You could guess it from the people at the helm, too, since many of them are veterans of Pincus's previous startup, SupportSoft, who "voluntarily" left amidst the settlement of a shareholder lawsuit. Ah, serial entrepreneurs.
For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I've ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That's less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.
And yes, I've seen Wulfram's talks on it, and they're crap. He presented via videoconference at IJCAI IJCAI 2009, which he only got into because of the hype (sure, it's blind review, but it's hard to have blind review of a Wulfram Alpha paper that identifies itself as such in the paper), and there was no technical information at all, nor AI advances that weren't already done by like the 1960s (the AI advance in question is "querying a database").
Maybe Bing has something up their sleeve, but I'd bet on it being more hype.
In all seriousness though, I think the grandparent poster might be right. If it's designed as a single-purpose device specifically to assist people with a disability, it goes into a whole different market which might include insurance coverage.
The raw features somehow make the $1500 seem odd. The admittedly unwieldy equivalent built out of commodity parts is basically a 5-megapixel camera that transfers its data over USB (can be had for under $100 these days), and a netbook (~$300), for a total of ~$400 of hardware. What's the extra $1100 for? The integration into a nice portable package? Development costs of a proprietary OCR/voicesynth pipeline?
Are they really "American companies"? They both have their headquarters in the U.S., but operations quite distributed. What proportion of each company's employees are based in the United States? I've actually been looking for that information and can't find it, so not a rhetorical question.
They appeared linked at the oral argument, though. Roberts in particular suggested that if they struck down business-method patents but kept software patents, then companies could just implement their business method in some sort of business software, and patent it that way, rendering the fix pointless.
As a nitpick, that's actually 40 kiloton equivalent (0.40 x 10^-1 megatons = 0.04 megatons = 40 kilotons). You don't get a 400 kiloton airburst until you go up to 15m diameter
Ej, folks: Rigid schema design is an asset, not a liability!
Is that like "it's a feature, not a bug"? Sure, there are plenty of cases where rigid schema design is an asset, just like there are plenty of cases where architected-to-hell OO design is an asset. But there are cases where being able to change your damn schema without jumping through hoops is desirable, just as there are cases where you might want to be able to modify your programs nimbly.
Oddly enough, these seem to go together--- the sorts of people using non-SQL storage also tend to use dynamic languages rather than C++ or Ada.
To some extent relational databases are making a similar bet, optimizing for particular kinds of access at the expense of more general queries. There are more expressive database languages that support more general kinds of queries, including quantification and variable binding and such, like Datalog, but they're harder to make efficient (though they can also be optimized for common query paths). I see SQL as something of a middle-of-the-road choice: more general than tuple stores and some other approaches, but less general than Datalog and similar approaches. That middle-of-the-road choice might be the optimal one for a lot of applications, but it's not clear to me that it's some sort of global optimum.
This sort of thing has been done before, and in the past hasn't exactly set off a golden age of 3d television. The BBC broadcast several 3d shows in 1993, among them a Dr. Who special, but the experiment didn't catch on then. Discovery Channel did a 3d Shark Week a few years ago, also.
Well, the energy sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, and works well compared to the huge mess the deregulated banking system made of itself. You do realize that the government took over the banking sector because the bankers failed to run it?
That's not actually true. EMI, as with most record labels, only owns the particular recordings of the songs. There is a separate songwriter copyright owned, in most cases, by Lennon/McCartney. EMI doesn't own the copyright to live recordings of Beatles songs, for example, though the Beatles might be contractually prohibited from separately publishing CDs of them.
That's one reason there are many more live recordings on YouTube of many bands not yet taken down. Apart from often being lower quality (and thus of less interest to take down), in many cases the record label doesn't own their copyright, so can't be the one to send the DMCA notice.
Ah yeah, looks like I got the timeframe wrong. This book (Google Books link) says grounded outlets for residential construction were added as a requirement to the National Electrical Code around 1960 (though presumably some states added the requirement earlier).
While I wouldn't say the Microsoft anti-trust suit was nearly as successful as many of us Slashdot types would've hoped, it did have some benefits. It managed to stop a few pernicious practices, like exclusive licensing to OEMs (who weren't allowed to sell non-Windows OSs if they wanted to receive the normal favorable OEM pricing). It also provided a sort of hovering threat that forced Microsoft to at least think a little harder about whether they wanted to engage in new anti-competitive practices, since MS knew the cost of doing so would be higher than otherwise.
Ah yeah, I've seen that sort of thing in really old houses/apartments. I think all houses built in the last ~50 years have exclusively 3-prong outlets, though; I've only seen 2-prong outlets in pre-WW2 construction (and in Taiwan).
I agree that plenty of devices in the U.S. don't use a ground pin, but I've rarely seen appliances with no ground. Have you really seen a refrigerator or a microwave or something with no ground pin?
Although I don't disagree entirely, measuring it by hours played per gamer is of course going to show hardcore games near the top. I think a list of top-10 Wii games by copies sold would be considerably different.
It seems like a subjective judgment. Which is better: keeping cats indoors their whole lives, except for periodic walks outdoors on leashes, and therefore keeping them safer but quite constrained; or allowing them to wander about outdoors as they wish, but with significantly more risk to their safety? Even in humans, the tradeoff between safety and quality of life is subjective, and people do plenty of things that are quite dangerous, like riding motorcycles, skiing, and surfing.
Well, not quite "out of control"; it'll cause the engine to rev to red-line, which doesn't really have much harmful effect besides using some fuel and making noise.
I'm not sure it's the "vast majority". Statistics seem to vary, but I've seen about 60-75% quoted for the proportion of patent cases filed by practicing entities, with 25-40% being from patent holding companies. And out of those filed by practicing entities, only a smallish proportion are like this one, a small company using the patent system to protect itself against a large corporation. A huge proportion of patent suits are trench wars between large companies, often used as a negotiating tactic. A decent proportion are large companies using huge patent portfolios to stifle innovation by keeping out new entrants (e.g. how Intel protects its x86 fiefdom). The average patent litigant spends $4-5 million in legal costs, which itself is an indication that the majority of patent litigants are large, well-funded corporations.
It's not implausible that's true, but I'm not convinced. Are there benchmarks showing that, overall, the performance of a typical single-OS-install desktop system actually improves using ZFS?
Slashdot Mirror
You could guess it from the people at the helm, too, since many of them are veterans of Pincus's previous startup, SupportSoft, who "voluntarily" left amidst the settlement of a shareholder lawsuit. Ah, serial entrepreneurs.
For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I've ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That's less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.
And yes, I've seen Wulfram's talks on it, and they're crap. He presented via videoconference at IJCAI IJCAI 2009, which he only got into because of the hype (sure, it's blind review, but it's hard to have blind review of a Wulfram Alpha paper that identifies itself as such in the paper), and there was no technical information at all, nor AI advances that weren't already done by like the 1960s (the AI advance in question is "querying a database").
Maybe Bing has something up their sleeve, but I'd bet on it being more hype.
In all seriousness though, I think the grandparent poster might be right. If it's designed as a single-purpose device specifically to assist people with a disability, it goes into a whole different market which might include insurance coverage.
No, in that case it would list for $15,000. =]
The raw features somehow make the $1500 seem odd. The admittedly unwieldy equivalent built out of commodity parts is basically a 5-megapixel camera that transfers its data over USB (can be had for under $100 these days), and a netbook (~$300), for a total of ~$400 of hardware. What's the extra $1100 for? The integration into a nice portable package? Development costs of a proprietary OCR/voicesynth pipeline?
Are they really "American companies"? They both have their headquarters in the U.S., but operations quite distributed. What proportion of each company's employees are based in the United States? I've actually been looking for that information and can't find it, so not a rhetorical question.
They appeared linked at the oral argument, though. Roberts in particular suggested that if they struck down business-method patents but kept software patents, then companies could just implement their business method in some sort of business software, and patent it that way, rendering the fix pointless.
As a nitpick, that's actually 40 kiloton equivalent (0.40 x 10^-1 megatons = 0.04 megatons = 40 kilotons). You don't get a 400 kiloton airburst until you go up to 15m diameter
Ej, folks: Rigid schema design is an asset, not a liability!
Is that like "it's a feature, not a bug"? Sure, there are plenty of cases where rigid schema design is an asset, just like there are plenty of cases where architected-to-hell OO design is an asset. But there are cases where being able to change your damn schema without jumping through hoops is desirable, just as there are cases where you might want to be able to modify your programs nimbly.
Oddly enough, these seem to go together--- the sorts of people using non-SQL storage also tend to use dynamic languages rather than C++ or Ada.
To some extent relational databases are making a similar bet, optimizing for particular kinds of access at the expense of more general queries. There are more expressive database languages that support more general kinds of queries, including quantification and variable binding and such, like Datalog, but they're harder to make efficient (though they can also be optimized for common query paths). I see SQL as something of a middle-of-the-road choice: more general than tuple stores and some other approaches, but less general than Datalog and similar approaches. That middle-of-the-road choice might be the optimal one for a lot of applications, but it's not clear to me that it's some sort of global optimum.
Also, Linus doesn't want to move to v3, and he's a pretty important code contributor.
This sort of thing has been done before, and in the past hasn't exactly set off a golden age of 3d television. The BBC broadcast several 3d shows in 1993, among them a Dr. Who special, but the experiment didn't catch on then. Discovery Channel did a 3d Shark Week a few years ago, also.
Well, the energy sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, and works well compared to the huge mess the deregulated banking system made of itself. You do realize that the government took over the banking sector because the bankers failed to run it?
Bullshit legal controversy created as a negotiating tactic is resolved by negotiations in which everyone gets varying slices of the pie. Shocking!
The main difficulty I've had in this brief saga is figuring out if there was some way I could root against everyone involved simultaneously.
That's not actually true. EMI, as with most record labels, only owns the particular recordings of the songs. There is a separate songwriter copyright owned, in most cases, by Lennon/McCartney. EMI doesn't own the copyright to live recordings of Beatles songs, for example, though the Beatles might be contractually prohibited from separately publishing CDs of them.
That's one reason there are many more live recordings on YouTube of many bands not yet taken down. Apart from often being lower quality (and thus of less interest to take down), in many cases the record label doesn't own their copyright, so can't be the one to send the DMCA notice.
Ah yeah, looks like I got the timeframe wrong. This book (Google Books link) says grounded outlets for residential construction were added as a requirement to the National Electrical Code around 1960 (though presumably some states added the requirement earlier).
While I wouldn't say the Microsoft anti-trust suit was nearly as successful as many of us Slashdot types would've hoped, it did have some benefits. It managed to stop a few pernicious practices, like exclusive licensing to OEMs (who weren't allowed to sell non-Windows OSs if they wanted to receive the normal favorable OEM pricing). It also provided a sort of hovering threat that forced Microsoft to at least think a little harder about whether they wanted to engage in new anti-competitive practices, since MS knew the cost of doing so would be higher than otherwise.
Ah yeah, I've seen that sort of thing in really old houses/apartments. I think all houses built in the last ~50 years have exclusively 3-prong outlets, though; I've only seen 2-prong outlets in pre-WW2 construction (and in Taiwan).
I agree that plenty of devices in the U.S. don't use a ground pin, but I've rarely seen appliances with no ground. Have you really seen a refrigerator or a microwave or something with no ground pin?
Although I don't disagree entirely, measuring it by hours played per gamer is of course going to show hardcore games near the top. I think a list of top-10 Wii games by copies sold would be considerably different.
The Wii has plenty of games for "mature audiences", like your grandmother.
It seems like a subjective judgment. Which is better: keeping cats indoors their whole lives, except for periodic walks outdoors on leashes, and therefore keeping them safer but quite constrained; or allowing them to wander about outdoors as they wish, but with significantly more risk to their safety? Even in humans, the tradeoff between safety and quality of life is subjective, and people do plenty of things that are quite dangerous, like riding motorcycles, skiing, and surfing.
Well, not quite "out of control"; it'll cause the engine to rev to red-line, which doesn't really have much harmful effect besides using some fuel and making noise.
I'm not sure it's the "vast majority". Statistics seem to vary, but I've seen about 60-75% quoted for the proportion of patent cases filed by practicing entities, with 25-40% being from patent holding companies. And out of those filed by practicing entities, only a smallish proportion are like this one, a small company using the patent system to protect itself against a large corporation. A huge proportion of patent suits are trench wars between large companies, often used as a negotiating tactic. A decent proportion are large companies using huge patent portfolios to stifle innovation by keeping out new entrants (e.g. how Intel protects its x86 fiefdom). The average patent litigant spends $4-5 million in legal costs, which itself is an indication that the majority of patent litigants are large, well-funded corporations.
It's not implausible that's true, but I'm not convinced. Are there benchmarks showing that, overall, the performance of a typical single-OS-install desktop system actually improves using ZFS?