For those interested in ludology (the study of games), check out DiGRA. Its a discussion site where academics and games creators discuss some of the topics that cross their works. Quite interesting, although probably a bit high-brow for the slashdot masses;^)
I could almost have written your post myself! I agree totally about the need to find a compromise over software patents, also because I feel that deciding that people 'own' ideas just because they had them first is a ridiculous concept. However, people who have ideas for a living do need to have some form of renumeration for their work so the two positions need to meet in the middle somewhere.
So the question now is how to get somebody to suggest the idea to the right person? I was thinking of writing to my new MEP after the results are announced tomorrow (hopefully the LibDem candidate will get in as at least they're opposed to software patents) and seeing if he would support the idea. What other ways are there of getting people to think about this?
At least its a new an improved dupe. Half the posts the last time around were complaining about calling it a PSTN network instead of POTS. It's almost as if the editors kindof listened....
This is going down the right track. The main problem with the current patent system is the implementation. There are far too many obvious and trivial patents. One way that we've been using in the sciences for hundreds of years to stop this is peer review. So why not open up the patent system to peer review?
A site like this could be used to coordinate this process in much the same way as conferences and journals coordinate the peer review of scientific publications. It would be in the interests of companies to get involved as they would have some say in the granting of patents in the fields that they operate in.
Combine this with a shorter term (say 3 years) and software patents wouldn't be such a bad thing...
It would appear that mathworld.com agrees with you...
----------------
Riemann Hypothesis "Proof" Much Ado About Noithing A June 8 Purdue University news release reports a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis by L. de Branges. However, both the 23-page preprint cited in the release (which is actually from 2003) and a longer preprint from 2004 on de Branges's home page seem to lack an actual proof. Furthermore, a counterexample to de Branges's approach due to Conrey and Li has been known since 1998. The media coverage therefore appears to be much ado about nothing.
Is your name Marvin by any chance and do you have a brain the size of a planet? I'm sure that you should be in filming somewhere rather than posting...
True, that's a very good point. I was just trying to point out that if it can be done independently then the patent is worthless. The whole issue of whether or not inventing something 'first' should give you an exclusive monopoly is another can of worms. (And, no I don't think that it should but I've yet to see an alternative).
No, this is not a reminder to developers that they should perform a patent search before implementing things. If somebody can independently implement the 'invention' between the time the patent is filed and when it is granted then the patent is obvious. The patent filing is not required to make the invention and so the filing is frivilous; because somebody else with normal skill in the art was capable of reproducing the invention *without* the patent.
Have you seen this pit with your own eyes? Do you not undertand that a hoax is still a hoax even if it claims that it isn't. Odd that really, seems to take some thought process to understand, go on try...
Actually, that is likely to be a hoax. There is a good debunking of it on this page
Quite a way down in the section entitled 'Radioactive Ash in Rajasthan, India'. As they point out it fits with peoples preconceptions and a willingness to believe that there is some esoteric layer to history.
The various other pieces of 'evidence' are interesting but inconclusive. There's quite a good description of them in 'Fingerprints of the Gods' by Graham Hancock who goes in for that sort of thing.
That's the point that they're missing. The goal of anti-competition law is to make anti-competative behaviour unprofitable. So they continue to abuse their monopoly position, there are more anti-trust cases, and they get more fines. Those fines raise the basic cost of doing business for them and so they raise their prices. This makes their product less attractive than those that don't have to subsidise the cost of legal action, so that the market then corrects the situation.
In the long term, this cost of doing business will make them less profitable and their product less successful. Then we'll get some kind of radical change and the system will stabilise around some new stable point. This is anti-competition law working, although it takes a long time to play out...
These do look nice, but the killer feature on a keyboard for me would be a built in trackball somewhere near the middle of the main key area. The reason that I avoid using the mouse a lot is that the latency of getting my hands from over the main keys to the mouse and back is so high, having a trackball under a thumb would be ideal.
I saw one (can't remember the name or link) once that had an oversized space-bar with a trackball in it but it was ps/2 and only had windows drivers. Ahh to dream of such a beast that would work under linux....
Ok, so you read the microsoft response but did you fail to read the actual reuters summary? The commision found that barrier-to-entry for the operating system market were so high because people don't want to have to change to an incompatible product, and that this places *special* obligations on microsoft an a monopolist in such a market.
A better analogy would be that there was a dominant shoe maker that refused to make the shoelace holes in a way that would allow other shoelace makers to create a product that worked with their shoes.
Why SSL on the connection, the mail got to your server over an unencrypted connection, what's the point in starting when its already been naked in the wild?
What FS are you running on your server than you can guarentee that when a message is deleted its gone? Most just flag it as deleted but the bytes stay there until they're overwritten.
Not to mention scalability. At the moment if you install an older game on some newer hardware then it can talk to it fine through DirectX or OpenGL and the game runs quicker. So that old game suddenly runs at a higher resolution than it used to.
If you freeze the version of DirectX/OpenGL by burning it onto the disk then this can't happen, and if you have a card newer than the game then chances are it won't be supported by the old drivers.
I was referring to complexity of use; how easy it is to get something done in either system. The size of the code base is irrelevent. Berkeley DB is a fairly standard component and is installed in most distributions anyway. Why should they have reinvented the wheel and implemented their own locking transaction system?
CVS on the other hand opts for the approach of not handling transactions at all, which is a bitch if you've ever had a commit abort halfway through.
CVS and subversion are just as complicated as each other. If anything, subversion is easier to use than CVS ever was, and certainly easier to administrate. You can't say that CVS is simpler than subversion as they follow the same model of use, but subversion is somewhat more streamlined and there are less gotcha's to bite you in the ass.
HD space isn't the issue, download times are the issue. More and more games are designed to be played online with downloadable content, look at the success of X-Box live. Now imagine how much quicker a procedurally described level would download than an explicitly described one. Which would you rather wait for?
Re:I have most of those moments in the shower..
on
Those Eureka Moments
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· Score: 1
I'm glad to see that someone around here is talking some sense instead of following the slashdot mindset. I also like adwords, when I actually want to buy something they're pretty damn useful and accurate - when I don't they're pretty much invisible. Everyone complains about being saturated with advertising, well here is a company getting slammed for doing it properly.
The main complain in the article seemed to be about the service reading your email to perform the adword scan. For all the naysayers out there who are agreeing with it, answer me one question:
How is a webmail service going to show me my email without reading it?
Also, aren't google fulfilling the DPA by flagging the data as deleted? That's how most operating systems do it and no-one is complaining that any business using linux/windows is breaching the law because they don't take a magnet to the harddrive when you finish doing business with them.
Yeah, I agree with the gist of your point, but maybe I just don't see a downside to it;^)
On the eventual investment though, somebody else made the point - why would Google IPO? They're an internet company that's actually cash-rich, they have lots of motivated intelligent employees that seem to love what they do. An IPO would only contrain them to chase the bottom-line like other mega-corporations...
I believe the primary concern is identity theft and other things.
You don't want bank, credit card, and other personal identification floating around in your emails for the rest of eternity, do you?
I happen to buy things online and bank online.
Oh my god! You'd send bank information over email! Seriously, step right this way, just hand over all your money to the girl at the checkin desk, no sir, no need to worry about it one little bit...
Yes, I bank online as well - but through a webbrowser over an SSL connection. Email can be read by anybody in the chain from your computer to the far end. Email is not and never has been secure in any, way shape and form.
Whilst you do make some insightful observations, you can't count to four can you;^)
Nit-picking aside, your second reason is a community service, Google are really good at publishing the results of their research. That experiment in distributed computing is not just going to advance the state of the art in scalable systems, its going to drive it.
If companies refused to go off shore, then everyone would be able to survive and we wouldn't lose any jobs.
Afraid not. What you've just said is paraphrasing the prisoners dilemma. In that situation, the first company to go offshore wins and everyone else loses unless they do the same. Why? Because then they could compete on price while nobody else could. It's not a stable state...
Slashdot Mirror
For those interested in ludology (the study of games), check out DiGRA. Its a discussion site where academics and games creators discuss some of the topics that cross their works. Quite interesting, although probably a bit high-brow for the slashdot masses ;^)
I could almost have written your post myself! I agree totally about the need to find a compromise over software patents, also because I feel that deciding that people 'own' ideas just because they had them first is a ridiculous concept. However, people who have ideas for a living do need to have some form of renumeration for their work so the two positions need to meet in the middle somewhere.
So the question now is how to get somebody to suggest the idea to the right person? I was thinking of writing to my new MEP after the results are announced tomorrow (hopefully the LibDem candidate will get in as at least they're opposed to software patents) and seeing if he would support the idea. What other ways are there of getting people to think about this?
At least its a new an improved dupe. Half the posts the last time around were complaining about calling it a PSTN network instead of POTS. It's almost as if the editors kindof listened ....
This is going down the right track. The main problem with the current patent system is the implementation. There are far too many obvious and trivial patents. One way that we've been using in the sciences for hundreds of years to stop this is peer review. So why not open up the patent system to peer review?
A site like this could be used to coordinate this process in much the same way as conferences and journals coordinate the peer review of scientific publications. It would be in the interests of companies to get involved as they would have some say in the granting of patents in the fields that they operate in.
Combine this with a shorter term (say 3 years) and software patents wouldn't be such a bad thing...
It would appear that mathworld.com agrees with you...
----------------
Riemann Hypothesis "Proof" Much Ado About Noithing
A June 8 Purdue University news release reports a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis by L. de Branges. However, both the 23-page preprint cited in the release (which is actually from 2003) and a longer preprint from 2004 on de Branges's home page seem to lack an actual proof. Furthermore, a counterexample to de Branges's approach due to Conrey and Li has been known since 1998. The media coverage therefore appears to be much ado about nothing.
Is your name Marvin by any chance and do you have a brain the size of a planet? I'm sure that you should be in filming somewhere rather than posting...
True, that's a very good point. I was just trying to point out that if it can be done independently then the patent is worthless. The whole issue of whether or not inventing something 'first' should give you an exclusive monopoly is another can of worms. (And, no I don't think that it should but I've yet to see an alternative).
No, this is not a reminder to developers that they should perform a patent search before implementing things. If somebody can independently implement the 'invention' between the time the patent is filed and when it is granted then the patent is obvious. The patent filing is not required to make the invention and so the filing is frivilous; because somebody else with normal skill in the art was capable of reproducing the invention *without* the patent.
Have you seen this pit with your own eyes? Do you not undertand that a hoax is still a hoax even if it claims that it isn't. Odd that really, seems to take some thought process to understand, go on try...
Actually, that is likely to be a hoax. There is a good debunking of it on this page
Quite a way down in the section entitled 'Radioactive Ash in Rajasthan, India'. As they point out it fits with peoples preconceptions and a willingness to believe that there is some esoteric layer to history.
The various other pieces of 'evidence' are interesting but inconclusive. There's quite a good description of them in 'Fingerprints of the Gods' by Graham Hancock who goes in for that sort of thing.
That's the point that they're missing. The goal of anti-competition law is to make anti-competative behaviour unprofitable. So they continue to abuse their monopoly position, there are more anti-trust cases, and they get more fines. Those fines raise the basic cost of doing business for them and so they raise their prices. This makes their product less attractive than those that don't have to subsidise the cost of legal action, so that the market then corrects the situation.
In the long term, this cost of doing business will make them less profitable and their product less successful. Then we'll get some kind of radical change and the system will stabilise around some new stable point. This is anti-competition law working, although it takes a long time to play out...
These do look nice, but the killer feature on a keyboard for me would be a built in trackball somewhere near the middle of the main key area. The reason that I avoid using the mouse a lot is that the latency of getting my hands from over the main keys to the mouse and back is so high, having a trackball under a thumb would be ideal.
I saw one (can't remember the name or link) once that had an oversized space-bar with a trackball in it but it was ps/2 and only had windows drivers. Ahh to dream of such a beast that would work under linux....
Ok, so you read the microsoft response but did you fail to read the actual reuters summary? The commision found that barrier-to-entry for the operating system market were so high because people don't want to have to change to an incompatible product, and that this places *special* obligations on microsoft an a monopolist in such a market.
A better analogy would be that there was a dominant shoe maker that refused to make the shoelace holes in a way that would allow other shoelace makers to create a product that worked with their shoes.
But yes, nice "flaimbait" quote.
Two questions:
Why SSL on the connection, the mail got to your server over an unencrypted connection, what's the point in starting when its already been naked in the wild?
What FS are you running on your server than you can guarentee that when a message is deleted its gone? Most just flag it as deleted but the bytes stay there until they're overwritten.
Not to mention scalability. At the moment if you install an older game on some newer hardware then it can talk to it fine through DirectX or OpenGL and the game runs quicker. So that old game suddenly runs at a higher resolution than it used to.
If you freeze the version of DirectX/OpenGL by burning it onto the disk then this can't happen, and if you have a card newer than the game then chances are it won't be supported by the old drivers.
I was referring to complexity of use; how easy it is to get something done in either system. The size of the code base is irrelevent. Berkeley DB is a fairly standard component and is installed in most distributions anyway. Why should they have reinvented the wheel and implemented their own locking transaction system? CVS on the other hand opts for the approach of not handling transactions at all, which is a bitch if you've ever had a commit abort halfway through.
CVS and subversion are just as complicated as each other. If anything, subversion is easier to use than CVS ever was, and certainly easier to administrate. You can't say that CVS is simpler than subversion as they follow the same model of use, but subversion is somewhat more streamlined and there are less gotcha's to bite you in the ass.
Why don't they run lossless compression over it? Is it a speed of access issue?
HD space isn't the issue, download times are the issue. More and more games are designed to be played online with downloadable content, look at the success of X-Box live. Now imagine how much quicker a procedurally described level would download than an explicitly described one. Which would you rather wait for?
Don't you find that the paper smudges?
I'm glad to see that someone around here is talking some sense instead of following the slashdot mindset. I also like adwords, when I actually want to buy something they're pretty damn useful and accurate - when I don't they're pretty much invisible. Everyone complains about being saturated with advertising, well here is a company getting slammed for doing it properly.
The main complain in the article seemed to be about the service reading your email to perform the adword scan. For all the naysayers out there who are agreeing with it, answer me one question:
How is a webmail service going to show me my email without reading it?
Also, aren't google fulfilling the DPA by flagging the data as deleted? That's how most operating systems do it and no-one is complaining that any business using linux/windows is breaching the law because they don't take a magnet to the harddrive when you finish doing business with them.
Yeah, I agree with the gist of your point, but maybe I just don't see a downside to it ;^)
On the eventual investment though, somebody else made the point - why would Google IPO? They're an internet company that's actually cash-rich, they have lots of motivated intelligent employees that seem to love what they do. An IPO would only contrain them to chase the bottom-line like other mega-corporations...
I believe the primary concern is identity theft and other things.
You don't want bank, credit card, and other personal identification floating around in your emails for the rest of eternity, do you?
I happen to buy things online and bank online.
Oh my god! You'd send bank information over email! Seriously, step right this way, just hand over all your money to the girl at the checkin desk, no sir, no need to worry about it one little bit...
Yes, I bank online as well - but through a webbrowser over an SSL connection. Email can be read by anybody in the chain from your computer to the far end. Email is not and never has been secure in any, way shape and form.
Whilst you do make some insightful observations, you can't count to four can you ;^)
Nit-picking aside, your second reason is a community service, Google are really good at publishing the results of their research. That experiment in distributed computing is not just going to advance the state of the art in scalable systems, its going to drive it.
If companies refused to go off shore, then everyone would be able to survive and we wouldn't lose any jobs.
Afraid not. What you've just said is paraphrasing the prisoners dilemma. In that situation, the first company to go offshore wins and everyone else loses unless they do the same. Why? Because then they could compete on price while nobody else could. It's not a stable state...