Drifting a bit off topic but.... "...This lead Jefferson et. al to set up the first patent board some 200 years ago..."
Of course, outside of the US, patent systems have been in existence much longer much than that. For a history of the UK's (one of the oldest stretching back about 500 years) try: Patent Origins
Anyway, this is just another example of how incredibly insane the Patent Process has gotten in the last few years. Hell, I could go out and get a patent on sex, and sue the hell out of anyone who does the hunka-chunka in any of my patented positions
No, you would not be able to patent sex due to prior art (eg Kama Sutra or the simple existence of humans). (Besides any position considered non-obvious might also be considered illegal;-) )
On the other hand (and i can't believe I'm typing this) if you found a novel use for sex, say, "a new way of powering airborne vehicles via copulation", then you could probably apply for a patent for that. You could at least enjoy the research.
I just did a quick search on the USPTO and there are indeed a patent listed for "Woolston" (who was named as the inventor in the article). For those interested, the page is Patent 5,845,265 - Consigment Nodes. It was filed back in 1995. I haven't looked at the claims etc.
While doing the search, I noticed some other auction patents, such as one titled "Distributed Live Auction" that is assigned to Amazon.
Indeed they are probably quite qualified but they probably don't have a great deal of time. In my experience, it often seems that it's merely keyword searching of the patent database that is being done. (This is probably understandable given that some patents are written in a way that are "not understandable".:-))
When the PO responds, it's then up to the inventor to either point out why the new patent is novel (given the cited references) or to adapt it accordingly. I just feel that if more databases are searched (even via keyword only), then there's a greater chance that any prior art will be revealed.
Of course, there is the problem that "keywords" for the same idea might not match up.
Ok, it's a big "IF", but if they spent the money on better prior art searches, perhaps it might improve the system. For example, in my experience with patent submission, the US patent office only appears to search for prior art in its own published patent database, while say, in Europe, the EPO seems to look a bit harder.
Of course, extending it to looking through well-known journals relating to the particular art would be even better, but just looking at foreign patent databases (relative to the USA) would be a start.
... Well we've only got an SGI Indigo2 in our office. If I needed to take it on a trip to and from Canada, would it be compatible with their Iris scanners?;-)
According to researchers at F-Secure, the Slapper.B worm variant is able to retrieve its source code from a Web page after the worm has been removed from infected servers. The worm uses a common free software utility, wget, to retrieve its source code from an infected Web page in the home.ro domain.
Administrators of the domain, which is located in Romania, have been notified and the infected page has been deleted from the site, according to F-Secure.
Rather than simply having deleted the page, I wonder if it would have possible to replace this source code with something else that acted as an "antibody"?
honestly have grown to love the steady white-noise of a running computer... I find it difficult to sleep if my computer is shut off
A bit off topic perhaps, but some people I know find they can get their young babies to go back to sleep by playing a recording of, say, a vacuum cleaner. Apparently the white noise is supposed to be similar to the sound of the womb.
I'm not at all sure what this says about you. Perhaps you want to go back...:-).
To return to the topic, I find that I don't notice the "jet engine like" whine of my PC until I turn it off. It's then that I appreciate the peace and quiet. Frankly I'm all for more efficient CPUs.
The equivalent would be if you were listening and as a result they heard less of their own music.
I suppose, being rather pedantic here, that the new listener being present would "reduce" the amount of music the original listener could hear simply because he might be absorbing some of the echo.
Anyway, I think the original analogy was rather flawed. It's not the listening that's really the problem but that the new user has pulled up in another car with a loud stereo that is drowning out the original car's sound system.
One thing I should add. Pyramids of textures were used in texturing systems prior to "MIP" mapping, but it was Williams who introduced triliear filtering. (The earlier systems used simpler filtering, eg Dungan(?) just used linear interpolation of samples).
"The basic problem with texture maps, of course, is that you can't get too close before the texture gets blurry and the illusion breaks down...Games don't have that luxury; you can get close to a surface and blow the illusion."
This problem was addressed long ago. The solution was Mip-mapping. Mip-mapping is a technique used where textures are swapped in and out of a scene, depending on how far you are from an object. Most games have at least 2 and somtimes 3-4 different resolutions for each texture so the texture is never "blurry" or out of focus.
Perhaps I'm being pedantic here, but that's not what MIP mapping was for. Lance Williams invented it as an inexpensive means of texture antialiasing (see "Pyramidal Parametrics", Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) Vol 7, No 3, July 1983 (reprinted in Seminal Graphics)). Once the highest resolution texture map is defined, a "pyramid" of smaller, down-filtered, maps are created from that original source.
You cannot obtain more detail than that which is defined in that top level map.
Oh, incidentally, it is not a great idea to go swapping the MIP map levels in and out of (texture) memory because on true hardware the levels that the texels are read from are chosen by the hardware on a pixel-by-pixel basis. You could easily end up with texture aliasing if the hardware is forced to read inappropriate texture levels. (The P(o)S2, of course, has b'all texure memory and so developers often don't have a choice).
What you are probably looking for are solutions either based on virtual texturing (i.e. specific HW support for swapping texture data) or use of detail textures.
I was pleased to see that the case was dismissed but rather concerned by the way in which it was rejected.
I would have thought that an argument based on prior art (the existence of which was described in the original article) was a valid reason for rejecting the patent.
Instead, AFAICS, the argument for non-infringement seemed to be that the internet has numerous computers while the claim, describing a main computer with database accessed remotely, only had one.
IANAPL, but wouldn't that open doors to an abuse of otherwise valid patents?
To translate a film from American English to U.K English? What do they do, overdub "F*cking" with "bloddy" every time it's uttered?
Given that most four letter swear words are some of the few bits of English that could even be understood by a medieval peasant**, I don't think the translation is really necessary:-) (...and thus a whole new market opens for up for time travelling film executives)
Perhaps I was being too harsh - sometimes the live sports quality was excellent (for example in the velodrome) but often the athletics broadcast wasn't. Given that both are "fast paced" activities, I really don't understand the variation in quality.
I'm still hoping that the FCC drops the requirements that broadcast channels be analog so that we can actually start seeing a push for all digital channels. The channels I have that come in digital are about 2x as clear and the sound is a lot better as well.
Speaking as someone in the UK who has just recently bought a new TV with a built-in digital receiver, I've got mixed impressions about the quality of digital VS analog.
Sometimes the quality of digital is indeed impressive, but there are other occasions when we switch back to the analog version of the particular station. There are occasional tolerable problems with what I assume are drop-outs/transmission interence which can range from just sections of the image being drawn with low-res blocks to having the entire display disappear.
My main quibbles, however, are with the artefacts, especially in live TV coverage (eg with the current Commonwealth games coverage on the BBC). For example, competitors are often haloed by DCT blocks (i.e. high frequency areas) or while low frequency data (i.e. subtle blended colours like walls or the sky) are often quite banded.
Of course, this could be that the realtime compression hardware simply doesn't have the grunt to cope with the image data that's being thrown at it, but I'm also wondering if the signals are deliberately over bandwidth-limited. I believe that the latter has been the case with some digital radio broadcasts.
Simon
PS: Mind you, for those in the US, digital TV would be leaps and bounds better than the standard NTSC broadcasts:-)
absolute nonsense. Moing film quickly is a peice of piss, as every wildlife documentary and commercial with slow-motion in it that you've ever seen will attest. I've seen cameras that could shoot 10000 frames/sec - and there are MUCH faster ones in existence. It's perfectly normal for a movie 35mm camera to be variable up to 150fps, why would a projector be a big challenge? Shit, my old Steenbeck used to run up to 96fps without problems.
A long while ago I saw a documentary on Imax/Omnimax at least one of which runs the film at higher rates (48fps?).
It's not the camera speed that's the general problem, because it only processes the film once, but the projector because the finished print has to go through many times. Increasing the speed there causes extra stress.
The documentary described the problems the Imax/Omnimax people were having with the increased projection speed. IIRC, in a standard cinema projector, the film is moved, stopped for a period of time while it's displayed, and then moved again etc. (During the movement period I believe a shutter masks the transition). The acceleration of the movement implies quite a bit of force/stress on the film. The Imax/omni developers were having lots of problems with the film simply shredding because of the increased stress due to increased speed.
They then discovered an Aussie invention (plugging my home country here) called something like the "rolling loop" film projector, where the film is "bunched up" slightly in places. The whole film then moves along like a caterpillar a frame at a time with far less stress.
20kHz is the average upper limit of human hearing. Some of us are able to hear higher frequencies, allowing us to do stupid party tricks like complaining about TVs that are left on with no video signal feeding them. But I digress.
One day in a physics lab during my freshman year of college, we were doing audio interference experiments and, after finishing early, I started playing with the audio oscillator I had been assigned. According to this test (which was, admittedly, likely to be somewhat less than 100% accurate) I was capable of hearing sounds up to about 23.5kHz and could sense vibrations up to around 25kHz, although these were perceived as something more like a pressure on my head rather than as sound.
What I was refering to was using a signal generator in high school that was both connected to a speaker and a CRO/Scope (That's what they are called in Australia and the UK.. don't know what they get called in the US). At that frequency I can only describe it as an unpleasant feeling and certainly not musical, but I was able to hear it.
BTW thanks to the other posters who said the "dog whistle" was 15khz.
Slashdot Mirror
Drifting a bit off topic but....
"...This lead Jefferson et. al to set up the first patent board some 200 years ago..."
Of course, outside of the US, patent systems have been in existence much longer much than that. For a history of the UK's (one of the oldest stretching back about 500 years) try: Patent Origins
Anyway, this is just another example of how incredibly insane the Patent Process has gotten in the last few years. Hell, I could go out and get a patent on sex, and sue the hell out of anyone who does the hunka-chunka in any of my patented positions
;-) )
No, you would not be able to patent sex due to prior art (eg Kama Sutra or the simple existence of humans). (Besides any position considered non-obvious might also be considered illegal
On the other hand (and i can't believe I'm typing this) if you found a novel use for sex, say, "a new way of powering airborne vehicles via copulation", then you could probably apply for a patent for that. You could at least enjoy the research.
I just did a quick search on the USPTO and there are indeed a patent listed for "Woolston" (who was named as the inventor in the article). For those interested, the page is
Patent 5,845,265 - Consigment Nodes. It was filed back in 1995. I haven't looked at the claims etc.
While doing the search, I noticed some other auction patents, such as one titled "Distributed Live Auction" that is assigned to Amazon.
Indeed they are probably quite qualified but they probably don't have a great deal of time. In my experience, it often seems that it's merely keyword searching of the patent database that is being done. (This is probably understandable given that some patents are written in a way that are "not understandable". :-))
When the PO responds, it's then up to the inventor to either point out why the new patent is novel (given the cited references) or to adapt it accordingly. I just feel that if more databases are searched (even via keyword only), then there's a greater chance that any prior art will be revealed.
Of course, there is the problem that "keywords" for the same idea might not match up.
Ok, it's a big "IF", but if they spent the money on better prior art searches, perhaps it might improve the system. For example, in my experience with patent submission, the US patent office only appears to search for prior art in its own published patent database, while say, in Europe, the EPO seems to look a bit harder.
Of course, extending it to looking through well-known journals relating to the particular art would be even better, but just looking at foreign patent databases (relative to the USA) would be a start.
... Well we've only got an SGI Indigo2 in our office. If I needed to take it on a trip to and from Canada, would it be compatible with their Iris scanners? ;-)
Rather than simply having deleted the page, I wonder if it would have possible to replace this source code with something else that acted as an "antibody"?
honestly have grown to love the steady white-noise of a running computer... I find it difficult to sleep if my computer is shut off
:-).
A bit off topic perhaps, but some people I know find they can get their young babies to go back to sleep by playing a recording of, say, a vacuum cleaner. Apparently the white noise is supposed to be similar to the sound of the womb.
I'm not at all sure what this says about you. Perhaps you want to go back...
To return to the topic, I find that I don't notice the "jet engine like" whine of my PC until I turn it off. It's then that I appreciate the peace and quiet. Frankly I'm all for more efficient CPUs.
Simon
I suppose, being rather pedantic here, that the new listener being present would "reduce" the amount of music the original listener could hear simply because he might be absorbing some of the echo.
Anyway, I think the original analogy was rather flawed. It's not the listening that's really the problem but that the new user has pulled up in another car with a loud stereo that is drowning out the original car's sound system.
And here was me thinking Sirius Cybernetics Corp was modelled on a company in Seattle....
"Share and Enjoy,
Share and Enjoy,
With your plastic boy
Or girl by your side...."
(pardon any misquoting).
I guess you've never commuted to work on public transport. One day, try taking the train/metro/tube in, for example, London.
for myself and family (frankly we don't need much) and then use the rest for a trust to do things such as buying wells for 3rd world nations.
At least that might achieve something (which is probably better than the hot air generated at the "sustainable development" summit).
S
One thing I should add. Pyramids of textures were used in texturing systems prior to "MIP" mapping, but it was Williams who introduced triliear filtering. (The earlier systems used simpler filtering, eg Dungan(?) just used linear interpolation of samples).
Perhaps I'm being pedantic here, but that's not what MIP mapping was for. Lance Williams invented it as an inexpensive means of texture antialiasing (see "Pyramidal Parametrics", Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) Vol 7, No 3, July 1983 (reprinted in Seminal Graphics)). Once the highest resolution texture map is defined, a "pyramid" of smaller, down-filtered, maps are created from that original source.
You cannot obtain more detail than that which is defined in that top level map.
Oh, incidentally, it is not a great idea to go swapping the MIP map levels in and out of (texture) memory because on true hardware the levels that the texels are read from are chosen by the hardware on a pixel-by-pixel basis. You could easily end up with texture aliasing if the hardware is forced to read inappropriate texture levels. (The P(o)S2, of course, has b'all texure memory and so developers often don't have a choice).
What you are probably looking for are solutions either based on virtual texturing (i.e. specific HW support for swapping texture data) or use of detail textures.
Simon
Pardon me for asking, but isn't that a bit unhygienic?
(I can't even begin to consider the agony of requiring 10Gs!)
Simon
I was pleased to see that the case was dismissed but rather concerned by the way in which it was rejected.
I would have thought that an argument based on prior art (the existence of which was described in the original article) was a valid reason for rejecting the patent.
Instead, AFAICS, the argument for non-infringement seemed to be that the internet has numerous computers while the claim, describing a main computer with database accessed remotely, only had one.
IANAPL, but wouldn't that open doors to an abuse of otherwise valid patents?
Can I recommend the review at Beyond3D? The reviews there generally dig a bit deeper into the technology than most of the run-of-the-mill sites.
Simon
Given that most four letter swear words are some of the few bits of English that could even be understood by a medieval peasant**, I don't think the translation is really necessary
Simon
**According to "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson.
Perhaps I was being too harsh - sometimes the live sports quality was excellent (for example in the velodrome) but often the athletics broadcast wasn't. Given that both are "fast paced" activities, I really don't understand the variation in quality.
Simon
Sometimes the quality of digital is indeed impressive, but there are other occasions when we switch back to the analog version of the particular station. There are occasional tolerable problems with what I assume are drop-outs/transmission interence which can range from just sections of the image being drawn with low-res blocks to having the entire display disappear.
My main quibbles, however, are with the artefacts, especially in live TV coverage (eg with the current Commonwealth games coverage on the BBC). For example, competitors are often haloed by DCT blocks (i.e. high frequency areas) or while low frequency data (i.e. subtle blended colours like walls or the sky) are often quite banded.
Of course, this could be that the realtime compression hardware simply doesn't have the grunt to cope with the image data that's being thrown at it, but I'm also wondering if the signals are deliberately over bandwidth-limited. I believe that the latter has been the case with some digital radio broadcasts.
Simon
PS: Mind you, for those in the US, digital TV would be leaps and bounds better than the standard NTSC broadcasts
Good old google gives a useful link
to a description of the rolling loop
It's not the camera speed that's the general problem, because it only processes the film once, but the projector because the finished print has to go through many times. Increasing the speed there causes extra stress.
The documentary described the problems the Imax/Omnimax people were having with the increased projection speed. IIRC, in a standard cinema projector, the film is moved, stopped for a period of time while it's displayed, and then moved again etc. (During the movement period I believe a shutter masks the transition). The acceleration of the movement implies quite a bit of force/stress on the film. The Imax/omni developers were having lots of problems with the film simply shredding because of the increased stress due to increased speed.
They then discovered an Aussie invention (plugging my home country here) called something like the "rolling loop" film projector, where the film is "bunched up" slightly in places. The whole film then moves along like a caterpillar a frame at a time with far less stress.
Simon
What I was refering to was using a signal generator in high school that was both connected to a speaker and a CRO/Scope (That's what they are called in Australia and the UK
BTW thanks to the other posters who said the "dog whistle" was 15khz.
Simon