Actually, the development of the microprocessor was outsourced from Japan to the US. Intel had a contract from a Japanese calculator company called Busicom to develop a set of chips for a new calculator. One of Intel's engineers realized that it was easier to build one programmable chip than several function-specific chips, and the 4004 was born.
Intel realized what they had done and bought the rights back from Busicom for $60K. Busicom went broke soon after. See Intel's version of the story.
This is what they patented, right? No, this isn't what they patented. While I think all software patents are stupid, this looks original to me. What they patented was to generate an autocomplete dataset to be sent to the client device. (They are targeting mobile devices) When a user types in two (or three, or one, depending) characters, the client code will check the dataset and try the autocomplete.
It isn't an earthshattering invention; I suspect half the programmers on the planet could come up with this idea in less than an hour given the right problem statement. Amazon got there first. Under the rules of the game, they get the patent. If you don't like the rules, change them.
Surely it is not. They are listening to signals picked up outside the US. US spy agencies have no restrictions on passive (as in just listening) activies outside the US. A Saudi national living in a cave on the Pakistan/Afghanistan borders has no rights in the US. That changes when he enters the country.
Before you get in a huff, realize that most nations gather information abroad if it is important to their national security, it is just that the US has the best technology right now.
This occured to me yesterday in the shower, how does the RIAA know what these two people downloaded? Do they have gigantic sniffers on the backbone (ala carnivore) or are they breaking into people's computers to rummage around hard drives?
Neither posibility feels good. And if this isn't illegal, shoudln't it be?
The strange thing is, the levers of democracy do work. It sometimes takes a while, but wrongs get righted. The Jim Crow laws were abolished. Discontent with the VietNam war forced Lyndon Johnson from office.
No. The automatic declassification takes 25 years, so the documents scheduled for declassification this year would be from 1978 and before. If this is intended to protect individuals, it would be from the Nixon/Ford administrations.
I checked dice for jobs in that part of Montana (area code 406), looking for hits on any of java, c, c++, object oriented, or perl. I got 3 hits, none in Billings. Sr. linux admin going for $40-50K.
Sorry friend, if you take a call center job, you will likely never get a coding job. You see, while you cool your heels talking to angry users, your s/w skills atrophy, and there are hordes of undergraduates learning skills that are new since you graduated. And when they graduate, they will work for less than you want.
Hiring managers (I know, I have been one) will see you as a call center person, not a developer.
It's a bitch to be obselete at 23, but this is a tough industry
It seems to me that whatever changes strong winds make in the earth's rotation must be temporary because of the conservation of angular momentum. When the wind pick up, the earth slows down. Wehn the winds die down, the earth speeds up again.
If you really want to get agitated about the earth's rotation slowing down, consider the moon. Tides act as a brake on the earth/moon system. So the rotation of the earth slows, and the moon (to conserve angular momentum) moves ever so slowly away from the earth.
If you post certain kinds of encryption software, expect a visit by the FBI.
Have you never noticed those labels on software packages that say "not for export outside the US and Canada?" I am pretty sure that reflects the strength of the encryption in the product.
You seem to think that all the interference would be heading toward the military systems. What do you think a couple megawatts (pulsed on for 2 microseconds, 500 times a second) will do to the average WiFi equiped laptop?
All my information is 30 years old, but back then 5 MHz was used mostly for fire control systems. Once, the trainees at the electronics tech school on Treasure Island made the mistake of actually radiating the radar they were working on. When it swept by the PX, all the camera flashbulbs and all the flourescent lights exploded.
So do you really save anything with this kind of outsourcing? If I have to define everything right down to data structures, it seems to me writing the code myself is likely easier than trying to communicate all of my detailed decisions to people half a world away, who don't understand my colloquial speech.
A few years back Ed Yourdon was tearing around the country telling everyone that the American programmer was doomed by cheap offshore labor. It hasn't happened yet, and it won't. Offshore outsourcing may work in special circumstances, but it will usually fail. Just because of the nature of software development.
Of course that won't stop bosses from trying to take advantage of low offshore salaries.
It depends on the mission of the ship. I am pretty sure that the mission of this ship is coastal defense. For that mission her stealtiness is much less important than her cruising speed, 30 knots, and the range of her antiship weapon, 160 miles. That would let her leave port and, in half a day, be in position to attack a carrier battle group before the CV was in range to launch an attack on Russia. She would be able to use land-based air assets to give her targeting information to allow her to fire her missles long before she could detect the CV with her own sensors.
I think you are expecting the Europeans to behave like Americans.
In the case of NASA, there was a plan to have huge (school bus size) satellites with 18 (or 23, I've forgotten) instruments on them. The reason for having so many instruments on one bird was to gather sychronous (some time, same place) data, making corelations much easier to establish, and allowing bettter science. Unfortunately, from '92 to '94 the budget got cut from $15 billion to (IIRC) $4 billion. This is when NASA's PR flacks started the "smaller is better" campaign. I always suspected that the budget was cut to keep the project from discovering anything that would support the hypothesis that human activity is causing global warming. Keep the project alive but crippled so the pols can say "We need better science," and the project isn't capable of doing better science.
Satellite: Shows possibility to discover clear signs of changes in earth's environment.
Politicians: Knowing who their contributors are, guts sattelite project.
Net Results: Nothing
It is sad to see NASA give up its palce as the premier place for space science. I'm glad the ESA is taking up the slack.
PS The NASA project soldiers on. See http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/
"If the government is a government of the people and for the people, there should be no need for things to be classified from the people."
Are you arguing that it was wrong during WWII of the US and Britain to classify the fact that both the German and Japanese codes had been broken?
"Worry about our plans falling into others hands? Not really, because the others either know the plans already or that we should have plans that are so fool proof that knowing them will show the other side the invetablity of their actions will lead to them losing."
When you play poker, do turn all your cards face up before the betting starts?
There is a lot of hysteria here about the erosion of rights. I am a bit hysterical about it myself. But remember that the US is very frightened right now. We are effectively at war. And if you read history, you will learn that the US has often suspended rights during wartime.
Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus (the granddady of all rights) during the civil war!
But once the country feels safe again, rights get restored. It feels crappy now, and it may be the end of the Republic, but things may get better later.
Re:Is there a life expectancy?
on
Autonomic Computing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The question of why we age is still open, but the accumulation of damage theory doesn't move me. It doesn't explain why mice live a few years, dogs 10, cats 20, humans 80, and galapagos tortises hundreds. (all numbers approximate)
There is also a phenomenon called apoptosis, which is the spontaneous death of seemingly healthy cells. It is part of the body's self-regulation -- cancer seems to be, in some sense, a failure of the apoptosis mechanism.
So we may have software vendors building, instead of planned obsolescence, apoptosis into products. They could even make it a feature -- if nothing ever dies, evolution stops.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the development of the microprocessor was outsourced from Japan to the US. Intel had a contract from a Japanese calculator company called Busicom to develop a set of chips for a new calculator. One of Intel's engineers realized that it was easier to build one programmable chip than several function-specific chips, and the 4004 was born.
Intel realized what they had done and bought the rights back from Busicom for $60K. Busicom went broke soon after.
See Intel's version of the story.
This is what they patented, right?
No, this isn't what they patented. While I think all software patents are stupid, this looks original to me. What they patented was to generate an autocomplete dataset to be sent to the client device. (They are targeting mobile devices)
When a user types in two (or three, or one, depending) characters, the client code will check the dataset and try the autocomplete.
It isn't an earthshattering invention; I suspect half the programmers on the planet could come up with this idea in less than an hour given the right problem statement. Amazon got there first. Under the rules of the game, they get the patent. If you don't like the rules, change them.
Surely this is illegal?
Surely it is not. They are listening to signals picked up outside the US. US spy agencies have no restrictions on passive (as in just listening) activies outside the US. A Saudi national living in a cave on the Pakistan/Afghanistan borders has no rights in the US. That changes when he enters the country.
Before you get in a huff, realize that most nations gather information abroad if it is important to their national security, it is just that the US has the best technology right now.
This occured to me yesterday in the shower, how does the RIAA know what these two people downloaded? Do they have gigantic sniffers on the backbone (ala carnivore) or are they breaking into people's computers to rummage around hard drives?
Neither posibility feels good. And if this isn't illegal, shoudln't it be?
Try arranging them on the surface of a sphere.
The strange thing is, the levers of democracy do work. It sometimes takes a while, but wrongs get righted. The Jim Crow laws were abolished. Discontent with the VietNam war forced Lyndon Johnson from office.
But it takes time, energy, and organization.
Expect a visit from the DMCA police!
No. The automatic declassification takes 25 years, so the documents scheduled for declassification this year would be from 1978 and before.
If this is intended to protect individuals, it would be from the Nixon/Ford administrations.
I checked dice for jobs in that part of Montana (area code 406), looking for hits on any of java, c, c++, object oriented, or perl. I got 3 hits, none in Billings.
Sr. linux admin going for $40-50K.
Sorry friend, if you take a call center job, you will likely never get a coding job. You see, while you cool your heels talking to angry users, your s/w skills atrophy, and there are hordes of undergraduates learning skills that are new since you graduated. And when they graduate, they will work for less than you want.
Hiring managers (I know, I have been one) will see you as a call center person, not a developer.
It's a bitch to be obselete at 23, but this is a tough industry
It seems to me that whatever changes strong winds make in the earth's rotation must be temporary because of the conservation of angular momentum. When the wind pick up, the earth slows down. Wehn the winds die down, the earth speeds up again.
If you really want to get agitated about the earth's rotation slowing down, consider the moon. Tides act as a brake on the earth/moon system. So the rotation of the earth slows, and the moon (to conserve angular momentum) moves ever so slowly away from the earth.
The author's name is Fred Brooks. And it wasn't just any project he ran, it was OS360. IBM knows a bit about OSs.
If you post certain kinds of encryption software, expect a visit by the FBI.
Have you never noticed those labels on software packages that say "not for export outside the US and Canada?" I am pretty sure that reflects the strength of the encryption in the product.
Because no matter how good a techie you are, if you can't convince the boss/customer/whoever, you lose.
You seem to think that all the interference would be heading toward the military systems. What do you think a couple megawatts (pulsed on for 2 microseconds, 500 times a second) will do to the average WiFi equiped laptop?
All my information is 30 years old, but back then 5 MHz was used mostly for fire control systems. Once, the trainees at the electronics tech school on Treasure Island made the mistake of actually radiating the radar they were working on. When it swept by the PX, all the camera flashbulbs and all the flourescent lights exploded.
Consider the impact on a Beowolf cluster!
So do you really save anything with this kind of outsourcing? If I have to define everything right down to data structures, it seems to me writing the code myself is likely easier than trying to communicate all of my detailed decisions to people half a world away, who don't understand my colloquial speech.
A few years back Ed Yourdon was tearing around the country telling everyone that the American programmer was doomed by cheap offshore labor. It hasn't happened yet, and it won't. Offshore outsourcing may work in special circumstances, but it will usually fail. Just because of the nature of software development.
Of course that won't stop bosses from trying to take advantage of low offshore salaries.
It depends on the mission of the ship. I am pretty sure that the mission of this ship is coastal defense. For that mission her stealtiness is much less important than her cruising speed, 30 knots, and the range of her antiship weapon, 160 miles. That would let her leave port and, in half a day, be in position to attack a carrier battle group before the CV was in range to launch an attack on Russia. She would be able to use land-based air assets to give her targeting information to allow her to fire her missles long before she could detect the CV with her own sensors.
I think you are expecting the Europeans to behave like Americans.
In the case of NASA, there was a plan to have huge (school bus size) satellites with 18 (or 23, I've forgotten) instruments on them. The reason for having so many instruments on one bird was to gather sychronous (some time, same place) data, making corelations much easier to establish, and allowing bettter science.
Unfortunately, from '92 to '94 the budget got cut from $15 billion to (IIRC) $4 billion. This is when NASA's PR flacks started the "smaller is better" campaign.
I always suspected that the budget was cut to keep the project from discovering anything that would support the hypothesis that human activity is causing global warming. Keep the project alive but crippled so the pols can say "We need better science," and the project isn't capable of doing better science.
Satellite: Shows possibility to discover clear signs of changes in earth's environment.
Politicians: Knowing who their contributors are, guts sattelite project.
Net Results: Nothing
It is sad to see NASA give up its palce as the premier place for space science. I'm glad the ESA is taking up the slack.
PS The NASA project soldiers on. See http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Oh good. 500 EEs, who know about as much about software as I do about circuit design. This is certainly going to help with goofy software patents.
(for all of you offended EEs, I actually do know a bit about circuit design)
"If the government is a government of the people and for the people, there should be no need for things to be classified from the people."
Are you arguing that it was wrong during WWII of the US and Britain to classify the fact that both the German and Japanese codes had been broken?
"Worry about our plans falling into others hands? Not really, because the others either know the plans already or that we should have plans that are so fool proof that knowing them will show the other side the invetablity of their actions will lead to them losing."
When you play poker, do turn all your cards face up before the betting starts?
There is a lot of hysteria here about the erosion of rights. I am a bit hysterical about it myself. But remember that the US is very frightened right now. We are effectively at war. And if you read history, you will learn that the US has often suspended rights during wartime. Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus (the granddady of all rights) during the civil war!
But once the country feels safe again, rights get restored. It feels crappy now, and it may be the end of the Republic, but things may get better later.
The question of why we age is still open, but the accumulation of damage theory doesn't move me. It doesn't explain why mice live a few years, dogs 10, cats 20, humans 80, and galapagos tortises hundreds. (all numbers approximate)
There is also a phenomenon called apoptosis, which is the spontaneous death of seemingly healthy cells. It is part of the body's self-regulation -- cancer seems to be, in some sense, a failure of the apoptosis mechanism.
So we may have software vendors building, instead of planned obsolescence, apoptosis into products. They could even make it a feature -- if nothing ever dies, evolution stops.