you laugh at them now, but they'll be the only ones protecting their brains when the magnetic poles stop protecting us from deadly radiation. Maybe, but isn't there a potential problem of the atmosphere being stripped away if the magnetic field disappears for too long? At least, isn't that the theory of what happened to Mars?
Anyway, I'm off to ebay to look for a 2nd hand space suit....
AC quoted the abstract: which modifies the data compression method of Lempel and Ziv
What do you think the W in LZW means? Welch modified an earlier Lempel and Ziv technique to produce LZW which, IIRC, formed the Unisys patent. The IBM patent appears to be similiar but I haven't examined it closely (life is too short).
FWIW, the abstract of a patent is NOT the important bit. It's the "claims" which you should check.
But the one feature I've never been able to find in an MP3 player that would be perfect for listening to audiobooks is variable speed playback.
Many audiobooks you could speed up the playback by 20% - 50% and still understand it and comprehend it. In many cases you retain more because your mind doesn't have time to drift off.
Apparently a better thing to do is to reduce the length of silences between words etc. I remember seeing research (perhaps 20years ago!) into a variable speed tape recorder/player which would reduce silences in speech but leave the words at the normal rate.
That way you don't have to listen to mickey mouse or the chipmunks yet still save time and maintain comprehension.
I suspect that it was a combination of several things: 1) Until recently, the US didn't publish the applications, only the granted patents, and the lifetime of the patent was from date or grant, not date of filing. There was the tendancy for the applicants not to bother rushing things through. (dare I say submarining).
Note that elsewhere, patent applications became public after, IIRC, 18 months and their lifetime started from the date of filing - there was no point in being tardy.
2) I suspect that, back then, searching existing patents was probably a lot more difficult. It wouldn't surprise me if it was all done manually which'd be utterly tedious. It's bad enough with online electronic systems.:-(
3)It is the responsibility of the patenter to inform the patent office if new information/documents comes to light and to update their patents accordingly (I've done this with one of mine) but I guess researchers can move on to other fields, change employers, or simply lose interest. (shrug)
Unless the IBM patent introduces something new (but I couldn't see anything like that in the first claim) and you were actually using it then, assuming the expired patent was filed before the IBM patent, the former should constitute (public) prior art. You should be able to use it without concerns.
Of course, the lawyer types might still want to argue the case since that's how that make their money
The reason? Apparently there was a risk that the CD would shatter in the drive, sending deadly shards of metal/plastic in all directions LOL! Wow you must have been using one of the new 1000x speed CD drives. I wish I could have one:-)
The memo went on to advise us that if we absolutely had to use a CD, we should turn our computers to face the wall (presumably because walls don't sue for workplace injury). So was there no danger of ricochets then?:-)
Actually, that reminds me of a very old April Fool's computer article describing a new high capacity, high speed hard disk. It had a big diameter and very high RPM. By the end of the article it pointed out that it achieved the phenomenal data transfer rate because the outer rim was exceeding the speed of light.:D
I used to work at a government defense contractor and this type of policy was standard there. No CD players, no radios, nothing with any type electronics could be brought in just in case they could somehow be used as a transmitter or to steal data or something. Oddly enough, floppies could be used. Go figure.
That sounds more like a "we don't want to be sued for electrocution from untested (and hence, probably uninsured) equipment" policy. You can get that at some companies and public services, such as hospitals.
Who the hell wants some crappy camcorder-made copy of a movie, anyways? I'll bet you only fans of the movie.
I seriously doubt that. A fan would want to see their movie in half-decent quality.
These crappy movies must be selling reasonably well to the general public because you see "dodgy" market stalls with very dubious DVDs for sale.... well, at least, I don't think many studios use dot matrix printers for the DVD covers:-)
If they didn't sell then the copyright infringers wouldn't bother pirating them. I suspect it's the average Joe Bloggs who sees these things for sale, sometimes only a few days after they are in the cinema, and buys one.
If they released DVDs and movies at the same time, there wouldn't be this problem.
Movies are not a charitable institution. Seeing them is not "a right" nor are they essential to your survival. If the maker wants to make more money by showing them in a cinema first, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"-Rex's breath - guess someone forgot to tell him to brush his teeth."
I used to catch beared dragons when I was a kid. They didn't have bad breath (that I can remember) but if they bit you the bacteria on their teeth could be nasty.
I'd rather not think of the method as brute force. I'll agree with that. Brute force searching would go though all the parameters a la..
for(parameter1 = min limit...)
for(parameter2 = min limit...)
for(parameter3... )
etc....
Evaluate(parameter1, param2,....)
Genetic algorithms try to limit the search space by starting with "probably good" sets of parameter values and trying to generate other "probably good but hopefully better" parameter combinations.
It won't necessarily find the absolute best set of parameters but it might find some reasonable ones.
While it was a little too PASCAL As a professional OCCAM programmer for 3 years I would have said they should have made it more like Pascal (or C)
Occam "convenienty" featured:
1) No decent data structures (i.e. records/structs). You had the choice of an array or an array.
2) Had no recursion. I guess this saved them having to do dynamic memory management and helped the "provability" of the language, but it was a pain to do my ray tracing code.
3) Only had pre-tested loops.
4) No pointers/dynamic memory (but there were ways of hacking around that).
Some features, OTOH, were nice, such as array slices and automatic array bounds checking, and the ease of doing multi-threading was wonderful.
Speeding is not necessarily dangerous. I'm something of a 'fast' driver and have a squeaky clean record after almost six years of driving......I do recognize that energy is a function of mass linearly and of velocity geometrically, but cars are going 'fast' anyway so the difference between 60 mph and 70 mph in an accident is going to be pretty minimal.
Tell that to the parents of a child hit by a car travelling at 40mph/65kph in a 30mph/50kph zone and took 70% more distance to stop. I'm sure they'll see your point of view.
The system with the best games will win. Possibly, but it's more likely to be down to marketing.
Actually, I'm surprised no one here has picked up on the fact that mobile phones and PDAs will soon have 3D graphics that will, perhaps, come close to DC-level performance.
Perhaps dedicated game systems will become a thing of the past?
Lets go for something a little less kiddie than Eddings. If a director could get the main character right, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Donaldson would be good.
Heaven forbid! Not that. I could not think of a more apathetic leading character. I seem to recall wanting to scream "Do something" while reading the series.
IMHO, the "Dragonbone Chair" trilogy by Tad Williams would be a much better candidate for adaptation.
Were it not for his followers that stole his invention and started mass production of books (very similar to those we now nowadays - set up in antiqua typeface) that cheap books started to exist and made wide dissemination of knowledge possible. If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible.
It's an interesting hypothetical situation but you've got the outcome wrong!
(For the moment, let us ignore the chicken and egg problem of actually making copies of such a patent.....)
Patents only last for, at most, 2 decades. Let's say Gutenberg did patent his press. Once the patent expired everybody would be legally entitled to make their own press.
In the mean time, because Gutenberg has had to put down a detailed description, with diagrams, of how the printing press works, far more people will have got the opportunity to see how to build their own. Moreover, others may then seen ways to make it better.
In other words, instead of it being a trade secret, and hence kept hidden away slowing down the spread of printing, a patent would have helped speed up its adoption.
Why haven't they got a "liar" moderation option ?
on
iPod Mini Autopsy
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I don't know about you, but I only take a couple minutes to recharge after a lapdance.
Well I had some moderation points I wanted to use on the parent post, but I just couldn't find a "liar" or at least "probably deluded" option:-)
if you think about it, all data is effectively delivered through Morse code. To paraphrase Monty Python "You'll have to explain the logic underlying that conclusion"!
AFAICS, Morse code is a ternary system, whereas most data, these days, tends to be sent in binary.
On the tailshaft in your transmission there is a gear. There is a meshing gear in the speedo sending unit. This gear is turned by the tailshaft on the transmission, obviously, and causes the cable to turn. The cable, inside your speedo gauge, is headed by another gear, which goes through a series of gears that results in placing the needle on the gauge (and advancing the odometer).
The "series of gears" might apply for the odometer, but I don't think they are necessary for the actual speedometer.
The last time I checked, the cable drives a small rotating magnet which is in close proximity to a metal disk that is attached to the needle's axle. The rotating magnet thus induces currents in the disk which in turn eventually results in a torque being applied to the axle. A spring resists the free rotation of the needle giving a reading which is proportional to the speed.
It's not real-time at all, and is usually 1-2 seconds off. So it's not "instant information" as you put it, it's actually old information by the time you see it.
There may be a lag of a second but that'll surely be just for filtering purposes so that the displayed reading is steady. In a sense, the same thing MUST happen with the analog speedo. There needs to be some damping in that too or else it'd oscillate up and down - in fact you can see it occur with old speedos which, presumably, are worn out.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that Sony were probably** doing the same when PS2 first came out.
**This is an educated guess based on the size of chips when first released and the equipment
you laugh at them now, but they'll be the only ones protecting their brains when the magnetic poles stop protecting us from deadly radiation.
Maybe, but isn't there a potential problem of the atmosphere being stripped away if the magnetic field disappears for too long? At least, isn't that the theory of what happened to Mars?
Anyway, I'm off to ebay to look for a 2nd hand space suit....
I blame it on too many people walking around wearing tin foil hats.
AC quoted the abstract: which modifies the data compression method of Lempel and Ziv
What do you think the W in LZW means? Welch modified an earlier Lempel and Ziv technique to produce LZW which, IIRC, formed the Unisys patent. The IBM patent appears to be similiar but I haven't examined it closely (life is too short).
FWIW, the abstract of a patent is NOT the important bit. It's the "claims" which you should check.
...and you were actually using it then...,
That, of course, should have read
"and you weren't actually using it"
But the one feature I've never been able to find in an MP3 player that would be perfect for listening to audiobooks is variable speed playback.
Many audiobooks you could speed up the playback by 20% - 50% and still understand it and comprehend it. In many cases you retain more because your mind doesn't have time to drift off.
Apparently a better thing to do is to reduce the length of silences between words etc. I remember seeing research (perhaps 20years ago!) into a variable speed tape recorder/player which would reduce silences in speech but leave the words at the normal rate.
That way you don't have to listen to mickey mouse or the chipmunks yet still save time and maintain comprehension.
I suspect that it was a combination of several things:
:-(
1) Until recently, the US didn't publish the applications, only the granted patents, and the lifetime of the patent was from date or grant, not date of filing. There was the tendancy for the applicants not to bother rushing things through. (dare I say submarining).
Note that elsewhere, patent applications became public after, IIRC, 18 months and their lifetime started from the date of filing - there was no point in being tardy.
2) I suspect that, back then, searching existing patents was probably a lot more difficult. It wouldn't surprise me if it was all done manually which'd be utterly tedious. It's bad enough with online electronic systems.
3)It is the responsibility of the patenter to inform the patent office if new information/documents comes to light and to update their patents accordingly (I've done this with one of mine) but I guess researchers can move on to other fields, change employers, or simply lose interest. (shrug)
Unless the IBM patent introduces something new (but I couldn't see anything like that in the first claim) and you were actually using it then, assuming the expired patent was filed before the IBM patent, the former should constitute (public) prior art. You should be able to use it without concerns .
Of course, the lawyer types might still want to argue the case since that's how that make their money
The reason? Apparently there was a risk that the CD would shatter in the drive, sending deadly shards of metal/plastic in all directions :-)
:-)
:D
LOL!
Wow you must have been using one of the new 1000x speed CD drives. I wish I could have one
The memo went on to advise us that if we absolutely had to use a CD, we should turn our computers to face the wall (presumably because walls don't sue for workplace injury).
So was there no danger of ricochets then?
Actually, that reminds me of a very old April Fool's computer article describing a new high capacity, high speed hard disk. It had a big diameter and very high RPM. By the end of the article it pointed out that it achieved the phenomenal data transfer rate because the outer rim was exceeding the speed of light.
I used to work at a government defense contractor and this type of policy was standard there. No CD players, no radios, nothing with any type electronics could be brought in just in case they could somehow be used as a transmitter or to steal data or something. Oddly enough, floppies could be used. Go figure.
That sounds more like a "we don't want to be sued for electrocution from untested (and hence, probably uninsured) equipment" policy. You can get that at some companies and public services, such as hospitals.
I seriously doubt that. A fan would want to see their movie in half-decent quality.
These crappy movies must be selling reasonably well to the general public because you see "dodgy" market stalls with very dubious DVDs for sale.... well, at least, I don't think many studios use dot matrix printers for the DVD covers
If they didn't sell then the copyright infringers wouldn't bother pirating them. I suspect it's the average Joe Bloggs who sees these things for sale, sometimes only a few days after they are in the cinema, and buys one.
Movies are not a charitable institution. Seeing them is not "a right" nor are they essential to your survival. If the maker wants to make more money by showing them in a cinema first, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"-Rex's breath - guess someone forgot to tell him to brush his teeth."
I used to catch beared dragons when I was a kid. They didn't have bad breath (that I can remember) but if they bit you the bacteria on their teeth could be nasty.
but since we 'merkins
OT I know, but I've always understood that a "merkin" was a pubic wig; at least I believe that's the definition in the OED.
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
Surely that's not right? I don't recall seeing that in the book and nor can I imagine Arthur Dent saying "flashlight". Surely he'd have said "torch"?
Is it possible the publishers did a translation for the US market?
Ahh: These links (a, and b) tend to agree with me.
I'd rather not think of the method as brute force. ..
...) ...) ....)
I'll agree with that. Brute force searching would go though all the parameters a la
for(parameter1 = min limit
for(parameter2 = min limit
for(parameter3... )
etc....
Evaluate(parameter1, param2,
Genetic algorithms try to limit the search space by starting with "probably good" sets of parameter values and trying to generate other "probably good but hopefully better" parameter combinations.
It won't necessarily find the absolute best set of parameters but it might find some reasonable ones.
Maybe not Farcry, but the next generation of cell phones probably should be capable of, say, Quake 2 or 3 at around 30~60Hz on QVGA res.
Have a google for the MBX technology.
While it was a little too PASCAL
As a professional OCCAM programmer for 3 years I would have said they should have made it more like Pascal (or C)
Occam "convenienty" featured:
1) No decent data structures (i.e. records/structs). You had the choice of an array or an array.
2) Had no recursion. I guess this saved them having to do dynamic memory management and helped the "provability" of the language, but it was a pain to do my ray tracing code.
3) Only had pre-tested loops.
4) No pointers/dynamic memory (but there were ways of hacking around that).
Some features, OTOH, were nice, such as array slices and automatic array bounds checking, and the ease of doing multi-threading was wonderful.
Simon
Speeding is not necessarily dangerous. I'm something of a 'fast' driver and have a squeaky clean record after almost six years of driving......I do recognize that energy is a function of mass linearly and of velocity geometrically, but cars are going 'fast' anyway so the difference between 60 mph and 70 mph in an accident is going to be pretty minimal.
Tell that to the parents of a child hit by a car travelling at 40mph/65kph in a 30mph/50kph zone and took 70% more distance to stop. I'm sure they'll see your point of view.
The system with the best games will win.
Possibly, but it's more likely to be down to marketing.
Actually, I'm surprised no one here has picked up on the fact that mobile phones and PDAs will soon have 3D graphics that will, perhaps, come close to DC-level performance.
Perhaps dedicated game systems will become a thing of the past?
i had the misfortune of snarfing a half chewed grape once. My friends were very suprised, to say the least...
Not as surprised as the grape.
Lets go for something a little less kiddie than Eddings. If a director could get the main character right, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Donaldson would be good.
Heaven forbid! Not that. I could not think of a more apathetic leading character. I seem to recall wanting to scream "Do something" while reading the series.
IMHO, the "Dragonbone Chair" trilogy by Tad Williams would be a much better candidate for adaptation.
Were it not for his followers that stole his invention and started mass production of books (very similar to those we now nowadays - set up in antiqua typeface) that cheap books started to exist and made wide dissemination of knowledge possible.
If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible.
It's an interesting hypothetical situation but you've got the outcome wrong!
(For the moment, let us ignore the chicken and egg problem of actually making copies of such a patent.....)
Patents only last for, at most, 2 decades. Let's say Gutenberg did patent his press. Once the patent expired everybody would be legally entitled to make their own press.
In the mean time, because Gutenberg has had to put down a detailed description, with diagrams, of how the printing press works, far more people will have got the opportunity to see how to build their own. Moreover, others may then seen ways to make it better.
In other words, instead of it being a trade secret, and hence kept hidden away slowing down the spread of printing, a patent would have helped speed up its adoption.
I don't know about you, but I only take a couple minutes to recharge after a lapdance.
:-)
Well I had some moderation points I wanted to use on the parent post, but I just couldn't find a "liar" or at least "probably deluded" option
if you think about it, all data is effectively delivered through Morse code.
To paraphrase Monty Python "You'll have to explain the logic underlying that conclusion"!
AFAICS, Morse code is a ternary system, whereas most data, these days, tends to be sent in binary.
An analog speedometer works like this:
On the tailshaft in your transmission there is a gear. There is a meshing gear in the speedo sending unit. This gear is turned by the tailshaft on the transmission, obviously, and causes the cable to turn. The cable, inside your speedo gauge, is headed by another gear, which goes through a series of gears that results in placing the needle on the gauge (and advancing the odometer).
The "series of gears" might apply for the odometer, but I don't think they are necessary for the actual speedometer.
The last time I checked, the cable drives a small rotating magnet which is in close proximity to a metal disk that is attached to the needle's axle. The rotating magnet thus induces currents in the disk which in turn eventually results in a torque being applied to the axle. A spring resists the free rotation of the needle giving a reading which is proportional to the speed.
It's not real-time at all, and is usually 1-2 seconds off. So it's not "instant information" as you put it, it's actually old information by the time you see it.
There may be a lag of a second but that'll surely be just for filtering purposes so that the displayed reading is steady. In a sense, the same thing MUST happen with the analog speedo. There needs to be some damping in that too or else it'd oscillate up and down - in fact you can see it occur with old speedos which, presumably, are worn out.