I don't have the Gnome-box here in order to try. Until now I saw the 'delete' as grayed out.
Fully agree with you coming from XP and finding Gnome to be okay. So did I. You are wrong w.r.t. KDE as 'looking to much like Windows' in my case. It doesn't look like Windows at all here. This is why I prefer it: I can set it to look whatever I want to. I have no single panel here, I have no start button or so. I have all full-screen windows without frame nor border here. Any move to another application is done by a mouse-edge event, and each application sits on its own desktop. Should I need anything else, I access the dashboard (which is like a 2-dimensional panel, if you like to call it so).
move everything from the panel at the top to the one at the bottom (this is how I like to work and I'm not letting Gnome designers tell me what's best for me) and remove the top panel
That doesn't even work for Gnome TWO. I have a Cairo-dock, but the top panel has no way to be removed. Except you edit the Registry (of Gnome). And since I don't edit registries, because that's just a bad habit, I switched to KDE. Which is far, far, from perfect; but at least the developers are aware of that fact, and therefore don't dare telling me how I have to work.
"standardised proprietary client solutions" is what the article says they want to return to. By all means, they didn't get it: It is not about the software; but about standards. If I were a German taxpayer, I'd be up in arms: From now onwards, again, taxpayers' monies are used to produce documents that are inaccessible in future. Ask your parents, how nicely old MS-Office documents can opened in newer software versions: zero and nada.
Something smells corrupt here.
Oh, no, I suddenly - struck by enlightenment - understand: the crybabies ("missing functionality, interoperability") can't play Crysis on their workstations.
It fucking is, to use one of your terms. Lying. In most cases it is not lying outright, sorts of "I will do anything to prove that the extract of a gland of the common fly cures cancer." But once you incidentally find some cases of unexpected recoveries, and some of those one way or another had come into contact with said extract, and you are looking for your PhD-topic, or tenure, or after your publication record; or just - and that is human - our own sense of importance; the perspective often starts to change. Having been in science for 30 years, I can confirm that many, if not most of us, are simply taken in by our own ideas, and would love to see them working. And then we tend to overlook our mistakes, unclean test-tubes, generally non-representative samples of the population. Humans have been able to - and very much willing - deceive themselves. The borderline becomes permeable, the transgressions from 100% sane and solid to malleable and soft start to occur. An outlier is found and eliminated. And we still in principle believe in our work. And in the ensuing publication, we cannot present our data as 'maybe only once, only here, and only this time'. Because then our peers will reject it. So we will have to be silent about our own, possible, doubts. Still not lying? Suppressing the truth is not lying?
That's why we have to go back to the scientific method, that has been made use of so graciously and repeatedly to put down, e.g. homeopathy: If the result cannot be reproduced by independent research, it cannot be accepted. Only, to please ourselves, for our own 'scientific research' we don't have to apply the same rules? That's what I'd call cheating.
A kingdom for a hunter-gatherers' village! Yep, including one that you consider 'with spoiled ground'. This is nothing compared to the shit that we dump into our ground continuously. Their shit would let stuff grow much much better. If in doubt, I can attach a picture of the area in our garden, where the cats shit. The grass is greener and grows three times faster.
I'd move into that village of your description any moment.
Absolutely. I dunno if it was in the 1990 for me. I'd rather put that period into the 1970-1980. At least in Europe. In those days, I used to live a few kilometers away from the iron curtain and some nuke could have been started all the time. But the civil liberties were greater (maybe not for homosexuals); much less streamlining, no need for political correctness, more enjoying one's life. Yep, aside from the Cold War we tend to agree. And computer science was still computer science; not the brainless clickety-click of the IT of today.
How about GPS so we could, y'know, get the computer back?
I don't know about the States, but where we live, we had people contacting the police about stolen cars, and the answer was along the lines of "So, if you know where your car is, then why not go and just repossess it!?" Though I do vaguely remember a Slashot story about some stolen laptop, and zero enforcement due to the laptop being used in some other of the 50 states.
It seems nobody has yet posted this, so I think I should:
Next, might see a return to the old-style cold-war export restrictions. Instead of not exporting, it will be only Intel to be exported legally. Then all those jerks running some nuke factories in Iran or North Korea become much less of a danger, since their facilities can be disabled remotely whenever the State Department feels like. Then the Barack Obamas and Sarah Palins will get an additional emergency button added to their repositories: The infamous 'D'-button, enabling the 'D'isablement of all CPUs in the axes of evils.
Thank you. What a nice difference, since usually people are on Slashdot to disagree...;)
This is exactly one of the total weaknesses of the patent system in the last decade(s). I can guarantee you, that the 'good old days' at least in this respect were actually good. I know what I am talking about, I used to be patent examiner. People tend to overlook that before 1982, the USPTO outright refused to grant any software patents. The old Dutch system did not allow amendments, the patent was granted or rejected 'as is'.
Forgive for a somewhat lengthy post here, but this patent is a very bad one with respect to what we agreed upon. As I wrote somewhere else, probably it was rejected in the first round for total obviousness, and then these famous 5 to 80 ms came in. This is a trick often used by applicants, to still make it work: add some item that is not anticipated in the literature, and the examiner, according to case law, needs to grant. This actually is outrageous, because it is not any technical , nor inventive detail. It rather is a result. So it is not a disclosure in its genuine sense. This is one of the reasons why the system is broken: a one-size-fits-all description, spiced up with some exotic thingy, and you get your patent.
let me close with an awkward example of my own experience. There was an application, where 'applicant' found that in an electrical two-pole of resistor in series with capacitor (RC), "applicant's research" had found a better image reproduction quality, and better colours on a CRT, if one changes the sequence from RC to CR. That is, the "processing sequence" in this two-pole with the signal hitting the capacitor first, would be "advantageous". We, electrical engineers, fought tooth and nail to reject it; in vain. Patent law does not accept standard text books that show the opposite of what is claimed. The only reference that can be cited against this hilarious application would be, if some fantasist had filed the same thing earlier.
Oh, sorry, another fact: The International Patent Classification has a specific class for patent granted for perpetuum mobile. No kidding. Though unfortunately I don't remember it, and am too lazy to look it up.
I really wonder, how the heterogeneous clients and the dynamical resource allocation and deallocation are done by the underlying 'cloud' application. At least, not in the claims.
That's the downside of all the IT, I guess, in these days. It is so easy to drag&drop a bunch of references forth and back. A bunch that is just classified in the same patent class, and/or contains a specific set of keywords. In my early days, those reports had to be done manually, in handwriting. I can guarantee you that we did read carefully, rather than blindly insert. And so did the applicants. We read the claims, all of them, carefully, and extracted all the features in the claims, independent and dependent. And then we were looking for prior art for these features, and not just for the features as such, but in a suitable combination within the field of the application. So I would not cite any capacitor, except if in connection with a power supply. Except, of course, there had never been any capacitor mentioned with a power supply, then I had to cite a capacitor as such. This way, I would find all power supplies with a capacitor and the inventive step. Then the application can be rejected. If the inventive step is not found in all the documents of 'power supply and capacitor' it is granted. In a nutshell. So, studying the underlying claims of the patent under discussion here, there are less than 10 features. The independent claims all cover some game controller for moving game elements, to be played over some network, with distributed resources. There are surely documents that contain all of this in a single document. What other features? WiFi, 5 GHz, RAID, 801.11. That's another few. Then, the crucial one, about the compression and the 5-80 milliseconds. Is this found somewhere in the most pertinent ones? Otherwise it needs another reference.
Yes, I am too lazy to read the communication between examiner and applicant in this case, but I bet that the discussion was - as it always is - about the most pertinent documents, less than a handful. Though I am sure, in these days, examiners also have ready-made paragraphs where they only have to enter a document number, and can assemble their communication within minutes from a library of text passages. No regrets to be out of that type of business!
"[...]the Office is aware of and evaluates the teachings of all information material to patentability. Each individual associated with the filing and prosecution of a patent application has a duty of candor and good faith in dealing with the Office, which includes a duty to disclose to the Office all information known to that individual to be material to patentability as defined in this section."
This is the general blurb. Now we get more specific ['as defined in this section']: "The Office encourages applicants to carefully examine: [...] (2) The closest information over which individuals associated with the filing or prosecution of a patent application believe any pending claim patentably defines[...]"
'closest' is a rather unambiguous term. It is not dumping the content of the patent office's database, or at least of all documents in the same patent class, unfiltered to the office. And so should the office do, if not lazy: evaluate
We are on Slashdot, so everyone is expected to be a dick. You're welcome. Maybe in the times of my former career this was considered overdone? Actually, I really never saw those numbers in my times.
And though I am well aware that the applicant has to cite anything that he is aware of as prior art, I only can consider this hilarious. It rather shows a bad (if not lazy) behaviour on the side of applicant/attorney/examiner: To my best understanding, as well as common sense, it is the task not to blindly plug whatever has similar keywords, but intelligently identify the most pertinent documents. Which usually cannot be more than a handful. No wonder the USPTO grants so much crap these days, when seemingly quantity beats quality hands down. The independent claims are pretty clear, containing a handful of features. So a good examiner will be able to pinpoint not more than around 3 most pertinent documents, and base the argumentation on those. If your 'recently issued patents' have more than 200 references, no wonder the quality of the USPTO has gone south as south can be. That's the exact opposite of a sign of a quality examination and grant procedure.
And I am a former on my own resignation. After 6 years the facts were simply too overwhelming: the patent system in these days is anything but helping the individual inventor or the SME. It helps just one section: the multinational conglomerates. Nobody else, neither society nor consumers.
in my mind the implementation of OnLive is doing something a lot more complicated than X forwarding (the idea, of course, is the same).
It's working over a contended public network with a large number of hops with varying latencies, doing low latency compression on HD resolutions at reasonably low bandwidth.
As I understand it, wifi adds more unreliability (packet loss and latency) to the network path
Yes, and? Though I am not totally against patents, but then these complicated methods ought to be filed, not the resulting off-the-shelf product.
Congrats to the teams and all, I'm sure there were a lot of technologically challenging problems that had to be solved (e.g. compression).
I wouldn't know yet, why one should congratulate them in any way. If they solved complex problems, please, by all means, file patent applications that specify the problems and the solutions employed. But this is more like BMW filing for a car, engine, 4 wheels, steering, with a length not shorter than 387 cam and not longer than 422 cm. No congratulations due for this patent, sorry.
And how are those cloud-relevant, please? I can only read 'network' and 'multi-player' in there. And, nope, multiple wireless transceivers are not much of a cloud to me, except we agreed to water down the whole cloud concept to distributed computing.
Except for using a wired network rather than wifi -- which is immaterial to the issue at hand -- tell me, how exactly did that differ from this cherished patent?
I am pretty sure your question is purely rhetorical. Though, I could question if you really had a compression unit in your game that had a latency between 5 and 80 milliseconds? Chances are you didn't. How the inclusion of that compression unit actually makes an invention is beyond me, however.
a compression unit for compressing the video game video with a latency of less than approximately 80 ms, but greater than about 5 ms;
which is the only part in here, I agree, that is not really off the shelf, so to say. I mean, it has probably to make with the latencies between the players. But what does it make a patent? Where are the technicalities in here??
So the patent wouldn't cover latencies outside this range?
No. But I guess, that about all 'high twitch-action' would fall into that range. And I secretly assume that's what the attorney put on the table as argument: chances are these numbers are not 'anticipated' in the list of cited documents.
Why this band only?
Not 'only'. It is a dependent claim, so the patent is valid in any frequency range, and specifically so in the range of 5 GHz.
The best thing altogether is the list of documents cited against this application: I stopped counting when I reached 100. Actually, having been patent examiner, I never ever before saw such a long list. How can the examiner seriously find the relevant elements comprised of aspects and features from more than 100 documents?? Just look at the claims, there are only 25; and many in principle repeatedly covering the wireless and wired connection. Plus on RAID array. Maybe the examiner and his assistant try to compete for the 'most ridiculous number of Cited References in any US patent ever'?
Good nite USPTO, you best are leveled and restarted from scratch!
Slashdot Mirror
Because if Gnome 3 turns out to be popular it would be DOA.
I can promise you: no need to worry about that
Nope it doesn't. Now the new panel can't be deleted, though I want it to go.
Done. Over with Gnome. And I was right, even in Gnome 2 this isn't possible.
Yes, you're right. It does work once another full panel is available.
I don't have the Gnome-box here in order to try. Until now I saw the 'delete' as grayed out.
Fully agree with you coming from XP and finding Gnome to be okay. So did I.
You are wrong w.r.t. KDE as 'looking to much like Windows' in my case. It doesn't look like Windows at all here. This is why I prefer it: I can set it to look whatever I want to. I have no single panel here, I have no start button or so. I have all full-screen windows without frame nor border here. Any move to another application is done by a mouse-edge event, and each application sits on its own desktop. Should I need anything else, I access the dashboard (which is like a 2-dimensional panel, if you like to call it so).
About Gnome 3 I'll google for way to:
That doesn't even work for Gnome TWO. I have a Cairo-dock, but the top panel has no way to be removed. Except you edit the Registry (of Gnome). And since I don't edit registries, because that's just a bad habit, I switched to KDE. Which is far, far, from perfect; but at least the developers are aware of that fact, and therefore don't dare telling me how I have to work.
"standardised proprietary client solutions" is what the article says they want to return to.
By all means, they didn't get it: It is not about the software; but about standards. If I were a German taxpayer, I'd be up in arms: From now onwards, again, taxpayers' monies are used to produce documents that are inaccessible in future. Ask your parents, how nicely old MS-Office documents can opened in newer software versions: zero and nada.
Something smells corrupt here.
Oh, no, I suddenly - struck by enlightenment - understand: the crybabies ("missing functionality, interoperability") can't play Crysis on their workstations.
Nitpicking, I know. Indonesia actually is (largest Muslim population), while Malaysia has an Islamic population of well below 20 million.
It fucking is, to use one of your terms. Lying.
In most cases it is not lying outright, sorts of "I will do anything to prove that the extract of a gland of the common fly cures cancer." But once you incidentally find some cases of unexpected recoveries, and some of those one way or another had come into contact with said extract, and you are looking for your PhD-topic, or tenure, or after your publication record; or just - and that is human - our own sense of importance; the perspective often starts to change. Having been in science for 30 years, I can confirm that many, if not most of us, are simply taken in by our own ideas, and would love to see them working. And then we tend to overlook our mistakes, unclean test-tubes, generally non-representative samples of the population. Humans have been able to - and very much willing - deceive themselves. The borderline becomes permeable, the transgressions from 100% sane and solid to malleable and soft start to occur. An outlier is found and eliminated. And we still in principle believe in our work. And in the ensuing publication, we cannot present our data as 'maybe only once, only here, and only this time'. Because then our peers will reject it. So we will have to be silent about our own, possible, doubts. Still not lying? Suppressing the truth is not lying?
That's why we have to go back to the scientific method, that has been made use of so graciously and repeatedly to put down, e.g. homeopathy: If the result cannot be reproduced by independent research, it cannot be accepted. Only, to please ourselves, for our own 'scientific research' we don't have to apply the same rules?
That's what I'd call cheating.
A kingdom for a hunter-gatherers' village! Yep, including one that you consider 'with spoiled ground'. This is nothing compared to the shit that we dump into our ground continuously. Their shit would let stuff grow much much better.
If in doubt, I can attach a picture of the area in our garden, where the cats shit. The grass is greener and grows three times faster.
I'd move into that village of your description any moment.
Absolutely. I dunno if it was in the 1990 for me. I'd rather put that period into the 1970-1980. At least in Europe. In those days, I used to live a few kilometers away from the iron curtain and some nuke could have been started all the time. But the civil liberties were greater (maybe not for homosexuals); much less streamlining, no need for political correctness, more enjoying one's life.
Yep, aside from the Cold War we tend to agree.
And computer science was still computer science; not the brainless clickety-click of the IT of today.
Okay, okay. I seem to get old. ... .
I for one was thinking 'whoosh'. But when the 'Flamebait' came around, I started to wonder
Okay, it was not very funny, but after all, I still consider it as adequate manner to drive the absurdity of the idea into the open.
How about GPS so we could, y'know, get the computer back?
I don't know about the States, but where we live, we had people contacting the police about stolen cars, and the answer was along the lines of "So, if you know where your car is, then why not go and just repossess it!?"
Though I do vaguely remember a Slashot story about some stolen laptop, and zero enforcement due to the laptop being used in some other of the 50 states.
This could mean several new clients for AMD
It seems nobody has yet posted this, so I think I should:
Next, might see a return to the old-style cold-war export restrictions. Instead of not exporting, it will be only Intel to be exported legally. Then all those jerks running some nuke factories in Iran or North Korea become much less of a danger, since their facilities can be disabled remotely whenever the State Department feels like.
Then the Barack Obamas and Sarah Palins will get an additional emergency button added to their repositories: The infamous 'D'-button, enabling the 'D'isablement of all CPUs in the axes of evils.
Thank you. What a nice difference, since usually people are on Slashdot to disagree ... ;)
This is exactly one of the total weaknesses of the patent system in the last decade(s). I can guarantee you, that the 'good old days' at least in this respect were actually good. I know what I am talking about, I used to be patent examiner. People tend to overlook that before 1982, the USPTO outright refused to grant any software patents. The old Dutch system did not allow amendments, the patent was granted or rejected 'as is'.
Forgive for a somewhat lengthy post here, but this patent is a very bad one with respect to what we agreed upon. As I wrote somewhere else, probably it was rejected in the first round for total obviousness, and then these famous 5 to 80 ms came in. This is a trick often used by applicants, to still make it work: add some item that is not anticipated in the literature, and the examiner, according to case law, needs to grant.
This actually is outrageous, because it is not any technical , nor inventive detail. It rather is a result. So it is not a disclosure in its genuine sense.
This is one of the reasons why the system is broken: a one-size-fits-all description, spiced up with some exotic thingy, and you get your patent.
let me close with an awkward example of my own experience. There was an application, where 'applicant' found that in an electrical two-pole of resistor in series with capacitor (RC), "applicant's research" had found a better image reproduction quality, and better colours on a CRT, if one changes the sequence from RC to CR. That is, the "processing sequence" in this two-pole with the signal hitting the capacitor first, would be "advantageous". We, electrical engineers, fought tooth and nail to reject it; in vain. Patent law does not accept standard text books that show the opposite of what is claimed. The only reference that can be cited against this hilarious application would be, if some fantasist had filed the same thing earlier.
Oh, sorry, another fact: The International Patent Classification has a specific class for patent granted for perpetuum mobile. No kidding. Though unfortunately I don't remember it, and am too lazy to look it up.
I really wonder, how the heterogeneous clients and the dynamical resource allocation and deallocation are done by the underlying 'cloud' application. At least, not in the claims.
Your term 'allegedly' is a nice word. Thanks.
That's the downside of all the IT, I guess, in these days. It is so easy to drag&drop a bunch of references forth and back. A bunch that is just classified in the same patent class, and/or contains a specific set of keywords. In my early days, those reports had to be done manually, in handwriting. I can guarantee you that we did read carefully, rather than blindly insert. And so did the applicants.
We read the claims, all of them, carefully, and extracted all the features in the claims, independent and dependent. And then we were looking for prior art for these features, and not just for the features as such, but in a suitable combination within the field of the application. So I would not cite any capacitor, except if in connection with a power supply. Except, of course, there had never been any capacitor mentioned with a power supply, then I had to cite a capacitor as such.
This way, I would find all power supplies with a capacitor and the inventive step. Then the application can be rejected. If the inventive step is not found in all the documents of 'power supply and capacitor' it is granted. In a nutshell.
So, studying the underlying claims of the patent under discussion here, there are less than 10 features. The independent claims all cover some game controller for moving game elements, to be played over some network, with distributed resources. There are surely documents that contain all of this in a single document. What other features? WiFi, 5 GHz, RAID, 801.11. That's another few. Then, the crucial one, about the compression and the 5-80 milliseconds. Is this found somewhere in the most pertinent ones? Otherwise it needs another reference.
Yes, I am too lazy to read the communication between examiner and applicant in this case, but I bet that the discussion was - as it always is - about the most pertinent documents, less than a handful.
Though I am sure, in these days, examiners also have ready-made paragraphs where they only have to enter a document number, and can assemble their communication within minutes from a library of text passages.
No regrets to be out of that type of business!
"[...]the Office is aware of and evaluates the teachings of all information material to patentability. Each individual associated with the filing and prosecution of a patent application has a duty of candor and good faith in dealing with the Office, which includes a duty to disclose to the Office all information known to that individual to be material to patentability as defined in this section."
This is the general blurb. Now we get more specific ['as defined in this section']:
"The Office encourages applicants to carefully examine:
[...]
(2) The closest information over which individuals associated with the filing or prosecution of a patent application believe any pending claim patentably defines[...]"
'closest' is a rather unambiguous term. It is not dumping the content of the patent office's database, or at least of all documents in the same patent class, unfiltered to the office. And so should the office do, if not lazy: evaluate
We are on Slashdot, so everyone is expected to be a dick. You're welcome.
Maybe in the times of my former career this was considered overdone? Actually, I really never saw those numbers in my times.
And though I am well aware that the applicant has to cite anything that he is aware of as prior art, I only can consider this hilarious. It rather shows a bad (if not lazy) behaviour on the side of applicant/attorney/examiner: To my best understanding, as well as common sense, it is the task not to blindly plug whatever has similar keywords, but intelligently identify the most pertinent documents. Which usually cannot be more than a handful.
No wonder the USPTO grants so much crap these days, when seemingly quantity beats quality hands down.
The independent claims are pretty clear, containing a handful of features. So a good examiner will be able to pinpoint not more than around 3 most pertinent documents, and base the argumentation on those.
If your 'recently issued patents' have more than 200 references, no wonder the quality of the USPTO has gone south as south can be. That's the exact opposite of a sign of a quality examination and grant procedure.
And I am a former on my own resignation. After 6 years the facts were simply too overwhelming: the patent system in these days is anything but helping the individual inventor or the SME. It helps just one section: the multinational conglomerates. Nobody else, neither society nor consumers.
in my mind the implementation of OnLive is doing something a lot more complicated than X forwarding (the idea, of course, is the same).
It's working over a contended public network with a large number of hops with varying latencies, doing low latency compression on HD resolutions at reasonably low bandwidth.
As I understand it, wifi adds more unreliability (packet loss and latency) to the network path
Yes, and? Though I am not totally against patents, but then these complicated methods ought to be filed, not the resulting off-the-shelf product.
Congrats to the teams and all, I'm sure there were a lot of technologically challenging problems that had to be solved (e.g. compression) .
I wouldn't know yet, why one should congratulate them in any way. If they solved complex problems, please, by all means, file patent applications that specify the problems and the solutions employed.
But this is more like BMW filing for a car, engine, 4 wheels, steering, with a length not shorter than 387 cam and not longer than 422 cm. No congratulations due for this patent, sorry.
And how are those cloud-relevant, please? I can only read 'network' and 'multi-player' in there.
And, nope, multiple wireless transceivers are not much of a cloud to me, except we agreed to water down the whole cloud concept to distributed computing.
Except for using a wired network rather than wifi -- which is immaterial to the issue at hand -- tell me, how exactly did that differ from this cherished patent?
I am pretty sure your question is purely rhetorical.
Though, I could question if you really had a compression unit in your game that had a latency between 5 and 80 milliseconds? Chances are you didn't. How the inclusion of that compression unit actually makes an invention is beyond me, however.
a compression unit for compressing the video game video with a latency of less than approximately 80 ms, but greater than about 5 ms;
which is the only part in here, I agree, that is not really off the shelf, so to say. I mean, it has probably to make with the latencies between the players.
But what does it make a patent? Where are the technicalities in here??
So the patent wouldn't cover latencies outside this range?
No. But I guess, that about all 'high twitch-action' would fall into that range. And I secretly assume that's what the attorney put on the table as argument: chances are these numbers are not 'anticipated' in the list of cited documents.
Why this band only?
Not 'only'. It is a dependent claim, so the patent is valid in any frequency range, and specifically so in the range of 5 GHz.
The best thing altogether is the list of documents cited against this application: I stopped counting when I reached 100. Actually, having been patent examiner, I never ever before saw such a long list. How can the examiner seriously find the relevant elements comprised of aspects and features from more than 100 documents??
Just look at the claims, there are only 25; and many in principle repeatedly covering the wireless and wired connection. Plus on RAID array.
Maybe the examiner and his assistant try to compete for the 'most ridiculous number of Cited References in any US patent ever'?
Good nite USPTO, you best are leveled and restarted from scratch!
What, exactly, is there in 4.8 that there isn't in 3.6? Probably a decent amount of stuff, but nothing that made me say "I have to install that".
Right. Though you need to do that for security reasons. At least, that's why I'm doing it.