But while I'm working towards that goal of early retirement I'd like to be happy. If I switched jobs right now I could probably make 5-10k more than I do. That might let me retire 1-2 years earlier. In the meantime, I'd be working for 20-30 years spending 40+ hours a week on jobs I don't like so I can have 'freedom' on year earlier.
That doesn't sound like a very good tradeoff to me.
I'm a huge fan of VMware too and as it helped me to make the switch I assumed it'd work for everyone. The problem is that for some applications (photoshop, autocad) it's just painful to use. If the applications you want under windows are fairly lightweight then VMWare is perfect. If you're using a lot of your computer's resources though it can be horribly slow.
Or this would completely destroy the ability of individuals and small businesses to use patents.
If I come up with some brilliant, novel idea involving the use of expensive machinery right now, I can patent it and go around to large companies asking who will partner with me to produce it and put on the market. With your system I am incapable of patenting it until I bring it to the large company, at which point they build a working prototype and patent it first.
And besides, given that a good number of patents today are for ideas rather than physical objects, storage is pretty easy to accomplish. Buy a new rack of servers and your next 20k ideas are covered.
Seriously though, this is a reasonable move for Apple to ensure that the look, feel and reliability of the MacOS does not become corrupted for some users who may want to install OS X on "lower quality hardware".
Is it more or less reasonable than printer manufacturers trying to ensure the look, feel and reliability of their printouts are not corrupted with "lower quality ink"?
if I remember correctly once a given invention is made public, the inventor has a year to file for patent rights. If the first to file section isn't written very carefully that means that when someone invents something and say, donates the code to open source, large companies such as Microsoft can then go file for this idea they had nothing to do with.
Unless I'm missing something this little change has some pretty nasty implications.
The real purpose of a patent it to protect the investment of all the R&D by people.
Almost. But this fails to work for the brilliant computer scientist working in his mother's garage. If he comes up with some brilliant idea involving supercomputers or semiconductors he needs to get funding. If he can patent the idea, he can go around trying to get people to give him money to produce his invention or hire him on to apply it to their company. If he has to produce a working prototype ~before~ being protected by IP laws, he goes to ask for funding, the companies/investors say "No" and then go off and build it for themselves. Protecting the little guy is what patents were created for in the first place and the little guy may not be able to afford the R&D.
London's rainfall, at around 600mm/year is about half of what Sydney's is, and the same as Melbourne. Don't be fooled by your preconceived ideas (my preconceptions would have picked Melbourne as rainier than Sydney if I hadn't just looked that up).
Look at a map of Australia. Maybe http://www.theodora.com/maps/australia_map.html. Then notice that Sydney and Melbourne are around the outside. Then read the grandparent who says "We're effectively a desert continent with green patches around the outside."
So the parent did good research but only on the rainfall bit not on the location bit (which is just as important) making his comparisons irrelevant.
I don't think the author really thought this out well. The point of software patents is to protect indivduals and companies from competition when they come up with an idea. For example: a random developer comes up with an incredible new idea for an unheard of system. He goes to patent it but is now not allowed to get that patent until he has written a prototype of the entire system. While he is working his way through hundreds of thousands of lines of code on his own, a competitor gets wind of what he is doing and designates an entire team to code an implementation and get the patent first.
Some projects take years with hundreds of developers working on them to get into a working state. Think of IBM for example - if any small company had thought up the ideas behind the products of Tivoli or Lotus do you think they could have provided a prototype to go with their patent? If not, this addition would make software patents even more useless and harmful to small companies and individuals then they currently are.
If the model demands something the existence of which we are completely unable to verify, shouldn't we be questioning the model? Doesn't the very fact that there's all this "missing" matter indicate that perhaps our understanding is flawed?
I used to say the same thing (mainly in relation to the undiscovered Higgs boson) but it is not unprecidented in physics. If you read up on the discovery of the neutrino it was also hypothesized and then shown to exist a ways later. There was an experiment where two particles were 'shown' breaking the laws of momentum. Fermi decided that it'd be much nicer to assume there was some invisible/undetectable particle moving in a third direction (thus keeping momeutum conserved) than to scrap the conservation law. He was proven right when the neutrino was discovered, as soon as equipment had improved enough to detect it.
Of course I'm sure there are lots of examples where things didn't pan out but it's not unreasonable to try to keep your nice equations intact.
The real reason you haven't seen a color version yet, and aren't likely to anytime soon, is that e-paper is currently a strictly on/off display. It does not do grayscales at all.
Actually I think you're wrong here. I've seen several sites saying that there is at least 4 shades of gray along with the black and white (they're translations of the sony japanese site though - I can't prove they're reliable) and the e-ink site has a pretty clear drawing of how to do gray (http://www.eink.com/technology/)
Granted, it'd take more do color well but it'll happen if this version takes off.
Blaming the black out on a software bug is a damn cop-out. The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid
right. and that is why the article is titled "Software Bug Contributed to Blackout".
Contributed to does not imply caused, it indicates that it was a factor. If the grid had not been mismanaged or what have you, the black out would not have happened but if the bug wasn't there the people running the grid would have known there was a problem at the time and been able to do something about it.
Yeah really. The worst problem of this is it takes away the argument of "don't send me spam because I pay for the bandwidth". If something like this happened I bet the reputable companies would start doing direct marketing the same way they send those coupons on cheap recycled paper. I don't feel that I'd win earning a dollar daily, wading through 1,000 emails because every department store in my state was sending me their sale information.
not to mention all the new scams "Make 50,000 a year reading email! from home!"
IBM has abandoned using Lotus Notes inside the organisation
I don't know where people got the idea that this is the entire organization. The article says that there's a challenge to get the top folks at IBM moved over to linux by '05. This is Very different from a mandate that everyone in IBM is moved over. I expect most of the execs could get away with openoffice and lotus notes and if they were handed a machine with both these installed I doubt there would be too many helpdesk calls.
When is somebody going to stand up and say enough is enough? A better question is, who CAN stand up to this?
The problem is that a lot of America is behind Bush (and what his administration does) still. He's pretty much got a split of almost half the country loving him for kicking ass and not being wishy-washy and the other half thinking he's the worst 'leader' we have ever had and is going to cause WW3.
If all of america were united in being against the current regime we could definitely get things done. With half the people in this country happily behind him it just isn't that easy.
I suggest going out and finding a couple of people who plan on voting for him and explaining your point of view in a non-antagonistic way. If enough of us do this (and they have open minds) it just might work
Not to be a pessimist but will wording matter in the long run? I believe the US patent office claims that patents have to be novel and I know they insist there be no prior art and we've seen example after example of stupid, non-novel and pre-existing technologies being patented. This leaves me curious: does anyone here know if the EU patent office is better at following the letter of their law than the US seems to be?
The "house of reps" would simply be whoever the people respect enough, either overall or within their area of expertise, at any particular time, to trust with their own vote
I think it's more likely the house of reps would be brittney spears and arnold schwartzeneger I like the idea of people I respecting getting influence with key issues but honestly I think it would more turn the government into more of a popularity contest than it already is.
The DRM feature in Office and Outlook enables a user to prevent emails and documents from being forwarded to and viewed by people not specified by the sender/creator.
I presume this means that every email you forward to me has to be read in outlook. Somehow I don't think Microsoft will write a plugin for lotus notes (what I'm stuck using at work) or PINE or mutt.
So now I'm forced into using a Microsoft product which I'll have to pay for to read all those emails. And a couple of versions in the future I may no longer be able to copy/paste between half my emails and documents because people got used to leaving the DRM button checked. And I won't be able to make easy backups of my email because the DRM thinks I'm making illegal copies and sending them on...
If I want to keep something anonymous I just tell people in person. I'd much rather do that than deal with all the potential hassle.
In other RFID news today, Wired is reporting that the EU may implant RFID tags into the Euro, basically eliminating the anonymous cash transaction.
Except for the fact that no stores actually check these tags. And for the information paranoid it's a lot easier to trade cash around (swap with a friend, get change from a street kiosk) than to swap credit cards with someone every time you make a purchace =P.
If IBM buys up SCO and owns the licenses, who is going to sue them? They aren't going to sue themselves
Every single little company which has any IP rights remotely involved with linux. If IBM buys SCO out they send a message that they're willing to buy out anyone who starts this sort of FUD campaign against Linux IP. Not a good precedent to set.
It won't take long before people want to watch a movie a second time and get denied and grow sick of it. Eventually they will just decide to start copying them instead of viewing them.
There are practical uses for this sort of thing though. How nice would it be to go rent a movie and then not have to drive back to the store the next day? (not to mention make overdue fees a thing of the past) For all that I don't like 'buying' things without the right to do whatever I want with them (DeCSS anyone?) the rental market for movies at least is pretty well established.
This only works so well though. Many companies have small print that they basically own your brain while you work for them. Even IBM, which pays people to work on open source code has some paperwork for you if you want to work on your own projects. I believe it's fairly straightforward as long as you're not making money off something that looks a lot like your job but you Do have to fill it out. It does make sense from the company's perspective - they don't want to pay you to work on some propriatary code and then have you go home and use the expertise they paid you to gain to apply the same features to a free product that's their competition. Sadly I don't know the actual process one has to go through so I can't be of any help to whoever asked this.
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Vim can do everything Emacs can do
Bah. As much as I prefer vim, I have yet to see it play tetris.
But while I'm working towards that goal of early retirement I'd like to be happy. If I switched jobs right now I could probably make 5-10k more than I do. That might let me retire 1-2 years earlier. In the meantime, I'd be working for 20-30 years spending 40+ hours a week on jobs I don't like so I can have 'freedom' on year earlier.
That doesn't sound like a very good tradeoff to me.
I'm a huge fan of VMware too and as it helped me to make the switch I assumed it'd work for everyone. The problem is that for some applications (photoshop, autocad) it's just painful to use. If the applications you want under windows are fairly lightweight then VMWare is perfect. If you're using a lot of your computer's resources though it can be horribly slow.
Or this would completely destroy the ability of individuals and small businesses to use patents.
If I come up with some brilliant, novel idea involving the use of expensive machinery right now, I can patent it and go around to large companies asking who will partner with me to produce it and put on the market. With your system I am incapable of patenting it until I bring it to the large company, at which point they build a working prototype and patent it first.
And besides, given that a good number of patents today are for ideas rather than physical objects, storage is pretty easy to accomplish. Buy a new rack of servers and your next 20k ideas are covered.
Seriously though, this is a reasonable move for Apple to ensure that the look, feel and reliability of the MacOS does not become corrupted for some users who may want to install OS X on "lower quality hardware".
Is it more or less reasonable than printer manufacturers trying to ensure the look, feel and reliability of their printouts are not corrupted with "lower quality ink"?
if I remember correctly once a given invention is made public, the inventor has a year to file for patent rights. If the first to file section isn't written very carefully that means that when someone invents something and say, donates the code to open source, large companies such as Microsoft can then go file for this idea they had nothing to do with.
Unless I'm missing something this little change has some pretty nasty implications.
If you want a man to respect you as a colleague, ladies, then do a man's work and do it LIKE a man.
Actually I take my work and do it like a person. I don't know that 'coding like a man' would imply, really.
The real purpose of a patent it to protect the investment of all the R&D by people.
Almost. But this fails to work for the brilliant computer scientist working in his mother's garage. If he comes up with some brilliant idea involving supercomputers or semiconductors he needs to get funding. If he can patent the idea, he can go around trying to get people to give him money to produce his invention or hire him on to apply it to their company. If he has to produce a working prototype ~before~ being protected by IP laws, he goes to ask for funding, the companies/investors say "No" and then go off and build it for themselves. Protecting the little guy is what patents were created for in the first place and the little guy may not be able to afford the R&D.
London's rainfall, at around 600mm/year is about half of what Sydney's is, and the same as Melbourne. Don't be fooled by your preconceived ideas (my preconceptions would have picked Melbourne as rainier than Sydney if I hadn't just looked that up).
Look at a map of Australia. Maybe http://www.theodora.com/maps/australia_map.html. Then notice that Sydney and Melbourne are around the outside. Then read the grandparent who says "We're effectively a desert continent with green patches around the outside."
So the parent did good research but only on the rainfall bit not on the location bit (which is just as important) making his comparisons irrelevant.
I don't think the author really thought this out well. The point of software patents is to protect indivduals and companies from competition when they come up with an idea. For example: a random developer comes up with an incredible new idea for an unheard of system. He goes to patent it but is now not allowed to get that patent until he has written a prototype of the entire system. While he is working his way through hundreds of thousands of lines of code on his own, a competitor gets wind of what he is doing and designates an entire team to code an implementation and get the patent first.
Some projects take years with hundreds of developers working on them to get into a working state. Think of IBM for example - if any small company had thought up the ideas behind the products of Tivoli or Lotus do you think they could have provided a prototype to go with their patent? If not, this addition would make software patents even more useless and harmful to small companies and individuals then they currently are.
If the model demands something the existence of which we are completely unable to verify, shouldn't we be questioning the model? Doesn't the very fact that there's all this "missing" matter indicate that perhaps our understanding is flawed?
I used to say the same thing (mainly in relation to the undiscovered Higgs boson) but it is not unprecidented in physics. If you read up on the discovery of the neutrino it was also hypothesized and then shown to exist a ways later. There was an experiment where two particles were 'shown' breaking the laws of momentum. Fermi decided that it'd be much nicer to assume there was some invisible/undetectable particle moving in a third direction (thus keeping momeutum conserved) than to scrap the conservation law. He was proven right when the neutrino was discovered, as soon as equipment had improved enough to detect it.
Of course I'm sure there are lots of examples where things didn't pan out but it's not unreasonable to try to keep your nice equations intact.
The real reason you haven't seen a color version yet, and aren't likely to anytime soon, is that e-paper is currently a strictly on/off display. It does not do grayscales at all.
Actually I think you're wrong here. I've seen several sites saying that there is at least 4 shades of gray along with the black and white (they're translations of the sony japanese site though - I can't prove they're reliable) and the e-ink site has a pretty clear drawing of how to do gray (http://www.eink.com/technology/) Granted, it'd take more do color well but it'll happen if this version takes off.
Blaming the black out on a software bug is a damn cop-out. The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid
right. and that is why the article is titled "Software Bug Contributed to Blackout". Contributed to does not imply caused, it indicates that it was a factor. If the grid had not been mismanaged or what have you, the black out would not have happened but if the bug wasn't there the people running the grid would have known there was a problem at the time and been able to do something about it.
Yeah really. The worst problem of this is it takes away the argument of "don't send me spam because I pay for the bandwidth". If something like this happened I bet the reputable companies would start doing direct marketing the same way they send those coupons on cheap recycled paper. I don't feel that I'd win earning a dollar daily, wading through 1,000 emails because every department store in my state was sending me their sale information.
not to mention all the new scams "Make 50,000 a year reading email! from home!"
IBM has abandoned using Lotus Notes inside the organisation
I don't know where people got the idea that this is the entire organization. The article says that there's a challenge to get the top folks at IBM moved over to linux by '05. This is Very different from a mandate that everyone in IBM is moved over. I expect most of the execs could get away with openoffice and lotus notes and if they were handed a machine with both these installed I doubt there would be too many helpdesk calls.
When is somebody going to stand up and say enough is enough? A better question is, who CAN stand up to this?
The problem is that a lot of America is behind Bush (and what his administration does) still. He's pretty much got a split of almost half the country loving him for kicking ass and not being wishy-washy and the other half thinking he's the worst 'leader' we have ever had and is going to cause WW3.
If all of america were united in being against the current regime we could definitely get things done. With half the people in this country happily behind him it just isn't that easy.
I suggest going out and finding a couple of people who plan on voting for him and explaining your point of view in a non-antagonistic way. If enough of us do this (and they have open minds) it just might work
not suprising - I believe the page not found response is generally viewed in the browser's language while sitefinder was english only.
The EU has amended its draft proposal
Not to be a pessimist but will wording matter in the long run? I believe the US patent office claims that patents have to be novel and I know they insist there be no prior art and we've seen example after example of stupid, non-novel and pre-existing technologies being patented. This leaves me curious: does anyone here know if the EU patent office is better at following the letter of their law than the US seems to be?
The "house of reps" would simply be whoever the people respect enough, either overall or within their area of expertise, at any particular time, to trust with their own vote
I think it's more likely the house of reps would be brittney spears and arnold schwartzeneger I like the idea of people I respecting getting influence with key issues but honestly I think it would more turn the government into more of a popularity contest than it already is.
The DRM feature in Office and Outlook enables a user to prevent emails and documents from being forwarded to and viewed by people not specified by the sender/creator.
I presume this means that every email you forward to me has to be read in outlook. Somehow I don't think Microsoft will write a plugin for lotus notes (what I'm stuck using at work) or PINE or mutt. So now I'm forced into using a Microsoft product which I'll have to pay for to read all those emails. And a couple of versions in the future I may no longer be able to copy/paste between half my emails and documents because people got used to leaving the DRM button checked. And I won't be able to make easy backups of my email because the DRM thinks I'm making illegal copies and sending them on...
If I want to keep something anonymous I just tell people in person. I'd much rather do that than deal with all the potential hassle.
It's also interesting that 10 out of 12 of the songs are not sold individually. So much for buying your favorite songs...
In other RFID news today, Wired is reporting that the EU may implant RFID tags into the Euro, basically eliminating the anonymous cash transaction.
Except for the fact that no stores actually check these tags. And for the information paranoid it's a lot easier to trade cash around (swap with a friend, get change from a street kiosk) than to swap credit cards with someone every time you make a purchace =P.
If IBM buys up SCO and owns the licenses, who is going to sue them? They aren't going to sue themselves
Every single little company which has any IP rights remotely involved with linux. If IBM buys SCO out they send a message that they're willing to buy out anyone who starts this sort of FUD campaign against Linux IP. Not a good precedent to set.
It won't take long before people want to watch a movie a second time and get denied and grow sick of it. Eventually they will just decide to start copying them instead of viewing them.
There are practical uses for this sort of thing though. How nice would it be to go rent a movie and then not have to drive back to the store the next day? (not to mention make overdue fees a thing of the past) For all that I don't like 'buying' things without the right to do whatever I want with them (DeCSS anyone?) the rental market for movies at least is pretty well established.
This only works so well though. Many companies have small print that they basically own your brain while you work for them. Even IBM, which pays people to work on open source code has some paperwork for you if you want to work on your own projects. I believe it's fairly straightforward as long as you're not making money off something that looks a lot like your job but you Do have to fill it out. It does make sense from the company's perspective - they don't want to pay you to work on some propriatary code and then have you go home and use the expertise they paid you to gain to apply the same features to a free product that's their competition. Sadly I don't know the actual process one has to go through so I can't be of any help to whoever asked this.