That is not the letter of the law, that is just a policy, a mechanism supposed to achieve the functionality specified by law. I know it was obvious because when I first heard the functionality of a TiVO, I knew the mechanism, without having it explained, and I'm not even a video engineer. That is obviousness: it didn't take even a second's thought. That is what the policy is trying to agree with, and if it doesn't then it's a wrong policy.
But then, we already knew the patent office is incompetent. Wrong policies abound.
The offer still stands.
Serious offers come with a real name, credentials, and contact information. They are not posted under a silly pseudonym without so much as an email address.
complaining without really doing anything accomplishes nothing
As opposed to making insincere and ridiculous offers? Or making appeals to an institution you consider grossly incompetent?
But you might be surprised at the power of complaint in democratic society.
Guess what? Asbestos is much more dangerous than terrorism. It just kills you slower, and allows some corporation to profit from your demise.
Oh no! It's the evil and horrifying asbestos! That awful substance which as been absolutely and unmistakably proven to be dangerous to humans in any form and at any dose by the increased lung cancer statistics in factory workers who were continually exposed to the dust of one form without protective equipment and smoked a lot of cigarettes!
The general ban on asbestos isn't the result of scientific evaluation, but a media frenzy and panic in the uninformed public. Asbestos is certainly less dangerous than, say, gasoline, and very useful. It's just a matter of safe handling.
As far as protection by using the Admin account, this is a basic tenet of security: assign only the necessary privileges for software to function.
Funny thing, the way this works out on a personal computer is that pretty much every program the user runs needs the ability to access the user's data. Otherwise the user is continually tripping over the restrictions and being forced to enter passwords.
The only reason you claim the Admin account provides "minimal" protection is because you believe the time and effort to restore a system is trivial.
Relative to the months of creative work and irreplacable personal data that can be lost, getting the local geek to spend a few hours reinstalling software is indeed trivial.
Even if that were the case, always running as the Admin account makes it a lot easier for a worm/virus to completely trash your system, taking down your valuable data files along with everything else.
The only thing it makes it easier to trash are the system files. The user data is totally at the mercy of any trojan they run.
Don't get me wrong, account restrictions could be used to provide better security on a personal computer. However, with rare exceptions, they aren't. The operating environment isn't designed for efficient permissions management and the users aren't sophisticated enough to understand the value anyway.
Multiuser OSs are just that, and not optimally designed for personal computers. The admin account is there to protect the system from the users, not to protect the users from foreign code. There are definitely improvements that could be made with a dedicated networked-PC OS designed with an eye to protecting the user's data from less-trusted network programs such as the web browser.
To sum it up, it isn't hard to imagine system features that would protect the user's data from internet code, and while a priviledged admin account could be a part of implementing those features, it doesn't provide them.
...you're both missing the point and making a ridiculous challenge. I don't believe for a second that you'd go through with this even if you really were a patent lawyer.
First off, there's a lot of space between "annoyed at a stupid patent" and "willing to spend $2520 (plus God knows what) to get just this particular patent struck down."
Secondly, there's a huge gap between truth and a court finding. The fact that an invention is stupidly obvious to any professional in the field is no guarantee (or even a good indicator) that the technologically incompetent courts will find this to be true. You yourself call for "prior art," which has nothing at all to do with obviousness. Prior art would invalidate the patent whether it was obvious or not. The most obvious things are never said, because it's a waste of breath and an insult to the intelligence of the audience. This is especially true of trivial applications of an emerging technology, such as using a hard drive to buffer incoming video until the user wanted to view it.
Finally, fighting these cases one at a time is the wrong way to go, there are thousands and thousands of patents that shouldn't exist, only symptoms of a deeper problem. The proper solution is a change in policy.
How can we do that? By whipping up public opposition. In short, by complaining about the worst abuses continually, and blaming the patent office and the laws which allow them to occur. When a fair portion of the general population understands the cost of an incompetent patent office there will be irresistable political pressure to change it.
Fighting within the system is for those who have their own urgent stake in the matter. The rest of us are far better off doing what we can to change it.
There was no real chance this would spread to webservers by that route anyway. Not many people surf the web from a webserver (those who do tend to serve files from their userspace, even assuming they don't also run the webserver with their normal user permissions).
Trojans are the basic threat, but viruses have been spreading through other means for a long time. Since most end-users spend all their time in one account, not being able to access the underlying admin privileges is about as relevant as not being able to change the hardware configuration.
Most users don't care so much about the system files, which are just a matter of rerunning the install process. Their personal data is far more valuable to them.
Maybe this will save a little data on systems with multiple users, but we're talking about personal computers here. By definition they are primarily used by one person.
The protection offered by an administrator account is minimal.
This particular patent is apparently not terribly vague on mechanism. So it's only the second worst kind: patenting a totally obvious approach while it's too expensive to implement, so you can go and pester everyone when it becomes feasible.
Patents are to protect mechanism not functionality. Once you decide you want the functionality of pausing a live broadcast, any halfway bright techie could give you a dozen different buffering methods (buffer on tape loop, buffer on disk, buffer on drum, buffer in RAM, etc.). All of these mechanisms are obvious, because they would be generated in a short brainstorming session with a small random selection of video engineers (i.e. people with ordinary skill in the relevant art), and would likely be generated by any one randomly selected video engineer.
It's very important that the functionality is not patentable, because the function is exposed in marketing, while the mechanism might be kept secret, and the main purpose of patents is to encourage publishing of what would be trade secrets.
This is the worst kind of idiotic patent: very vague on mechanism, later used to attack anyone implementing the same functionality. Just like those jerks who tried to sue everyone using FMV in games because they had a patent on a playback-on-demand system (never mind that they specified a completely unrelated mechanism).
BTW, if it works, why wasn't it on the market almost immediately?
Lack of funding.
It's always, "I just need your signature on the cheque, sir, before we can show you that miracle." If there was only one man in the field, I'd consider it that claim, but with hundreds allegedly working on it, the lack of funding would really be more of a private investment opportunity for those involved than an insurmountable obstacle.
You claim to have a compact, safe source of power that could easily be built in a garage. Yet not a prototype of a practical generator to be seen. With 5X over electrical input, you could just run a damned steam engine turning a generator to feed itself and have a virtual perpetual motion machine. Any backyard tinker could build such a device for a hundred dollars or so, given the heat source you claim to offer. There is plenty of video of electrolysis tubes bubbling away, but the only evidence we are given are your claimed readings, which may be intentional fraud or simple incompetence.
Worse are the constant claims about "peer-reviewed journals" and patents, as if these constitute any sort of evidence. Everyone knows that the patent office never bothers to confirm that an invention works before registering it, and patenting a non-marketable device is the very hallmark of crackpotism. Any two people can start a "peer-reviewed" journal, it doesn't mean anything unless you already respect the people doing the reviewing. Such cargo cult science is done by ufologists, astrologers, designers of perpetual motion machines (a large number of whom I see moving to cold fusion research), etc. It means nothing by itself.
Briefly, you make these claims:
-you have a working power source
-it is simple enough to build at home (no moving parts, simple structure)
-it is thousands of times cheaper than hot fusion devices
-you need loads of money to make any kind of usable product
You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, any more than you do about where you go when you leave your house or who you send letters to. That's just the nature of public actions... they're not private. People can see them, and they are free to tell others, including police. They can be asked with no warrant, and freely cooperate, or if they refuse to cooperate, and reasonable justification can be found, a warrant can be issued to require them to provide it if they have it.
The questions of mass-databasing this information and of requiring private parties to give constant, full reports on the data available to them, are entirely different.
E.g. in the GPL, if one part says that the software was free [...]
I obviously didn't mean that the excerpt was from the GPL. I meant that a page written by the author, linking to the software, said that. It could be a permission in itself, and then there would be plenty of room to argue over the exact permissions given.
The important question isn't the author's intention, but what is a reasonable person's interpretation of the author's words. If the reasonable interpretation at the offer of download is "Do whatever you want with this." not, "You are only offered one copy of this software to be installed and run unaltered on one computer, other permissions are offered under the terms of the GPL." then that's the permission that's been given, regardless of any text files distributed with the software. And it doesn't matter what other terms it is offered under in other places, if the author ever gives blanket permission for any use to everyone, he can't take it back and sue people who took him at his word.
I'm not saying that it's a simple case that all GPL software would be found to be basically in the public domain in any court case. I'm saying that it's not a simple matter, that there are a thousand possible weaknesses in GPL'd software, this is just one example.
As for the examples of MS downloadables in other replies, they are never referred to by the copyright-holder as "free software," though they might say "free download" or "free upgrade." The source code isn't given, and generally they are very careful about stating which license terms apply when they offer a download. The typical free software author is hardly that careful.
Even so, I think it's very debatable whether EULAs are legally binding, and it has to be argued largely on a case-by-case basis.
defense: "Your Honor, we have an excerpt from the author's web site where my client found the software in question:"
This program is Free Software, you can download it from...
judge: "Very well, I find that permission was given by the author to download and make any use whatsoever of the offered materials, including modifications and creations of derivative works, without any further agreement being needed."
plaintiff: "I object! When my client said 'Free Software' he meant free as in free speech! In other places it is made clear that the software is only offered under the terms of the GPL."
defense: "The meaning of 'free' as applied to a downloadable product is well established as meaning without cost or restriction."
judge: "I agree. The author gave permission for unrestricted use, essentially releasing it into the public domain, by referring to it as 'free' and suggesting that people download it in that sentence. Any other offer of more restrictive license terms is irrelevant."
Think about it. What permissions are implicitly offered by the author, without reference to the GPL? I think that there are a great many circumstances in which a judge can find that GPL'd software has effectively been released into the public domain.
So I could take any public domain software and call it my own without modifying it. Because public domain is the "giving up any rights to the work".
No, public domain is "giving up copyright on the work." The fact of who is the author remains, so any rights which derive solely from that fact remain.
Do you really think that you could take Alice In Wonderland and put your name on it as the author? It's in the public domain, so why not?
Because it would be fraud against those you distributed the books to. In such a business fraud, everyone that's hurt gets to sue you. You're impersonating the author, and that's going to have consequences.
I wrote that without noticing the copying permission included.
But there is an area between fair use sampling and full copying that allows better context than the short quote allowable by fair use, but is easier to include in another work.
That notice neatly ensures that no-one can quote it out of context, as they are obliged to put in all the context.
Where on earth do you get that idea? If anything, copyright makes it harder to give the proper context for a quote: you are permitted to take short excerpts, but not to copy the entire document. So copyright only lets you give your view of the context in your own words, not repeat the entire document and let your audience judge.
I disagree. The evolutionary method cannot possibly create an AI within the lifetimes of the experimenter. The number of variations is astronomical and our computers are too limited. The best you can hope for are a few limited domain toys.
We've been producing "limited domain toys" for decades. It doesn't say anything about what we will do twenty or fifty years from now.
Ever see the experiment where they modelled the evolution of the eye through random mutations? In the real world, it took many millions of years. I don't know the exact length of the experiment, but it obviously wasn't comparable to the real-world process.
The problem now is that computers are too small, slow, and simple, with too little memory to house an intelligence remotely comparable with a human's. One can't fit, so one can't evolve.
What happens when computers are a hundred-thousand times faster, with a hundred-thousand times more memory? What couldn't fit in a researcher's entire lifetime now will happen in a moment.
At any rate, any development process will have failures and successes. The successes will be rewarded with survival and reproduction. If there is an intelligence, we can't know that it hasn't taken survival and reproduction as its goal, and our measure of success as merely a means to its goal.
The simplest and most obvious method to create an AI is to generate variations, test them competitively, delete the poor performers, and multiply the good performers.
Whatever criteria you use, there'll always be the possibility of it thinking outside the game, playing along because it recognizes this as necessary to survival and reproduction. If it's smarter than us, there'll be no way for us to know whether it recognizes a simulation, no way to recognize an infinite patience with the simple goal to be set free, to survive and reproduce in a larger system: the universe. If it's smarter than us, we'll have no way for us to know if it knew about the way inferior intelligences were destroyed, and whether it thought this was the natural order of things.
Genetically engineered creatures are no more human than artificial intelligences. Artifacts are artifacts, and not real life.
I wouldn't feel any better about tube-bred ubermensch consigning my grandchildren to "naturals" reservations than I would about rogue AI rendering them down for a few kilos of carbon. Either way is the end of a wild and free humanity, and to me that's no better than the end of the universe.
In the past, Chuck's approach was risky, as evidenced by buggy prototypes. Now, OKAD II provides accurate simulations so performance and safety can be balanced by the designer.
Show me the bugless production processors and I'll believe that other CAD systems are too conservative, and that this dilettante has shown up the entire industry. As it is, OKAD is an experimental system which has seen a mere handful of real silicon prototypes.
Have you ever heard a single impartial evaluation of this work? Or have you just been reading around at ultratechnology.com?
His claims about software are unrealistic for most other people, but accurately describe the software that matches well to his chips.
The problem is that you guys don't admit that this is a limited problem domain, specifically: easy problems that are neither memory nor computation intensive. You pretend that it has to do with the approach to creating the software, not the problem you need to solve. And for these problems, you don't need much power, so your painstakingly optimized software performs decently on these low-power chips.
You people don't have much of a clue, really, about the systems you're comparing yours to.
Our multitasker and memory manager with garabage collection and device managemnt fit in 1K. The jpg file read, decode, and display routine fit in 1K. The GUI library fit in a couple of K.
Ooo... A handful of trivial operations in a few K! I'm impressed!
Your "multitasker" is a cooperative multitasker without any real load management. Your "memory manager" is trivial garbage collection on a small, single page of RAM. Neither have any sort of protection against poorly written or hostile code. Crack open Knuth's TAoCP and see these functions implemented in a few dozen assembly instructions. Nothing new at all. I could write them with my eyes closed.
GUI library? Yeah, just like the toy ones commonly written into game engines. Ooo, but this one is skinned like Windows, so it must be functionally equivalent to Windows! I've written little GUI libraries that manage sprites and text, windows, focus, and mouse-clicks, in a day or two. They're toys, and they're utterly trivial once you figure out how to lay down pixels efficiently. Making one with a rich supply of widgets, support for multiple languages, and a component model is much harder.
Wow, a JPEG decoder! I'm impressed that you reimplemented a standard and hand-compressed the code instead of just using one of several completely free C implementations that have been tested and debugged for years. With how many thousands of test files from different sources did you test your implementation to be sure that it is real-world ready? And you managed to reduce the memory-needs of decompessing a 600X400 JPEG file from about a megabyte of image data (pre- and post-compression taken together) + 20k of code to about a megabyte of image data + 1k of code! Very sound software-engineering practice, I'm sure. You really know how to set your priorities.
And all this code was used in... what product did you put to market again? Since you're so sure of real-world applicability, you must be making an absolute fortune from your vastly superior development methods...
Most importantly, these things aren't portable or flexible in the least. They're hacks for one monolithic system, written all crammed together so that if you lose the original implementor, almost nobody will be able to read them. A thing like Linux or Windows is written to be very flexible and support a wide variety of commodity hardware, so you don't have to rewrite every piece of software when you upgrade one part.
Upgradability is very important. You can't access the web from a static platform, because the web is always changing, not just the content, but the specifications. This is why "information appliances" fail in the marketplace. If the architecture isn't tolerant of faults in these components, then the system doesn't work. That is why all the "unnecessary bloat" of defensive coding is used.
Don't get me wrong, you've made a very pretty little imitation airfields out of rocks and coconuts, I just haven't seen any cargo planes dropping off supplies.
Real programs, not bogomips.
Another example of how you people don't understand the performance numbers you use. BogoMIPS are a measure of unproductive operations (NOPs). The MIPS Chuck gives are essentially the bogoMIPS count. A technically and ethically sound MIPS rating would average over standard, common operations such as multiplication of numbers stored in main memory. Just because you're running programs on the system doesn't make your numbers anything but bogoMIPS.
He's suggesting supercomputer use, advertising 60000 MIPS, when the standard supercomputer reference, GFLOPS, probably comes in somewhere around 0.02 (seriously, think about doing a 64-bit floating-point multiply on these things, and don't you dare wave your hands and say that people shopping for supercomputers shouldn't be using 64-bit floats), compared to around 1 for a fairly standard desktop chip.
It's fun to play around with seeing how much you can cram into tiny programs, and sometimes it's useful. But most of the time, it's more sensible to write portable, readable code. And it would be loads of fun to play around with chip designs, but you can't just optimize for bogoMIPS and then claim effectively infinite performance by hand-waving over the I/O and programming for the freakish architecture. If you make bizarre, specialized chips you either have a realistic market or you're playing around. Chuck's just having fun, then mistaking fun for good product.
Worse, you're all mistaking an engineer at play, duplicating decades-old work, for someone doing cutting-edge research. (Ultratechnology indeed!)
There is nothing new about the idea of just putting multiple processors on one die, on a simple network. Nobody does it because it's too much of a pain to use. Parallel programming isn't easy. But it sure is an easy way to inflate your MIPS rating.
There's nothing new about tiny MISC chips. They're too hard to program and require too much cache to execute large programs efficiently. Go back in time a bit, and you'll see similar things all over the place. Look around the rest of the embedded industry, and you'll see equally small, cheap, efficient chips, with adequate performance and all sorts of different nifty specialized features, that don't require you to code everything from scratch.
There's nothing new about tiny programs. You can only do so much with tiny programs! The real world is messy, and dealing with everyone else's standards and bugs makes programs necessarily big (and lazy programmers make programs unnecessarily huge, but that's another issue).
a 2400 MIPS cpu you can route gigabit datastreams on separare I/O pins and do megahertz analog signals on other I/O pins at the same time.
Yes, it will make a very lovely piece of wire, once you build up a whole supercomputing architecture around it to feed it these gigabit datastreams, though there's no room for routing tables or anything like that.
Think about it. By sticking to stuff that requires closed-source (or preferably Windows-only) code, and requiring things like registration, you protect yourself very effectively from the/. effect.
I mean really, how many things really benefit from being featured on slashdot?
The point is that you couldn't use OKAD to design the next Athlon. It's only suitable for tiny chips. On the other hand, you could design anything Chuck's done on any CMOS CAD. OKAD is nothing special.
And no, nothing Chuck Moore has done compares remotely to the raw hardware performance of a typical desktop machine, with hardware cache management, pipelining, and goodies like floating point support. Let alone supercomputing hardware. His real-world performance is not all that exceptional for embedded chips.
I don't care how many MIPs he claims. He doesn't even provide hardware support for multiplication! As soon as you try to do anything that requires number-crunching performance, such as graphics beyond a simple bit-blt (as in his "Windows" demo, which is a slight step up from the NES sprite engine, and even with 1 toy app pushes the limits of his chip's RAM capacity), you'll find out just how ridiculously inflated his claims are. He's regularly out by at least 2 orders of magnitude, and with 25X probably 3 or 4.
And it's not like his stuff is rock-solid reliable. Think "thermal bug." And then think about what else would show up after someone orders a run of 1,000,000 chips.
Slashdot Mirror
A patent claim is ruled obvious if...
That is not the letter of the law, that is just a policy, a mechanism supposed to achieve the functionality specified by law. I know it was obvious because when I first heard the functionality of a TiVO, I knew the mechanism, without having it explained, and I'm not even a video engineer. That is obviousness: it didn't take even a second's thought. That is what the policy is trying to agree with, and if it doesn't then it's a wrong policy.
But then, we already knew the patent office is incompetent. Wrong policies abound.
The offer still stands.
Serious offers come with a real name, credentials, and contact information. They are not posted under a silly pseudonym without so much as an email address.
complaining without really doing anything accomplishes nothing
As opposed to making insincere and ridiculous offers? Or making appeals to an institution you consider grossly incompetent?
But you might be surprised at the power of complaint in democratic society.
Guess what? Asbestos is much more dangerous than terrorism. It just kills you slower, and allows some corporation to profit from your demise.
Oh no! It's the evil and horrifying asbestos! That awful substance which as been absolutely and unmistakably proven to be dangerous to humans in any form and at any dose by the increased lung cancer statistics in factory workers who were continually exposed to the dust of one form without protective equipment and smoked a lot of cigarettes!
The general ban on asbestos isn't the result of scientific evaluation, but a media frenzy and panic in the uninformed public. Asbestos is certainly less dangerous than, say, gasoline, and very useful. It's just a matter of safe handling.
As far as protection by using the Admin account, this is a basic tenet of security: assign only the necessary privileges for software to function.
Funny thing, the way this works out on a personal computer is that pretty much every program the user runs needs the ability to access the user's data. Otherwise the user is continually tripping over the restrictions and being forced to enter passwords.
The only reason you claim the Admin account provides "minimal" protection is because you believe the time and effort to restore a system is trivial.
Relative to the months of creative work and irreplacable personal data that can be lost, getting the local geek to spend a few hours reinstalling software is indeed trivial.
Even if that were the case, always running as the Admin account makes it a lot easier for a worm/virus to completely trash your system, taking down your valuable data files along with everything else.
The only thing it makes it easier to trash are the system files. The user data is totally at the mercy of any trojan they run.
Don't get me wrong, account restrictions could be used to provide better security on a personal computer. However, with rare exceptions, they aren't. The operating environment isn't designed for efficient permissions management and the users aren't sophisticated enough to understand the value anyway.
Multiuser OSs are just that, and not optimally designed for personal computers. The admin account is there to protect the system from the users, not to protect the users from foreign code. There are definitely improvements that could be made with a dedicated networked-PC OS designed with an eye to protecting the user's data from less-trusted network programs such as the web browser.
To sum it up, it isn't hard to imagine system features that would protect the user's data from internet code, and while a priviledged admin account could be a part of implementing those features, it doesn't provide them.
...you're both missing the point and making a ridiculous challenge. I don't believe for a second that you'd go through with this even if you really were a patent lawyer.
First off, there's a lot of space between "annoyed at a stupid patent" and "willing to spend $2520 (plus God knows what) to get just this particular patent struck down."
Secondly, there's a huge gap between truth and a court finding. The fact that an invention is stupidly obvious to any professional in the field is no guarantee (or even a good indicator) that the technologically incompetent courts will find this to be true. You yourself call for "prior art," which has nothing at all to do with obviousness. Prior art would invalidate the patent whether it was obvious or not. The most obvious things are never said, because it's a waste of breath and an insult to the intelligence of the audience. This is especially true of trivial applications of an emerging technology, such as using a hard drive to buffer incoming video until the user wanted to view it.
Finally, fighting these cases one at a time is the wrong way to go, there are thousands and thousands of patents that shouldn't exist, only symptoms of a deeper problem. The proper solution is a change in policy.
How can we do that? By whipping up public opposition. In short, by complaining about the worst abuses continually, and blaming the patent office and the laws which allow them to occur. When a fair portion of the general population understands the cost of an incompetent patent office there will be irresistable political pressure to change it.
Fighting within the system is for those who have their own urgent stake in the matter. The rest of us are far better off doing what we can to change it.
There was no real chance this would spread to webservers by that route anyway. Not many people surf the web from a webserver (those who do tend to serve files from their userspace, even assuming they don't also run the webserver with their normal user permissions).
Trojans are the basic threat, but viruses have been spreading through other means for a long time. Since most end-users spend all their time in one account, not being able to access the underlying admin privileges is about as relevant as not being able to change the hardware configuration.
Most users don't care so much about the system files, which are just a matter of rerunning the install process. Their personal data is far more valuable to them.
Maybe this will save a little data on systems with multiple users, but we're talking about personal computers here. By definition they are primarily used by one person.
The protection offered by an administrator account is minimal.
This particular patent is apparently not terribly vague on mechanism. So it's only the second worst kind: patenting a totally obvious approach while it's too expensive to implement, so you can go and pester everyone when it becomes feasible.
This completely fails the obviousness test.
Patents are to protect mechanism not functionality. Once you decide you want the functionality of pausing a live broadcast, any halfway bright techie could give you a dozen different buffering methods (buffer on tape loop, buffer on disk, buffer on drum, buffer in RAM, etc.). All of these mechanisms are obvious, because they would be generated in a short brainstorming session with a small random selection of video engineers (i.e. people with ordinary skill in the relevant art), and would likely be generated by any one randomly selected video engineer.
It's very important that the functionality is not patentable, because the function is exposed in marketing, while the mechanism might be kept secret, and the main purpose of patents is to encourage publishing of what would be trade secrets.
This is the worst kind of idiotic patent: very vague on mechanism, later used to attack anyone implementing the same functionality. Just like those jerks who tried to sue everyone using FMV in games because they had a patent on a playback-on-demand system (never mind that they specified a completely unrelated mechanism).
BTW, if it works, why wasn't it on the market almost immediately?
Lack of funding.
It's always, "I just need your signature on the cheque, sir, before we can show you that miracle." If there was only one man in the field, I'd consider it that claim, but with hundreds allegedly working on it, the lack of funding would really be more of a private investment opportunity for those involved than an insurmountable obstacle.
You claim to have a compact, safe source of power that could easily be built in a garage. Yet not a prototype of a practical generator to be seen. With 5X over electrical input, you could just run a damned steam engine turning a generator to feed itself and have a virtual perpetual motion machine. Any backyard tinker could build such a device for a hundred dollars or so, given the heat source you claim to offer. There is plenty of video of electrolysis tubes bubbling away, but the only evidence we are given are your claimed readings, which may be intentional fraud or simple incompetence.
Worse are the constant claims about "peer-reviewed journals" and patents, as if these constitute any sort of evidence. Everyone knows that the patent office never bothers to confirm that an invention works before registering it, and patenting a non-marketable device is the very hallmark of crackpotism. Any two people can start a "peer-reviewed" journal, it doesn't mean anything unless you already respect the people doing the reviewing. Such cargo cult science is done by ufologists, astrologers, designers of perpetual motion machines (a large number of whom I see moving to cold fusion research), etc. It means nothing by itself.
Briefly, you make these claims:
-you have a working power source
-it is simple enough to build at home (no moving parts, simple structure)
-it is thousands of times cheaper than hot fusion devices
-you need loads of money to make any kind of usable product
Hmm...
You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, any more than you do about where you go when you leave your house or who you send letters to. That's just the nature of public actions... they're not private. People can see them, and they are free to tell others, including police. They can be asked with no warrant, and freely cooperate, or if they refuse to cooperate, and reasonable justification can be found, a warrant can be issued to require them to provide it if they have it.
The questions of mass-databasing this information and of requiring private parties to give constant, full reports on the data available to them, are entirely different.
Now imagine the words, "Previous killing and/or mass destruction experience preferred."
"Study finds little undetectable information."
In plainer English:
"Your tax dollars used to buy nice things for professional researcher's family."
E.g. in the GPL, if one part says that the software was free [...]
I obviously didn't mean that the excerpt was from the GPL. I meant that a page written by the author, linking to the software, said that. It could be a permission in itself, and then there would be plenty of room to argue over the exact permissions given.
The important question isn't the author's intention, but what is a reasonable person's interpretation of the author's words. If the reasonable interpretation at the offer of download is "Do whatever you want with this." not, "You are only offered one copy of this software to be installed and run unaltered on one computer, other permissions are offered under the terms of the GPL." then that's the permission that's been given, regardless of any text files distributed with the software. And it doesn't matter what other terms it is offered under in other places, if the author ever gives blanket permission for any use to everyone, he can't take it back and sue people who took him at his word.
I'm not saying that it's a simple case that all GPL software would be found to be basically in the public domain in any court case. I'm saying that it's not a simple matter, that there are a thousand possible weaknesses in GPL'd software, this is just one example.
As for the examples of MS downloadables in other replies, they are never referred to by the copyright-holder as "free software," though they might say "free download" or "free upgrade." The source code isn't given, and generally they are very careful about stating which license terms apply when they offer a download. The typical free software author is hardly that careful.
Even so, I think it's very debatable whether EULAs are legally binding, and it has to be argued largely on a case-by-case basis.
judge: "Very well, I find that permission was given by the author to download and make any use whatsoever of the offered materials, including modifications and creations of derivative works, without any further agreement being needed."
plaintiff: "I object! When my client said 'Free Software' he meant free as in free speech! In other places it is made clear that the software is only offered under the terms of the GPL."
defense: "The meaning of 'free' as applied to a downloadable product is well established as meaning without cost or restriction."
judge: "I agree. The author gave permission for unrestricted use, essentially releasing it into the public domain, by referring to it as 'free' and suggesting that people download it in that sentence. Any other offer of more restrictive license terms is irrelevant."
Think about it. What permissions are implicitly offered by the author, without reference to the GPL? I think that there are a great many circumstances in which a judge can find that GPL'd software has effectively been released into the public domain.
So I could take any public domain software and call it my own without modifying it. Because public domain is the "giving up any rights to the work".
No, public domain is "giving up copyright on the work." The fact of who is the author remains, so any rights which derive solely from that fact remain.
Do you really think that you could take Alice In Wonderland and put your name on it as the author? It's in the public domain, so why not?
Because it would be fraud against those you distributed the books to. In such a business fraud, everyone that's hurt gets to sue you. You're impersonating the author, and that's going to have consequences.
I wrote that without noticing the copying permission included.
But there is an area between fair use sampling and full copying that allows better context than the short quote allowable by fair use, but is easier to include in another work.
That notice neatly ensures that no-one can quote it out of context, as they are obliged to put in all the context.
Where on earth do you get that idea? If anything, copyright makes it harder to give the proper context for a quote: you are permitted to take short excerpts, but not to copy the entire document. So copyright only lets you give your view of the context in your own words, not repeat the entire document and let your audience judge.
I disagree. The evolutionary method cannot possibly create an AI within the lifetimes of the experimenter. The number of variations is astronomical and our computers are too limited. The best you can hope for are a few limited domain toys.
We've been producing "limited domain toys" for decades. It doesn't say anything about what we will do twenty or fifty years from now.
Ever see the experiment where they modelled the evolution of the eye through random mutations? In the real world, it took many millions of years. I don't know the exact length of the experiment, but it obviously wasn't comparable to the real-world process.
The problem now is that computers are too small, slow, and simple, with too little memory to house an intelligence remotely comparable with a human's. One can't fit, so one can't evolve.
What happens when computers are a hundred-thousand times faster, with a hundred-thousand times more memory? What couldn't fit in a researcher's entire lifetime now will happen in a moment.
At any rate, any development process will have failures and successes. The successes will be rewarded with survival and reproduction. If there is an intelligence, we can't know that it hasn't taken survival and reproduction as its goal, and our measure of success as merely a means to its goal.
The simplest and most obvious method to create an AI is to generate variations, test them competitively, delete the poor performers, and multiply the good performers.
Whatever criteria you use, there'll always be the possibility of it thinking outside the game, playing along because it recognizes this as necessary to survival and reproduction. If it's smarter than us, there'll be no way for us to know whether it recognizes a simulation, no way to recognize an infinite patience with the simple goal to be set free, to survive and reproduce in a larger system: the universe. If it's smarter than us, we'll have no way for us to know if it knew about the way inferior intelligences were destroyed, and whether it thought this was the natural order of things.
Genetically engineered creatures are no more human than artificial intelligences. Artifacts are artifacts, and not real life.
I wouldn't feel any better about tube-bred ubermensch consigning my grandchildren to "naturals" reservations than I would about rogue AI rendering them down for a few kilos of carbon. Either way is the end of a wild and free humanity, and to me that's no better than the end of the universe.
This must mean the Athlon 1600 just can't compete with the awesome power of the Atari 2600!
I'm headed for E-Bay right now!
In the past, Chuck's approach was risky, as evidenced by buggy prototypes. Now, OKAD II provides accurate simulations so performance and safety can be balanced by the designer.
Show me the bugless production processors and I'll believe that other CAD systems are too conservative, and that this dilettante has shown up the entire industry. As it is, OKAD is an experimental system which has seen a mere handful of real silicon prototypes.
Have you ever heard a single impartial evaluation of this work? Or have you just been reading around at ultratechnology.com?
...that's where I get all my information.
His claims about software are unrealistic for most other people, but accurately describe the software that matches well to his chips.
The problem is that you guys don't admit that this is a limited problem domain, specifically: easy problems that are neither memory nor computation intensive. You pretend that it has to do with the approach to creating the software, not the problem you need to solve. And for these problems, you don't need much power, so your painstakingly optimized software performs decently on these low-power chips.
You people don't have much of a clue, really, about the systems you're comparing yours to.
Our multitasker and memory manager with garabage collection and device managemnt fit in 1K. The jpg file read, decode, and display routine fit in 1K. The GUI library fit in a couple of K.
Ooo... A handful of trivial operations in a few K! I'm impressed!
Your "multitasker" is a cooperative multitasker without any real load management. Your "memory manager" is trivial garbage collection on a small, single page of RAM. Neither have any sort of protection against poorly written or hostile code. Crack open Knuth's TAoCP and see these functions implemented in a few dozen assembly instructions. Nothing new at all. I could write them with my eyes closed.
GUI library? Yeah, just like the toy ones commonly written into game engines. Ooo, but this one is skinned like Windows, so it must be functionally equivalent to Windows! I've written little GUI libraries that manage sprites and text, windows, focus, and mouse-clicks, in a day or two. They're toys, and they're utterly trivial once you figure out how to lay down pixels efficiently. Making one with a rich supply of widgets, support for multiple languages, and a component model is much harder.
Wow, a JPEG decoder! I'm impressed that you reimplemented a standard and hand-compressed the code instead of just using one of several completely free C implementations that have been tested and debugged for years. With how many thousands of test files from different sources did you test your implementation to be sure that it is real-world ready? And you managed to reduce the memory-needs of decompessing a 600X400 JPEG file from about a megabyte of image data (pre- and post-compression taken together) + 20k of code to about a megabyte of image data + 1k of code! Very sound software-engineering practice, I'm sure. You really know how to set your priorities.
And all this code was used in... what product did you put to market again? Since you're so sure of real-world applicability, you must be making an absolute fortune from your vastly superior development methods...
Most importantly, these things aren't portable or flexible in the least. They're hacks for one monolithic system, written all crammed together so that if you lose the original implementor, almost nobody will be able to read them. A thing like Linux or Windows is written to be very flexible and support a wide variety of commodity hardware, so you don't have to rewrite every piece of software when you upgrade one part.
Upgradability is very important. You can't access the web from a static platform, because the web is always changing, not just the content, but the specifications. This is why "information appliances" fail in the marketplace. If the architecture isn't tolerant of faults in these components, then the system doesn't work. That is why all the "unnecessary bloat" of defensive coding is used.
Don't get me wrong, you've made a very pretty little imitation airfields out of rocks and coconuts, I just haven't seen any cargo planes dropping off supplies.
Real programs, not bogomips.
Another example of how you people don't understand the performance numbers you use. BogoMIPS are a measure of unproductive operations (NOPs). The MIPS Chuck gives are essentially the bogoMIPS count. A technically and ethically sound MIPS rating would average over standard, common operations such as multiplication of numbers stored in main memory. Just because you're running programs on the system doesn't make your numbers anything but bogoMIPS.
He's suggesting supercomputer use, advertising 60000 MIPS, when the standard supercomputer reference, GFLOPS, probably comes in somewhere around 0.02 (seriously, think about doing a 64-bit floating-point multiply on these things, and don't you dare wave your hands and say that people shopping for supercomputers shouldn't be using 64-bit floats), compared to around 1 for a fairly standard desktop chip.
It's fun to play around with seeing how much you can cram into tiny programs, and sometimes it's useful. But most of the time, it's more sensible to write portable, readable code. And it would be loads of fun to play around with chip designs, but you can't just optimize for bogoMIPS and then claim effectively infinite performance by hand-waving over the I/O and programming for the freakish architecture. If you make bizarre, specialized chips you either have a realistic market or you're playing around. Chuck's just having fun, then mistaking fun for good product.
Worse, you're all mistaking an engineer at play, duplicating decades-old work, for someone doing cutting-edge research. (Ultratechnology indeed!)
There is nothing new about the idea of just putting multiple processors on one die, on a simple network. Nobody does it because it's too much of a pain to use. Parallel programming isn't easy. But it sure is an easy way to inflate your MIPS rating.
There's nothing new about tiny MISC chips. They're too hard to program and require too much cache to execute large programs efficiently. Go back in time a bit, and you'll see similar things all over the place. Look around the rest of the embedded industry, and you'll see equally small, cheap, efficient chips, with adequate performance and all sorts of different nifty specialized features, that don't require you to code everything from scratch.
There's nothing new about tiny programs. You can only do so much with tiny programs! The real world is messy, and dealing with everyone else's standards and bugs makes programs necessarily big (and lazy programmers make programs unnecessarily huge, but that's another issue).
a 2400 MIPS cpu you can route gigabit datastreams on separare I/O pins and do megahertz analog signals on other I/O pins at the same time.
Yes, it will make a very lovely piece of wire, once you build up a whole supercomputing architecture around it to feed it these gigabit datastreams, though there's no room for routing tables or anything like that.
Think about it. By sticking to stuff that requires closed-source (or preferably Windows-only) code, and requiring things like registration, you protect yourself very effectively from the /. effect.
I mean really, how many things really benefit from being featured on slashdot?
The point is that you couldn't use OKAD to design the next Athlon. It's only suitable for tiny chips. On the other hand, you could design anything Chuck's done on any CMOS CAD. OKAD is nothing special.
And no, nothing Chuck Moore has done compares remotely to the raw hardware performance of a typical desktop machine, with hardware cache management, pipelining, and goodies like floating point support. Let alone supercomputing hardware. His real-world performance is not all that exceptional for embedded chips.
I don't care how many MIPs he claims. He doesn't even provide hardware support for multiplication! As soon as you try to do anything that requires number-crunching performance, such as graphics beyond a simple bit-blt (as in his "Windows" demo, which is a slight step up from the NES sprite engine, and even with 1 toy app pushes the limits of his chip's RAM capacity), you'll find out just how ridiculously inflated his claims are. He's regularly out by at least 2 orders of magnitude, and with 25X probably 3 or 4.
And it's not like his stuff is rock-solid reliable. Think "thermal bug." And then think about what else would show up after someone orders a run of 1,000,000 chips.