I think that the length of a patent should reflect the amount of development costs.
If something has no development cost or cost to test etc., then the patent length is 1 year.
You'd have to create a sliding scale up to a max of 20 years. (Should be 5 for software)
The patent office whould be the judge, I suppose, so they'd have to hire a pile of accountants to be able to investigate and dismiss inflated costs.
If software patents keep going like they are, the industry will grind to a halt where nobody will be able to build on the work of others.
Copyright is a whole other ball game and is less broken than the patent system. - as long as copyrights don't become indefinite.
Re: SCO and PanIp...
The second Bob Newhart show had an episode where Josee Ferrer's (rich old guy) character was describing the work of of a relative who made a living by suing people. He described the fellow's profession as being a "suer". (pronounced like sewer as in sewer pipe):)
It seems that Mitsui has stopped making their gold DVD-R media. (Real gold reflective layer) I don't think that anyone else is making gold media for the DVD-+R/RW burners either.
If that's the case, what kind of archival life can we expect out of the other brands? 4.7 gigs is a lot of data to go missing if a disk goes bad.
I've read that burned DVD's are more fragile than CD's and just bending them while taking them out of the case can ruin a disk.
Are we going to have to re-burn all our data every 10.. 5.. 2.. years because the marketplace has voted for crap/cheap media?
Testicular cells are much more sensitive to xrays that other tissues. How thin is the skin of the scrotum? Probably less than.1", especially on children. I'd like to see some data on reproductive safety.
Check out the picture of the guy they zapped.
They may have to turn the power down a bit more.
You can see his shinbones are well defined and the xrays are penetrating the skin on his face.
Has anyone out there tested the Disaster Recovery options of Veritas/Arcserve/Legato etc. in an MS environment? (no sneers please)
I'm kind of skeptical of them. It seems that you need the open files agent (costing $$$) on all your servers in addition to the D/R option. Even that may not be enough to work, since you will likely be restoring to different hardware than the one that was destroyed. (unless you get lucky on Ebay)
The only other option that I can see would be to image the hard drives with Imagecast or Ghost etc. This will work with a hardware RAID array but not a software one. If you took an image for safety and then a second image after running Sysprep, you would likely be able to restore to different hardware (chipsets/video/other drivers). You would then backup/restore the data using a regular full backup.
Any thoughts?
Re:but it's more humane!
on
Chicken Run
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· Score: 1
About 20 years ago I remember seeing an ad in the local paper for:
AI Technician
Cool, I thought. But then I read the fine print. EE didn't stand for Electrical Engineer either.
Picture balding, tall, skinny guy with small round glasses and scruffy beard being handed a face mask, arm-length rubber gloves and an electroejaculation prod.
Here's the best one I've ever seen. Notice he's wearing a hat though and not moving.:)
Our brains are wired to recognize faces which makes recreating one especially difficult. The limits to doing a face now are mostly artistic.
Most of the professional software these days has passed the point where it limits the artist. (Whether it can do it in time for a production deadline is another matter.)
Things that make a face not work are:
-Perfect symmetry. (check out Cameron Diaz's nose for how far you can go and still look beautifull)
-Not enough articulation in the forms. (Poser people are getting better but still look like mannequins - too much symmmetry also)
-The eyes and mouth look dry. No meniscus of water at the lids or on the teeth.
-Simple skin textures. The values and color of real skin have quite a range and more variation than most faces are textured/colored.
If you want to see how subtle expressions are, try doing a portrait in paint or pencil and change the shape of the mouth by 1mm or 2.
See this link for a really cool article on how subtle and complex facial expressions are. (Bill Clinton makes a guest appearance)
Slashdot Mirror
42 in base 3 would be: 1120
You can see that the minimum is somewhere between 2 and 4 though. Base e makes sense.
If something has no development cost or cost to test etc., then the patent length is 1 year. You'd have to create a sliding scale up to a max of 20 years. (Should be 5 for software)
The patent office whould be the judge, I suppose, so they'd have to hire a pile of accountants to be able to investigate and dismiss inflated costs.
If software patents keep going like they are, the industry will grind to a halt where nobody will be able to build on the work of others. Copyright is a whole other ball game and is less broken than the patent system. - as long as copyrights don't become indefinite.
Re: SCO and PanIp... The second Bob Newhart show had an episode where Josee Ferrer's (rich old guy) character was describing the work of of a relative who made a living by suing people. He described the fellow's profession as being a "suer". (pronounced like sewer as in sewer pipe) :)
If that's the case, what kind of archival life can we expect out of the other brands? 4.7 gigs is a lot of data to go missing if a disk goes bad. I've read that burned DVD's are more fragile than CD's and just bending them while taking them out of the case can ruin a disk.
Are we going to have to re-burn all our data every 10.. 5.. 2 .. years because the marketplace has voted for crap/cheap media?
Check out the picture of the guy they zapped.
They may have to turn the power down a bit more.You can see his shinbones are well defined and the xrays are penetrating the skin on his face.
I'm kind of skeptical of them. It seems that you need the open files agent (costing $$$) on all your servers in addition to the D/R option. Even that may not be enough to work, since you will likely be restoring to different hardware than the one that was destroyed. (unless you get lucky on Ebay)
The only other option that I can see would be to image the hard drives with Imagecast or Ghost etc. This will work with a hardware RAID array but not a software one. If you took an image for safety and then a second image after running Sysprep, you would likely be able to restore to different hardware (chipsets/video/other drivers). You would then backup/restore the data using a regular full backup.
Any thoughts?AI Technician
Cool, I thought. But then I read the fine print. EE didn't stand for Electrical Engineer either.Picture balding, tall, skinny guy with small round glasses and scruffy beard being handed a face mask, arm-length rubber gloves and an electroejaculation prod.
Says guy: " Hey!Here's the best one I've ever seen. Notice he's wearing a hat though and not moving. :)
Our brains are wired to recognize faces which makes recreating one especially difficult. The limits to doing a face now are mostly artistic. Most of the professional software these days has passed the point where it limits the artist. (Whether it can do it in time for a production deadline is another matter.)
Things that make a face not work are:
-Perfect symmetry. (check out Cameron Diaz's nose for how far you can go and still look beautifull)
-Not enough articulation in the forms. (Poser people are getting better but still look like mannequins - too much symmmetry also)
-The eyes and mouth look dry. No meniscus of water at the lids or on the teeth.
-Simple skin textures. The values and color of real skin have quite a range and more variation than most faces are textured/colored.
If you want to see how subtle expressions are, try doing a portrait in paint or pencil and change the shape of the mouth by 1mm or 2. See this link for a really cool article on how subtle and complex facial expressions are. (Bill Clinton makes a guest appearance)