Binary operations can be carried out by considering whatever values you have to be binary numbers, and working from there. Binary operations would probably have to be implemented like that somewhere, because they're quite useful...
Implementing binary operations using any base which isn't a power of two would, I suspect, be extremely painful...
But arithmetic and other operations wouldn't have to be based around binary logic; it seems like the circuits might get horribly difficult to reason about, but with decent computerised tools that's hardly a problem...
Well, I'd have to read the patent to be sure, but I'm guessing 'pulse-width modulation' means you turn the LEDs on and off rapidly with different 'on' times. Which is pretty obvious... it's the only way to get an apparently analogue variation in a binary system.
Indeed, I would be interested if someone can up with a source for that -- I've tried to come up with something on google, but the best I could find was an unsubstiantiated '5-10 years ago solar panels required more energy to make...etc...but I don't know about today'.
No -- they're investing major resources in lawyers. Read the article... you do not need 100 patents on controlling LEDs, nor do you need two full-time patent lawyers in a 75-employee company.
I would be surprised if more than one or two of those patents is nonobvious; certainly the major one mentioned in the article (blending LED colors to make -- gasp -- many different colors) is obvious. Even the author of the article complained about it.
Well, I'm damn sure Color Kinetics isn't getting any of my money. From the article:
The company holds 19 patents related to the control of LED lighting systems, and has filed for more than 100 additional patents. "We spend about a million dollars a year filing patents," says chief executive George Mueller. The company has two full-time patent lawyers in-house, and also works with the Boston firm of Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks.
And:
It'll be interesting to see whether Color Kinetics can exact a licensing fee from anyone who blends colored LEDs. Says Simms: "We haven't invested the fortune that we have in intellectual property without planning to defend it."
I'm not going to rant about this, because you've all heard it before. So I'll just sit here and fume silently...
I haven't actually seen anyone mention this yet, so, why not:-)
MSN Messenger is one of the pieces of 'bundled middleware' that is continuing to cause Microsoft legal troubles under antitrust laws... the last I heard things were moving forward in Europe to do something about it.
If there is ever going to be an antitrust ruling about messenger, I'm pretty sure this will make the ruling harder on Microsoft... maybe they'll have to give $200 million worth of software to schools instead of $150 million:-/
(I personally dislike messenger. Virtually everyone I know uses it simply because it came with Windows. This is the sort of thing antitrust laws are supposed to protect against...)
I get the impression the vast majority of systems that are still at risk belong to good old incompetent (through no fault of their own) home users. Contact and explain?... not likely to be very effective.
I started using Linux for coding about a year and a half ago, and switched to using it as my main OS a year ago.
I had various problems getting odd bits of hardware to work, etc, etc... nothing too serious. I found people were generally helpful. The one offputting thing that happened was this:
I use a chat program that I wrote under Delphi in Windows... making it pretty much impossible to port. Under Windows it binds to port 23 to let people connect to it with telnet... obviously impossible under Linux, but I didn't know that at the time:-)
Anyway. I asked how I could get around this -- and the person on IRC said, well, you could start it as root and drop priveleges. And then I said I wrote it and was running it under Wine... and the response was one of disbelief. Why I want to run anything under Wine?... it was 100% necessary to my switch to Linux, but they weren't interested.
So -- switching operating systems isn't easy, particular for a home user. The fact that I'm a compsci student, plus the fact that I was persistent, mean I made the switch okay. Much happier with what my computer can do now:-)... but you're absolutely right about the attitude of many current users. Relying on Windows doesn't mean you're stupid or weak; it's a tool like any other.
"I'm unaware of the [Microsoft] patch being available," said David Hugel, the deputy chief administrator of the MVA. "I've talked to our IT people and we weekly update the virus protection we do have, and this just happened to fall between those points when we had updated it and we didn't have the [new] update available yet."
No idea what most of this means, but it sounds very impressive:-)
First Defense
The complaint fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.
Second Defense
SCO's claims are barred because IBM has not engaged in any unlawful or unfair business practices, and IBM's conduct was privileged,performed in the exercise of an absolute right, proper and/or justified.
Third Defense
SCO lacks standing to pursue its claims against IBM.
Fourth Defense
SCO's claims are barred, in whole or in part, by the applicable statutes of limitations.
Fifth Defense
SCO's claims are barred, in whole or in part, by the economic-loss doctrine or the dependent-duty doctrine.
Sixth Defense
SCO's claims are barred by the doctrines of laches and delay.
Seventh Defense
SCO's claims are barred by the doctrines of waiver, estoppel and unclean hands.
Eighth Defense
SCO's claims are, in whole or in part, pre-empted by federal law.
Ninth Defense
SCO's claims are improperly venued in this district.
Tenth Defense
SCO has failed, in whole or in part, to mitigate its alleged damages.
The review is pretty positive, really. They admitted they were testing the most difficult situation -- non-technical people using Linux in a Windows environment -- and were impressed on many counts.
The fact is it's probably never going to be possible to switch operating systems without some minor glitches... switching will always cost money and time, so there's got to be a good reason to do so...
Ah, yes, well, RFID tags in general -- I was just commenting on the photograph part. RFID tags that stay in place could be bad... but in this case, they're part of the packaging, surely? And so not really a problem... who keeps the packaging for their razor blades?
...than plain old CCTV? Alright, so it's a little unsettling to think of someone with a photo of you taking something off the shelf comparing it with other photos to see if you bought the thing... but odds are if there's a CCTV camera then they're watching you as you take things off the shelf then, too.
Hmm. Doing this without telling people, however, is certainly cause for objection... there should be a sign of some sort, I suppose...
I would imagine that legally it doesn't require anything more than 'CCTV in use on these premesis', since the camera would have been there anyway...?
Jason Hall, president of the Provo Linux users group, said Linux developers are willing to remove the 60 or 80 lines of code in question from the approximate total of 40,000 lines. (harktheherald.com)
That's got to be a typo, surely?... or is he talking about a specific part of the kernel?
I think people are missing the point... including, oddly enough, the researcher himself... (or perhaps he was joking).
Savant abilities just aren't useful, from an evolutionary point of view... the human brain might be amazingly powerful, but for your average human being what matters is social interaction and not walking into things. The abstractions, if they're there, are there for a reason...
It's a bit like giving computer users access to the raw machine code -- really cutting out the filters and exposing what the computer can do, but utterly useless for 99.99% of people.
What they're doing strikes me as a little risky, although the researcher sounds confident... hmm. What happens if you slow down or confuse the part of the brain that controls your heart, for example?
Hmm, definitely a big jump on the morning of the Friday, though... perhaps enough people thought the deadline would mean something for there to be a rush to buy...
If that's the case, I would expect a noticable fall tomorrow. But what do I know:-)
I agree, it's quite scary -- it sounds like AOL might have had a very nasty effect on startups. The article specifically mentions two companies that they killed, but there must have been many, many more...
Interestingly enough I was just thinking yesterday, what would the world be like if advertising of any form was illegal... would've saved those companies a whole lot of money, for one.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a relic, I'm afraid ;-)
Binary operations can be carried out by considering whatever values you have to be binary numbers, and working from there. Binary operations would probably have to be implemented like that somewhere, because they're quite useful...
Implementing binary operations using any base which isn't a power of two would, I suspect, be extremely painful...
But arithmetic and other operations wouldn't have to be based around binary logic; it seems like the circuits might get horribly difficult to reason about, but with decent computerised tools that's hardly a problem...
Well, I'd have to read the patent to be sure, but I'm guessing 'pulse-width modulation' means you turn the LEDs on and off rapidly with different 'on' times. Which is pretty obvious... it's the only way to get an apparently analogue variation in a binary system.
Indeed, I would be interested if someone can up with a source for that -- I've tried to come up with something on google, but the best I could find was an unsubstiantiated '5-10 years ago solar panels required more energy to make...etc...but I don't know about today'.
Anyone?
No -- they're investing major resources in lawyers. Read the article... you do not need 100 patents on controlling LEDs, nor do you need two full-time patent lawyers in a 75-employee company.
I would be surprised if more than one or two of those patents is nonobvious; certainly the major one mentioned in the article (blending LED colors to make -- gasp -- many different colors) is obvious. Even the author of the article complained about it.
Well, I'm damn sure Color Kinetics isn't getting any of my money. From the article:
The company holds 19 patents related to the control of LED lighting systems, and has filed for more than 100 additional patents. "We spend about a million dollars a year filing patents," says chief executive George Mueller. The company has two full-time patent lawyers in-house, and also works with the Boston firm of Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks.
And:
It'll be interesting to see whether Color Kinetics can exact a licensing fee from anyone who blends colored LEDs. Says Simms: "We haven't invested the fortune that we have in intellectual property without planning to defend it."
I'm not going to rant about this, because you've all heard it before. So I'll just sit here and fume silently...
It's possible they don't...
I haven't actually seen anyone mention this yet, so, why not :-)
MSN Messenger is one of the pieces of 'bundled middleware' that is continuing to cause Microsoft legal troubles under antitrust laws... the last I heard things were moving forward in Europe to do something about it.
If there is ever going to be an antitrust ruling about messenger, I'm pretty sure this will make the ruling harder on Microsoft... maybe they'll have to give $200 million worth of software to schools instead of $150 million :-/
(I personally dislike messenger. Virtually everyone I know uses it simply because it came with Windows. This is the sort of thing antitrust laws are supposed to protect against...)
Er... which system administrator would that be?
I get the impression the vast majority of systems that are still at risk belong to good old incompetent (through no fault of their own) home users. Contact and explain?... not likely to be very effective.
I started using Linux for coding about a year and a half ago, and switched to using it as my main OS a year ago.
I had various problems getting odd bits of hardware to work, etc, etc... nothing too serious. I found people were generally helpful. The one offputting thing that happened was this:
I use a chat program that I wrote under Delphi in Windows... making it pretty much impossible to port. Under Windows it binds to port 23 to let people connect to it with telnet... obviously impossible under Linux, but I didn't know that at the time :-)
Anyway. I asked how I could get around this -- and the person on IRC said, well, you could start it as root and drop priveleges. And then I said I wrote it and was running it under Wine... and the response was one of disbelief. Why I want to run anything under Wine?... it was 100% necessary to my switch to Linux, but they weren't interested.
So -- switching operating systems isn't easy, particular for a home user. The fact that I'm a compsci student, plus the fact that I was persistent, mean I made the switch okay. Much happier with what my computer can do now :-)... but you're absolutely right about the attitude of many current users. Relying on Windows doesn't mean you're stupid or weak; it's a tool like any other.
Well, it is amongst people who object to being mailed Word documents, anyway. They're just a really bad format for publishing information in.
See Richard Stallman's 'no-word-attachments' article, for example...
"I'm unaware of the [Microsoft] patch being available," said David Hugel, the deputy chief administrator of the MVA. "I've talked to our IT people and we weekly update the virus protection we do have, and this just happened to fall between those points when we had updated it and we didn't have the [new] update available yet."
How about downloading security patches, too?
No idea what most of this means, but it sounds very impressive :-)
First Defense
The complaint fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.
Second Defense
SCO's claims are barred because IBM has not engaged in any unlawful or unfair business practices, and IBM's conduct was privileged,performed in the exercise of an absolute right, proper and/or justified.
Third Defense
SCO lacks standing to pursue its claims against IBM.
Fourth Defense
SCO's claims are barred, in whole or in part, by the applicable statutes of limitations.
Fifth Defense
SCO's claims are barred, in whole or in part, by the economic-loss doctrine or the dependent-duty doctrine.
Sixth Defense
SCO's claims are barred by the doctrines of laches and delay.
Seventh Defense
SCO's claims are barred by the doctrines of waiver, estoppel and unclean hands.
Eighth Defense
SCO's claims are, in whole or in part, pre-empted by federal law.
Ninth Defense
SCO's claims are improperly venued in this district.
Tenth Defense
SCO has failed, in whole or in part, to mitigate its alleged damages.
Take that, SCO! ;-)
Er... no. Logarithms increase.
Exponential decay is of the form:
y = e^-a x
Where a is positive. It's exponential in that a fixed increase in x multiplies y by a fixed number; it's just that this number is less than one.
The review is pretty positive, really. They admitted they were testing the most difficult situation -- non-technical people using Linux in a Windows environment -- and were impressed on many counts.
The fact is it's probably never going to be possible to switch operating systems without some minor glitches... switching will always cost money and time, so there's got to be a good reason to do so...
Ah, yes, well, RFID tags in general -- I was just commenting on the photograph part. RFID tags that stay in place could be bad... but in this case, they're part of the packaging, surely? And so not really a problem... who keeps the packaging for their razor blades?
...than plain old CCTV? Alright, so it's a little unsettling to think of someone with a photo of you taking something off the shelf comparing it with other photos to see if you bought the thing... but odds are if there's a CCTV camera then they're watching you as you take things off the shelf then, too.
Hmm. Doing this without telling people, however, is certainly cause for objection... there should be a sign of some sort, I suppose...
I would imagine that legally it doesn't require anything more than 'CCTV in use on these premesis', since the camera would have been there anyway...?
It's also true that I wasn't quite sure what day it was when I posted :-)
Up 15% as a result? Yahoo finances
That's got to be a typo, surely?... or is he talking about a specific part of the kernel?
I think people are missing the point... including, oddly enough, the researcher himself... (or perhaps he was joking).
Savant abilities just aren't useful, from an evolutionary point of view... the human brain might be amazingly powerful, but for your average human being what matters is social interaction and not walking into things. The abstractions, if they're there, are there for a reason...
It's a bit like giving computer users access to the raw machine code -- really cutting out the filters and exposing what the computer can do, but utterly useless for 99.99% of people.
What they're doing strikes me as a little risky, although the researcher sounds confident... hmm. What happens if you slow down or confuse the part of the brain that controls your heart, for example?
I imagine it would be in SCO's best interest to take the settlement, and I'd love to see the looks on their faces...
A small but (apparently) significant drop... and the conclusion that this means IBM is unlikely to settle.
But then, we knew that...
Hmm, definitely a big jump on the morning of the Friday, though... perhaps enough people thought the deadline would mean something for there to be a rush to buy...
If that's the case, I would expect a noticable fall tomorrow. But what do I know :-)
It seems the Friday deadline looked good to traders, the stock price jumped... Yahoo has an article, written on Friday, about the jump.
Any bets on what happens to the stock price on Monday?...
...and Microsoft bails out.
Insert your own anti-Microsoft statement here, this is really too easy :-)
Finally, someone who read the article :-)
I agree, it's quite scary -- it sounds like AOL might have had a very nasty effect on startups. The article specifically mentions two companies that they killed, but there must have been many, many more...
Interestingly enough I was just thinking yesterday, what would the world be like if advertising of any form was illegal... would've saved those companies a whole lot of money, for one.