesn't. You need to read Wikipedia on the calculation of GDP more carefully. GDP is the sum of final consumption expenditure, gross capital formation, and net exports. A business only has real resources to invest in new equipment because somebody is forgoing immediate consumption. If those resources (or claims to resources) are exchanged for worthless equipment, gross capital formation is zero.
So we have a reduction in final consumption with no gross capital formation, which means the GDP goes down. Alternatively, if you use the income approach, you must deduct capital consumption from the salaries and profits paid to everyone, and get the same result.
Users shouldn't really care what version they have, just that they are running Chrome
True, users shouldn't have to care what version they are running, but when software vendors release new versions with major regressions, which version a user is running becomes more than idle trivia.
Chrome 7 has been released with serious regressions from version 6. In particular, Flash/Javascript integration no longer works. Not at all. This breaks a large number of sites, but apparently the Chrome people didn't think this regression was important enough to hold the release for.
The scary thing is the auto-update policy. If the browser auto-updates to new major versions, nothing can stop carelessness like this from bringing mission critical applications to a halt. If Microsoft did this they would be shot.
The sad thing is that some people consider this an "invention". Just another random giveaway by people who make it their life's work to destroy the U.S. economy.
I put the pseudocode into Atari Basic on my trusty 800XL (1.86kHz)
I think you mean something megahertz. A one kilohertz computer wouldn't be good for much of anything. The Apple II, C-64, Atari 400/800, etc. all ran 1 Mhz 6502 CPUs at approximately 1 Mhz, somewhat more than that in the Atari case.
Since when does it matter if anyone was doing this? If an "invention" is obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art, it is not supposed to be patentable.
The only thing that changed here was that graphics coprocessors got faster. The idea that one can run an application on different types of processors was obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art fifty years ago. It is called "Turning machine equivalence". Turing published his seminal paper on that topic in 1937.
Microsoft's patent amounts to applying Turing machine equivalence to video encoding. Patent 1: Video encoding on x86. Patent 2: Video encoding on SPARC. Patent 3: Video encoding on a programmable coprocessor. Patent 4: Video encoding where a processor and a coprocessor work together!
The patent office is nothing other than a massive economy destroying exercise in corporate welfare, probably as much if not more responsible for the current economic malaise than anything stupid done by the banks.
1) Processing capacity rises on coprocessor by X%. 2) Suddenly it is now economical to run a new class of application on it!
Back when I was in school, some folks showed coprocessors (Transputers actually) that could compute Mandebrot sets in real time. It was impressive from a performance perspective, but no one with his head screwed on straight would make the claim that the idea of computing Mandebrot sets on a special purpose coprocessor was some sort of advance in the field.
You could not be more wrong. This type of thing was obvious fifty years ago. It just wasn't economical. That is the only reason most software patents are filed. An idea that any smart junior high school student could have come with in his sleep decades ago, has finally reached economic viability, so let's patent it and collect tolls.
v4v6 NAT devices will have to do DNS interception and rewriting of the sort you are talking about. That handles the problem of private IPv4 hosts speaking to public IPv6 hosts for most protocols. There isn't a serious technical problem with private IPv4 hosts speaking to public IPv4 hosts through some sort of v4v4 NAT and v4-in-v6 tunneling scheme either. The real problem is the same as with any other NAT - the interior devices are not directly addressable, and so lots of things will break until all the necessary NAT hacks, protocol workarounds, and remapping services are adopted.
The most important question for an interior host on a NATed network is what is my real, external (public) address, is it unique to me, what is the port mapping, etc. There is no standard way to answer those questions with v4v6 NAT now, especially when there is more than one layer of NAT, which will be common for years to come, especially the v4v4 (home) + v4v6 (ISP) configuration.
The only way for an ISP to make a profit is to over-sell their bandwidth. If the ISP is profitable, their lines WILL be saturated.
You are mis-using the word "over-sell" which normally means that no, you can't have peak bandwidth all the time. That doesn't mean that ISP backbone connections are saturated all the time, due to statistical multiplexing. At a well run ISP, lines are saturated only at certain periods during the day (if that). Take a look at this page, from Xmission, one of the best ISPs around. See any saturation there?
The whole point of good network management practice (to say nothing of congestion control) is to prevent lines from being saturated, because when they do the network tends to become unusable. Congestive failure, traffic jam, skyrocketing latency, web timeouts. If you experience that _all_ the time, then yes, your connection or your ISP is probably saturated.
A couple of years from now Senator Hatch will be history. He has been in there far too long, and is flaky on any number of issues such as this one. It is nearly a foregone conclusion that his party members in the state of Utah are going to dump him for somebody new when he is up for re-election in 2012, someone certainly more libertarian in character. Rep. Jason Chaffetz for example.
I hesitate to say that is one of the most poorly thought out arguments I have seen on Slashdot for quite some time. The all caps / all bold shouting doesn't exactly advance your case either.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the ITU, 4G is a synonym for ITM-Advanced
According to the ITU, they have the authority to decide what is "fourth generation" and what isn't. That is so laughable that it is ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous is that they have busybodies wasting their time coming up with a meaningless meta-standard like ITM-Advanced in the first place, a meta-standard so inconsequential that it will have no real world effect on anyone anywhere.
Guess what: "4G" is not defined by the ITU. "ITM-Advanced" is.
I thought they were defining what "IMT-2000" and "IMT-Advanced" are. The ITU doesn't have anything formally to do with what "3G" and "4G" are, nor does anyone else. What is particularly ridiculous about this is that IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced aren't really standards at all, but rather standards for standards.
No one in this right mind is going to care which technicality keeps a real standard from being classified as IMT-Advanced, because it has absolutely no bearing on anything in the real world. It is just a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats making up things to do.
The international standards body ITU has ruled that Clearwire's WiMax network and the LTE systems that Verizon and others are just starting to roll out are not in fact 4G services.
Are not "in fact" 4G services? Unless the ITU has some sort of trademark on "4G", that is a ridiculous claim. Ultimately the marketplace will decide what is 4G and what isn't, and at this point it looks like the ITU is up for more ridicule than Sprint / Clearwire.
I understand that LTE is significantly different from its predecessors, which gives it as good a reason as any to claim to be "4G". Is "LTE-Advanced" so different from "LTE" to rationally claim that it should be "4G" and "LTE" not be?
If it was so easy, we wouldn't be reading the article and debating what exactly "invent" means in this case.
The only people who think that this is some sort of invention worthy of a government granted monopoly are either clueless or have a pecuniary interest in destroying the software industry. Ultimately, it is all Congress' fault of course, for being so naive as to establish and promote such a irreparably counterproductive system in the first place. Patents are inextricably evil precisely because the law provides no solid ground to reject trivial "inventions" like this. The only people that benefit in the long run from the practice of granting trivial patents are patent attorneys, leaching off the productive sector like the parasitic creatures of government malfeasance they are.
Used car sales people at least perform a public service. The patent bar, by and large, serves no purpose other than to cripple the progress of science and the useful arts, and make us all poorer, sicker, and less well off than we would be otherwise. Wake up in the morning and consider, how can I impair the economy the most efficiently today? File a patent application of course.
No it doesn't. It is called depreciation and/or capital loss. If the equipment is worthless the real value of capital added is zero. Otherwise you are just engaging in an accounting fiction.
Sometimes it takes a little while for the accountants to catch on. But a typical example would be if the equipment is sold for scrap, or at a major loss. Then a capital loss entry gets entered representing the difference between the cost basis and the sale/scrap value. That is a reduction in the book value of the company, a capital loss, and a reduction in GDP.
That is why the Wikipedia article refers to the "capital consumption" adjustment in the first place. Depreciation counts as capital consumption. If the equipment is only worth a fraction of what was paid for it, properly speaking its book value should be marked down. Normally equipment is depreciated over its useful life, if it has a "useful" life, of course.
it measures the total dollar value of all final goods and services produced...
minus capital consumption, which you are forgetting.
Actually it does
Actually, it doesn't. You need to read Wikipedia on the calculation of GDP more carefully. GDP is the sum of final consumption expenditure, gross capital formation, and net exports. A business only has real resources to invest in new equipment because somebody is forgoing immediate consumption. If those resources (or claims to resources) are exchanged for worthless equipment, gross capital formation is zero.
So we have a reduction in final consumption with no gross capital formation, which means the GDP goes down. Alternatively, if you use the income approach, you must deduct capital consumption from the salaries and profits paid to everyone, and get the same result.
Users shouldn't really care what version they have, just that they are running Chrome
True, users shouldn't have to care what version they are running, but when software vendors release new versions with major regressions, which version a user is running becomes more than idle trivia.
Chrome 7 has been released with serious regressions from version 6. In particular, Flash/Javascript integration no longer works. Not at all. This breaks a large number of sites, but apparently the Chrome people didn't think this regression was important enough to hold the release for.
The scary thing is the auto-update policy. If the browser auto-updates to new major versions, nothing can stop carelessness like this from bringing mission critical applications to a halt. If Microsoft did this they would be shot.
The sad thing is that some people consider this an "invention". Just another random giveaway by people who make it their life's work to destroy the U.S. economy.
Red Hat provide proprietary extras
I am pretty sure that Red Hat is not in the business of providing proprietary anything.
Given the fact that the OPEC model of monopolistic control of resources was firmly established by 1992
OPEC seems to have had its act together by 1973...
I put the pseudocode into Atari Basic on my trusty 800XL (1.86kHz)
I think you mean something megahertz. A one kilohertz computer wouldn't be good for much of anything. The Apple II, C-64, Atari 400/800, etc. all ran 1 Mhz 6502 CPUs at approximately 1 Mhz, somewhat more than that in the Atari case.
Far as I know no one was doing this in 2004
Since when does it matter if anyone was doing this? If an "invention" is obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art, it is not supposed to be patentable.
The only thing that changed here was that graphics coprocessors got faster. The idea that one can run an application on different types of processors was obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art fifty years ago. It is called "Turning machine equivalence". Turing published his seminal paper on that topic in 1937.
Microsoft's patent amounts to applying Turing machine equivalence to video encoding. Patent 1: Video encoding on x86. Patent 2: Video encoding on SPARC. Patent 3: Video encoding on a programmable coprocessor. Patent 4: Video encoding where a processor and a coprocessor work together!
The patent office is nothing other than a massive economy destroying exercise in corporate welfare, probably as much if not more responsible for the current economic malaise than anything stupid done by the banks.
"processing each of the copies of the frame in parallel, using a different channel of the multiple channels of the GPU"
And it is some sort of advance to use multiple channels of a coprocessor to split the load? That is so 1955.
It is most definitely obvious:
1) Processing capacity rises on coprocessor by X%.
2) Suddenly it is now economical to run a new class of application on it!
Back when I was in school, some folks showed coprocessors (Transputers actually) that could compute Mandebrot sets in real time. It was impressive from a performance perspective, but no one with his head screwed on straight would make the claim that the idea of computing Mandebrot sets on a special purpose coprocessor was some sort of advance in the field.
As far as it being obvious, yes, it is NOW
You could not be more wrong. This type of thing was obvious fifty years ago. It just wasn't economical. That is the only reason most software patents are filed. An idea that any smart junior high school student could have come with in his sleep decades ago, has finally reached economic viability, so let's patent it and collect tolls.
v4v6 NAT devices will have to do DNS interception and rewriting of the sort you are talking about. That handles the problem of private IPv4 hosts speaking to public IPv6 hosts for most protocols. There isn't a serious technical problem with private IPv4 hosts speaking to public IPv4 hosts through some sort of v4v4 NAT and v4-in-v6 tunneling scheme either. The real problem is the same as with any other NAT - the interior devices are not directly addressable, and so lots of things will break until all the necessary NAT hacks, protocol workarounds, and remapping services are adopted.
The most important question for an interior host on a NATed network is what is my real, external (public) address, is it unique to me, what is the port mapping, etc. There is no standard way to answer those questions with v4v6 NAT now, especially when there is more than one layer of NAT, which will be common for years to come, especially the v4v4 (home) + v4v6 (ISP) configuration.
The only way for an ISP to make a profit is to over-sell their bandwidth. If the ISP is profitable, their lines WILL be saturated.
You are mis-using the word "over-sell" which normally means that no, you can't have peak bandwidth all the time. That doesn't mean that ISP backbone connections are saturated all the time, due to statistical multiplexing. At a well run ISP, lines are saturated only at certain periods during the day (if that). Take a look at this page, from Xmission, one of the best ISPs around. See any saturation there?
The whole point of good network management practice (to say nothing of congestion control) is to prevent lines from being saturated, because when they do the network tends to become unusable. Congestive failure, traffic jam, skyrocketing latency, web timeouts. If you experience that _all_ the time, then yes, your connection or your ISP is probably saturated.
A couple of years from now Senator Hatch will be history. He has been in there far too long, and is flaky on any number of issues such as this one. It is nearly a foregone conclusion that his party members in the state of Utah are going to dump him for somebody new when he is up for re-election in 2012, someone certainly more libertarian in character. Rep. Jason Chaffetz for example.
I hesitate to say that is one of the most poorly thought out arguments I have seen on Slashdot for quite some time. The all caps / all bold shouting doesn't exactly advance your case either.
It would be nice to be able to set this on a transaction by transaction basis. Sort of like this perhaps, or with some sort of session variable.
The biggest argument for using WHEN on a trigger is for per-tuple AFTER triggers, to avoid queuing up an event to fire later.
Assuming the database engine isn't smart enough (and most certainly aren't) to factor out a when condition from the actual trigger code, absolutely.
this means that you are recommending that they not implement the SQL spec, which is an interesting perspective
No need to make things up. There is no reason why they, or the developers of any other database can't do both.