This is not discrimination in any sort of unacceptable way. It is simply an organization taking a very legitimate stand on important issues. All organizations, in particular, *must* discriminate in determining their membership if the organization is to actually be able to maintain a substantive position on any issues.
I'm not eligible to be a Rabbi, because I'm not Jewish. I'm not eligible to be an Al Queda terrorist, because I'm not a bloodthirsty Wahabbist Mohammedan. I'm not allowed to hang around in the Women's restroom, because I'm a man.
In each of these cases I'm being "discriminated against", but in no case is the discrimination itself inappropriate or something that should be disallowed. (Al Queda's actions are, of course, reprehensible, but they have the same rights as any other group of people to choose those they wish to associate with and on what self-igniting terms.)
Stop this madness and see the light of the network engineers. Behold! The wonder of the Mbps. 1Mbps is a wonderful, intuitive 1,000,000 full bits per second. This is stuff I can explain my mother - and she'll understand.
Amen. You almost touched on the key difference - The binary crap is by computer scientists (many of whom make their living as high priests by spreading obfuscation), while networks (which have to work in actual practice, regardless of theory) were built by engineers.
I call bullshit! Check the/. archives (around 2000/2001, IIRC), and you'll find that this was led by a real standards organization to avoid confusing the correct base-10 prefixes with their binary-overloaded counterparts. (I think it was IEEE, since this sounds too useful to have been a Euro-weenie ISO endeavour...)
Creative, Seagate, and the others were correct - mega means 10^6, and giga means 10^9. Tort lawyers and hopeless computer dweebs (who don't even know you start counting at *one* for crying out loud!) don't get to redefine numbers just because they say so. This case was wrongly decided, it's too bad they decided it was easier to capitulate with coupons than actually fight this crap...
AMD is a good company, with (some) great products, but they've totally missed the boat in what may well be the most important chip market of the future: "mobile" CPUs. AMD has no decent mobile products, and nothing compelling in the pipeline over the next few years.
Don't underestimate the importance of "mobile" CPUs - they're going to be the heart of almost all post-PC internet access devices, and Internet-enabled smart phones, PDAs, and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices, as Intel calls them) are only the beginning. Anywhere a high-function, low-power, Internet interface is required, these things are going to show up. Personally, I expect devices based on this sort of chip to outnumber PCs by 10 or 20-to-one over the next several years. As pervasive internet connectivity finally arrives, these will be the chips that make such products real at the prices (and battery life) we demand.
Intel has a solid strategy here with their new x86-based MID chips, but AMD's tack is to keep whacking the old ex-NationalSemi Geode nag until it falls over dead. Geode's not a bad tech/architecture, but there's no way it can keep up with the likes of Intel's Silverton, or especially, the generations that will follow.
From a strategic point of view, this is AMD's greatest weakness, and it's not one they can patch up easily or quickly. Intel stands to be the big winner, since moving x86 downwards into this market means development gets really easy, even if not optimal. There's still a window for non-x86 architectures such as ARM (the iPhone's engine) in such devices, but AMD simply has no answer for what is probably the largest and fastest growing CPU market of the next few years.
Without a major correction ASAP, AMD may find it hard to maintain second place...
This is a good question. There is quite a bit of real science to suggest that most of what passes for evolutionary doctrine and dogma is indeed false, or at the very least, extremely suspect. A great place to begin investigating this is the excellent scienceagainstevolution.org website, which was founded by a well-respected engineer, a Fellow at the US Naval Weapons lab responsible for much of the science and engineering behind US missile guidance systems.
I have yet to find any open-minded evolutionist that doesn't have significant doubts about the scientific validity of evolution after a deep reading of that site. The evidence is clear: science does NOT support evolution.
The purpose of GIMPshop was to "replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop". Well, Adobe just told you themselves that the Photoshop UI sucks. So, clearly, redesigning Gimp to be more Photoshop-like would not have been a good way of improving it.
Photoshop's interface is pretty bad, no question. GIMP's interface is easily one of the worst ever devised. As bad as PhotoShop's interface is, it's light-years beyond the GIMP's.
I long for the day when we get good ones - I'm fairly impressed by Inkscape's Corel/Xara influenced UI. It would really be great to see a version of the GIMP with a UI designed to mesh with Inkscape's, which could allow the two programs to be used nearly transparently together.
First off, I'm not a typical game console guy - the Wii is the first game console I've ever liked enough to buy (excluding the already antique Atari 2600 my son bought about two years ago, which is also much more fun than most modern video games...)
Like a lot of Wii customers, one big reason I never bought any other console was that the games hold little to no appeal.
The Wii is fundamentally different, by design. No one thinks Wii Sports has great graphics, but *lots* of people will line up to play it. Case in point: There was an active, mixed crowd surrounding the bigscreen Wii at the big Captain Morgan's "Crewsade" parties here in Austin just a couple of weeks ago. No other console (or game) could hope to draw that kind of crowd. Cheesy graphics can be *fun*.
Active games that really use the Wii's unique capabilities will be huge hits. Lame ports of games aimed a the "traditional gamer" crowd will fail miserably. Almost all of the Wii's "grow the market" buyers, like myself, didn't buy previous consoles for one over-riding reason: we don't like playing those games. Games that require you to "earn" your way through stupidly jumping through hoops a zillion times until you get it right will fail in the Wii marketplace, but *fun* games, like the best of the Wii games, will do *very* well, especially because the Wii is really (IMO) the first effective "social" gaming platform for people with actual social skills.;-)
In short, the problem is gamers, and the fact that most game programmers are gamers, so they crank out the kind of gamer-think crap that Wii buyers never wanted, and won't ever buy.
The Wii will probably eventually be a stunninng success, but that means game developers (or other programmers that "get" the Wii) are going to have to start writing Wii-only (or at least Wii-centric) games that *really* leverage the console's unique capabilities. Wii games with the graphics of Blazing Angels (which for all its warts, at least shows the Wii can do decent graphics) and the gameplay/fun quotient of Wii Sports, especially for multiple players, are certain to be hits. Sadly, we're still waiting for those... (BTW: avoiding the whole dark goth theme would be a good idea, since this is one thing that made previous games and consoles unappealing...)
Oh, and how about using Mii definitions to drive higher-res Mii renderings for more serious-looking games? Why has no one done this? If I were in a gaming company, that's just one of many innovative changes I'd make to leverage the Wii platform. Tehre's gobs of potential there, just waiting to be unleashed...
I've commented elsewhere in this topic on CorelDraw, but it really is a real alternative to Adobe's CS. I agree that it's one of the very best programs available for Windows (and one of the best commercial software values anywhere). As I noted in my other post, it's also one of two programs (the other is Visio, which I still love, but use less since CorelDraw 12) that has kept me preferring Windows as my primary desktop for over a decade.
Consider the CorelDraw suite as an excellent alternative to Adobe's CreativeSuite - in fact, it covers almost all of the same ground, and is widely used by a significant number of professionals. (It's actually the preferred standard in signmaking and embroidery.)
While each individual piece may lack some of the more esoteric functionality of the CS equivalent, the CorelDraw Suite is light-years ahead of the open source and freeware alternatives, and fully usable by both professionals and amateurs. This last is an important point, because, IMO, one of the biggest problems with almost all Adobe software is that it insists on working differently than everything else out there, so Adobe's packages have a substantial learning curve.
CorelDraw is the only suite I know of that's truly competitive - it can do page layout and design, vector and bitmap graphics editing and manipulation, import and export to all major file formats, prepress and color separations, and much more. Add the fact that this $400 product comes with thousands of dollars worth of high quality fonts, clip art, and interactive tutorials, and the CorelDraw Suite is a real bargain. There are competitors in each niche: drawing/illustration tools, page layout/desktop publishing, bitmap editing, animation creation, prepress/separations, etc, but I don't know of any other package that can really compete with Adobe's CS across the entire range. I'm continually amazed at CorelDraw's lesser-know features. I recently needed to create barcode serial number labels for a new series of products and was pleasantly surprised to find CorelDraw's barcode wizard was fully up to the task. Sure, this sort of thing can be done manually, but Corel made a tedious and error-prone operation trivially easy.
FWIW, I have no relationship with Corel other than as a very satisfied CorelDraw customer. I still use CorelDraw 12, but my recent purchase of a new laptop with Vista may force me to upgrade to CorelDraw Graphics Suite X3. ($180 - not cheap, but chump change by Adobe standards.)
I just wish they'd resurrect the Mac port of the CorelDraw suite, so I could lose the MS desktop OS. To be honest, CorelDraw and Visio that are the biggest things keeping me in the Windows world - with Office 2007's grotesque new UI, I've switched to OpenOffice for almost all the lightweight stuff, and Corel does the heavy lifting.
BTW - most open source offerings that people wil suggest here are not even close to being in the same league with Adobe and Corel. IMO, GIMP is a sad, sick joke, and Inkscape a nice prototype, but lacks the capabilities of a professional program. The one exception is Scribus, which shows great promise, and could eventually be one of the first open source applications that can actually seriously offer a completely competitive alternative to commercial software in this space.
The "Plug and Play doesn't work" card is a farce. The vast majority of hardware works right out of the box. Most of the time I find it easier to get hardware working with Linux than with Windows. With Windows I always spend a lot of extra time loading drivers that came on separate media (If I can find them). More and more manufacturers are including Linux drivers and as the popularity of Linux grows it just gets better.
I call B.S.... It's not just Plug-and-Play that doesn't work in Linux- in reality, many users can reasonably expect that most of their hardware, especially peripherals, won't work correctly. Anyone that claims that more PC hardware works in Linux is just playing rabid fanboy and is deliberately denying reality.
I've been hoping for well over a decade that some Linux distro would get this sorted out, but it hasn't happened yet. The major distros are getting fatter and fatter, but still have the same problems and sometimes now run even slower than Windows on the same hardware. (Puppy Linux is a notable exception here, and it may well be the most usable desktop Linux available. Example from two installs earlier this week: Puppy install time: ~ 5 mins, very usable configuration, nearly everything "just works". Ubuntu install time: nearly TWO HOURS, shinier and much browner, but a whole bunch of stuff still doesn't work. Ubuntu's boot time is dramatically longer, too. Puppy wins by a mile - the new 2.15CE version coming out soon is even cooler, allowing customization by adding app suites for high-end web, graphics, dev, office apps, etc.)
That said, I'm reinstalling XP, due largely to the hardware support problems inherent in all Linuxes. If I were to switch to Linux on the desktop today, the following things would not work at all, or at the least, take a significant hit in functionality:
1) My laptop - There is NO Linux distro that I've seen that really handles power management and suspend/resume to both RAM and disk. And forget hot (or warm) docking - changing the hardware config that drastically requires rebooting in Linux. This is especially true if you have a multi-docking laptop like my ThinkPad, which has a docking interface for the base laptop with a media slice, and another docking interface from the media slice to the actual dock, which contains additional I/O hardware, including another Ethernet interface. Depending on my needs and how much weight I want to carry, I can split (undock) the system at either interface. Although pushing the limits, this config fully meets the Intel/MS power and docking management specs, and I'm pretty sure there's not a Linux distro on the planet that can support it. I did this stuff for Dell's portable brands, so I know what I'm talking about here - Linux still hasn't caught up the power management features of Microsoft's ACPI implementations of 1998. The bazaar has utterly and completely failed here.
2) My Color Laser Printer - Sure, I can move to Linux, if I'm willing to give up printing. This is a killer - quality printing seems to be effectively impossible with Linux. Getting any printing working at all in Linux is a major PITA, but over half the time, it's flat impossible, as in the case of my excellent OKI color page printer, which has NO Linux support at all. (It appears they got tired of dealing with a bunch of arrogant jerks and decided it was easier to just ignore Linux.) Even though it's a network printer, all printing from Linux must be done by first copying the files to an XP or OSX box and printing from there. Kinda kills the joy. (Yep, I could automate this, but I've got better things to do...)
3) My Treo - AFAIK, a full decade after Palm OS and its hotsync mechanism became mainstream, there is still no fully capable Linux equivalent of Palm Desktop. (Yes, I know there are bits and pieces that partly work (one app for calendar, another for contacts, a third for tasks, etc.)but that's not nearly enough, and it creates huge integration and sync problems.) And since Palm Desktop wasn't
This is the H1, remember, the bad-boy original designed for the military. While I'm no greenie, it's only the H1's military durability that makes it clean the Prius's clock in this analysis. 3X doesn't sound far off the mark to me.
You could make a good argument that both vehicles could last far longer than the mileages assumed, but the numbers chosen probably aren't too far off the mark as averages.
I imagine the market for used Priuses will be very low once people have to start replacing not only batteries, but also the other exotic (and expensive!!) parts of the car, especially its control electronics. This is just basic economics - repair costs dominate the value calculations for older cars - which is why you can buy a nice, used Ferrari for a surprisingly low amount - and also why the lower reliability and even higher repair costs drive used Aston ($12K for a new head?), Lotus, and Maserati (Biturbo, anyone?)prices right into the dirt...
I just wish someone would build a nice roomy 500-600 HP hybrid sedan. Hybrid technology has far more potential as "electric supercharging" to eliminate the need for huge motors than it does as a "green" technology to make tiny and expensive little penalty boxes that no one in their right mind wants to drive.
A series hybrid with a small, efficient gas turbine would make a LOT more sense than Toyota's brain-dead and outrageously expensive Prius design. (
BTW - these things cost FAR more to make than Toyota sells them for, a fact that has the US trade representative investigating invoking the "Super 301" anti-dumping laws. GM is on record about this subsidy saying that the cheapest way to get batteries for producing an electric car would be to buy a shipload of Toyota Hybrids, pull the batteries out, and throw the cars away. How many people would even consider a hybrid if the taxpayer-funded subsidy went away and they had to compete on a level economic playing field?
I think your system is easy to defeat or manipulate. If I am IBM, I just create lots of wholly owned companies that submit patents up to the 50 patent limit each, so no increase in fees. I submit lots of bogus patents in areas where my competitors have a strong lead shortening the time they have the advantage.
Actually, it's fairly resistant to such manipulation: Remember that the term of patents is affected only by the number of patents that actually *issue* in that category (and there are *lots* of categories!) - the number of patents *applied for* doesn't affect anything at all. All of the same criteria as today (novelty, usefulness, non-obviousness) would be used to determine validity prior to issue. Abusers would have to actually write patents good enough to actually issue or their actions would have no effect. (And if they do write patents applications that good, they *should* be issued!) The cost and effort of attempting to "game" the system speculatively this way, though, is likely prohibitive even for the largest companies, since no one knows where the next breakthroughs will be. Even "imperfect protection" against abuse is better than the "effectively no protection" we have today...
For all practical purposes, the proposed system is dramatically harder to game than the system we have today, with the benefit that attempts to do so would be far more obvious to everyone. Accelerating fees address the goal of levelling the playing field between small and large companies - this is a noble, but very secondary goal. Tying terms to patent issues, on the other hand, accomplishes the primary goal - eliminating the "jackpot" nature of the present system and its mismatch with market timescales, especially in fast-moving fields where the 20-year term is effectively a permanent monopoly, rather than the temporary one that the Constitution intended.
(I would also be in favor of a provision that would require the invention to be offered for public sale/use within say, the lesser of half of the patent's term or five years, else that patent would expire immediately. This would tend to keep people from sitting on or "locking up" patents defensively, with no intention of using them. After all, the whole purpose of patents (in the US) is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" (Article 1, Section 8, US Constitution), and camping out on a defensive patent for years cannot reasonably be interpreted as working to the end of promoting progress!)
As far as scaling fees upward with the number of applications, yes, this could be avoided through paper companies, etc. as you suggest, but the limit could easily apply to the highest-level majority ownership entity, for instance, eliminating that dodge. In any case, this simply serves as a disincentive for really large companies to file tons of junk patents as a smoke screen, as they do today. Accelerating fees for high-volume filers addresses the very real secondary, problem: the sheer volume of patent apps clogging the system. Part of the reason the system is so broken is that many patents no longer issue in time to even be relevant, so inventions in fast-moving fields are effectively denied real patent protection anyway, leaving them only with protection by "Pat. Pending" rather than actual issued patents. We desperately *need* a disincentive for junk patents, even if it is somewhat imperfect, but we also must preserve the fundamental protection of the patent system, as is explicitly called for in the Constitution. (At the relative pittance filing fees cost big companies (only twice the necessarily-reasonable "small entity" fees), I'm surprised we don't see far more companies engaging in this sort of abuse already. I suspect we *will* see much more such abuse soon, if we don't soon take some steps to provide self-regulating market-like approaches to patent regulation.)
Taken together, these two simple reforms produce a very powerful disincentive to the abuse we see today, while still preserving the great and necessary parts - the best parts - of a patent system that has worked so well for so long.
As I've stated here on/. in the past, there is an easy way to fix the patent system, which I've improved over the years. The patent system is not ideal, but it has been a stunningly effective engine for driving economic development and technological progress for centuries, especially in the US. It does NOT need to be abolished, nor does it need major surgery - what it needs, instead, is the addition of a simple self-regulation mechanism that will remove the incentive for most abuses. (For some more detail on why I think patents are a *very* good thing, check out a letter I wrote to LWN way back in 2000: http://lwn.net/2000/0420/backpage.php3#backpage)
The following addresses the US patent system, which for all its myriad faults, is in many ways the best in the world (at least as far as creating incentives for progress.) I don't address foreign patent systems here because, 1) I don't know them well, and 2) the ones that I do know a bit about all too often serve only the interests of large corporations with deep pockets.
How to Fix Patents Easily ("Dub Dublin's Proposal for Patent Reform"):
Part One: Instead of the current fixed length term of patents (20 years, in the US), make the term of patents adjustable on a sliding scale that is inversely proportional to the number of patents *issued* in that category in the trailing twelve months.
Part Two: Keep the reasonable cost of patent filings, but after a relatively low threshold of filings (say, 50 or so), make subsequent filing fees rapidly accelerate with the number of patent applications filed (also figured over the trailing twelve months). This has many benefits:
Although it doesn't fix everything, it fixes the most serious problems, with the huge bonus that it's simple to understand, easy to implement, and doesn't require a lot of tinkering in the future.
It ensures that truly new breakthroughs (say, antigravity or Mr. Fusion) or breakthroughs in sleepy areas for which there isn't much patent activity (steam-powered cars) would still receive maximum patent protection, preserving strong incentives for first movers in those areas. (FWIW, I favor setting the term in median-activity categories at around 12 years, with slower ones going up to 25 years, and more frenetic ones falling to as little as 3 years.)
In areas of furiously developing technology, the falling term reacts automatically to the pace of the market, adding a market-driven component to the patent process. This fundamental disconnect between the patent system and the state of the market (which largely drives and is driven by the pace of technological development) is the largest reason our patent system seems problematic (and to some degree, anachronistic) today.
It also ensures that as more and more people are issued valid, but possibly trivial or copycat patents in a patent "land rush", the value of those patents begins to fall rapidly as the terms decrease, possibly to as little as three years in very rapidly developing areas. (In today's world of Internet and software patents, anything longer than five years is darn near forever, anyway, but these shorter terms would keep those systems, methods, and processes from being unusable (for decades) by others wanting to (wisely) avoid deliberate infringement.) A bit of ambiguity about the term your patent application will buy you in a hot area is an intentional damper on excessive speculative patents.
As markets cool down and the number of patents falls off, the terms begin to increase again, creating some incentive for a continued incremental improvement or renewed activity in more mature markets.
Because it's market-based, it doesn't require prescient knowledge or the implementation of rules that will themselves someday be completely out-of step with the environment around them.
Similarly, Step Two places an effective limit on the number
The open source version as a "trial" product. For Sugar CRM this is basically the strategy. They give away an open source version that has limited functionality, most customers upgrade to a version that is not available 100% as an open source product. They charge customers for the full functionality product.
Someone explain to me what this means!!I thought Open Source means giving away (no choice here) the source code of whole functionality.
Obviously, GPL restrictions don't apply to the *originator* of a program. Under the GPL, that person/company has an advantage no one else can have - they *can* legally distribute the program with proprietary, closed-source bits (after all, it's theirs, and they set the license - for everyone else, it's the GPL, for them, it's whatever they want!)
[soapbox]As an aside, I think this is the real motivation behind some of the controversial GPL3 provisions - you have to remember that despite his claims, Stallman's actions *always* take a very anti-commerce, communist tone. Since the FSF's apparent *real* primary goal is to make commerce in software impossible/illegal, this is hardly surprising.[/soapbox]
Intelligent Design must be taken on faith, just like Pastafarianism.
Recognizing and acknowledging the prima facie evidence for intelligent design requires considerably less faith than believing that random chance produced a myriad of perfectly functioning and largely self-repairing creatures despite scientifically determined odds of zero. (The chance of a single living cell arising spontaneously as determined by serious scientists (opposed to the idea of God, by the way) is 1 in 10e40000 - since there are only around 10e80 atoms in the entire universe, this is as certain a zero as you'll ever find!) That doesn't even begin to touch the really hard problems, like the evolution of sex (requires two extremely "mutated" organisms to arise at the same time and place, with complementary changes in each), moral values, self-awareness, etc.
Ultimately, evolution is not science, but a worldview. Worldviews are always present, and always (though often invalidly) held on faith, since they must by definition appeal at some point to a self-authenticating authority. The worldview of those that believe in ID simply acknowledge that they don't know everything, and that the universe appears to show substantial evidence of direct teleological design and action. Those that insist that evolution must be true are laughing in the face of the evidence of science itself, due to their personal desire to eliminate any possiblity of a God. Read what a few very prominent scientists have said on this topic and see for yourself how they refuse to acknowledge or accept what thier own objective scientific inquiry has clearly shown them:
On the numbers above, by the very man that generated them: (The chance of even a single living cell arising apontaneously is) "An outrageously small probability, that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup." And later: "If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated (spontaneously) on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court." - Evolution From Space, by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1981, p.27 (and of course, Hoyle's pitiful attempt at an answer to this conundrum, Panspermia, is simply handwaving that moves the problem off-stage - he admits life clearly could not have spontaneously here, but the same exact logic says it can't have arisen anywhere else, either!)
"In spite of the genetic code being almost universal, the mechanism necessary to embody it is far too complex to have arisen in one blow." -Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, by Francis Crick, 1981, p. 71. (In other words, it can't have happened, but I have to belive that what science tells me is false if I'm to retain my godless worldview. La la la...)
"One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task, to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.... Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation." - George Wald, Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate, Scientific American, August 1954, p. 46 (Stunning refusal to accept objective science but rather to choose to believe on faith that spontaneous generation of life occured in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence arguing the opposite!)
"The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it....(After the publication of The Origin of Species,) evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it." -Physics Bulletin, "A Physicist Looks at Evolution," H.
I've had an Oki C5150n for a couple of years now, and it's perhaps the only piece of technology I've ever owned that just flat does *everything* it's supposed to. It's a bit over your price ceiling, but worth the stretch, since it offers excellent full-color and a bunch of really handy features.
I really can't say enough good things about it - it's just a really, really solid piece of engineering and manufacturing. (I have no relationship with Oki other than as a *very* happy customer.) This is one case where a company has developed a superior technology, and then done everything they needed to to bring all the benefits of that technology to market.
I looked carefully at everything in my price range before selecting the Oki, and I'm convinced I'd have been pretty disappointed with any of the other choices. HP (#3 choice), Samsung (#2 choice), Konica/Minolta, Brother, and Xerox(Tektronix Phaser) all fell short.
The Okis have several big advantages over regular laser printers that aren't immediately obvious - here's a short list:
Oki's printers use linear LED arrays rather than a laser scanner. This makes them smaller (especially for color), quieter, and produces better print quality. (Compare clarity of very small text on an Oki to HP or Samsung color lasers to see a *huge* difference.)
The noise of other color laser printers is a big deal, unless they live in an printer room where no one has to hear. While the Oki is far from silent while printing, it's *way* quiter than the horrible jangling, clunking noise of HP's ferris wheel of toner cartridges.
A significant benefit of the Oki LED imager technology is that all colors are applied and fused in a single pass - so colors stay perfectly in register. After two years, the colors in my Oki are still perfectly aligned - friends with HPs and Samsungs can't say that. Streaks, splotches, and stripes have simply never happened. This single-pass technology is also many times faster and a big part of the reason why it's quieter - it simply doesn't need complexities like the kludgey toner cartidge ferris wheel HP's design requires.
Oki's toner is pretty amazing stuff - a special ultrafine polymer powder far more durable than the competition's - I even use my printer to produce outdoor-use labels on Avery's weatherproof label stock. So far, I can say it lasts at least two years outdoors and not only does it still look good, it looks like the label material is going to go away before the printed image. That same durability makes it impossible to smudge an Oki-printed document, and produces a medium-glossy finish that looks much more like an offset-printed document than a laser printer. This professional look is handy, since I originally bought it to do print-on demand product brochures and the like.
It's networkable, of course, and uses a delightfully open lpr print queue, so it works with any computer or OS, and probably will forever.
Cost per page is surprisingly low - this is one of the big reasons to seriously consider a printer like this instead of an inkjet, which is *much* more expensive over the long haul on a per-page basis. At what good quality ink cartridges cost, you can pay for a nice color LED printer like this pretty quickly. Plus, Oki gives you decent 3000-page toner cartridges to start out with (they sell 3K and 5K sizes), unlike the HP ripoff factory cartridges that are much smaller and force you to spend hundreds more for toner before very long.
My Oki C5150n printer is one of the best products I've ever owned - it's *only* flaw is in not correctly using the manual bypass feeder tray without having to tell the driver you want to do that. (The manual says if there's paper there, it should use that by default, but it doesn't.) There are ne
Super Mario Bros is still lots of fun, I don't care what you say.
A LOT of the older stuff is more fun to play than today's ridiculously expensive and beautifully shaded 3D graphics-engined masterpieces.
My son asked for an Atari Flashback 2 for Christmas. Let me tell you something: this thing is great - it's really just a new Atari 2600 with a few dozen games integrated so you don't need the cartridges. Computer game graphics don't get much worse than this - when the 2600 was new, it was considered beneath those of us enlightened enough to have a Commodore 64 and its vastly superior sound and graphics. But here's the point: IT DOESN'T MATTER - those old games are more fun to play than most any of the new fancy stuff, and the whole family has had a blast with the thing.
New games are overly expensive, complex, and require way too much "earn your way to the next level" crap. That's too much like real life to be recreational for anyone with a job. Sometimes you just wanna shoot stuff or run through a maze gobbling up dots...
Because, lets face it - what Gavin is saying here is that proprietary software vendors find it hard to develop for linux. *shrugs*
No, I don't think that's what he's saying at all. But without question, development for Linux and other Open Source operating systems such as the BSDs *can be* much more difficult, simply because the environments themselves are not particularly well-defined, and there's very little in the way of services, libraries, daemons, etc. that can be reliably counted on to be present and configured in a predictable way.
Development per se may not be that much harder, but delivering a product that will work and be supportable in the customer's environment is very much harder.
This problem is not helped by the fact that people who try to address this problem are routinely savaged by the open source (especially Linux) community - Corel, Linspire, and lately, even the beleaguered Red Hat could be the poster children of this disdain. Linspire's Click-and Run repository is arguably the best *reliable* way to get and upgrade apps on Linux from the customer's point of view, but the Linux community refuses to embrace it, even though it represents a level of testing and quality that the community desperately needs. (
And no, apt-get/update/yast/whatever doesn't count - it's *way* too easy for an open source update tool to completely hose your system, leving it in a state that is extremely difficult for an expert to fix and impossible for the average user. (Hardly surprising, since it can't make any resaonable assumptions about the state and layout of the OS it's updating, either, so this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.) Personally, when tools like this hose the OS, which happens all to frequently, it's almost always easier to reinstall than try to really fix it. True, I have to do that with Windows too on a roughly biennial basis, but at least I can get really good software there, and security updates can be had without me having to hunt them down daily and *understand* them before installing them. Unlike the "average user", I *can* understand all that stuff, but why the heck would should I *have* to?)
The BSDs are slightly superior to most Linux distros in theis regard, since prerelease testing is much more a part of the BSD DNA, and there aren't a zillion distros to start with. This is definitely an area where the diversity of the Linux ecosystem is a very, very bad thing.
Right now, the only really viable alternative to Windows Mobile is Palm OS. (Symbian is for all practical purposes dead. PalmOS may be dead in the not-too-distant future, but it has a very large installed base that is dying for a usable browser.)
All those Treo users are deperately in need of a *real* web browser, something that's a native Plam app and doesn't have the very serious drawbacks of the Java-based Opera Mini.
If Opera wants to make a difference, here's wher it can get the best bang for its buck. A bit of clever coding between the Palm version and the desktop version could allow it to become a viable sync alternative to Outlook, which we're all about to have to use simply becasud it's the only thing most syncable programs can deal with.
There's a huge opportunity for extremely simple and clean web APIs here - not bloated Web Services XML crap, but lean and simple stuff - think SMTP for sync operations for everything from bookmarks and preferences to contacts and events.
Although this sounds like a stretch, browsers will eventually have to understand entities like these anyway - why not now, and on our own terms?
Of course, this is a red herring, because ice isn't held down by rocks - instead, it floats freely. Because the system is in static equilibrium to start with (and the ice floats submerged to the level equivalent to its weight in water), it's also in equilibrium after melting, with a net change of exactly zero in the water level. (The volume goes down, but the "excess" volume was above the surface to start with, and is now level with the surface, thus no change.)
Anyway, this reminds me of a question on a quiz from college:
You and a big rock are floating in a rowboat in the middle of a lake. You throw the rock overboard. What happens to the level of the lake?
The correct answer is that it goes down, which I jokingly extrapolated in my answer to state that if you threw enough rocks out, you could drain the lake. My prof got a kick out of that one...:-)
No one knows why - forming mineral hydrates, some other form of leaking into the earth itself, or global cooling - it's all speculation right now, just like global warming. The truth: The world is a complex place and we're not even close to understanding it.
BTW: Remember when "all the world's climate experts" warned of global cooling and an impending ice age only around 30 years ago? (Which would, of course, require many of the same environmental policy changes wanted by the global warming crowd now.) Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
There are ogg players out there, but I've never seen one here in Venezuela, so I keep everything in MP3 so I don't have to go converting whenever I want it on a different format.
Don't feel bad - AFAIK, I've never seen one here in the US, either, although I suppose I could find one if I cared. But then again, why would I want to re-rip everything in a format I can't use, or worse-yet, transcode it, making the result sound like complete crap?
Unless you're willing to put up with WMA or AAC DRM, MP3 is really the only option. Ogg is only for radicals willing to isolate themselves from the modern world. (Hint to these folks: Putting your head in the sand doesn't really make the world go away...)
I've heard a few people complain about the Treo650's reliability, but very few, and almost all on Cingular.
My Sprint Treo 650 has a few minor warts, but it's still a very solid device, although it's not as solid, or as well-integrated from a phone perspective as the Kyocera 6035 Palm phone I had before. No Palm phone I've seen is as solid and reliable as a Palm PDA-only device yet. (Although any Palm device is orders of magnitude more stable and rugged than any Windows Mobile device I've seen.)
My biggest gripe is the execrable Blazer browser. The Sprint data network actually doesn't suck (even without EVDO) but you'd never know that from using Blazer. (To get an idea of the underlying network's true speed, notice the performance you get when bypassing Blazer to make a similarly large data connection - upgrading Pocket Tunes is a great example - it flat flies.)
Really, in today's world, the browser could easily be the most important app on the device, and Blazer is just awful - it's so bad, in so many important ways, that it's hard to find words to express how stupid, dumb and broken it is. At his point, there is no really good alternative, either - no proxied browser makes any sense in today's web apps/Ajax world, and Opera Mini is enormous (counting Java, which you must) and doesn't work with anything else on the device, making it an island. Palm needs to get us a real, fast browser - I'd give up all other new features for that. (Although replacing the incredibly lame RealPlayer with PocketTunes is a great move, since it's the only really functional audio player option available for Palm devices. The Blazer guys could learn a LOT from the programmers at Normsoft!)
Still the Treo 650 is a very solid device, with one weird exception: pressing the green phone key to wake it up after WorldClock has sounded an alarm causes a spontaneous reboot. Annoying, but not critical.
Firefox is not lighter or faster than IE. This is a confusion created by the fact that is it is lighter than the Mozilla suite.
Like hell it is. Firefox weighs in at very nearly the same as the entire Seamonkey (ex-Mozilla) suite. Try it yourself - fire up Firefox and Thunderbird, and check the resource utilization relative to Seamonkey with both browser and mail windows open - the FF/TB combo is nearly twice the size. Seamonkey delivers *much* more bang for the buck than Firefox/Tbird/Nvu/etc., which is why it's the high-performance choice where size and speed matter - Puppy Linux being just one of a number of good examples.
I would bet my car stereo is better than 99.99% of those on the road:)
But now you've spent all your money on the sound system - bad idea. Cars are infamously bad places to build a good audio experience. Or as Scott Mc Nealy famously said (about Windows, but it applies here), "You can put whipped cream and a cherry on a cow patty, but that doesn't mean I'm going to want to eat it!"
Better idea: Buy the best used Italian GT car you can afford (and you can probably afford more than you expect, if you shop around) - the engine noise is music in its own right, and anyway, it's so loud you can get by with the crappiest kind of stereo, since you'll never hear it clearly with the engine running anyway. Enjoy the heck out of driving the car, and then listen to a real stereo when you get home. As a bonus, you can learn the joys of mech hacking, which can be a very rewarding experience in its own right.
If you're a real audiophile, you realize that *no* amount of money can accurately reproduce the sound of sitting a few feet away from musicians at a live performance, anyway. (A really good tube set with top-notch vinyl input is as good as it gets, but is really expensive and finicky, and still can't reproduce the live sound of difficult instruments such as a Church Organ in a stone cathedral.) Just lighten up and deal with crappy quality for "environmental" music, but satisfy your need for quality by listening to as much real live music as you can. Life is short, and you can add good friends, food, and drink to the live music - after you've driven there in your GT car with its inaudible crappy stereo.
Sometimes, it pleasing to argue *for* crappiness for a change...
Slashdot Mirror
This is not discrimination in any sort of unacceptable way. It is simply an organization taking a very legitimate stand on important issues. All organizations, in particular, *must* discriminate in determining their membership if the organization is to actually be able to maintain a substantive position on any issues.
I'm not eligible to be a Rabbi, because I'm not Jewish. I'm not eligible to be an Al Queda terrorist, because I'm not a bloodthirsty Wahabbist Mohammedan. I'm not allowed to hang around in the Women's restroom, because I'm a man.
In each of these cases I'm being "discriminated against", but in no case is the discrimination itself inappropriate or something that should be disallowed. (Al Queda's actions are, of course, reprehensible, but they have the same rights as any other group of people to choose those they wish to associate with and on what self-igniting terms.)
Stop this madness and see the light of the network engineers. Behold! The wonder of the Mbps. 1Mbps is a wonderful, intuitive 1,000,000 full bits per second. This is stuff I can explain my mother - and she'll understand.
Amen. You almost touched on the key difference - The binary crap is by computer scientists (many of whom make their living as high priests by spreading obfuscation), while networks (which have to work in actual practice, regardless of theory) were built by engineers.
My money is on the engineers every time...
"Gibi" is a prefix invented by Wikipedia.
/. archives (around 2000/2001, IIRC), and you'll find that this was led by a real standards organization to avoid confusing the correct base-10 prefixes with their binary-overloaded counterparts. (I think it was IEEE, since this sounds too useful to have been a Euro-weenie ISO endeavour...)
I call bullshit! Check the
Creative, Seagate, and the others were correct - mega means 10^6, and giga means 10^9. Tort lawyers and hopeless computer dweebs (who don't even know you start counting at *one* for crying out loud!) don't get to redefine numbers just because they say so. This case was wrongly decided, it's too bad they decided it was easier to capitulate with coupons than actually fight this crap...
AMD is a good company, with (some) great products, but they've totally missed the boat in what may well be the most important chip market of the future: "mobile" CPUs. AMD has no decent mobile products, and nothing compelling in the pipeline over the next few years.
Don't underestimate the importance of "mobile" CPUs - they're going to be the heart of almost all post-PC internet access devices, and Internet-enabled smart phones, PDAs, and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices, as Intel calls them) are only the beginning. Anywhere a high-function, low-power, Internet interface is required, these things are going to show up. Personally, I expect devices based on this sort of chip to outnumber PCs by 10 or 20-to-one over the next several years. As pervasive internet connectivity finally arrives, these will be the chips that make such products real at the prices (and battery life) we demand.
Intel has a solid strategy here with their new x86-based MID chips, but AMD's tack is to keep whacking the old ex-NationalSemi Geode nag until it falls over dead. Geode's not a bad tech/architecture, but there's no way it can keep up with the likes of Intel's Silverton, or especially, the generations that will follow.
From a strategic point of view, this is AMD's greatest weakness, and it's not one they can patch up easily or quickly. Intel stands to be the big winner, since moving x86 downwards into this market means development gets really easy, even if not optimal. There's still a window for non-x86 architectures such as ARM (the iPhone's engine) in such devices, but AMD simply has no answer for what is probably the largest and fastest growing CPU market of the next few years.
Without a major correction ASAP, AMD may find it hard to maintain second place...
This is a good question. There is quite a bit of real science to suggest that most of what passes for evolutionary doctrine and dogma is indeed false, or at the very least, extremely suspect. A great place to begin investigating this is the excellent scienceagainstevolution.org website, which was founded by a well-respected engineer, a Fellow at the US Naval Weapons lab responsible for much of the science and engineering behind US missile guidance systems.
Best starting URL: http://scienceagainstevolution.org/newsletters.htm
I have yet to find any open-minded evolutionist that doesn't have significant doubts about the scientific validity of evolution after a deep reading of that site. The evidence is clear: science does NOT support evolution.
The purpose of GIMPshop was to "replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop". Well, Adobe just told you themselves that the Photoshop UI sucks. So, clearly, redesigning Gimp to be more Photoshop-like would not have been a good way of improving it.
Photoshop's interface is pretty bad, no question. GIMP's interface is easily one of the worst ever devised. As bad as PhotoShop's interface is, it's light-years beyond the GIMP's.
I long for the day when we get good ones - I'm fairly impressed by Inkscape's Corel/Xara influenced UI. It would really be great to see a version of the GIMP with a UI designed to mesh with Inkscape's, which could allow the two programs to be used nearly transparently together.
First off, I'm not a typical game console guy - the Wii is the first game console I've ever liked enough to buy (excluding the already antique Atari 2600 my son bought about two years ago, which is also much more fun than most modern video games...)
;-)
Like a lot of Wii customers, one big reason I never bought any other console was that the games hold little to no appeal.
The Wii is fundamentally different, by design. No one thinks Wii Sports has great graphics, but *lots* of people will line up to play it. Case in point: There was an active, mixed crowd surrounding the bigscreen Wii at the big Captain Morgan's "Crewsade" parties here in Austin just a couple of weeks ago. No other console (or game) could hope to draw that kind of crowd. Cheesy graphics can be *fun*.
Active games that really use the Wii's unique capabilities will be huge hits. Lame ports of games aimed a the "traditional gamer" crowd will fail miserably. Almost all of the Wii's "grow the market" buyers, like myself, didn't buy previous consoles for one over-riding reason: we don't like playing those games. Games that require you to "earn" your way through stupidly jumping through hoops a zillion times until you get it right will fail in the Wii marketplace, but *fun* games, like the best of the Wii games, will do *very* well, especially because the Wii is really (IMO) the first effective "social" gaming platform for people with actual social skills.
In short, the problem is gamers, and the fact that most game programmers are gamers, so they crank out the kind of gamer-think crap that Wii buyers never wanted, and won't ever buy.
The Wii will probably eventually be a stunninng success, but that means game developers (or other programmers that "get" the Wii) are going to have to start writing Wii-only (or at least Wii-centric) games that *really* leverage the console's unique capabilities. Wii games with the graphics of Blazing Angels (which for all its warts, at least shows the Wii can do decent graphics) and the gameplay/fun quotient of Wii Sports, especially for multiple players, are certain to be hits. Sadly, we're still waiting for those... (BTW: avoiding the whole dark goth theme would be a good idea, since this is one thing that made previous games and consoles unappealing...)
Oh, and how about using Mii definitions to drive higher-res Mii renderings for more serious-looking games? Why has no one done this? If I were in a gaming company, that's just one of many innovative changes I'd make to leverage the Wii platform. Tehre's gobs of potential there, just waiting to be unleashed...
I've commented elsewhere in this topic on CorelDraw, but it really is a real alternative to Adobe's CS. I agree that it's one of the very best programs available for Windows (and one of the best commercial software values anywhere). As I noted in my other post, it's also one of two programs (the other is Visio, which I still love, but use less since CorelDraw 12) that has kept me preferring Windows as my primary desktop for over a decade.
Consider the CorelDraw suite as an excellent alternative to Adobe's CreativeSuite - in fact, it covers almost all of the same ground, and is widely used by a significant number of professionals. (It's actually the preferred standard in signmaking and embroidery.)
While each individual piece may lack some of the more esoteric functionality of the CS equivalent, the CorelDraw Suite is light-years ahead of the open source and freeware alternatives, and fully usable by both professionals and amateurs. This last is an important point, because, IMO, one of the biggest problems with almost all Adobe software is that it insists on working differently than everything else out there, so Adobe's packages have a substantial learning curve.
CorelDraw is the only suite I know of that's truly competitive - it can do page layout and design, vector and bitmap graphics editing and manipulation, import and export to all major file formats, prepress and color separations, and much more. Add the fact that this $400 product comes with thousands of dollars worth of high quality fonts, clip art, and interactive tutorials, and the CorelDraw Suite is a real bargain. There are competitors in each niche: drawing/illustration tools, page layout/desktop publishing, bitmap editing, animation creation, prepress/separations, etc, but I don't know of any other package that can really compete with Adobe's CS across the entire range. I'm continually amazed at CorelDraw's lesser-know features. I recently needed to create barcode serial number labels for a new series of products and was pleasantly surprised to find CorelDraw's barcode wizard was fully up to the task. Sure, this sort of thing can be done manually, but Corel made a tedious and error-prone operation trivially easy.
FWIW, I have no relationship with Corel other than as a very satisfied CorelDraw customer. I still use CorelDraw 12, but my recent purchase of a new laptop with Vista may force me to upgrade to CorelDraw Graphics Suite X3. ($180 - not cheap, but chump change by Adobe standards.)
I just wish they'd resurrect the Mac port of the CorelDraw suite, so I could lose the MS desktop OS. To be honest, CorelDraw and Visio that are the biggest things keeping me in the Windows world - with Office 2007's grotesque new UI, I've switched to OpenOffice for almost all the lightweight stuff, and Corel does the heavy lifting.
BTW - most open source offerings that people wil suggest here are not even close to being in the same league with Adobe and Corel. IMO, GIMP is a sad, sick joke, and Inkscape a nice prototype, but lacks the capabilities of a professional program. The one exception is Scribus, which shows great promise, and could eventually be one of the first open source applications that can actually seriously offer a completely competitive alternative to commercial software in this space.
The "Plug and Play doesn't work" card is a farce. The vast majority of hardware works right out of the box. Most of the time I find it easier to get hardware working with Linux than with Windows. With Windows I always spend a lot of extra time loading drivers that came on separate media (If I can find them). More and more manufacturers are including Linux drivers and as the popularity of Linux grows it just gets better.
I call B.S.... It's not just Plug-and-Play that doesn't work in Linux- in reality, many users can reasonably expect that most of their hardware, especially peripherals, won't work correctly. Anyone that claims that more PC hardware works in Linux is just playing rabid fanboy and is deliberately denying reality.
I've been hoping for well over a decade that some Linux distro would get this sorted out, but it hasn't happened yet. The major distros are getting fatter and fatter, but still have the same problems and sometimes now run even slower than Windows on the same hardware. (Puppy Linux is a notable exception here, and it may well be the most usable desktop Linux available. Example from two installs earlier this week: Puppy install time: ~ 5 mins, very usable configuration, nearly everything "just works". Ubuntu install time: nearly TWO HOURS, shinier and much browner, but a whole bunch of stuff still doesn't work. Ubuntu's boot time is dramatically longer, too. Puppy wins by a mile - the new 2.15CE version coming out soon is even cooler, allowing customization by adding app suites for high-end web, graphics, dev, office apps, etc.)
That said, I'm reinstalling XP, due largely to the hardware support problems inherent in all Linuxes. If I were to switch to Linux on the desktop today, the following things would not work at all, or at the least, take a significant hit in functionality:
1) My laptop - There is NO Linux distro that I've seen that really handles power management and suspend/resume to both RAM and disk. And forget hot (or warm) docking - changing the hardware config that drastically requires rebooting in Linux. This is especially true if you have a multi-docking laptop like my ThinkPad, which has a docking interface for the base laptop with a media slice, and another docking interface from the media slice to the actual dock, which contains additional I/O hardware, including another Ethernet interface. Depending on my needs and how much weight I want to carry, I can split (undock) the system at either interface. Although pushing the limits, this config fully meets the Intel/MS power and docking management specs, and I'm pretty sure there's not a Linux distro on the planet that can support it. I did this stuff for Dell's portable brands, so I know what I'm talking about here - Linux still hasn't caught up the power management features of Microsoft's ACPI implementations of 1998. The bazaar has utterly and completely failed here.
2) My Color Laser Printer - Sure, I can move to Linux, if I'm willing to give up printing. This is a killer - quality printing seems to be effectively impossible with Linux. Getting any printing working at all in Linux is a major PITA, but over half the time, it's flat impossible, as in the case of my excellent OKI color page printer, which has NO Linux support at all. (It appears they got tired of dealing with a bunch of arrogant jerks and decided it was easier to just ignore Linux.) Even though it's a network printer, all printing from Linux must be done by first copying the files to an XP or OSX box and printing from there. Kinda kills the joy. (Yep, I could automate this, but I've got better things to do...)
3) My Treo - AFAIK, a full decade after Palm OS and its hotsync mechanism became mainstream, there is still no fully capable Linux equivalent of Palm Desktop. (Yes, I know there are bits and pieces that partly work (one app for calendar, another for contacts, a third for tasks, etc.)but that's not nearly enough, and it creates huge integration and sync problems.) And since Palm Desktop wasn't
This is the H1, remember, the bad-boy original designed for the military. While I'm no greenie, it's only the H1's military durability that makes it clean the Prius's clock in this analysis. 3X doesn't sound far off the mark to me.
You could make a good argument that both vehicles could last far longer than the mileages assumed, but the numbers chosen probably aren't too far off the mark as averages.
I imagine the market for used Priuses will be very low once people have to start replacing not only batteries, but also the other exotic (and expensive!!) parts of the car, especially its control electronics. This is just basic economics - repair costs dominate the value calculations for older cars - which is why you can buy a nice, used Ferrari for a surprisingly low amount - and also why the lower reliability and even higher repair costs drive used Aston ($12K for a new head?), Lotus, and Maserati (Biturbo, anyone?)prices right into the dirt...
I just wish someone would build a nice roomy 500-600 HP hybrid sedan. Hybrid technology has far more potential as "electric supercharging" to eliminate the need for huge motors than it does as a "green" technology to make tiny and expensive little penalty boxes that no one in their right mind wants to drive.
A series hybrid with a small, efficient gas turbine would make a LOT more sense than Toyota's brain-dead and outrageously expensive Prius design. (
BTW - these things cost FAR more to make than Toyota sells them for, a fact that has the US trade representative investigating invoking the "Super 301" anti-dumping laws. GM is on record about this subsidy saying that the cheapest way to get batteries for producing an electric car would be to buy a shipload of Toyota Hybrids, pull the batteries out, and throw the cars away. How many people would even consider a hybrid if the taxpayer-funded subsidy went away and they had to compete on a level economic playing field?
I think your system is easy to defeat or manipulate.
If I am IBM, I just create lots of wholly owned companies that submit patents up to the 50 patent limit each, so no increase in fees.
I submit lots of bogus patents in areas where my competitors have a strong lead shortening the time they have the advantage.
Actually, it's fairly resistant to such manipulation: Remember that the term of patents is affected only by the number of patents that actually *issue* in that category (and there are *lots* of categories!) - the number of patents *applied for* doesn't affect anything at all. All of the same criteria as today (novelty, usefulness, non-obviousness) would be used to determine validity prior to issue. Abusers would have to actually write patents good enough to actually issue or their actions would have no effect. (And if they do write patents applications that good, they *should* be issued!) The cost and effort of attempting to "game" the system speculatively this way, though, is likely prohibitive even for the largest companies, since no one knows where the next breakthroughs will be. Even "imperfect protection" against abuse is better than the "effectively no protection" we have today...
For all practical purposes, the proposed system is dramatically harder to game than the system we have today, with the benefit that attempts to do so would be far more obvious to everyone. Accelerating fees address the goal of levelling the playing field between small and large companies - this is a noble, but very secondary goal. Tying terms to patent issues, on the other hand, accomplishes the primary goal - eliminating the "jackpot" nature of the present system and its mismatch with market timescales, especially in fast-moving fields where the 20-year term is effectively a permanent monopoly, rather than the temporary one that the Constitution intended.
(I would also be in favor of a provision that would require the invention to be offered for public sale/use within say, the lesser of half of the patent's term or five years, else that patent would expire immediately. This would tend to keep people from sitting on or "locking up" patents defensively, with no intention of using them. After all, the whole purpose of patents (in the US) is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" (Article 1, Section 8, US Constitution), and camping out on a defensive patent for years cannot reasonably be interpreted as working to the end of promoting progress!)
As far as scaling fees upward with the number of applications, yes, this could be avoided through paper companies, etc. as you suggest, but the limit could easily apply to the highest-level majority ownership entity, for instance, eliminating that dodge. In any case, this simply serves as a disincentive for really large companies to file tons of junk patents as a smoke screen, as they do today. Accelerating fees for high-volume filers addresses the very real secondary, problem: the sheer volume of patent apps clogging the system. Part of the reason the system is so broken is that many patents no longer issue in time to even be relevant, so inventions in fast-moving fields are effectively denied real patent protection anyway, leaving them only with protection by "Pat. Pending" rather than actual issued patents. We desperately *need* a disincentive for junk patents, even if it is somewhat imperfect, but we also must preserve the fundamental protection of the patent system, as is explicitly called for in the Constitution. (At the relative pittance filing fees cost big companies (only twice the necessarily-reasonable "small entity" fees), I'm surprised we don't see far more companies engaging in this sort of abuse already. I suspect we *will* see much more such abuse soon, if we don't soon take some steps to provide self-regulating market-like approaches to patent regulation.)
Taken together, these two simple reforms produce a very powerful disincentive to the abuse we see today, while still preserving the great and necessary parts - the best parts - of a patent system that has worked so well for so long.
The following addresses the US patent system, which for all its myriad faults, is in many ways the best in the world (at least as far as creating incentives for progress.) I don't address foreign patent systems here because, 1) I don't know them well, and 2) the ones that I do know a bit about all too often serve only the interests of large corporations with deep pockets.
How to Fix Patents Easily ("Dub Dublin's Proposal for Patent Reform"):
Part One: Instead of the current fixed length term of patents (20 years, in the US), make the term of patents adjustable on a sliding scale that is inversely proportional to the number of patents *issued* in that category in the trailing twelve months.
Part Two: Keep the reasonable cost of patent filings, but after a relatively low threshold of filings (say, 50 or so), make subsequent filing fees rapidly accelerate with the number of patent applications filed (also figured over the trailing twelve months). This has many benefits:
The open source version as a "trial" product. For Sugar CRM this is basically the strategy. They give away an open source version that has limited functionality, most customers upgrade to a version that is not available 100% as an open source product. They charge customers for the full functionality product.
Someone explain to me what this means!!I thought Open Source means giving away (no choice here) the source code of whole functionality.
Obviously, GPL restrictions don't apply to the *originator* of a program. Under the GPL, that person/company has an advantage no one else can have - they *can* legally distribute the program with proprietary, closed-source bits (after all, it's theirs, and they set the license - for everyone else, it's the GPL, for them, it's whatever they want!)
[soapbox]As an aside, I think this is the real motivation behind some of the controversial GPL3 provisions - you have to remember that despite his claims, Stallman's actions *always* take a very anti-commerce, communist tone. Since the FSF's apparent *real* primary goal is to make commerce in software impossible/illegal, this is hardly surprising.[/soapbox]
Recognizing and acknowledging the prima facie evidence for intelligent design requires considerably less faith than believing that random chance produced a myriad of perfectly functioning and largely self-repairing creatures despite scientifically determined odds of zero. (The chance of a single living cell arising spontaneously as determined by serious scientists (opposed to the idea of God, by the way) is 1 in 10e40000 - since there are only around 10e80 atoms in the entire universe, this is as certain a zero as you'll ever find!) That doesn't even begin to touch the really hard problems, like the evolution of sex (requires two extremely "mutated" organisms to arise at the same time and place, with complementary changes in each), moral values, self-awareness, etc.
Ultimately, evolution is not science, but a worldview. Worldviews are always present, and always (though often invalidly) held on faith, since they must by definition appeal at some point to a self-authenticating authority. The worldview of those that believe in ID simply acknowledge that they don't know everything, and that the universe appears to show substantial evidence of direct teleological design and action. Those that insist that evolution must be true are laughing in the face of the evidence of science itself, due to their personal desire to eliminate any possiblity of a God. Read what a few very prominent scientists have said on this topic and see for yourself how they refuse to acknowledge or accept what thier own objective scientific inquiry has clearly shown them:
I really can't say enough good things about it - it's just a really, really solid piece of engineering and manufacturing. (I have no relationship with Oki other than as a *very* happy customer.) This is one case where a company has developed a superior technology, and then done everything they needed to to bring all the benefits of that technology to market.
I looked carefully at everything in my price range before selecting the Oki, and I'm convinced I'd have been pretty disappointed with any of the other choices. HP (#3 choice), Samsung (#2 choice), Konica/Minolta, Brother, and Xerox(Tektronix Phaser) all fell short.
The Okis have several big advantages over regular laser printers that aren't immediately obvious - here's a short list:
My Oki C5150n printer is one of the best products I've ever owned - it's *only* flaw is in not correctly using the manual bypass feeder tray without having to tell the driver you want to do that. (The manual says if there's paper there, it should use that by default, but it doesn't.) There are ne
Super Mario Bros is still lots of fun, I don't care what you say.
A LOT of the older stuff is more fun to play than today's ridiculously expensive and beautifully shaded 3D graphics-engined masterpieces.
My son asked for an Atari Flashback 2 for Christmas. Let me tell you something: this thing is great - it's really just a new Atari 2600 with a few dozen games integrated so you don't need the cartridges. Computer game graphics don't get much worse than this - when the 2600 was new, it was considered beneath those of us enlightened enough to have a Commodore 64 and its vastly superior sound and graphics. But here's the point: IT DOESN'T MATTER - those old games are more fun to play than most any of the new fancy stuff, and the whole family has had a blast with the thing.
New games are overly expensive, complex, and require way too much "earn your way to the next level" crap. That's too much like real life to be recreational for anyone with a job. Sometimes you just wanna shoot stuff or run through a maze gobbling up dots...
Because, lets face it - what Gavin is saying here is that proprietary software vendors find it hard to develop for linux. *shrugs*
No, I don't think that's what he's saying at all. But without question, development for Linux and other Open Source operating systems such as the BSDs *can be* much more difficult, simply because the environments themselves are not particularly well-defined, and there's very little in the way of services, libraries, daemons, etc. that can be reliably counted on to be present and configured in a predictable way.
Development per se may not be that much harder, but delivering a product that will work and be supportable in the customer's environment is very much harder.
This problem is not helped by the fact that people who try to address this problem are routinely savaged by the open source (especially Linux) community - Corel, Linspire, and lately, even the beleaguered Red Hat could be the poster children of this disdain. Linspire's Click-and Run repository is arguably the best *reliable* way to get and upgrade apps on Linux from the customer's point of view, but the Linux community refuses to embrace it, even though it represents a level of testing and quality that the community desperately needs. (
And no, apt-get/update/yast/whatever doesn't count - it's *way* too easy for an open source update tool to completely hose your system, leving it in a state that is extremely difficult for an expert to fix and impossible for the average user. (Hardly surprising, since it can't make any resaonable assumptions about the state and layout of the OS it's updating, either, so this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.) Personally, when tools like this hose the OS, which happens all to frequently, it's almost always easier to reinstall than try to really fix it. True, I have to do that with Windows too on a roughly biennial basis, but at least I can get really good software there, and security updates can be had without me having to hunt them down daily and *understand* them before installing them. Unlike the "average user", I *can* understand all that stuff, but why the heck would should I *have* to?)
The BSDs are slightly superior to most Linux distros in theis regard, since prerelease testing is much more a part of the BSD DNA, and there aren't a zillion distros to start with. This is definitely an area where the diversity of the Linux ecosystem is a very, very bad thing.
Right now, the only really viable alternative to Windows Mobile is Palm OS. (Symbian is for all practical purposes dead. PalmOS may be dead in the not-too-distant future, but it has a very large installed base that is dying for a usable browser.)
All those Treo users are deperately in need of a *real* web browser, something that's a native Plam app and doesn't have the very serious drawbacks of the Java-based Opera Mini.
If Opera wants to make a difference, here's wher it can get the best bang for its buck. A bit of clever coding between the Palm version and the desktop version could allow it to become a viable sync alternative to Outlook, which we're all about to have to use simply becasud it's the only thing most syncable programs can deal with.
There's a huge opportunity for extremely simple and clean web APIs here - not bloated Web Services XML crap, but lean and simple stuff - think SMTP for sync operations for everything from bookmarks and preferences to contacts and events.
Although this sounds like a stretch, browsers will eventually have to understand entities like these anyway - why not now, and on our own terms?
Of course, this is a red herring, because ice isn't held down by rocks - instead, it floats freely. Because the system is in static equilibrium to start with (and the ice floats submerged to the level equivalent to its weight in water), it's also in equilibrium after melting, with a net change of exactly zero in the water level. (The volume goes down, but the "excess" volume was above the surface to start with, and is now level with the surface, thus no change.)
:-)
Anyway, this reminds me of a question on a quiz from college:
You and a big rock are floating in a rowboat in the middle of a lake. You throw the rock overboard. What happens to the level of the lake?
The correct answer is that it goes down, which I jokingly extrapolated in my answer to state that if you threw enough rocks out, you could drain the lake. My prof got a kick out of that one...
This shouldn't really be a surprise - after all, it's been known for several years that the water level of the oceans is going down, due to the "leaky seas" phenomenon. See New Scientist article from a few years ago at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16322030.200 .html (used to be free, but no longer), or a CNN summary at the time: http://www.cnn.com/NATURE/9909/17/leaky.seas.enn/i ndex.html
No one knows why - forming mineral hydrates, some other form of leaking into the earth itself, or global cooling - it's all speculation right now, just like global warming. The truth: The world is a complex place and we're not even close to understanding it.
BTW: Remember when "all the world's climate experts" warned of global cooling and an impending ice age only around 30 years ago? (Which would, of course, require many of the same environmental policy changes wanted by the global warming crowd now.) Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
There are ogg players out there, but I've never seen one here in Venezuela, so I keep everything in MP3 so I don't have to go converting whenever I want it on a different format.
Don't feel bad - AFAIK, I've never seen one here in the US, either, although I suppose I could find one if I cared. But then again, why would I want to re-rip everything in a format I can't use, or worse-yet, transcode it, making the result sound like complete crap?
Unless you're willing to put up with WMA or AAC DRM, MP3 is really the only option. Ogg is only for radicals willing to isolate themselves from the modern world. (Hint to these folks: Putting your head in the sand doesn't really make the world go away...)
I've heard a few people complain about the Treo650's reliability, but very few, and almost all on Cingular.
My Sprint Treo 650 has a few minor warts, but it's still a very solid device, although it's not as solid, or as well-integrated from a phone perspective as the Kyocera 6035 Palm phone I had before. No Palm phone I've seen is as solid and reliable as a Palm PDA-only device yet. (Although any Palm device is orders of magnitude more stable and rugged than any Windows Mobile device I've seen.)
My biggest gripe is the execrable Blazer browser. The Sprint data network actually doesn't suck (even without EVDO) but you'd never know that from using Blazer. (To get an idea of the underlying network's true speed, notice the performance you get when bypassing Blazer to make a similarly large data connection - upgrading Pocket Tunes is a great example - it flat flies.)
Really, in today's world, the browser could easily be the most important app on the device, and Blazer is just awful - it's so bad, in so many important ways, that it's hard to find words to express how stupid, dumb and broken it is. At his point, there is no really good alternative, either - no proxied browser makes any sense in today's web apps/Ajax world, and Opera Mini is enormous (counting Java, which you must) and doesn't work with anything else on the device, making it an island. Palm needs to get us a real, fast browser - I'd give up all other new features for that. (Although replacing the incredibly lame RealPlayer with PocketTunes is a great move, since it's the only really functional audio player option available for Palm devices. The Blazer guys could learn a LOT from the programmers at Normsoft!)
Still the Treo 650 is a very solid device, with one weird exception: pressing the green phone key to wake it up after WorldClock has sounded an alarm causes a spontaneous reboot. Annoying, but not critical.
Firefox is not lighter or faster than IE. This is a confusion created by the fact that is it is lighter than the Mozilla suite.
Like hell it is. Firefox weighs in at very nearly the same as the entire Seamonkey (ex-Mozilla) suite. Try it yourself - fire up Firefox and Thunderbird, and check the resource utilization relative to Seamonkey with both browser and mail windows open - the FF/TB combo is nearly twice the size. Seamonkey delivers *much* more bang for the buck than Firefox/Tbird/Nvu/etc., which is why it's the high-performance choice where size and speed matter - Puppy Linux being just one of a number of good examples.
I would bet my car stereo is better than 99.99% of those on the road :)
But now you've spent all your money on the sound system - bad idea. Cars are infamously bad places to build a good audio experience. Or as Scott Mc Nealy famously said (about Windows, but it applies here), "You can put whipped cream and a cherry on a cow patty, but that doesn't mean I'm going to want to eat it!"
Better idea: Buy the best used Italian GT car you can afford (and you can probably afford more than you expect, if you shop around) - the engine noise is music in its own right, and anyway, it's so loud you can get by with the crappiest kind of stereo, since you'll never hear it clearly with the engine running anyway. Enjoy the heck out of driving the car, and then listen to a real stereo when you get home. As a bonus, you can learn the joys of mech hacking, which can be a very rewarding experience in its own right.
If you're a real audiophile, you realize that *no* amount of money can accurately reproduce the sound of sitting a few feet away from musicians at a live performance, anyway. (A really good tube set with top-notch vinyl input is as good as it gets, but is really expensive and finicky, and still can't reproduce the live sound of difficult instruments such as a Church Organ in a stone cathedral.) Just lighten up and deal with crappy quality for "environmental" music, but satisfy your need for quality by listening to as much real live music as you can. Life is short, and you can add good friends, food, and drink to the live music - after you've driven there in your GT car with its inaudible crappy stereo.
Sometimes, it pleasing to argue *for* crappiness for a change...