The definition of a heuristic is a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem.
Ok, so heuristics -- commonsense rules -- can be patented now. This is so far from the original patent intent that they should basically now be considered as a legal stand-over right rather than as a protection of a novel invention.
They probably used the illicitly gained profits to do more R&D, resulting in the terrible situation of having even better LCD displays for even lower prices.
Legendary! This boosts my faith in the need for a strong hacker community -- one of the last remaining brakes on the relentless march towards a world of corporate fascism.
I'm a non-Mac person and I'd buy an Apple tablet in an instant. I'm quite happy with a Windows notebook, but the TabletPCs are somewhat clunky and I'd hope Apple would create something with a far more elegant form-factor and better usability. I know a couple of people in the finance industry who use tablets extensively (for note taking, meeting minutes, mind mapping, etc) and they do seem more productive with them.
The only Apple products I own are an iPod and a Newton. With any future Apple tablet, I'm hoping the Apple team will apply the same usability innovations that went into the Newton.
I live in Japan, and the reason the iPod is so popular is very very simple. The iPod is simply so much better and more intuitive than the players released by Sony and to a lesser extent other manufacturers. Don't think Japanese aren't also sick of Sony's crap. Years of bad experiences with crippled products (I think it started with DAT) have primed Japanese to jump on the first digital audio product that is significantly better. Forget nationalistic pride, iPod is cool, and now that the iPod has reached critical mass, I don't see Sony gaining much market share back for a very long time.
This has really brought out the C++ haters. Still, most commercial applications, games, utilities, OS's, etc are still written in C++ (or a combination of C and C++). There is a reason for this; it is because C++ is both incredibly effective and extremely efficient. Sure, its possible to create artificial benchmarks that prove otherwise, but in te real world where performance counts, people use C++. But when they want flexibility they go for Ruby or Python or something similar. If you want outstanding applications, you use an outstanding language like C++. If you want average applications, you use an average language like Java.
The huge problem with these crackdowns is that they result in the development of more secure, more anonymous file sharing technology making the sharing of information amongst terrorist groups harder to snoop on. If it wasn't for these trivial attacks on relatively mundane sharing activities, the authorities responsible for monitoring serious criminal activity, that has a true negative impact on society, would have a much easier job.
You mean like the Itanic? Not really. The Itanic is targetted at the high-cost, low-volume market segment (that's how it turned out, anyway). The cell, however, should be produced in much higher volumes by virtue of it being used in games consoles and hence should hopefully be available at a much lower price-point. A lower price means more people will experiment with it, more Linux users will buy it, leading possibly to a positive feedback cycle where the chip gets cheaper and cheaper, or maybe faster and faster, and hence used more and more.
The English-language article wasn't as detailed as the Japanese reports. You know how you can hit shift-F1 in MS products and you get the arrow with a question mark which you then use to get help on a subsequent element on the screen... well this is the same except that you can click an icon as an alternative to shift-F1. There are some screen shots at the bottom of this Japanese-language article: http://japan.cnet.com/news/biz/story/0,2000050156, 20080442,00.htm
If you want to experience freefall its going to be much cheaper to take a ride on the "Vomit Comet" or just spend fifty bucks at an indoor skydiving facility for a go in the vertical wind tunnel. But I guess the views and bragging rights wouldn't be anywhere near as good.
experience is similar
"
ia64 pwns amd64. pwns i say.
but seriously, itanium pwns the shit out of amd64."
From a purely performance standpoint, it certainly does. But in terms of price, I don't think there is much competition in the 64bit space for AMD's chips. Seriously, not many people can afford an Itanium just to play around with, but many of us have no problem justifying the price of an AMD64. Don't get me wrong, if an Itanium and related hardware were available for the same price as an AMD64 chip and motherboard, I'd seriously consider getting one for some high-end Linux experimentation.
So the way that the Cell processor works is that there is a pool of 16 or so of these (probably not completely identical) RISC or SIMD/VLIW cores on a single die. The system will do its processing by drawing resources from this pool on a task-specific basis. For instance, the audio processing subsystem will consist of a set of software routines that request cycles from the pool for the purpose of processing 3D audio. The 3D engine will similarly request cycles from the same pool for rendering, and similarly with the game AI system, etc. The different processing cores will probably be grouped together dynamically by software into "teams" in order to complete specific tasks (i.e. 3D rendering, audio, etc.). Each team's size will scale dynamically to fit its current workload by either acquiring new cores from the pool or releasing unneeded cores back to the pool for use by other processes.
Its seems that Intel have lost their technology edge. Early in Intel's life, the company direction was driven by the engineers, but it over the last few years, highlighted by the mhz race, all tech R&D has been driven by marketing managers. This was probably to be expected. Marketers and non-tech managers are usually very good with people, very good at playing politics, and hence very good at influencing company direction; far better than most engineers. Intel is now paying the price for their incompetence by loosing out to smaller, more hungry competitors.
I don't know where the Itanic fits into this theory. I guess if it wasn't so late, and was made available during the tech bubble, Intel would now be on a fundamentally different track, rather than playing catch-up (poorly) with more innovative companies.
Now, onto multi-core chips. This is actually a very exciting direction. Sun has already demonstrated an 8 core, quad-hyperthreading 32-way chip http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040910 (Project Niagra). Intel certainly has much catching up to do, but its time for a new race and hopefully they'll get their arse into gear and show us some exciting things in the years to come, that is, if the marketoids can be somehow dethroned from their positions of power.
I watched the preview and my theory is that this has already happened. Some doofus stepped off the path and killed a butterfly, because the rest of the trailer bears absolutely no resemblence to my memory of Ray Bradbury's story.
The patent process is designed to encourage inventors to publish their ideas so that other people can build off of them.
With trivial software patents, that argument completely fails. Anyone with a basic knowledge of programming can often come up with a similar solution without ever having heard of the patent. The patent system is unsuitable for software since you can patent even the most basic software method that is blatently obvious to anyone with even the most rudimentary programming skills.
Bad analogy. The Gimp is more like that big wheel transportation device in one of the South Park episodes. You had to have something painfully rammed up you ass while driving it. And it didn't have to be that way.
I'm sick of being called lazy for only working 50 to 60 hours per week. I'm sick of being called stupid because I'm not Indian, Chinese or Russian. I'm sick of being called overpaid because I have have to survive to buy food, pay rent, pay off education, etc in a country whose cost of living is higher than in an Indian village. I'm sick of being called racist simply for wanting a job for myself and my friends in my own country. And I'm sick of the constant fear that I'll be layed-off while the high level managers levels of compensation keeps growing. I'm so sick of the fact that they leveredge this fear to make us work longer and longer hours.
I'm so sick of it all.
Slashdot Mirror
The definition of a heuristic is a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem. Ok, so heuristics -- commonsense rules -- can be patented now. This is so far from the original patent intent that they should basically now be considered as a legal stand-over right rather than as a protection of a novel invention.
They probably used the illicitly gained profits to do more R&D, resulting in the terrible situation of having even better LCD displays for even lower prices.
According to the Japanese site: http://www.fixstars.com/products/gigaaccel180/price.html you can get their CBE card for around 900,000 yen ($9.5k USD), or a million if you get it as part of the Lenovo workstation set.
They charge 45,000 yen per year for a Linux licence (~ $450 USD). Anyone know if they contribute their changes back into the public Yellow Dog distro? http://www.fixstars.com/company/press/20080916.html
They've hacked our timeline? These guys are good.
Legendary! This boosts my faith in the need for a strong hacker community -- one of the last remaining brakes on the relentless march towards a world of corporate fascism.
If this was Fark, someone would now post a pic of the Oh Noes! flaming paper bag guy: http://www.wildyams.com/blog/archives/oh_noes.jpg
/And finally some slashies
Then we'd get miscellaneous funny cat pictures before the thread devolved into a Bush flamewar.
I'm a non-Mac person and I'd buy an Apple tablet in an instant. I'm quite happy with a Windows notebook, but the TabletPCs are somewhat clunky and I'd hope Apple would create something with a far more elegant form-factor and better usability. I know a couple of people in the finance industry who use tablets extensively (for note taking, meeting minutes, mind mapping, etc) and they do seem more productive with them.
The only Apple products I own are an iPod and a Newton. With any future Apple tablet, I'm hoping the Apple team will apply the same usability innovations that went into the Newton.
I live in Japan, and the reason the iPod is so popular is very very simple. The iPod is simply so much better and more intuitive than the players released by Sony and to a lesser extent other manufacturers. Don't think Japanese aren't also sick of Sony's crap. Years of bad experiences with crippled products (I think it started with DAT) have primed Japanese to jump on the first digital audio product that is significantly better. Forget nationalistic pride, iPod is cool, and now that the iPod has reached critical mass, I don't see Sony gaining much market share back for a very long time.
This has really brought out the C++ haters. Still, most commercial applications, games, utilities, OS's, etc are still written in C++ (or a combination of C and C++). There is a reason for this; it is because C++ is both incredibly effective and extremely efficient. Sure, its possible to create artificial benchmarks that prove otherwise, but in te real world where performance counts, people use C++. But when they want flexibility they go for Ruby or Python or something similar. If you want outstanding applications, you use an outstanding language like C++. If you want average applications, you use an average language like Java.
The huge problem with these crackdowns is that they result in the development of more secure, more anonymous file sharing technology making the sharing of information amongst terrorist groups harder to snoop on. If it wasn't for these trivial attacks on relatively mundane sharing activities, the authorities responsible for monitoring serious criminal activity, that has a true negative impact on society, would have a much easier job.
You mean like the Itanic?
Not really. The Itanic is targetted at the high-cost, low-volume market segment (that's how it turned out, anyway). The cell, however, should be produced in much higher volumes by virtue of it being used in games consoles and hence should hopefully be available at a much lower price-point. A lower price means more people will experiment with it, more Linux users will buy it, leading possibly to a positive feedback cycle where the chip gets cheaper and cheaper, or maybe faster and faster, and hence used more and more.
The English-language article wasn't as detailed as the Japanese reports. You know how you can hit shift-F1 in MS products and you get the arrow with a question mark which you then use to get help on a subsequent element on the screen... well this is the same except that you can click an icon as an alternative to shift-F1. There are some screen shots at the bottom of this Japanese-language article: http://japan.cnet.com/news/biz/story/0,2000050156, 20080442,00.htm
Scroll down past the Japanese description and you can see some pics of the offending icon in this link: http://japan.cnet.com/news/biz/story/0,2000050156, 20080442,00.htm
If you want to experience freefall its going to be much cheaper to take a ride on the "Vomit Comet" or just spend fifty bucks at an indoor skydiving facility for a go in the vertical wind tunnel. But I guess the views and bragging rights wouldn't be anywhere near as good. experience is similar
You asked for it, you got it: 2009 Mars Rover will be Nuclear Powered
http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_2009_Rover.htm
The only player better than an iPod is...
... the Evangelion iPod:
http://lalabitmarket.channel.or.jp/ipodeva.html
Yes, I ordered one.
No, I do not expect to gain much respect for this purchasing decision.
Its seems that Intel have lost their technology edge. Early in Intel's life, the company direction was driven by the engineers, but it over the last few years, highlighted by the mhz race, all tech R&D has been driven by marketing managers. This was probably to be expected. Marketers and non-tech managers are usually very good with people, very good at playing politics, and hence very good at influencing company direction; far better than most engineers. Intel is now paying the price for their incompetence by loosing out to smaller, more hungry competitors.
0 (Project Niagra). Intel certainly has much catching up to do, but its time for a new race and hopefully they'll get their arse into gear and show us some exciting things in the years to come, that is, if the marketoids can be somehow dethroned from their positions of power.
I don't know where the Itanic fits into this theory. I guess if it wasn't so late, and was made available during the tech bubble, Intel would now be on a fundamentally different track, rather than playing catch-up (poorly) with more innovative companies.
Now, onto multi-core chips. This is actually a very exciting direction. Sun has already demonstrated an 8 core, quad-hyperthreading 32-way chip http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/2004091
I watched the preview and my theory is that this has already happened. Some doofus stepped off the path and killed a butterfly, because the rest of the trailer bears absolutely no resemblence to my memory of Ray Bradbury's story.
The patent process is designed to encourage inventors to publish their ideas so that other people can build off of them.
With trivial software patents, that argument completely fails. Anyone with a basic knowledge of programming can often come up with a similar solution without ever having heard of the patent. The patent system is unsuitable for software since you can patent even the most basic software method that is blatently obvious to anyone with even the most rudimentary programming skills.
Bad analogy. The Gimp is more like that big wheel transportation device in one of the South Park episodes. You had to have something painfully rammed up you ass while driving it. And it didn't have to be that way.
I'm sick of being called lazy for only working 50 to 60 hours per week. I'm sick of being called stupid because I'm not Indian, Chinese or Russian. I'm sick of being called overpaid because I have have to survive to buy food, pay rent, pay off education, etc in a country whose cost of living is higher than in an Indian village. I'm sick of being called racist simply for wanting a job for myself and my friends in my own country. And I'm sick of the constant fear that I'll be layed-off while the high level managers levels of compensation keeps growing. I'm so sick of the fact that they leveredge this fear to make us work longer and longer hours. I'm so sick of it all.