Isn't it part of Microsoft licensing that you must run the software under Microsoft's environment? I haven't used FoxPro since Microsoft bought it out, but I've heard that's a pretty common term with at least some of their EULAs.
And an illegal one, but they'll wait until the DOJ raps their knuckles on every issue until they C&D. This is "leveraging their OS monopoly" if I ever saw it.
So if I were the guys trying to run FoxPro on linux, and assuming M$ doesn't decide to play nice, I'd fire off a comment to the people in DOJ supposedly enforcing this crap. It worked for getting the Explorer Uninstaller more prominent positioning.
I don't usually use C and/or C++ for the control though. It's all about performance.
Some might say there is a bit of a cause/effect relationship there. You are able to get better performance because you have greater control over your code, etc.
But I do take your point about the insight of making the protector an option.
Consider scale...and how about earthquakes?
on
Energy From Vibrations
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging
Classic slashdot. You know, you could actually read the article and find out. You do go to berkeley.
the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
Well, he didn't imply "power," he stated "recover." As others have mentioned, any vibration recovered isn't giving you that tingly feeling that says your phone is going off. So nothing doing there, but Hemos isn't quite as daft as you think. (Insert./ editor joke here)
What this article is really about (I feel like I'm making Cliff's Notes here for the science-deprived) is not recovering a significant proportion of power from a low-power device like a cell phone. It's about powering a milliwatt-draining device like a sensor off of, say, a megawatt-producing device like a nuclear reactor. This is actually kind of cool, since as the article states (for the literate among you), there are places with no light, no wiring, and a lot of vibrations where you might need power. So this has the chance to do some cool things - just don't expect it to actually extend the life of your cell phone or be a perpetual-motion machine.
On the interesting side, this would make a cool way to create non-powered earthquake sensors. When it gets a quake, it transmits its position and maybe have the power out proportional to power in. You could distribute hundreds of them and have a real-time quake sensor that might be better than triangulating.
Also, could be useful to track vehicles if you slap it on the chassis. Again, deploy once, no worries about going dead.
And if you have a useful idea and can actually put it into production, you'll need to start a company. A few grand for a patent application is peanuts compared to the cost of actually making anything out of some idea. Very often, the idea itself isn't actually the important part; the execution is.
Depends on the product, and also assumes that the inventor intends to be the one who carries out the idea. There's no reason to think that the person who invents something is any better able to carry out their own idea than anyone else. For this reason, it would be a good idea for the inventor to sell the patent to an established comany that would have the means to execute the idea. So, if I invent something, it might be a good idea for me to cash out on the patent after getting it.
So, if that's the goal, then $10,000 could be quite prohibitive. It means that someone who doesn't have a lot of money will basically be forced to disclose their idea to a potential partner before filing the patent, in order to get the money to file at all. Then they pretty much have to hope that they don't get screwed (even if they have a lawyer), and you can bet they will get very little for their idea.
I find myself in the same position - I have an idea for an interesting product that would actually be fairly cheap to make (Prototype would be around a few hundred dollars, and production would be under $5). Additionally, it means that for a cheaper product, you have to sell a jillion of them just to make back the patent costs. Not fun. Even if I had a profit margin of 75% (ie, sell it for $20 at $5 cost), I would have to sell about 500 units to break even.
This person may simply have made pisspoor font or layout choices.
He just used default fonts (Helvetica or something) and spacings. I've had similar issues with OO as well. I don't think it was a matter of flexibility - I think the defaults should at least not look like garbage. And I've played around with OO a bit, and haven't found any way to make the fonts look even as good as in Word. Part of the problem is Linux's abysmal font handling, part is OO's issues with the same.
I will say that neither OO or linux will get significant desktop support until things look good "out of the box," and this is currently nowhere near the case.
Is OpenOffice really there yet? During our final presentation last week in a CS class, a fellow was trying to explain to the teacher why his entire presentation featured scrunched up, barely legible text. "I created it in OpenOffice and brought it into PowerPoint," he explained, as the class laughed at at him.
Yeah, and I don't think you have to invoke the file-transfer argument. In our research group, a fellow linux guy was giving a presentation that he made in OO. He didn't transfer it, he hooked his laptop into a projector and displayed it that way.
Yet, his fonts had terrible spacing issues. Some of the text was scrunched, some spread out. His presentation looked like a damned ransom letter.
Oh, and he was using Suse 8.1, basic install. So no, the combination of a base linux/OO install is not ready for professional looking presentations.
It's been a year since we switched over from Microsoft Office, and there have only had a handful of documents that have had MS Office/Open Office incompatibilities.
I use Office for a variety of data analysis tasks, and I rarely have a document more complicated than a letter that doesn't get corrupted in some way when making the transition. Even simple graphs lose their axes (or worse). More complicated plots get completely corrupted. I've never had a powerpoint presentation that opened correctly.
Additionally, openoffice's implementation of the spreadsheet is a certified joke. It is missing many of the statistical functions from excel, making life difficult. Also, it's not smart enough to determine what app goes with a certain file. For example, if I have an ASCII datafile, I have to tell it every time to open it as CSV, or it opens it in the word processor (and that gets really OLD quickly, especially when you're editing a lot of files and forget to keep doing it).
I do support wholeheartedly the idea of an open source office suite, but OpenOffice isn't yet ready. If you've had good fortune with file conversion, you are truly lucky. And I've found OO to be kludgey even outside of conversion, even missing features. I never thought I'd see a worse designed UI than MSOffice, but Star/Open Office nailed it.
Slashdot Mirror
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And an illegal one, but they'll wait until the DOJ raps their knuckles on every issue until they C&D. This is "leveraging their OS monopoly" if I ever saw it.
So if I were the guys trying to run FoxPro on linux, and assuming M$ doesn't decide to play nice, I'd fire off a comment to the people in DOJ supposedly enforcing this crap. It worked for getting the Explorer Uninstaller more prominent positioning.
Some might say there is a bit of a cause/effect relationship there. You are able to get better performance because you have greater control over your code, etc.
But I do take your point about the insight of making the protector an option.
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging
Classic slashdot. You know, you could actually read the article and find out. You do go to berkeley.
the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
Well, he didn't imply "power," he stated "recover." As others have mentioned, any vibration recovered isn't giving you that tingly feeling that says your phone is going off. So nothing doing there, but Hemos isn't quite as daft as you think. (Insert ./ editor joke here)
What this article is really about (I feel like I'm making Cliff's Notes here for the science-deprived) is not recovering a significant proportion of power from a low-power device like a cell phone. It's about powering a milliwatt-draining device like a sensor off of, say, a megawatt-producing device like a nuclear reactor. This is actually kind of cool, since as the article states (for the literate among you), there are places with no light, no wiring, and a lot of vibrations where you might need power. So this has the chance to do some cool things - just don't expect it to actually extend the life of your cell phone or be a perpetual-motion machine.
On the interesting side, this would make a cool way to create non-powered earthquake sensors. When it gets a quake, it transmits its position and maybe have the power out proportional to power in. You could distribute hundreds of them and have a real-time quake sensor that might be better than triangulating.
Also, could be useful to track vehicles if you slap it on the chassis. Again, deploy once, no worries about going dead.
Still, worst-case scenario for any file is the status-quo that we're dealing with for *all* files, so no matter what, this would be nice.
Depends on the product, and also assumes that the inventor intends to be the one who carries out the idea. There's no reason to think that the person who invents something is any better able to carry out their own idea than anyone else. For this reason, it would be a good idea for the inventor to sell the patent to an established comany that would have the means to execute the idea. So, if I invent something, it might be a good idea for me to cash out on the patent after getting it.
So, if that's the goal, then $10,000 could be quite prohibitive. It means that someone who doesn't have a lot of money will basically be forced to disclose their idea to a potential partner before filing the patent, in order to get the money to file at all. Then they pretty much have to hope that they don't get screwed (even if they have a lawyer), and you can bet they will get very little for their idea.
I find myself in the same position - I have an idea for an interesting product that would actually be fairly cheap to make (Prototype would be around a few hundred dollars, and production would be under $5). Additionally, it means that for a cheaper product, you have to sell a jillion of them just to make back the patent costs. Not fun. Even if I had a profit margin of 75% (ie, sell it for $20 at $5 cost), I would have to sell about 500 units to break even.
He just used default fonts (Helvetica or something) and spacings. I've had similar issues with OO as well. I don't think it was a matter of flexibility - I think the defaults should at least not look like garbage. And I've played around with OO a bit, and haven't found any way to make the fonts look even as good as in Word. Part of the problem is Linux's abysmal font handling, part is OO's issues with the same.
I will say that neither OO or linux will get significant desktop support until things look good "out of the box," and this is currently nowhere near the case.
Yeah, and I don't think you have to invoke the file-transfer argument. In our research group, a fellow linux guy was giving a presentation that he made in OO. He didn't transfer it, he hooked his laptop into a projector and displayed it that way.
Yet, his fonts had terrible spacing issues. Some of the text was scrunched, some spread out. His presentation looked like a damned ransom letter.
Oh, and he was using Suse 8.1, basic install. So no, the combination of a base linux/OO install is not ready for professional looking presentations.
I use Office for a variety of data analysis tasks, and I rarely have a document more complicated than a letter that doesn't get corrupted in some way when making the transition. Even simple graphs lose their axes (or worse). More complicated plots get completely corrupted. I've never had a powerpoint presentation that opened correctly.
Additionally, openoffice's implementation of the spreadsheet is a certified joke. It is missing many of the statistical functions from excel, making life difficult. Also, it's not smart enough to determine what app goes with a certain file. For example, if I have an ASCII datafile, I have to tell it every time to open it as CSV, or it opens it in the word processor (and that gets really OLD quickly, especially when you're editing a lot of files and forget to keep doing it).
I do support wholeheartedly the idea of an open source office suite, but OpenOffice isn't yet ready. If you've had good fortune with file conversion, you are truly lucky. And I've found OO to be kludgey even outside of conversion, even missing features. I never thought I'd see a worse designed UI than MSOffice, but Star/Open Office nailed it.