I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them. Well, the US patent system has a lot more problems like obvious things being patented and being able to patent business processes.
But apart from the US,some of the biggest problems come up in companies buying patents and being patent trolls. Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, selling the patent isn't protecting the inventor anymore. Also unless a company merges with another company I think all patents that the company owns should dissolve with the company and be unpatentable.
If you have a patent, I think you should be required to have products out using that patent, or at least working on making products with that patent. Too many companies patent something that they heard someone else speak about, they have no plans to use the patent, just profit off of someone else's work by beating them to the patent office, or just plain having the money to buy the patent where the person doesn't. I guess that still wouldn't quite solve the problem. There would need to be some process where you proved that you created the idea.
*start rant* Now as for the US Patent system, there is an official report that calls it too much of a joke for us to merge our patent system with their's. Our company started looking at US Patents and as far as we can tell, you can't write a line of code with out violating a patent. It is so silly that "If...else" is patented. "ifelse" is patented. "Begin...End" is patented. I think you can get away with "{...}" blocks, but not much else.
No, your thinking Canadian patent law. This is the US patent system that is being talked about. One we considered merging with and part of the official report that recommended against it described the US Patent System as being a joke. Something completely impractical. I understand there is an obvious clause in the US patent system, but it is so hard to meet that criteria that it basically doesn't exist.
I can't find the link, but someone trying to prove a point about how bad the US patent system is put in an application for patent on the if else combination in programming languages. He wasn't expecting to get it, but it was granted to him.
Don't forget that they put it in the 8pm on Friday time slot originally. You know the time where most people who would want to watch the show wouldn't be home.
Also at least here in Canada I read about it about a year before it was out, then the next thing I read is that it has been canceled. Nothing advertising that when it was starting, when it was on. I was looking forward to watching it, but didn't know it had started until after it was already canceled. I agree, someone didn't want it to succeed.
We want to reward a behavior to encourage it. In this case it sounds like Microsoft has made a good product. What ever they did to make it good we want to reinforce. Where when they come out with Vista we want to boo and hiss them to reinforce that we don't want crap like that made.
Sorry, I was not using Mac IE 5.5, so I don't recall IE 5 being light years ahead of Netscape. I remember the 5.x series on Windows which was a useless pile of junk.
Depending on when you downloaded IE 5 you would get a different build number and you could not upgrade to the newest build number.
This caused all sorts of problems because one version the onload was broken. Another the mouseover was broken.
Sure it had more CSS support(TM), unfortunately it was inconsistent which made CSS virtually unusable. I also liked how it could not pass the HTML1 spec test, really not a hard test to pass, I believe IE8 is the first version to pass this test.
So the only thing I can think of is that you are talking about the Mac version, which I hear was quite good, or that it was LIGHTYEARS ahead of Netscape down the hole since that's where Netscape headed.
From TFA
"Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions."
Chernobyl would not have created the seismic shock of a nuclear explosion and the air pressure sensors probably would not have been triggered, only the radiation.
Also the "No contact from headquarters" requirement would not have been met.
Personally I buy D-Link over more expensive crap because generally the more expensive crap is crap. Linksys I could almost guarantee would die in a 1 year, and their wireless stuff use to really suck. I understand Cisco has improved the quality of the products, but people are still using custom firmware because of the limitations of the original firmware. I don't have these problems with D-Link.
Belkin products they basically don't support after you've bought them. If they kind of work, that's good enough for them.
I know people that have put D-link bluetooth devices through the wash a few times and survived. I've had the misfortune of dropping a powered on D-link router into a vat of concentrated detergent and after it still worked. I haven't had one of my D-Link devices die on me yet. Even here at work we have had a few Cisco and other network equipment die, but the D-Links keep ticking away.
When Canada took a look at the US Patent System part of the official review of it was that it was found to be "too much of a joke".
One of the requirements of getting a Patent in Canada is that it cannot be obvious. It also has to be your own creation.
I believe the US system includes that there be no prior implementation, but there have been a few cases in the US where a company created a product and patented the technologies that another company had created years earlier, but not patented the tech. Even with the patent office knowing about prior work the patent was granted to the later company.
You do realise that one of the design goals of Firefox was to reduce options?
If you really want a full featured browser with the same rendering engine as Firefox you really need to look at Seamonkey, which was the old Mozilla Browser. Unfortunately version 2 that has all the functionality of Firefox 2 & 3 with out the artificial limitations is still in Beta. http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
I agree DirectX was an amazing accomplishment. I can't think of any other API where you would allocate buffer and you had to constantly check to make sure that the pointer to that buffer hadn't been magically lost. Oh, I loved the sound API from version 5-8, and it was always going to be fixed "In the next version."
*Start Rant*
Actually that's not true, the Winsock API used to be so buggy you used to have to do error checking on operations which on any other OS there is no possibility of them failing. (I hear things are better now)
Also, if DirectX is such an amazing accomplishment, how come they had to make a version specifically for the XBox that is only partially compatible with the PC version? Why are they having to come out with a new version of the API every 6 months to 1 year? DirectX 9, 9a, 9b, 9c, 9d, 9e, 10, 10.1, 11
Why, if it's so amazing are so many companies switching to OpenAL for their audio?
Why did so many companies continue to develop for Glide when DirectX worked on all graphics cards?
The truth is that DirectX started out as a piece of garbage, and is slowly getting better and better. Microsoft was given the chance to work together to come up with a graphics standard that would be flexible and would be properly designed. It was called Fahrenheit. Microsoft was originally going to be a big force behind this, but did not allocate the needed resources, instead ramming DirectX 7 down our throats.
Microsoft does not want a good API. Look at the number of versions of DirectX there have been. Look at.Net. Microsoft isn't interested in making good APIs, they are interested in making good enough APIs and using their marketing power to ram it down developer's throats. After all, if they came out with a great version of lets say DirectX, what would be the point in developers upgrading their version of Visual Studio?
I most recently ran into this when looking into the contacts system in Vista. Here it was, this brand new system to centralize all our contact information in Windows. A new API that is only about 1.5 years old. No longer supported. No links to the new API, if there is one. I can't even figure out if Windows Contacts are just in Windows 7 for "backward compatibility", or if its meant to be be used.
Microsoft does not allow keyboards or mice to be used on their consoles. You are not allowed to make Mice and Keyboards for the Xbox and games are not allowed to support them.
You know, we had Kirk and his green women. Then Riker was sleeping with everyone. Even Picard got to have some relationship times with people like Vash.
I think it was GTA III that they started to have arcade games in. Though it might have been Vice City, but they have arcade games that you can play in the game.
No, not dumbed down, just simplified. The controls will be simplified down so much to make you feel like an old time British person. (Like you have a stick stuck up your butt)
You just have to hit, A A B AA C to fire your main weapon. Other weapons will require a little more complex system.
*sarcasm*
I for one like a variety of different games. I've had great fun playing this one game where you run around beating people with sticks and blood unrealistically comes poring off of them turning the ground red. The graphics weren't very good and if they were I probably wouldn't have wanted to play that game. TF2 was originally going to be a highly realistic game and they changed to a cartoon style that I think has worked well for it.
If I'm playing something that's slower moving than I generally want something that is prettier to look at. That can be stylistic, or more realistic. I prefer the graphics of NWN1 (Neverwinter Nights) to NWN2. While NWN2's graphics are "better" I think that NWN1 looks better because of how smoothly the engine reacts and when I get shot, or shoot someone with an arrow I want to see it sticking out of them. I know NWN2 had to get rid of the sticking out arrows to make a Teen rating, but it ruined the experience for me.
One of the things that kept me in DaoC so long was the pretty graphics. Graphics cannot make up for gameplay. One of the reasons why I'm not impressed with most MMOs, they look pretty, but in the end they are just massive multiplayer medieval Quake.
There is a reason for people, especially programmers, to bash Microsoft.
We write programs to run on Windows. Windows has various APIs that we are supposed to be able to use and just trust that they will work properly.
The problem is they don't just work. Winsock for the longest time, maybe still, had so many bugs in it that you had to do so much much error checking that on any other platform would have been ridiculous overkill.
Directsound API had a known bug that after loading a sound into memory you had to make sure to check that it was actually there just before playing it because sometimes Windows would just loose track of where that sound was, so you had to load it again, and don't forget to check it again before playing because Windows might have already lost it again.
The multimedia timer hasn't worked since the Windows 9x days. Then the.Net timers are so much a joke that I always invoke the Windows timer instead. The problem with the.Net timer is that it might never fire and there is no way you can guarantee that it fires. If I remember correctly, if the computer is too busy when the timer is supposed to fire the timer just gets dropped instead of firing as soon as it can after the time it was supposed to.
Then you have API hell. Microsoft is constantly coming out with new APIs to do the same thing as APIs that already exist. Trying to figure out which API is the newest and should be used is difficult. Sometimes the new API has been deprecated and they suggest using one of the older APIs. It's really hard to tell at times.
Unfortunately because of the broken Javascript code that.Net 2.0 - 3.5 uses for some of it's post backs, we are unable to make our pages xhtml compatible. The postback code works fine in IE, but no other browsers if the form tag appears outside of the body tag. Unfortunately because of the design of.Net we have to have the form tag outside of the body, which causes us to do a really ugly hack to get it working in all browsers. That hack is to put a body tag, the form tag, then in our template we have the actual body tag. Of course this makes our pages not xhtml conformant, but it's the only thing we've found that works around the CLR 2 bugs. This was not a problem in.net 1.1 because the postback code was properly written. Hopefully this is fixed in.Net 4, but I doubt it.
From the HTML 4.01 Spec:
src = uri [CT]
This attribute specifies the location of the image resource. Examples of widely recognized image formats include GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
Now true, that doesn't say that any formats are recommended, well at least not until you head to the W3C PNG specification: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/
Price of training every two years that a new Microsoft product comes out? But open source software comes out with new versions faster.
So what if the open source software doesn't undergo major changes for no reason. You still have the price of retraining from moving from Microsoft products to open source.
Bugs, what bugs? No Microsoft product have any show stopping bugs. BTW, that new feature you requested will be in the next version(tm).
(Legal: Next version is not a binding contract and just refers to some future version of the software which may, or may not be the next release. Microsoft reserves the right to cease production of this product line at any time with out implementing said feature)
In BC if you are driving along the highway at 80kph and the speed limit is 80kph, but if everyone else is going 90kph, you are actually breaking the law because you are driving at an unsafe speed in relation to the cars around you. If you speed up to 90kph you will now be breaking the speed limit, but are no longer breaking the unsafe speed law.
There are quite a few of these catch 22s. Even the most law abiding people they've found are breaking laws inadvertently. Sometimes there is no way not to break a law.
Now in the right hands the powers of this proposed bill would not be a problem, but our Police time and time again have shown themselves to be less than honest and upright. Even if they were now, what's to say the people replacing them would be?
Requiring the warrent provides that extra check to try to make sure that the Police are not fishing for information, because if you look in anyone closet, you'll find things no matter how clean it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them. Well, the US patent system has a lot more problems like obvious things being patented and being able to patent business processes.
But apart from the US,some of the biggest problems come up in companies buying patents and being patent trolls. Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, selling the patent isn't protecting the inventor anymore. Also unless a company merges with another company I think all patents that the company owns should dissolve with the company and be unpatentable.
If you have a patent, I think you should be required to have products out using that patent, or at least working on making products with that patent. Too many companies patent something that they heard someone else speak about, they have no plans to use the patent, just profit off of someone else's work by beating them to the patent office, or just plain having the money to buy the patent where the person doesn't. I guess that still wouldn't quite solve the problem. There would need to be some process where you proved that you created the idea.
*start rant* Now as for the US Patent system, there is an official report that calls it too much of a joke for us to merge our patent system with their's. Our company started looking at US Patents and as far as we can tell, you can't write a line of code with out violating a patent. It is so silly that "If...else" is patented. "ifelse" is patented. "Begin...End" is patented. I think you can get away with "{...}" blocks, but not much else.
No, your thinking Canadian patent law. This is the US patent system that is being talked about. One we considered merging with and part of the official report that recommended against it described the US Patent System as being a joke. Something completely impractical. I understand there is an obvious clause in the US patent system, but it is so hard to meet that criteria that it basically doesn't exist.
I can't find the link, but someone trying to prove a point about how bad the US patent system is put in an application for patent on the if else combination in programming languages. He wasn't expecting to get it, but it was granted to him.
Don't forget that they put it in the 8pm on Friday time slot originally. You know the time where most people who would want to watch the show wouldn't be home.
Also at least here in Canada I read about it about a year before it was out, then the next thing I read is that it has been canceled. Nothing advertising that when it was starting, when it was on. I was looking forward to watching it, but didn't know it had started until after it was already canceled. I agree, someone didn't want it to succeed.
We want to reward a behavior to encourage it. In this case it sounds like Microsoft has made a good product. What ever they did to make it good we want to reinforce. Where when they come out with Vista we want to boo and hiss them to reinforce that we don't want crap like that made.
Sorry, I was not using Mac IE 5.5, so I don't recall IE 5 being light years ahead of Netscape. I remember the 5.x series on Windows which was a useless pile of junk.
Depending on when you downloaded IE 5 you would get a different build number and you could not upgrade to the newest build number.
This caused all sorts of problems because one version the onload was broken. Another the mouseover was broken.
Sure it had more CSS support(TM), unfortunately it was inconsistent which made CSS virtually unusable. I also liked how it could not pass the HTML1 spec test, really not a hard test to pass, I believe IE8 is the first version to pass this test.
So the only thing I can think of is that you are talking about the Mac version, which I hear was quite good, or that it was LIGHTYEARS ahead of Netscape down the hole since that's where Netscape headed.
From TFA
"Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions."
Chernobyl would not have created the seismic shock of a nuclear explosion and the air pressure sensors probably would not have been triggered, only the radiation.
Also the "No contact from headquarters" requirement would not have been met.
Personally I buy D-Link over more expensive crap because generally the more expensive crap is crap. Linksys I could almost guarantee would die in a 1 year, and their wireless stuff use to really suck. I understand Cisco has improved the quality of the products, but people are still using custom firmware because of the limitations of the original firmware. I don't have these problems with D-Link.
Belkin products they basically don't support after you've bought them. If they kind of work, that's good enough for them.
I know people that have put D-link bluetooth devices through the wash a few times and survived. I've had the misfortune of dropping a powered on D-link router into a vat of concentrated detergent and after it still worked. I haven't had one of my D-Link devices die on me yet. Even here at work we have had a few Cisco and other network equipment die, but the D-Links keep ticking away.
When Canada took a look at the US Patent System part of the official review of it was that it was found to be "too much of a joke".
One of the requirements of getting a Patent in Canada is that it cannot be obvious. It also has to be your own creation.
I believe the US system includes that there be no prior implementation, but there have been a few cases in the US where a company created a product and patented the technologies that another company had created years earlier, but not patented the tech. Even with the patent office knowing about prior work the patent was granted to the later company.
You do realise that one of the design goals of Firefox was to reduce options?
If you really want a full featured browser with the same rendering engine as Firefox you really need to look at Seamonkey, which was the old Mozilla Browser. Unfortunately version 2 that has all the functionality of Firefox 2 & 3 with out the artificial limitations is still in Beta.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
I agree DirectX was an amazing accomplishment. I can't think of any other API where you would allocate buffer and you had to constantly check to make sure that the pointer to that buffer hadn't been magically lost. Oh, I loved the sound API from version 5-8, and it was always going to be fixed "In the next version."
.Net. Microsoft isn't interested in making good APIs, they are interested in making good enough APIs and using their marketing power to ram it down developer's throats. After all, if they came out with a great version of lets say DirectX, what would be the point in developers upgrading their version of Visual Studio?
*Start Rant*
Actually that's not true, the Winsock API used to be so buggy you used to have to do error checking on operations which on any other OS there is no possibility of them failing. (I hear things are better now)
Also, if DirectX is such an amazing accomplishment, how come they had to make a version specifically for the XBox that is only partially compatible with the PC version? Why are they having to come out with a new version of the API every 6 months to 1 year? DirectX 9, 9a, 9b, 9c, 9d, 9e, 10, 10.1, 11
Why, if it's so amazing are so many companies switching to OpenAL for their audio?
Why did so many companies continue to develop for Glide when DirectX worked on all graphics cards?
The truth is that DirectX started out as a piece of garbage, and is slowly getting better and better. Microsoft was given the chance to work together to come up with a graphics standard that would be flexible and would be properly designed. It was called Fahrenheit. Microsoft was originally going to be a big force behind this, but did not allocate the needed resources, instead ramming DirectX 7 down our throats.
Microsoft does not want a good API. Look at the number of versions of DirectX there have been. Look at
I most recently ran into this when looking into the contacts system in Vista. Here it was, this brand new system to centralize all our contact information in Windows. A new API that is only about 1.5 years old. No longer supported. No links to the new API, if there is one. I can't even figure out if Windows Contacts are just in Windows 7 for "backward compatibility", or if its meant to be be used.
Microsoft does not allow keyboards or mice to be used on their consoles. You are not allowed to make Mice and Keyboards for the Xbox and games are not allowed to support them.
You know, we had Kirk and his green women. Then Riker was sleeping with everyone. Even Picard got to have some relationship times with people like Vash.
Upgrade the graphics and high quality video. Mmmm, Flint.... sorry, I'm back now.
I think it was GTA III that they started to have arcade games in. Though it might have been Vice City, but they have arcade games that you can play in the game.
But what...is it good for?
Personally I like my G7 because it's wireless but has two Li-Ion batteries that are easy to change. One is recharging while the other is in use.
No, not dumbed down, just simplified. The controls will be simplified down so much to make you feel like an old time British person. (Like you have a stick stuck up your butt)
You just have to hit, A A B AA C to fire your main weapon. Other weapons will require a little more complex system. *sarcasm*
I for one like a variety of different games. I've had great fun playing this one game where you run around beating people with sticks and blood unrealistically comes poring off of them turning the ground red. The graphics weren't very good and if they were I probably wouldn't have wanted to play that game. TF2 was originally going to be a highly realistic game and they changed to a cartoon style that I think has worked well for it.
If I'm playing something that's slower moving than I generally want something that is prettier to look at. That can be stylistic, or more realistic. I prefer the graphics of NWN1 (Neverwinter Nights) to NWN2. While NWN2's graphics are "better" I think that NWN1 looks better because of how smoothly the engine reacts and when I get shot, or shoot someone with an arrow I want to see it sticking out of them. I know NWN2 had to get rid of the sticking out arrows to make a Teen rating, but it ruined the experience for me.
One of the things that kept me in DaoC so long was the pretty graphics. Graphics cannot make up for gameplay. One of the reasons why I'm not impressed with most MMOs, they look pretty, but in the end they are just massive multiplayer medieval Quake.
No, you read that right. One of our clients had their IE6 usage climb from about 20% to about 23%.
There is a reason for people, especially programmers, to bash Microsoft.
.Net timers are so much a joke that I always invoke the Windows timer instead. The problem with the .Net timer is that it might never fire and there is no way you can guarantee that it fires. If I remember correctly, if the computer is too busy when the timer is supposed to fire the timer just gets dropped instead of firing as soon as it can after the time it was supposed to.
We write programs to run on Windows. Windows has various APIs that we are supposed to be able to use and just trust that they will work properly.
The problem is they don't just work. Winsock for the longest time, maybe still, had so many bugs in it that you had to do so much much error checking that on any other platform would have been ridiculous overkill.
Directsound API had a known bug that after loading a sound into memory you had to make sure to check that it was actually there just before playing it because sometimes Windows would just loose track of where that sound was, so you had to load it again, and don't forget to check it again before playing because Windows might have already lost it again.
The multimedia timer hasn't worked since the Windows 9x days. Then the
Then you have API hell. Microsoft is constantly coming out with new APIs to do the same thing as APIs that already exist. Trying to figure out which API is the newest and should be used is difficult. Sometimes the new API has been deprecated and they suggest using one of the older APIs. It's really hard to tell at times.
I am referring to webform apps, not MVC.
.Net 2.0 - 3.5 uses for some of it's post backs, we are unable to make our pages xhtml compatible. The postback code works fine in IE, but no other browsers if the form tag appears outside of the body tag. Unfortunately because of the design of .Net we have to have the form tag outside of the body, which causes us to do a really ugly hack to get it working in all browsers. That hack is to put a body tag, the form tag, then in our template we have the actual body tag. Of course this makes our pages not xhtml conformant, but it's the only thing we've found that works around the CLR 2 bugs. This was not a problem in .net 1.1 because the postback code was properly written. Hopefully this is fixed in .Net 4, but I doubt it.
Unfortunately because of the broken Javascript code that
From the HTML 4.01 Spec:
src = uri [CT]
This attribute specifies the location of the image resource. Examples of widely recognized image formats include GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
Now true, that doesn't say that any formats are recommended, well at least not until you head to the W3C PNG specification:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/
They also have a nice section on SVG:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
I for one welcome our new Martian nanobot overloards. All hail Emperor *zip* *click * *zoot*
No really, Microsoft says it so it must be true.
Price of training every two years that a new Microsoft product comes out? But open source software comes out with new versions faster.
So what if the open source software doesn't undergo major changes for no reason. You still have the price of retraining from moving from Microsoft products to open source.
Bugs, what bugs? No Microsoft product have any show stopping bugs. BTW, that new feature you requested will be in the next version(tm).
(Legal: Next version is not a binding contract and just refers to some future version of the software which may, or may not be the next release. Microsoft reserves the right to cease production of this product line at any time with out implementing said feature)
It is extremely difficult to not break the law.
In BC if you are driving along the highway at 80kph and the speed limit is 80kph, but if everyone else is going 90kph, you are actually breaking the law because you are driving at an unsafe speed in relation to the cars around you. If you speed up to 90kph you will now be breaking the speed limit, but are no longer breaking the unsafe speed law.
There are quite a few of these catch 22s. Even the most law abiding people they've found are breaking laws inadvertently. Sometimes there is no way not to break a law.
Now in the right hands the powers of this proposed bill would not be a problem, but our Police time and time again have shown themselves to be less than honest and upright. Even if they were now, what's to say the people replacing them would be?
Requiring the warrent provides that extra check to try to make sure that the Police are not fishing for information, because if you look in anyone closet, you'll find things no matter how clean it is.