Currently, the main target uses are electrical. From the article:
"So what do you do with the stuff once you've made it? Antoinette says the sheets would be particularly good for shielding electronic components from electromagnetic interference. He's talked to manufacturers of cell phones and PDAs who are looking at the material as something they could use to build handsets that are less vulnerable to the noise from stray transmissions. It might also make a nice housing for a computer, with aligned nanotubes acting as an antenna for wireless connections and randomly oriented nanotubes protecting the computer from electrical surges, while the material also dissipates heat from the processor."
There used to be a couple of before-after pictures in the physics laboratory at Cambridge of removing blur from a slow-shutter picture of a car going past.
- in the before, the licence plate is blurred out and unreadable - in the after its perfectly readable
They were using fourier analysis to do this. My tutor was doing a phd on this.
I see this argument a lot. Do we even need mailing-lists any more? They were great in the days before forums. Now they just chew up bandwidth, mailstorage space, and make it harder to filter spam.
It is asserted that cells do not die from lack of oxygen, but terminate themselves upon resumption of oxygen, because they have been preprogrammed to do so.
It is proposed to give drugs to prevent apoptosis prior to reviving asphyxiated patients, then resume the oxygen supply. In theory this could allow survival after even several hours of being "dead" from asphyxiation.
The scheduler is reponsible for deciding which programs can use the processor when. So, lets says you're running Word (not likely on linux, for quickest example I could come up with), and Word is for some reason using 100% cpu. Well, depending on how the scheduler works, that is how the cpu is shared between processes, other applications might continue working ok, or might freeze up entirely whilst they wait for Word to finish.
So, the scheduler controls how well different applications work together at the same time.
Threads are incredibly useful, but the issue is not the development itself: its the testing. Creating a new thread, and playing with locks and so on, is pretty easy; but how are you going to guarantee that your application is thoroughly tested? Normal unit tests just dont cut it.
So, you create threading/locking standards for your code, and hope that it works, but you're never really 100% sure.
It's true that must be frustrating. The other side of the coin is the user's machines full of random applets/spyware etc that run slowly, crash frequently, and have non-standard dlls so that their critical business applications stop working.
Ideally it'd be possible to create different profiles, ie standard locked-down user, developer, etc, and some companies do do this. Obviously, there is a cost associated with this.
Well you are right, and I understand what you are saying. For AMD this particular situation, with AMD, you may be right.
I guess in my head I'm imagining: what if there is a market with a monopoly, company BigMonopoly. There's no way anyone can break into that market, because they'd have to start small, so BigMonopoly stays. The only exception to this is that if SmallUnderdog comes along, they could gain a foothold in the market, as long as people are prepared to pay extra for their products.
With increased competition, BigMonopoly will start to reduce its prices, making SmallUnderdog look even worse, but without SmallUnderdog being there, this wouldnt happen. However, the strategy is clear on the part of BigMonopoly: they're trying to drive SmallUnderdog from the market.
The underdog in a market will have higher overheads, less economies of scale. It could be worth paying a slight premium for their products just to keep them in the market?
"m4a = mp4, but not necessarily vice versa. That is because m4a says, "This is an audio mpeg4 file", to you for your sake, not the computers, because the data is the same. You can safely rename m4a files as mp4, and vice versa so long as the mp4 file is an audio-only file.
"aac is an audio file, like an m4a, without the meta-data header. It's basically a nake m4a file. You can't add information into the file like Artist, Album, Track, etc. This was Apple's (rather lame, IMHO) idea."
Note that the only part of a patent with legal standing is the claims section http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aapatent claimsa.htm . The rest of the patent is just blah-blah to help interpret the claims. The claims are generally constructed as a first, most-generic, claim, then specializations of that. If you can demonstrate prior art for the first claim, then the patent pretty much falls apart.
The first claim is:
"1. A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user's predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system."
If you can show prior art within this, and show that Blackboard Inc intentionally didnt declare this within their patent, then you can sue Blackboard for inequitable conduct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequitable_conduct .
Agree with everything said here. I'd mod it up if I could, but it's already +5, and anyway I dont have any mod points;-)
I'd also go a little further in fact. It's not just that frameworks are bad, but small libraries are much better than overly large ones. Things like ode, tinyxml and lua are great because they are small, easy to build and easy to understand. Certain gui libraries, which will remain nameless, are really a pain to build, even if you just want a few UTF8 or file handling utilies!
Energy is the key to the world, since the cost of anything eventually boils down to energy. Want to fly from America to Europe? Gotta pay for the fuel. Want to buy a computer? Gotta pay to transport that computer, have to pay for the energy to mine the raw materials and run the factories.
Energy ultimately determines how much things cost and how easy it is to make things, so the cheaper it is the better.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that we're free to workaround this patent by simply rewriting the html itself with local image urls?
:-/ )
(Ooops, should have patented that last line I guess
Currently, the main target uses are electrical. From the article:
"So what do you do with the stuff once you've made it? Antoinette says the sheets would be particularly good for shielding electronic components from electromagnetic interference. He's talked to manufacturers of cell phones and PDAs who are looking at the material as something they could use to build handsets that are less vulnerable to the noise from stray transmissions. It might also make a nice housing for a computer, with aligned nanotubes acting as an antenna for wireless connections and randomly oriented nanotubes protecting the computer from electrical surges, while the material also dissipates heat from the processor."
Link about the marbles/pegs/bell curve:
http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/cousined/lego/5-Machines/Galton/Galton.html
Ballistic electrons in graphene:
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=2340.php
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=853
That seems excessively difficult. Try this: .length; i++ ) {
dumparray = function( targetarray ) {
var text = "";
for( var i = 0; i < targetarray
for( var x = 0; x < targetarray[i].length; x++ ) {
if( targetarray[i][x] ) {
text += "*";
} else {
text += "-";
}
}
text += "\n";
}
return text;
}
f = function(d) {
var before = dumparray(d);
var newresults = new Array();
for( var i = d.length - 1; i > 0; i-- ) {
var thisrow = d[i];
var prevrow = d[i - 1];
for( var x = 0; x < thisrow.length; x++ ) {
if( prevrow[x] && !thisrow[x] ){
var ok = true;
if( x > 0 ) {
if( prevrow[x-1] ) {
ok = false;
}
}
if( x < thisrow.length - 1 ) {
if( prevrow[x+1] ) {
ok = false;
}
}
if( x > 0 && x < thisrow.length - 1 ) {
if( thisrow[x-1] && thisrow[x+1] ) {
ok = false;
}
}
if( ok ) {
prevrow[x] = false;
thisrow[x] = true;
}
}
}
}
var after = dumparray(d);
alert( before + "\n" + after );
}
There used to be a couple of before-after pictures in the physics laboratory at Cambridge of removing blur from a slow-shutter picture of a car going past.
- in the before, the licence plate is blurred out and unreadable
- in the after its perfectly readable
They were using fourier analysis to do this. My tutor was doing a phd on this.
Use electricity from India?
Well, that's about 100 miles by 100 miles. Smaller than England, to power the entire United States, and no pollution. Not too shabby.
> Err... If I wanted to be paid for it, I wouldn't put it under the CC license in the first place!
Well, she didnt did she? Some random guy photographed her, and put her photo on the internet.
This lawsuit is simply a way to negociate to be paid by Virgin ... which is fair enough.
Imagine your picture was being used in a huge advertising campaign. You'd probably want to be paid for it right?
That's what this is about, and Virgin will most likely agree (who needs negative publicity???)
I am not a lawyer, and nothing here should be seen to constitute legal advice. You use this information at your own risk.
> and kill mailing-lists
I see this argument a lot. Do we even need mailing-lists any more? They were great in the days before forums. Now they just chew up bandwidth, mailstorage space, and make it harder to filter spam.
The primary cause of death in a vacuum is asphyxiation. So, the following article is relevant:
k /
Reviving the dead: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newswee
It is asserted that cells do not die from lack of oxygen, but terminate themselves upon resumption of oxygen, because they have been preprogrammed to do so.
It is proposed to give drugs to prevent apoptosis prior to reviving asphyxiated patients, then resume the oxygen supply. In theory this could allow survival after even several hours of being "dead" from asphyxiation.
The scheduler is reponsible for deciding which programs can use the processor when. So, lets says you're running Word (not likely on linux, for quickest example I could come up with), and Word is for some reason using 100% cpu. Well, depending on how the scheduler works, that is how the cpu is shared between processes, other applications might continue working ok, or might freeze up entirely whilst they wait for Word to finish.
So, the scheduler controls how well different applications work together at the same time.
Threads are incredibly useful, but the issue is not the development itself: its the testing. Creating a new thread, and playing with locks and so on, is pretty easy; but how are you going to guarantee that your application is thoroughly tested? Normal unit tests just dont cut it.
So, you create threading/locking standards for your code, and hope that it works, but you're never really 100% sure.
In a FOSS environment, customization services works.
An avatar that looks like you is only valuable to you, everyone else wants to look like themself.
Windows Scripting Host provides a javascript engine.
It's true that must be frustrating. The other side of the coin is the user's machines full of random applets/spyware etc that run slowly, crash frequently, and have non-standard dlls so that their critical business applications stop working.
Ideally it'd be possible to create different profiles, ie standard locked-down user, developer, etc, and some companies do do this. Obviously, there is a cost associated with this.
Well you are right, and I understand what you are saying. For AMD this particular situation, with AMD, you may be right.
I guess in my head I'm imagining: what if there is a market with a monopoly, company BigMonopoly. There's no way anyone can break into that market, because they'd have to start small, so BigMonopoly stays. The only exception to this is that if SmallUnderdog comes along, they could gain a foothold in the market, as long as people are prepared to pay extra for their products.
With increased competition, BigMonopoly will start to reduce its prices, making SmallUnderdog look even worse, but without SmallUnderdog being there, this wouldnt happen. However, the strategy is clear on the part of BigMonopoly: they're trying to drive SmallUnderdog from the market.
The underdog in a market will have higher overheads, less economies of scale. It could be worth paying a slight premium for their products just to keep them in the market?
For anyone else who is wondering what is aac, it's mp4 audio.
Reference: http://www.analogduck.com/main/m4a
"mp4 can be an audio or video mpeg4 file
"m4a = mp4, but not necessarily vice versa. That is because m4a says, "This is an audio mpeg4 file", to you for your sake, not the computers, because the data is the same. You can safely rename m4a files as mp4, and vice versa so long as the mp4 file is an audio-only file.
"aac is an audio file, like an m4a, without the meta-data header. It's basically a nake m4a file. You can't add information into the file like Artist, Album, Track, etc. This was Apple's (rather lame, IMHO) idea."
Note that the only part of a patent with legal standing is the claims section http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aapatent claimsa.htm . The rest of the patent is just blah-blah to help interpret the claims. The claims are generally constructed as a first, most-generic, claim, then specializations of that. If you can demonstrate prior art for the first claim, then the patent pretty much falls apart.
The first claim is:
"1. A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user's predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system."
If you can show prior art within this, and show that Blackboard Inc intentionally didnt declare this within their patent, then you can sue Blackboard for inequitable conduct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequitable_conduct .
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
What a great idea!
That's all we have to see for twenty years progress?? :-( Man, I was kindof hoping to have inter-stellar space-travel and stuff by now...
Agree with everything said here. I'd mod it up if I could, but it's already +5, and anyway I dont have any mod points ;-)
I'd also go a little further in fact. It's not just that frameworks are bad, but small libraries are much better than overly large ones. Things like ode, tinyxml and lua are great because they are small, easy to build and easy to understand. Certain gui libraries, which will remain nameless, are really a pain to build, even if you just want a few UTF8 or file handling utilies!
Energy is the key to the world, since the cost of anything eventually boils down to energy. Want to fly from America to Europe? Gotta pay for the fuel. Want to buy a computer? Gotta pay to transport that computer, have to pay for the energy to mine the raw materials and run the factories.
Energy ultimately determines how much things cost and how easy it is to make things, so the cheaper it is the better.