I thought of two apps off the top of my head that are very responsive: jEdit and jDiskReport. Try one or both of them out, I'm sure you'll be surprised.
I am sure one could create some small applets which after being carefully optimized would run well but jEdit and jDiskReport are nowhere near anything like SQL Database Administration tools and Enterpise Online Banking applications. And that is what I deal with daily. And at those levels of complexity, frankly, Java sucks donkey balls.
Oh and even jEdit and jDiskReport requre the monstrous ~64MB per instance memory footprint on a Win2K Terminal Services machine for example (thats what Java VM does). You run 10 of these (in 10 user sessions) and it takes more memory then 10 instances of Outlook (they share the DLL's) and this is indeed nothing to brag about.
So to you a "community" is a bunch of people who only do things which they themselves want and never help each other? Weird
Like any community we get all kinds. There are those who do as you say. But there are also those who care for non-programmers and try to accommodate them. It all depends. In the case of a hard-core problem like speech recognition/synthesis (which is nowhere near acceptable level of scientific understanding) you are likely to get more of the "go code it yourself" kind because this area is prone to be inhabited by people who are arrogant "know-it-alls" but also unable to do anything about it. On the other hand, sometimes the questions asked by the "non-programmers" are also arrogant and of "Gimme now! Free! Now! Or I will hold my breath!" variety of attitude, which will be dealt with accordingly.
I am with you, brother. I think "Waiting For Something To Happen" is the Java motto. In my long experience with oodles of java (cr)apps which the Banks, IBM and various other "fad-of-the-week" pointy hair boss infected places make us use, I did not see a single, I repeat, single Java app that had interactivity even remotely approaching that of any other language.
For Pete's sake, we have VB apps that smoke Java any minute! I mean that must be some kind of a truly cosmic insult.
Stuff written in Java is better than stuff written in C or C++ because there are no frapping buffer overflows in Java code
True, instead there are a thousand "super-efficient".jar libraries required by a "Hello World" app, which use the "Object Oriented Programing and Long Lasting Cure All and Testicular Itch Relief Paradigm(tm)" to such extremes that it takes 12 objects instantiated in 4 containers to flip a bit in a byte. Additionally, there is the substitution of native performance of compiled code to code compiled "Just Too Late" combined with exceptional memory usage that entails. If it were not enough, as a bonus, we get the garbage collector which is scientifically fine-tuned to run just when user is expected to interact with the application in most time sensitive manner. As an icing on the cake we also are treated to multiple, insideously incompatible with each other, versions of the so-called "universal" VM, resulting in one app demanding that SunVM is used and the other that MS VM is used thus resulting in total impossibility of using both at the same time. Yes I do speak from looong and utterly infuriorating experience with Java apps.
At one point I considered printing a sign warning of Java advocates being shot on sight, I could probably make some serious money selling it, given similiar amount of grief my other colleagues are going through.
Ahem, and yes, the greatest offenders in me experience are... err... frigging IBM Java apps. We actually abandoned DB2 8.x release because noone could deal with the havoc the DB2 admin tools were causing with various other retarded banking related Java apps.
Detailed overhead pics of your neighborhood? Sure. Detailed overhead pics of a nuclear powerplant? That's a different story.
Setting aside the discussion of usefulness of such censorship (a kite+camera, etc), the problem is that the ever greedy for power securocracy uses the excuse of nuclear power plant to classify all pictures. Because they might contain something secret. They will decide what that is but wont tell you. This is a classic cop-out of a tyrannical police-state aparatus.
Would you trust the general public with the design and operating parameters of the defensive measures on Air Force One?
There is a loooong way from the defense systems of a presidential jet to pictures of your neighbourhood. FOIA was made so that the natural lust every securocracy on the planet has, a self-important desire to expand control and power until it turns into a clone of Gestapo, is kept in check. After 9-11 all of these balances seem to have been removed wholesale. Call me paranoid but I do foresee serious trouble ahead, one could argue a threat far more serious then what Al-Queida could have managed by itself.
You trust the bank not to use your credit card maliciously.
You must be kidding. Banks cheat, make errors and generaly try to steal from the customers at every opportunity with "transaction fees", mysterious interest rate changes etc. No. I dont trust the bank with my money. Similiarly, no governmental body can be trusted and has to be constantly monitored. That is why very wise men came up with the "separation of powers" and "oversight" ideas. Apparently though, their wisdom is becoming more and more fit for the "pearls before swine" addage.
The only thing left that can differentiate between them is design
That is part of the "quality" of the product.
What the original poster was trying to say is that products in a certain class all performed their jobs at a similar level of quality.
No. What he was referring to is that the only way to extract high profits from a product, regardless of its manufacturing quality (design included), performance and usefulnes is to market a "lifestyle" together with it, which is what the grand-parent of this thread described. Next time, try to be less ignorant and read the whole discussion.
Manufactured goods are cheap. Image is the only thing of value anymore.
Correction: manufactured goods are of varying value, in proportion to their quality and usefulnes. Image is the only thing of exorbitant price as it is the only thing proven to reliably appeal to vain idiots. The fact that Western economies are increasingly relying on "image" and "cool factor" is as telling sign of decay as a stench of rot would be on a corpse.
I'm saying that those who are so buried in debt that they can't get a credit card aren't.
In the US thats called being born poor and having a serious illness. Or having an accident and surgeries, cost of which exceed your insurance coverage. Or being an owner of a business which failed due to frivolous lawsuits. Or being a victim of identity theft. Or... you know, you are a typical right-wing drooling imbecile. Since you have a good credit, that naturally means that all those who do not are immature vermin punished by the divine, crackheads, communists etc...
That is precsiely that sort of dickheaded attitude being so popular that makes USA such a scary fucking place.
Re:transistor development driven by commerce
on
Antarctic Telescope?
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· Score: 1
But no quantum mechanics
This discussion wasn't about quantum mechanics but about corporations funding bits of research and then claiming it as their "property", copyrighting public data so that one has to pay perpetual rent on it and in general thieving and profiteering in countless ways at the expense of general public. You know: public resources for private profit. "Intellectual Property". Righteous "self-made" men claiming spoils of war. Stolen fair and square.
The point is, claiming that corporate research is essentially parasitical because not all of its parents are also corporate is childish folly. Corporations aren't old enough to have original roots in science. This is like saying that a second generation immigrant isn't nationalized because they can't trace their roots back to the mayflower. Whether or not something's parents are corporate doesn't matter. Corporate science has generated a great many significant breakthroughs and has invested a great amount into research.
The difference is that unlike all who went before, corporations claim ownership of the ideas. This entire conversation is really about this. If you do fund public science and do not claim that the results are yours and only yours to use for however many (ever expanding) number of years, I have no problem. Unfortunately, the whole notion of "Intellectual Property" is what makes this thing so screwed up. If none of the science, being information, can be "property" (which is what I claim) then noone can "own" it and I have really no issue with corporate research. Conversely, if one can "own" pieces of scientific data, then corporations are abusing the priviledge of public information to achieve essentially a theft. Your example of an immigrant is a fallacy, since he does not claim the idea of being an immigrant and attempt to charge anyone for the priviledge, regardless if their family trees are only similiar to his. That is what a patent on an idea does.
Yes indeed. This is a classic example of the nature of science. There are many many independent ways people discover things and all of it is based on the paths other people made before for you. The key is free exchange of data. It is unknowable at this point if Barden, Brattain and crew were aware of that data, but I would not be surprised. The whole point is that one cannot "own" science, and any attempts to do so are just another variation on the "Public Funding/Private Profits" theme, so dear to many right-wing activists.
I'll be the first to agree that they all depended on public knowledge to develop their inventions, but I also would point out that all the inventions above really did benefit very substantially from the support of companies that had commercial interest, and that probably none of the inventions above would have seen nearly the development that they did without it.
The point is that corporate science, at least in its recent incarnation, is all about "owning information" instead of taking advantage of discoveries to make new product. All of the people we argue about here, are famous because their discoveries ended up public (as I feel they had to due to the massive dependance on public knowledge). Recently however, it is becoming more and more common for pundits of "Intellectual Property" to claim ownership of bits of science based on source of funding. Let me phrase it this way:
Commercial funding for public science, with commercial engineering benefits? No problem.
Commercial funding for "privately owned" science, whereby royalties are expected from each person who happens to take the same road independently? Fuck off corporate thieves!
I think this should clear things up.
Re:transistor development driven by commerce
on
Antarctic Telescope?
·
· Score: 1
"crystal and cat's whisker"
And only to get it working one had to have radio, based on decades of research of electromagnetism, in turn based on reseach of electricity, based on research of physics... etc etc etc.
Re:transistor development driven by commerce
on
Antarctic Telescope?
·
· Score: 1
it's hard to say that commerce doesn't (or shouldn't) play a role.
It is not a question of commerce playing a role or not. Commerce can provide funds for science, as it has many times in the past. What cannot co-exist with science is the corporatism and "Intellectual Property" crap that has been foisted on us for the last century. We are talking two different phenomena here. One where some commercially minded people fund science (like astronomy/navigation deal) but that science is done by academics and publicly available, process itself is open to peer review etc. On the other hand (and this is what gets my goat) is the "Its all mine!" type of jerkiness whereby some poeople attempt to take advantage of public knowledge and then block roads to some discoveries with signs marked "I got here first, fuck off suckers for 20 years".
I also object to the idea of being able to develop things meaningfully without prior public science and your idea of private labs being "enlightened" is laughable. They inevietably must leak all their basic science out because the process of developing it depended on peer-review and contacts throughout scientific world. That is how they become "enlightened", the cat is out of the bag for years before the "discovery". Yet the trend is that more and more of them in spite of it attempt to patent/copyright the crap out of the research. This brave new world of greed and all of the science being someone's property is really irking me.
eveloping a range of revolutionary technologies from telephone switches to specialized coverings for telephone cables, to the transistor
Which is a bunch of hooya. If it were so, the transistor would be under patents till probably now (and subsequently half of the electronics/computer revolution) would be yet to come. Alas, transistor, was developed by academics John Bardeen (Princeton University), Walter Brattain (University of Oregon) with the help of William B. Shockley (MIT) (partially funded by AT&T but based on research of many, many people in academia, like Professor J.H. Van Vleck for example). AT&T tried to become the sole owner of the device, alas was apparently forced to licence it to anyone at $25k a pop, mainly due to the fact that the development was based on major academic input and substantial government funding.
None of these people could develop a fly-swatter, were it not for all the science that was made available to them by these academic institutions. If anything, this is an example of typical corporate power grab, whereby something they have only marginal imput in, is then with much yelling and screaming announced as "Ours!", "We did it!" etc. Followed by attempts at pissing on the subject at hand to mark corporate "ownership" very much the same way as dogs do.
I will not dwelve in taking apart "AT&T's" other discoveries one by one, suffice to say that all of them were made by academics, based on public academic research, academics whose personal greed made them hire themselves to the corporation and yet who were utterly dependant on free public knowledge. My personal opinion is that if this were to be truly attributed to "AT&T" they should have founded 100% all of the education in the world since its inception, to be able to claim any discovery as theirs. Hiring some scientists so that they can read public academic journals and then based on that develop something is merely a form of robbery from the public purse.
I remember reading some paper from fundamental quantum mechanics whose author thanked US Navy for funding
That is merely public (military) or private funding for public academia (which I have no problem with as long as the results do not become someone's "private property"). What he was talking about is corporate, for profit research, where the results are the property of the corporation (otherwise there is little point to this from commercial perspective other then maybe good PR).
GFCI is a mere device constructed out of existing electronic components, bringing no new scientific discoveries at all. It is merely an example of clever engineering, something commerce indeed can excel at.
Oh, hey, what about that computer you typed your comment on? Did any corporate-funded research went into that?
Here we go again. The PC is en exaple of engineering application of science, such as that of solid state physics, mathematics, binary logic, data structures, algorithms, etc. A clever use of public academic knowledge.
Pick any. They all are based on scientific process. We are talking science here, no? And a fundamental property of scientific process is free exchange of ideas. Peer-review being only a small part of it. No scientist in the world, at any time, is capable of functioning in a vacuum. All profound discoveries made by famous men and women are mere tips of mountains of thought that were built by other free thinkers who went before them. In essence, commerce is an anathema of science because of this simple fact: in commerce, secrecy is paramount in order to prevent competition from benefiting from research in progress. This puts any commercial "research" at a fatal disadvantage, cutting it of from the very bloodstream of science: the free exchange of ideas. That is how I can say with certainty that all profound discoveries were based on public (as in accessible to other scientists for review and discussion) research.
This article is presented by a someone who has an idea about how to get excellent results for a fraction of the cost of Hubble or a successor.
Being a self-professed expert on corporate-funded research you should also be aware that old-folks homes are littered with people who lost all their money taking this sort of self-aggrandisig press-release cum "article" seriously. Corporate "research" is riddled with con-artists, greedy half-wits and outright lunatics who were laughed out of any peer-reviewed scientific arena. It is also, rarely, capable of producing some useful rip-off or elaboration on some academia-based discovery. What corporate "research" is very good at on the other hand, is taking credit for things (so that the owners/investors can look good and have basis for various legal wranglings), making wild announcements in the press aimed at luring venture capital and last, but not least, providing "scientific" justification for various rape-and-pillage type schemes in which various industries engage periodically.
I dare you to name any profound, completely corporately-funded discovery, which was not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research in public academia.
What next - they buy Sun to be number 1 again, and then layoff everyone and kill the product lines to become number 2 again the next quarter
I am afraid you do not realize what is going on. This is all about Carly's ego. The entire operation, all of the decisions and everything that has happened can be explained by this. Just look at the recent overtures to the movie and music industry. The woman wants to deal hereself into Hollywood. So HP does all these insane things, purpose of which is to keep Carly on front pages of papers, showing off her latest outfit and hairdo, and of course later someone has to pay for it. On rolls the pink-slip machine. The HP/Compaq monster is a walking dead at this point, although I am sure Calry and crew will manage to jump off onto some other healthy host just before the corpse falls over.
it was a win-modem/sound combo, so neither one worked.
My understanding of MWave was that it was supposed to be a DSP co-processor capable of doing various signal-processing functions (such as sound or modulation/demodulation of V90 signals). Similiar idea to that of a 3D accellerator, as opposed to a WinModem. Unfortunately, in practice, any advantages of the microcode runing on the chip were utterly erased by the abysmal OS integration drivers, making the thing a step backward instead of forward.
Maybe finally someone will make an IM client that can actually transfer files behind a nat box without this bullshit port forwarding. ..
Yea! And then we will only need to make sure that it can connect over HTTP proxy servers and pretend to be a web-browser. That way the IT people cant filter for it. Yea! We will p0wn all those corporate PCs! Yea! Nothing like a music sharing app to get all those dumbasses in marketing to install it. Cool idea!
what i meant is that if you have the key (dvd player) and the lock (dvd media), where is the security?
Is that what you mean by alice and neo?
Yes, that is the essence of it, although I was focusing on the cryptographical aspects of that silliness. But you are right of course, no matter what analogy one uses, the whole scheme is still crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure one could create some small applets which after being carefully optimized would run well but jEdit and jDiskReport are nowhere near anything like SQL Database Administration tools and Enterpise Online Banking applications. And that is what I deal with daily. And at those levels of complexity, frankly, Java sucks donkey balls.
Oh and even jEdit and jDiskReport requre the monstrous ~64MB per instance memory footprint on a Win2K Terminal Services machine for example (thats what Java VM does). You run 10 of these (in 10 user sessions) and it takes more memory then 10 instances of Outlook (they share the DLL's) and this is indeed nothing to brag about.
Like any community we get all kinds. There are those who do as you say. But there are also those who care for non-programmers and try to accommodate them. It all depends. In the case of a hard-core problem like speech recognition/synthesis (which is nowhere near acceptable level of scientific understanding) you are likely to get more of the "go code it yourself" kind because this area is prone to be inhabited by people who are arrogant "know-it-alls" but also unable to do anything about it. On the other hand, sometimes the questions asked by the "non-programmers" are also arrogant and of "Gimme now! Free! Now! Or I will hold my breath!" variety of attitude, which will be dealt with accordingly.
I am with you, brother. I think "Waiting For Something To Happen" is the Java motto. In my long experience with oodles of java (cr)apps which the Banks, IBM and various other "fad-of-the-week" pointy hair boss infected places make us use, I did not see a single, I repeat, single Java app that had interactivity even remotely approaching that of any other language.
For Pete's sake, we have VB apps that smoke Java any minute! I mean that must be some kind of a truly cosmic insult.
True, instead there are a thousand "super-efficient" .jar libraries required by a "Hello World" app, which use the "Object Oriented Programing and Long Lasting Cure All and Testicular Itch Relief Paradigm(tm)" to such extremes that it takes 12 objects instantiated in 4 containers to flip a bit in a byte. Additionally, there is the substitution of native performance of compiled code to code compiled "Just Too Late" combined with exceptional memory usage that entails. If it were not enough, as a bonus, we get the garbage collector which is scientifically fine-tuned to run just when user is expected to interact with the application in most time sensitive manner. As an icing on the cake we also are treated to multiple, insideously incompatible with each other, versions of the so-called "universal" VM, resulting in one app demanding that SunVM is used and the other that MS VM is used thus resulting in total impossibility of using both at the same time. Yes I do speak from looong and utterly infuriorating experience with Java apps.
At one point I considered printing a sign warning of Java advocates being shot on sight, I could probably make some serious money selling it, given similiar amount of grief my other colleagues are going through.
Ahem, and yes, the greatest offenders in me experience are... err... frigging IBM Java apps. We actually abandoned DB2 8.x release because noone could deal with the havoc the DB2 admin tools were causing with various other retarded banking related Java apps.
Setting aside the discussion of usefulness of such censorship (a kite+camera, etc), the problem is that the ever greedy for power securocracy uses the excuse of nuclear power plant to classify all pictures. Because they might contain something secret. They will decide what that is but wont tell you. This is a classic cop-out of a tyrannical police-state aparatus.
There is a loooong way from the defense systems of a presidential jet to pictures of your neighbourhood. FOIA was made so that the natural lust every securocracy on the planet has, a self-important desire to expand control and power until it turns into a clone of Gestapo, is kept in check. After 9-11 all of these balances seem to have been removed wholesale. Call me paranoid but I do foresee serious trouble ahead, one could argue a threat far more serious then what Al-Queida could have managed by itself.
You must be kidding. Banks cheat, make errors and generaly try to steal from the customers at every opportunity with "transaction fees", mysterious interest rate changes etc. No. I dont trust the bank with my money. Similiarly, no governmental body can be trusted and has to be constantly monitored. That is why very wise men came up with the "separation of powers" and "oversight" ideas. Apparently though, their wisdom is becoming more and more fit for the "pearls before swine" addage.
That is part of the "quality" of the product.
What the original poster was trying to say is that products in a certain class all performed their jobs at a similar level of quality.
No. What he was referring to is that the only way to extract high profits from a product, regardless of its manufacturing quality (design included), performance and usefulnes is to market a "lifestyle" together with it, which is what the grand-parent of this thread described. Next time, try to be less ignorant and read the whole discussion.
Correction: manufactured goods are of varying value, in proportion to their quality and usefulnes. Image is the only thing of exorbitant price as it is the only thing proven to reliably appeal to vain idiots. The fact that Western economies are increasingly relying on "image" and "cool factor" is as telling sign of decay as a stench of rot would be on a corpse.
Price does not equal value.
In the US thats called being born poor and having a serious illness. Or having an accident and surgeries, cost of which exceed your insurance coverage. Or being an owner of a business which failed due to frivolous lawsuits. Or being a victim of identity theft. Or... you know, you are a typical right-wing drooling imbecile. Since you have a good credit, that naturally means that all those who do not are immature vermin punished by the divine, crackheads, communists etc...
That is precsiely that sort of dickheaded attitude being so popular that makes USA such a scary fucking place.
This discussion wasn't about quantum mechanics but about corporations funding bits of research and then claiming it as their "property", copyrighting public data so that one has to pay perpetual rent on it and in general thieving and profiteering in countless ways at the expense of general public. You know: public resources for private profit. "Intellectual Property". Righteous "self-made" men claiming spoils of war. Stolen fair and square.
The difference is that unlike all who went before, corporations claim ownership of the ideas. This entire conversation is really about this. If you do fund public science and do not claim that the results are yours and only yours to use for however many (ever expanding) number of years, I have no problem. Unfortunately, the whole notion of "Intellectual Property" is what makes this thing so screwed up. If none of the science, being information, can be "property" (which is what I claim) then noone can "own" it and I have really no issue with corporate research. Conversely, if one can "own" pieces of scientific data, then corporations are abusing the priviledge of public information to achieve essentially a theft. Your example of an immigrant is a fallacy, since he does not claim the idea of being an immigrant and attempt to charge anyone for the priviledge, regardless if their family trees are only similiar to his. That is what a patent on an idea does.
Yes indeed. This is a classic example of the nature of science. There are many many independent ways people discover things and all of it is based on the paths other people made before for you. The key is free exchange of data. It is unknowable at this point if Barden, Brattain and crew were aware of that data, but I would not be surprised. The whole point is that one cannot "own" science, and any attempts to do so are just another variation on the "Public Funding/Private Profits" theme, so dear to many right-wing activists.
The point is that corporate science, at least in its recent incarnation, is all about "owning information" instead of taking advantage of discoveries to make new product. All of the people we argue about here, are famous because their discoveries ended up public (as I feel they had to due to the massive dependance on public knowledge). Recently however, it is becoming more and more common for pundits of "Intellectual Property" to claim ownership of bits of science based on source of funding. Let me phrase it this way:
Commercial funding for public science, with commercial engineering benefits? No problem.
Commercial funding for "privately owned" science, whereby royalties are expected from each person who happens to take the same road independently? Fuck off corporate thieves!
I think this should clear things up.
And only to get it working one had to have radio, based on decades of research of electromagnetism, in turn based on reseach of electricity, based on research of physics... etc etc etc.
It is not a question of commerce playing a role or not. Commerce can provide funds for science, as it has many times in the past. What cannot co-exist with science is the corporatism and "Intellectual Property" crap that has been foisted on us for the last century. We are talking two different phenomena here. One where some commercially minded people fund science (like astronomy/navigation deal) but that science is done by academics and publicly available, process itself is open to peer review etc. On the other hand (and this is what gets my goat) is the "Its all mine!" type of jerkiness whereby some poeople attempt to take advantage of public knowledge and then block roads to some discoveries with signs marked "I got here first, fuck off suckers for 20 years".
I also object to the idea of being able to develop things meaningfully without prior public science and your idea of private labs being "enlightened" is laughable. They inevietably must leak all their basic science out because the process of developing it depended on peer-review and contacts throughout scientific world. That is how they become "enlightened", the cat is out of the bag for years before the "discovery". Yet the trend is that more and more of them in spite of it attempt to patent/copyright the crap out of the research. This brave new world of greed and all of the science being someone's property is really irking me.
Which is a bunch of hooya. If it were so, the transistor would be under patents till probably now (and subsequently half of the electronics/computer revolution) would be yet to come. Alas, transistor, was developed by academics John Bardeen (Princeton University), Walter Brattain (University of Oregon) with the help of William B. Shockley (MIT) (partially funded by AT&T but based on research of many, many people in academia, like Professor J.H. Van Vleck for example). AT&T tried to become the sole owner of the device, alas was apparently forced to licence it to anyone at $25k a pop, mainly due to the fact that the development was based on major academic input and substantial government funding.
None of these people could develop a fly-swatter, were it not for all the science that was made available to them by these academic institutions. If anything, this is an example of typical corporate power grab, whereby something they have only marginal imput in, is then with much yelling and screaming announced as "Ours!", "We did it!" etc. Followed by attempts at pissing on the subject at hand to mark corporate "ownership" very much the same way as dogs do.
I will not dwelve in taking apart "AT&T's" other discoveries one by one, suffice to say that all of them were made by academics, based on public academic research, academics whose personal greed made them hire themselves to the corporation and yet who were utterly dependant on free public knowledge. My personal opinion is that if this were to be truly attributed to "AT&T" they should have founded 100% all of the education in the world since its inception, to be able to claim any discovery as theirs. Hiring some scientists so that they can read public academic journals and then based on that develop something is merely a form of robbery from the public purse.
That is merely public (military) or private funding for public academia (which I have no problem with as long as the results do not become someone's "private property"). What he was talking about is corporate, for profit research, where the results are the property of the corporation (otherwise there is little point to this from commercial perspective other then maybe good PR).
GFCI is a mere device constructed out of existing electronic components, bringing no new scientific discoveries at all. It is merely an example of clever engineering, something commerce indeed can excel at.
Oh, hey, what about that computer you typed your comment on? Did any corporate-funded research went into that?
Here we go again. The PC is en exaple of engineering application of science, such as that of solid state physics, mathematics, binary logic, data structures, algorithms, etc. A clever use of public academic knowledge.
Pick any. They all are based on scientific process. We are talking science here, no? And a fundamental property of scientific process is free exchange of ideas. Peer-review being only a small part of it. No scientist in the world, at any time, is capable of functioning in a vacuum. All profound discoveries made by famous men and women are mere tips of mountains of thought that were built by other free thinkers who went before them. In essence, commerce is an anathema of science because of this simple fact: in commerce, secrecy is paramount in order to prevent competition from benefiting from research in progress. This puts any commercial "research" at a fatal disadvantage, cutting it of from the very bloodstream of science: the free exchange of ideas. That is how I can say with certainty that all profound discoveries were based on public (as in accessible to other scientists for review and discussion) research.
Being a self-professed expert on corporate-funded research you should also be aware that old-folks homes are littered with people who lost all their money taking this sort of self-aggrandisig press-release cum "article" seriously. Corporate "research" is riddled with con-artists, greedy half-wits and outright lunatics who were laughed out of any peer-reviewed scientific arena. It is also, rarely, capable of producing some useful rip-off or elaboration on some academia-based discovery. What corporate "research" is very good at on the other hand, is taking credit for things (so that the owners/investors can look good and have basis for various legal wranglings), making wild announcements in the press aimed at luring venture capital and last, but not least, providing "scientific" justification for various rape-and-pillage type schemes in which various industries engage periodically.
I dare you to name any profound, completely corporately-funded discovery, which was not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research in public academia.
I am afraid you do not realize what is going on. This is all about Carly's ego. The entire operation, all of the decisions and everything that has happened can be explained by this. Just look at the recent overtures to the movie and music industry. The woman wants to deal hereself into Hollywood. So HP does all these insane things, purpose of which is to keep Carly on front pages of papers, showing off her latest outfit and hairdo, and of course later someone has to pay for it. On rolls the pink-slip machine. The HP/Compaq monster is a walking dead at this point, although I am sure Calry and crew will manage to jump off onto some other healthy host just before the corpse falls over.
My understanding of MWave was that it was supposed to be a DSP co-processor capable of doing various signal-processing functions (such as sound or modulation/demodulation of V90 signals). Similiar idea to that of a 3D accellerator, as opposed to a WinModem. Unfortunately, in practice, any advantages of the microcode runing on the chip were utterly erased by the abysmal OS integration drivers, making the thing a step backward instead of forward.
Yea! And then we will only need to make sure that it can connect over HTTP proxy servers and pretend to be a web-browser. That way the IT people cant filter for it. Yea! We will p0wn all those corporate PCs! Yea! Nothing like a music sharing app to get all those dumbasses in marketing to install it. Cool idea!
Is that what you mean by alice and neo?
Yes, that is the essence of it, although I was focusing on the cryptographical aspects of that silliness. But you are right of course, no matter what analogy one uses, the whole scheme is still crazy.