They're not making nearly the same revenue per employee, though, so there seem to be some diminishing returns. Craigslist brings in somewhere around $6 million per employee, while Microsoft brings in about $600,000, and Google about $1.1 million.
I think the distinguishing characteristics are more a matter of interesting v. cookie-cutter device, and durable v. throw-away. I would pay money for an interesting, well-designed, durable computer with historical value. But I'm not going to shell out for a generic PC with an expected lifespan of less than 10 years, just because someone famous used it.
In short, the Olivetti has some style, and it will likely continue to work, or can be serviced if not. That may be true of some computers, also--- older Apple products, especially the Apple ][ line and classic Macs, are already becoming collectors' items to some extent. But nobody is going to be shelling out for a 1996 Packard Bell.
Well, so is lots of other stuff patented, if you squint at it hard enough. Yes, all computing can be described at its base by computation theory, and is therefore math. But patents of physical machines are at their base usually also math: ultimately macroscopic physical phenomena are just derivable mathematical consequences of lower-level physics theories.
The question is what level of ingenuity is worth patenting. I'm not sure that differs markedly. In both cases, it's more or less: is this truly a remarkable discovery, which an expert in the field is likely to see as highly non-obvious? There are cases of patented physical devices that are straightforward applications of known physics and mechanical practices, and there are cases of patented software that are straightforward applications of known computing theory and practices, and cases of both that aren't. I'm certainly open to the possibility that real ingenuity is less often found in software patents. But I'm not sure there's a fundamental philosophical difference: both are just patenting mathematical regularities in the universe that happen to be of practical interest.
If we're going to start voiding warranties for computers that spent time in households that contributed to component failure, though, smokers aren't really the only place to look (or even necessarily the place to start). Pet-owning households are particularly bad, for example.
(Apart from being a good ruling for civil liberties and privacy, Kyllo's also interesting for its strange 5-4 split: the majority, pro-civil-liberties, opinion is by Scalia, joined by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer.)
It's a pity that they cannot smuggle SETI into the pack. Anyway, if I was a SETI researcher I'd save some of my radiotelescope time to look into the region of space occupied by exoplanets deemed suitable for life by borg such as this.
On the plus side, it's given us some pretty good reusable components. If the only goal were to get e17 out the door years ago, they probably could've done that, but by doing the extra work to produce clean components with generally usable APIs, we've got a whole set of things like evas and imlib2 that other projects now use. It's fairly typical that it takes at least 2x (usually more like 3x-5x) as long to produce something with a reusable API, that you're willing to distribute and maintain for use by other projects, than to hack up something that's good enough specifically for your own internal use.
I'd be interested in numbers on those outcomes. Did police agencies who switched from 9mm to a larger caliber have measurably better outcomes, under some relevant measure (controlling for other variables, of course), after the switch than before? Do agencies in comparable situations that use different calibers have anything measurably different about their outcomes?
He's somewhat well-known, yeah. He got rich in tech before he entered sports--- he used his $billions from selling out a not-very-profitable company at the height of the tech bubble to buy a sports team.
Also, despite selling out for $6 billion in 1999, he's now worth $2 billion. Not a very good ROI over those 10 years.
Re:Methodology fads
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They even seem to come with the weird religious rhetoric, too, promising that if only you embrace $Methodology, your life will change. Well, except the ultra-oppressive ones like CMMI: it demands that you accept CMMI or be destroyed.
It seems to be a fact of life that these things are going to float around, so I guess what makes sense is figuring out which ones are relatively better or worse, and what ideas from them are relatively useful or not. As (excellent tech blogger) YosefK put it in a review of an Extreme Programming book:
This quote is right from the book cover. "Extreme Programming Explained. EMBRACE CHANGE." Does it freak you out the way it freaks me out? Maybe it's because of the cultural gap created by my Russian origins? Nay, I know plenty of English slogans I can relate to. Say, "Trust a condom". Beats "Embrace change" hands-down. Changes come in two flavors, good and bad. Should I "embrace" both kinds?
[...]
"The key to XP is integrity, acting in harmony with my true values The past five years have been a journey of changing my actual values into those I wanted to hold."
"Journey". Talking about being good. Do you like hippies? I like hippies more than nazis. I like XP more than CMM. But IMO the hippie world view and general style is suboptimal.
Kahlua might skirt around the definition of "food additive" because its caffeine isn't actually specifically added? Hard to say for sure, but it's plausible that having caffeine because the drink includes coffee is legally distinct from adding synthetic caffeine, as most energy drinks do.
Since is only looking at pre-mixed drinks; you're free to mix vodka and red bull if you want, and in fact bars are free to mix them for their patrons as well.
How do we write history, then? Actor Walter Sedlmayr was clearly murdered in 1990. His future biographies will of course mention this, since it would be absurd not to. But they must never include information on who murdered him? How far back does this apply? Would a German equivalent of Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinating a prominent political figure, be forever expunged from the history books? Can he be written back in after his death, at least?
I certainly hope that never happens, and would strongly campaign against it. The government should be able to tell people that only an anointed priesthood can write software? Maybe for some critical infrastructure I could see that--- air-traffic control software or something can plausibly have a licensing process. But I should have to get a license to write a videogame? To contribute a patch to Slashcode? To write a freeware app that helps people maintain their TODO lists? Etc. Absurd and oppressive.
I went to an engineering school that was founded in the aftermath of WW2, so had a strong ethos of: "scientists and engineers need to understand what we're doing and why, not just implement stuff other people tell us to". I.e., don't assume the people above you are in charge of the "why" and as the scientist/engineer all you need to care about is the "how". Usually it's seen as more of an ethics thing, but interesting to be reminded that on occasion it can be a matter of self-interest, too, since you have a legal responsibility to know what you're doing and why, at least to some minimum degree.
I don't see any inherent reason why AI should be bad at dancing units. If anything it should be better at it, because the essentially infinite click speed and ability to attend to multiple places at once means that an AI could dance multiple groups of units at different parts of the map at all once, which for humans is something only really skilled players can do.
For logistical reasons there aren't a lot of options. Past competitions have used Wargus, since it's open source. Game-industry people tend to roll their eyes at it though, and would prefer a competition using a "real" RTS, i.e. a popular mainstream one. Starcraft is one of the only choices for that, because someone's made an API for it that allows you to write external AI to play the game. Most commercial RTSs don't have any way of doing that, unless you were to screen-scrape the display and then have to implement all sorts of computer vision to even figure out what's going on (in which case it'd be more of a vision than an AI-strategy competition).
I really don't see how Intel can possibly patent an instruction set (the implementation thereof, sure, but the instructions themselves?)
Technically all the patents are on implementations, but there are thousands of them, mostly covering the obvious ways you would implement any of the features, or any pair of features, or any triple of features, or any pair of features in a particular process, etc., etc. The end effect is that it's basically impossible to implement x86 without stepping on some patents, probably several hundred. Of course, many of those patents may be invalid, since they're obvious to someone skilled in the art. It's quite expensive to get that shown, though, and might not work at all, because it's hard to convince a court that something seemingly really technologically advanced is actually obvious to someone skilled in chip design.
The Tribune is mainstream media, but in this case, they appear to have printed a column from some random guy, whose qualifications seem to be self-publishing his own "podcast" talk show, which is sort of what he's complaining about CNN doing.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not making nearly the same revenue per employee, though, so there seem to be some diminishing returns. Craigslist brings in somewhere around $6 million per employee, while Microsoft brings in about $600,000, and Google about $1.1 million.
I think the distinguishing characteristics are more a matter of interesting v. cookie-cutter device, and durable v. throw-away. I would pay money for an interesting, well-designed, durable computer with historical value. But I'm not going to shell out for a generic PC with an expected lifespan of less than 10 years, just because someone famous used it.
In short, the Olivetti has some style, and it will likely continue to work, or can be serviced if not. That may be true of some computers, also--- older Apple products, especially the Apple ][ line and classic Macs, are already becoming collectors' items to some extent. But nobody is going to be shelling out for a 1996 Packard Bell.
Well, so is lots of other stuff patented, if you squint at it hard enough. Yes, all computing can be described at its base by computation theory, and is therefore math. But patents of physical machines are at their base usually also math: ultimately macroscopic physical phenomena are just derivable mathematical consequences of lower-level physics theories.
The question is what level of ingenuity is worth patenting. I'm not sure that differs markedly. In both cases, it's more or less: is this truly a remarkable discovery, which an expert in the field is likely to see as highly non-obvious? There are cases of patented physical devices that are straightforward applications of known physics and mechanical practices, and there are cases of patented software that are straightforward applications of known computing theory and practices, and cases of both that aren't. I'm certainly open to the possibility that real ingenuity is less often found in software patents. But I'm not sure there's a fundamental philosophical difference: both are just patenting mathematical regularities in the universe that happen to be of practical interest.
If we're going to start voiding warranties for computers that spent time in households that contributed to component failure, though, smokers aren't really the only place to look (or even necessarily the place to start). Pet-owning households are particularly bad, for example.
That's no longer permitted in the US.
(Apart from being a good ruling for civil liberties and privacy, Kyllo's also interesting for its strange 5-4 split: the majority, pro-civil-liberties, opinion is by Scalia, joined by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer.)
It's a pity that they cannot smuggle SETI into the pack. Anyway, if I was a SETI researcher I'd save some of my radiotelescope time to look into the region of space occupied by exoplanets deemed suitable for life by borg such as this.
Does the 3rd world really have always-on mobile internet with unlimited data, such that all apps being webapps is a good idea?
On the plus side, it's given us some pretty good reusable components. If the only goal were to get e17 out the door years ago, they probably could've done that, but by doing the extra work to produce clean components with generally usable APIs, we've got a whole set of things like evas and imlib2 that other projects now use. It's fairly typical that it takes at least 2x (usually more like 3x-5x) as long to produce something with a reusable API, that you're willing to distribute and maintain for use by other projects, than to hack up something that's good enough specifically for your own internal use.
I'd be interested in numbers on those outcomes. Did police agencies who switched from 9mm to a larger caliber have measurably better outcomes, under some relevant measure (controlling for other variables, of course), after the switch than before? Do agencies in comparable situations that use different calibers have anything measurably different about their outcomes?
He's somewhat well-known, yeah. He got rich in tech before he entered sports--- he used his $billions from selling out a not-very-profitable company at the height of the tech bubble to buy a sports team.
Also, despite selling out for $6 billion in 1999, he's now worth $2 billion. Not a very good ROI over those 10 years.
They even seem to come with the weird religious rhetoric, too, promising that if only you embrace $Methodology, your life will change. Well, except the ultra-oppressive ones like CMMI: it demands that you accept CMMI or be destroyed.
It seems to be a fact of life that these things are going to float around, so I guess what makes sense is figuring out which ones are relatively better or worse, and what ideas from them are relatively useful or not. As (excellent tech blogger) YosefK put it in a review of an Extreme Programming book:
There's actually quite a few porters and stouts brewed with coffee, e.g. example A, example B
Kahlua might skirt around the definition of "food additive" because its caffeine isn't actually specifically added? Hard to say for sure, but it's plausible that having caffeine because the drink includes coffee is legally distinct from adding synthetic caffeine, as most energy drinks do.
Since is only looking at pre-mixed drinks; you're free to mix vodka and red bull if you want, and in fact bars are free to mix them for their patrons as well.
How do we write history, then? Actor Walter Sedlmayr was clearly murdered in 1990. His future biographies will of course mention this, since it would be absurd not to. But they must never include information on who murdered him? How far back does this apply? Would a German equivalent of Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinating a prominent political figure, be forever expunged from the history books? Can he be written back in after his death, at least?
I certainly hope that never happens, and would strongly campaign against it. The government should be able to tell people that only an anointed priesthood can write software? Maybe for some critical infrastructure I could see that--- air-traffic control software or something can plausibly have a licensing process. But I should have to get a license to write a videogame? To contribute a patch to Slashcode? To write a freeware app that helps people maintain their TODO lists? Etc. Absurd and oppressive.
Most real engineers aren't either--- only a small fraction of engineers who work for large corporations have P.E. certification.
Good guess! Though I'm not there anymore; graduated in '04. =]
I went to an engineering school that was founded in the aftermath of WW2, so had a strong ethos of: "scientists and engineers need to understand what we're doing and why, not just implement stuff other people tell us to". I.e., don't assume the people above you are in charge of the "why" and as the scientist/engineer all you need to care about is the "how". Usually it's seen as more of an ethics thing, but interesting to be reminded that on occasion it can be a matter of self-interest, too, since you have a legal responsibility to know what you're doing and why, at least to some minimum degree.
I don't see any inherent reason why AI should be bad at dancing units. If anything it should be better at it, because the essentially infinite click speed and ability to attend to multiple places at once means that an AI could dance multiple groups of units at different parts of the map at all once, which for humans is something only really skilled players can do.
For logistical reasons there aren't a lot of options. Past competitions have used Wargus, since it's open source. Game-industry people tend to roll their eyes at it though, and would prefer a competition using a "real" RTS, i.e. a popular mainstream one. Starcraft is one of the only choices for that, because someone's made an API for it that allows you to write external AI to play the game. Most commercial RTSs don't have any way of doing that, unless you were to screen-scrape the display and then have to implement all sorts of computer vision to even figure out what's going on (in which case it'd be more of a vision than an AI-strategy competition).
Technically all the patents are on implementations, but there are thousands of them, mostly covering the obvious ways you would implement any of the features, or any pair of features, or any triple of features, or any pair of features in a particular process, etc., etc. The end effect is that it's basically impossible to implement x86 without stepping on some patents, probably several hundred. Of course, many of those patents may be invalid, since they're obvious to someone skilled in the art. It's quite expensive to get that shown, though, and might not work at all, because it's hard to convince a court that something seemingly really technologically advanced is actually obvious to someone skilled in chip design.
The Tribune is mainstream media, but in this case, they appear to have printed a column from some random guy, whose qualifications seem to be self-publishing his own "podcast" talk show, which is sort of what he's complaining about CNN doing.
Yeah, you can bet I bought a Core 2 Duo after what happened to my coffee when I was researching a Phenom II...