Sure you can. It's not a crime to apply for a patent on something with previous art.
Actually, it can be. When you file a patent, then you must sign a document saying that you have searched the published material for related work and that you are not aware of any prior art. If this statement can be shown to be false, then you have just committed perjury.
Yes, you missed something. Intel is not dictating what random institutions can do, it's dictating what institutions receiving funds from Intel can do. A university is free to find funding elsewhere and still file patents. If they believe that patents are really worthwhile, then they can get investors to fund the research in exchange for a percentage of the patent royalties. In fact, if patents really were useful to universities, then they wouldn't be asking Intel for funding at all, they'd all be funding their research with their massive patent royalty income.
IBM does make 90% of their money on support. Of course, support doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It doesn't mean answering the phone and saying 'no, click on the left button' it means saying 'well, we have these components, and you have these problems. We can solve your problems by deploying these components and writing these ones.' And that's always been where the big money has been in software: using it to solve real-world problems. Sometimes an off-the-shelf solution exists, but most of the time a company's problems are not quite the same as anyone else's, so the solution needs to be modified too.
There was a story on Slashdot a couple of years ago about a mobile company that put up a mast in a village, and started getting complaints from people saying that the transmitter was giving them headaches and so on. They issued quite an amusing press release, saying that they were sorry and they hoped that the symptoms wouldn't get much worse next month when they turned the transmitter on...
I can't help think that this could all be addressed by discretising the time for the market. If trades placed within a window were all executed simultaneously, say every 30 seconds, then a few milliseconds would not give anyone an advantage. I'd be quite happy to see that 30 seconds increased to 30 minutes. That's more than enough time for trades that actually add value - no company went bust by not being able to raise capital now instead of in half an hour's time - and it would ensure that there was enough time for a human to make a decision. A slightly better model might be to have overlapping windows with a delay, so a trade placed now would always execute 15-30 minutes in the future.
I'm not sure how it works in Germany, but in the UK the statement 'the economy grew by 0.25% this quarter' is interpreted by most of the media as 'OMG recession! We're all going to be starving to death on the streets!!1111eleventyone'
You know, I could get involved in a front line battle pretty easily. There's an army recruitment centre a few miles away, and after some training they'd happily send me somewhere to be shot at. Or I could join a mercenary unit and go right now. Why don't I? Because I don't think killing people or being shot at is fun. But shooting simulated bad guys in a totally morally unambiguous setting with no possibility of physical danger? Absolutely!
Well that's just plain confusing. Almost as confusing as Apple deciding that the version of Objective-C that followed Objective-C 4 was Objective-C 2. It's a good thing that the programmers at these companies have a better understanding of arithmetic than the marketroids...
Don't forget that we're talking about government IT here, not you in your basement. A cheap project costs a couple of million. For that price, you could hire the entire development team of something like OpenOffice.org for a couple of years to work on the features that you need. For smaller things, I can point you to half a dozen small businesses within 20 miles of here that will happily take contracts to add features to or fix bugs in pretty much any open source project that you need - if it's one that they haven't used before, then it will be more expensive, of course. For bigger projects, IBM or HP will happily deliver a team of people to do the work for you for a few months - or longer.
But the US is no longer an important part of the phone industry, y'know
What do you mean 'no longer?' The US has never been an important part of the phone industry, from the perspective of handset makers. They don't sell phones to customers, they sell them to networks, who demand a low price and will only bundle phones with the really expensive contracts with a 20% APR loan hidden in the details if they don't get a very low price. Then they'll try to rip out all of the best features of the phone, leaving them network-branded devices, with most of the uniqueness gone.
Open source is another matter entirely, to do with transparency and code-security
More to the point, it's to do with lock-in and long-term support. Open source software is supported as long as you're willing to pay for the support. Proprietary software is supported as long as you are a sufficiently valuable customer for the company not to be able to make more money by ignoring you. If the original provider goes out of business or doesn't want to support your deployment anymore, then with open source you can always get someone else in, and there are big companies like IBM and HP that will happily modify existing open source code for you, as well as a lot of small companies. With proprietary software, you're fucked. You have to either upgrade to the new version (at a cost defined by the provider, with no competition), or you have to switch to something new.
That would be fine. We're talking about open source, not community-developed software. This is government IT procurement, not your basement Linux server. The problem is that open source software, by definition, must allow unlimited redistribution (point one of the Open Source Definition). A one-off payment of £10K is fine, as long as that covers all copies of the software and of derived works. A FRAND standard, however, could require a 10p payment per copy of the software. This is impossible, because you'd be requiring everyone who distributed a copy of the software downstream to pay 10p to the standards body (or you'd be required to pay it, with no limit on the potential number of copies).
Having used both, I'd much rather have a WebOS device than an Android one. It was seriously let down by the hardware, not by the software. For example, in WebOS you have a conversation with a person, and whether it's via SMS, IM, or email it just seamlessly flows together. With Android, these are all separate streams.
HTC has shown that they can do hardware pretty well, so if they made a WebOS phone I'd be sorely tempted. I'd definitely recommend it to non-technical friends - WebOS is a not more user friendly than Android, which is quite clearly designed by geeks.
I have three IMAP accounts, all hosted in different places. One on a university server, one on my own server, and one hosted by Google. I don't experience any problems with the other ones. Google seems to be up at the moment, but this morning I checked my mail and got messages from the other two accounts and an error from Google. Maybe it's just me, but when two other servers work and Google's doesn't, that makes me suspect that it's their problem...
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago. It uses Yahoo's BYOSS, which uses Bing on the back end, but it doesn't record any user-identifiable information (even preferences are stored in a cookie that is just a string of preference flags, so two uses with the same preferences will have the same cookie). It uses HTTPS by default, and it (optionally) bounces you via a redirect page to strip out referrer information if you're really paranoid. The search results are okay. It has a link to send you to Google if you don't find the results you want, and the only times I've clicked on it, Google hasn't found anything useful either. Oh, and the UI is a lot nicer than Google.
Not sure why this is flamebait. Consider the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So united that we had Irish terrorists blowing up people for half a century trying to make Northern Ireland independent, we have a referendum on Scottish independence scheduled soon, and there's a growing movement for Welsh independence. Or maybe the United States of America, where states rights are a major issue and people from Texas (for example) will claim that they're Texan rather than American.
Slashdot doesn't have web bugs on thousands of popular sites that all get sent your Slashdot cookie so that it can correlate your browsing habits across a large subset of the web. It also doesn't require to you provide your real name and won't ban your account if it discovers that some of the information that you've provided is incorrect. Oh, and it doesn't track your friends / foes to search for common interests to provide to advertisers.
The main advantage of logging in is that you get notified when someone replies to you. This means you can actually have a discussion, rather than just a load of one-off comments.
XP added a few things. The ugly UI was one. In XP Pro, remote desktop was standard - this was the only feature that really made me consider upgrading. They also improved the compatibility modes a lot. Quite a lot of games ran on Windows XP but not on 2000. For me, coming from NT4 to 2000, this wasn't a real selling point because the only games I had that didn't work on 2000 were DOS games, and I could always boot into DOS to play them (and, later, play them in DOSBox). 2000 was NT 5 and XP was NT 5.1.
Oh, and XP also came with a Home edition (while 2000 only came in Workstation, Server, and Advanced Server flavours), which stripped out a lot of the functionality and was cheaper. The new look probably made it easier to sell. 2000 looked a lot like Windows 98. It was easy to sell to corporate customers because of all of the low-level functionality, but it's hard to persuade home users to switch from one OS to another one that looks the same. This is probably the main reason why every release of Windows and OS X comes with a new theme.
Windows NT isn't a version, it's a family. NT 3.1 was released in 1993, 3.5 in 1994, 4.0 in 1996. 5.0 was rebranded 2000, so no prizes for guessing when it was released. 5.1 was branded XP, 6 was branded Vista, and 7 was branded... 7.
And that's just within a single batter technology. The old and new AAs in my example are both NiMH cells, just with improvements. In my lifetime, LiIon and LiPoly have gone from nonexistent to ubiquitous. LiS is just stating to appear, although the very low number of recharge cycles means that it's currently limited to military applications (30 recharge cycles for a UAV is a lot - it will probably be shot down before the limit is reached). LiIon cells now last for about ten times as many recharge cycles as they did five years ago, so hopefully LiS will see some improvement over the next few years.
It uses a lot of screen space. That's about the only thing I can think of. I used it for the first time last week. It's not particularly innovative, it's just a different way of presenting the menu. If I had a large desktop then I'd probably prefer the ribbon to the traditional menu + toolbar combination. It's more discoverable navigable than the menu. On a laptop, however, it was a disaster. It used a huge amount of the available screen space - and this wasn't a small laptop.
The really nice thing about the ribbon is that it presents exactly the same information as the menu. Each menu item becomes a button, grouped by dividers. I don't know what Microsoft's APIs look like, but it should be possible to define the menu structure and then present it using anything from the Maemo single-menu-with-lots-of-submenus to the ribbon without changing the code, just depending on the amount of screen space available.
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Sure you can. It's not a crime to apply for a patent on something with previous art.
Actually, it can be. When you file a patent, then you must sign a document saying that you have searched the published material for related work and that you are not aware of any prior art. If this statement can be shown to be false, then you have just committed perjury.
Yes, you missed something. Intel is not dictating what random institutions can do, it's dictating what institutions receiving funds from Intel can do. A university is free to find funding elsewhere and still file patents. If they believe that patents are really worthwhile, then they can get investors to fund the research in exchange for a percentage of the patent royalties. In fact, if patents really were useful to universities, then they wouldn't be asking Intel for funding at all, they'd all be funding their research with their massive patent royalty income.
IBM does make 90% of their money on support. Of course, support doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It doesn't mean answering the phone and saying 'no, click on the left button' it means saying 'well, we have these components, and you have these problems. We can solve your problems by deploying these components and writing these ones.' And that's always been where the big money has been in software: using it to solve real-world problems. Sometimes an off-the-shelf solution exists, but most of the time a company's problems are not quite the same as anyone else's, so the solution needs to be modified too.
Just ask the BBC.
There was a story on Slashdot a couple of years ago about a mobile company that put up a mast in a village, and started getting complaints from people saying that the transmitter was giving them headaches and so on. They issued quite an amusing press release, saying that they were sorry and they hoped that the symptoms wouldn't get much worse next month when they turned the transmitter on...
I can't help think that this could all be addressed by discretising the time for the market. If trades placed within a window were all executed simultaneously, say every 30 seconds, then a few milliseconds would not give anyone an advantage. I'd be quite happy to see that 30 seconds increased to 30 minutes. That's more than enough time for trades that actually add value - no company went bust by not being able to raise capital now instead of in half an hour's time - and it would ensure that there was enough time for a human to make a decision. A slightly better model might be to have overlapping windows with a delay, so a trade placed now would always execute 15-30 minutes in the future.
I'm not sure how it works in Germany, but in the UK the statement 'the economy grew by 0.25% this quarter' is interpreted by most of the media as 'OMG recession! We're all going to be starving to death on the streets!!1111eleventyone'
You know, I could get involved in a front line battle pretty easily. There's an army recruitment centre a few miles away, and after some training they'd happily send me somewhere to be shot at. Or I could join a mercenary unit and go right now. Why don't I? Because I don't think killing people or being shot at is fun. But shooting simulated bad guys in a totally morally unambiguous setting with no possibility of physical danger? Absolutely!
Well that's just plain confusing. Almost as confusing as Apple deciding that the version of Objective-C that followed Objective-C 4 was Objective-C 2. It's a good thing that the programmers at these companies have a better understanding of arithmetic than the marketroids...
Don't forget that we're talking about government IT here, not you in your basement. A cheap project costs a couple of million. For that price, you could hire the entire development team of something like OpenOffice.org for a couple of years to work on the features that you need. For smaller things, I can point you to half a dozen small businesses within 20 miles of here that will happily take contracts to add features to or fix bugs in pretty much any open source project that you need - if it's one that they haven't used before, then it will be more expensive, of course. For bigger projects, IBM or HP will happily deliver a team of people to do the work for you for a few months - or longer.
But the US is no longer an important part of the phone industry, y'know
What do you mean 'no longer?' The US has never been an important part of the phone industry, from the perspective of handset makers. They don't sell phones to customers, they sell them to networks, who demand a low price and will only bundle phones with the really expensive contracts with a 20% APR loan hidden in the details if they don't get a very low price. Then they'll try to rip out all of the best features of the phone, leaving them network-branded devices, with most of the uniqueness gone.
Open source is another matter entirely, to do with transparency and code-security
More to the point, it's to do with lock-in and long-term support. Open source software is supported as long as you're willing to pay for the support. Proprietary software is supported as long as you are a sufficiently valuable customer for the company not to be able to make more money by ignoring you. If the original provider goes out of business or doesn't want to support your deployment anymore, then with open source you can always get someone else in, and there are big companies like IBM and HP that will happily modify existing open source code for you, as well as a lot of small companies. With proprietary software, you're fucked. You have to either upgrade to the new version (at a cost defined by the provider, with no competition), or you have to switch to something new.
That would be fine. We're talking about open source, not community-developed software. This is government IT procurement, not your basement Linux server. The problem is that open source software, by definition, must allow unlimited redistribution (point one of the Open Source Definition). A one-off payment of £10K is fine, as long as that covers all copies of the software and of derived works. A FRAND standard, however, could require a 10p payment per copy of the software. This is impossible, because you'd be requiring everyone who distributed a copy of the software downstream to pay 10p to the standards body (or you'd be required to pay it, with no limit on the potential number of copies).
Having used both, I'd much rather have a WebOS device than an Android one. It was seriously let down by the hardware, not by the software. For example, in WebOS you have a conversation with a person, and whether it's via SMS, IM, or email it just seamlessly flows together. With Android, these are all separate streams.
HTC has shown that they can do hardware pretty well, so if they made a WebOS phone I'd be sorely tempted. I'd definitely recommend it to non-technical friends - WebOS is a not more user friendly than Android, which is quite clearly designed by geeks.
I have three IMAP accounts, all hosted in different places. One on a university server, one on my own server, and one hosted by Google. I don't experience any problems with the other ones. Google seems to be up at the moment, but this morning I checked my mail and got messages from the other two accounts and an error from Google. Maybe it's just me, but when two other servers work and Google's doesn't, that makes me suspect that it's their problem...
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago. It uses Yahoo's BYOSS, which uses Bing on the back end, but it doesn't record any user-identifiable information (even preferences are stored in a cookie that is just a string of preference flags, so two uses with the same preferences will have the same cookie). It uses HTTPS by default, and it (optionally) bounces you via a redirect page to strip out referrer information if you're really paranoid. The search results are okay. It has a link to send you to Google if you don't find the results you want, and the only times I've clicked on it, Google hasn't found anything useful either. Oh, and the UI is a lot nicer than Google.
With the decline of Myspace and Geocities the internet needed a new idiot-sink
Isn't that what Facebook is for?
And now YouTube is connected to G+, so real names for everyone!
Not sure why this is flamebait. Consider the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So united that we had Irish terrorists blowing up people for half a century trying to make Northern Ireland independent, we have a referendum on Scottish independence scheduled soon, and there's a growing movement for Welsh independence. Or maybe the United States of America, where states rights are a major issue and people from Texas (for example) will claim that they're Texan rather than American.
Slashdot doesn't have web bugs on thousands of popular sites that all get sent your Slashdot cookie so that it can correlate your browsing habits across a large subset of the web. It also doesn't require to you provide your real name and won't ban your account if it discovers that some of the information that you've provided is incorrect. Oh, and it doesn't track your friends / foes to search for common interests to provide to advertisers.
The main advantage of logging in is that you get notified when someone replies to you. This means you can actually have a discussion, rather than just a load of one-off comments.
XP added a few things. The ugly UI was one. In XP Pro, remote desktop was standard - this was the only feature that really made me consider upgrading. They also improved the compatibility modes a lot. Quite a lot of games ran on Windows XP but not on 2000. For me, coming from NT4 to 2000, this wasn't a real selling point because the only games I had that didn't work on 2000 were DOS games, and I could always boot into DOS to play them (and, later, play them in DOSBox). 2000 was NT 5 and XP was NT 5.1.
Oh, and XP also came with a Home edition (while 2000 only came in Workstation, Server, and Advanced Server flavours), which stripped out a lot of the functionality and was cheaper. The new look probably made it easier to sell. 2000 looked a lot like Windows 98. It was easy to sell to corporate customers because of all of the low-level functionality, but it's hard to persuade home users to switch from one OS to another one that looks the same. This is probably the main reason why every release of Windows and OS X comes with a new theme.
Windows NT isn't a version, it's a family. NT 3.1 was released in 1993, 3.5 in 1994, 4.0 in 1996. 5.0 was rebranded 2000, so no prizes for guessing when it was released. 5.1 was branded XP, 6 was branded Vista, and 7 was branded... 7.
And that's just within a single batter technology. The old and new AAs in my example are both NiMH cells, just with improvements. In my lifetime, LiIon and LiPoly have gone from nonexistent to ubiquitous. LiS is just stating to appear, although the very low number of recharge cycles means that it's currently limited to military applications (30 recharge cycles for a UAV is a lot - it will probably be shot down before the limit is reached). LiIon cells now last for about ten times as many recharge cycles as they did five years ago, so hopefully LiS will see some improvement over the next few years.
It uses a lot of screen space. That's about the only thing I can think of. I used it for the first time last week. It's not particularly innovative, it's just a different way of presenting the menu. If I had a large desktop then I'd probably prefer the ribbon to the traditional menu + toolbar combination. It's more discoverable navigable than the menu. On a laptop, however, it was a disaster. It used a huge amount of the available screen space - and this wasn't a small laptop.
The really nice thing about the ribbon is that it presents exactly the same information as the menu. Each menu item becomes a button, grouped by dividers. I don't know what Microsoft's APIs look like, but it should be possible to define the menu structure and then present it using anything from the Maemo single-menu-with-lots-of-submenus to the ribbon without changing the code, just depending on the amount of screen space available.