I'd have switched to Opera or Firefox already, but still I remain with IE in spite of the threats to my security and privacy. One of the big reasons is because I like my shortcut collection - "favorites" - to be INDEPENDENT OF THE BROWSER. What if - *gasp* - I might actually want to have several browsers and be able to actively switch between them, sharing and adding to the SAME on-disk collection of shortcuts rather than separate and distinct proprietary ones? Netscape certainly had no clue how to do it, and neither does Opera nor even Firefox; they can all import and export, but they can't actually SAVE to and manage non-proprietary shortcut files... Internet Explorer can and does just that, with.URL files (which may be proprietary to MS but not particularly to IE, AFAICT).
Hurricane wasn't truly Quarterdeck's, either, given that its dev team didn't originate it: another company was absorbed to acquire it. That was during the Bad Days after the IPO and King Lee's takeover, when many foolish acquisitions were used to muddy the ledger and nudge the company toward a buyout by Lee's former employer: Symantec.
The average human being is simply incapable of truly predictive and predictable driving, and thus incapable of being a good driver. Coincidentally, those are the very same people most often caught in mortal accidents; Darwin himself might suggest that in fact this is exactly the way Mother Nature had planned it, and no accident at all.
Horowitz missed the real story
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mr. Horowitz:
If you truly believe, or can prove, that a disproportionate percentage of IT workers are "annoying", perhaps you're missing a much more pervasive underlying cause? Perhaps you should investigate the prevalence of giftedness, High-Functioning Autism, Asperger's Syndrome, and similar traits within the technical segment of the industry?
Further, I'd suggest that those who aren't so "afflicted" had better learn to be more tolerant, because IT and in fact the whole of science and engineering would not be what it is without these people, pleasant to work with or not; THEY have the talents that more pleasant and tactful - but average - people lack. The entire history of scientific achievement owes its very existence to these extreme Yin-Yang social outcasts, stretching back to naked-in-the-street Archimedes and beyond.
And how exactly do either of your complaints describe a situation that doesn't already exist? If it were up to me I'd close BOTH of the "loopholes" you mentioned by only allowing patents to be held by true flesh and blood (or perhaps a Millenium Man) and not by corporate aggregations. Thomas Hartmann wrote a book, "Unequal Protection", about the precedent of treating corporations legally as individuals, and I happen to vigorously agree with his thesis. There might be nothing to stop a company from using some dumbass flunkie as a front man for a patent, but if the company itself is barred from any controlling interest in it and can reap no benefit from its existence (all of that accruing to the flunkie), why would it bother? Perhaps the flunkie would be coerced or forced to collect and sign over his licensing awards, but indeed why would he? What would be his motivation at that point?
You might argue that this would cause corporations to never hire nor fund researchers or inventors, but that's unrealistic because business can't compete without innovation; a more likely result is that IF an inventor agrees to work for a company - as opposed to freelance - it's because the company wants to pay him handsomely in exchange for DENYING his inventions to competitors, since a patent holder has the right to refuse to license his patent as it suits his whim.
How is the concept presented in this article really so much different that what the better anti-spam products already do? It appears to me that the only thing this article adds to the discourse of identifying spam is attachment of the jingoistic buzzwords "genetic" and "biological" to the process.
Patents were never intended to be a COMMODITY, but that is what has happened as the system has been perverted through misguided legal precedents. Patents were intended to protect the intellectual and intangible achievement OF THE ORIGINAL INVENTOR and no one else. Patents should be restricted to the original applicant, for that applicant's lifetime, PERIOD. Not even the applicant's heirs should have rights in such patents; after all, THEY didn't invent anything! And for those patents where the applicant is not an individual but some other organization or entity, if that entity is disbanded, merged, acquired, or otherwise ceases to exist independently, then its patents also cease to be valid.
Reinterpreting patent law in this way and making it stick would put the kibosh on just about all of the patent antics that are causing such consternation. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Did anyone else notice the minimalist chairs and table and the vending machines in the first photo? Nope, no cushy chairs or catered meals for these guys... they're focused on the Prize.
I recently saw a BenQ drive advertised for the first time. I can't recall the exact price, but it was so far below the average that it made me suspicious and dismiss it; now I wish that I hadn't.
Human civilization would not implode if patents ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact, I think you'd find it would be vastly more beneficial for the Many at the loss of a small bit of profit for a very few. Patents didn't always exist, did they? Do you suppose the sun only began to rise each day when patents were conceived? Human civilization did just fine before patents existed.
Here's an idea whose time may have come: change patent law to prohibit original patent-holders from selling or even transferring their invention and patent; in other words, the value of the patent accrues ONLY to the original inventor. Isn't that what the creators of the patent system really intended in the first place? I haven't thought this through in too much depth yet, but at face value it seems to have the potential to prevent many of the worst abuses of the patent system. Wishful thinking or something more?
Leadtek's TV2000 series has been around for more than a year. I've been using the TV2000 Deluxe since last May, and it was a major step up from the Pinnacle card that I had previously... mostly because (1) the Leadtek software was far better and had genuine PVR capability, (2) Pinnacle has a Nazi policy about major updates to its software and is very lazy about both that and its tech support, and (3) Leadtek is polite enough to provide the (RS232) port for its infrared remote right on the card, rather than demanding an existing free port like the Pinnacle product.
A recent update to the Leadtek software allegedly added direct-to-DVD feature to its PVR capabilities (using Ulead's Disc-Direct SDK), but so far I haven't benn able to get it to work (reboots my Win 2K PC and such).
Nevertheless, in perspective the Leadtek card is FAR better than the Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro that I owned, and cost considerably less as well. The only thing I'm really missing with the Leadtek is what the Hauppauge PVR-350 has: built-in HARDWARE MPEG encoding and decoding.
The problem with Treeline (as advocated in the first response) and other similar "PIMs" is that outlining is an inappropriate technique to try to organize complex and severely disparate bits of data.
What do you do when a particular bit of data has multiple possible locations - or folders - in an outline or hierarchy? Do you simply throw it in what you *think* is the most likely one you'll think to check in the future? Do you place copies in folders in ALL possible places you might anticipate trying to find it later? Do you add one folder with the data and then add other folders in all other possible locations with nothing but notes to see the first folder (and God help you if you ever decide to relocate the original)?
Personal information management - whether to-do lists or full-blown personal libraries - should be free-format, unstructured, INDEXED, and searchable by most or any word. This is the only approach that guarantees that you will be able to find what you want much later, even when you don't have the foggiest how/where you might have filed the original. Outline/hierarchical systems only work well if you have a bloody photographic memory to recall where you filed something... and if you have a photographic memory you wouldn't need a PIM or personal librarian in the first place, would you?
There are certain greedy people in the software development and publishing industry who have longingly watched profits soar in industries where the "subscription" paradigm is king, and eagerly wanted for some time to try to force a subscription model in their businesses as well; there's nothing better to them than having a consistent guaranteed monthly cash flow. Historically they've tried to use the "upgrade" model to achieve that same end, but I suspect more software buyers than just myself caught onto that scheme a long time ago; often I was upgrading for more than half the cost of the original product, and getting bug fixes that never should have been necessary and new features I'd never use. The software industry's subscription introductions have thus far been met with skepticism and sometimes outright derision and indignance. These efforts to paint a picture of the near future where hardware is free seems to me to be a very transparent attempt to "soften up" their markets for a renewed and more concerted subscription blitz.
Gird your loins and your wallets, techno-chipmunks, because they're after your nuts again....
Hmmm... I still have my CueCat gathering dust in a corner, after that similar attempt to further commercialize hyperlinking failed. Might this not suffer the same fate? At least in this instance the device already has am existing primary purpose (as a phone), unlike the now-near-useless CueCat (it can be adapted as a barcode reader with some effort).
Is this truly a "green" energy production technique, or just a gimmick to sucker people who can't think critically? Does the potential energy of the oil produced exceed the actual energy expended in its production? Does the plant produce any biological or chemical pollutants as a by-product? Does the human-labor "energy" expended compare favorably with petroleum extraction and refining? How much pollutants are released when this oil is used as fuel? What are the hidden costs from the agriculture and land management required to support this on a large scale? Could it function on the output of a fully sustainable agricultural system (which we are yet to see in this country)?
These are just a few of the questions I'd like to see answered before I make any conclusions.
The only reason this solution appears to save them so much money is because their business *IS* cattle and so they have a FREE source of the raw "combustible" material. If I, for instance, wanted to power my home or non-ranch business with a manure/methane generator, I might very well have to pay someone for regular purchases - and transport - of manure, which might cut substantially into the net savings.
Perhaps, if we're going to have a patent system at all, its processes should be as democratic as our (American) government allegedly is? I wonder if reformulating the USPTO as a peer-review organization might provide a fairer result?
The relative vulnerability of a system, silicon or otherwise, is exactly equal to the incentive and motivation to compromise it.
The only part that usability might play in increasing a system's vulnerability is an indirect one: improved usability increases a system's popularity and value, and thus the incentive to unfairly exploit it.
Case in point: the bigger the ISP, the bigger the bulls-eye painted on it for spammers' dictionary attacks.
Okay, maybe not so much "broken" as just not "scaleable" from yesteryear to today, but still! Did anyone catch the final paragraph and especially this sentence?
"He patented the idea - and retired."
This is exactly the sort of (ab-)use of the patent system that needs to be highlighted: people that use the system to innovate once in their life and then retire on the licensing fees they collect from the patent. Nature and the Real World don't function this way at all... there is no free lunch and everyone should be encouraged to engage in a process of CONTINUOUS innovation. In such an environment the threat of copy-catters is insignificant because continued improvements - change - create a continuous process of obsolescence. IBM, Intel, and some other technology companies have learned this lesson quite well, and even abuse it to bankrupt some competitors by creating various "standards" and then abandoning them after the competition has become heavily vested in them.
Now we have "intellectual property holding companies" like Ideaflood, who don't actually produce any tangible product at all and often don't even originate or innovate anything, but instead merely traffic in IP and patents, buying "low" and selling "high" to the highest bidders as if it were nothing more than a stock market commodity.
In what twisted alternate-reality Earth is this supposed to be conducive to competition, innovation, and incremental evolution? I'd thought the patent system was originally intended to protect the little-guy garage inventor from being raped; perhaps that was never the reality in the first place and it just wasn't obvious until now, but it's creating an environment of corrupt and dishonest tactics that is especially injurious to the Little Guy, who is now being horse-whipped by the system, e.g. freelance or Mom-and-Pop programmers and developers. It's not good for business, definitely not good for consumers, and bad for overall productivity; the only people who seem to benefit from this system now are IP and patent lawyers and their deep-pocketed ligitious clients.
In your published article, "The Zen of Overclocking", you stated in the first sentence of the sixth paragraph: "Overclocking has been around since the early 1990s...." Upon reading that, I was at first surprised that someone with your experience and tenure as an industry insider could be mistaken about the overclocking timeline. Then I realized that, while I and others were actually out in the field in the late Eighties getting our technical hands dirty, you were probably cooped-up in a Class 100 clean room somewhere inside Intel!
The real truth, to which I can attest from direct personal experience, is that the overclocking concept was already being applied in practical use in the mid- and late Eighties, and in fact was already commonplace before the Nineties even rolled around. I know this because I was working as a service tech and service manager at the time, and routinely "upgraded" customers' systems by overclocking them, for instance by replacing the clock crystals in IBM AT systems with faster ones and replacing Intel 8088 CPUs with NEC V-series ones and boosting the clock speed. I can't recall whether we called it "overclocking" back then, and the techniques have certainly become different and more varied over the years, but the concept has remained unchanged.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have switched to Opera or Firefox already, but still I remain with IE in spite of the threats to my security and privacy. One of the big reasons is because I like my shortcut collection - "favorites" - to be INDEPENDENT OF THE BROWSER. What if - *gasp* - I might actually want to have several browsers and be able to actively switch between them, sharing and adding to the SAME on-disk collection of shortcuts rather than separate and distinct proprietary ones? Netscape certainly had no clue how to do it, and neither does Opera nor even Firefox; they can all import and export, but they can't actually SAVE to and manage non-proprietary shortcut files... Internet Explorer can and does just that, with .URL files (which may be proprietary to MS but not particularly to IE, AFAICT).
Hurricane wasn't truly Quarterdeck's, either, given that its dev team didn't originate it: another company was absorbed to acquire it. That was during the Bad Days after the IPO and King Lee's takeover, when many foolish acquisitions were used to muddy the ledger and nudge the company toward a buyout by Lee's former employer: Symantec.
The average human being is simply incapable of truly predictive and predictable driving, and thus incapable of being a good driver. Coincidentally, those are the very same people most often caught in mortal accidents; Darwin himself might suggest that in fact this is exactly the way Mother Nature had planned it, and no accident at all.
If you truly believe, or can prove, that a disproportionate percentage of IT workers are "annoying", perhaps you're missing a much more pervasive underlying cause? Perhaps you should investigate the prevalence of giftedness, High-Functioning Autism, Asperger's Syndrome, and similar traits within the technical segment of the industry?
Further, I'd suggest that those who aren't so "afflicted" had better learn to be more tolerant, because IT and in fact the whole of science and engineering would not be what it is without these people, pleasant to work with or not; THEY have the talents that more pleasant and tactful - but average - people lack. The entire history of scientific achievement owes its very existence to these extreme Yin-Yang social outcasts, stretching back to naked-in-the-street Archimedes and beyond.
You might argue that this would cause corporations to never hire nor fund researchers or inventors, but that's unrealistic because business can't compete without innovation; a more likely result is that IF an inventor agrees to work for a company - as opposed to freelance - it's because the company wants to pay him handsomely in exchange for DENYING his inventions to competitors, since a patent holder has the right to refuse to license his patent as it suits his whim.
Gee, how original....
Reinterpreting patent law in this way and making it stick would put the kibosh on just about all of the patent antics that are causing such consternation. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Good writing and proofreading help is *so* hard to find these days, ain't it?
Did anyone else notice the minimalist chairs and table and the vending machines in the first photo? Nope, no cushy chairs or catered meals for these guys... they're focused on the Prize.
I recently saw a BenQ drive advertised for the first time. I can't recall the exact price, but it was so far below the average that it made me suspicious and dismiss it; now I wish that I hadn't.
Human civilization would not implode if patents ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact, I think you'd find it would be vastly more beneficial for the Many at the loss of a small bit of profit for a very few. Patents didn't always exist, did they? Do you suppose the sun only began to rise each day when patents were conceived? Human civilization did just fine before patents existed.
The kid makes a mental note to self as he's arrested: "MUST read SlashDot nore often...."
Here's an idea whose time may have come: change patent law to prohibit original patent-holders from selling or even transferring their invention and patent; in other words, the value of the patent accrues ONLY to the original inventor. Isn't that what the creators of the patent system really intended in the first place? I haven't thought this through in too much depth yet, but at face value it seems to have the potential to prevent many of the worst abuses of the patent system. Wishful thinking or something more?
Install and configure the firewall FIRST, BEFORE you establish the first connection. Doh!
A recent update to the Leadtek software allegedly added direct-to-DVD feature to its PVR capabilities (using Ulead's Disc-Direct SDK), but so far I haven't benn able to get it to work (reboots my Win 2K PC and such).
Nevertheless, in perspective the Leadtek card is FAR better than the Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro that I owned, and cost considerably less as well. The only thing I'm really missing with the Leadtek is what the Hauppauge PVR-350 has: built-in HARDWARE MPEG encoding and decoding.
What do you do when a particular bit of data has multiple possible locations - or folders - in an outline or hierarchy? Do you simply throw it in what you *think* is the most likely one you'll think to check in the future? Do you place copies in folders in ALL possible places you might anticipate trying to find it later? Do you add one folder with the data and then add other folders in all other possible locations with nothing but notes to see the first folder (and God help you if you ever decide to relocate the original)?
Personal information management - whether to-do lists or full-blown personal libraries - should be free-format, unstructured, INDEXED, and searchable by most or any word. This is the only approach that guarantees that you will be able to find what you want much later, even when you don't have the foggiest how/where you might have filed the original. Outline/hierarchical systems only work well if you have a bloody photographic memory to recall where you filed something... and if you have a photographic memory you wouldn't need a PIM or personal librarian in the first place, would you?
Gird your loins and your wallets, techno-chipmunks, because they're after your nuts again....
Hmmm... I still have my CueCat gathering dust in a corner, after that similar attempt to further commercialize hyperlinking failed. Might this not suffer the same fate? At least in this instance the device already has am existing primary purpose (as a phone), unlike the now-near-useless CueCat (it can be adapted as a barcode reader with some effort).
... if BootIt NG (Next Gen.) had been used as the boot manager.
These are just a few of the questions I'd like to see answered before I make any conclusions.
The only reason this solution appears to save them so much money is because their business *IS* cattle and so they have a FREE source of the raw "combustible" material. If I, for instance, wanted to power my home or non-ranch business with a manure/methane generator, I might very well have to pay someone for regular purchases - and transport - of manure, which might cut substantially into the net savings.
Perhaps, if we're going to have a patent system at all, its processes should be as democratic as our (American) government allegedly is? I wonder if reformulating the USPTO as a peer-review organization might provide a fairer result?
The relative vulnerability of a system, silicon or otherwise, is exactly equal to the incentive and motivation to compromise it.
The only part that usability might play in increasing a system's vulnerability is an indirect one: improved usability increases a system's popularity and value, and thus the incentive to unfairly exploit it.
Case in point: the bigger the ISP, the bigger the bulls-eye painted on it for spammers' dictionary attacks.
"He patented the idea - and retired."
This is exactly the sort of (ab-)use of the patent system that needs to be highlighted: people that use the system to innovate once in their life and then retire on the licensing fees they collect from the patent. Nature and the Real World don't function this way at all... there is no free lunch and everyone should be encouraged to engage in a process of CONTINUOUS innovation. In such an environment the threat of copy-catters is insignificant because continued improvements - change - create a continuous process of obsolescence. IBM, Intel, and some other technology companies have learned this lesson quite well, and even abuse it to bankrupt some competitors by creating various "standards" and then abandoning them after the competition has become heavily vested in them.
Now we have "intellectual property holding companies" like Ideaflood, who don't actually produce any tangible product at all and often don't even originate or innovate anything, but instead merely traffic in IP and patents, buying "low" and selling "high" to the highest bidders as if it were nothing more than a stock market commodity.
In what twisted alternate-reality Earth is this supposed to be conducive to competition, innovation, and incremental evolution? I'd thought the patent system was originally intended to protect the little-guy garage inventor from being raped; perhaps that was never the reality in the first place and it just wasn't obvious until now, but it's creating an environment of corrupt and dishonest tactics that is especially injurious to the Little Guy, who is now being horse-whipped by the system, e.g. freelance or Mom-and-Pop programmers and developers. It's not good for business, definitely not good for consumers, and bad for overall productivity; the only people who seem to benefit from this system now are IP and patent lawyers and their deep-pocketed ligitious clients.
In your published article, "The Zen of Overclocking", you stated in the first sentence of the sixth paragraph: "Overclocking has been around since the early 1990s...." Upon reading that, I was at first surprised that someone with your experience and tenure as an industry insider could be mistaken about the overclocking timeline. Then I realized that, while I and others were actually out in the field in the late Eighties getting our technical hands dirty, you were probably cooped-up in a Class 100 clean room somewhere inside Intel!
The real truth, to which I can attest from direct personal experience, is that the overclocking concept was already being applied in practical use in the mid- and late Eighties, and in fact was already commonplace before the Nineties even rolled around. I know this because I was working as a service tech and service manager at the time, and routinely "upgraded" customers' systems by overclocking them, for instance by replacing the clock crystals in IBM AT systems with faster ones and replacing Intel 8088 CPUs with NEC V-series ones and boosting the clock speed. I can't recall whether we called it "overclocking" back then, and the techniques have certainly become different and more varied over the years, but the concept has remained unchanged.