Personally I think patents are great, they give innovators a way to protect innovations giving them a small lead to jump-start their project. In fact, I'll go so far as to say I think patents could solve much of the trouble we are currently having pulling our selves/society in to the digital information age.
Bear with me..
The problems with patents as they currently stand is they are often used as bullshit tools whihc stifle technology in an attempt to extort or monopolise any technology or idea. What once might have been a useful tool has become a strategic game-piece often crippling American innovation when it was intended to encourage it.
But I don't believe the answer is to abolish the system, or even to make it increasingly difficult to make use of, that would punish legitimate users and patent trolls and legal firms would no doubt find ways to continue around it.
What I'd like to see is it remain almost exactly as it is today, with a few small changes:
Patents should be granted rapidly. Pending patents help no-one while discouraging research and innovation. Either you have one or you don't.
Patents should be reasonably easy to get. We should encourage their use, with a few sensible restriction (below).
Patent length should be very short. The protection they provide should last no more then 1-3 years. When a patent expires competition should be able to immediately begin.
Patents sole purpose should be to encourage innovation. Patent trolling and patent portfolios do nothing towards this end and actively, often parasitically discourage it and a great cost to the society they depend on.
Businesses that can't gain a reasonable advantage using a patent protected 1-3 year monopoly should not indefinably limit those that might.
Patents should only be granted for new ideas or new technologies and should never extend their protection onto old or existing technology. This is particularly important for software, where new code should be patentable (explained below) but at the end of the patents term only additions or patches might be considered new and therefore patentable.
Patenting code should be valuable because it would allow developers benefit from their work without relying on strictly on licensing or obscuring code through binary blobs. Quality projects would still could continue funded development with changes and updates eligible for patent protection. Of course nothing requires that anyone patent such work, or that should they chose to patent it that they drop protective licenses or release source. But we're heading towards a future where the user will be increasingly technical and black-box application may eventually find they have a disadvantage in the marketplace. Should they chose to make their products reasonably open source and use patent provisions to protect their business process it's possible that both society and business might benefit from a new form of commercial open source.
It's probably worth noting that software companies which wish to keep their code and related processes black-boxed would still have several options, one obvious option (aside from restrictive licensing and binary only releases) being SAS, where they control the process by keeping access to all relevant code and business systems themselves, only pushing relevant/needed data out to the client front-end. SAS is really the ultimate black-box solution and it protect your property from just about everything but internal abuse (staff, break-ins, social engineering) and network related penetration. And that's nothing new.
Sorry about any grammaros/typos/spellos. I just wanted to get these ideas out while there was still active discussion. Over the past several years I've begun to strongly believe our own enemy (patents - via trolling/hording and other related anti-competitive business practices) are actually our best hope for a sensible business/technology future.
You're either intentionally missing my point or have simply missed it.
Sure, you could run Oracle on x86 desktop hardware. You could even go so far as buying two cheap e-machines and run them both as Linux-based RAC nodes. Granted, those shitty nodes with the fibre-channel attached disk array would still have set you back probably over $90k with the additional hardware and licenses.
Eventually, if you're lucky enough to see rapid or continued growth you'll find yourself moving onto better enterprise grade gear and the best way to push performance (aside from application/network/database optimization) it to begin your vertical scaling by increasing your available memory, disk speed (SSD cache disks, etc) and total number of cores.
Oracle is amazing with multi-core architecture. I've personally performed days, probably several weeks, of stress testing and watching Oracles core/page/memory use which, as compared to MySQL for example, is a thing of beauty.
But that all comes with a per-core license cost attached which can make capacity increases cost significantly more in database licenses then in physical hardware. That's fine if you have a business that really needs some of the features that come with Oracle. But I'd argue that the majority of businesses like Twitter or Facebook need flexible, cheaply scalable, high-volume read-writes more then they need the reliability or datamining/statistical features that come with the Oracle price tag.
But to each their own. The premise of my post was proper evaluation, the right tool for the right jobs and there are certainly times Oracle is/will be that tool.
Holy fuck, the right tool for the right job, please? Oracle does somethings for some markets really well but for the rest of us who don't need such a high degree of transactional safety that $90k + two-node RAC price tag might just end up taking your great web 3.0 business through development, maybe early beta before you begin liquidating assets. That's per-processor licensing too on a database that scales vertically well (very well really) but not horizontally well (sharding anyone?) so the better your project does the more processor licenses you'll be looking at, and using higher-priced hardware to do it too (because cheap boxes scale best horizontally).
So sure, if you can afford it get the big iron and with any luck your industry works with the kind of margins you'll never even need to know the cost of going that way. Personally, after having done the Sun/Oracle thing I hope to never find myself sitting at a business meeting trying to figure out how we can meet capacity demands after we've run out of money paying for high priced hardware and license fees.
I'm glad products like Oracles exist, even somewhat impressed by them, but not every project will need them and there are very real cost considerations that should also be taken into account. Know your business and for the love of God, do a thorough survey of all the available tools before you commit to one.
Maybe in your long history of casual gaming you just didn't know when you did see it. Not only has it been rampant, but all the popular commercial cheat engines support it, so if your really curious you pay (or find a working free injector/proggy) try it on yourself.
More likely big, pointless hardware and software purchases. If you know anyone who works in government the words marginally competent might be a flattering way to describe their business processes. As the professional IT person in my family I find myself regularly horrified by civilian-army family members describing their IT departments (and generally working environment). Did you know ex-military applicants take priority over more qualified non ex-military applicants? And that's not even touching on the rampant nepotism, sheltered career incompetence and general disdain and misunderstanding of the importance of proper training of information technology staff. Of course on the plus side, it probably makes for greater freedom.
What will make Ubuntu different or better then any other well maintained Linux distribution? How can Linux distribution truly compete by offering minor modifications of the same basic set of software?
All I'm saying is that while proprietary software can be highly useful it's value stops at it's usefulness. You can use proprietary software to do things or to learn how to use it to do things, but you need open source software to learn how it works and how to make it better.
Proprietary software is essentially the same thing as open source software, just with protective business process rules restricting its use. It would be like the sciences keeping their source business processes secret by restricting access to research and peer review. Medicines would probably still work, but what would society gain and why would you trust them?
Just to be fair, there are plenty of FOSS fans that think the benefits of Free Open Source Software are intrinsically intellectual and technical. Proprietary software isn't immoral it's just (often) needlessly or inappropriately proprietary and therefore of somewhat decreased intellectual value.
So far it's one of the best I've tried and it does a pretty great job of extracting all the reference/author data. As a desktop application, for my purposes at least, it seems just about perfect with my only current quibbles (only an hour or so into use) would be 1) the way it's search handles multiple matches within a document (hint: it doesn't) 2) they way it displays matched documents (matches aren't highlighted and must be manually paged/scrolled to).
Those 2 points are kind of important issues for an indexing/search/research tool, but overall I'm still really impressed with the project and features like the folder watch (rather then manually importing new documents) definitely add value.
Of course it's pretty slick too, which is always nice.
Ya, right now my research project revolves around ligand research. Obviously there are a lot of great oss solutions that cover the basic document management stuff, and some really useful import/index/search features. Thumbing through a large collection of PDFs would be a nightmare (fortunately even with a standard DMS this isn't necessary).
I'll be installing and reviewing a lot of software over the next few days, but there seem to be some great suggestions here.
At the end of the day I'd like to be able to do some of the basic think we've been doing for ages with printed paper, with the advantage of better/more flexible seaching and indexing, review matches and leave notes over everything I find relevant. Something like Google Documents with a footnotes feature, but since a lot of my resources are paid articles uploading just isn't much of an option.
If you find anything that ends up being particularly useful and think about it, ping me to make sure I took a good look at it myself.
This is exactly the area I've been feeling pain for years, and recently have been working to address. My key innovations are around interface / visualization methods, automation, and collaboration. Please email me at sdw@lig.net if you have a wish / idea list, pointers to interesting related ideas / technology, or want to be a beta tester.
The problem with voice recognition is inherently a user related problem. All this fluid/casual conversation, regional dialects, muffled voices, uneven, laxidasical cadences not to mention you kids and your fads and lexicon of so-called 'lingo'. If everyone just spoke like robots there'd be no problems. Humph!
What's to figure out? Either they completely re-invent themselves as digital media publishers and let every other old-school media company fight to bury/sue/discredit or otherwise marginalize them/their business (naturally, while picking their bones and pulling off anything remaining of value) or they themselves join in the frenzy to bury/sue/discredit or otherwise marginalize anyone else who dares to embrace the only actually viable media publishing option available to big business.
We once had to cut down trees to dispense news and information then carry/freight/ship it around the whole world just so that people could use it. But none of that's been true for us since the last century and none of our children will ever remember otherwise. I guess I wish I was so important that if I complained loudly enough (or legally enough) everyone around me would pretend everything was business as normal too.
Unlike many of the brutish or often self-serving things we do many Americans (and many non-Americans!) think the people who attempt to advance the science (and practice) of space exploration are real heroes.
As a person who's probably paid for 3/4 of a rather large collection let me point out that for artwork and extra content scene releases usually trump paid releases. And it really makes sense because labels could give two shits about the content of their product while the people involved in the scenes are often actual music fans.
If most developers are too smart|independent|white-collar to unionize maybe they should start to form their own companies. If existing management practices are so ineffective create/implement better practices and change the industry by example. Seems like that would be the smart thing to do.
Boogeyman? Microsoft routinely does bad things (tm) that in no way can be used to explain the usability issues Linux-based operating systems face today. But none-the-less their patent trolling, anti-competitive and generally litigious nature still makes them a serious threat to freedom and innovation.
I love the idea of not needing to install Flash, but I also like being able to block annoying animations by not installing Flash.
??? Just use Noscript with javascript disabled by default (which you should be doing anyway). Then the advantage of a pure javascript solution is that not only do you avoid installing Flash (and the security issues associated with it) but you don't need to install another plugin to block the animation (because everyone uses noscript already...right?).;-)
On your legacy Xbox you should be able to stream.mp4, so just remux. You could do that with Avidemux or just use something simple like XenonMKV. Remuxing will give you the container format you need without requiring a (lossy) re-encode although depending on the audio format you might sometimes need to recode AC3->AAC.
Strange right! An advertisement about the growth of Bing trumpeting the growth of Bing! And on an unrelated note, can we stop slashvertising Microsoft shit?
Truthfully though, where the heck are the meta-data based filesystems that we were promised? I've love to be able to, on a filesystem level, instantly pull up a folder view of all videos - or all images. Or all images of my dog. Or all images outdoors. Or all images of my dog outdoors.
T-Mobile is a multinational provider. Wikipedia says:
Globally, T-Mobile has some 150 million subscribers, making it the world's seventh largest mobile phone service provider by subscribers and the third largest multinational after the United Kingdom's Vodafone and Spain's Telefónica.
The other carriers serve considerably smaller markets.
"The studio is hoping that the four-week window will push consumers interested in watching movies at home to... seek or create an alternative distribution source."
There, fixed that for you. Pirating is just so 19th century.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear with me..
The problems with patents as they currently stand is they are often used as bullshit tools whihc stifle technology in an attempt to extort or monopolise any technology or idea. What once might have been a useful tool has become a strategic game-piece often crippling American innovation when it was intended to encourage it.
But I don't believe the answer is to abolish the system, or even to make it increasingly difficult to make use of, that would punish legitimate users and patent trolls and legal firms would no doubt find ways to continue around it.
What I'd like to see is it remain almost exactly as it is today, with a few small changes:
It's probably worth noting that software companies which wish to keep their code and related processes black-boxed would still have several options, one obvious option (aside from restrictive licensing and binary only releases) being SAS, where they control the process by keeping access to all relevant code and business systems themselves, only pushing relevant/needed data out to the client front-end. SAS is really the ultimate black-box solution and it protect your property from just about everything but internal abuse (staff, break-ins, social engineering) and network related penetration. And that's nothing new.
Sorry about any grammaros/typos/spellos. I just wanted to get these ideas out while there was still active discussion. Over the past several years I've begun to strongly believe our own enemy (patents - via trolling/hording and other related anti-competitive business practices) are actually our best hope for a sensible business/technology future.
You're either intentionally missing my point or have simply missed it.
Sure, you could run Oracle on x86 desktop hardware. You could even go so far as buying two cheap e-machines and run them both as Linux-based RAC nodes. Granted, those shitty nodes with the fibre-channel attached disk array would still have set you back probably over $90k with the additional hardware and licenses.
Eventually, if you're lucky enough to see rapid or continued growth you'll find yourself moving onto better enterprise grade gear and the best way to push performance (aside from application/network/database optimization) it to begin your vertical scaling by increasing your available memory, disk speed (SSD cache disks, etc) and total number of cores.
Oracle is amazing with multi-core architecture. I've personally performed days, probably several weeks, of stress testing and watching Oracles core/page/memory use which, as compared to MySQL for example, is a thing of beauty.
But that all comes with a per-core license cost attached which can make capacity increases cost significantly more in database licenses then in physical hardware. That's fine if you have a business that really needs some of the features that come with Oracle. But I'd argue that the majority of businesses like Twitter or Facebook need flexible, cheaply scalable, high-volume read-writes more then they need the reliability or datamining/statistical features that come with the Oracle price tag.
But to each their own. The premise of my post was proper evaluation, the right tool for the right jobs and there are certainly times Oracle is/will be that tool.
Holy fuck, the right tool for the right job, please? Oracle does somethings for some markets really well but for the rest of us who don't need such a high degree of transactional safety that $90k + two-node RAC price tag might just end up taking your great web 3.0 business through development, maybe early beta before you begin liquidating assets. That's per-processor licensing too on a database that scales vertically well (very well really) but not horizontally well (sharding anyone?) so the better your project does the more processor licenses you'll be looking at, and using higher-priced hardware to do it too (because cheap boxes scale best horizontally).
So sure, if you can afford it get the big iron and with any luck your industry works with the kind of margins you'll never even need to know the cost of going that way. Personally, after having done the Sun/Oracle thing I hope to never find myself sitting at a business meeting trying to figure out how we can meet capacity demands after we've run out of money paying for high priced hardware and license fees.
I'm glad products like Oracles exist, even somewhat impressed by them, but not every project will need them and there are very real cost considerations that should also be taken into account. Know your business and for the love of God, do a thorough survey of all the available tools before you commit to one.
Maybe in your long history of casual gaming you just didn't know when you did see it. Not only has it been rampant, but all the popular commercial cheat engines support it, so if your really curious you pay (or find a working free injector/proggy) try it on yourself.
More likely big, pointless hardware and software purchases. If you know anyone who works in government the words marginally competent might be a flattering way to describe their business processes. As the professional IT person in my family I find myself regularly horrified by civilian-army family members describing their IT departments (and generally working environment). Did you know ex-military applicants take priority over more qualified non ex-military applicants? And that's not even touching on the rampant nepotism, sheltered career incompetence and general disdain and misunderstanding of the importance of proper training of information technology staff. Of course on the plus side, it probably makes for greater freedom.
What will make Ubuntu different or better then any other well maintained Linux distribution? How can Linux distribution truly compete by offering minor modifications of the same basic set of software?
All I'm saying is that while proprietary software can be highly useful it's value stops at it's usefulness. You can use proprietary software to do things or to learn how to use it to do things, but you need open source software to learn how it works and how to make it better.
Proprietary software is essentially the same thing as open source software, just with protective business process rules restricting its use. It would be like the sciences keeping their source business processes secret by restricting access to research and peer review. Medicines would probably still work, but what would society gain and why would you trust them?
Just to be fair, there are plenty of FOSS fans that think the benefits of Free Open Source Software are intrinsically intellectual and technical. Proprietary software isn't immoral it's just (often) needlessly or inappropriately proprietary and therefore of somewhat decreased intellectual value.
So far it's one of the best I've tried and it does a pretty great job of extracting all the reference/author data. As a desktop application, for my purposes at least, it seems just about perfect with my only current quibbles (only an hour or so into use) would be 1) the way it's search handles multiple matches within a document (hint: it doesn't) 2) they way it displays matched documents (matches aren't highlighted and must be manually paged/scrolled to).
Those 2 points are kind of important issues for an indexing/search/research tool, but overall I'm still really impressed with the project and features like the folder watch (rather then manually importing new documents) definitely add value.
Of course it's pretty slick too, which is always nice.
I'll be installing and reviewing a lot of software over the next few days, but there seem to be some great suggestions here.
At the end of the day I'd like to be able to do some of the basic think we've been doing for ages with printed paper, with the advantage of better/more flexible seaching and indexing, review matches and leave notes over everything I find relevant. Something like Google Documents with a footnotes feature, but since a lot of my resources are paid articles uploading just isn't much of an option.
If you find anything that ends up being particularly useful and think about it, ping me to make sure I took a good look at it myself.
Alos, user sdw claims to be developing something that may be similar:
Maybe something of interest will come from it.
The problem with voice recognition is inherently a user related problem. All this fluid/casual conversation, regional dialects, muffled voices, uneven, laxidasical cadences not to mention you kids and your fads and lexicon of so-called 'lingo'. If everyone just spoke like robots there'd be no problems. Humph!
What's to figure out? Either they completely re-invent themselves as digital media publishers and let every other old-school media company fight to bury/sue/discredit or otherwise marginalize them/their business (naturally, while picking their bones and pulling off anything remaining of value) or they themselves join in the frenzy to bury/sue/discredit or otherwise marginalize anyone else who dares to embrace the only actually viable media publishing option available to big business.
We once had to cut down trees to dispense news and information then carry/freight/ship it around the whole world just so that people could use it. But none of that's been true for us since the last century and none of our children will ever remember otherwise. I guess I wish I was so important that if I complained loudly enough (or legally enough) everyone around me would pretend everything was business as normal too.
Unlike many of the brutish or often self-serving things we do many Americans (and many non-Americans!) think the people who attempt to advance the science (and practice) of space exploration are real heroes.
Or some sort of modeling.
Can we stop calling the paid Windows 7 public beta Vista?
As a person who's probably paid for 3/4 of a rather large collection let me point out that for artwork and extra content scene releases usually trump paid releases. And it really makes sense because labels could give two shits about the content of their product while the people involved in the scenes are often actual music fans.
If most developers are too smart|independent|white-collar to unionize maybe they should start to form their own companies. If existing management practices are so ineffective create/implement better practices and change the industry by example. Seems like that would be the smart thing to do.
Boogeyman? Microsoft routinely does bad things (tm) that in no way can be used to explain the usability issues Linux-based operating systems face today. But none-the-less their patent trolling, anti-competitive and generally litigious nature still makes them a serious threat to freedom and innovation.
??? Just use Noscript with javascript disabled by default (which you should be doing anyway). Then the advantage of a pure javascript solution is that not only do you avoid installing Flash (and the security issues associated with it) but you don't need to install another plugin to block the animation (because everyone uses noscript already...right?). ;-)
On your legacy Xbox you should be able to stream .mp4, so just remux. You could do that with Avidemux or just use something simple like XenonMKV. Remuxing will give you the container format you need without requiring a (lossy) re-encode although depending on the audio format you might sometimes need to recode AC3->AAC.
Here's a cool list of container formats in case anyone's not see it.
Why wasn't this cannon illustration included with the story? ;-)
Strange right! An advertisement about the growth of Bing trumpeting the growth of Bing! And on an unrelated note, can we stop slashvertising Microsoft shit?
Here ya go.
The other carriers serve considerably smaller markets.
"The studio is hoping that the four-week window will push consumers interested in watching movies at home to... seek or create an alternative distribution source."
There, fixed that for you. Pirating is just so 19th century.