I am sure that you realize this but it's worth saying (again) for those that don't. Anitbiotics won't directly anything to stop flu. Flu is a virus and therefore not harmed by anitbiotics which stop bacteria. Broad spectrum antibiotics are sometimes given to people that are very ill with a viral infection in order to combact secondary infections that come about due to the patient having a weakend immune system. As a general rule, however, taking antibiotics for a viral infection is just plain stupid. Worse though, it weakens the effectiveness of antibiotics for people that really do need them by introducing bacteria to the antibiotic and risking the development of a resistant strain. Many of our best antibiotics are losing their effectiveness due to over prescription by doctors who want to hand out what are essentially placebos to people with a cold.
Please can we stop with this panicing about everying. It seems that there isn't a week that goes by with out something new that is going to kill us and million of other people. I gave up TV and news papers a long time ago because of this. I'm shocked everytime I go and stay with someone that partake of mass media (has a TV) just how much complete and utter scare-mongering crap is on. Yes there probably will be a flu pandemic. So what? It's not like we can do much about it. We might be able to make an antiviral after it's appeared in time to say a lot of people in the west. Do you really think the drug will make it to the third world though where the virus will hit hardest? Any way what I want to know is...
Perhaps the big players should try and coincide a wide spread roll out of fibre with a general aboption of IPv6. That way we could get all the pain and expense over and done with in one hit. Mmmmmmh huge untypeable IP addresses - just what I've always wanted.
Simply yes. You didn't invent the inhibitor you came up with the idea that there might be an inhibitor - that's fundamentally different. I'm not saying that your study was worthless, far from it, but just because you came up with the idea doesn't mean you inverted the inhibitor.
The patent process is in place to protect those that spent the money investigating a problem and coming up with a solution. The company that spent the 200 million coming up with the inhibitor deserves to get the bulk of hte finantial reward because they were the ones who took the biggest risk.
The way the patent system rewards people / companes at the moment is pretty poor really. Very few intentions are made in complete isolation there should be some way of dividing up the money amongst the contributors. That would reward people such as the small company in your post who do some of the ground work but can't afford to go the whole distance. The problem is where does that end. It's a judgement call regarding who really contributed and who didn't. It would probably end up in court which is the last thing anybody needs.
AIUI in the states at least you don't have to actually have built the deveice that you patent or even know how to built it. You just have to show that it is reasonable that it could feasibly be built.
Personally I think that is totally wrong. Nobody should be able to petent something they can't build. Fair enough people can come up with ideas for deveices we could build in the future but if they can't build them, to my mind, they didn't invent them. Having said that by letting people patent ideas rather than inventions it means quite a few patents have expired before we can ever build the device which as good as nullifies the patent.
It's interesting that the best he can come up with is that open source breaks applications and isn't innovative. I admit that OSS isn't (generally) very innovative but then nor are a lot of companies. Yes there are some that lavish money on research but most pretty much just copy what their competitor is doing. More to the point though OSS just doesn't have the budget or man power to do a lot of research. It's a fundamentally different approach to software developemnt than the way it works in a company. I think in the long run the companies that succeed will be the ones that do research to keep ahead of the OSS crowd who will always create a free offering of any popular piece of software (e.g. an operating system, an office suite, image editing etc etc).
As for OSS breaking other software all I can say is that the other software must be very poor written if it can be broken so easily. Yes the OSS piece might be a heap of steaming feces but serious breakage in another piece of software is the fault of that other piece of software. At best it's the fault of the tester for not picking up the bug before it went out the door. At the end of the day he doesn't have to use any OSS so if he considers it a risk. The guys an idiot clutching at straws trying to do what his master tells him.
Hmmm. From the description this sounds like the taper-resistance:o) that was included in the original xbox. Is using OSS biggest enemy to bash the much loved Apple morally abhorrent? Even if the bashing is being given to stop DRM? Tough one.
The problem is drawing the fine line between creating a police state and failing completely to be vigilant. As usual the people find it difficult to decide what they want. On the one hand they want to be safe and not get blown to bits on the other hand they don't want to be stopped, questioned, searched and spied on. It's a perfectly understandable, if somewhat contradictory, position to hold.
Personally I think there is an argument for intercepting / reading unencrypted email. Unencrypted email is the equivalent of shouting to someone across the street or writting a postcard. I don't think anyone would find it strange if a postman read the odd postcard even if they would, perhaps, find it slightly objectionable. Just like they wouldn't expect everyone in the street to block their ears while they shouted to their friend.
Encrypted email, however, is more like a letter in an envelope or a conversation in a closed room. I think most people would be pretty annoyed if the postman opened and read that (the postmen round here do it all the time. grrrr) or they found a bug in the room.
The only thing that doesn't fit into this view is telephone calls. Telephone calls are a communication across a public network that is unencrypted but also requires, well it did anyway, a court order to intercept. I think it's fair to leave this one as a special case for now.
Refuse to buy tunes from the stores until they remove the DRM. I can sort of just about maybe understand (if I get drunk and look at it reflected in a wobbly mirror) some of the DRM technology being put on CDs. I can't understand why anyone in their right mind would buy a track from iTunes et al. It's like buying a CD and saying I'm only ever going to use it on these 4 machines. Worse than that you have to buy the machine from the same company you got the track from. People must have more money than sense.
If I had to pick an area where I could make mega-bucks for moderate investment I would choose content. Once you've created it it's yours for ever (or good as) and you can just keep making money from it. Trouble is that it's a hard market to get into. The likes of Sony and Disney aren't going to want M$ taking a slice of their cash and will batter M$ 6 ways from sunday if they try. Right now, while Sony is really hurting, is probably about the only chance M$ have of getting into the market. I don't hold out much hope for them though.
Nice interpretation of copyright law. If it's all the same I'll wait for someone else to test that interpretation first though. I somehow think that you might find not everyone agrees with you.
IANAL either but I am pretty sure using a machine such as this way to create a work doesn't cause it to fall outside of copyright law. I suppose you could argue that it is similar to a random text generator but that's pushing it a bit.
It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk
This is a seriously ambiguous line. Is he saying that the business is at risk or that the business of being fundamentally a software development company is at risk. I assume he has got to be saying the first because moving into the Google services space is a fundamental shift in the way M$ works. I have wondered from time to time why M$ have decided to go down the services + content route when their core business and money making comes from software development. They could own the software development world but are instead going head to head with massive companies in the content and service space. Odd. Here's to hoping they contiune.
I'm a UK'ian so I'm familiar with OS maps. I don't necessarly think we need OS levels of detail right now opened up to the general masses (although it would be nice). For now google earth levels of detail would provide some pretty nice features. Who knows what people would be able to layer over the top of those maps if they didn't cost a small forture to buy. It's all about innovation and market entry. For a small one off tax spread across the earth we could potentially create the next big mapping innovation. Maybe it wouldn't create anything new but even so it cost very little to do.
I see why we have got to this position I just think the long term benifits of making this information public domain far out weighs the short term benifits of having it controlled by commercial ventures. It's only a matter of time before a truely free version becomes available anyway I think. I don't know what it is like in the states but over here maps have all but been controlled by HMSO forever. We are just starting to see the first maps that aren't controlled by them appearing. A good thing I think.
we can get Government funded missions to map and photograph other planets that place the results in the public domain but we can't get Government funded missions to map and photograph our own planet which put the results in the public domain? It occurs to me that the latter would not only be substantially cheaper to do but also far more useful to the general populous. A multi-national effort to provide such mapping would cost each country peanuts and would provide numerous benifits.
I accept your argument that the final goal of the space program is to get us established somewhere other than Earth but that is hundreds of years away at best. Now I'm not saying that's a reason not to research it I saying that is a reason not to put huge quantities of money into it right now. We could establish a manned station on the moon and mars with current technology but it wouldn't be self sufficient and therefore not really met the goal of getting us off this rock. Even if we could make it self sufficient it would be an awful place to live. There is no way you could live long term on the moon as the gravity is to weak. Living on Mars would be like living in the winter of the actic circle all the time just without the bugs. To really get off this rock we would need to find another planet that can support life without the need for domes and air generators. Those planets are minimum 4 light years away. That's the sort fo distance that we can't even contemplate. We are like Da Vinci contemplating heavier than air flight. Our technology just doesn't allow us to get to other planets yet just like his didn't allow hime to build a wing. He was bright enough to realise that he couldn't build a plane so worked on things he could build.
! That's two well written, well thought out, sensible posts I have read in one discussion. I must have mistyped slashdot.org.
Seriously though, that was a quality post. I was nice to hear from soneone who campains for the preservation birds also take a wider world view and realize that we, as a people, need to do something about the energy problems we are facing.
It's a real shame that so many people who campain to better one aspect of the world are totally blinkered to every other issue and unable to prioritize. They just come across as crackpots and get ignored.
On our forum Gathering or Tweakers the first photograph of AMD's Socket f has emerged. In May we wrote all that AMD new processorsocket on its roadmap had put. The new voetstuk 1207 connection points would count and is intended for multi-Opteron-servers.
That's like me saying "I created a program on my computer, can someone offer me support without seeing the code or knowing much about it?"
Actually I think it's more like buying a car, modding it to hell and back, and then expecting the local garage to do a full service for the same amount. You would have to be a complete loon to think they wouldn't charge you more. This M$ guy has stated the obvious and made it sound like a bad thing.
I agree but I have to also ask what is the point of the whole space program? It's hard to really point at anything that is a direct result of research done in space. I know that the microprocessor got a good leg up from the space program but it could easily be argued that it would have happened about then any way. Yes the space program gave us Teflon. Wait a minute is that it. Just Teflon! How many billions has the space program cost? The problem is the advances they came up with are almost always self serving - which makes sense. In the recent past, however, it doesn't seem to have made any advances. Personally I think that's because risk has become a dirty word so we have to use only tried and trusted technology.
I love space research, have done ever since I was a kid, but this current obsession with flexing the scientific muscle and shooting people into space is just a huge waste of money. I don't see how people are going to do any research that couldn't be done by a machine.
Is there a technolgical reason why multiple GPUs can't be put on a card? I freely admit I know very little about graphics cards but it seems like it might be a cheap way to make a very powerful card. I seem to remember there was a card with two processors on that failed dismally because basically twice the price. What about a card with 4 or 8 cheap processors? Ok the power consumption would be silly but as long as it could be throttled so that when not playing a game only 1 GPU was used it might work. Just thought I'd share that with you all:o)
There's a dead body on the ground. The suspect is being walked towards a police van between two touch looking cops. His last words before they slam the door on the rest of his life...
but I have a sneaky feeling he's selling us vapourware. What's the bet that when he reveals this to the world there will be one or two little problems still to solve that he will claim need a couple of million and a year or so to fix. After 10 years and 10's of millions they will be deemed impossible. Why do investors keep falling for these crack pots?
Yes it is a constantly moving target but this rating isn't designed to catch the bledding edge people. This rating is design to appeal to people that buy a machine every two or three years. People like parents of little Jonny who don't know much about computers.
The people who want cutting edge can go and pay for it but howmany games get released that _must_ be played on cutting edge hardware. Not many if any. Most will play well on a machine that is a year old and pretty well on a machine that is 2 or even 3 years old. I only just gave up my Athlon 800 as a games machine!
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure that you realize this but it's worth saying (again) for those that don't. Anitbiotics won't directly anything to stop flu. Flu is a virus and therefore not harmed by anitbiotics which stop bacteria. Broad spectrum antibiotics are sometimes given to people that are very ill with a viral infection in order to combact secondary infections that come about due to the patient having a weakend immune system. As a general rule, however, taking antibiotics for a viral infection is just plain stupid. Worse though, it weakens the effectiveness of antibiotics for people that really do need them by introducing bacteria to the antibiotic and risking the development of a resistant strain. Many of our best antibiotics are losing their effectiveness due to over prescription by doctors who want to hand out what are essentially placebos to people with a cold.
Please can we stop with this panicing about everying. It seems that there isn't a week that goes by with out something new that is going to kill us and million of other people. I gave up TV and news papers a long time ago because of this. I'm shocked everytime I go and stay with someone that partake of mass media (has a TV) just how much complete and utter scare-mongering crap is on. Yes there probably will be a flu pandemic. So what? It's not like we can do much about it. We might be able to make an antiviral after it's appeared in time to say a lot of people in the west. Do you really think the drug will make it to the third world though where the virus will hit hardest? Any way what I want to know is...
Perhaps the big players should try and coincide a wide spread roll out of fibre with a general aboption of IPv6. That way we could get all the pain and expense over and done with in one hit. Mmmmmmh huge untypeable IP addresses - just what I've always wanted.
Simply yes. You didn't invent the inhibitor you came up with the idea that there might be an inhibitor - that's fundamentally different. I'm not saying that your study was worthless, far from it, but just because you came up with the idea doesn't mean you inverted the inhibitor.
The patent process is in place to protect those that spent the money investigating a problem and coming up with a solution. The company that spent the 200 million coming up with the inhibitor deserves to get the bulk of hte finantial reward because they were the ones who took the biggest risk.
The way the patent system rewards people / companes at the moment is pretty poor really. Very few intentions are made in complete isolation there should be some way of dividing up the money amongst the contributors. That would reward people such as the small company in your post who do some of the ground work but can't afford to go the whole distance. The problem is where does that end. It's a judgement call regarding who really contributed and who didn't. It would probably end up in court which is the last thing anybody needs.
AIUI in the states at least you don't have to actually have built the deveice that you patent or even know how to built it. You just have to show that it is reasonable that it could feasibly be built.
Personally I think that is totally wrong. Nobody should be able to petent something they can't build. Fair enough people can come up with ideas for deveices we could build in the future but if they can't build them, to my mind, they didn't invent them. Having said that by letting people patent ideas rather than inventions it means quite a few patents have expired before we can ever build the device which as good as nullifies the patent.
It's interesting that the best he can come up with is that open source breaks applications and isn't innovative. I admit that OSS isn't (generally) very innovative but then nor are a lot of companies. Yes there are some that lavish money on research but most pretty much just copy what their competitor is doing. More to the point though OSS just doesn't have the budget or man power to do a lot of research. It's a fundamentally different approach to software developemnt than the way it works in a company. I think in the long run the companies that succeed will be the ones that do research to keep ahead of the OSS crowd who will always create a free offering of any popular piece of software (e.g. an operating system, an office suite, image editing etc etc).
As for OSS breaking other software all I can say is that the other software must be very poor written if it can be broken so easily. Yes the OSS piece might be a heap of steaming feces but serious breakage in another piece of software is the fault of that other piece of software. At best it's the fault of the tester for not picking up the bug before it went out the door. At the end of the day he doesn't have to use any OSS so if he considers it a risk. The guys an idiot clutching at straws trying to do what his master tells him.
Hmmm. From the description this sounds like the taper-resistance :o) that was included in the original xbox. Is using OSS biggest enemy to bash the much loved Apple morally abhorrent? Even if the bashing is being given to stop DRM? Tough one.
The problem is drawing the fine line between creating a police state and failing completely to be vigilant. As usual the people find it difficult to decide what they want. On the one hand they want to be safe and not get blown to bits on the other hand they don't want to be stopped, questioned, searched and spied on. It's a perfectly understandable, if somewhat contradictory, position to hold.
Personally I think there is an argument for intercepting / reading unencrypted email. Unencrypted email is the equivalent of shouting to someone across the street or writting a postcard. I don't think anyone would find it strange if a postman read the odd postcard even if they would, perhaps, find it slightly objectionable. Just like they wouldn't expect everyone in the street to block their ears while they shouted to their friend.
Encrypted email, however, is more like a letter in an envelope or a conversation in a closed room. I think most people would be pretty annoyed if the postman opened and read that (the postmen round here do it all the time. grrrr) or they found a bug in the room.
The only thing that doesn't fit into this view is telephone calls. Telephone calls are a communication across a public network that is unencrypted but also requires, well it did anyway, a court order to intercept. I think it's fair to leave this one as a special case for now.
Refuse to buy tunes from the stores until they remove the DRM. I can sort of just about maybe understand (if I get drunk and look at it reflected in a wobbly mirror) some of the DRM technology being put on CDs. I can't understand why anyone in their right mind would buy a track from iTunes et al. It's like buying a CD and saying I'm only ever going to use it on these 4 machines. Worse than that you have to buy the machine from the same company you got the track from. People must have more money than sense.
If I had to pick an area where I could make mega-bucks for moderate investment I would choose content. Once you've created it it's yours for ever (or good as) and you can just keep making money from it. Trouble is that it's a hard market to get into. The likes of Sony and Disney aren't going to want M$ taking a slice of their cash and will batter M$ 6 ways from sunday if they try. Right now, while Sony is really hurting, is probably about the only chance M$ have of getting into the market. I don't hold out much hope for them though.
Nice interpretation of copyright law. If it's all the same I'll wait for someone else to test that interpretation first though. I somehow think that you might find not everyone agrees with you.
IANAL either but I am pretty sure using a machine such as this way to create a work doesn't cause it to fall outside of copyright law. I suppose you could argue that it is similar to a random text generator but that's pushing it a bit.
It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk
This is a seriously ambiguous line. Is he saying that the business is at risk or that the business of being fundamentally a software development company is at risk. I assume he has got to be saying the first because moving into the Google services space is a fundamental shift in the way M$ works. I have wondered from time to time why M$ have decided to go down the services + content route when their core business and money making comes from software development. They could own the software development world but are instead going head to head with massive companies in the content and service space. Odd. Here's to hoping they contiune.
I'm a UK'ian so I'm familiar with OS maps. I don't necessarly think we need OS levels of detail right now opened up to the general masses (although it would be nice). For now google earth levels of detail would provide some pretty nice features. Who knows what people would be able to layer over the top of those maps if they didn't cost a small forture to buy. It's all about innovation and market entry. For a small one off tax spread across the earth we could potentially create the next big mapping innovation. Maybe it wouldn't create anything new but even so it cost very little to do.
I see why we have got to this position I just think the long term benifits of making this information public domain far out weighs the short term benifits of having it controlled by commercial ventures. It's only a matter of time before a truely free version becomes available anyway I think. I don't know what it is like in the states but over here maps have all but been controlled by HMSO forever. We are just starting to see the first maps that aren't controlled by them appearing. A good thing I think.
we can get Government funded missions to map and photograph other planets that place the results in the public domain but we can't get Government funded missions to map and photograph our own planet which put the results in the public domain? It occurs to me that the latter would not only be substantially cheaper to do but also far more useful to the general populous. A multi-national effort to provide such mapping would cost each country peanuts and would provide numerous benifits.
...should be enough to anybody!
I accept your argument that the final goal of the space program is to get us established somewhere other than Earth but that is hundreds of years away at best. Now I'm not saying that's a reason not to research it I saying that is a reason not to put huge quantities of money into it right now. We could establish a manned station on the moon and mars with current technology but it wouldn't be self sufficient and therefore not really met the goal of getting us off this rock. Even if we could make it self sufficient it would be an awful place to live. There is no way you could live long term on the moon as the gravity is to weak. Living on Mars would be like living in the winter of the actic circle all the time just without the bugs. To really get off this rock we would need to find another planet that can support life without the need for domes and air generators. Those planets are minimum 4 light years away. That's the sort fo distance that we can't even contemplate. We are like Da Vinci contemplating heavier than air flight. Our technology just doesn't allow us to get to other planets yet just like his didn't allow hime to build a wing. He was bright enough to realise that he couldn't build a plane so worked on things he could build.
! That's two well written, well thought out, sensible posts I have read in one discussion. I must have mistyped slashdot.org.
Seriously though, that was a quality post. I was nice to hear from soneone who campains for the preservation birds also take a wider world view and realize that we, as a people, need to do something about the energy problems we are facing.
It's a real shame that so many people who campain to better one aspect of the world are totally blinkered to every other issue and unable to prioritize. They just come across as crackpots and get ignored.
And the fish says...
On our forum Gathering or Tweakers the first photograph of AMD's Socket f has emerged. In May we wrote all that AMD new processorsocket on its roadmap had put. The new voetstuk 1207 connection points would count and is intended for multi-Opteron-servers.
That's like me saying "I created a program on my computer, can someone offer me support without seeing the code or knowing much about it?"
Actually I think it's more like buying a car, modding it to hell and back, and then expecting the local garage to do a full service for the same amount. You would have to be a complete loon to think they wouldn't charge you more. This M$ guy has stated the obvious and made it sound like a bad thing.
I agree but I have to also ask what is the point of the whole space program? It's hard to really point at anything that is a direct result of research done in space. I know that the microprocessor got a good leg up from the space program but it could easily be argued that it would have happened about then any way. Yes the space program gave us Teflon. Wait a minute is that it. Just Teflon! How many billions has the space program cost? The problem is the advances they came up with are almost always self serving - which makes sense. In the recent past, however, it doesn't seem to have made any advances. Personally I think that's because risk has become a dirty word so we have to use only tried and trusted technology.
I love space research, have done ever since I was a kid, but this current obsession with flexing the scientific muscle and shooting people into space is just a huge waste of money. I don't see how people are going to do any research that couldn't be done by a machine.
Is there a technolgical reason why multiple GPUs can't be put on a card? I freely admit I know very little about graphics cards but it seems like it might be a cheap way to make a very powerful card. I seem to remember there was a card with two processors on that failed dismally because basically twice the price. What about a card with 4 or 8 cheap processors? Ok the power consumption would be silly but as long as it could be throttled so that when not playing a game only 1 GPU was used it might work. Just thought I'd share that with you all :o)
There's a dead body on the ground. The suspect is being walked towards a police van between two touch looking cops. His last words before they slam the door on the rest of his life...
"But I thought it was all a game!"
but I have a sneaky feeling he's selling us vapourware. What's the bet that when he reveals this to the world there will be one or two little problems still to solve that he will claim need a couple of million and a year or so to fix. After 10 years and 10's of millions they will be deemed impossible. Why do investors keep falling for these crack pots?
Yes it is a constantly moving target but this rating isn't designed to catch the bledding edge people. This rating is design to appeal to people that buy a machine every two or three years. People like parents of little Jonny who don't know much about computers.
The people who want cutting edge can go and pay for it but howmany games get released that _must_ be played on cutting edge hardware. Not many if any. Most will play well on a machine that is a year old and pretty well on a machine that is 2 or even 3 years old. I only just gave up my Athlon 800 as a games machine!