I know this is going to earn me plenty of foes, but here goes.
I think patents aid innovation. And I'm not just referring to the incentive of royalties. If the easiest or best known (or possibly the obvious) way of doing something is restricted, people and companies are motivated to come up with a new way of doing it.
Now, how a patented technology may remain dominant in a market with a superior, even free, rival technology available is a side effect of how business is done.
Considering GIF is about to go public domain, I'd rather have that as an option for animation than have to learn to propgram Flash. (Or even install the damn plugin.)
My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.
With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.
First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.)... they'll all run hideously slow. If you can, do you word processing as plain text. If you absolutely need formatting (and you're not handy with LaTeX and related apps like Lyx), use HTML. Raw code is good, but if that doesn't work for you, try Bluefish (requires X). Once you're on a desktop system, you can import it into OpenOffice or Word, where you can make any additional formatting changes you need.
If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.
If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus.
You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.
Naw...It can't be. Just wait; they'll point out all the people caught with camcorders. After all, if there are fewer versions of Harry Potter 3 available, I guess you'll have to go see it in theaters.
Re:Or not...
on
Hacking Quartz
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe I'm just not good at VB, but I got less flicker making my own animated screensavers on my old 286+QBASIC than I get with VB. (VB does make some of the job easier, though.)
Unfortunately, VB so spoiled me in elementary and middle school that I still can't sit down long enough to learn to combine C and GTK, or C++ and QT, or Perl and Tk. I have managed to do some stuff with C and SDL, though.
Re:Linus the writer?
on
Who Wrote Linux?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
when the salesman tells him it's just as good as Windows only cheaper?
If the salesman does that, he'll probably lose his job. I was at Best Buy yesterday...I was considering picking up VMWare and a copy of WinXP.
They didn't have VMWare. Looking around, I noticed they didn't even have any distribution of Linux. And no software at all that runs under Linux. (Unless you count games like RTCW where you download the binaries from the website.)
Stores aren't going to want to sell Linux machines until they can stock their shelves with software that will run on it. Which, ironically enough, is unecessary.
I actually wrote a paper on those in middle school. The problem with them is that the larger ones are very difficult to tune.
It turns out that if you have more than three layers (in other words, if you have any layers between the input and putput), you run into proplems in training when the network doesn't work as well as you want it to perform, but furthur cycles of your training algorithm don't seem to make it any better.
The comp.ai.neural-nets FAQ was my primary source for that paper. Read that if you're interested. (I felt like my brain went numb after a while back when writing the paper.)
Slashdot Mirror
Or just call any IP-benevolent inventor a "Wardak" ...
I know this is going to earn me plenty of foes, but here goes.
I think patents aid innovation. And I'm not just referring to the incentive of royalties. If the easiest or best known (or possibly the obvious) way of doing something is restricted, people and companies are motivated to come up with a new way of doing it.
Now, how a patented technology may remain dominant in a market with a superior, even free, rival technology available is a side effect of how business is done.
Actually, there have been many occasions where electors didn't vote for who they were expected to. A quick googling turned up this link.
A program I used to use called Neotrace does this...Not with the confidence ratings, though.
I remember when "Broadband" was used to refer to everything from a PRI to ISDN.
He probably wants to spin the CDs up some before launching them. (Thus the foam disc reference)
Considering GIF is about to go public domain, I'd rather have that as an option for animation than have to learn to propgram Flash. (Or even install the damn plugin.)
How about word processing software? Or college classes requiring you to write papers? Or every instance of a family singing "Happy Birthday"?
Game theory goes beyond just chess. It's the whole concept of reacting to changing stimuli to reach a specific goal...
(IANAE)
Computers do not settle for draws like humans do in face of complications.
Sure they can, if they're directed to minimize losses.
Personally, I'm curious why game theory software doesn't have the kinds of export restrictions that encryption software or computing hardware does.
If they're able to compile for the target architecture, neat. Imagine the escrow for the source code to that kind of gaming logic.
Except a human has this neat thing called intuition.
Your intuition can tell you things that will take you hours and hours to prove on paper. Or even in your head, following logic.
My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.
... they'll all run hideously slow. If you can, do you word processing as plain text. If you absolutely need formatting (and you're not handy with LaTeX and related apps like Lyx), use HTML. Raw code is good, but if that doesn't work for you, try Bluefish (requires X). Once you're on a desktop system, you can import it into OpenOffice or Word, where you can make any additional formatting changes you need.
With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.
First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.)
If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.
If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus.
You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.
That's all I can really think of ATM.
There's no good reason to defend industries tied tightly to obsolete technology.
Unless you're a politician, of course.
Naw...It can't be. Just wait; they'll point out all the people caught with camcorders. After all, if there are fewer versions of Harry Potter 3 available, I guess you'll have to go see it in theaters.
Maybe I'm just not good at VB, but I got less flicker making my own animated screensavers on my old 286+QBASIC than I get with VB. (VB does make some of the job easier, though.)
Unfortunately, VB so spoiled me in elementary and middle school that I still can't sit down long enough to learn to combine C and GTK, or C++ and QT, or Perl and Tk. I have managed to do some stuff with C and SDL, though.
It ain't a legend if you can verify it in Google.
Take the cross product of SCO and Dell? Gee, go in a whole new direction, why don't ya?
Weird...I was at the one in Grand Haven, MI, and they didn't have anything that ran on a non-MS PC.
And I have seen VMWare at BBs before. I don't remember which one, though.
when the salesman tells him it's just as good as Windows only cheaper?
If the salesman does that, he'll probably lose his job. I was at Best Buy yesterday...I was considering picking up VMWare and a copy of WinXP.
They didn't have VMWare. Looking around, I noticed they didn't even have any distribution of Linux. And no software at all that runs under Linux. (Unless you count games like RTCW where you download the binaries from the website.)
Stores aren't going to want to sell Linux machines until they can stock their shelves with software that will run on it. Which, ironically enough, is unecessary.
We had a similar problem, except it was a root server, and the DNS record was corrupted to never expire. Finally got it fixed, though.
LOL. Do you think He is still running the GA algorithm? Or was that done on Deep Thought?
I actually wrote a paper on those in middle school. The problem with them is that the larger ones are very difficult to tune.
It turns out that if you have more than three layers (in other words, if you have any layers between the input and putput), you run into proplems in training when the network doesn't work as well as you want it to perform, but furthur cycles of your training algorithm don't seem to make it any better.
The comp.ai.neural-nets FAQ was my primary source for that paper. Read that if you're interested. (I felt like my brain went numb after a while back when writing the paper.)
I didn't see any info on their implementation in the article...did I miss a link or something?
I'd be careful to say it's not the only purpose, but it's the best use of it I can think of. :)