I have developed for more years than i care to admit (> 20). About 10 years ago, i began to have problems with my hands and wrists. I thought about buying a wrist brace until a friend recommended that i buy a split keyboard (i think microsoft calls it "natural"?). It immediately cleared up the problems with my hands and wrists.
About 5 years ago i began to experience problems with my right hand. I shifted the mouse to my left side and, voila!, the problem went away. Now i have absolutely no problem shifting between a left and right sided mouse. However, it's made me appreciate that many of the "hot" keys (cut, copy, paste, etc.) were specified by right-handed people using a right-sided mouse.
At $5 per month, that's $60 per year. Given that Aubrey de Grey figures we can live for 500 to 1000 years, it seems to me that a $12,000 fine is cheap, although RIAA is requesting the money up front.
I remember reading a report about 10 years ago about a group of researchers trying to prove that a given conference was bogus. The group generated 4 papers (including a random one) to see which among them would be accepted. My favorite was entitled:
Oh my gosh. Let me get this right. There is no other system that can process HTML like IE? There is no other interface for display of web pages except IE. There is no ability in an operating system to attach a processing module to a data (actually file) type. IE is unique in the world with the ability to render pages.
How surprising.
I'm running something OTHER than IE, and my windows system hasn't crashed because of this. So, i'm still confused:
Windows doesn't appear to require IE.
IE uses only publically available interfaces
And yet
IE is an integral element of Windows.
... there are no Operating System APIs that IE uses that are not documented on MSDN as part of the platform SDK and available to other browsers and any other software that runs on Windows..
Then how is it that...
IE is part of the Windows Operating System so that parts of the OS and other applications can rely on the functionality and APIs being present.
These two statements seem to contradict each other. Either:
It's part of the OS and uses "internal" or protected calls that provide it a significant advantage OR
It uses the exact same interface as any other program in which case it can be pulled out and replaced without affecting anything else in the OS.
I really wish that you, you the nerdy Slashdot reader who SHOULD have some command of what is a reasoned arguement, would PLEASE STOP slandering Gore about the internet.
As a post below states, Gore was critical in the passage of an education funding bill that was instrumental in development of the internet infrastructure. And, as i recall, the bill was passed in 1989, well before the world wide web
Let's save the cheap stupid shots for the Bill O'Reilly Show
May i echo that i, too, would buy a Tivo were it not for the fees. I figure i've already paid for the hardware, why should i pay for the software? I KNOW when and what i want to record -- why is Tivo helping out with this.
If i actually watched tv (i don't, but the kids do), i would probably build a DVR myself. As such, i don't think it's worth the time.
From the sound of it, the guy did an exhautive search on the trees of all puzzles which were 4x4.
And incredibly so, he did it in Haskell (crowd gasps!), a functional programming language which requires recursive execution of algorithms. What was it, 50 lines of code? 75?
What impresses me is how this guy got so many column inches in the Economist. I need better marketting...
The weirdest naming i saw was while trying to help an undergraduate work on a program:
one = 4 two = 3 three = one + two
The benefit is that you're pretty sure not to run out of variable names. The downside is that this is a real problem to try to follow after a VERY short time.
The record shows that Mr. Gore did a lot more for your internet connection than you're giving him credit for. Mr. Gore didn't invent networks or protocols or browsers. He gave you commercial-free bandwidth.
The most recent IEEE Spectrum (Nov. 2004) has an article about their success in predicting technology over the past 40 years (it's their 40th anniversary issue).
The 1989 entry (pg. 79) is The Internet. The text:
Sometimes all you have to do is unlock the barn door--the hourse will amble out, and the cart will follow. When it came to the horse that would turn into the Internet, Bob Lucky wasn't worried about where it would go--he just wanted to be sure he was along for the ride.
In September 1989, two years before any commercial activity on the Internet and four years before the graphical Web, the plucky Lucky, then a Bell Labs research director and still Spectrum's in-house sage, wrote: "A bill bending before the United States Congress, sponsored by Senator Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn), would authorize the construction of a nationwide gigabit network to connect educational and research institutes. The issue that keeps being raised is: what would a user do with a gigabit data link?"
Lucky's answer was simple. "We are not very good at prediciting uses until the actual service becomes available. I am not worried; we will think of something when it happens."
At that time, 56K was sufficient for research; those home users who existed were getting by with 300 to 1440 Baud. (Even today, many users still survive on dial-up.) Of course, someone would have gotten the idea to fund a high speed network for commercial use. However, it almost certainly wouldn't look like the one that got funded for educational and research use, though. Necessarily so, it would have been immediately organized to generate an ROI for the investors who paid for it. Who knows? Maybe SPAM would have been called: COMMERCIAL CONTENT?
Gore's contribution wasn't technical, but if you've been paying attention you'll know that the technical problems are almost always the easiest to solve. The Internet as we know it today wouldn't exist without high bandwidth, inexpensive data pipes, and Mr. Gore generated the cash to have those built. I think he deserves a little credit for the significance of the contribution he made.
And alchemy is.. the transmutation of matter. Which is what nuclear fission and fusion is.
I recall a quote where Newton wrote that he just needed a bigger fire to accomplish the feat. I read that to say that he understood that he needed more applied energy. It took another couple of hundred years to organize it.
I recall a similar "automation gone wild" story (urban myth?) about the Airbus having a "load balancing" algorithm for fuel. If one side had more than the other, it would pump fuel to balance. Problem was - there was a leak on the one side. So the plane kept supplying ready fuel to leak out. As the story went, the pilot had no override to prevent the exchange, and the plane became dangerously short of fuel.
Smalltalk supports objects as its atomic data structure (it doesn't suffer the dicotomy between "atomic" and composite objects like Java), and
these objects are in the heap (are not merely kept on the program's stack frame), and
the VM has the ability to create, destroy and print objects
so that Smalltalk demonstrates both an implementation of management of data objects and (at least) an implicit statement of their value.
Using your "bridge" metaphor, the Kodak patent seems more like the case where thousands of bridges had been built and then i suddenly i come along and declare: Bridges are useful for crossing rivers and other gaps that separate ridge-like geographic locations... and then proceed to describe how to build the bridge. So, suddenly, i'm in control of building bridges because i've articulated the obvious.
I've looked throught the three patents (no i have not studied them), but the claims are stating the desirability of using libraries of functions to support operations on composite objects. Smalltalk had gazillions of objects created/printed/destroyed, so it had been done for at least a dozen years before the patent was filed. It's hard not to see how these capabilities aren't part of the structure of the Smalltalk VM, and hence represent prior art.
Of course, IANAL, nor am i a patent examiner. But it might be useful to check out flavors of Smalltalk to contrast. (Note, patent 5,421,012, which is a continuation of the other two, specifically references the Aug. 1981 issue of Byte magazine for its in-depth coverage of Smalltalk.)
However, given that Smalltalk was the original object oriented language, it would seem to me that their methods for effecting operations on objects predate those claimed in the patent. That is, an object represents a data type which has code fragments associated with the datatype.
The patent claims to be innovative in that it applies operators/operations to a composite datatype as opposed to atomic datatypes which reside on a given architecture (int, real, etc.)
If smalltalk supported composite objects, some variant of it optimized object operations, which implies to me an implementation in a VM.
(Now i'd better go back and study the Kodak patents. Sigh, and i wanted to get some real work done.)
I read through claims on the last one. It appears to me that they're claiming that Object Oriented VM behavior is not-obvious and therefore worthy of the patent. I think the Smalltalk VM is a perfect example of (functionally equivalent) prior art.
I should have gone to law school. It's obviously easier to get rich doing that than actually producing anything of value.
I don't care what topic you choose to skewer, but it's remarkably easy to take any text/subject more than 10 years old and show how it's antiquated.
What a surprise!
I heartily agree that this article is stupid.
In the late 1960s, few people KNEW about Moore's law, and our field hadn't been around long enough for people to be able to watch the trajectory of miniaturization. To mock systems engineers who needed to factor in systems administrators for the VERY BIG 360/370 systems simply because you have TWO machines under your desk tells me that you are both immature and thoughtless in your perceptions.
To take another tack... you cannot possibly understand the importance of Moore's law if you can't appreciate what engineers in the 1960s needed to consider and do in comparison to what we have to do today. The author's attitude merely advises me that he is ill equipped to understand and act upon the accelerating changes that we are now experiencing.
Nonsense. If you have been programming at all for the last 25 years, i suspect it might take yo u at most a month to be able to write HP assembly code as well as you used to.
I think it's interesting that noone points out that Bill doesn't even MAKE hardware (aside from his XBox, which i don't think he includes in this model). So it's easy to give someone else's something away for free.
I mean, at least SUN has a hardware manufacturing arm, so they're at least offering SOMETHING for nothing, whereas Bill's only offering nothing for nothing.
Clever marketing. And, if they repeat the mantra enough times, who knows? Maybe people will believe it.
The 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to ANTONIO CAETANO DE ABREU FREIRE EGAS MONIZ for his work showning that pre-frontal lobotomies were effective in controlling behavior for certain psychoses.
Although i would absolutely agree with you that homosexuality is not a psychological problem, i think it's safe to say that spending months extracting cyanide from apple pits with the intension of suicide is an indication of a psychological problem. Wouldn't you agree?
Slashdot Mirror
About 5 years ago i began to experience problems with my right hand. I shifted the mouse to my left side and, voila!, the problem went away. Now i have absolutely no problem shifting between a left and right sided mouse. However, it's made me appreciate that many of the "hot" keys (cut, copy, paste, etc.) were specified by right-handed people using a right-sided mouse.
At $5 per month, that's $60 per year. Given that Aubrey de Grey figures we can live for 500 to 1000 years, it seems to me that a $12,000 fine is cheap, although RIAA is requesting the money up front.
How surprising.
I'm running something OTHER than IE, and my windows system hasn't crashed because of this. So, i'm still confused:
Sorry. I don't buy it.As a post below states, Gore was critical in the passage of an education funding bill that was instrumental in development of the internet infrastructure. And, as i recall, the bill was passed in 1989, well before the world wide web
Let's save the cheap stupid shots for the Bill O'Reilly Show
May i echo that i, too, would buy a Tivo were it not for the fees. I figure i've already paid for the hardware, why should i pay for the software? I KNOW when and what i want to record -- why is Tivo helping out with this. If i actually watched tv (i don't, but the kids do), i would probably build a DVR myself. As such, i don't think it's worth the time.
metaphors are suspect.
I could easily sling a hundred images that would support the parent's question (ever hear the parable of the Grasshopper and the Ant?)
The devil is "in the details".
And incredibly so, he did it in Haskell (crowd gasps!), a functional programming language which requires recursive execution of algorithms. What was it, 50 lines of code? 75?
What impresses me is how this guy got so many column inches in the Economist. I need better marketting...
The most recent IEEE Spectrum (Nov. 2004) has an article about their success in predicting technology over the past 40 years (it's their 40th anniversary issue).
The 1989 entry (pg. 79) is The Internet. The text:
At that time, 56K was sufficient for research; those home users who existed were getting by with 300 to 1440 Baud. (Even today, many users still survive on dial-up.) Of course, someone would have gotten the idea to fund a high speed network for commercial use. However, it almost certainly wouldn't look like the one that got funded for educational and research use, though. Necessarily so, it would have been immediately organized to generate an ROI for the investors who paid for it. Who knows? Maybe SPAM would have been called: COMMERCIAL CONTENT?
Gore's contribution wasn't technical, but if you've been paying attention you'll know that the technical problems are almost always the easiest to solve. The Internet as we know it today wouldn't exist without high bandwidth, inexpensive data pipes, and Mr. Gore generated the cash to have those built. I think he deserves a little credit for the significance of the contribution he made.
I recall a quote where Newton wrote that he just needed a bigger fire to accomplish the feat. I read that to say that he understood that he needed more applied energy. It took another couple of hundred years to organize it.
In a heartbeat.
I recall a similar "automation gone wild" story (urban myth?) about the Airbus having a "load balancing" algorithm for fuel. If one side had more than the other, it would pump fuel to balance. Problem was - there was a leak on the one side. So the plane kept supplying ready fuel to leak out. As the story went, the pilot had no override to prevent the exchange, and the plane became dangerously short of fuel.
- Smalltalk supports objects as its atomic data structure (it doesn't suffer the dicotomy between "atomic" and composite objects like Java), and
- these objects are in the heap (are not merely kept on the program's stack frame), and
- the VM has the ability to create, destroy and print objects
so that Smalltalk demonstrates both an implementation of management of data objects and (at least) an implicit statement of their value.Using your "bridge" metaphor, the Kodak patent seems more like the case where thousands of bridges had been built and then i suddenly i come along and declare: Bridges are useful for crossing rivers and other gaps that separate ridge-like geographic locations ... and then proceed to describe how to build the bridge. So, suddenly, i'm in control of building bridges because i've articulated the obvious.
I've looked throught the three patents (no i have not studied them), but the claims are stating the desirability of using libraries of functions to support operations on composite objects. Smalltalk had gazillions of objects created/printed/destroyed, so it had been done for at least a dozen years before the patent was filed. It's hard not to see how these capabilities aren't part of the structure of the Smalltalk VM, and hence represent prior art.
Of course, IANAL, nor am i a patent examiner. But it might be useful to check out flavors of Smalltalk to contrast. (Note, patent 5,421,012, which is a continuation of the other two, specifically references the Aug. 1981 issue of Byte magazine for its in-depth coverage of Smalltalk.)
However, given that Smalltalk was the original object oriented language, it would seem to me that their methods for effecting operations on objects predate those claimed in the patent. That is, an object represents a data type which has code fragments associated with the datatype.
The patent claims to be innovative in that it applies operators/operations to a composite datatype as opposed to atomic datatypes which reside on a given architecture (int, real, etc.)
If smalltalk supported composite objects, some variant of it optimized object operations, which implies to me an implementation in a VM.
(Now i'd better go back and study the Kodak patents. Sigh, and i wanted to get some real work done.)
I read through claims on the last one. It appears to me that they're claiming that Object Oriented VM behavior is not-obvious and therefore worthy of the patent. I think the Smalltalk VM is a perfect example of (functionally equivalent) prior art.
I should have gone to law school. It's obviously easier to get rich doing that than actually producing anything of value.
Oh, so you're pointing out that they solved the easy part of the problem, ehh?
If you could predict when the company folds and goes out of business, does that mean that you can compute the transitive closure?
What a surprise!
I heartily agree that this article is stupid.
In the late 1960s, few people KNEW about Moore's law, and our field hadn't been around long enough for people to be able to watch the trajectory of miniaturization. To mock systems engineers who needed to factor in systems administrators for the VERY BIG 360/370 systems simply because you have TWO machines under your desk tells me that you are both immature and thoughtless in your perceptions.
To take another tack ... you cannot possibly understand the importance of Moore's law if you can't appreciate what engineers in the 1960s needed to consider and do in comparison to what we have to do today. The author's attitude merely advises me that he is ill equipped to understand and act upon the accelerating changes that we are now experiencing.
The bigger question is: why would you want to?
I mean, at least SUN has a hardware manufacturing arm, so they're at least offering SOMETHING for nothing, whereas Bill's only offering nothing for nothing.
Clever marketing. And, if they repeat the mantra enough times, who knows? Maybe people will believe it.
xxx
The 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to ANTONIO CAETANO DE ABREU FREIRE EGAS MONIZ for his work showning that pre-frontal lobotomies were effective in controlling behavior for certain psychoses.
Although i would absolutely agree with you that homosexuality is not a psychological problem, i think it's safe to say that spending months extracting cyanide from apple pits with the intension of suicide is an indication of a psychological problem. Wouldn't you agree?