After reading this, it sounds to me as if incremental evolution or invention will suffer a major setback. Most progress is in fact incremental, not revolutionary. Because of this ruling, it seems that it's more likely that such incremental improvements will ALWAYS accrue to an existing "revolutionary" patent-holder, even if that patent-holder didn't invent the increment.
If that's a correct analysis, then this ruling will have a very chilling effect on new patents, and concentrate even more power/leverage in the hands of existing patent-holders, who will now routinely use this ruling to challenge threatening incremental-invention patents as invalid, as well as continue to sue anyone who dares produce an incremental product without the backing of a patent.
That won't help foster invention, it will retard it.
When are people going to wise up to the fact that what truly fosters invention is an ABSENCE of a patent system?
Yep, like a Republican guy's Democratic girlfriend watching him vote and promising him he'll get extra-sweaty sex later if he votes for this or that candidate. That same guy might stand up to intimidation or bribery, but how many guys can refuse that kinda offer?
Get rid of this stupid notion that anyone has a right to conceal their identity, and ALL the sordid little messes like this one will vanish pretty quickly, as will much of what makes MySpace the cesspool that it is. These horrid children wouldn't have been able to pull off this crap if 'Net anonymity wasn't a presumed right.
The post just struck me as annoying because, to me, it tempted with hints of ideas and then delivered anecdotes. Gimme the meat, I can take or leave the potatoes. Your followup was more "constructive".:-)
I can see the multi-head design being left on the cutting-room floor for perhaps three reasons: expense, volume, and complexity. Expense because of the need for not only extra heads but a second actuator for them; volume because that second actuator would force the drive to become relatively huge; and complexity because the signals from the opposing heads would have to be coordinated and interleaved.
Your second idea doesn't really require perfect alignment, at least to any greater degree than the normal read-write process. It does add that complexity factor again, though, and if data is being read or written through multiple heads/platters simultaneously it might hit a practical wall, might slow things down. There's also the matter that not every drive has multiple platters, or the same number of multiple platters: it might mess with "scalability" of designs (being able to alter the number of platters to produce different models) that disk makers so cherish.
The last one is definitely the stuff of dreams... I think it might even cause problems with maintaining proper head separation from the platter (not to mention alignment).
Actually, if I was gonna dream of any drive with integrated RAID behavior, it would at least be RAID 5! Not sure how you'd string such drives together in a single spanned volume then, but as long as we're just daydreaming....
So what constructive storage inventions came out of those endless hours of brainstorming? Were you actually intending to share them and just forgot, or were you mum because the patents haven't come thru yet?
Great, this article mentions pretty much every spec except the most important one when assessing claims of disk drive "speed": the disk- or platter-to-buffer transfer rate.
On all the mass-market drives that I investigated up until fall 2005, that rate - which is effectively the sustained transfer rate of a drive - was less than 100MB/s... in other words, ridiculously less than the maximum bandwidth of SATA II/300, substantially less than even SATA I/150, and barely faster than ATA100 if at all. In the fall of 2005 I bought four 250GB SATA II Hitachi drives which, even though they had the SATA II interface, had a disk-to-buffer rate no better than about 75MB/s.
Now, granted, this new drive has an awesome rotational speed and perpendicular recording, but I wonder just how close it really comes to testing the limits of a new SCSI or SATA II interface's bandwidth? Had the most important of all the "speed" specs been reported, we might have been able to answer that.
I hate technical artiicles that leave out the most relevant detail....
Physicists and cosmologists searching for a "unifying theory" of the universe are, in my assessment, searching for the exact same thing as people who believe in God. For religious people, their god is their unifying theory. Dark matter, and dark energy, are their latest fictional creations to justify their obsessive need to find certainty.
This Hubble "map" is a CONSTRUCTION. It's not actual evidence; it proves nothing. I just love how the "anomalies" are discussed so dismissively, as if they aren't the crack in the dike threatening to bring the whole house of cards down.
I'm really sick of religious fanatics masquerading as "scientists".
Some of us have been using this "prototype hijacking" technique with HTML filters for years to block and thwart CORPORATE and capitalist abuses of JavaScript. That, in my book, counts as a good use of this technique. Please don't take my Kodachrome away!
I'm sorry, call me picky, but if the research that leads to a discovery is conducted at and funded by a public university, then the entire discovery should be open-sourced, not patented and hoarded for the selfish enrichment of the university or particular people involved.
... or the driver is a fashion freak, and is wearing leather gloves? Will the car then also demand that the driver remove the gloves? What would O.J. do if he couldn't wear his favorite driving gloves?
Absolutely! The specific language itself and its syntax is immaterial; if students are taught proper techniques and principles - in effect taught how to solve problems logically and programmatically - then good coding form naturally follows. Unfortunately... it requires people of strong character who can resist temptation! It's certainly possible to forcibly code the functional equivalent of strong typing etc. in C(++), essentially SELF-IMPOSING rules and limits rather than the language imposing them, but that requires self-discipline and self-control that too many programmers just don't have: they'll stoop to pretty much ANY silly and risky coding stunt that the particular language syntax allows. Pascal (and Ada and others) produce more stable code merely because they impose "ten commandments" in stone rather than relying on an "honor system" like C(++) and others.
Yep, too bad it's only two pair of eyes seeing this thread now! 8-/
Yeah, Ada also makes the point and is a more functional strongly typed language, but I mentioned Pascal because it had wider familiarity and was used as a teaching language. Perhaps the trouble started when Pascal was replaced by C in classrooms?
Completely avoid buffer overflows: code in Pascal!
on
DieHard, the Software
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps the reason we endure so many buffer-overflow exploits and need stopgaps like DieHard is because too many mediocre programmers were playing with "dangerous" languages like C(++)? No rules and no boundaries leads to bad behavior... every parent knows this. Too bad IT project managers never figured that out....
Wikipedia was a reasonably inspired idea... this one, of a user-driven search engine, is NOT. As a not-exactly-run-of-the-mill human who is already nearly drowning in the mediocrity and stupidity that surrounds me, I'm frankly terrified at the prospect that AVERAGE people will be entirely responsible for determining what results are returned by my search engine! I want the exceptional results that *I* can comprehend and appreciate, not the moronic ones that appeal to people of average intelligence and abilities. It already takes far too much time to coax those gems out of existing search engines; Wales' idea would make it utterly impossible. The search engine would drown in the same sea of mediocrity by which I'm engulfed.
This idea would actually be a search-engine implementation of "tyranny of the majority", to go micely hand-in-hand with spam blacklists ad nauseum. The founders of the United States tried their best to put safeguards in place to prevent said tyranny, and now dear Jimmy Wales wants to thwart that? Apparently Mr. Wales is now more interested in any wild idea that stands a ghost of a chance of trumping his one decent idea than in doing something truly useful or helpful. Useful or helpful are nor words descriptive of user-driven search engine results.
eAcceleration is another sleazy Washington State business hawking crappy security tools that I doubt do anything useful (and what's worse selling them as a subscription service). If they're advertising in Washington State the same way they are in California, they ought to be the Washington DA's next target. No Slashdot reader would ever buy their crap BECAUSE of the way they advertise, but the uninformed might be suckered by their terrorist fear-mongering.
This was unique and innovative in 2000? Yeah, right... I was using "digital" computer telephony - using my PC to make and receive calls and act as my answering machine (which it still does) - years before that! And I was hardly alone.
How could the PTO researchers have possibly not known about this history and just how unoriginal it was, and what a landslide of prior art which existed? How long have FAX capabilities existed in Windows and computing in general, anyone? Yeah, a LONG time, and the same goes for other telephony functions. I'm quite sure that Talkworks, for one, existed as a commercial product before 2000.
This is such a transparent failure it might just finally be the straw that breaks the PTO's back and brings the reform issue to the 11 O'Clock News.
The existence of neither dark energy nor dark matter have been materially proven, yet already "scientists" are treating them as gospel and trying hang yet more theories off the presumption that they exist. There's a word to describe such mentality: religion. Physicists and cosmologists hellbent on identifying a Unifying Theory of the Universe would be wise to take a dozen steps back and reflect: a Unifying Theory sounds an awful lot like a monotheistic god. Jehovah/Allah is the original "unifying theory" for billions of believers. People who now believe in dark energy might just as well be attending church services. It's the same neurology at work.
Hmmm? C'mon, name me even just one instance. Can't do it, can ya?
The proper functioning of Capitalism is dependent upon every participant being (equally) greedy. The theory is that since one gets screwed-over in transaction A - an inequal exchange of value - then one must in turn screw-over someone else in later transactions just in order to break even... but of course some people still manage to do better than breaking even. Sounds pretty ethical, don't it?
This story is just an instance of Capitalism working exactly as intended.:-)
Flash is just a sneaky way of implementing a form of DRM for Web documents, since it can hide or obfuscate source files that would otherwise have been directly accessible under good old HTML. The real "Web 2.0" is one we need to WORRY about and fear, not herald... the real Web 2.0 will be one based upon information-restrictive technologies like Flash. HTML was designed with "open source" in mind... can any form of Flash-like Web interface ever truly be called open source? Do we really want to continue to encourage this form of Web design? Personally, I avoid any Web site which is entirely designed with Flash.
Spoken just like a good little misguided fanatic Libertarian would say it, especially that last gasp about eminent domain and ownership.
The Libertarian dream only exists in fantasy, and thank goodness! If everyone was allowed to do entirely whatever the hell they wanted with land they own, there'd be even more abuse of it and natural resources than there is now. Homo sapiens is still far too limbic and too little sapient to put into practice what Libertarians imagine. Sadly, that's also true of Socialism as well. One requires perfect market education and awareness, and the other requires perfect ethics (and objective valuation).
What the United States has now is a hodge-podge of capitalism and socialism with a smidge of libertarianism, and that economic mutt - or some variant of it with a bit more or less of one or the others - is about the best we can expect to achieve for a good long time. Only capitalism can exist successfully in its "pure" state, because it's the baseline economic Law of the Jungle and not dependent on any higher human brain functions. Even chimps and rats practice capitalism. Our advanced evolution, however, only gets us to the point of a few humans being able to IMAGINE other systems... we're still mostly practicing the same economic model as every lower life form. Dog eat dog. Survival mode. Survival of the "fittest". Hooray for us!
Slashdot Mirror
After reading this, it sounds to me as if incremental evolution or invention will suffer a major setback. Most progress is in fact incremental, not revolutionary. Because of this ruling, it seems that it's more likely that such incremental improvements will ALWAYS accrue to an existing "revolutionary" patent-holder, even if that patent-holder didn't invent the increment.
If that's a correct analysis, then this ruling will have a very chilling effect on new patents, and concentrate even more power/leverage in the hands of existing patent-holders, who will now routinely use this ruling to challenge threatening incremental-invention patents as invalid, as well as continue to sue anyone who dares produce an incremental product without the backing of a patent.
That won't help foster invention, it will retard it.
When are people going to wise up to the fact that what truly fosters invention is an ABSENCE of a patent system?
Yep, like a Republican guy's Democratic girlfriend watching him vote and promising him he'll get extra-sweaty sex later if he votes for this or that candidate. That same guy might stand up to intimidation or bribery, but how many guys can refuse that kinda offer?
Get rid of this stupid notion that anyone has a right to conceal their identity, and ALL the sordid little messes like this one will vanish pretty quickly, as will much of what makes MySpace the cesspool that it is. These horrid children wouldn't have been able to pull off this crap if 'Net anonymity wasn't a presumed right.
My next-door neighbor is much more dense than this RAM.
... or do they actually have to die in order to qualify? :-)
The post just struck me as annoying because, to me, it tempted with hints of ideas and then delivered anecdotes. Gimme the meat, I can take or leave the potatoes. Your followup was more "constructive". :-)
I can see the multi-head design being left on the cutting-room floor for perhaps three reasons: expense, volume, and complexity. Expense because of the need for not only extra heads but a second actuator for them; volume because that second actuator would force the drive to become relatively huge; and complexity because the signals from the opposing heads would have to be coordinated and interleaved.
Your second idea doesn't really require perfect alignment, at least to any greater degree than the normal read-write process. It does add that complexity factor again, though, and if data is being read or written through multiple heads/platters simultaneously it might hit a practical wall, might slow things down. There's also the matter that not every drive has multiple platters, or the same number of multiple platters: it might mess with "scalability" of designs (being able to alter the number of platters to produce different models) that disk makers so cherish.
The last one is definitely the stuff of dreams... I think it might even cause problems with maintaining proper head separation from the platter (not to mention alignment).
Actually, if I was gonna dream of any drive with integrated RAID behavior, it would at least be RAID 5! Not sure how you'd string such drives together in a single spanned volume then, but as long as we're just daydreaming....
So what constructive storage inventions came out of those endless hours of brainstorming? Were you actually intending to share them and just forgot, or were you mum because the patents haven't come thru yet?
Great, this article mentions pretty much every spec except the most important one when assessing claims of disk drive "speed": the disk- or platter-to-buffer transfer rate.
On all the mass-market drives that I investigated up until fall 2005, that rate - which is effectively the sustained transfer rate of a drive - was less than 100MB/s... in other words, ridiculously less than the maximum bandwidth of SATA II/300, substantially less than even SATA I/150, and barely faster than ATA100 if at all. In the fall of 2005 I bought four 250GB SATA II Hitachi drives which, even though they had the SATA II interface, had a disk-to-buffer rate no better than about 75MB/s.
Now, granted, this new drive has an awesome rotational speed and perpendicular recording, but I wonder just how close it really comes to testing the limits of a new SCSI or SATA II interface's bandwidth? Had the most important of all the "speed" specs been reported, we might have been able to answer that.
I hate technical artiicles that leave out the most relevant detail....
Physicists and cosmologists searching for a "unifying theory" of the universe are, in my assessment, searching for the exact same thing as people who believe in God. For religious people, their god is their unifying theory. Dark matter, and dark energy, are their latest fictional creations to justify their obsessive need to find certainty.
This Hubble "map" is a CONSTRUCTION. It's not actual evidence; it proves nothing. I just love how the "anomalies" are discussed so dismissively, as if they aren't the crack in the dike threatening to bring the whole house of cards down.
I'm really sick of religious fanatics masquerading as "scientists".
Some of us have been using this "prototype hijacking" technique with HTML filters for years to block and thwart CORPORATE and capitalist abuses of JavaScript. That, in my book, counts as a good use of this technique. Please don't take my Kodachrome away!
I'm sorry, call me picky, but if the research that leads to a discovery is conducted at and funded by a public university, then the entire discovery should be open-sourced, not patented and hoarded for the selfish enrichment of the university or particular people involved.
... or the driver is a fashion freak, and is wearing leather gloves? Will the car then also demand that the driver remove the gloves? What would O.J. do if he couldn't wear his favorite driving gloves?
Absolutely! The specific language itself and its syntax is immaterial; if students are taught proper techniques and principles - in effect taught how to solve problems logically and programmatically - then good coding form naturally follows. Unfortunately... it requires people of strong character who can resist temptation! It's certainly possible to forcibly code the functional equivalent of strong typing etc. in C(++), essentially SELF-IMPOSING rules and limits rather than the language imposing them, but that requires self-discipline and self-control that too many programmers just don't have: they'll stoop to pretty much ANY silly and risky coding stunt that the particular language syntax allows. Pascal (and Ada and others) produce more stable code merely because they impose "ten commandments" in stone rather than relying on an "honor system" like C(++) and others.
Yep, too bad it's only two pair of eyes seeing this thread now! 8-/
Mark
Yeah, Ada also makes the point and is a more functional strongly typed language, but I mentioned Pascal because it had wider familiarity and was used as a teaching language. Perhaps the trouble started when Pascal was replaced by C in classrooms?
Perhaps the reason we endure so many buffer-overflow exploits and need stopgaps like DieHard is because too many mediocre programmers were playing with "dangerous" languages like C(++)? No rules and no boundaries leads to bad behavior... every parent knows this. Too bad IT project managers never figured that out....
Wikipedia was a reasonably inspired idea... this one, of a user-driven search engine, is NOT. As a not-exactly-run-of-the-mill human who is already nearly drowning in the mediocrity and stupidity that surrounds me, I'm frankly terrified at the prospect that AVERAGE people will be entirely responsible for determining what results are returned by my search engine! I want the exceptional results that *I* can comprehend and appreciate, not the moronic ones that appeal to people of average intelligence and abilities. It already takes far too much time to coax those gems out of existing search engines; Wales' idea would make it utterly impossible. The search engine would drown in the same sea of mediocrity by which I'm engulfed.
This idea would actually be a search-engine implementation of "tyranny of the majority", to go micely hand-in-hand with spam blacklists ad nauseum. The founders of the United States tried their best to put safeguards in place to prevent said tyranny, and now dear Jimmy Wales wants to thwart that? Apparently Mr. Wales is now more interested in any wild idea that stands a ghost of a chance of trumping his one decent idea than in doing something truly useful or helpful. Useful or helpful are nor words descriptive of user-driven search engine results.
eAcceleration is another sleazy Washington State business hawking crappy security tools that I doubt do anything useful (and what's worse selling them as a subscription service). If they're advertising in Washington State the same way they are in California, they ought to be the Washington DA's next target. No Slashdot reader would ever buy their crap BECAUSE of the way they advertise, but the uninformed might be suckered by their terrorist fear-mongering.
This was unique and innovative in 2000? Yeah, right... I was using "digital" computer telephony - using my PC to make and receive calls and act as my answering machine (which it still does) - years before that! And I was hardly alone.
How could the PTO researchers have possibly not known about this history and just how unoriginal it was, and what a landslide of prior art which existed? How long have FAX capabilities existed in Windows and computing in general, anyone? Yeah, a LONG time, and the same goes for other telephony functions. I'm quite sure that Talkworks, for one, existed as a commercial product before 2000.
This is such a transparent failure it might just finally be the straw that breaks the PTO's back and brings the reform issue to the 11 O'Clock News.
The existence of neither dark energy nor dark matter have been materially proven, yet already "scientists" are treating them as gospel and trying hang yet more theories off the presumption that they exist. There's a word to describe such mentality: religion. Physicists and cosmologists hellbent on identifying a Unifying Theory of the Universe would be wise to take a dozen steps back and reflect: a Unifying Theory sounds an awful lot like a monotheistic god. Jehovah/Allah is the original "unifying theory" for billions of believers. People who now believe in dark energy might just as well be attending church services. It's the same neurology at work.
Hmmm? C'mon, name me even just one instance. Can't do it, can ya?
:-)
The proper functioning of Capitalism is dependent upon every participant being (equally) greedy. The theory is that since one gets screwed-over in transaction A - an inequal exchange of value - then one must in turn screw-over someone else in later transactions just in order to break even... but of course some people still manage to do better than breaking even. Sounds pretty ethical, don't it?
This story is just an instance of Capitalism working exactly as intended.
Flash is just a sneaky way of implementing a form of DRM for Web documents, since it can hide or obfuscate source files that would otherwise have been directly accessible under good old HTML. The real "Web 2.0" is one we need to WORRY about and fear, not herald... the real Web 2.0 will be one based upon information-restrictive technologies like Flash. HTML was designed with "open source" in mind... can any form of Flash-like Web interface ever truly be called open source? Do we really want to continue to encourage this form of Web design? Personally, I avoid any Web site which is entirely designed with Flash.
Wouldn't that make people less likely to download and install it, not more so?
Now, disguising a nuisance program as a legit codec, OTOH, might be pretty brilliant; suppose anyone has thought to try that?
Enuf said.
... because the Windows "firewall" isn't a firewall.
Spoken just like a good little misguided fanatic Libertarian would say it, especially that last gasp about eminent domain and ownership.
The Libertarian dream only exists in fantasy, and thank goodness! If everyone was allowed to do entirely whatever the hell they wanted with land they own, there'd be even more abuse of it and natural resources than there is now. Homo sapiens is still far too limbic and too little sapient to put into practice what Libertarians imagine. Sadly, that's also true of Socialism as well. One requires perfect market education and awareness, and the other requires perfect ethics (and objective valuation).
What the United States has now is a hodge-podge of capitalism and socialism with a smidge of libertarianism, and that economic mutt - or some variant of it with a bit more or less of one or the others - is about the best we can expect to achieve for a good long time. Only capitalism can exist successfully in its "pure" state, because it's the baseline economic Law of the Jungle and not dependent on any higher human brain functions. Even chimps and rats practice capitalism. Our advanced evolution, however, only gets us to the point of a few humans being able to IMAGINE other systems... we're still mostly practicing the same economic model as every lower life form. Dog eat dog. Survival mode. Survival of the "fittest". Hooray for us!