how actively are they trying to develop their patent?
Let's say you're a CompSci researcher and figure out a really nifty new way to route calls in a cell phone network, for example. Chances are, you don't actually own a cell phone network (no, not even of you look really hard under the couch). The only way you can make something from your idea is to approach one of the existing, major mobile developers. Having a patent is a way to protect yourself from just being ripped off. Except it isn't, anymore.
You realize, I assume, that many lawyers out there are completely willing to take on a case like that, presuming it's reasonably clear cut, for both the notoriety of successfully taking on a big company and for a cut of the damages?
Sure - and that is, according to most other posters, a sure sign of a true troll, that you've partnered with, or sold the idea to, a law firm that isn't going to actually produce your idea.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And let's take this line of reasoning to licenses: Since someone releasing software under an Open Source licence can't expect to make any significant amount of money on it (it's free to copy after all), anybody can use the code as they want until such a time that the single developer actually goes through ten-fifteen years of court proceedings - and probably a personal bankrupcy, divorce proceedings and a suicide.
The problem with the "patent trolls" idea is that it's all but indistinguishable from the "small inventor with few resources" one in many cases.
This ruling does mean that if you're a small-time inventor that couldn't afford to implement your idea yourself, you can freely be ripped off by large corps that can, with impunity, since you wouldn't have made a lot of money without a major partner in any case.
Tell me again how patents are protecting the inventor against large corporations?
If you are right then it makes no sense at all to buy the PS3 for it's blu-ray player - or any blu-ray or hd-dvd media - until you're really sure that's the format that's going to win.
This is a perfectly valid argument for 2006, but what about 2008? When HDTV hits critical mass, the choices of pre-recorded medial are either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Period.
No. First, you'll have DVDs being sold along whatever new format for years to come. Second, with a HDTV set, DVD:s look great - much better than on old sets. You don't have the same enourmous quality gap between DVD and the high-res formats that you had with VHS versus DVD, so there won't be the same great push to replace already owned DVDs with the new format.
If Blu-ray is an argument, then it's an argument to wait with buying the PS3 until you have a HDTV set, you know that blu-ray, not hd-dvd, is the player to own, and you're ready to start buying blu-ray movies rather than DVDs.
And if you're saying that HDTV will start to become common around 2008-2009, and that we by that time will know which format (if either) will actually come out on top, then it's already time for the next generation consoles to start making an appearance, in which case it probably makes sense to skip the PS3 altogether.
It's a game console. Gaming is not worth $600 just for the box (adding another $50-$60 for every title) to me. It isn't a general purpose computer, it is a toy. And I'm not paying $600 for a toy; I'm especially not paying $600 for a toy when it comes out of our common budget and I'm the only one who's interested in playing with it.
If Sony can't sell this level of technology for substantially less than $600, then they have overspent on the technology level. It could push a gazillion perfectly rendered polygons every nanosecond and it'd not be worth it. It could have 48 channel surround-sound and automatically hire the remaining members of Beatles to perform live in my living room whenever I try to play the White Album and it'd not be worth it. It could snuggle up to me every morning to wake me up with a cup of fresh coffee and a blowjob and it'd still not be worth it.
$600 for a game console pushes it solidly into the same realm as gaming PC:s with $500 GPU:s - great technology value for a small hard-core audience, but just too expensive for many more casual prospective buyers.
Can you not understand that well-paid, highly-cleared NSA employees do not scuttle their careers without good reason? The people doing the leaking are being asked to do something really evil, and they are not happy about it.
And they will gradually be found and dismissed, or quit over this or unrelated reasons and be replaced with new hires that don't mind the shady reputation of the agency. Thus gradually leaving only people who see no problem with the whole thing.
For many users, speed is the most important aspect of a browser.
For most users, speed is a minor issue as long as it's perceived to be fast enough. And response times from the distant website (not infrequently in the second+ range) typically swamps local things like redraw speed.
So no, unless you have the hots for Opera and need a way to motivate your obsession, speed is not a major issue today.
Hiragana and Katakana developed independently, as the other poster mentioned. The basic reason for both was the need in Japanese to record sound symbolisms (such as verb inflections) not needed in Chinsese; put shortly, Hanzi was a great fit for Chinese, but not all that great for Japanese (as evidenced by the difference in the way "original" Japanese words and chinese loanwords are written). Hiragana and Katakana were developed during different times of close contact, and were in one case a shorthand of Hanzi commonly used for phonetic spelling, and in the other, as common subcomponents with a well-known phonetic use (though these were different from radicals). In a few cases, and over a millennium of confusion, they resolved to nearly the same shape, but that is incidental.
More to the point, there was not one single time that Hanzi crossed the sea and became Kanji. That has happened in multiple waves, so some characters are of younger origin than others - and this is also part of the explanation why some characters have so many readings; being common, they had changed over time and picked up new readings and meanings every time there was a new burst of cultural exchange between the countries. Also, a few characters have gone the other way, originating in Japan and being used in China as well.
The man was a giant in philosphoy, no doubt. But didn't he ever hear about ghost writers? Seriousy, it's a testament to the greatness of his ideas that he is still read - no less remembered - despite the hideous Lovecraftian abomination that passes for prose in his works.
A Japanese house (yes probably through necessity) is, in comparison, polite quiet and tidy. And the home made food infinitely more apatising. So the pods being a refuge idea is a US construct I think.
I live in Japan, and it's not altogether "a US construct". Consider: you're 20-something, and you're of course living at home, since the rent on even a small apartment is absolutely ruinous for a single person. You do have a job, though, and since - if you're a very consentious child - you're sharing the living expenses with your parents, you have a quite comfortable level of disposeable income even with a pretty low entry-level position (and if your parents are indulgent, you aren't paying anything at all, making that income all the more significant). The same goes for your current SO.
In fact, if you save for a few years, together you could in fact afford that apartment in a Tokyo suburb or somewhere in southern Osaka. But until your relationship becomes long-term and serious enough, there's of course no way you're goi9ng to risk something like that. So for the time being you're relegated to whatever resources you have. And seriously, with money burning in your pocket, are you going to spend an hour on the local train to go to your or your SO:s parent's house, endure socializing, knowing winks (not to mention the ever-present risk of baby pictures) to retire to a small bedroom all of a couple of meters away from the living room where the old folk are laughing at the latest lame Osaka burlesque on the TV?
Or are you going to a dinner out on the town, followed by a short walk to a clean, fresh hotel in any kind of style you wish (with no shortage of "special" styles whenever you want to spice things up a bit (there famously is a Hello Kitty Dungeon in one hotel here in Osaka)), with no interruptions, thin walls, kid brothers or parents, and with attentive, affordable room service at the touch of a button?
I absolutely, totally, unconditionally agree on the state of Japanese living - it really is neater, cleaner and more friendly than anywhere I've been. But for those times you want to be alone together, it's really not optimal.
Hotels renting rooms over night or by the hour, often with some kind of theme setting. It's not for prostitution, as many westerners assume at first, but a popular way for people to get together, especially since the expensive rents mean you often live at home until you marry.
My favourite around here in Osaka is "Chapel Christmas", which, as you may guess, is Christmas-themed, complete with a huge Santa and grinning happy elves all over the facade. I have a few pictures here:
Also, these internet and manga cafés are usually open around the clock, and have lately begun to offer amenities like showers, so quite a few people use them as a cheap place to crash if they've been partying and missed the last train home.
Of course. But that all comes down to what a particular developer or team considers their platform to be. If that sound app developer saw their platform as Linux, specifically, then the decision to use ALSA made sense for them. If, on the other hand, a developer sees "any desktop" as their platform, they have very, very restricted options since they need to make it work on Windows, Linux, OSX, xxxBSD...
You have a hierarchy of platforms, really. Lowest is the individual app, and since nothing else depends on it, they are free to choose platform (and libraries and what have you) at will. At the top, more or less, is the OS platform, which doesn't depend on anything above it and so is free to branch out or restrict itself as needed, though it makes sense to widen itself as much as practical since that widens the appeal for developers (you could make a good case that it's the computer architecture that's at the top, of course).
But inbetween are layers of libraries, desktop platforms and so on. They depend on the OS's they run on on one hand, and greatly affect the applications using it on the other. They face, at all times, a very delicate balance between using their parent platform to it's fullest advantage on one hand, and making itself as widespread and easily deployable as possible for it's app developers on the other. So when the question about OS-specific functionality comes up, the answer is more often than not that it's not worth it; you'll alienate far more developers that don't have the functionality available than you'll gain among the developers on the platform that does.
Seen this way it's not so strange that GNOME and KDE have been relatively slow in adopting XGL-like eyecandy and accelleration. For Apple especially, but also for Microsoft (who does have a captive audience), pushing some specific hardware requirement is not a major stumbling block. For a platform that needs to work on a large variety of hardware, it is. So, since everybody knows OpenGL-accellerated desktops is not going to happen until the vast majority of Linux, Solaris, xxxBSD users (not to mention the Nokia tablet and other small platforms) can either cope or do some acceptable, still very useable, workaround, there's been little point in pushing it heavily anyway.
Sorry if this is trolling, or I'm misunderstanding something, but I believe that you can only use Windows XP if you use filesystem NTFS, and I don't think that went over too badly.
You're misunderstanding a bit, I guess. Disregarding that XP is the whole OS while we're talking about components, XP can (and should) use NTFS, since that is the standard on every machine it's going to run on. For GNOME, for example, the platform is (at least) every major Linux distribution and Solaris, as well as xxxBSD and a few others. So, for example, depending on something that is specific for ReiserFS would be impossible, since it would not be the default, not desireable or not available at all on many of the platforms.
You know, when people are saying that the quality of the generated data is "actually not that bad", with a surprised and delighted tilt in their voices, you know your customers aren't exactly expecting greatness anymore.
the problem now is to get groups like GNOME and KDE to use the features we're making available to them.
The obvious problem for large projects like GNOME is of course that they need to make a good experience on a pretty wide variety of platforms. To use any platform-specific feature it will need to be either emulated, replicated, worked around or otherwise made available on all platforms; or it could only go in as an optional extra that nothing else is actually depending on. So, making advanced FS logging capabilities a cornerstone of the desktop, for example, would be out since far from all platforms will have the requisite framework. "You can only run desktop X if you also use filesystem Y" is likely to go over like a lead balloon.
Fortunately, good ideas in the OS space tends to be picked up by everybody sooner or later. Over time there just aren't that many good ideas that will not be available everywhere as time goes on.
Thank you! I read it in some anthology (translated into Swedish, no less) as a child, but could afterwards never remember who wrote it, the name of the story or even in which anthology I stumbled onto it.
if you get a photon out the system before you sent one, are you locked into sending one?
I read a great short story on that theme once (really short; I believe it was less than two full pages). A researcher built a time machine, and sent a brass cube five minutes back in time during a demonstration. An audience member, looking at the "two" brass cubes on the desk asked what would happen if he never sent the original cube. They tried - and the universe, except for the brass cube, ceased to exist.
I know your joking but "heat" doesn't care about direction.
I know:)
Also consider this, what's the temperature in a vacuum where there are *no* molecules to be moving at all?:-)
Well, IANAPSWWBPOIBAM (I Am Not A Physicist, Something Which Will Bebome Painfully Obvious In But A Minute), but:
I vaguely remember "heat" to have a wider definition today, related to the energy state of particles more generally. And since vaccuum is never actually empty (the lack of real particles gives room for lots of virtual particles slipping in and out of existence), there is a nonzero temperature there as well, from these temporary particles' energy states.
Heat is atoms vibrating, and so we think absolute motionlessness - absolute zero - is the lowest possible temperature. But taking the concepts from this slashdot story, it's obvious we can make it even colder - by having them vibrate in the opposite direction!!! OK, can I have my Nobel price now?
When it comes to comics/graphic novels/call it what you want, I don't actually know of any other country with as lively, large and varied market as Japan, so how is it overrated?
Slashdot Mirror
how actively are they trying to develop their patent?
Let's say you're a CompSci researcher and figure out a really nifty new way to route calls in a cell phone network, for example. Chances are, you don't actually own a cell phone network (no, not even of you look really hard under the couch). The only way you can make something from your idea is to approach one of the existing, major mobile developers. Having a patent is a way to protect yourself from just being ripped off. Except it isn't, anymore.
You realize, I assume, that many lawyers out there are completely willing to take on a case like that, presuming it's reasonably clear cut, for both the notoriety of successfully taking on a big company and for a cut of the damages?
Sure - and that is, according to most other posters, a sure sign of a true troll, that you've partnered with, or sold the idea to, a law firm that isn't going to actually produce your idea.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And let's take this line of reasoning to licenses: Since someone releasing software under an Open Source licence can't expect to make any significant amount of money on it (it's free to copy after all), anybody can use the code as they want until such a time that the single developer actually goes through ten-fifteen years of court proceedings - and probably a personal bankrupcy, divorce proceedings and a suicide.
The problem with the "patent trolls" idea is that it's all but indistinguishable from the "small inventor with few resources" one in many cases.
This ruling does mean that if you're a small-time inventor that couldn't afford to implement your idea yourself, you can freely be ripped off by large corps that can, with impunity, since you wouldn't have made a lot of money without a major partner in any case.
Tell me again how patents are protecting the inventor against large corporations?
If you are right then it makes no sense at all to buy the PS3 for it's blu-ray player - or any blu-ray or hd-dvd media - until you're really sure that's the format that's going to win.
This is a perfectly valid argument for 2006, but what about 2008? When HDTV hits critical mass, the choices of pre-recorded medial are either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Period.
No. First, you'll have DVDs being sold along whatever new format for years to come. Second, with a HDTV set, DVD:s look great - much better than on old sets. You don't have the same enourmous quality gap between DVD and the high-res formats that you had with VHS versus DVD, so there won't be the same great push to replace already owned DVDs with the new format.
If Blu-ray is an argument, then it's an argument to wait with buying the PS3 until you have a HDTV set, you know that blu-ray, not hd-dvd, is the player to own, and you're ready to start buying blu-ray movies rather than DVDs.
And if you're saying that HDTV will start to become common around 2008-2009, and that we by that time will know which format (if either) will actually come out on top, then it's already time for the next generation consoles to start making an appearance, in which case it probably makes sense to skip the PS3 altogether.
It's a game console. Gaming is not worth $600 just for the box (adding another $50-$60 for every title) to me. It isn't a general purpose computer, it is a toy. And I'm not paying $600 for a toy; I'm especially not paying $600 for a toy when it comes out of our common budget and I'm the only one who's interested in playing with it.
If Sony can't sell this level of technology for substantially less than $600, then they have overspent on the technology level. It could push a gazillion perfectly rendered polygons every nanosecond and it'd not be worth it. It could have 48 channel surround-sound and automatically hire the remaining members of Beatles to perform live in my living room whenever I try to play the White Album and it'd not be worth it. It could snuggle up to me every morning to wake me up with a cup of fresh coffee and a blowjob and it'd still not be worth it.
$600 for a game console pushes it solidly into the same realm as gaming PC:s with $500 GPU:s - great technology value for a small hard-core audience, but just too expensive for many more casual prospective buyers.
Can you not understand that well-paid, highly-cleared NSA employees do not scuttle their careers without good reason? The people doing the leaking are being asked to do something really evil, and they are not happy about it.
And they will gradually be found and dismissed, or quit over this or unrelated reasons and be replaced with new hires that don't mind the shady reputation of the agency. Thus gradually leaving only people who see no problem with the whole thing.
For many users, speed is the most important aspect of a browser.
For most users, speed is a minor issue as long as it's perceived to be fast enough. And response times from the distant website (not infrequently in the second+ range) typically swamps local things like redraw speed.
So no, unless you have the hots for Opera and need a way to motivate your obsession, speed is not a major issue today.
Hiragana and Katakana developed independently, as the other poster mentioned. The basic reason for both was the need in Japanese to record sound symbolisms (such as verb inflections) not needed in Chinsese; put shortly, Hanzi was a great fit for Chinese, but not all that great for Japanese (as evidenced by the difference in the way "original" Japanese words and chinese loanwords are written). Hiragana and Katakana were developed during different times of close contact, and were in one case a shorthand of Hanzi commonly used for phonetic spelling, and in the other, as common subcomponents with a well-known phonetic use (though these were different from radicals). In a few cases, and over a millennium of confusion, they resolved to nearly the same shape, but that is incidental.
More to the point, there was not one single time that Hanzi crossed the sea and became Kanji. That has happened in multiple waves, so some characters are of younger origin than others - and this is also part of the explanation why some characters have so many readings; being common, they had changed over time and picked up new readings and meanings every time there was a new burst of cultural exchange between the countries. Also, a few characters have gone the other way, originating in Japan and being used in China as well.
Kant on the other hand requires absolute silence.
The man was a giant in philosphoy, no doubt. But didn't he ever hear about ghost writers? Seriousy, it's a testament to the greatness of his ideas that he is still read - no less remembered - despite the hideous Lovecraftian abomination that passes for prose in his works.
A Japanese house (yes probably through necessity) is, in comparison, polite quiet and tidy. And the home made food infinitely more apatising. So the pods being a refuge idea is a US construct I think.
I live in Japan, and it's not altogether "a US construct". Consider: you're 20-something, and you're of course living at home, since the rent on even a small apartment is absolutely ruinous for a single person. You do have a job, though, and since - if you're a very consentious child - you're sharing the living expenses with your parents, you have a quite comfortable level of disposeable income even with a pretty low entry-level position (and if your parents are indulgent, you aren't paying anything at all, making that income all the more significant). The same goes for your current SO.
In fact, if you save for a few years, together you could in fact afford that apartment in a Tokyo suburb or somewhere in southern Osaka. But until your relationship becomes long-term and serious enough, there's of course no way you're goi9ng to risk something like that. So for the time being you're relegated to whatever resources you have. And seriously, with money burning in your pocket, are you going to spend an hour on the local train to go to your or your SO:s parent's house, endure socializing, knowing winks (not to mention the ever-present risk of baby pictures) to retire to a small bedroom all of a couple of meters away from the living room where the old folk are laughing at the latest lame Osaka burlesque on the TV?
Or are you going to a dinner out on the town, followed by a short walk to a clean, fresh hotel in any kind of style you wish (with no shortage of "special" styles whenever you want to spice things up a bit (there famously is a Hello Kitty Dungeon in one hotel here in Osaka)), with no interruptions, thin walls, kid brothers or parents, and with attentive, affordable room service at the touch of a button?
I absolutely, totally, unconditionally agree on the state of Japanese living - it really is neater, cleaner and more friendly than anywhere I've been. But for those times you want to be alone together, it's really not optimal.
Hotels renting rooms over night or by the hour, often with some kind of theme setting. It's not for prostitution, as many westerners assume at first, but a popular way for people to get together, especially since the expensive rents mean you often live at home until you marry.
My favourite around here in Osaka is "Chapel Christmas", which, as you may guess, is Christmas-themed, complete with a huge Santa and grinning happy elves all over the facade. I have a few pictures here:
Chapel Christmas
Also, these internet and manga cafés are usually open around the clock, and have lately begun to offer amenities like showers, so quite a few people use them as a cheap place to crash if they've been partying and missed the last train home.
Of course. But that all comes down to what a particular developer or team considers their platform to be. If that sound app developer saw their platform as Linux, specifically, then the decision to use ALSA made sense for them. If, on the other hand, a developer sees "any desktop" as their platform, they have very, very restricted options since they need to make it work on Windows, Linux, OSX, xxxBSD...
You have a hierarchy of platforms, really. Lowest is the individual app, and since nothing else depends on it, they are free to choose platform (and libraries and what have you) at will. At the top, more or less, is the OS platform, which doesn't depend on anything above it and so is free to branch out or restrict itself as needed, though it makes sense to widen itself as much as practical since that widens the appeal for developers (you could make a good case that it's the computer architecture that's at the top, of course).
But inbetween are layers of libraries, desktop platforms and so on. They depend on the OS's they run on on one hand, and greatly affect the applications using it on the other. They face, at all times, a very delicate balance between using their parent platform to it's fullest advantage on one hand, and making itself as widespread and easily deployable as possible for it's app developers on the other. So when the question about OS-specific functionality comes up, the answer is more often than not that it's not worth it; you'll alienate far more developers that don't have the functionality available than you'll gain among the developers on the platform that does.
Seen this way it's not so strange that GNOME and KDE have been relatively slow in adopting XGL-like eyecandy and accelleration. For Apple especially, but also for Microsoft (who does have a captive audience), pushing some specific hardware requirement is not a major stumbling block. For a platform that needs to work on a large variety of hardware, it is. So, since everybody knows OpenGL-accellerated desktops is not going to happen until the vast majority of Linux, Solaris, xxxBSD users (not to mention the Nokia tablet and other small platforms) can either cope or do some acceptable, still very useable, workaround, there's been little point in pushing it heavily anyway.
Sorry if this is trolling, or I'm misunderstanding something, but I believe that you can only use Windows XP if you use filesystem NTFS, and I don't think that went over too badly.
You're misunderstanding a bit, I guess. Disregarding that XP is the whole OS while we're talking about components, XP can (and should) use NTFS, since that is the standard on every machine it's going to run on. For GNOME, for example, the platform is (at least) every major Linux distribution and Solaris, as well as xxxBSD and a few others. So, for example, depending on something that is specific for ReiserFS would be impossible, since it would not be the default, not desireable or not available at all on many of the platforms.
You know, when people are saying that the quality of the generated data is "actually not that bad", with a surprised and delighted tilt in their voices, you know your customers aren't exactly expecting greatness anymore.
the problem now is to get groups like GNOME and KDE to use the features we're making available to them.
The obvious problem for large projects like GNOME is of course that they need to make a good experience on a pretty wide variety of platforms. To use any platform-specific feature it will need to be either emulated, replicated, worked around or otherwise made available on all platforms; or it could only go in as an optional extra that nothing else is actually depending on. So, making advanced FS logging capabilities a cornerstone of the desktop, for example, would be out since far from all platforms will have the requisite framework. "You can only run desktop X if you also use filesystem Y" is likely to go over like a lead balloon.
Fortunately, good ideas in the OS space tends to be picked up by everybody sooner or later. Over time there just aren't that many good ideas that will not be available everywhere as time goes on.
Easy solution: buy caffeine pills in bulk, crush in a mortar and keep in a bowl next to the sugar. Drink whatever you want and season to taste.
In fact, just mix it in with the sugar and some MSG, and you have flavour, energy and hyperactivity all in one convenient serving!
The Experiment by Fredric Brown.
Thank you! I read it in some anthology (translated into Swedish, no less) as a child, but could afterwards never remember who wrote it, the name of the story or even in which anthology I stumbled onto it.
if you get a photon out the system before you sent one, are you locked into sending one?
I read a great short story on that theme once (really short; I believe it was less than two full pages). A researcher built a time machine, and sent a brass cube five minutes back in time during a demonstration. An audience member, looking at the "two" brass cubes on the desk asked what would happen if he never sent the original cube. They tried - and the universe, except for the brass cube, ceased to exist.
I know your joking but "heat" doesn't care about direction.
:)
:-)
I know
Also consider this, what's the temperature in a vacuum where there are *no* molecules to be moving at all?
Well, IANAPSWWBPOIBAM (I Am Not A Physicist, Something Which Will Bebome Painfully Obvious In But A Minute), but:
I vaguely remember "heat" to have a wider definition today, related to the energy state of particles more generally. And since vaccuum is never actually empty (the lack of real particles gives room for lots of virtual particles slipping in and out of existence), there is a nonzero temperature there as well, from these temporary particles' energy states.
Of course, what do I know?
Heat is atoms vibrating, and so we think absolute motionlessness - absolute zero - is the lowest possible temperature. But taking the concepts from this slashdot story, it's obvious we can make it even colder - by having them vibrate in the opposite direction!!! OK, can I have my Nobel price now?
Um, all of Dell's current laptop products use Intel WLAN chipsets.
Mea culpa. I read that Dell has taken a board position with Airgo and jumped to conclusions.
Also, I completely agree about the chipset of choice; reliability and compatibility trumps extra flash any day of the week.
So the "Alienware" line of Dell laptops gets the same chipset as other Dell laptops.
Or, in other words, "alienware" have already become normal Dell machines, only with garish colors and a higher price tag.
Japan is overrated.
By whom? In what way?
When it comes to comics/graphic novels/call it what you want, I don't actually know of any other country with as lively, large and varied market as Japan, so how is it overrated?