The example in the patent looks like the same early-XML format used by Ventura, a desktop publishing program released in 1986 by Xerox
And, Charles Goldfarb says he invented SGML in '74, which means the amount of prior art to something like XML is huge. The whole point was to separate content from layout, as well as (theoretically) allowing more automation on documents.
I utterly fail to see how this can possibly be something which can be patented by someone who filed an application in '94.
Was Vista really that bad that Microsoft has to attempt to manipulate the press and websites to this extent in order to give the illusion that Windows 7 is better?
If Microsoft ever fails to convince people their newest stuff is better, than they're out of business.
The new hotness is always the new hotness, and the old and busted must be replaced for a generous amount of money they'll happily accept from you.
Are we looking for planets that will potentially have life forms that are some how similar to those we know of on our own world?
Well, because if you look for conditions like your own world, you know you have at least a fighting chance. If you start looking for lifeforms with chemistry vastly different from your own, you have no basis to look at.
So, absent any workable evidence of a completely different life-form to us, you stick what what we do know works. That would be purely speculative as you'd have no way to look for it other than making WAGs about things you know nothing about. At that point, it kinda stops being science.
How would you even start to search for something you can't conceive of? At least looking for things similar to our own conditions you can screen out most of the candidates to a smaller sample.
The kind of Buddhism imported to the West - secularized, made "not a religion," turned into a kind of set of technologies for personal development, stripped of any perspectives that generally clash with regular humanism - is very much unlike the Buddhisms of Asia, which are very much religions, which have real religious exclusivity, which have outright superstitions, rituals, etc.
See, it's still Buddhism, and it's all compatible. At core, the same teachings are present in both -- The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-Fold Path form the basis for the whole shebang.
The superstitions, rituals, and what have you have generally remained as cultural things on top of the Buddhism. In the end, the trappings themselves are considered to be "empty" -- meaning in the end, they too fall away in the grand scheme of things. The Buddha is said to have eschewed such things.
Except for in places where sects of Buddhists can clash violently (very much losing sight of Buddhism), by now the major schools of Buddhism differ largely in the odd bit of metaphysics or semantics that get pretty arcane. Even the Theravada and Mahayana traditions generally can reach consensus on most things.
Buddhism has never been monolithic. As I said before, while it can be practiced as a religion, it is not required that Buddhism manifest as a religion.
Buddhism isn't technically a religion. There really isn't a "god" to believe in, and some of the Western interpretations play down a lot of the actual parts which make it a religion and emphasize the personal growth aspect of it. You can believe in literal reincarnation and nirvana, or treat it as more of a metaphor and a way to teach a more meaningful life. There's nothing inherent to it which requires you to take it all on faith, and it's always up for debate if it proves to be wrong -- it's just held up to close examination. Many people consider themselves as Buddhists without considering it their religion. In fact, Buddhism can co-exist with a religion -- you can be Catholic and practice Buddhism.
It's not like once you've lit your 10,000th stick of incense, some guy named Buddha appears before you, smacks you on the forehead to open up your third eye and then you're suddenly enlightened.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.:-P
Who cares about such monstrosities? Now, a real human female breast growing out of the top of a computer mouse would sell like crazy.
Well, it certainly is the most intuitive interface we've got. Bet it'd be nice and ergonomic as well.;-)
Hmmm.... I bet if you really did some R&D work, you could get a two handed setup to make a virtual keyboard or something -- jiggling and squeezing boobies to prevent RSI and have a more natural interface to the computer!
You should look into some venture capital on that one.;-)
Hmmm.... so, do you mean that like growing a human ear on a mouse so you have an actual breast growing out of the back or a frog? Or do you mean a whole new market of cosmetic breast augmentation for frogs?
I'm just asking. Either way, I'm sure it would fast become a popular kind of porn for some people.;-)
I don't know about you, but the wireless syncing and game support was much better than the Ipod's until the touch came out.
*shrug* If you think those are useful, glad you liked them. I have no interest in playing games on my music player, or my phone.:-P
"Geek-cool or cool-people cool? Because, quite frankly, they're very different."
Don't hurt yourself thinking about this question, I realize it's very difficult.
No, seriously. Because the Zune never matched the cool factor of the iPod. Outside of the hardcore MS fanboi, most people showed no interest in it whatsoever.
I mean, clearly this guy thought it was "cool", but again, I don't think that's what most people when they think of "cool".:-P
The Zune isn't/wasn't a bad device, in fact it had features that Ipods lacked for many years.
But, were they features people actually wanted, or just some extra bells and whistles that only a few people will ever need, use, or even know about? I don't think in the years I've owned iPods I've ever felt there were features I wish it had.
It was just marketed poorly and could beat the Ipod's cool factor.
Geek-cool or cool-people cool? Because, quite frankly, they're very different.
So, they're either trying to patent the general-purpose computer, or they're trying to say that merging your home theatre into one single component is a unique invention.
I mean, you've been able to watch TV, movies, play music, and play games on a Mac for, what, 10+ years now? And you can easily make a PC do all of this as well (most of it right out of the box). And by changing the settings on my amplifier, I can choose between music, movies, video games, and the radio.
All they're doing is taking functionality which has been available individually, as well as already integrated into the function of a computer, and adding one more thing -- being a gaming console. None of these sound like they should be patentable -- you can't take something people do all of the time, and patent the idea of doing it all in one box. That makes no sense to me.
Have patents really devolved to "take what we can already do, put it in a box that also plays video games" and have that somehow be an innovation??
I would argue that the entire computer industry (Microsoft included) has produced enough prior art as to seemingly completely invalidate this entire patent.
Well, as someone who's been waiting for an affordable HMD that I can use for an augmented reality project I've been thinking of starting, let me just ask you one thing: How would I go about mounting a 50" LCD monitor or a projector + screen on my head in a way that doesn't make result in me constantly falling over?
Hurt it's appeal??? For Chirsts sake it's the second most moneymaking movie of all time and broke more than a dozen box office recrords!!!
Iron Man did make money, but it's nowhere near the second highest grossing film of all time.
Domestically, that's Dark Knight, with Iron Man in 21st place. Worldwide, Iron Man is in 48th overall -- -- it is the second highest grossing for 2008.
It did well, but not quite as well as you suggest. You are, however, correct in saying it certainly doesn't seem that the character in Iron Man hurt it's appeal to movie-goers.
Just goes to show ya that MIT guys will crack a nut using a bulldozer. There's plenty of dedicated level-meter chips around which cost next to nothing and provide a better, logarithmic response, which is what you want for sound.
While there's some truth to what you say, if we all just decided to use off-the-shelf components to do all of this stuff, people would forget how it's done, and then it would be arcanum.
The MIT approach of using a bulldozer to crack a nut usually demonstrates a pretty fine control over the bulldozer, and a reasonable understanding of how much force to apply to the nut and not end up with powder. It usually somehow comes across with a bit of controlled elegance amid the mayhem.:-P
Isn't the whole point to be doing the science and technology for the sake of doing the basic science and technology? I applaud anyone who can and does go back to first principles -- because, quite frankly, I can't do it myself. It's just good to know someone is keeping it alive.
There's a lot to be said for being able to roll up your sleeves and actually do the fiddly bits. It shows you understand the underlying problem instead of just downloading a magic cure that does it for you. (Well, in this case, buy a kit and then assemble it.)
Granted, a lot of people are kvetching that this really isn't that difficult (which I'm not qualified to comment on;-) -- as much as this might fall into the category of "someone at MIT did it so it's both cool and revolutionary", it still warms my heart to know people are still kicking it old school.
Not all problems are best solved with trying to turn an iPhone into a Swiss-army chain-saw. That's what perl is supposed to be for.:-P
Back when Vista first came out, machines with 512 MB of RAM were sold with Vista. So it's not just older computers. Many people didn't realize 512 MB wasn't enough, and got upset that their computers ran slowly out of the box.
Oh, I understand that. The problem is that manufacturers have never sold machines with enough RAM due to price. When I bought an XP box in about 2002 or so, I put 1GB on it since I already knew that the 256MB or so that was common was nowhere near enough.
Heck, back in '92 if you bought a Windows machine with the "recommended" 4MB that Microsoft gave as a guideline, with 4MB the machine was completely unusable. The machine would thrash itself into oblivion with only Word running -- yet, people said that it should be a usable configuration. Those computers ran slowly right out of the box too.
By the time Vista came out, 512MB wasn't really enough to run XP on, so it's hardly a surprise that it couldn't hold up to Vista.
That used to be true a few years ago, but probably not anymore, for some people. Flash-based online video eats up both CPU usage and RAM in large amounts.
Quite frankly, that's why I think Flash-based anything is a piece of shit. It uses way more resources than older and more established video formats like Quicktime, MPEG, or AVI -- and I'm not convinced it actually provides any benefits.
I don't have flash installed on my machines. Anything which is solely Flash dependent is something I avoid because it's garbage and resource intensive.
Maybe Vista is not slow anymore on newer machines with nice specs, but Windows 7 is still faster.:) You like Vista, but would you still pick it over Windows 7 if you didn't have a decent computer and were buying one when Windows 7 already came out?
In all honesty, I'm not overly clear on what Windows 7 is going to offer as any compelling reason to upgrade, and the machine is still only about 6 months old. So, I'm not even closely monitoring what Windows 7 is supposed to offer as benefits.
If I was buying a brand new machine with decent specs, I'd probably go with what is considered the latest OS. It just happened that when I was buying my machine, Vista was the new hotness and could be had with 64-bit support.
I don't really see it as a choice between Vista and Windows 7. Windows 7 is so far just a beta, and there's no compelling reason to cause me to upgrade my Vista box to it just yet.
I'm just always baffled by complaints that Vista doesn't run as fast as on an older machine with much smaller specs than it does on a new one. That seems fairly obvious to me.:-P
I have always maintained that the best way to future-proof a machine is to put as much RAM as you can afford/it can hold when you buy it. Very few applications have ever really needed more CPU speed, but not enough memory is going to slow your machine to a crawl.
Eventually, people will need more than 3 GB of RAM. At that point, the choice will be between XP x64, Vista, and Windows 7 if they want to stick with M$ Operating Systems. XP x64 has compatibility issues; Vista is slow. Take a guess at what they are going to pick.
I'm typically not one to defend Microsoft on these things. I'll admit, I've been a hater in the past. But, I tend to think this whole "Vista is slow" thing is BS or just whining.
This year I bought myself a new machine, and since prices have dropped so much over the last bunch of years, I decided to make a big honking machine. I've got a 64-bit quad-core Intel, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk -- this all for about $1200 CDN, and that included the OEM version of Vista Home Premium 64.
I must say, I've been actually rather quite happy with Vista. The UAC everyone is always bitching about is actually kind of a nice feature, and lets me run as a non-admin user for 99% of what I do, and get admin rights only when I need them.
The problem is, a modern OS simply requires more resources than an older one. Back in the day when we had 8MB of memory and 33MHz of processing speed, things were a lot more lightweight and leaner because they had to be. As computers do more, they need more resources.
I can completely see that Microsoft can't continue to build an OS that does all they want it to do and still have it fit in 256MB of RAM on a slow processor. It's not really reasonable to hope that your 5 year old machine will run the new hotness.
I'm willing to bet that Apple's latest OSX is a dog on older Macs that don't come close to the specs of shipping machines.
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These people are not considered terrorists. That's why they have to be released sooner rather than later.
They are currently being held because they can't go back to China, and they haven't yet found a place that can give them asylum.
Cheers
And, Charles Goldfarb says he invented SGML in '74, which means the amount of prior art to something like XML is huge. The whole point was to separate content from layout, as well as (theoretically) allowing more automation on documents.
I utterly fail to see how this can possibly be something which can be patented by someone who filed an application in '94.
This sounds awfully fishy to me.
Cheers
If Microsoft ever fails to convince people their newest stuff is better, than they're out of business.
The new hotness is always the new hotness, and the old and busted must be replaced for a generous amount of money they'll happily accept from you.
What are they going to say, "now, 10% better"??
Cheers
I think pico is a little too fine grained. What about something bigger .... like, microsofts maybe? ;-)
Cheers
Well, because if you look for conditions like your own world, you know you have at least a fighting chance. If you start looking for lifeforms with chemistry vastly different from your own, you have no basis to look at.
So, absent any workable evidence of a completely different life-form to us, you stick what what we do know works. That would be purely speculative as you'd have no way to look for it other than making WAGs about things you know nothing about. At that point, it kinda stops being science.
How would you even start to search for something you can't conceive of? At least looking for things similar to our own conditions you can screen out most of the candidates to a smaller sample.
Cheers
Why use a flashlight when you can use a genetically engineered fluorescent monkey?
I mean, sure, it's a little showy, but chicks dig it. :-P
Cheers
With monkeys??? :-P
Cheers
Tamil's aren't Buddhist. That's the Sinhalese.
Cheers
See, it's still Buddhism, and it's all compatible. At core, the same teachings are present in both -- The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-Fold Path form the basis for the whole shebang.
The superstitions, rituals, and what have you have generally remained as cultural things on top of the Buddhism. In the end, the trappings themselves are considered to be "empty" -- meaning in the end, they too fall away in the grand scheme of things. The Buddha is said to have eschewed such things.
Except for in places where sects of Buddhists can clash violently (very much losing sight of Buddhism), by now the major schools of Buddhism differ largely in the odd bit of metaphysics or semantics that get pretty arcane. Even the Theravada and Mahayana traditions generally can reach consensus on most things.
Buddhism has never been monolithic. As I said before, while it can be practiced as a religion, it is not required that Buddhism manifest as a religion.
Cheers
Buddhism isn't technically a religion. There really isn't a "god" to believe in, and some of the Western interpretations play down a lot of the actual parts which make it a religion and emphasize the personal growth aspect of it. You can believe in literal reincarnation and nirvana, or treat it as more of a metaphor and a way to teach a more meaningful life. There's nothing inherent to it which requires you to take it all on faith, and it's always up for debate if it proves to be wrong -- it's just held up to close examination. Many people consider themselves as Buddhists without considering it their religion. In fact, Buddhism can co-exist with a religion -- you can be Catholic and practice Buddhism.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. :-P
Cheers
Well, yeah. But, loking at the rules, I should think that from 27-36 all stem from 34.
I mean, 27 through 33 starts with the quest for porn, and always have. ;-)
Cheers
Well, it certainly is the most intuitive interface we've got. Bet it'd be nice and ergonomic as well. ;-)
Hmmm .... I bet if you really did some R&D work, you could get a two handed setup to make a virtual keyboard or something -- jiggling and squeezing boobies to prevent RSI and have a more natural interface to the computer!
You should look into some venture capital on that one. ;-)
Cheers
Hmmm .... so, do you mean that like growing a human ear on a mouse so you have an actual breast growing out of the back or a frog? Or do you mean a whole new market of cosmetic breast augmentation for frogs?
I'm just asking. Either way, I'm sure it would fast become a popular kind of porn for some people. ;-)
Cheers
*shrug* If you think those are useful, glad you liked them. I have no interest in playing games on my music player, or my phone. :-P
No, seriously. Because the Zune never matched the cool factor of the iPod. Outside of the hardcore MS fanboi, most people showed no interest in it whatsoever.
I mean, clearly this guy thought it was "cool", but again, I don't think that's what most people when they think of "cool". :-P
Cheers
Why stop at two? I've always wanted one of those big wall-o-monitor dealios you see on TV. :-P
Cheers
But, were they features people actually wanted, or just some extra bells and whistles that only a few people will ever need, use, or even know about? I don't think in the years I've owned iPods I've ever felt there were features I wish it had.
Geek-cool or cool-people cool? Because, quite frankly, they're very different.
Cheers
So, they're either trying to patent the general-purpose computer, or they're trying to say that merging your home theatre into one single component is a unique invention.
I mean, you've been able to watch TV, movies, play music, and play games on a Mac for, what, 10+ years now? And you can easily make a PC do all of this as well (most of it right out of the box). And by changing the settings on my amplifier, I can choose between music, movies, video games, and the radio.
All they're doing is taking functionality which has been available individually, as well as already integrated into the function of a computer, and adding one more thing -- being a gaming console. None of these sound like they should be patentable -- you can't take something people do all of the time, and patent the idea of doing it all in one box. That makes no sense to me.
Have patents really devolved to "take what we can already do, put it in a box that also plays video games" and have that somehow be an innovation??
I would argue that the entire computer industry (Microsoft included) has produced enough prior art as to seemingly completely invalidate this entire patent.
Cheers
Big huge counterweight? :-P
Cheers
OK, here's the inflation adjusted list too. :-P
Cheers
Iron Man did make money, but it's nowhere near the second highest grossing film of all time.
Domestically, that's Dark Knight, with Iron Man in 21st place. Worldwide, Iron Man is in 48th overall -- -- it is the second highest grossing for 2008.
It did well, but not quite as well as you suggest. You are, however, correct in saying it certainly doesn't seem that the character in Iron Man hurt it's appeal to movie-goers.
Cheers
While there's some truth to what you say, if we all just decided to use off-the-shelf components to do all of this stuff, people would forget how it's done, and then it would be arcanum.
The MIT approach of using a bulldozer to crack a nut usually demonstrates a pretty fine control over the bulldozer, and a reasonable understanding of how much force to apply to the nut and not end up with powder. It usually somehow comes across with a bit of controlled elegance amid the mayhem. :-P
Isn't the whole point to be doing the science and technology for the sake of doing the basic science and technology? I applaud anyone who can and does go back to first principles -- because, quite frankly, I can't do it myself. It's just good to know someone is keeping it alive.
Cheers
There's a lot to be said for being able to roll up your sleeves and actually do the fiddly bits. It shows you understand the underlying problem instead of just downloading a magic cure that does it for you. (Well, in this case, buy a kit and then assemble it.)
Granted, a lot of people are kvetching that this really isn't that difficult (which I'm not qualified to comment on ;-) -- as much as this might fall into the category of "someone at MIT did it so it's both cool and revolutionary", it still warms my heart to know people are still kicking it old school.
Not all problems are best solved with trying to turn an iPhone into a Swiss-army chain-saw. That's what perl is supposed to be for. :-P
Cheers
Oh, I understand that. The problem is that manufacturers have never sold machines with enough RAM due to price. When I bought an XP box in about 2002 or so, I put 1GB on it since I already knew that the 256MB or so that was common was nowhere near enough.
Heck, back in '92 if you bought a Windows machine with the "recommended" 4MB that Microsoft gave as a guideline, with 4MB the machine was completely unusable. The machine would thrash itself into oblivion with only Word running -- yet, people said that it should be a usable configuration. Those computers ran slowly right out of the box too.
By the time Vista came out, 512MB wasn't really enough to run XP on, so it's hardly a surprise that it couldn't hold up to Vista.
Quite frankly, that's why I think Flash-based anything is a piece of shit. It uses way more resources than older and more established video formats like Quicktime, MPEG, or AVI -- and I'm not convinced it actually provides any benefits.
I don't have flash installed on my machines. Anything which is solely Flash dependent is something I avoid because it's garbage and resource intensive.
Cheers
In all honesty, I'm not overly clear on what Windows 7 is going to offer as any compelling reason to upgrade, and the machine is still only about 6 months old. So, I'm not even closely monitoring what Windows 7 is supposed to offer as benefits.
If I was buying a brand new machine with decent specs, I'd probably go with what is considered the latest OS. It just happened that when I was buying my machine, Vista was the new hotness and could be had with 64-bit support.
I don't really see it as a choice between Vista and Windows 7. Windows 7 is so far just a beta, and there's no compelling reason to cause me to upgrade my Vista box to it just yet.
I'm just always baffled by complaints that Vista doesn't run as fast as on an older machine with much smaller specs than it does on a new one. That seems fairly obvious to me. :-P
I have always maintained that the best way to future-proof a machine is to put as much RAM as you can afford/it can hold when you buy it. Very few applications have ever really needed more CPU speed, but not enough memory is going to slow your machine to a crawl.
Cheers
I'm typically not one to defend Microsoft on these things. I'll admit, I've been a hater in the past. But, I tend to think this whole "Vista is slow" thing is BS or just whining.
This year I bought myself a new machine, and since prices have dropped so much over the last bunch of years, I decided to make a big honking machine. I've got a 64-bit quad-core Intel, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk -- this all for about $1200 CDN, and that included the OEM version of Vista Home Premium 64.
I must say, I've been actually rather quite happy with Vista. The UAC everyone is always bitching about is actually kind of a nice feature, and lets me run as a non-admin user for 99% of what I do, and get admin rights only when I need them.
The problem is, a modern OS simply requires more resources than an older one. Back in the day when we had 8MB of memory and 33MHz of processing speed, things were a lot more lightweight and leaner because they had to be. As computers do more, they need more resources.
I can completely see that Microsoft can't continue to build an OS that does all they want it to do and still have it fit in 256MB of RAM on a slow processor. It's not really reasonable to hope that your 5 year old machine will run the new hotness.
I'm willing to bet that Apple's latest OSX is a dog on older Macs that don't come close to the specs of shipping machines.
Cheers