Some of those patents will expire soon. Furthermore, it seems feasible to work around them. And as a last resort, you can leave out that small piece of functionality and allow people to plug in a small dynamically loadable library that they can license from some third party (with a simple default implementation).
To each their own. I think a lot of the infatuation with Photoshop is analogous to Microsoft Word--it's simply what people are used to, and there is a lot of third party support for it (books, plug-ins, seminars, etc.). And Photoshop has so many features that it fills a lot of different niches, even if more specialized programs for each niche might be a better solution.
If you (or your friend) want something like Photoshop on Linux, don't just complain, do something about it. Write down what features you use and want in a tool, participate in a project like the Gimp, contribute code, key-bindings, and ideas. For open source software, it's very simple: software gets the features that the people who contribute to it want.
The original poster was talking about shared vehicles on a PRT system, but as you have (obliquely) pointed out, a communal PRT system can always allow private ownership of vehicles to run on that system, although the system would have to cover the entire city to make that desirable.
On a PRT system, you don't own the cars, but you use them privately and individually. I suggest you and the other respondent actually read the web sites that I pointed to.
On the other hand, use of smart cards as a payment mechanism, combined with suitable privacy protection, would allow for people who encounter a vandalised communal pod to hit a button that sends it off for cleaning, and the most recent users smart cards get flagged for monitoring or even arrest.
That is the idea. Traditionally, vandalism seems to have been less of a problem with shared personal transportation than people think. The fact that they need to identify themselves personally in order to get into the vehicle seems to be an excellent deterrent.
There are plenty of e-mail mining tools in development. This particular work takes one particular approach to mining the data. Whether this approach will turn out to be useful remains to be seen.
The idea behind Opteron is to build off of the Latin root optimus meaning best or if you play with the translation a bit you get optimal unit or flagship.
The first thing that comes to my mind is "optional", which is perhaps not so good for the company holding the second place in the market. Maybe they should have called it the "Superon".
Incidentally, I wonder how many people relalize that "durus" means "hard" in Latin, so "Duron" was kind of suggestive...
Well, then let's get rid of the personal automobile immediately! After all, the personal automobile is even more dangerous. In addition to entering it often in dimly lit parking lots, unlike PRT, personal automobiles are not monitored by cameras, can't be tracked by GPS, and can be commandeered by criminals into the most remote locations. Personal automobiles are obviously highly dangerous! Abolish them immediately!
Too bad they are thinking "big 1960's style public transportation".
A monorail system like Personal Rapid Transit would have been so much nicer. See also here.
Are all the features available from Linux? Are the drivers open source, or are they semi-closed, like nVidia's? How good is OpenGL performance on Linux?
Of course, if everyone is reading copies of your columns, articles, and books, you get... nothing. And that's the point. You've become a famous, but hungry, author.
That's a bad point because, for practical purposes, people can and do copy columns and articles widely already, yet the authors are still getting paid. Why? Because newspapers, on-line news sites, and other places have found other ways of making money: through advertising, though providing convenient access, through providing timely and reliable information, and through providing databases. The music industry should do the same and get out of the hair of the consumer.
But I think a "functioning society" is not absolutely correlated with government policies.
Nothing in the real world is "absolutely correlated" with anything.
There are plenty of examples of societies with lousy governmental policies and, yet, some fine, upstanding good citizens.
Likewise, there are places with progressive, enlightened governmental policies where, nevertheless, criminals can be found.
Crime and terrorism isn't about existence or non-existence, it's about statistics and frequency. And the US statistics are lousy.
It would be convenient if government policies were so effective, but my observation is that they are only roughly correlated with society's behavior.
Government is one of the mechanisms by which culture is made. And, in a democracy, government is the mechanism by which culture acts. It's the one place where culture becomes visible and where it can be changed.
I'm sorry, but Office v. X for Macintosh is not "Windows software". Even if they meant "Microsoft software", it's still blackmail and anticompetitive. Should they be able to charge $42 per Linux machine or Palm handheld if they write minesweeper for those platforms?
You never read magazines? Or even newspapers? How about that box of cookies? The package your latest computer game came in? Music CDs?
No, generally, I don't. News is now conveniently available on-line, and all the other stuff is just packaging. Fancy packaging generally suggests a lack of good content to me, and publishers would be better off keeping things simple as far as I'm concerned.
The fact that it's free should not mean that you should have to be a nerd to use it. Good useability is probably more important than correct functionality.
Oh, but it does. For commercial software, you pay other people to program what you want. For free software, you implement yourself what you want, an option closed to the non-programming public. That makes users of free software nerds.
Furthermore, what long-term incentive do developers of free software have to build software that's less useful for themselves and more useful to the general public?
People only have one locus of attention, it is easier to use an interface that makes the options visible in a clear manner rather than making you guess at it, the time taken to hit a target is directly related to the distance distance to the object and the size of the object, etc, etc. It's all been documented, go do some reading on it.
That's a mix of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and mis-applied cognitive science results. There is no indication whatsoever that applying ideas universally lead to user satisfaction or even overall improved user performance. For example, most of the programs I am most effective and comfortable with display none of their options; sacrificing screen real-estate to displaying options would decrease their usability for me.
There are two things HCI needs. The first is less of a reliance on pseudo-science: while cognitive science results are valid within their domain, they are completely misapplied in HCI. The second is a clear understanding that people differ widely in their preferences, styles, and interests. Maybe you like the stuff Microsoft and Lotus's highly-paid UI designers put out, but I find it awful and ineffective.
By your argument, one size of car or one size of clothing would fit everybody as well. Well, it doesn't, and for HCI researchers and UI designers to pretend that it does is merely arrogant.
Sure, developers write things for themselves. Developers write things for their co-workers. But do developers of Free Software really go out and research the goals of their users?
You answered your own question: because free software developers develop for themselves, they know the goals of their users. With the exception of some messianic and confused free software developers that see themselves in some odd race with Microsoft, it's a good arrangement. Let's not spoil it by making free software useless for its primary audience by trying to cater to an audience that couldn't care less.
we use ultra-high-end hardware solutions from Heidelberg, AGFA, ABDick, Kodak and the like that don't change at the rate of OS architecture.
What's all that stuff good for? Almost all printed matter that I come across that is actually worth reading is black-and-white, has a simple layout, simple fonts, and simple typesetting. High-end typesetting seems like an obsession akin to high-end sports cars or expensive antiques. And for high-quality color images, I rather go on-line.
They only have to distribute the patches/sources if they distribute the binaries outside their organization. If it's for internal use, they can do whatever they want and keep it secret.
It doesn't make sense to give the Intellectual Property away. Your company exists to make profit. I highly doubt giving away your IP is somehow going to make you more profit than you lose.
Donating IP to an open source project gives you company visibility, good will, attracts programmers, invites enhancements from other users, and in many cases reduces your maintenance costs. That often beats letting the stuff sit in a drawer, where you derive exactly zero benefit for it, or even have to pay for continually patching it into open source software.
No, contributing code or ideas to open source projects isn't always a financial win, but it makes a lot of sense much more often than you suggest.
But Microsoft has put a new spin on the agreement, requiring an "institution-wide commitment." That means the district must include in its count not only the PCs, but all the iMacs and Power Macs that might conceivably use Windows software.
If this isn't blackmail and anti-competitive, I don't know what is.
Huh? Drivers for Linux are already out, and they work well. There are also plenty of games for these cards that work on Linux, as well as many engineering and scientific applications.
There are plenty of places in the world where safety is not a problem. They have security mechanisms that work well traditionally: liveable communities, functioning social networks, police officers from the community, equality of opportunity, low economic disparities, etc.
Trying to substitute cheap technology for a functioning society is the wrong path. You can put in cameras to detect potential criminals, but that doesn't get at the root of the problem. Crime and violence are the result of failed government policies. Cameras won't make you secure, and neither will minimum wage security gaurds or a stressed police force.
The cynic is you: rather than trying to prevent crime at the root, you give up and want throw more and more people into jail.
The trouble is, humans are inefficient and expensive, and their "gut instincts" may be fallible.
The trouble is that people have too much confidence in the efficiency and infallibility of machines. A department store security guard that suspects you of being a shoplifter might be annoying, but he can't do anything until you actually shoplift.
Also, these kinds of machine vision applications are almost impossible to validate. Where do you get the training data from? How do you measure false alarm rate? Most likely, they will have to get trained by some person's judgement of what looks suspicious, which merely enshrines a fallible human judgment into perpetuity, inexactly at that.
The potential for false alarms is enormous. If you have some disability, carry a heavy package in an unusual way, or wear some strange outfit, this system is likely going to tag you as suspicious. Video cameras and computers have nowhere near the reasoning ability to figure out what is going on, or the resolution to even see the necessary details if they could.
The patent was filed in 1990 and issued in 1992 (number 5,171,534). According to the article, the invention was made in 1982, and Hood's lab was showing the devices and describing the process to visitors in the mid-to-late 1980's. That makes me wonder whether the patent is even valid: if you disclose your invention before filing, the patent is generally not valid.
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Some of those patents will expire soon. Furthermore, it seems feasible to work around them. And as a last resort, you can leave out that small piece of functionality and allow people to plug in a small dynamically loadable library that they can license from some third party (with a simple default implementation).
If you (or your friend) want something like Photoshop on Linux, don't just complain, do something about it. Write down what features you use and want in a tool, participate in a project like the Gimp, contribute code, key-bindings, and ideas. For open source software, it's very simple: software gets the features that the people who contribute to it want.
Thank goodness it isn't; I find Photoshop awful.
On a PRT system, you don't own the cars, but you use them privately and individually. I suggest you and the other respondent actually read the web sites that I pointed to.
On the other hand, use of smart cards as a payment mechanism, combined with suitable privacy protection, would allow for people who encounter a vandalised communal pod to hit a button that sends it off for cleaning, and the most recent users smart cards get flagged for monitoring or even arrest.
That is the idea. Traditionally, vandalism seems to have been less of a problem with shared personal transportation than people think. The fact that they need to identify themselves personally in order to get into the vehicle seems to be an excellent deterrent.
There are plenty of e-mail mining tools in development. This particular work takes one particular approach to mining the data. Whether this approach will turn out to be useful remains to be seen.
The first thing that comes to my mind is "optional", which is perhaps not so good for the company holding the second place in the market. Maybe they should have called it the "Superon".
Incidentally, I wonder how many people relalize that "durus" means "hard" in Latin, so "Duron" was kind of suggestive...
Well, then let's get rid of the personal automobile immediately! After all, the personal automobile is even more dangerous. In addition to entering it often in dimly lit parking lots, unlike PRT, personal automobiles are not monitored by cameras, can't be tracked by GPS, and can be commandeered by criminals into the most remote locations. Personal automobiles are obviously highly dangerous! Abolish them immediately!
Too bad they are thinking "big 1960's style public transportation". A monorail system like Personal Rapid Transit would have been so much nicer. See also here.
Are all the features available from Linux? Are the drivers open source, or are they semi-closed, like nVidia's? How good is OpenGL performance on Linux?
That's a bad point because, for practical purposes, people can and do copy columns and articles widely already, yet the authors are still getting paid. Why? Because newspapers, on-line news sites, and other places have found other ways of making money: through advertising, though providing convenient access, through providing timely and reliable information, and through providing databases. The music industry should do the same and get out of the hair of the consumer.
Nothing in the real world is "absolutely correlated" with anything.
There are plenty of examples of societies with lousy governmental policies and, yet, some fine, upstanding good citizens. Likewise, there are places with progressive, enlightened governmental policies where, nevertheless, criminals can be found.
Crime and terrorism isn't about existence or non-existence, it's about statistics and frequency. And the US statistics are lousy.
It would be convenient if government policies were so effective, but my observation is that they are only roughly correlated with society's behavior.
Government is one of the mechanisms by which culture is made. And, in a democracy, government is the mechanism by which culture acts. It's the one place where culture becomes visible and where it can be changed.
I'm sorry, but Office v. X for Macintosh is not "Windows software". Even if they meant "Microsoft software", it's still blackmail and anticompetitive. Should they be able to charge $42 per Linux machine or Palm handheld if they write minesweeper for those platforms?
No, generally, I don't. News is now conveniently available on-line, and all the other stuff is just packaging. Fancy packaging generally suggests a lack of good content to me, and publishers would be better off keeping things simple as far as I'm concerned.
For a desktop, you can plug in your mouse of choice. Too bad that all the Mac laptops still only have one button.
Oh, but it does. For commercial software, you pay other people to program what you want. For free software, you implement yourself what you want, an option closed to the non-programming public. That makes users of free software nerds.
Furthermore, what long-term incentive do developers of free software have to build software that's less useful for themselves and more useful to the general public?
That's a mix of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and mis-applied cognitive science results. There is no indication whatsoever that applying ideas universally lead to user satisfaction or even overall improved user performance. For example, most of the programs I am most effective and comfortable with display none of their options; sacrificing screen real-estate to displaying options would decrease their usability for me.
There are two things HCI needs. The first is less of a reliance on pseudo-science: while cognitive science results are valid within their domain, they are completely misapplied in HCI. The second is a clear understanding that people differ widely in their preferences, styles, and interests. Maybe you like the stuff Microsoft and Lotus's highly-paid UI designers put out, but I find it awful and ineffective.
By your argument, one size of car or one size of clothing would fit everybody as well. Well, it doesn't, and for HCI researchers and UI designers to pretend that it does is merely arrogant.
You answered your own question: because free software developers develop for themselves, they know the goals of their users. With the exception of some messianic and confused free software developers that see themselves in some odd race with Microsoft, it's a good arrangement. Let's not spoil it by making free software useless for its primary audience by trying to cater to an audience that couldn't care less.
What's all that stuff good for? Almost all printed matter that I come across that is actually worth reading is black-and-white, has a simple layout, simple fonts, and simple typesetting. High-end typesetting seems like an obsession akin to high-end sports cars or expensive antiques. And for high-quality color images, I rather go on-line.
They only have to distribute the patches/sources if they distribute the binaries outside their organization. If it's for internal use, they can do whatever they want and keep it secret.
Donating IP to an open source project gives you company visibility, good will, attracts programmers, invites enhancements from other users, and in many cases reduces your maintenance costs. That often beats letting the stuff sit in a drawer, where you derive exactly zero benefit for it, or even have to pay for continually patching it into open source software.
No, contributing code or ideas to open source projects isn't always a financial win, but it makes a lot of sense much more often than you suggest.
If this isn't blackmail and anti-competitive, I don't know what is.
Huh? Drivers for Linux are already out, and they work well. There are also plenty of games for these cards that work on Linux, as well as many engineering and scientific applications.
Trying to substitute cheap technology for a functioning society is the wrong path. You can put in cameras to detect potential criminals, but that doesn't get at the root of the problem. Crime and violence are the result of failed government policies. Cameras won't make you secure, and neither will minimum wage security gaurds or a stressed police force.
The cynic is you: rather than trying to prevent crime at the root, you give up and want throw more and more people into jail.
The trouble is that people have too much confidence in the efficiency and infallibility of machines. A department store security guard that suspects you of being a shoplifter might be annoying, but he can't do anything until you actually shoplift.
Also, these kinds of machine vision applications are almost impossible to validate. Where do you get the training data from? How do you measure false alarm rate? Most likely, they will have to get trained by some person's judgement of what looks suspicious, which merely enshrines a fallible human judgment into perpetuity, inexactly at that.
The potential for false alarms is enormous. If you have some disability, carry a heavy package in an unusual way, or wear some strange outfit, this system is likely going to tag you as suspicious. Video cameras and computers have nowhere near the reasoning ability to figure out what is going on, or the resolution to even see the necessary details if they could.
The patent was filed in 1990 and issued in 1992 (number 5,171,534). According to the article, the invention was made in 1982, and Hood's lab was showing the devices and describing the process to visitors in the mid-to-late 1980's. That makes me wonder whether the patent is even valid: if you disclose your invention before filing, the patent is generally not valid.