"There wouldn't be any reason for that on the part of the maker."
I can think of a very good reason: no government is going to be buy a device to catch drunk drivers if it doesn't indicate the presence drunk drivers. Remember, gov't officials aren't too bright. If they were testing competing devices, they may have just gone with the one that turned up more drunks, regardless of whether or not they *were* actually drunk. I'll admit its of the same paranoia that gets us the "Symantec must be making viruses so that people will need to buy Norton!" complaint. However, I have heard stories (not claiming this is data) of red-light cameras that snap a few fractions of a second too early, bringing in millions for the city until someone figures it out. I can imagine the same logic with a breathalyzer.
.sol seems pretty silly. Do you think we'd travel outside our own solar system and discover an inhabitable planet only to give it the same name as one in our own system?
No need to be snarky. I see lots of posts every other story wishing that the submitter had included a little summary identifying/explaining the subject of the article. You and I know what SETI is, but not everyone does.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the same purpose wouldn't be served by a link to SETI's wikipedia webpage.
Number 3 seems a bit extreme. It's not reasonable to bar entities from applying for patents just because one gets invalidated, even companies like IBM who just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. What you need to do is apply fees to make it cost-prohibitive to apply for more and more patents. Another poster suggested some sort of exponential curve, or perhaps a graduated fee structure.
Remember, large conglomerates like IBM and GE have been around for a long time. They can afford to wait out ten years without new patents. But I don't think society benefits much from having companies like that not release any new products because they can't patent them.
Your client shouldn't be punished, especially if an impartial 3rd party (say, a judge) can determine that the prior art was sufficiently hard to find. However, the presentation of such prior art before a judge should render your client's patent invalid.
We need a middle ground. For example, maybe if the prior art is not accessible on the internet, then your client shouldn't be punished even if his patent should be immediately invalidated. However, if a Google search turns up said paper, then your client pays a fee to the patent office, author's legal fees, and reimburses previous defendants he may have won cases against using said patent, simply because he didn't do a very good prior art search.
A person can't reasonably be expected to travel around the world looking for prior art, but he can be expected to drive to an internet cafe.
Re:Prize goes to the 3D graphics provider
on
VMware Fusion goes Beta
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Um, no. AutoCAD does not even exist in the parametric 3D modelling area. That field is dominated by Pro/E, solidworks, CATIA, and UGS.
That doesn't mean that someone can't need AutoCAD and declare that the mac is insufficient because its not available, but my money says that AutoCAD will run better in emulation than the other packages simply because it doesn't have the 3D capabilities the others do.
I had the fortune to being able to test Parallels and Pro/Engineer on my father's Dual-2.66 Ghz Quad Core mac pro. It has 5 gigs of ram, a radeon X1900 with 512 MB of ram, and a 23" cinema display.
Let me tell you how it behaves: Not great.
I'd imagine for small changes and assemblies its probably usable, but I pulled up my largest project to really put it through its paces. This is an assembly with hundreds of parts in it, mostly sheetmetal. Parallels seriously needs 3D acceleration. It is also worth noting that the only graphics card on any mac that is listed as supported by Pro/E (see PTC's website) is the Quadro FX 4500, which is a $1700 BTO option.
I was able to select and redefine features, but screen regens were horribly slow. Pan/Zoom/Rotate was totally unavailable despite the multi-button mouse and Parallels wouldn't recognize my spaceball at all (yes, I installed the driver software).
I wasn't able to get boot camp running because the X1900 + 23" display does not work with boot camp presently (apparently this is a widespread issue discussed on the Apple forums).
I'll be testing it on my macbook pro (core 2 duo 2.33 ghz) next week in both boot camp and parallels, though I don't expect much performance. Our Pro/E guru at work tells me that the graphics card is going to be the biggest problem for performance if its not an officially-supported card (and the X1600 on my macbook isn't on that list either).
Despite all the performance lags, I was so excited just to be running Pro/E on a mac that I imagine it can only get better from here. And if not...I don't really want to do work at home anyway!;) I plan to keep testing it, though, because its important to me and I have the resources to do it. For some reason, no one else does.
HSA's are great, and immensely popular with the young and healthy in Silicon Valley. There are many opportunities:
1) It's another savings vehicle like your 401k or IRA 2) The money doesn't expire at the end of the year like an FSA. 3) You don't HAVE to use the money to pay for medical expenses that come your way 4) You CAN use the money on things that regular health care doesn't cover: glasses, dentist, orthdontics, etc 5) You can reimburse yourself for medical expenses at any time (not just in the same fiscal year the expense occured!). If I have some expensive bloodwork and pay for it out-of-pocket and the next year I lose my job, I can just take the money out of my HSA and deposit it into my checking account. 6) If you make it to 65 (59.5?) healthy, the money is yours! 7) Some companies will even contribute part/most of the yearly deductible (like the one I work for).
My brother and I were having a discussion about this the other. He was convinced that Nintendo wouldn't be able to sell their old games at more than a couple bucks a piece. I thought 5-10 seemed reasonable. My brother, 18, didn't understand that there are millions of mid-20's people who grew up on these games and have plenty of disposable income. As I have already purchased Zelda III and original Metroid for my game boy advance, I knew better.
I think it would be pretty difficult for the following reasons:
1) Despite the second amendment, I feel its still pretty hard to get the types of equipment we'd need to take on our own military, such as assault rifles. Guerrilla warfare absolutely works (Vietnam, American Revolutionary War, Nicaragua), but I don't think we can do it with handguns, and a copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook.
2) Political affiliations and religion make this difficult. The people who are forming militias in the backwaters of Bumfuck USA are generally ultra-conservatives. Many are white-power/KKK/racists. How well do you think those people would work, if at all, with the people who currently hate our government most: Liberals, homosexuals, intellectuals, aethists? I'm making some generalizations here, but look at the large centers of anti-bush sentiment and tell me if you think those people have anything in common with the people who do have any guns. In fact, those groups have been at odds over gun control for my entire (short) lifetime.
3) There isn't enough popular agreement. Talk to someone in a US city today and ask them what they think of those militia groups. They'll say they're nutjobs. They'd never join those people. I used to agree.
It wasn't until Bush started all this nonsense that I started to understand why we needed the second amendment and just how right those groups are to be stockpiling weapons. Admittedly, they would stage a revolution for their own intolerant ends, but I recognize their right to believe that way and wish there was similar stockpiling happening on the other side of the political fence.
I'm a mechanical engineer who uses Pro/Engineer at work. I design geometry and then use built-in software (Pro/Mechanica) to analyze the parts every day. How is this new?
At first it sounded like it was simultaneously computing something about parts as you design, but this just isn't possible or even useful as far as I can tell. The whole point of having a separate step is that you can define different loading scenarious. "What is the strength of this part?" is a meaningless question. What you want to know is "how much force will it take to displace the end of this beam by 2 inches?". There just isn't anything to compute on the fly.
So again, what is it that this is doing? The integration of FEA modules in CAD is already pretty seamless. It saves the analysis features as part features.
Reading the article, I see some interesting quotes:
"The way it is now, the same CAD software used to make the shape of the part can't be used to analyze the mesh" - flat out wrong. Pro/E, ANSYS, and NX all have integrated FEA modules. Its a separate module, true, but you just push a button in the GUI to change your mode from modelling to analysis.
"After the designer designs the object, it is thrown over to the analyst, and the analyst says, 'OK, I think, based on my analysis, that your design has to be modified this way,' and then throws it back to the designer, who makes the modification" - sorry, but this is not the way things should be designed. The company I work for is small, but in general there are only a few designers who have *extensive* knowledge of manufacturing capabilites and extensive experience. This enables them to make good judgements when designing parts. When they do make a mistake, the engineers have sufficient CAD skills to make the change themselves. There is very little "back and forth". Now, if the analysis indicates the design is completely non-viable (i.e. "Not strong enough now and never will be!") then the designer goes back to the drawing board. But that's an entire re-design and not nearly as similar to phone-tag as the article makes it sound.
And don't even get me started on the fact that its written in Java...it may be a fine language for web apps, but I've used FEMLAB and if someone else writes a CAD package in Java I may well be forced to hit them in the face with a trout.
Excuse me, but *I* was excited about it. I'm the child of baby boomers and I'm not looking forward to paying for them. I get far better returns on my private retirement accounts (401k and Roth IRA) than I ever would in Social Security. I love the idea of not paying into it.
I second the motion. McMaster is awesome. My only gripe is that I can't seem to get ahold of a printed catalog (yes, I want this massive brick of dead tree). Alternately, you can go to Olander. My experience is that both have crappy websites, though McMaster's is a bit better. Olander's is totally non-functional (regardless of browser/platform).
As a mechanical designer who works mostly on computers, I find both of them to provide the incredibly valuable service of helping me select and source different screws.
Most browsers on the mac fall into one of two categories: supported by a mega-corp (Safari, Internet Explorer) or backed by the Mozilla engine (Mozilla, Camino, Firefox). What is Opera's market share when considering only the mac platform? What advantages do you think your product offers over Omniweb, for example, which is another browser that does not fall into either of the two categories mentioned? Do you have significant development effort put into your mac product to help meet or beat the market share of one of the dominant mac browsers? Or are you mostly "maintenance" on that platform?
Slashdot Mirror
Now I can finally find out what the capital of Assyria is! I hope its not "aaaarrrrhhhh"
"There wouldn't be any reason for that on the part of the maker."
I can think of a very good reason: no government is going to be buy a device to catch drunk drivers if it doesn't indicate the presence drunk drivers. Remember, gov't officials aren't too bright. If they were testing competing devices, they may have just gone with the one that turned up more drunks, regardless of whether or not they *were* actually drunk. I'll admit its of the same paranoia that gets us the "Symantec must be making viruses so that people will need to buy Norton!" complaint. However, I have heard stories (not claiming this is data) of red-light cameras that snap a few fractions of a second too early, bringing in millions for the city until someone figures it out. I can imagine the same logic with a breathalyzer.
.sol seems pretty silly. Do you think we'd travel outside our own solar system and discover an inhabitable planet only to give it the same name as one in our own system?
No need to be snarky. I see lots of posts every other story wishing that the submitter had included a little summary identifying/explaining the subject of the article. You and I know what SETI is, but not everyone does.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the same purpose wouldn't be served by a link to SETI's wikipedia webpage.
Number 3 seems a bit extreme. It's not reasonable to bar entities from applying for patents just because one gets invalidated, even companies like IBM who just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. What you need to do is apply fees to make it cost-prohibitive to apply for more and more patents. Another poster suggested some sort of exponential curve, or perhaps a graduated fee structure.
Remember, large conglomerates like IBM and GE have been around for a long time. They can afford to wait out ten years without new patents. But I don't think society benefits much from having companies like that not release any new products because they can't patent them.
Your client shouldn't be punished, especially if an impartial 3rd party (say, a judge) can determine that the prior art was sufficiently hard to find. However, the presentation of such prior art before a judge should render your client's patent invalid.
We need a middle ground. For example, maybe if the prior art is not accessible on the internet, then your client shouldn't be punished even if his patent should be immediately invalidated. However, if a Google search turns up said paper, then your client pays a fee to the patent office, author's legal fees, and reimburses previous defendants he may have won cases against using said patent, simply because he didn't do a very good prior art search.
A person can't reasonably be expected to travel around the world looking for prior art, but he can be expected to drive to an internet cafe.
Um, no. AutoCAD does not even exist in the parametric 3D modelling area. That field is dominated by Pro/E, solidworks, CATIA, and UGS.
That doesn't mean that someone can't need AutoCAD and declare that the mac is insufficient because its not available, but my money says that AutoCAD will run better in emulation than the other packages simply because it doesn't have the 3D capabilities the others do.
I had the fortune to being able to test Parallels and Pro/Engineer on my father's Dual-2.66 Ghz Quad Core mac pro. It has 5 gigs of ram, a radeon X1900 with 512 MB of ram, and a 23" cinema display.
;) I plan to keep testing it, though, because its important to me and I have the resources to do it. For some reason, no one else does.
Let me tell you how it behaves: Not great.
I'd imagine for small changes and assemblies its probably usable, but I pulled up my largest project to really put it through its paces. This is an assembly with hundreds of parts in it, mostly sheetmetal. Parallels seriously needs 3D acceleration. It is also worth noting that the only graphics card on any mac that is listed as supported by Pro/E (see PTC's website) is the Quadro FX 4500, which is a $1700 BTO option.
I was able to select and redefine features, but screen regens were horribly slow. Pan/Zoom/Rotate was totally unavailable despite the multi-button mouse and Parallels wouldn't recognize my spaceball at all (yes, I installed the driver software).
I wasn't able to get boot camp running because the X1900 + 23" display does not work with boot camp presently (apparently this is a widespread issue discussed on the Apple forums).
I'll be testing it on my macbook pro (core 2 duo 2.33 ghz) next week in both boot camp and parallels, though I don't expect much performance. Our Pro/E guru at work tells me that the graphics card is going to be the biggest problem for performance if its not an officially-supported card (and the X1600 on my macbook isn't on that list either).
Despite all the performance lags, I was so excited just to be running Pro/E on a mac that I imagine it can only get better from here. And if not...I don't really want to do work at home anyway!
HSA's are great, and immensely popular with the young and healthy in Silicon Valley. There are many opportunities:
1) It's another savings vehicle like your 401k or IRA
2) The money doesn't expire at the end of the year like an FSA.
3) You don't HAVE to use the money to pay for medical expenses that come your way
4) You CAN use the money on things that regular health care doesn't cover: glasses, dentist, orthdontics, etc
5) You can reimburse yourself for medical expenses at any time (not just in the same fiscal year the expense occured!). If I have some expensive bloodwork and pay for it out-of-pocket and the next year I lose my job, I can just take the money out of my HSA and deposit it into my checking account.
6) If you make it to 65 (59.5?) healthy, the money is yours!
7) Some companies will even contribute part/most of the yearly deductible (like the one I work for).
Seriously. Everyone knows there's no hyphen in asshat.
"Waving my hand over my Macbook (accomplished with Shadowbook + Virtuedesktops), caused my screen to rotate into either Windows XP or OS X at will"
This is not the operating system you're looking for. You don't need to see our serial number.
That is FREAKIN SWEET.
My brother and I were having a discussion about this the other. He was convinced that Nintendo wouldn't be able to sell their old games at more than a couple bucks a piece. I thought 5-10 seemed reasonable. My brother, 18, didn't understand that there are millions of mid-20's people who grew up on these games and have plenty of disposable income. As I have already purchased Zelda III and original Metroid for my game boy advance, I knew better.
This is going to be a gold mine for them.
Hastert, Stevens, Rice, Snow, and Rumsfeld are the next 5 in the line of succession. Sorry, but I don't want any of them running things either.
I think it would be pretty difficult for the following reasons:
1) Despite the second amendment, I feel its still pretty hard to get the types of equipment we'd need to take on our own military, such as assault rifles. Guerrilla warfare absolutely works (Vietnam, American Revolutionary War, Nicaragua), but I don't think we can do it with handguns, and a copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook.
2) Political affiliations and religion make this difficult. The people who are forming militias in the backwaters of Bumfuck USA are generally ultra-conservatives. Many are white-power/KKK/racists. How well do you think those people would work, if at all, with the people who currently hate our government most: Liberals, homosexuals, intellectuals, aethists? I'm making some generalizations here, but look at the large centers of anti-bush sentiment and tell me if you think those people have anything in common with the people who do have any guns. In fact, those groups have been at odds over gun control for my entire (short) lifetime.
3) There isn't enough popular agreement. Talk to someone in a US city today and ask them what they think of those militia groups. They'll say they're nutjobs. They'd never join those people. I used to agree.
It wasn't until Bush started all this nonsense that I started to understand why we needed the second amendment and just how right those groups are to be stockpiling weapons. Admittedly, they would stage a revolution for their own intolerant ends, but I recognize their right to believe that way and wish there was similar stockpiling happening on the other side of the political fence.
"And so it begins"
Also
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote."
I'm a mechanical engineer who uses Pro/Engineer at work. I design geometry and then use built-in software (Pro/Mechanica) to analyze the parts every day. How is this new?
At first it sounded like it was simultaneously computing something about parts as you design, but this just isn't possible or even useful as far as I can tell. The whole point of having a separate step is that you can define different loading scenarious. "What is the strength of this part?" is a meaningless question. What you want to know is "how much force will it take to displace the end of this beam by 2 inches?". There just isn't anything to compute on the fly.
So again, what is it that this is doing? The integration of FEA modules in CAD is already pretty seamless. It saves the analysis features as part features.
Reading the article, I see some interesting quotes:
"The way it is now, the same CAD software used to make the shape of the part can't be used to analyze the mesh" - flat out wrong. Pro/E, ANSYS, and NX all have integrated FEA modules. Its a separate module, true, but you just push a button in the GUI to change your mode from modelling to analysis.
"After the designer designs the object, it is thrown over to the analyst, and the analyst says, 'OK, I think, based on my analysis, that your design has to be modified this way,' and then throws it back to the designer, who makes the modification" - sorry, but this is not the way things should be designed. The company I work for is small, but in general there are only a few designers who have *extensive* knowledge of manufacturing capabilites and extensive experience. This enables them to make good judgements when designing parts. When they do make a mistake, the engineers have sufficient CAD skills to make the change themselves. There is very little "back and forth". Now, if the analysis indicates the design is completely non-viable (i.e. "Not strong enough now and never will be!") then the designer goes back to the drawing board. But that's an entire re-design and not nearly as similar to phone-tag as the article makes it sound.
And don't even get me started on the fact that its written in Java...it may be a fine language for web apps, but I've used FEMLAB and if someone else writes a CAD package in Java I may well be forced to hit them in the face with a trout.
From Mr. I'm-my-own-grandfather.
I'll keep dreaming, if you don't mind.
Excuse me, but *I* was excited about it. I'm the child of baby boomers and I'm not looking forward to paying for them. I get far better returns on my private retirement accounts (401k and Roth IRA) than I ever would in Social Security. I love the idea of not paying into it.
What were you listening to!?
I second the motion. McMaster is awesome. My only gripe is that I can't seem to get ahold of a printed catalog (yes, I want this massive brick of dead tree). Alternately, you can go to Olander. My experience is that both have crappy websites, though McMaster's is a bit better. Olander's is totally non-functional (regardless of browser/platform).
As a mechanical designer who works mostly on computers, I find both of them to provide the incredibly valuable service of helping me select and source different screws.
Most browsers on the mac fall into one of two categories: supported by a mega-corp (Safari, Internet Explorer) or backed by the Mozilla engine (Mozilla, Camino, Firefox). What is Opera's market share when considering only the mac platform? What advantages do you think your product offers over Omniweb, for example, which is another browser that does not fall into either of the two categories mentioned? Do you have significant development effort put into your mac product to help meet or beat the market share of one of the dominant mac browsers? Or are you mostly "maintenance" on that platform?
Obviously, we need more muff-type devices! I mean really, what problem couldn't be solved by making things more muff-like?
I was going to say "Football", but your answer is good too!
All five of you are going to have a damn secure internet experience!
You're telling this to the crowd who watched x-files. Talk about preaching to the deaf.