Alice comes up with a way of eating solid cheddar cheese through a fluffy pink straw and decides that it's so ingeious that she should patent it. Meanwhile, Bob, who just so happens to have been living in a deep cave for the past 20 years (where by chance someone had thrown some cheese and a fluffy pink straw), managed to come up with a method of eating solid cheddar cheese through a fluffy pink straw, and knows that despite his past 20-year exclusion from the world, this is a wholly remarkable breakthrough and decides to use it to get rich.
Why shouldn't Bob be able to do so, since he obviously has worked just as hard as Alive, just because Alice has one of these "patent" things?
The whole idea of patents suck, really. For small businesses\people they may actually serve a purposeful.. er.. purpose. If they can't afford to make a good product out of their ideas (maybe because it would cost a lot to actually implement), but came up with a truly genious thing, then they should be able to protect their idea from being stolen and having to watch the theif get stupily rich thanks to them. If someone else thinks of it, it's all fair game IMO and the fact it's already patented shouldn't matter (it means theres fair competition, which ultimately results in the best products for the user). But alas, this is clearly subject to abuse since people could merely claim they thought of it themselves and nobody could prove it sufficiently either way.
Anyway, instead of patents being used in this way (which is what I assume they were originally made for), big corporations with millions, or even billions of cash in the bank gobble up any ideas they can. Why? Who cares. Sometimes to cover their ass in case someone else tries to steal there idea and sue the orginial inventor, in this case I think the patent is valid (although if patents were used for the purpose intended, this wouldn't be needed anyway). It's when patents are used to gain an advantage in ANY way that pisses me off. Y'know, companies getting patents so nobody else can use that idea - how can you possibly make an alternative product for the user if you can't do the same stuff? You can't. No competition, the thing ends in a monopoly and the happy patent holding scum is free to make terrible software and charge for it, because nobody else can. If other people can use the idea, everyone is free to use it in the best way, which pushes people to make better and better software until finally someone who REALLY deserves to get rich from the work does.
When I make software (apart from the fact I don't know where to start), I don't try to patent my ideas, because I like to think I'm doing it in the best way anyway, so I don't NEED to patent it. If someone else does the same and gets a larger userbase than me, then I'll just have to work harder and that doesn't bother me. Having said that, the rich companies would simply hire lots of programmers and beat me.
I guess it's not really the patent system, or guns, or money (etc), which is the problem. It's humans. On the whole, we're a completely and utterly disgusting race driven by greed and other "unethical" morals. It's what's brought the infinite number of problems to modern day society.
Anyway, enough of my opinions. If I could get rich from someone elses work, I probably would... Just goes to prove my point really.
I have absolutely no knowledge of voice recognition technologies at all, but I'm getting the impression that they're based upon some preset accents, speeds, tones, and\or other stuff. So why can't\hasn't anyone come up with a voice recognition program which starts off completely empty. You have to train it (say a bare minimum, then you can train more to get it more accurate later). It'll get you to say certain letters, words, certain letter combinations (or words with certain letter combinations within them), etc. It'll analyze the wave oscillation, tone, speed or whatever these things check, and be able to build up a database of how you say certain things (i.e. it'll map your pronunciation of things to their letter\word counterparts), so that when you talk it understands you regardless of accent, language, tone, speed or any other difference in your way of speaking.
Oh come on, really, who cares. If you insist on being a grammar Nazi at least get it right before complaining about it.
It's is short for "it is" or "it has" (e.g. "It's a very hot Summer day."). Its is a possesive form of it, and is used when referring to something already mentioned (e.g. "The hot Summer day has lost its heat.").
I'm no business or legal expert, and I'm not completely sure about what IPO means exactly.
Does becoming 'IPOed' that mean big mean Microsoft can come along and buy the whole thing? Or does IPO mean the company offers shares to be bought, but keeps a significant amount for itself to prevent that kind of thing from happening?
All this stuff aside, a Corporation sounds like it's much more capable of kicking ass than a Foundation, even if there's no real difference.
Personally, I quite like it. Yes, it's by *gasp* MS. Yes, it's a blatent rip off of Google's page, which was no doubt inspired\ripped\whatever from some other site. I don't care.
It has lots of features, lots of feeds to choose from, skins, other nice stuff, and it's just starting out. I'm all for MS bashing and I don't really want them to win this 'battle' but if they improve this and make a nice page out of it they probably will, and I may well use it (but not the search part of it, I'll stick to Google).
Googles page, on the other hand, I haven't really had much interest in, it's nice n all but there's not much to do and see really. You can add your own feeds, but a lot of users won't know where to find them and won't go looking for decent stuff to add.
Yeah, transparent PNGs will be supported in IE7 Beta 2, according to the article\blog that was on/. yesterday.
Apparently the background-attachment CSS feature will also work correctly, which I'm glad to hear since you can do cool pseudo-transparent HTML elements with it (namely DIVs). Previously, instead of the picture being positioned relative to the whole page, it was only relative to the element which it was in, making it look goddamn awful in IE and pretty damn nice in anything else - see here.
Personally, I'm glad they've sorted out some major rendering flaws, and I'm glad many problems remain - I want my websites to look like they're made to in IE, but I still want IE to be bad enough to make people join the Firefox fanboy club.
On a side note, could this be the most redundant/. article yet? Well... no probably not, but I think we all feel this way anyway.
Yeah, and the summary doesn't explain what teaflops are either.
From TFS: "Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teaflops".
I think it might be a number related to bistromatics, perhaps the number of times an urge for tea emerges per second, in it's brain the size of a galaxy, or maybe it's gone off the rails and now calculates things in decimals of tea. Who knows?
Nah, I think a more fitting place would be the "Null" or "Garbage" categories. Yunno, the ones where anything sent to them just gets nullified and whoever submitted the article gets their slashdot account deleted and their IP is permanently banned.
People fuck up with emails, text, etc. all the time. Seriously, WHO FUCKING CARES (apart the people who are about to mod me troll)?
I'm guessing the reason they have these computers hooked up to the internet with important stuff on is the same reason they have default passwords.. cos they're 'tards who specialize in military stuff rather than security stuff, like he says in the interview.
He didn't find anti-gravity tech. If the UFO files he found were bullshit, slamming a 70 year jail sentence in a prison which has a record for abuse of their tazer belts seems a little harsh, no? $900k worth of damage caused by some guy looking around some networks, maybe dropping a few access programs here and there so he can come back later doesn't seem to add up either.
Personally, I don't think this guy is a crackpot (I fucking loathe the fact he was asked "do you have friends?" "were you taking drugs at the time?", etc. (although I loved his answer, smokin grass rocks)) - he's just some guy who believes in something and because people won't tell him the answers he wants, he goes and looks for himself. The techniques he used are relatively basic things anyone who spends a week reading 'Hack FAQs' could pick up. The US is, for whatever reason, slamming a shit load of absurd claims about this guy into his face and making a real example out of him. I don't believe in alien technology or UFOs flying around our planet, but for what he's done, 70 years is fucked up by anybodys viewpoint, and the fact they won't give details about stuff he's done or found makes the whole thing stink.
The only reason people use IE over FF is because they're ignorant. The majority of people (according to website stats) still use IE. If they use IE now, why would they even consider swapping to FF when their much-loved browser gets a huge update with all the features and security measures they think they need?
Alternatively, they release FF before IE7, get a bunch of publicity and some more users while they can.
Don't play games with MS. They have enough money to do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, and they more than likely WILL win. They can afford advertisements that reach everywhere, they have the brand name people recognise and talk about, they have the lawyers and bank balance to threaten or destroy businesses.
Why take risks? Do whatever you can while the big boys are busy getting their toys ready.
And by the looks of things, 84.75% of posts in this stories comments have usless and erroneous statistics in them.
First guy was moderately funny, although let's face it, it's not orginial, the thought crossed all our minds before we even looked at the comments. The rest are redundant crap, including this.
IANAW(eatherman), but clearly I know a lot more about weather prediction than you, given your posts consists of 99% ignorance.
People get information about the current weather using weather balloons, satellites, everyday weather instruments and whatever else. Then they can use that data to pretty accurately predict what's going to happen next. If you see a bunch of hot air, clouds, cold air, you know where winds are coming from, the temperature of them, the speed, etc. and you know from past experience what happens when such and such occurs, it's not surprising that you should be able to build up a picture of what's going to happen within the next hour. Now keep the prediction going, but instead of using the facts about current weather, they will have to use their future prediction as fact and do the same as before with the new data. Carry this on for a few days and the chances are your data is going to lose some accuracy, but it's still going to be a rough guide to what will happen. The longer you try to predict, the less accuracte the prediction will be. That's not to say the model is wrong.
It's like calculating the distance the Earth takes as it moves around the sun - to calculate the exact distance you would need to know the exact gravitational pull from *everything* in the universe, shove it into a huge calculation and you have your answer. This is obviously a hell of a lot of work and probably couldn't be done for a lot of reasons. So instead, we ignore pretty much everything in the universe and imagine only the Sun and the Earth exist. The formula would still be pretty complex, but it gives an answer that's very accurate.
It's not wrong, it's just not 100% right because to do that would require an immensely huge (and therefore unreasonable) amount of data and computer power.
Haha, my pr0n is also in a subfolder in a folder called programming, along with my real programming files. I have a feeling that if someone ever checks the size of the folder, or decides to show hidden\system files and thinks my MacroMouse "program" sounds interesting, I might be outed. I may be a geek, but almost half a gig of code for one program is a little much.
I've only tried DVORAK once.. I must say it didn't take very long (less than a week) before I started to pick up speed and learned the locations of certain keys to the point where I was pretty confident in not needing to look, and right from the start it felt like a much, much easier and more comfortable layout to type with. Unfortunately because I was using DVORAK and QWERTY frequently (college, and I used to swap back to QWERTY for when I came online, IM'ing was tediously slow otherwise), I never really got the whole hang of it and ended up ditching it completely a few days later.
I suggest if you're going to learn DVORAK, do it at a time when you don't need to use QWERTY, because you may end up swapping back to it too much and eventaully give up. Of course, once you can type with it proficiently, I can't imagine swapping between the two could cause much of a problem.
Exactly. I'm all for Microsoft bashing, but come on, if users are stupid enough to fall for this kind of thing then you can't really blame Microsoft.
Sure, more frequent updates would be nice, but most users won't bother downloading them anyway. The main reason we have so many pieces of spyware, viruses and other shite going around the internet is user stupidity. I don't download updates very often (mainly because I'm on 56k, but still), I have a working firewall and an out of date AV program, but for around a year I didn't have either and the only crap I got installed on my PC was through worms which couldn't really be avoided.
Sometimes my little brothers come on the PC, visit a few websites, and when I come back the PC is infested with crap, even with the AV and firewall.
Bottom line: Patches, Antivirus and Firewall software undoubtely helps, but is users aren't going to wise up, we're all still fucked.
So who has the right to sell those plots of land on the moon, or mars?
£££ for something you'll never see or have anything to do with again. ...I'm just so glad that people who are complete fucking retards and can't earn an honest penny in their life, can sell this bullshit and get rich.... yeah, it makes my IT talent and hard work, seem so worth it, even though I earn jack shit. Pft!
I tried to sell land on the moon and mars myself but got laughed at every occasion I tried. I don't see why, same rules should apply to me as they do to some smart ass company who thinks they own the whole universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant, for example:
Alice comes up with a way of eating solid cheddar cheese through a fluffy pink straw and decides that it's so ingeious that she should patent it.
Meanwhile, Bob, who just so happens to have been living in a deep cave for the past 20 years (where by chance someone had thrown some cheese and a fluffy pink straw), managed to come up with a method of eating solid cheddar cheese through a fluffy pink straw, and knows that despite his past 20-year exclusion from the world, this is a wholly remarkable breakthrough and decides to use it to get rich.
Why shouldn't Bob be able to do so, since he obviously has worked just as hard as Alive, just because Alice has one of these "patent" things?
The whole idea of patents suck, really. For small businesses\people they may actually serve a purposeful.. er.. purpose. If they can't afford to make a good product out of their ideas (maybe because it would cost a lot to actually implement), but came up with a truly genious thing, then they should be able to protect their idea from being stolen and having to watch the theif get stupily rich thanks to them. If someone else thinks of it, it's all fair game IMO and the fact it's already patented shouldn't matter (it means theres fair competition, which ultimately results in the best products for the user). But alas, this is clearly subject to abuse since people could merely claim they thought of it themselves and nobody could prove it sufficiently either way.
Anyway, instead of patents being used in this way (which is what I assume they were originally made for), big corporations with millions, or even billions of cash in the bank gobble up any ideas they can. Why? Who cares. Sometimes to cover their ass in case someone else tries to steal there idea and sue the orginial inventor, in this case I think the patent is valid (although if patents were used for the purpose intended, this wouldn't be needed anyway). It's when patents are used to gain an advantage in ANY way that pisses me off. Y'know, companies getting patents so nobody else can use that idea - how can you possibly make an alternative product for the user if you can't do the same stuff? You can't. No competition, the thing ends in a monopoly and the happy patent holding scum is free to make terrible software and charge for it, because nobody else can. If other people can use the idea, everyone is free to use it in the best way, which pushes people to make better and better software until finally someone who REALLY deserves to get rich from the work does.
When I make software (apart from the fact I don't know where to start), I don't try to patent my ideas, because I like to think I'm doing it in the best way anyway, so I don't NEED to patent it. If someone else does the same and gets a larger userbase than me, then I'll just have to work harder and that doesn't bother me. Having said that, the rich companies would simply hire lots of programmers and beat me.
I guess it's not really the patent system, or guns, or money (etc), which is the problem. It's humans. On the whole, we're a completely and utterly disgusting race driven by greed and other "unethical" morals. It's what's brought the infinite number of problems to modern day society.
Anyway, enough of my opinions. If I could get rich from someone elses work, I probably would... Just goes to prove my point really.
I have absolutely no knowledge of voice recognition technologies at all, but I'm getting the impression that they're based upon some preset accents, speeds, tones, and\or other stuff. So why can't\hasn't anyone come up with a voice recognition program which starts off completely empty. You have to train it (say a bare minimum, then you can train more to get it more accurate later). It'll get you to say certain letters, words, certain letter combinations (or words with certain letter combinations within them), etc. It'll analyze the wave oscillation, tone, speed or whatever these things check, and be able to build up a database of how you say certain things (i.e. it'll map your pronunciation of things to their letter\word counterparts), so that when you talk it understands you regardless of accent, language, tone, speed or any other difference in your way of speaking.
Oh come on, really, who cares.
If you insist on being a grammar Nazi at least get it right before complaining about it.
It's is short for "it is" or "it has" (e.g. "It's a very hot Summer day.").
Its is a possesive form of it, and is used when referring to something already mentioned (e.g. "The hot Summer day has lost its heat.").
Now RFTA and quit complaining.
that or blogging.
OT and unjustified, but...
;)
Saying Java is good because it works on all OSs is like saying anal sex is good because it works on both genders.
Yeah, after reading the post from one of the developers of Start I've realised this. Even more reason to like it.
I'm no business or legal expert, and I'm not completely sure about what IPO means exactly.
Does becoming 'IPOed' that mean big mean Microsoft can come along and buy the whole thing? Or does IPO mean the company offers shares to be bought, but keeps a significant amount for itself to prevent that kind of thing from happening?
All this stuff aside, a Corporation sounds like it's much more capable of kicking ass than a Foundation, even if there's no real difference.
I agree.
Personally, I quite like it. Yes, it's by *gasp* MS. Yes, it's a blatent rip off of Google's page, which was no doubt inspired\ripped\whatever from some other site. I don't care.
It has lots of features, lots of feeds to choose from, skins, other nice stuff, and it's just starting out. I'm all for MS bashing and I don't really want them to win this 'battle' but if they improve this and make a nice page out of it they probably will, and I may well use it (but not the search part of it, I'll stick to Google).
Googles page, on the other hand, I haven't really had much interest in, it's nice n all but there's not much to do and see really. You can add your own feeds, but a lot of users won't know where to find them and won't go looking for decent stuff to add.
Yeah, transparent PNGs will be supported in IE7 Beta 2, according to the article\blog that was on /. yesterday.
/. article yet? Well... no probably not, but I think we all feel this way anyway.
Apparently the background-attachment CSS feature will also work correctly, which I'm glad to hear since you can do cool pseudo-transparent HTML elements with it (namely DIVs). Previously, instead of the picture being positioned relative to the whole page, it was only relative to the element which it was in, making it look goddamn awful in IE and pretty damn nice in anything else - see here.
Personally, I'm glad they've sorted out some major rendering flaws, and I'm glad many problems remain - I want my websites to look like they're made to in IE, but I still want IE to be bad enough to make people join the Firefox fanboy club.
On a side note, could this be the most redundant
Yeah, and the summary doesn't explain what teaflops are either.
From TFS: "Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teaflops".
I think it might be a number related to bistromatics, perhaps the number of times an urge for tea emerges per second, in it's brain the size of a galaxy, or maybe it's gone off the rails and now calculates things in decimals of tea. Who knows?
I think that was the full joke...
Nah, I think a more fitting place would be the "Null" or "Garbage" categories. Yunno, the ones where anything sent to them just gets nullified and whoever submitted the article gets their slashdot account deleted and their IP is permanently banned.
People fuck up with emails, text, etc. all the time. Seriously, WHO FUCKING CARES (apart the people who are about to mod me troll)?
I'm guessing the reason they have these computers hooked up to the internet with important stuff on is the same reason they have default passwords.. cos they're 'tards who specialize in military stuff rather than security stuff, like he says in the interview.
He didn't find anti-gravity tech. If the UFO files he found were bullshit, slamming a 70 year jail sentence in a prison which has a record for abuse of their tazer belts seems a little harsh, no? $900k worth of damage caused by some guy looking around some networks, maybe dropping a few access programs here and there so he can come back later doesn't seem to add up either.
Personally, I don't think this guy is a crackpot (I fucking loathe the fact he was asked "do you have friends?" "were you taking drugs at the time?", etc. (although I loved his answer, smokin grass rocks)) - he's just some guy who believes in something and because people won't tell him the answers he wants, he goes and looks for himself. The techniques he used are relatively basic things anyone who spends a week reading 'Hack FAQs' could pick up. The US is, for whatever reason, slamming a shit load of absurd claims about this guy into his face and making a real example out of him. I don't believe in alien technology or UFOs flying around our planet, but for what he's done, 70 years is fucked up by anybodys viewpoint, and the fact they won't give details about stuff he's done or found makes the whole thing stink.
I'll try, but the day after my weed runs out I can be likened to a scorned woman the day she starts her period.
Mozilla's decision is their's, I'm just saying IMO, you can't afford to fuck with MS.
Steal the thunder my ass.
The only reason people use IE over FF is because they're ignorant. The majority of people (according to website stats) still use IE.
If they use IE now, why would they even consider swapping to FF when their much-loved browser gets a huge update with all the features and security measures they think they need?
Alternatively, they release FF before IE7, get a bunch of publicity and some more users while they can.
Don't play games with MS. They have enough money to do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, and they more than likely WILL win. They can afford advertisements that reach everywhere, they have the brand name people recognise and talk about, they have the lawyers and bank balance to threaten or destroy businesses.
Why take risks? Do whatever you can while the big boys are busy getting their toys ready.
And by the looks of things, 84.75% of posts in this stories comments have usless and erroneous statistics in them.
First guy was moderately funny, although let's face it, it's not orginial, the thought crossed all our minds before we even looked at the comments. The rest are redundant crap, including this.
I think you forgot something vitally important here...
4. ???
5. Profit!
IANAW(eatherman), but clearly I know a lot more about weather prediction than you, given your posts consists of 99% ignorance.
People get information about the current weather using weather balloons, satellites, everyday weather instruments and whatever else. Then they can use that data to pretty accurately predict what's going to happen next. If you see a bunch of hot air, clouds, cold air, you know where winds are coming from, the temperature of them, the speed, etc. and you know from past experience what happens when such and such occurs, it's not surprising that you should be able to build up a picture of what's going to happen within the next hour. Now keep the prediction going, but instead of using the facts about current weather, they will have to use their future prediction as fact and do the same as before with the new data. Carry this on for a few days and the chances are your data is going to lose some accuracy, but it's still going to be a rough guide to what will happen. The longer you try to predict, the less accuracte the prediction will be. That's not to say the model is wrong.
It's like calculating the distance the Earth takes as it moves around the sun - to calculate the exact distance you would need to know the exact gravitational pull from *everything* in the universe, shove it into a huge calculation and you have your answer. This is obviously a hell of a lot of work and probably couldn't be done for a lot of reasons. So instead, we ignore pretty much everything in the universe and imagine only the Sun and the Earth exist. The formula would still be pretty complex, but it gives an answer that's very accurate.
It's not wrong, it's just not 100% right because to do that would require an immensely huge (and therefore unreasonable) amount of data and computer power.
Unfortunately it's not a disk compression tool that keeps it that "low", it's the fact I'm on a 56gay modem.
Haha, my pr0n is also in a subfolder in a folder called programming, along with my real programming files. I have a feeling that if someone ever checks the size of the folder, or decides to show hidden\system files and thinks my MacroMouse "program" sounds interesting, I might be outed. I may be a geek, but almost half a gig of code for one program is a little much.
I've only tried DVORAK once.. I must say it didn't take very long (less than a week) before I started to pick up speed and learned the locations of certain keys to the point where I was pretty confident in not needing to look, and right from the start it felt like a much, much easier and more comfortable layout to type with.
Unfortunately because I was using DVORAK and QWERTY frequently (college, and I used to swap back to QWERTY for when I came online, IM'ing was tediously slow otherwise), I never really got the whole hang of it and ended up ditching it completely a few days later.
I suggest if you're going to learn DVORAK, do it at a time when you don't need to use QWERTY, because you may end up swapping back to it too much and eventaully give up. Of course, once you can type with it proficiently, I can't imagine swapping between the two could cause much of a problem.
Totally OT, but I always thought apple should release a (or change the name of an existing) software package and call it iCandy.
Oh the possibilities.
Exactly. I'm all for Microsoft bashing, but come on, if users are stupid enough to fall for this kind of thing then you can't really blame Microsoft.
Sure, more frequent updates would be nice, but most users won't bother downloading them anyway. The main reason we have so many pieces of spyware, viruses and other shite going around the internet is user stupidity.
I don't download updates very often (mainly because I'm on 56k, but still), I have a working firewall and an out of date AV program, but for around a year I didn't have either and the only crap I got installed on my PC was through worms which couldn't really be avoided.
Sometimes my little brothers come on the PC, visit a few websites, and when I come back the PC is infested with crap, even with the AV and firewall.
Bottom line: Patches, Antivirus and Firewall software undoubtely helps, but is users aren't going to wise up, we're all still fucked.
So who has the right to sell those plots of land on the moon, or mars?
£££ for something you'll never see or have anything to do with again.
...I'm just so glad that people who are complete fucking retards and can't earn an honest penny in their life, can sell this bullshit and get rich.... yeah, it makes my IT talent and hard work, seem so worth it, even though I earn jack shit. Pft!
I tried to sell land on the moon and mars myself but got laughed at every occasion I tried. I don't see why, same rules should apply to me as they do to some smart ass company who thinks they own the whole universe.