Congress needs to provide funding to give the USPO a new division that watches for things like this, and invalidates patents that are deemed harmful to competition or that go against the spirit of the patent system.
If patents are meant to make sure an inventor benefits from his original work, then why is it possible to change ownership of the patent to some other entity, say a corporation.
I propose to limit the ownership of a patent to the neural network that originally came up with the idea with no possibility to transfer to any other entity. Also the patent should immediately expire once the neural network that owns the patent has reached halting state.
Chesky Records "Ultimate Demonstration Disc" is available from the ITMS. Go on, buy it, stick it on your iPod, get a Y cable. Then, buy the real disk from Chesky.
How is playing one song through a high-end DAC and another through an iPod's headphone port a fair comparison of audio encoding schemes ? If you want a fair comparison, play both on a computer, connect the computer to a high-end DAC over S/PDIF and then compare the two in a double blind test.
I just hate having to part with a good LCD monitor every time I want to upgrade or switch computers.
So go for the iMac, it doesn't have a decent LCD monitor so you won't have to feel sorry if you ever need to replace it.
Seriously, I'm a huge Apple fan, and I love the look of the new iMac. I was already saving up to get one when we got one at work to do some video editing. The screen on the 20" version is a disgrace. I'm really disappointed that Apple, with their reputation of making great hardware, included such a cheap LCD panel in the new 20" iMac. (the 24" are okay). There is a huge noticeable color difference between the top an bottom of the screen.
One of the key mistakes made almost every time computers are introduced to kids is to try to introduce them to computers.
I agree, the OLPC is meant to be something like "the young lady's illustrated primer" in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". And apparently it's working.
What I don't get is the continued use of rockets. Is going straight up (the brute force & ignorance method) really the most efficient method of getting up there ? Isn't an approach like SpaceShipOne uses more efficient in terms of amount of energy needed per kilo of launched mass and thus costs ?
You very obviously only read fiction, or, at least, only read for pleasure. If you had ever been to University, or taken a book-intensive course (such as Philosophy), then you'd know that e-books and e-readers are hopelessly ineffective.
Strange, my experience is different. Books are hopelessly ineffective, they contain no hyperlinks, are slow to search through and worst of all: horribly out of date. Most references I used during my education have been web-based or at least been accessible through a computer.
What about dealing with original works, that are perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years old?
Hundreds or even thousands of years ago, not many books were written on the subject of computer science. And if they were, they wouldn't be of much practical use. In fact, last years book is probably quite useless by now. (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit).
Your e-reader only has a working lifespan of around 10 years, if that.
My e-book readers replacement has been replaced by then. What you 'old timers' don't seem to get is that while hardware can and will die, information can be flawlessly copied and stay in 'original' condition for as long as you'd like. You guys are too much short-term planners, I don't care that paper books last ten thousand years, what about a million ? In a million years, all your dead tree books have rotted away. My digital collection could still be around by then.
Able to be read, reread, marked up, compared...E-books are, quite frankly, a joke when it comes to serious academic usage. There is no gain in having them compared with a well-organized library
Sure, it would make my life so much easier if I had to walk to the library every time I want to look up the specifics of some API. And who is going to pay for replacing half the libraries books with updated versions every 6 months ?
The utility of the e-book is incredibly limited; effectively, only geeks like you who only read Heinlein or Rand can ever find use for it. For everybody else, the tried-and-true technology that has lasted thousands of years will suffice.
I bet you take your 'tried-and-true' donkey cart to work each day and yell at the people passing you by that cars are just a fad which will blow over real soon now.
You don't have a proper appreciation of how much or how little you are reading. Some people might think it's a plus, but other people need to manage their time more carefully.
The e-book reader I use (TiBR) shows a little clock in the right bottom of the screen, very convenient for keeping track of time.
It's not as easy to take notes in e-books. So most books that require deep thought and pondering are out of the question.
I could just press one button and access the doodle pad or memo application on my PDA, but they are indeed not as convenient as a paper notebook. I mostly use this to read books for entertainment though.
I stopped using dead-tree books years ago, first I used a Palm III and later I switched to a Sony Clie TH-55. A lot of people are skeptical about e-books, saying it is uncomfortable reading from a screen but my experience is that the exact opposite is true.
The big advantages of reading e-books:
The choice in books is a lot bigger, I prefer reading english books, mostly sci-fi and fantasy. In the Netherlands where I live libraries have a very limited selection of english books and hardly any sci-fi/fantasy.
It's much easier to use than a 'real' book, I never have problems with light, with a real book I often find myself blocking my own light. My PDA has a frontlight (transflective lcd) and I never have to worry about light conditions. (e-book reader without some kind of illumination for the display = no go for me)
Reading in bed, I like to read in bed on a lazy sunday morning. If you hold a book like an 'L' with the bottom part of the 'L' parallel to the surface you're lying on, you can only read the upright page. With a 'real' book, I often find myself having to turn around with every page.
I read "the god delusion" a while back which was (at least at the time) not available in e-book format, so I had to buy the dead tree edition. I was really surprised, after not having read a dead tree book for a long time, how annoyed I was by the limitations of paper books.
Other phones don't even have real web browsers Nokia has had the series 60 browser since november 2005, which is based on WebKit, the exact same rendering engine that is powering Safari and the iPhone webbrowser.
Btw, how does that flash website look on your iPhone ? Looks great on my Nokia...
Which other phones have a multi-touch screen? None, but it's not that big of a feature, sure it's nice, but certainly not a selling point.
Which other phones have a good web browser? Every single Series60 phone since november 2005 has a browser that uses the same rendering engine as the browser on the iPhone (WebKit which based on khtml).
Which other phones have iTunes? Motorola ROKR E1 for one. But of course, iTunes is a brand name so you won't find many with 'itunes'. Phones with MP3 functionality, however, have been around for ages, SonyEricsson sells a lot under the "walkman" brand name, all Nokia's have had mp3's players for ages.
Add to that the lack of even standard 3G, let alone 3.5G (HSDPA)
The biggest problem is not so much the stuff people are made of, but the lack of proper debugging tools for wetware. If you, as a programmer, had to do a compete release of your software to a testgroup, write test protocols, test it on rats to make sure it doesn't kill anyone, do a double blind test on human subjects and then evaluate the results for every time you press the 'build and run' button while developing. "Hello world" would take a year to complete.
So what would set off a revolution in medical science is fixing this development cycle.
1. it didnt use AWT. instead they create yet another windowing toolkit specifically for micro devices. i dont understand why it was essentially a copy of awt. Why would you want the horrible, horrible AWT on a mobile ?
2. it didnt allow use of floats/doubles. It does now, and has for ages. CLDC 1.0 doesn't support floats, CLDC 1.1 does.
Took about 17 seconds on a Nokia 6120 over 192Kbps UMTS (I have HSDPA disabled, enabling it would not increase the transfer speed but it would decrease the latency, also, it cuts battery life in half)
Because they limited the ability of business to make money on a product;
Nokia doesn't seem to have a problem making a profit selling unlocked phones, neither does SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG, HTC etc. Apple could have sold way more phones if it had been available worldwide, unlocked and without a plan, just like e.g. the iPod.
And they should have released in Europe first, by the time the iPhone was released in the US, it was high-tech for the US market, but not so much for the EU market. by the time it arrives in Europe, it's outdated. Sure it has a nice user interface, but it misses a lot of the features people expect, like UMTS or HSDPA.
The backup has to go off-site. Some suggestions: parents' house, the office, a friend's.
That would usually still be in the same city or state, what if the entire city floods (new orleans anyone?) or an entire province like in my country in '53.
For additional paranoia-proof protection the offsite backup needs to be on the opposite side of the planet. If you got family really far away, send them a flashdrive once in a while.
A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together.
No it doesn't.
There is no internal 'viewscreen' that the brain displays the images on. (a so called "cartesian theater" ) after all, if that happens, who is watching the screen and how does that work ?
Instead of an internal 'framebuffer' I think* it's more like a MVC kind of system. Instead of pasting parts of images on an internal framebuffer to make up a whole, the individual parts are used to fill the datamodel of the world you've got inside your head. You 'see' the datamodel.
* - This is all just a bit of philosophizing on my side, I may be completely wrong.
Typical slashdot. First most games are produced by teams, not individuals.
Houses are build by teams, should I pay a license fee for every person who visits my house ? No, you pay the guys who build your house according to their hourly rate, doesn't really matter if it's one guy or tens or hundreds.
Second you may want to look up "Mass Production" and "Economics of scale". Apparently those are your weak areas.
No, they aren't.
So, if a game sells 2 million copies, do I pay half as much as when the game sells 1 million copies ?
although I realize I'm nearly alone on this site in believing people should be paid for making software.
I agree that programmers should be paid for making software, just like musicians should be paid for making music.
But only for making the software/music, not for the copies. So if an artist/programmer spends 100 hours making a song or programming an application, he/she should get paid for the 100 hours they spent, according to their hourly rate. Why do people think it's fair to get paid for work they actually haven't done ?
If you have a plumber install a toilet in your house, you don't have to pay a license fee for every person who wants to take a shit on it, you just pay him for the amount of time he's spent installing it. I don't see how music or software is any different.
Bunch of crap. I don't see anybody talking about PRADA LG, though it was announced a year ago.
Because it's a load of horse manure.
Have you ever tried using an LG phone ? They all S U C K. They're even worse than Samsung. It's not about the looks, there are plenty of good looking phones that give a horrible user experience.
Everybody tries to do this. Apple isn't alone. You dont think PalmOne, Motorola, Erikson, Nokia want to be considered "hip"?
If they want to be considered 'hip' maybe they should release some products for the 'hip' crowd.
Have you ever tried using an N-Gage ? Have you ever used one of the high-end Nokia 'smart' phones, like e.g. the new N95 ? They suck. The user interface is a mess, the phones are slow and unresponsive, the casing feels really cheap and plastic. And these are expensive phones.
Every high end phone on the market right now sucks ass. They are a pain to work with, they are slow, unstable and feel flimsy. The phone manufacturers are trying to beat the competition by rushing out new phones with all the newest features as soon as they can, with no regards to quality or user experience.
It's no wonder people are exited, given Apple's reputation.
But just imagine, it wasnt made by Apple - say it was a Motorola, or Erikson, or billy magoo. It's the exact same design, exact same features, exact same software. Would we be talking about it right now?
Yes, we would. The sad fact is that other companies are not making an iPhone. Motorola's RAZR was 'hip' and 'cool' years ago, but they seem to have fired their design team because they keep coming up with variations of the same design. I don't want the gazillionth incarnation of the RAZR. I don't want a windows smartphone with the ugly and non-intuitive interface. Not to speak of the chaotic mess that is Series60 and UIQ.
I work as a software developer and we build a lot of stuff for mobile phones, it's not uncommon for us developers to get puzzled by a phone. How would you think Joe User would react ?
The sad fact is that the user experience for any modern phone is absolutely horrible.
BMW USA doesn't sell anything new I can comfortably afford while paying down my house quickly; they don't aim at the lower end of the market here at all
They don't aim for the lower end of the market over here either. Quite often you'll see a BMW being driven by someone who clearly shouldn't be able to afford one.
Slashdot Mirror
This sucks, for those three people still using GSM.
What about the security of UMTS ?
If patents are meant to make sure an inventor benefits from his original work, then why is it possible to change ownership of the patent to some other entity, say a corporation.
I propose to limit the ownership of a patent to the neural network that originally came up with the idea with no possibility to transfer to any other entity. Also the patent should immediately expire once the neural network that owns the patent has reached halting state.
So go for the iMac, it doesn't have a decent LCD monitor so you won't have to feel sorry if you ever need to replace it.
Seriously, I'm a huge Apple fan, and I love the look of the new iMac. I was already saving up to get one when we got one at work to do some video editing. The screen on the 20" version is a disgrace. I'm really disappointed that Apple, with their reputation of making great hardware, included such a cheap LCD panel in the new 20" iMac. (the 24" are okay). There is a huge noticeable color difference between the top an bottom of the screen.
What I don't get is the continued use of rockets. Is going straight up (the brute force & ignorance method) really the most efficient method of getting up there ? Isn't an approach like SpaceShipOne uses more efficient in terms of amount of energy needed per kilo of launched mass and thus costs ?
Strange, my experience is different. Books are hopelessly ineffective, they contain no hyperlinks, are slow to search through and worst of all: horribly out of date. Most references I used during my education have been web-based or at least been accessible through a computer.
Hundreds or even thousands of years ago, not many books were written on the subject of computer science. And if they were, they wouldn't be of much practical use. In fact, last years book is probably quite useless by now. (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit).
My e-book readers replacement has been replaced by then. What you 'old timers' don't seem to get is that while hardware can and will die, information can be flawlessly copied and stay in 'original' condition for as long as you'd like. You guys are too much short-term planners, I don't care that paper books last ten thousand years, what about a million ? In a million years, all your dead tree books have rotted away. My digital collection could still be around by then.
Sure, it would make my life so much easier if I had to walk to the library every time I want to look up the specifics of some API. And who is going to pay for replacing half the libraries books with updated versions every 6 months ?
I bet you take your 'tried-and-true' donkey cart to work each day and yell at the people passing you by that cars are just a fad which will blow over real soon now.
The e-book reader I use (TiBR) shows a little clock in the right bottom of the screen, very convenient for keeping track of time.
I could just press one button and access the doodle pad or memo application on my PDA, but they are indeed not as convenient as a paper notebook. I mostly use this to read books for entertainment though.
The big advantages of reading e-books:
I read "the god delusion" a while back which was (at least at the time) not available in e-book format, so I had to buy the dead tree edition. I was really surprised, after not having read a dead tree book for a long time, how annoyed I was by the limitations of paper books.
Other phones don't even have real web browsers
Nokia has had the series 60 browser since november 2005, which is based on WebKit, the exact same rendering engine that is powering Safari and the iPhone webbrowser.
Btw, how does that flash website look on your iPhone ? Looks great on my Nokia...
Which other phones have a multi-touch screen?
None, but it's not that big of a feature, sure it's nice, but certainly not a selling point.
Which other phones have a good web browser?
Every single Series60 phone since november 2005 has a browser that uses the same rendering engine as the browser on the iPhone (WebKit which based on khtml).
Which other phones have iTunes?
Motorola ROKR E1 for one. But of course, iTunes is a brand name so you won't find many with 'itunes'. Phones with MP3 functionality, however, have been around for ages, SonyEricsson sells a lot under the "walkman" brand name, all Nokia's have had mp3's players for ages.
Add to that the lack of even standard 3G, let alone 3.5G (HSDPA)
The biggest problem is not so much the stuff people are made of, but the lack of proper debugging tools for wetware. If you, as a programmer, had to do a compete release of your software to a testgroup, write test protocols, test it on rats to make sure it doesn't kill anyone, do a double blind test on human subjects and then evaluate the results for every time you press the 'build and run' button while developing. "Hello world" would take a year to complete.
So what would set off a revolution in medical science is fixing this development cycle.
1. it didnt use AWT. instead they create yet another windowing toolkit specifically for micro devices. i dont understand why it was essentially a copy of awt.
Why would you want the horrible, horrible AWT on a mobile ?
2. it didnt allow use of floats/doubles.
It does now, and has for ages. CLDC 1.0 doesn't support floats, CLDC 1.1 does.
Took about 17 seconds on a Nokia 6120 over 192Kbps UMTS (I have HSDPA disabled, enabling it would not increase the transfer speed but it would decrease the latency, also, it cuts battery life in half)
Nokia doesn't seem to have a problem making a profit selling unlocked phones, neither does SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG, HTC etc. Apple could have sold way more phones if it had been available worldwide, unlocked and without a plan, just like e.g. the iPod.
And they should have released in Europe first, by the time the iPhone was released in the US, it was high-tech for the US market, but not so much for the EU market. by the time it arrives in Europe, it's outdated. Sure it has a nice user interface, but it misses a lot of the features people expect, like UMTS or HSDPA.
You could ask them to send you the MD5 hash of the drive once it arrives.
That would usually still be in the same city or state, what if the entire city floods (new orleans anyone?) or an entire province like in my country in '53.
For additional paranoia-proof protection the offsite backup needs to be on the opposite side of the planet. If you got family really far away, send them a flashdrive once in a while.
Unless they say you're a 'terrah' suspect and ship you off to guantanamo bay without any kind of trial.
There is no internal 'viewscreen' that the brain displays the images on. (a so called "cartesian theater" ) after all, if that happens, who is watching the screen and how does that work ?
Instead of an internal 'framebuffer' I think* it's more like a MVC kind of system. Instead of pasting parts of images on an internal framebuffer to make up a whole, the individual parts are used to fill the datamodel of the world you've got inside your head. You 'see' the datamodel.
* - This is all just a bit of philosophizing on my side, I may be completely wrong.
Houses are build by teams, should I pay a license fee for every person who visits my house ? No, you pay the guys who build your house according to their hourly rate, doesn't really matter if it's one guy or tens or hundreds.
No, they aren't.
So, if a game sells 2 million copies, do I pay half as much as when the game sells 1 million copies ?
I agree that programmers should be paid for making software, just like musicians should be paid for making music.
But only for making the software/music, not for the copies. So if an artist/programmer spends 100 hours making a song or programming an application, he/she should get paid for the 100 hours they spent, according to their hourly rate. Why do people think it's fair to get paid for work they actually haven't done ?
If you have a plumber install a toilet in your house, you don't have to pay a license fee for every person who wants to take a shit on it, you just pay him for the amount of time he's spent installing it. I don't see how music or software is any different.
Because it's a load of horse manure.
Have you ever tried using an LG phone ? They all S U C K. They're even worse than Samsung. It's not about the looks, there are plenty of good looking phones that give a horrible user experience.
If they want to be considered 'hip' maybe they should release some products for the 'hip' crowd.
Have you ever tried using an N-Gage ? Have you ever used one of the high-end Nokia 'smart' phones, like e.g. the new N95 ? They suck. The user interface is a mess, the phones are slow and unresponsive, the casing feels really cheap and plastic. And these are expensive phones.
Every high end phone on the market right now sucks ass. They are a pain to work with, they are slow, unstable and feel flimsy. The phone manufacturers are trying to beat the competition by rushing out new phones with all the newest features as soon as they can, with no regards to quality or user experience.
It's no wonder people are exited, given Apple's reputation.
Yes, we would. The sad fact is that other companies are not making an iPhone. Motorola's RAZR was 'hip' and 'cool' years ago, but they seem to have fired their design team because they keep coming up with variations of the same design. I don't want the gazillionth incarnation of the RAZR. I don't want a windows smartphone with the ugly and non-intuitive interface. Not to speak of the chaotic mess that is Series60 and UIQ.
I work as a software developer and we build a lot of stuff for mobile phones, it's not uncommon for us developers to get puzzled by a phone. How would you think Joe User would react ?
The sad fact is that the user experience for any modern phone is absolutely horrible.