No, you're not missing anything. Rigid structures, after a puncture, can provide a strong, even surface around small punctures against which a patch may be applied, and against which it may adhere, and seal. Inflated structures depend on surface-equalized pressure to keep the surface taut, and once punctured, the structure bulges outwards around the tear; the larger the tear, the less likely it is to provide a good seating surface for the sealant. I'm talking about very tiny tears here; larger tears will decompress the area too fast to be repaired before the surfaces loses all rigidity, and the smaller the inflatable is, the faster it will decompress. Neither rigid or inflatable structures can stop a micro-meteorite with one layer, but only the rigid single-layer structure has the built-in integrity to be re-sealable with ease and speed. That's not to say that what NASA has in mind is a one-layer structure; but without specifics, such speculation is not unreasonable.
I prefer self-healing designs, myself; a sandwich of outer insulator, sandwiched goo, and inner shell. The almost liquid goo reacts on losing oxygen, or on sudden temperature change (either way) by turning into an extremely viscous and sticky substance that will plug anything short of a dime sized hole and then hardens (likely if you've had a dime-sized or larger incoming, there's nothing left inside the structure but a crater anyway.) NASA is looking for light-to-transport, and who can blame them. We can't afford space travel when we're busy making war in Iraq; you can only accumulate debt at a certain rate before people get antsy.
In fact, buy it with windows (let them drive the cost down for you) and then install linux over it. Now you have a cheaper linux machine. I don't see the problem, really. Plus you have the pleasure of destroying a windows installation... that's kind of... priceless.
If you were going to go to that kind of trouble, why not buy a chip (or entire board) designed to be a DSP? Why go the FPGA route? Not trying to be nasty, I assume you have a reason for suggesting this, I just don't know what it is.
You use ambient sound instead of radiating a signal yourself, and you try to resolve the entire environment, rather than just the sound emitting elements in the environment. This makes you a lot harder to detect; it also makes resolving what is going on a lot more difficult. Hence the need for lots of CPU power. In the water or in the air. Passive sonar - at least typically - is intended to resolve (for instance) a ship or a weapon that is emitting noise. But the sea is emitting noise all the time - waves, fish burping, whale calls, shrimp clicking - all kinds of noise, really. Using that noise as the detecting signal is the trick, and it isn't very similar to normal sonar, in terms of what kind of computations or results are required. Classic sonar gives you a range and bearing; this kind of thing is aimed at giving you an actual picture of the environment. It's a lot harder to do, but man, is it cool.
I don't know why people insist on solving all kinds of problems with PC hardware when much more efficient solutions (in terms of performance and developer effort) are available.
Simple: they aren't available. PC's don't typically come with DSPs. But they do come with graphics, and if you can use the GPU for things like this, it's a nice dovetail. For someone like that radio manufacturer, no need to force the consumer to buy more hardware. It's already there.
In other news, what was presumed to be junk DNA in the human genome has been decoded. It turns out it contains a message: "Help - I'm trapped in a creature factory."
it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications
It might be hard, but then again, it might be worthwhile. For instance (I'm a ham radio operator) I ran into a sampling shortwave radio receiver the other day. Thing samples from the antenna at 60+ MHz, thereby producing a stream of 14-bit data that can resolve everything happening below 30 MHz, or in other words, the entire shortwave spectrum and longwave and so on basically down to DC.
Now, a radio like this requires that the signal be processed; first you separate it from the rest, then you demodulate it, then you apply things like notch filters (or you can do that prior to demodulation, that's very nice) you build an automatic gain control to handle amplitude swings, provide a way to vary the bandwidth and move the filter skirts (low and high) independently... you might like to produce a "panadapter" display of the spectrum around the signal of interest where the is a graph that lays out signal strengths for a defined distance up and down spectrum... you might want to demodulate more than one signal at once (say, a FAX transmission into a map on the one hand, and a voice transmission of the weather on the other.) And so on - I could really go on for a while.
The thing is, as with all signal processing, the more you try to do with a real-time signal, the more resources you have to dedicate. And this isn't audio, or at least, not at the early stages; a 60+ MHz stream of data requires quite a bit more in terms of how fast you have to do things to it than does an audio stream at, say, 44 KHz.
Bit signal processing typically uses fairly simple math; a lot of it, but you can do a lot without having to resort to real craziness. A teraflop of processing that isn't even happening on the CPU is pretty attractive. You'd have to get the data to it, and I'm thinking that would be pretty resource intensive, but between the main CPU and the GPU you should have enough "ooomph" left over to make a beautiful and functional radio interface.
There is an interesting set of tasks in the signal processing space; forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging) requires lots and lots of signal processing. Be a kick to have it in a relatively standard box, with easily replaceable components. Maybe you could do the same thing above-ground; after all, it's still sound and there are still reflections that can tell you a lot (just observe a bat.)
The cool thing about signal processing is that a lot of it is like graphics, in a way; generally, you set up some horrible sequence of things to do to your data, and then thrash each sample just like you did the last one.
Anyway, it just struck me that no matter how hard it is to program, it could certainly be useful for some of these really resource intensive tasks.
First, the patent system, regardless of its flaws, does encourage disclosure of inventions and eventually makes them public domain. In 20 years, regardless of how the owner has used, not used, or abused the patent, the invention claimed in that patent will be public domain, and usable by all with no royalties or restrictions. And even during those 20 years, society can still use that knowledge for further experimentation, or improve on the original invention.
Are you asserting here that the only way to encourage disclosure is to ensure exclusivity? Because that seems to be the heart of your argument, and the very idea is specious. Disclosure - sharing - could be the heart of a no-patents system. Disclosure could result in reward, either from also-rans in the same work domain, or from society in general, or customers, or some combination thereof. Disclosure could be information trading; disclosure could be returned in an area entirely disjoint, such as a study on something else one is interested in. Tax breaks. Import and Export duty breaks. The possibilities are mind boggling; and the fact that other possible ways exist to encourage disclosure and innovation means that these cannot be justification for keeping the current system.
Second, and on a related note, abolishing the patent system will encourage the hoarding of knowledge.
Again, you assume that no other mechanism can be put in place to encourage the dissemination. That's a specious assumption for two reasons. First, because the fact is, there are other ways to do so. Second, because you assume that secrets embodied in devices and software distributed to the public are easily kept. They are not. While you might think that hoarding is likely, the fact that it is very difficult to do makes it unlikely. Better to encourage sharing - in any of a wide variety of ways, or a combination of them.
You are wrong here, the US Patent system is the only major system in the world that gives priority for a patent to the first to invent.
Look, this is a distinction without a difference. Why? Because: Joe invents Widget. Takes two years, is very careful, writes it all down. Jane invents same Widget. Blue skies it, gets it right, doesn't make any notes, gets it done in a year. Joe started first; Jane started later, but still beats Joe to final design, invention, filing, whatever the "first" metric is - first to invent, first to file, first to pay, doesn't matter. First in something. The point is, even though Joe's work was entirely above board, careful, cost just as much, was just as legitimate (perhaps more so), if Jane gets the rights and locks Joe out, Joe, in a word, has been 100% robbed of his time and effort. As is everyone else who might have been working on this; there may be a lot more than two people involved. This is why the system is inherently unfair and cannot be made to be fair under a "first" metric, no matter what that metric is. First has zero relationship to legitimate effort extended that deserves some combination of recognition, recompense, acknowledgment, parity. First is, in fact, a metric more related to coin tossing than to legitimacy. Time is not a uniformly available commodity to all inventors, nor is there any assurance that the starting line was the same, nor is there even any assurance that the same problems were approached and solved by both (or many) parties on the way to the finish line, whatever the PTO determines that to consist of.
I agree here, patent litigation is inherently expensive and does favor those with deep pockets, but unless you want to do away with the patent system entirely, I see no way around this.
I'm sorry if I was unclear. Yes, I'd be delighted to see it done away with entirely, with mechanisms that reward positive behavior replacing the current mechanism that rewards negative behavior.
For example, pharmaceutical patents, as odious as a concept as they are, seem to be the thing that pays the bills for the research, and without them there would be a lot less medicine being developed.
Well, you need to look at why it is so expensive to develop pharmaceuticals. Where are the costs? First, there are the government hoops to jump through, the approvals that need to be gotten. The presumption there is that the pharma companies can't operate without big brother watching over them. I disagree. I think we can do away with that and make them cover their own asses; costs for problems caused, rather than hoops and delays made of paper and bureaucrats. Let them find the most efficient way to make good drugs. Government isn't it.
Second, lawyers. Pharma is subject to lawsuits at a rate one can only boggle at. They try to help, supply drugs that really do work very well, someone is not your average patient, and bang, there goes a hundred million bucks. They have to have huge slush to cover this stuff. I don't see that this is reasonable.
Should people who, through no fault of their own, get hosed by taking some drug that says it is for what they apparently have, be left to flounder? No. Should they make huge legal messes? Also no. Society should just take them under its wing, help 'em out, and move along. Life is full of risks. We should ameliorate them, but we should not indemnify against them, or worse, reward running into them.
Third; like everyone else, they have to allow for patent fights. Get rid of that. Want to make a drug? Go ahead and make it. Design the system so that there is more of a percentage in sharing the idea than hiding it. There are several ways to go about that I can think of (pooling risk, pooling R&D and results, pooling or staging manufacturing capabilities), I'm sure others, far more clever than I am, could do better.
Once you pull the costs inherent in the way pharma is forced to do business, you've got an entirely new business model. That's what I'd like to see happen. Patents are part of those costs; they only benefit one of the players at a time, and perhaps not even then if they have to defend. Redesign the system so that new ideas and inventions benefit the players in a broad sense. Knowledge is a poor choice for "gimme-gimme" behaviors, it seems to me.
ike the idea of the thing being patented *actually being a physical thing* instead of just information, a process, or a way of processing information, but that doesn't seem to go far enough to prevent silly hardware patents.
Nothing can prevent silly patents, because there is no metric that can be used to decide what is obvious. Here we are, 200 years into the system, and "obvious" and silly patents abound. The system does not work. Not on that level, and not on many others. Lawyers excepted.
Out of curiosity, when you've created a system where no one makes any money off invention, how exactly does that help the mysterious "actual inventor" and the slow guy? Being as how you're such a whirlwind of innovation, presumably you have a plan for that?
I don't need a plan for it; just as there is room in the marketplace for many hamburger vendors, many shampoo vendors, many auto parts manufacturers, there is room for more than one vendor of image compression formats, encryption tools, clever little hammers, drills and saws, IC fabricators, drugs to alleviate this or that disease or symptom, and so on.
I disagree with the presumption that first should equal only, or control. First should just be... first. You want differentiation? Fine. There are as many ways to differentiate as you like. Do it on manufacturing quality. Reliability. Warranty. Customer service. Features. Longevity. Multiple use. Asthetics. Storability. Weather resistance. Efficiency. Portability. Price. Financing. Even delivery. You know - things that separate products from one another, rather than producers.
Also, I didn't postulate (much less create) a system where "no one makes any money off invention", I implied a system where lawyers don't, and inventors and producers do. If you want to challenge me, challenge me on where I stand, not under some strawman you cooked up. It was your contention that no one would make any money; so if that position needs defending, you are the one who needs to defend it.
Other than the fact that this guy is out of his bloody mind?
Software patents: totally ridiculous, and putting a huge hurt on an area that should be boiling with creativity. Creatively speaking, this time in our history offers more creative ground and lower barriers to entry than ever before in our history. The primary barrier, aside from your own intellectual resources, is the patent system. It is a barrier to creativity, and furthermore, it is a barrier to progress.
Hardware patents: First guy with the money into the patent system and with the wherewithal to defend the patent wins. Nothing to do with the actual inventor; totally centered about money. Anything wrong with that? Only that it suppresses any inventor without corporate backing, which ought to be a crime in and of itself.
And oh yeah, the other inventor(s) who worked on this? A second late to file, and they are well and truly locked out. Is that fair? Is that even slightly fair?
The US patent system is a well of misery, corporate bootlicking, and "let's crush the little guy" methodologies. Sure, everyone else looks to the US system, because it is a system designed to turn over money, not encourage innovation. The fact that it manages to encourage at least corporations to innovate can be considered a side effect. It certainly isn't the main goal of the system, which is to feed the legal profession a regular set of juicy, meaty bones.
I'll tell you what is "fundamentally wrong"; The US patent system is fundamentally wrong. Why? Because it is a system that guarantees that anyone but the 1st to the gate is hammered; because it is a system that guarantees that anyone without deep pockets cannot actually be protected (read, encouraged) by the system; because it discourages innovation. The number of devices/programs you can actually create without running smack into someone's fool patent is very near zero. So much for encouraging innovation. Now lawyers... they are encouraged. Oh yes. Very much so.
The copyright system isn't doing a lot better, but that's a different issue, somewhat.
Small indie labels really need some kind of recommendation system. Genres aren't enough
Well, speaking for myself, they are for me. My taste does fall into particular genres, but as to conforming with other people's picks within the genre... not so much. I just want to find, to taste, rock, blues, metal without screaming (a tough find these days... the upside being these young pups will eventually blow out their throats and then I can enjoy their music once they are forced to shut the hell up. Screaming, IMHO, is not music. Maybe as a one-phrase accent, but for Darwin's sake, not the entire bloody song.)
Anyway, I'm sure it'd be useful to others, as would other features. But until they at *least* get genres, that site will be on my "sucks" list.
I went to the site linked, and found that the only way to select music was by the artist's name. Considering that I didn't recognize a single artist, this left me totally in the dark as to what the musical genre was, and the only way that you could get a sense of the musical genre was to select each artist, one by one, where sometimes a note would tell you - but often not.
I would be more than willing to support a site like this if they make it reasonably easy. Even Wham-a-lart takes the time to sort music by genre so shoppers don't have to weed through all the styles they don't like to find something to listen to.
When they get the genre thing figured out, track preview and sale by track are the next items required to get them up to the bare-bones standards of online music sales.
Tried OO running over SSH to my linux box and attempted to copy/paste, didn't work.
Not sure why you'd expect it to. That's not the Mac version; why would it be aware of the Mac clipboard? Install OO's version for the Mac, use Apple-C and Apple-V and then it'll work - as I said, it works here and exactly as I described it, no workarounds whatsoever.
Never had to worry about the clipboard on Windows or Linux...
Worry? Worry? Apple C, Apple V. Same as per usual in Aqua. What worry?
Wheres my drag and drop support on OS X's X11 by the way?
As far as I know, there isn't any. Inasmuch as it is simply a substitute for file movement and access, you'll just have to grit your teeth and use the file dialogs. Incomprehensible as it may be, it turns out that through a freak of coincidence, this is a fully functional means of managing files and documents. Assuming your goal is to get work done. If not, why by all means, continue to complain. Perhaps Apple will read your comments and laugh^whelp.
More specifically, I just went into OO (without xclipboard running), typed a sentence, selected a couple of words, pressed Apple-C, switched to TextEdit (an Aqua app) and pressed Apple-V, and there it was. All is not doom and gloom my friend. The clipboard works. You just have to learn how these two systems interact, and we're talking very simple issues.
Yeah, my perspective is one where we develop all our own tools; so the underlying database is the the issue. If you're stuck using canned solutions... then you're stuck. We never liked to get all bound up depending on others. It never seems to work out in our favor in the long run.
Oh, come on! We're not talking about a bunch of geeky UI nazis, we're talking about people who need to get work done. OO works fine on a Mac, Aqua is 100% irrelevant - it's just eye candy. The windows open on the desktop, the programs are 100% functional, work transparently within the Mac filesystem - trust me, no one who has to write a letter or build a spreadsheet or hook a database into a report is looking at how "gemmy" the widgets are or bitching about the rendering of the title bar, or freaking out because the menus aren't all jammed into Aqua's top-of-screen location. These things are worth a single instance of "oh, so that's how this works" and nothing else. Not if they want to keep their job around here, anyway.
The only legitimate bitch I hear is from the people we got Powerbooks for; the two-finger mouse emulation doesn't do a good enough job (there are mousing ops you can't do with it) and for those people, we just hand them a real mouse and they go back to work quietly, problem solved. Though I am perfectly willing to call this an Apple foul-up; two buttons have demonstrated a great deal of usefulness for a long, long time now, and Apple is just being needlessly stubborn about the portables. They'd be well advised to put a keypad in the Macbook Pros, too. Lot of space going to speakers that sound like they're in a bag made of tinfoil anyway.
The day we finished our move to PostgreSQL was the day I said goodbye to a lot of headaches. Backing up PgSQL is a lark, as is restoring it; there are no purchase or upgrade costs; it is really robust and eminently dependable, and it is hooked into just about every language and scripting system you could name. And of course, MS Office was replaced wholesale with OO. Also zero cost, works just fine.
When we have to run Windows apps, Parallels covers the ground. But that requirement is becoming less and less common as we learn more about our new Macs. Our own application is pretty well tied into Windows in terms of the windowing and graphics API, but that's coming along too.
Changing from Windows to Mac incurs other costs, such as having to purchase new copies of Office suites
Oh, I don't know. When we switched here (just 30 machines), we simply switched to Open Office. No purchase cost at all, and "training" was not required; the few people who had highly technical needs were technical enough to work the issues out themselves in a day or so. I mean really, if you can't run an office suite... well, you won't be working for us, anyway.
The only real problem we've had with Macs is everyone wants a huge monitor now.
It seems to me that if the IT department (Ok, the undergrad who has to act like an IT department) is leaving IE as the default browser on those machines, you're getting pretty much what you deserve. Get them to put Firefox on there and the general level of noise and hijacking will settle down quite a bit.
Or you can go Mac and it'll settle down to zero and stay there.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Where are your papers?"
Land of the free^wregistered, home of the brave^wslave.
Ooooh! Shiny! Wait... awwwww...
No, you're not missing anything. Rigid structures, after a puncture, can provide a strong, even surface around small punctures against which a patch may be applied, and against which it may adhere, and seal. Inflated structures depend on surface-equalized pressure to keep the surface taut, and once punctured, the structure bulges outwards around the tear; the larger the tear, the less likely it is to provide a good seating surface for the sealant. I'm talking about very tiny tears here; larger tears will decompress the area too fast to be repaired before the surfaces loses all rigidity, and the smaller the inflatable is, the faster it will decompress. Neither rigid or inflatable structures can stop a micro-meteorite with one layer, but only the rigid single-layer structure has the built-in integrity to be re-sealable with ease and speed. That's not to say that what NASA has in mind is a one-layer structure; but without specifics, such speculation is not unreasonable.
I prefer self-healing designs, myself; a sandwich of outer insulator, sandwiched goo, and inner shell. The almost liquid goo reacts on losing oxygen, or on sudden temperature change (either way) by turning into an extremely viscous and sticky substance that will plug anything short of a dime sized hole and then hardens (likely if you've had a dime-sized or larger incoming, there's nothing left inside the structure but a crater anyway.) NASA is looking for light-to-transport, and who can blame them. We can't afford space travel when we're busy making war in Iraq; you can only accumulate debt at a certain rate before people get antsy.
In fact, buy it with windows (let them drive the cost down for you) and then install linux over it. Now you have a cheaper linux machine. I don't see the problem, really. Plus you have the pleasure of destroying a windows installation... that's kind of... priceless.
If you were going to go to that kind of trouble, why not buy a chip (or entire board) designed to be a DSP? Why go the FPGA route? Not trying to be nasty, I assume you have a reason for suggesting this, I just don't know what it is.
Yes, I have. Great pointers; thanks.
You use ambient sound instead of radiating a signal yourself, and you try to resolve the entire environment, rather than just the sound emitting elements in the environment. This makes you a lot harder to detect; it also makes resolving what is going on a lot more difficult. Hence the need for lots of CPU power. In the water or in the air. Passive sonar - at least typically - is intended to resolve (for instance) a ship or a weapon that is emitting noise. But the sea is emitting noise all the time - waves, fish burping, whale calls, shrimp clicking - all kinds of noise, really. Using that noise as the detecting signal is the trick, and it isn't very similar to normal sonar, in terms of what kind of computations or results are required. Classic sonar gives you a range and bearing; this kind of thing is aimed at giving you an actual picture of the environment. It's a lot harder to do, but man, is it cool.
Simple: they aren't available. PC's don't typically come with DSPs. But they do come with graphics, and if you can use the GPU for things like this, it's a nice dovetail. For someone like that radio manufacturer, no need to force the consumer to buy more hardware. It's already there.
In other news, what was presumed to be junk DNA in the human genome has been decoded. It turns out it contains a message: "Help - I'm trapped in a creature factory."
It might be hard, but then again, it might be worthwhile. For instance (I'm a ham radio operator) I ran into a sampling shortwave radio receiver the other day. Thing samples from the antenna at 60+ MHz, thereby producing a stream of 14-bit data that can resolve everything happening below 30 MHz, or in other words, the entire shortwave spectrum and longwave and so on basically down to DC.
Now, a radio like this requires that the signal be processed; first you separate it from the rest, then you demodulate it, then you apply things like notch filters (or you can do that prior to demodulation, that's very nice) you build an automatic gain control to handle amplitude swings, provide a way to vary the bandwidth and move the filter skirts (low and high) independently... you might like to produce a "panadapter" display of the spectrum around the signal of interest where the is a graph that lays out signal strengths for a defined distance up and down spectrum... you might want to demodulate more than one signal at once (say, a FAX transmission into a map on the one hand, and a voice transmission of the weather on the other.) And so on - I could really go on for a while.
The thing is, as with all signal processing, the more you try to do with a real-time signal, the more resources you have to dedicate. And this isn't audio, or at least, not at the early stages; a 60+ MHz stream of data requires quite a bit more in terms of how fast you have to do things to it than does an audio stream at, say, 44 KHz.
Bit signal processing typically uses fairly simple math; a lot of it, but you can do a lot without having to resort to real craziness. A teraflop of processing that isn't even happening on the CPU is pretty attractive. You'd have to get the data to it, and I'm thinking that would be pretty resource intensive, but between the main CPU and the GPU you should have enough "ooomph" left over to make a beautiful and functional radio interface.
There is an interesting set of tasks in the signal processing space; forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging) requires lots and lots of signal processing. Be a kick to have it in a relatively standard box, with easily replaceable components. Maybe you could do the same thing above-ground; after all, it's still sound and there are still reflections that can tell you a lot (just observe a bat.)
The cool thing about signal processing is that a lot of it is like graphics, in a way; generally, you set up some horrible sequence of things to do to your data, and then thrash each sample just like you did the last one.
Anyway, it just struck me that no matter how hard it is to program, it could certainly be useful for some of these really resource intensive tasks.
Are you asserting here that the only way to encourage disclosure is to ensure exclusivity? Because that seems to be the heart of your argument, and the very idea is specious. Disclosure - sharing - could be the heart of a no-patents system. Disclosure could result in reward, either from also-rans in the same work domain, or from society in general, or customers, or some combination thereof. Disclosure could be information trading; disclosure could be returned in an area entirely disjoint, such as a study on something else one is interested in. Tax breaks. Import and Export duty breaks. The possibilities are mind boggling; and the fact that other possible ways exist to encourage disclosure and innovation means that these cannot be justification for keeping the current system.
Again, you assume that no other mechanism can be put in place to encourage the dissemination. That's a specious assumption for two reasons. First, because the fact is, there are other ways to do so. Second, because you assume that secrets embodied in devices and software distributed to the public are easily kept. They are not. While you might think that hoarding is likely, the fact that it is very difficult to do makes it unlikely. Better to encourage sharing - in any of a wide variety of ways, or a combination of them.
Look, this is a distinction without a difference. Why? Because: Joe invents Widget. Takes two years, is very careful, writes it all down. Jane invents same Widget. Blue skies it, gets it right, doesn't make any notes, gets it done in a year. Joe started first; Jane started later, but still beats Joe to final design, invention, filing, whatever the "first" metric is - first to invent, first to file, first to pay, doesn't matter. First in something. The point is, even though Joe's work was entirely above board, careful, cost just as much, was just as legitimate (perhaps more so), if Jane gets the rights and locks Joe out, Joe, in a word, has been 100% robbed of his time and effort. As is everyone else who might have been working on this; there may be a lot more than two people involved. This is why the system is inherently unfair and cannot be made to be fair under a "first" metric, no matter what that metric is. First has zero relationship to legitimate effort extended that deserves some combination of recognition, recompense, acknowledgment, parity. First is, in fact, a metric more related to coin tossing than to legitimacy. Time is not a uniformly available commodity to all inventors, nor is there any assurance that the starting line was the same, nor is there even any assurance that the same problems were approached and solved by both (or many) parties on the way to the finish line, whatever the PTO determines that to consist of.
I'm sorry if I was unclear. Yes, I'd be delighted to see it done away with entirely, with mechanisms that reward positive behavior replacing the current mechanism that rewards negative behavior.
Well, you need to look at why it is so expensive to develop pharmaceuticals. Where are the costs? First, there are the government hoops to jump through, the approvals that need to be gotten. The presumption there is that the pharma companies can't operate without big brother watching over them. I disagree. I think we can do away with that and make them cover their own asses; costs for problems caused, rather than hoops and delays made of paper and bureaucrats. Let them find the most efficient way to make good drugs. Government isn't it.
Second, lawyers. Pharma is subject to lawsuits at a rate one can only boggle at. They try to help, supply drugs that really do work very well, someone is not your average patient, and bang, there goes a hundred million bucks. They have to have huge slush to cover this stuff. I don't see that this is reasonable.
Should people who, through no fault of their own, get hosed by taking some drug that says it is for what they apparently have, be left to flounder? No. Should they make huge legal messes? Also no. Society should just take them under its wing, help 'em out, and move along. Life is full of risks. We should ameliorate them, but we should not indemnify against them, or worse, reward running into them.
Third; like everyone else, they have to allow for patent fights. Get rid of that. Want to make a drug? Go ahead and make it. Design the system so that there is more of a percentage in sharing the idea than hiding it. There are several ways to go about that I can think of (pooling risk, pooling R&D and results, pooling or staging manufacturing capabilities), I'm sure others, far more clever than I am, could do better.
Once you pull the costs inherent in the way pharma is forced to do business, you've got an entirely new business model. That's what I'd like to see happen. Patents are part of those costs; they only benefit one of the players at a time, and perhaps not even then if they have to defend. Redesign the system so that new ideas and inventions benefit the players in a broad sense. Knowledge is a poor choice for "gimme-gimme" behaviors, it seems to me.
Nothing can prevent silly patents, because there is no metric that can be used to decide what is obvious. Here we are, 200 years into the system, and "obvious" and silly patents abound. The system does not work. Not on that level, and not on many others. Lawyers excepted.
I don't need a plan for it; just as there is room in the marketplace for many hamburger vendors, many shampoo vendors, many auto parts manufacturers, there is room for more than one vendor of image compression formats, encryption tools, clever little hammers, drills and saws, IC fabricators, drugs to alleviate this or that disease or symptom, and so on.
I disagree with the presumption that first should equal only, or control. First should just be... first. You want differentiation? Fine. There are as many ways to differentiate as you like. Do it on manufacturing quality. Reliability. Warranty. Customer service. Features. Longevity. Multiple use. Asthetics. Storability. Weather resistance. Efficiency. Portability. Price. Financing. Even delivery. You know - things that separate products from one another, rather than producers.
Also, I didn't postulate (much less create) a system where "no one makes any money off invention", I implied a system where lawyers don't, and inventors and producers do. If you want to challenge me, challenge me on where I stand, not under some strawman you cooked up. It was your contention that no one would make any money; so if that position needs defending, you are the one who needs to defend it.
Other than the fact that this guy is out of his bloody mind?
Software patents: totally ridiculous, and putting a huge hurt on an area that should be boiling with creativity. Creatively speaking, this time in our history offers more creative ground and lower barriers to entry than ever before in our history. The primary barrier, aside from your own intellectual resources, is the patent system. It is a barrier to creativity, and furthermore, it is a barrier to progress.
Hardware patents: First guy with the money into the patent system and with the wherewithal to defend the patent wins. Nothing to do with the actual inventor; totally centered about money. Anything wrong with that? Only that it suppresses any inventor without corporate backing, which ought to be a crime in and of itself.
And oh yeah, the other inventor(s) who worked on this? A second late to file, and they are well and truly locked out. Is that fair? Is that even slightly fair?
The US patent system is a well of misery, corporate bootlicking, and "let's crush the little guy" methodologies. Sure, everyone else looks to the US system, because it is a system designed to turn over money, not encourage innovation. The fact that it manages to encourage at least corporations to innovate can be considered a side effect. It certainly isn't the main goal of the system, which is to feed the legal profession a regular set of juicy, meaty bones.
I'll tell you what is "fundamentally wrong"; The US patent system is fundamentally wrong. Why? Because it is a system that guarantees that anyone but the 1st to the gate is hammered; because it is a system that guarantees that anyone without deep pockets cannot actually be protected (read, encouraged) by the system; because it discourages innovation. The number of devices/programs you can actually create without running smack into someone's fool patent is very near zero. So much for encouraging innovation. Now lawyers... they are encouraged. Oh yes. Very much so.
The copyright system isn't doing a lot better, but that's a different issue, somewhat.
Well, speaking for myself, they are for me. My taste does fall into particular genres, but as to conforming with other people's picks within the genre... not so much. I just want to find, to taste, rock, blues, metal without screaming (a tough find these days... the upside being these young pups will eventually blow out their throats and then I can enjoy their music once they are forced to shut the hell up. Screaming, IMHO, is not music. Maybe as a one-phrase accent, but for Darwin's sake, not the entire bloody song.)
Anyway, I'm sure it'd be useful to others, as would other features. But until they at *least* get genres, that site will be on my "sucks" list.
I went to the site linked, and found that the only way to select music was by the artist's name. Considering that I didn't recognize a single artist, this left me totally in the dark as to what the musical genre was, and the only way that you could get a sense of the musical genre was to select each artist, one by one, where sometimes a note would tell you - but often not.
I would be more than willing to support a site like this if they make it reasonably easy. Even Wham-a-lart takes the time to sort music by genre so shoppers don't have to weed through all the styles they don't like to find something to listen to.
When they get the genre thing figured out, track preview and sale by track are the next items required to get them up to the bare-bones standards of online music sales.
Not sure why you'd expect it to. That's not the Mac version; why would it be aware of the Mac clipboard? Install OO's version for the Mac, use Apple-C and Apple-V and then it'll work - as I said, it works here and exactly as I described it, no workarounds whatsoever.
Worry? Worry? Apple C, Apple V. Same as per usual in Aqua. What worry?
As far as I know, there isn't any. Inasmuch as it is simply a substitute for file movement and access, you'll just have to grit your teeth and use the file dialogs. Incomprehensible as it may be, it turns out that through a freak of coincidence, this is a fully functional means of managing files and documents. Assuming your goal is to get work done. If not, why by all means, continue to complain. Perhaps Apple will read your comments and laugh^whelp.
Sure it can, generally speaking: xclipboard
More specifically, I just went into OO (without xclipboard running), typed a sentence, selected a couple of words, pressed Apple-C, switched to TextEdit (an Aqua app) and pressed Apple-V, and there it was. All is not doom and gloom my friend. The clipboard works. You just have to learn how these two systems interact, and we're talking very simple issues.
Yeah, my perspective is one where we develop all our own tools; so the underlying database is the the issue. If you're stuck using canned solutions... then you're stuck. We never liked to get all bound up depending on others. It never seems to work out in our favor in the long run.
Oh, come on! We're not talking about a bunch of geeky UI nazis, we're talking about people who need to get work done. OO works fine on a Mac, Aqua is 100% irrelevant - it's just eye candy. The windows open on the desktop, the programs are 100% functional, work transparently within the Mac filesystem - trust me, no one who has to write a letter or build a spreadsheet or hook a database into a report is looking at how "gemmy" the widgets are or bitching about the rendering of the title bar, or freaking out because the menus aren't all jammed into Aqua's top-of-screen location. These things are worth a single instance of "oh, so that's how this works" and nothing else. Not if they want to keep their job around here, anyway.
The only legitimate bitch I hear is from the people we got Powerbooks for; the two-finger mouse emulation doesn't do a good enough job (there are mousing ops you can't do with it) and for those people, we just hand them a real mouse and they go back to work quietly, problem solved. Though I am perfectly willing to call this an Apple foul-up; two buttons have demonstrated a great deal of usefulness for a long, long time now, and Apple is just being needlessly stubborn about the portables. They'd be well advised to put a keypad in the Macbook Pros, too. Lot of space going to speakers that sound like they're in a bag made of tinfoil anyway.
128k MP3 here as well.
The day we finished our move to PostgreSQL was the day I said goodbye to a lot of headaches. Backing up PgSQL is a lark, as is restoring it; there are no purchase or upgrade costs; it is really robust and eminently dependable, and it is hooked into just about every language and scripting system you could name. And of course, MS Office was replaced wholesale with OO. Also zero cost, works just fine.
When we have to run Windows apps, Parallels covers the ground. But that requirement is becoming less and less common as we learn more about our new Macs. Our own application is pretty well tied into Windows in terms of the windowing and graphics API, but that's coming along too.
What? Assuming only that Xwindows is installed, OO works just fine. We run it all over the place. What are you talking about?
Oh, I don't know. When we switched here (just 30 machines), we simply switched to Open Office. No purchase cost at all, and "training" was not required; the few people who had highly technical needs were technical enough to work the issues out themselves in a day or so. I mean really, if you can't run an office suite... well, you won't be working for us, anyway.
The only real problem we've had with Macs is everyone wants a huge monitor now.
It seems to me that if the IT department (Ok, the undergrad who has to act like an IT department) is leaving IE as the default browser on those machines, you're getting pretty much what you deserve. Get them to put Firefox on there and the general level of noise and hijacking will settle down quite a bit.
Or you can go Mac and it'll settle down to zero and stay there. :)