...will come when phone manufacturers realize what a flash is and why a camera intended to take snapshots of your friends when you are partying is useless without one.
Yes! Finally we can have Gyro Gearloose's shoes that make you float two inches above ground, and where you just lean in the direction you want to go!:)
"Detailed calculations indicate that the actual scaling is not quite that dramatic, but a millimeter-size engine would have a thrust-to-weight ratio of about 100:1, compared with 10:1 for the best modern aircraft engines."
This gives me visions of a jumbojet with the whole wingspan covered in thousands of really small jet engines.:)
OK, OK, I guess he is not European. I just noted that all the others of what is the typical "ASP" web setup of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL was involved, so his absence kinda stood out.;-)
Comics can make for good movies, because of course, they are very visual. But not fudging up Watchmen will be *very* hard. It's an amazing piece of Comic.
For some weird reason, I bought it around when it came out, and then did not read it for a couple of years. It just stood in my bookshelf and I almost forgot about it. Boy did I punish myself for that when I finally read it.
It *is* very good, people: If you like comics even just a little bit, you need to read it. Same thing if you like dark and "artsy" movies.
I would have assumed that things like this was already happening. NASA is goverment funded, their data should reasonably be accessible if not publicly then at least by universities!
There are actually rules for what is supposed to be accepted as patents, and including those things are that there exists no prior art and that it is non-obvious. It's nice of the patent clerks to look things up to see if it has been patented before, but what is included in their job is to do at least a basic search for prior art and to reject things that are obvious solutions.
And they are not doing that, which results in lots of patents who should not be accepted, many of which sooner or later end up in a court case, costing companies lots of money.
This "IsNot" patent is only one of many patent applications which are both obvious and has lots of prior art, and which should therefore not be accepted. Chances are, it will be, because it is no less patently absurd than Lotus patenting the use of backslash to open a menu, or
this gem. Yes, it's the famous comb-over patent.
They are wasting money, and forcing companies to slug out patent infringement in court, when they should be doing basic research themselves.
But in fact, they are obviously doing exactly *nothing* but sit on their asses, drink coffe and then accept all patent applications without even reading them first. But of course, only after they had delayed them for a while, to look busy.
That should be enough basis for the mother of all class action cases, where everybody who have ever bought a product from a company involved in a patent case have suffered from increased prices.
Are they tax funded? Then everybody who have ever payed taxes can sue them too..
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
on
MiniGRAIL Online
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, the gravitational waves has to have a frequency pretty close to 2.9kHz to be detected, then? Why that specific frequency? The site seems to offer no clues. Is it just random? It seems awfully high to me...
Doing that seems not to be possible in the US. There you have to sure everybody that possibly maybe might be considered to infringe on your intellectual properties, or you will not be able to sue people later where it really matters.
This is why lot's of people get these silly cease and decist letters from lawyers because they are possibly maybe infringing on trademarks. Remember that teenager who had a domain that sounded a bit like Microsoft? They *have* to force him to stop doing that, or they may be unable to protect their trademark in a real case later, because they ignored this infringement.
That's what you get when you let lawyers create the law. A law that is custom made to create more work for lawyers.;-)
Interesting point, but unfortunately, your reasoning is pure paranoia . Do you have any reference to Google censoring? Tibet.org doesn't even mention Google. Don't you think they should mention it if they thought Google censored them?
Programming is about making a computer understand what a person wants it to do. This is typically done by making the set of tasks the computer can do smaller. Much smaller. Like, storing data in a relational structure, or doing 3D graphics.
The reason for this is that human languages are fuzzy. Why does sum(a4:g15) work in a spreadsheet? Becuase all variables are layed out in two dimensions, and they can all be assumed to be numbers. What the meaning of "Do the sum of everythin from a4 to g15" is clear in the limited world of a spreadsheet. You can't write have such a method in a generic programming languge, because what comes in between the variable pGrok and iTresko? The statement makes no sense.
Natural Language Programming will come in specialized fields. I can "program" the computer to sort my mail in very natural language. But yet again, that are simple specific situations, where the fuzzines of human language is not a cause for misunderstandings. And the best way to get there is to use computer language programming to limit what you can do with the computer.
True. The thickness of the ice sheet varies very much, so not only would you need to find a fault-line, you need it to be under reasonably thin ice. Luckily, this seems to be the case!
...is that this is a cheap way of causing earth quakes. Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, besides the obvious reason of being an evil villain in a Bond-movie, you could also do this to make small earthquakes to disperse the tension in the crust, thereby averting big buildups that evetually get released in big, disastrous earthquakes.
Of course this would need to be tested somewhere safe. Are there any major fault lines in the antarctic?
Isn't interesting how everything that critizises Kerry or the kerry-campaign seems to get a troll rating, no matter how correct, sensible and argumentative it is?
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna get troll rating for this too. well, come on, then, punk. Prove my point.
I love how everything is a "business model"...
on
The Webmail Wars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, Google is using their software to match search keywords to ads on email to, and suddenly that's a "business model"? No of course not, it's a way to get more klick-throughs. It is an *improvement*. Nobody claimes a new "business model" because they have built a better mousetrap.
A business model is rather from where you get revenues, or how you are organised. I get my money from consulting, and the software I'm building is free. Microsoft charges for their software. THAT is different business models.
Between 1989 and 1992 I worked for a large international company. During this time there was a project to unify the computer environment. This project early on saw the potential of Windows 3 and committed to using it already before it had gone out of beta. We of course needed office software, and I got to test word processing programs.
We were a wordperfect shop then and really wanted a windows version, but although we never doubted that Windows 3 would be a hit, Wordperfect obviously made a different judgement on that. There was no Windows version, and nothing was in the pipeline. This forced us to choose between the other available programs. I rember that the contest was between Ami Pro and Word for Windows. Nothing else was even remotely usable. Word won, but just as we were going to commit to Word, Wordperfect finally saw the light. So, we didn't commit to Word. We didn't commit at all, but instead we used Word until Wordperfect for Windows came out, intending to switch back.
I don't remember exactly how long it took, maybe it was a year later that I got to see a beta version of Wordperfect for Windows. This late beta was so buggy that it was completely unusable. Did we give up? No. We waited for the final version.
When it finally came, not only was everybody now happily using Word, the final version of Wordperfect for windows was crap. It was a useless pile of garbage, where the best way to edit a document was to go into the code-view that made it work exactly like Word Perfect for DOS. The WYSIWYG mode was rather "What You See Is Nothing Like What You Are Trying To Get". The program was confusing and hard to use.
When I first started using Word, I missed that code view, and checked that lack off as a minus. Pretty soon it was apparent that with Word, you did not need it. With Wordperfect, it was a necessity.
So what killed Wordperfect was not Microsoft, but a double blow of bad decision making and crappy software, delivered hard and fast by Word Perfect itself. Novell buying Wordperfect in 1992 was a mistake. As simple as that, and now they are trying to blame Microsoft. Pitiful.
I hope Microsoft takes this to court, and I hope they win. If they need a witness, I'm game!:-)
When I was kid in the 70's it was the home computer. No, heck, we couldn't do anything useful with them, but they were the future. "I program my home computer - beam myself into the future" as Kraftwerk put it. Well, we did, and we knew it. The feeling must have been similar when people got their first radio, or their first TV.
And now, cheap, do-it-yourself holograms! I just love it when science fictions promises are fulfilled, and the future arrives on my doorstep!
"The same was said about destructive cults. The adepts just kept said that God would help them and replace the bad people on the top, because... after all, they were God's chosen."
Well, of course, that has absolutely no resemblance to anything I said... so, yeah, maybe somebody said that about EA. But I didn't.
Should he admit that FireFox is better? Hah! He is just doing his job. Companies have to claim their product is better or cheaper than the competition (and cheaper is not an option here).
And honestly, the main reason I use FireFox is that it has tabbed browsing. Most lusers would just get confused by that.;-)
They can't win against Google
on
MSN Search Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The reason nobody can win against Google is that Googles results are almost as good as they can be. That's why it only took me a couple of test searches to switch to Google. (Can you remember the time before Google? I *think* I was using Altavista, but it's all a blur of vague memories of never finding anything, so I'm not sure...)
They only time Google doesn't come up with relevant search results is when I'm forced to use so generic words that I get a wide spread of hits. No traditional keyword based search engine can beat that.
The next search engine people will switch to is the one that can help you focus in on a more specific topic or type of information, without using specific keywords and without using keyword searching. I have seen some experimental search engines that will group pages depending on what they are about and then let you do subsearches withing a selected group. This technology is still too raw to be useful, and it is still based on keywords in the pages and links, but someday somebody will have an idea as bright as Google, adn searching will leap to the next level.
I'm not betting on that it will be Microsoft. Actually, the company most likely to do such a thing is Google themselves. They still haven't lost the inventive touch, as Gmails user interface shows.
Slashdot Mirror
...will come when phone manufacturers realize what a flash is and why a camera intended to take snapshots of your friends when you are partying is useless without one.
Yes! Finally we can have Gyro Gearloose's shoes that make you float two inches above ground, and where you just lean in the direction you want to go! :)
"Detailed calculations indicate that the actual scaling is not quite that dramatic, but a millimeter-size engine would have a thrust-to-weight ratio of about 100:1, compared with 10:1 for the best modern aircraft engines."
:)
This gives me visions of a jumbojet with the whole wingspan covered in thousands of really small jet engines.
OK, OK, I guess he is not European. I just noted that all the others of what is the typical "ASP" web setup of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL was involved, so his absence kinda stood out. ;-)
Comics can make for good movies, because of course, they are very visual. But not fudging up Watchmen will be *very* hard. It's an amazing piece of Comic.
For some weird reason, I bought it around when it came out, and then did not read it for a couple of years. It just stood in my bookshelf and I almost forgot about it. Boy did I punish myself for that when I finally read it.
It *is* very good, people: If you like comics even just a little bit, you need to read it. Same thing if you like dark and "artsy" movies.
Go get it! Now! *plugplug*
I took a (not that hard) look at which are best as compliments to the top dog, GIANT AntiSpyware.
Turns out that SW Doctor seems to fill up the holes best, even better than AdAware and SpySweeper, although they come in better as standalone.
So, GIANT AntiSpyware with a liberal helping of SW Doctor and maybe an occational spray of AdAware seems to be the medicin to use.
All LED lights I have seen has had a horrible cold light worse even that flourescent lights. It makes me queasy...
;-)
These may be different, but that remains for them to prove.
I would have assumed that things like this was already happening. NASA is goverment funded, their data should reasonably be accessible if not publicly then at least by universities!
There are actually rules for what is supposed to be accepted as patents, and including those things are that there exists no prior art and that it is non-obvious. It's nice of the patent clerks to look things up to see if it has been patented before, but what is included in their job is to do at least a basic search for prior art and to reject things that are obvious solutions.
And they are not doing that, which results in lots of patents who should not be accepted, many of which sooner or later end up in a court case, costing companies lots of money.
This "IsNot" patent is only one of many patent applications which are both obvious and has lots of prior art, and which should therefore not be accepted. Chances are, it will be, because it is no less patently absurd than Lotus patenting the use of backslash to open a menu, or this gem. Yes, it's the famous comb-over patent.
They are wasting money, and forcing companies to slug out patent infringement in court, when they should be doing basic research themselves.
But in fact, they are obviously doing exactly *nothing* but sit on their asses, drink coffe and then accept all patent applications without even reading them first. But of course, only after they had delayed them for a while, to look busy.
That should be enough basis for the mother of all class action cases, where everybody who have ever bought a product from a company involved in a patent case have suffered from increased prices.
Are they tax funded? Then everybody who have ever payed taxes can sue them too..
So, the gravitational waves has to have a frequency pretty close to 2.9kHz to be detected, then? Why that specific frequency? The site seems to offer no clues. Is it just random? It seems awfully high to me...
Doing that seems not to be possible in the US. There you have to sure everybody that possibly maybe might be considered to infringe on your intellectual properties, or you will not be able to sue people later where it really matters.
;-)
This is why lot's of people get these silly cease and decist letters from lawyers because they are possibly maybe infringing on trademarks. Remember that teenager who had a domain that sounded a bit like Microsoft? They *have* to force him to stop doing that, or they may be unable to protect their trademark in a real case later, because they ignored this infringement.
That's what you get when you let lawyers create the law. A law that is custom made to create more work for lawyers.
Interesting point, but unfortunately, your reasoning is pure paranoia . Do you have any reference to Google censoring? Tibet.org doesn't even mention Google. Don't you think they should mention it if they thought Google censored them?
Programming is about making a computer understand what a person wants it to do. This is typically done by making the set of tasks the computer can do smaller. Much smaller. Like, storing data in a relational structure, or doing 3D graphics.
The reason for this is that human languages are fuzzy. Why does sum(a4:g15) work in a spreadsheet? Becuase all variables are layed out in two dimensions, and they can all be assumed to be numbers. What the meaning of "Do the sum of everythin from a4 to g15" is clear in the limited world of a spreadsheet. You can't write have such a method in a generic programming languge, because what comes in between the variable pGrok and iTresko? The statement makes no sense.
Natural Language Programming will come in specialized fields. I can "program" the computer to sort my mail in very natural language. But yet again, that are simple specific situations, where the fuzzines of human language is not a cause for misunderstandings. And the best way to get there is to use computer language programming to limit what you can do with the computer.
and since perl uses manu natural language dieas, we now see why this isn't a very good idea.
"Thats not even an honorable death, dying from a robot?"
Better than death by bulunga!
True. The thickness of the ice sheet varies very much, so not only would you need to find a fault-line, you need it to be under reasonably thin ice. Luckily, this seems to be the case!
t hq uakes.html2 001-2002/200 1_1216/quakes.html
http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/seismology/answer/ear
http://www.polar.org/antsun/oldissues
...is that this is a cheap way of causing earth quakes. Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, besides the obvious reason of being an evil villain in a Bond-movie, you could also do this to make small earthquakes to disperse the tension in the crust, thereby averting big buildups that evetually get released in big, disastrous earthquakes.
Of course this would need to be tested somewhere safe. Are there any major fault lines in the antarctic?
Isn't interesting how everything that critizises Kerry or the kerry-campaign seems to get a troll rating, no matter how correct, sensible and argumentative it is?
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna get troll rating for this too. well, come on, then, punk. Prove my point.
So, Google is using their software to match search keywords to ads on email to, and suddenly that's a "business model"? No of course not, it's a way to get more klick-throughs. It is an *improvement*. Nobody claimes a new "business model" because they have built a better mousetrap.
A business model is rather from where you get revenues, or how you are organised. I get my money from consulting, and the software I'm building is free. Microsoft charges for their software. THAT is different business models.
...but I'm with Microsoft on this one.
:-)
Between 1989 and 1992 I worked for a large international company. During this time there was a project to unify the computer environment. This project early on saw the potential of Windows 3 and committed to using it already before it had gone out of beta. We of course needed office software, and I got to test word processing programs.
We were a wordperfect shop then and really wanted a windows version, but although we never doubted that Windows 3 would be a hit, Wordperfect obviously made a different judgement on that. There was no Windows version, and nothing was in the pipeline. This forced us to choose between the other available programs. I rember that the contest was between Ami Pro and Word for Windows. Nothing else was even remotely usable. Word won, but just as we were going to commit to Word, Wordperfect finally saw the light. So, we didn't commit to Word. We didn't commit at all, but instead we used Word until Wordperfect for Windows came out, intending to switch back.
I don't remember exactly how long it took, maybe it was a year later that I got to see a beta version of Wordperfect for Windows. This late beta was so buggy that it was completely unusable. Did we give up? No. We waited for the final version.
When it finally came, not only was everybody now happily using Word, the final version of Wordperfect for windows was crap. It was a useless pile of garbage, where the best way to edit a document was to go into the code-view that made it work exactly like Word Perfect for DOS. The WYSIWYG mode was rather "What You See Is Nothing Like What You Are Trying To Get". The program was confusing and hard to use.
When I first started using Word, I missed that code view, and checked that lack off as a minus. Pretty soon it was apparent that with Word, you did not need it. With Wordperfect, it was a necessity.
So what killed Wordperfect was not Microsoft, but a double blow of bad decision making and crappy software, delivered hard and fast by Word Perfect itself. Novell buying Wordperfect in 1992 was a mistake. As simple as that, and now they are trying to blame Microsoft. Pitiful.
I hope Microsoft takes this to court, and I hope they win. If they need a witness, I'm game!
When I was kid in the 70's it was the home computer. No, heck, we couldn't do anything useful with them, but they were the future. "I program my home computer - beam myself into the future" as Kraftwerk put it. Well, we did, and we knew it. The feeling must have been similar when people got their first radio, or their first TV.
And now, cheap, do-it-yourself holograms! I just love it when science fictions promises are fulfilled, and the future arrives on my doorstep!
"The same was said about destructive cults. The adepts just kept said that God would help them and replace the bad people on the top, because... after all, they were God's chosen."
Well, of course, that has absolutely no resemblance to anything I said... so, yeah, maybe somebody said that about EA. But I didn't.
Should he admit that FireFox is better? Hah! He is just doing his job. Companies have to claim their product is better or cheaper than the competition (and cheaper is not an option here).
;-)
And honestly, the main reason I use FireFox is that it has tabbed browsing. Most lusers would just get confused by that.
The reason nobody can win against Google is that Googles results are almost as good as they can be. That's why it only took me a couple of test searches to switch to Google. (Can you remember the time before Google? I *think* I was using Altavista, but it's all a blur of vague memories of never finding anything, so I'm not sure...)
They only time Google doesn't come up with relevant search results is when I'm forced to use so generic words that I get a wide spread of hits. No traditional keyword based search engine can beat that.
The next search engine people will switch to is the one that can help you focus in on a more specific topic or type of information, without using specific keywords and without using keyword searching. I have seen some experimental search engines that will group pages depending on what they are about and then let you do subsearches withing a selected group. This technology is still too raw to be useful, and it is still based on keywords in the pages and links, but someday somebody will have an idea as bright as Google, adn searching will leap to the next level.
I'm not betting on that it will be Microsoft. Actually, the company most likely to do such a thing is Google themselves. They still haven't lost the inventive touch, as Gmails user interface shows.