Sure it is good to find something new, but very few of these ever work out in the real world. Having a virus eat bad brain cells and leave good ones is one thing, but there are still many other hurdles before this becomes an effective and reliable treatment. For instance, it might ignore good brain cells but it might eat liver cells or spinal nerve cells. The toxins from the broken down brain cells could be quite harmful too.
That said though, if many of our food items were new today, the FDA would ban them. No fizzy drinks because CO2 is poisonous. Put a rat in a bucket of CO2 and it dies! Perhaps the FDA etc are a bit too cautious about some drugs and treatments.
Good design is a play-off between the different features and constraints in the system: deliver dates, cost, battery life, size, weight,...
3G just did not add enough to the product, at the time it was designed, to justify the extra weight, battery life etc. Technology is changing and likely future iphones will have 3G and other features.
The crap design you mention is jsut that: a crap design. It is possible to make a good automatic design.
How many cars these days have manual chokes, advance/retard, mixture settings etc? None. They are all automatic. Give a user a knob and they will fiddle with it and break the system.
Was the "Vista Capable" program a positive informing effort for customers or was it a muddying tactic to prevent dreadded market overhang? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_overhang
Without some sort of sticker program, people would have stopped buying PCs for fear of Vista obsolecence just around the corner. That would have sucked for the sellers, especially hardware sellers who would have got stuck with obsolete stock.
That even pretty sharp and jaded people got fooled indicates that this sticker program was effective at fooling people and it would seem that this was their intention and they succeeded.
Most people equate Vista with shiny pixels and would feel suckered if their machine could not do the shiny pixels.
To be honest and transparent, MS should have released the limited UI under a completely different brand.
I have been using VS for doing Windows CE 6 builds. The brains at MS decided to build the WinCE tools into VS to make everything easier to use, rather than using standalone tools as in the past.
Anyone who was given one of those penknives with a built in fork know what a crap idea that is.
Debugging messages sent to the Visual Studio output logging box take a long time to show up. I have seen messages coming through a few at a time over half an hour after the target was stopped.
Building/debugging are unbelievably slow too (especially when compared to Linux) when running on similar platforms.
No wonder MS are losing ground in the Windows CE space.
I am also not a lawyer, but I have written over ten patents and read many.
As in many of these "obvious patent" trolling articles, the article/summary oversimplify the patent. The patent does not just claim click here, fetch there redirection which is used by just about every major site, but algorithms for doing the load balancing etc.
If you read some of the claims, then you'll see that various algorithms are used for load balancing and other purposes. While these might be obvious to some, they are extremely obvious to all.
The test of "obvious" is also not that clear cut. IIRC, the tests is "reasonably obvious to practitioners of the art". This test should be applied to the state of the art as at the time of the patent, because a patent "teaches" the industry and therefore after the disclosure the less-than-obvious become obvious.
After $100m or so you really have no use for money. You can but a couple of holiday homes in interesting locations and park a few cars in each driveway and moor a yacht off each private jetty and never need to worry about money again.
After that, money is just power. If you only get $800m instead of $900m you'd feel screwed over. You gave Bill some of your power.
The new generation have been educated that the world revolves around them and their feelings. Many even believe that scientific "facts" are just an opinion and that their opinions are just as valid, whether based in fact or not.
Science needs to be, if nothing else, impartial and rational. The current educational generation are not being educated to be impartial or rational. Thus, science will suffer.
Sure, Good Science need not be completely dry and boring, but Discovery Channel etc edit for entertainment value, not fact. At the end of the day they are generating material which competes for eyeballs with sitcoms and Reality TV etc. No eyeballs means no ad revenue which means no airtime. Simple.
Is it really a net positive for science if it gives a very skewed version of what science is and how science works?
I would argue that the USA's peak of scientific interest was during the late 1960s when the space program was a national obsession and every second kid had a Nasa poster on their bedroom wall. Perhaps we have a lot of scientists and engineers now, but that is mainly a generational lag thing. Perhaps we know more about science now, but the interest is long gone. The current national obsessions (it there are any) are Britney Spears etc. The USA sure is not seeding the next generation of scientists.
Look how Discovery channel etc get hyped and dramatized and facts removed to make for a more entertaining package. Even the news is infotainment.
Anyway, what is Good Science? A lot of the more entertaining science is Bad Science. For example, Discovery Channel segments on dinosaurs often feature people making roaring extrapolations: find a tooth fragment and say that they have found something from a dinosaur that would have been 25 ft long and run at 40 mph. What bullshit.
Possibly, though MS already offer XP and CE in the embedded space. For more info on that sort of thing read http://www.windowsfordevices.com/
Lightwight secure OSs are pretty handy for industrial applications like robotics etc, but Linux is making huge inroads there too mainly because of reduced footprint (== lower cost) and better network management.
Part of dying is to break down or "open up" the proteins or whatever in the fibres so that they can take up the dyes. If you don't do this the dye just washes off. This same process will also break down some other materials, including many stains, allowing them to be washed away.
Protein based fibres (wool, feathers, silk etc) require different treatment than plant based fibres(cotton, hemp etc) because there's a need to "open up" different types of cells.
For protein based dying (in a home/craft situation) it is common to use vinegar. Vinegar is also one of your great grandmother's go-to household cleaners.
I act on behalf of the International Gastapodian Society.
The Society finds your comments repulsive. Associating Vista with snails gives said snails a very bad name.
Contrary to your misinformed opinion, some snails are capable of very high speeds, up to 12 inches per minute (15 with a good tailwind). I think we can all agree that this is far faster than Vista.
We therefore request that you withdraw your hurtful comments.
Frivolous cases, of all kinds, are often struck down with costs. No reason to think this will have any significant impact on patents, any more than on other laws.
An acquisition works when both the acquirer and acquiree emerge stronger (ie sum greater than its parts). That is not the case with MS+Yahoo, but it could be with MS+SAP.
MS already have very strong business units dealing with large organisations and combining with SAP could potentially strengthen both parties by providing more vomplete solutions, one stop shopping & service etc.
By comparison, the yahoo thing is a wtf. Both MS and Yahoo are on the downward direction in click ads and online services and combining sums the numbers but does not improve the trend (ie downward + downward is still downward).
About the only thing that yahoo really seems to have is a reasonably sound base in yahoo groups. Moving a group is painful, so existing groups won't move to google groups just for fun. New groups are another matter, with google groups being far more appealing.
SAP does make more sense than Yahoo, but is it enough?
MS's main problem is not Google per se, but a Google obsession.
MS has failed dismally with its various acquisitions, with very few exceptions. MS core money makers are OS and Office. They seem to be putting very little energy into Vista and fixing its problems, doing something which would make their core business sound. In fact it looks like they've just cut these adrift.
If Google had not emerged as the new obsession, they'd still be aiming for Apple with knock-off interfaces, Zune etc.
This is reaaly the MS tradgedy: instead of being customer focussed and delivering new exciting products and technologies (something such an organisation should be able to do with their huge resources), they have become competition focussed.
There is very little motivation within the patent system to change it.
The USPTO makes a lot of profit. Why should Uncle Sam kill a cash cow.
The patent lawyers make a lot of money filing patents. Easy filing encourages more filing which means more business/profit. But the real money gets earned when patents get contested. Therefore bad patents mean lots of litigation which mean more profits. No motivation to improve patent quality.
Systems don't fix themselves. Since there is no motivation to change, change won't happen.
lets a 7 year old kid play around on the internet by themselves?
Parents: the internet is not a nanny.
How about getting the kid to play with playdough, building blocks etc. Studies show much more educational benefit for this playing with building blocks than on a computer.
"What do you want the numbers to say? We'll torture them until they say it!"
These studies are such a crock and use very dodgy extrapolations. Of course I didn't RTFA, but they're generally along the lines of: Give a company 56k dialup and they become 20% more profitable. Therefore is we give them 2Mbits they will become 20% * 2M/56k = 700%. Or: a survey shows a correlation between company size and bandwidth. Larger companies tend to have more bandwidth than smaller companies. Therefore we will give all the small companies broadband and they will all turn into big companies thus creating more jobs and money!
These studies very seldom take a holistic view either. Less driving might mean more hours worked, but it is just as likely to mean more time doing something useless. It also means less wear and tear on cars and roads (therefore less auto mechanic jobs and less road contruction/repair jobs).
Slashdot Mirror
That said though, if many of our food items were new today, the FDA would ban them. No fizzy drinks because CO2 is poisonous. Put a rat in a bucket of CO2 and it dies! Perhaps the FDA etc are a bit too cautious about some drugs and treatments.
3G just did not add enough to the product, at the time it was designed, to justify the extra weight, battery life etc. Technology is changing and likely future iphones will have 3G and other features.
Everyone has a different leartning style. Some think best when in an incubator-like evironment and others think more by walking around outside.
I hope they give these kids lots of healthy fresh air too. No point in burning them out.
How many cars these days have manual chokes, advance/retard, mixture settings etc? None. They are all automatic. Give a user a knob and they will fiddle with it and break the system.
Without some sort of sticker program, people would have stopped buying PCs for fear of Vista obsolecence just around the corner. That would have sucked for the sellers, especially hardware sellers who would have got stuck with obsolete stock.
That even pretty sharp and jaded people got fooled indicates that this sticker program was effective at fooling people and it would seem that this was their intention and they succeeded.
Most people equate Vista with shiny pixels and would feel suckered if their machine could not do the shiny pixels.
To be honest and transparent, MS should have released the limited UI under a completely different brand.
Anyone who was given one of those penknives with a built in fork know what a crap idea that is.
Debugging messages sent to the Visual Studio output logging box take a long time to show up. I have seen messages coming through a few at a time over half an hour after the target was stopped.
Building/debugging are unbelievably slow too (especially when compared to Linux) when running on similar platforms.
No wonder MS are losing ground in the Windows CE space.
As in many of these "obvious patent" trolling articles, the article/summary oversimplify the patent. The patent does not just claim click here, fetch there redirection which is used by just about every major site, but algorithms for doing the load balancing etc.
If you read some of the claims, then you'll see that various algorithms are used for load balancing and other purposes. While these might be obvious to some, they are extremely obvious to all.
The test of "obvious" is also not that clear cut. IIRC, the tests is "reasonably obvious to practitioners of the art". This test should be applied to the state of the art as at the time of the patent, because a patent "teaches" the industry and therefore after the disclosure the less-than-obvious become obvious.
After that, money is just power. If you only get $800m instead of $900m you'd feel screwed over. You gave Bill some of your power.
Science needs to be, if nothing else, impartial and rational. The current educational generation are not being educated to be impartial or rational. Thus, science will suffer.
Is it really a net positive for science if it gives a very skewed version of what science is and how science works?
I would argue that the USA's peak of scientific interest was during the late 1960s when the space program was a national obsession and every second kid had a Nasa poster on their bedroom wall. Perhaps we have a lot of scientists and engineers now, but that is mainly a generational lag thing. Perhaps we know more about science now, but the interest is long gone. The current national obsessions (it there are any) are Britney Spears etc. The USA sure is not seeding the next generation of scientists.
Anyway, what is Good Science? A lot of the more entertaining science is Bad Science. For example, Discovery Channel segments on dinosaurs often feature people making roaring extrapolations: find a tooth fragment and say that they have found something from a dinosaur that would have been 25 ft long and run at 40 mph. What bullshit.
Here's a place where patents really suck: a good idea gets sat on and cannot be used by people would could make into something good.
Lightwight secure OSs are pretty handy for industrial applications like robotics etc, but Linux is making huge inroads there too mainly because of reduced footprint (== lower cost) and better network management.
Protein based fibres (wool, feathers, silk etc) require different treatment than plant based fibres(cotton, hemp etc) because there's a need to "open up" different types of cells.
For protein based dying (in a home/craft situation) it is common to use vinegar. Vinegar is also one of your great grandmother's go-to household cleaners.
The Society finds your comments repulsive. Associating Vista with snails gives said snails a very bad name.
Contrary to your misinformed opinion, some snails are capable of very high speeds, up to 12 inches per minute (15 with a good tailwind). I think we can all agree that this is far faster than Vista.
We therefore request that you withdraw your hurtful comments.
Yours in slime,
S. Cargo
Frivolous cases, of all kinds, are often struck down with costs. No reason to think this will have any significant impact on patents, any more than on other laws.
So ripping off a stock photo is Bad and this guy did good by pushing for his rights and winning.
But pirating copyright music via p2p etc is OK because nobody got hurt right.
ENOCOMPUTE
Why did they have to withdraw it? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/21/1526225&from=rss
Is this what 5 years and $5bn gets you in a monstorous company like MS?
MS already have very strong business units dealing with large organisations and combining with SAP could potentially strengthen both parties by providing more vomplete solutions, one stop shopping & service etc.
By comparison, the yahoo thing is a wtf. Both MS and Yahoo are on the downward direction in click ads and online services and combining sums the numbers but does not improve the trend (ie downward + downward is still downward).
About the only thing that yahoo really seems to have is a reasonably sound base in yahoo groups. Moving a group is painful, so existing groups won't move to google groups just for fun. New groups are another matter, with google groups being far more appealing.
SAP does make more sense than Yahoo, but is it enough?
MS has failed dismally with its various acquisitions, with very few exceptions. MS core money makers are OS and Office. They seem to be putting very little energy into Vista and fixing its problems, doing something which would make their core business sound. In fact it looks like they've just cut these adrift.
If Google had not emerged as the new obsession, they'd still be aiming for Apple with knock-off interfaces, Zune etc.
This is reaaly the MS tradgedy: instead of being customer focussed and delivering new exciting products and technologies (something such an organisation should be able to do with their huge resources), they have become competition focussed.
The USPTO makes a lot of profit. Why should Uncle Sam kill a cash cow.
The patent lawyers make a lot of money filing patents. Easy filing encourages more filing which means more business/profit. But the real money gets earned when patents get contested. Therefore bad patents mean lots of litigation which mean more profits. No motivation to improve patent quality.
Systems don't fix themselves. Since there is no motivation to change, change won't happen.
Linux is used a lot in the actual EFPOS terminals, particurly in Europe where the numbers are way higher than the corresponding US numbers.
Parents: the internet is not a nanny.
How about getting the kid to play with playdough, building blocks etc. Studies show much more educational benefit for this playing with building blocks than on a computer.
These studies are such a crock and use very dodgy extrapolations. Of course I didn't RTFA, but they're generally along the lines of: Give a company 56k dialup and they become 20% more profitable. Therefore is we give them 2Mbits they will become 20% * 2M/56k = 700%. Or: a survey shows a correlation between company size and bandwidth. Larger companies tend to have more bandwidth than smaller companies. Therefore we will give all the small companies broadband and they will all turn into big companies thus creating more jobs and money!
These studies very seldom take a holistic view either. Less driving might mean more hours worked, but it is just as likely to mean more time doing something useless. It also means less wear and tear on cars and roads (therefore less auto mechanic jobs and less road contruction/repair jobs).
How about sharing the contents of your bank account?
Let's face it folk. IP theft is theft. Just because it is easy to do or everyone does it does not make it right.