Inevitably there will be a backlash to this technology, similar to what occurred in response to Compact Digital Audio discs. It will be spearheaded not by audiophiles but by photophiles, who will insist that persistence of vision is a myth and that any strobing effect, even measured in millionths of a second, is dangerous and will cause mental illness or cancer.
That magnification feature is just one of how many claims in this patent? If that ONE claim is what defines the whole as unique, then why isn't the patent specifically about that, and titled as such? If there is more than one unique claim in this patent, then why weren't separate and distinct patents filed for each specific, distinct, and unique element, rather than lumping multiple claims into a single patent with a misleading title? You certainly weren't the first commenter to make a big deal of the inclusion of the magnification feature, as if that somehow otherwise completely justifies this patent.
My final comment was a general one, and was motivated by the collective stupidity of the system and not this one patent. It was very much called-for, though you might still argue it was uncalled-for in this context.
Remember a little insignificant software company named Quarterdeck Office Systems? I worked there for four years in the early Nineties. One of its products was called Sidebar, which was an "icon dock" that included icons for certain basic system functions as well as duplicates of all the app icons in Program Manager. It also allowed iconified subfolders to be created, etc. This would have been about '93 or '94, and even (IIRC) predated Windows 95.
I think that might count as prior evidence.
Patents in general are probably dumb and counter-productive to the claimed desired effect, but software patents require a descriptive adjective that even moronic doesn't quite address.
This has been tried before, by other ailing IC-making firms, and it didn't help them survive to the present day; why should it be any better a strategy for AMD?
Corporate cost-cutting strategies are idiotic and political. They're temporary band-aids, and not very good ones. Selling material assets at a loss or sending human resources packing in order to make the bottom line APPEAR better is moronic and short-sighted, and it never really helps. Keeping those assets and more effectively utilizing them is the correct route to fixing the bottom line; cutting assets loose is an admission that the company is run by inept strategists or corporate raiders who care about something else other than the long-term success of the company.
The ASEV should have been clairvoyant enough to patent the technique, in order to keep insipid inventors like this one from being able to cash in on a bad idea later. Maybe there is actually one good use for patents after all.:-)
... for certain tool kits one might find in Home Depot or Lowe's. You know the ones I mean: the package boasts "200 Pieces", but that includes EVERY little niggling bit of material in the box.
Stallman is right that it's a bunch of evil-doing corporations campaigning to make it true: cloud computing, as it's called, is a scheme to further legitimize and sell consumers on the notion of "web apps" and paying not once for a software license but rather paying every month, as if software is no different than a cable TV subscription.
Software publishers have had this goal for years now; they've been envious of the consistent cash flow and healthy balance sheets of "content" publishers, and so have been eager to re-brand software as content and sell it as such to consumers. Attempts to do this directly have repeatedly failed, perhaps because of people like me who saw the ulterior motive and made it public. Since attempts to sell software directly by subscription have failed, the latest plan is to use the concept of "web apps" to sell people on software as content; once people habituate to web apps, they'll habituate to the notion of paying every month for software as well.
Web apps are all about making more money and acquiring more control, not providing better software or services. Any tool that furthers that goal, including "Windows Cloud", is something that should be burned at the stake, along with the people that would choose to employ it.
Yes, but when the trees eventually die they are decomposed and release the CO2 into the air again (or in the case of biofuel, they release it into the air again when burned). It is a carbon-neutral system, both when left alone and when used as a fuel.
I'm not a degreed botanist or bioloist, but I don't think that the mere decomposition of a dead tree by fungi and other agents actually releases much carbon back into the atmosphere; most of that carbon remains out of the atmosphere but merely changes form, right?
Actually, if you really wanna get technical about it, trees are an indirect contributor to carbon dioxide emissions while living: they are a food source for other living things, which having been thus fed and sustained will then exhale carbon dioxide as a byproduct of consuming that tree and "combusting" the energy in its tissue. In that way it might be that trees actually return as much CO2 to the environment in a year as they remove through photosynthesis.
Stallman is right that it's a bunch of evil-doing corporations campaigning to make it true: cloud computing, as it's called, is a scheme to further legitimize and sell consumers on the notion of "web apps" and paying not once for a software license but rather paying every month, as if software is no different than a cable TV subscription.
Software publishers have had this goal for years now; they've been envious of the consistent cash flow and healthy balance sheets of "content" publishers, and so have been eager to re-brand software as content and sell it as such to consumers. Attempts to do this directly have repeatedly failed, perhaps because of people like me who saw the ulterior motive and made it public. Since attempts to sell software directly by subscription have failed, the latest plan is to use the concept of "web apps" to sell people on software as content; once people habituate to web apps, they'll habituate to the notion of paying every month for software as well.
Does this need to be said again? There's no shortage of roof space and other places to locate solar cells, so the efficiency of the cells is only a marginal issue; the bigger issue is COST. Instead of focusing all the research on this penile my-cell-is-more-efficient-than-YOURS pissing contest, it ought to be focused on finding least toxic and least expensive means of production. Certainly large scale mass production will eventually reduce costs, but large scale adoption won't occur until they can be produced inexpensively enough in the first place to motivate widespread use. Efforts should be focused on finding the least expensive and least toxic method of production for now, and worry about improving efficiency once their use has become commonplace.
Try DVDFlick (OSS) or ConvertXtoDVD 3 (VSO Software, makers of the Patin-Couffin engine).
ConvertXtoDVD 3 has one very useful feature in particular: there's an option to "copy original to DVD if possible", which attempts to transcode with slightly lower quality and leave enough free space to copy the original file to the DVD as well (in an \ORIGINAL folder). This can be very handy if you ever have illusions of trying to re-do the transcoding later but still don't want the video file cluttering up a hard drive, and you have a DVD that is at least playable in the meantime.
That was my immediate reaction when I saw the title of this in the Slashdot feed. Doesn't really reflect an appreciation of the Scientific Method as opposed to Scientific Religiosity, now does it? Science ain't done until the Fat Lady sings (and it ain't happened yet).
Point of your rapier wit taken. I remember those good old days, too; it's why I quit reading magazines eventually. We needed something a bit more idealistic there and then, too, I think. Maybe this means I'll "quit the Web" eventually, too... but not today. At least for now I can tweak, edit, and censor the Web in ways that I couldn't edit those magazines, when the only editorial tool I had was a pair of scissors.
To see exactly where the World Wide Web is going, what progress now looks like, try to save a flattened copy of that entire article to a local file, either as HTML or perhaps as an OO or DOC file; you'll have to use a doo-dad like the AntiPagination or RePagination extensions for Firefox, unless you want to drive yourself nuts trying to successively cut and paste each of the twelve pages.
What you initially get when you're done is mostly not even the article at all: it's all "secondary" page content. When this secondary and irrelevant content is removed, the article itself proves to not really be very long at all, and wouldn't justify scattering it across twelve pages... except for CNet UK wanting to artificially increase page views in doing so. I find it telling that an article about the history of the Internet would be so utterly littered with dreck as to be almost unbearable to view.
I don't know anything of Tim Berners-Lee's values, but if he's at all idealistic about his creation then this current state of "progress" must surely drive him to seek solace in a prescription or two. I know it does me; I need a refill after those twelve pages.
This is incorrect, to my knowledge. Universities and other institutions engaged in what is essentially publicly funded research do not keep control of the patents that result from research: rather it's the individual researchers themselves who retain control of such patents.
What do you suppose they do with those patents? They start an outside company not affiliated with the university to capitalize on the patent(s) and reap personal profit from it. The university basically doesn't get - or isn't legally entitled to - a dime of that profit. This has been happening for decades.
Frankly, such patentable innovations discovered by virtue of public funding should be registered to The Public Domain (or Public Trust), rather than to individual researchers or even universities. If it's bragging rights they want, they can still proclaim their involvement. If public resources, taxes or the equivalent, made the research possible in the first place, though, then no individual person or institution should be able to claim any exclusive legal ownership of that little piece of knowledge.
(Frankly no one should be able to claim exclusive legal ownership of any bit of knowledge, IMO, but I'm throwing the dissenters a bone here.)
Why does your company feel the need to protect its alleged intellectual property?
First of all, how many collective shoulders has your company stood upon in order to "invent" this intellectual property in the first place? How much of what went into it is actually original innovation, and how much is directly due to the collective ingenuity of the heads on all those other shoulders upon which you have been standing?
Second, exactly how long do you suppose it will be before the patent is granted? Is it possible that this intellectual property will become effectively obsolete before the patent is even granted? If the patent is granted, what's the use in having it if the innovation will be superceded and obsoleted long before the patent expires? Does your company intend to become a patent troll, and litigate the patent long after any period of genuine originality?
Knowledge just wants to be free. Trying to keep tabs on who owns which tiny piece of it is just unnecessary (and massive) bookkeeping that creates jobs for people who ought to be doing something constructive instead. The way to create more innovation is to fire all the patent officials and lawyers and engage them in actually creating themselves, rather than tabulating and litigating someone else's creations. I don't care if your next door neighbor happened to come up with The Most Brilliant Idea Ever one week before you did: you're both entitled to the full fruits of that knowledge, regardless who happened to think of it first.
Could this summary possibly be any more misleading and confusing? I had no idea what the actual source article was going to describe until I read it firsthand. I thought Slashdot had staff described as editors because they are actually capable of editing effectively?
As far as the subject of the article is concerned, could it possibly gloat any more? Could it possibly rub any more salt in wounds? Here's Wal-Mart, an evil corporation, finally in the process of doing the right thing (for admittedly less than pure reasons), and here's an article deriding the effort because the transition will negatively affect some people? Gimme a break.
'We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web,' says a company spokesman.
I've explained this before, nearly ad nauseum: this is part and parcel of the larger goal of re-branding all software as "content" and then convincing users to pay for it every month, just as they do their entertainment services. It's all done in the name of profit, greed, and consistent cash flow. Software publishers have been jealously eyeing the financials of their brethren in content publishing for a long, long time.
That is a horrendously bad review, and this is just a free promotion for an otherwise unremarkable Web site. This is one of those times Slashdot deeply disappoints for its lack of discretion.
Yep, it is... which might explain why I feel so exhausted and overwhelmed much of the time. I learned the critical thinking discipline very early, though I don't know from whom... certainly not my parents (who are the subjects of TFA and OP). Maybe some of it is heritable and skips generations? I can't recall a time when I wasn't skeptical, critical, introspective, and generally questioning *everything* and everyone. It gets me in more trouble than anything else.
Electoral lotteries wouldn't look anything like what you;ve described. Do you know how juries are selected, initially at random and then tested for qualifications? Those people ultimately wind up making life-and-death decisions. I'm suggesting we adapt that process for elections:
The initial step would be people going to the post office to buy a "Presidential Lottery" ticket for a buck and enter the lottery. A buck might not seem like much, but consider the numbers likely involved here, when you tally ALL the elected positions nationwide, from Federal down to municipal: the whole process would likely pay for itself in this way, with the ultimate "losers" footing the bill, just as in traditional (state) lotteries. No worries about "campaign finances" because the whole process funds itself.
Once in the lottery pools, large preliminary groups would then be selected at random, proportional to the office at hand... perhaps 1000 or 5000 for the Presidency? Then the real fun begins, where panels of experts - analogous to courtroom lawyers and judges - would test the qualifications of each potential candidate and narrow the field. Of course at some point(s) there would be popular elections by the relevant constituencies to finalize choices for each office. It's only the second part of the process that is random; every other step involves the usual volition and "reason" and choice that we so dearly treasure.
This sort of process almost completely thwarts the ability of obscenely ambitious people to unfairly game and manipulate the system... or at least so I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Inevitably there will be a backlash to this technology, similar to what occurred in response to Compact Digital Audio discs. It will be spearheaded not by audiophiles but by photophiles, who will insist that persistence of vision is a myth and that any strobing effect, even measured in millionths of a second, is dangerous and will cause mental illness or cancer.
Mark my words....
That magnification feature is just one of how many claims in this patent? If that ONE claim is what defines the whole as unique, then why isn't the patent specifically about that, and titled as such? If there is more than one unique claim in this patent, then why weren't separate and distinct patents filed for each specific, distinct, and unique element, rather than lumping multiple claims into a single patent with a misleading title? You certainly weren't the first commenter to make a big deal of the inclusion of the magnification feature, as if that somehow otherwise completely justifies this patent.
My final comment was a general one, and was motivated by the collective stupidity of the system and not this one patent. It was very much called-for, though you might still argue it was uncalled-for in this context.
Remember a little insignificant software company named Quarterdeck Office Systems? I worked there for four years in the early Nineties. One of its products was called Sidebar, which was an "icon dock" that included icons for certain basic system functions as well as duplicates of all the app icons in Program Manager. It also allowed iconified subfolders to be created, etc. This would have been about '93 or '94, and even (IIRC) predated Windows 95.
I think that might count as prior evidence.
Patents in general are probably dumb and counter-productive to the claimed desired effect, but software patents require a descriptive adjective that even moronic doesn't quite address.
This has been tried before, by other ailing IC-making firms, and it didn't help them survive to the present day; why should it be any better a strategy for AMD?
Corporate cost-cutting strategies are idiotic and political. They're temporary band-aids, and not very good ones. Selling material assets at a loss or sending human resources packing in order to make the bottom line APPEAR better is moronic and short-sighted, and it never really helps. Keeping those assets and more effectively utilizing them is the correct route to fixing the bottom line; cutting assets loose is an admission that the company is run by inept strategists or corporate raiders who care about something else other than the long-term success of the company.
The ASEV should have been clairvoyant enough to patent the technique, in order to keep insipid inventors like this one from being able to cash in on a bad idea later. Maybe there is actually one good use for patents after all. :-)
... for certain tool kits one might find in Home Depot or Lowe's. You know the ones I mean: the package boasts "200 Pieces", but that includes EVERY little niggling bit of material in the box.
Indeed. As I said in response to that article:
Stallman is right that it's a bunch of evil-doing corporations campaigning to make it true: cloud computing, as it's called, is a scheme to further legitimize and sell consumers on the notion of "web apps" and paying not once for a software license but rather paying every month, as if software is no different than a cable TV subscription.
Software publishers have had this goal for years now; they've been envious of the consistent cash flow and healthy balance sheets of "content" publishers, and so have been eager to re-brand software as content and sell it as such to consumers. Attempts to do this directly have repeatedly failed, perhaps because of people like me who saw the ulterior motive and made it public. Since attempts to sell software directly by subscription have failed, the latest plan is to use the concept of "web apps" to sell people on software as content; once people habituate to web apps, they'll habituate to the notion of paying every month for software as well.
Web apps are all about making more money and acquiring more control, not providing better software or services. Any tool that furthers that goal, including "Windows Cloud", is something that should be burned at the stake, along with the people that would choose to employ it.
Yes, but when the trees eventually die they are decomposed and release the CO2 into the air again (or in the case of biofuel, they release it into the air again when burned). It is a carbon-neutral system, both when left alone and when used as a fuel.
I'm not a degreed botanist or bioloist, but I don't think that the mere decomposition of a dead tree by fungi and other agents actually releases much carbon back into the atmosphere; most of that carbon remains out of the atmosphere but merely changes form, right?
Actually, if you really wanna get technical about it, trees are an indirect contributor to carbon dioxide emissions while living: they are a food source for other living things, which having been thus fed and sustained will then exhale carbon dioxide as a byproduct of consuming that tree and "combusting" the energy in its tissue. In that way it might be that trees actually return as much CO2 to the environment in a year as they remove through photosynthesis.
Stallman is right that it's a bunch of evil-doing corporations campaigning to make it true: cloud computing, as it's called, is a scheme to further legitimize and sell consumers on the notion of "web apps" and paying not once for a software license but rather paying every month, as if software is no different than a cable TV subscription.
Software publishers have had this goal for years now; they've been envious of the consistent cash flow and healthy balance sheets of "content" publishers, and so have been eager to re-brand software as content and sell it as such to consumers. Attempts to do this directly have repeatedly failed, perhaps because of people like me who saw the ulterior motive and made it public. Since attempts to sell software directly by subscription have failed, the latest plan is to use the concept of "web apps" to sell people on software as content; once people habituate to web apps, they'll habituate to the notion of paying every month for software as well.
Did you go and leave your tinfoil hat at home again? The tinfoil taped around your finger wasn't enough of a reminder, huh?
Does this need to be said again? There's no shortage of roof space and other places to locate solar cells, so the efficiency of the cells is only a marginal issue; the bigger issue is COST. Instead of focusing all the research on this penile my-cell-is-more-efficient-than-YOURS pissing contest, it ought to be focused on finding least toxic and least expensive means of production. Certainly large scale mass production will eventually reduce costs, but large scale adoption won't occur until they can be produced inexpensively enough in the first place to motivate widespread use. Efforts should be focused on finding the least expensive and least toxic method of production for now, and worry about improving efficiency once their use has become commonplace.
Try DVDFlick (OSS) or ConvertXtoDVD 3 (VSO Software, makers of the Patin-Couffin engine).
ConvertXtoDVD 3 has one very useful feature in particular: there's an option to "copy original to DVD if possible", which attempts to transcode with slightly lower quality and leave enough free space to copy the original file to the DVD as well (in an \ORIGINAL folder). This can be very handy if you ever have illusions of trying to re-do the transcoding later but still don't want the video file cluttering up a hard drive, and you have a DVD that is at least playable in the meantime.
Ummm... that's what I said!
That was my immediate reaction when I saw the title of this in the Slashdot feed. Doesn't really reflect an appreciation of the Scientific Method as opposed to Scientific Religiosity, now does it? Science ain't done until the Fat Lady sings (and it ain't happened yet).
Point of your rapier wit taken. I remember those good old days, too; it's why I quit reading magazines eventually. We needed something a bit more idealistic there and then, too, I think. Maybe this means I'll "quit the Web" eventually, too... but not today. At least for now I can tweak, edit, and censor the Web in ways that I couldn't edit those magazines, when the only editorial tool I had was a pair of scissors.
Thanks for clarifying the state of affairs. I had no idea it was like that (even less idealistic than I had expected).
To see exactly where the World Wide Web is going, what progress now looks like, try to save a flattened copy of that entire article to a local file, either as HTML or perhaps as an OO or DOC file; you'll have to use a doo-dad like the AntiPagination or RePagination extensions for Firefox, unless you want to drive yourself nuts trying to successively cut and paste each of the twelve pages.
What you initially get when you're done is mostly not even the article at all: it's all "secondary" page content. When this secondary and irrelevant content is removed, the article itself proves to not really be very long at all, and wouldn't justify scattering it across twelve pages... except for CNet UK wanting to artificially increase page views in doing so. I find it telling that an article about the history of the Internet would be so utterly littered with dreck as to be almost unbearable to view.
I don't know anything of Tim Berners-Lee's values, but if he's at all idealistic about his creation then this current state of "progress" must surely drive him to seek solace in a prescription or two. I know it does me; I need a refill after those twelve pages.
This is incorrect, to my knowledge. Universities and other institutions engaged in what is essentially publicly funded research do not keep control of the patents that result from research: rather it's the individual researchers themselves who retain control of such patents.
What do you suppose they do with those patents? They start an outside company not affiliated with the university to capitalize on the patent(s) and reap personal profit from it. The university basically doesn't get - or isn't legally entitled to - a dime of that profit. This has been happening for decades.
Frankly, such patentable innovations discovered by virtue of public funding should be registered to The Public Domain (or Public Trust), rather than to individual researchers or even universities. If it's bragging rights they want, they can still proclaim their involvement. If public resources, taxes or the equivalent, made the research possible in the first place, though, then no individual person or institution should be able to claim any exclusive legal ownership of that little piece of knowledge.
(Frankly no one should be able to claim exclusive legal ownership of any bit of knowledge, IMO, but I'm throwing the dissenters a bone here.)
Why does your company feel the need to protect its alleged intellectual property?
First of all, how many collective shoulders has your company stood upon in order to "invent" this intellectual property in the first place? How much of what went into it is actually original innovation, and how much is directly due to the collective ingenuity of the heads on all those other shoulders upon which you have been standing?
Second, exactly how long do you suppose it will be before the patent is granted? Is it possible that this intellectual property will become effectively obsolete before the patent is even granted? If the patent is granted, what's the use in having it if the innovation will be superceded and obsoleted long before the patent expires? Does your company intend to become a patent troll, and litigate the patent long after any period of genuine originality?
Knowledge just wants to be free. Trying to keep tabs on who owns which tiny piece of it is just unnecessary (and massive) bookkeeping that creates jobs for people who ought to be doing something constructive instead. The way to create more innovation is to fire all the patent officials and lawyers and engage them in actually creating themselves, rather than tabulating and litigating someone else's creations. I don't care if your next door neighbor happened to come up with The Most Brilliant Idea Ever one week before you did: you're both entitled to the full fruits of that knowledge, regardless who happened to think of it first.
Could this summary possibly be any more misleading and confusing? I had no idea what the actual source article was going to describe until I read it firsthand. I thought Slashdot had staff described as editors because they are actually capable of editing effectively?
As far as the subject of the article is concerned, could it possibly gloat any more? Could it possibly rub any more salt in wounds? Here's Wal-Mart, an evil corporation, finally in the process of doing the right thing (for admittedly less than pure reasons), and here's an article deriding the effort because the transition will negatively affect some people? Gimme a break.
I just lost a bit of respect for Cory Doctorow.
... doing no corporate evil?
'We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web,' says a company spokesman.
I've explained this before, nearly ad nauseum: this is part and parcel of the larger goal of re-branding all software as "content" and then convincing users to pay for it every month, just as they do their entertainment services. It's all done in the name of profit, greed, and consistent cash flow. Software publishers have been jealously eyeing the financials of their brethren in content publishing for a long, long time.
That is a horrendously bad review, and this is just a free promotion for an otherwise unremarkable Web site. This is one of those times Slashdot deeply disappoints for its lack of discretion.
Yep, it is... which might explain why I feel so exhausted and overwhelmed much of the time. I learned the critical thinking discipline very early, though I don't know from whom... certainly not my parents (who are the subjects of TFA and OP). Maybe some of it is heritable and skips generations? I can't recall a time when I wasn't skeptical, critical, introspective, and generally questioning *everything* and everyone. It gets me in more trouble than anything else.
Electoral lotteries wouldn't look anything like what you;ve described. Do you know how juries are selected, initially at random and then tested for qualifications? Those people ultimately wind up making life-and-death decisions. I'm suggesting we adapt that process for elections:
The initial step would be people going to the post office to buy a "Presidential Lottery" ticket for a buck and enter the lottery. A buck might not seem like much, but consider the numbers likely involved here, when you tally ALL the elected positions nationwide, from Federal down to municipal: the whole process would likely pay for itself in this way, with the ultimate "losers" footing the bill, just as in traditional (state) lotteries. No worries about "campaign finances" because the whole process funds itself.
Once in the lottery pools, large preliminary groups would then be selected at random, proportional to the office at hand... perhaps 1000 or 5000 for the Presidency? Then the real fun begins, where panels of experts - analogous to courtroom lawyers and judges - would test the qualifications of each potential candidate and narrow the field. Of course at some point(s) there would be popular elections by the relevant constituencies to finalize choices for each office. It's only the second part of the process that is random; every other step involves the usual volition and "reason" and choice that we so dearly treasure.
This sort of process almost completely thwarts the ability of obscenely ambitious people to unfairly game and manipulate the system... or at least so I think.