Re:FOSS == obvious to skilled practitioner
on
Patents and the Penguin
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> Is this reasonable?
No, it has nothing to do with obviousness: it's about novelty. Quite simply, if the (so called) patented invention is already disclosed to the public, then a patent cannot be obtained for it.
In other words, the mere fact of committing code to a CVS repository already discloses it and thus whether it is obvious or not (i.e. "inventive") is irrelevant: no one can now patent it.
There are further complexities once you did deeper, but that's the basic rule.
Nice try, but Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage are recognised as the inventors of modern computing and programming. I suggest reading a bit about the architecture of the analytical, difference and related "engines" that he designed: they should remarkable similarity to a von neumann / harvard architecture (i.e. central processing units, memory banks, ALUs, etc).
Not to undervalue Alan Turing's contribution though, but he was really breaking more substantial ground in the theory of computability; which really transcends software, hardware, and the trivial implementation details.
Alan Turing actually fits alongside Newton and Eistein and those others who developed great universal insights.
"I hate to be a dick, but you are giving me the technical arguments that I'm already aware of..."
You are a dick: I gave you an economic argument.
But I agree with you, when you put the totality together, Microsoft products remain very dominant and hard to topple. Cost is perhaps really the major one in this case, because I cannot see any technical advantages other than issues over reduced administration and maintenance by IT.
> has anyone ever been able to sway non-techie management away from Office?
Try cost: rather than several thousand dollars per seat for MSOffice, services like this will offer more flexible and incremental options: e.g. pay as you go, pay per document, pay per hour, etc. There's a good question about how competitive the pricing would be.
Alternatively, rather than per-client install by IT, they just buy a dedicated "office server" and one central install for all employees to use. Reduces maintenance overheads and so on.
More interestingly, is when there are a wide range of backended plugins: e.g. you browse a template library that's really a remote library with thousands of third-party templates available. Same goes with installing new fonts. The ideal part of this is the way it becomes transparent and seamless. No longer do you have to search through an icky font website, now you just access it like any other font.
Just to place this prior art into the public domain, I hereby describe the following invention so that it may not be patentable:
a method and device for adaptive image compression
it is know that air time costs money, and it is known that compression techniques can operate at various quality levels and in return provide lower size of image.
the problem solved by this invention is the transmission of image with adaptive compression to ensure that the entire image can be transmitted within a certain time constraint.
the user specifies a time constraint, and a minimum quality level.
when the connection is established, the data rate of the connection, the quality level and the time constraint is input to the device.
if the quality level cannot be met, the user is presneted with alternate options, one of which may be termination.
the device begins compression at specified quality level, in such a way to incrementally deliver the entire image at levels of refinement: during the transmission, should the transmission rate fall, then the adaptive algorithm will adjust the compression quality level.
one embodiment of this invention is a computer program.
These buildings are highly relevant to computing, as they epitomise the contemporary state of post-modern architects that stretch the possibilities of form, e.g. Libeskind as well.
They depend a lot on advanced materials, advanced construction techniques, and importantly, advanced simulation and modelling to ensure that stress/tolerances/forces are all correct.
Previously, structures depended upon classic forms and draftsman calculated stress/force.
A few years ago in Venice Biennale, I saw the international exhibits side-by-side. The US stood out particularly (the exhibiters from UCLA) with a lot of techno-fetish - very tacticle cyber type compute relevant forms.
I don't recall exactly: maybe Horizon, definitely scandinavian. I remember because I decompiled it! What happened was that I started the demo, and unusually the disk drive kept spinning: so I turned if off which caused the demo to fail. Tested loading, then trying to start the demo and it didn't work, so curiosity, an Action Reply and an irq investigation revealed what was going on. I think it was a single part demo: the most memorable C64 demo for me because of that trick.
What's really needed is to couple the GPU and CPU in such a way that the GPU actually runs a very low level O/S, like an L4Ka style kernel (http://l4ka.org/), and becomes "just another" MP resource.
Then, on top of this low level, actually runs the UI graphics driver and so on. Other tasks can also run, but ultimately the priority is given to the UI driver.
Then, the O/S on the CPU needs to be able to know generally how to distribute tasks across to the GPU. Fairly standard for a tightly coupled MP that has shared bus memory.
Why do I say this? Because the result is
(a) if you're using an especially high performance application, the GUI runs full throttle dedicated to rendering/etc and acts as per normal;
(b) if you're not, e.g. such as when running Office or Engineering other compute intensive tasks (e.g. recoding video without displaying the video), then the GPU is just another multi processor resource to soak up cycles.
Then, CPU/GPU is just a seamless computing resource. The fantastic benefit of this is that if the O/S is designed properly, then it could allow simply buying/plugging in additional PCI (well, PCI probably not good because of low speed, perhaps AGP?) cards that are simply "additonal processors" - then you get a relatively cheaper way of putting more MP into your machine.
This concept was being used back in 1988. The Commodore 64 (1mhz 6510, a 6502 like micro processor) had a peripheral 5.25 disk drive called the 1541, which itself had a 1mhz 6510 cpu in it, connected via. a serial link.
It became common practice to introduce fast loaders: these were partially resident in the C64, and also in the 1541: effectively replacing the 1541's limited firmware.
However, demo programmers figured out how to utilise the 1541: one particular demo involved uploading program to the 1541 at start, then upon ever screen rewrite, uploading vectors to the 1541, which the 1541 would perform calculations in parallel with the C64, then at the end of the screen, the C64 fetch the results from the 1541, and incorporate them into the next screen frame.
Equally, GPU provides similar capability if so used.
> What's the problem with scribbling "www.sashdot.org" on a sheet of paper?
High density of content: potentially the semacode can store URL, name, location, lat/long and a swath of content. Meaning that even if you are not "network connected", you can still extract useful information.
This would be great for hearing/visual impaired people.
It's not that simple: forensics: examine the earliest locations of the virus, exam the nature of its source code - cross check against other source code. Granted, a dedicated genius can evade this, but not all virus writers are dedicated genius. I think there's a good analogy to standard forensics (I watch CSI, which granted is a popular misconception of what forensics is really like, but it shows some sense of the direction).
Fantastic idea, I would suggest you look at the L4Ka and related projects (http://l4ka.org/projects/hazelnut/).
Please do not create a new project from scratch: there are enough.
What is needed though is adapting existing operating systems (e.g. Linux, BSD, etc) to work in these virtualised environments. Further to this, also supporting co-ooperative virtualise environments.
Your efforts in this area would be very well looked upon.
Slashdot Mirror
> Is this reasonable?
No, it has nothing to do with obviousness: it's about novelty. Quite simply, if the (so called) patented invention is already disclosed to the public, then a patent cannot be obtained for it.
In other words, the mere fact of committing code to a CVS repository already discloses it and thus whether it is obvious or not (i.e. "inventive") is irrelevant: no one can now patent it.
There are further complexities once you did deeper, but that's the basic rule.
Nice try, but Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage are recognised as the inventors of modern computing and programming. I suggest reading a bit about the architecture of the analytical, difference and related "engines" that he designed: they should remarkable similarity to a von neumann / harvard architecture (i.e. central processing units, memory banks, ALUs, etc).
Not to undervalue Alan Turing's contribution though, but he was really breaking more substantial ground in the theory of computability; which really transcends software, hardware, and the trivial implementation details.
Alan Turing actually fits alongside Newton and Eistein and those others who developed great universal insights.
Is this the day for bad karma ? Both Nintendo and Sony put out new products that, I think, are actually aesthetically backwards design steps.
"I hate to be a dick, but you are giving me the technical arguments that I'm already aware of..."
You are a dick: I gave you an economic argument.
But I agree with you, when you put the totality together, Microsoft products remain very dominant and hard to topple. Cost is perhaps really the major one in this case, because I cannot see any technical advantages other than issues over reduced administration and maintenance by IT.
> has anyone ever been able to sway non-techie management away from Office?
Try cost: rather than several thousand dollars per seat for MSOffice, services like this will offer more flexible and incremental options: e.g. pay as you go, pay per document, pay per hour, etc. There's a good question about how competitive the pricing would be.
Alternatively, rather than per-client install by IT, they just buy a dedicated "office server" and one central install for all employees to use. Reduces maintenance overheads and so on.
More interestingly, is when there are a wide range of backended plugins: e.g. you browse a template library that's really a remote library with thousands of third-party templates available. Same goes with installing new fonts. The ideal part of this is the way it becomes transparent and seamless. No longer do you have to search through an icky font website, now you just access it like any other font.
Just to place this prior art into the public domain, I hereby describe the following invention so that it may not be patentable:
a method and device for adaptive image compression
it is know that air time costs money, and it is known that compression techniques can operate at various quality levels and in return provide lower size of image.
the problem solved by this invention is the transmission of image with adaptive compression to ensure that the entire image can be transmitted within a certain time constraint.
the user specifies a time constraint, and a minimum quality level.
when the connection is established, the data rate of the connection, the quality level and the time constraint is input to the device.
if the quality level cannot be met, the user is presneted with alternate options, one of which may be termination.
the device begins compression at specified quality level, in such a way to incrementally deliver the entire image at levels of refinement: during the transmission, should the transmission rate fall, then the adaptive algorithm will adjust the compression quality level.
one embodiment of this invention is a computer program.
These buildings are highly relevant to computing, as they epitomise the contemporary state of post-modern architects that stretch the possibilities of form, e.g. Libeskind as well.
They depend a lot on advanced materials, advanced construction techniques, and importantly, advanced simulation and modelling to ensure that stress/tolerances/forces are all correct.
Previously, structures depended upon classic forms and draftsman calculated stress/force.
A few years ago in Venice Biennale, I saw the international exhibits side-by-side. The US stood out particularly (the exhibiters from UCLA) with a lot of techno-fetish - very tacticle cyber type compute relevant forms.
the following stories:
* DIY ipod;
* DIY home media server;
* DIY wireless speakers (bluetooth, wifi);
* DIY ethernet speakers;
* DIY home SAN;
etc.
I don't recall exactly: maybe Horizon, definitely scandinavian. I remember because I decompiled it! What happened was that I started the demo, and unusually the disk drive kept spinning: so I turned if off which caused the demo to fail. Tested loading, then trying to start the demo and it didn't work, so curiosity, an Action Reply and an irq investigation revealed what was going on. I think it was a single part demo: the most memorable C64 demo for me because of that trick.
What's really needed is to couple the GPU and CPU in such a way that the GPU actually runs a very low level O/S, like an L4Ka style kernel (http://l4ka.org/), and becomes "just another" MP resource.
Then, on top of this low level, actually runs the UI graphics driver and so on. Other tasks can also run, but ultimately the priority is given to the UI driver.
Then, the O/S on the CPU needs to be able to know generally how to distribute tasks across to the GPU. Fairly standard for a tightly coupled MP that has shared bus memory.
Why do I say this? Because the result is
(a) if you're using an especially high performance application, the GUI runs full throttle dedicated to rendering/etc and acts as per normal;
(b) if you're not, e.g. such as when running Office or Engineering other compute intensive tasks (e.g. recoding video without displaying the video), then the GPU is just another multi processor resource to soak up cycles.
Then, CPU/GPU is just a seamless computing resource. The fantastic benefit of this is that if the O/S is designed properly, then it could allow simply buying/plugging in additional PCI (well, PCI probably not good because of low speed, perhaps AGP?) cards that are simply "additonal processors" - then you get a relatively cheaper way of putting more MP into your machine.
This concept was being used back in 1988. The Commodore 64 (1mhz 6510, a 6502 like micro processor) had a peripheral 5.25 disk drive called the 1541, which itself had a 1mhz 6510 cpu in it, connected via. a serial link.
It became common practice to introduce fast loaders: these were partially resident in the C64, and also in the 1541: effectively replacing the 1541's limited firmware.
However, demo programmers figured out how to utilise the 1541: one particular demo involved uploading program to the 1541 at start, then upon ever screen rewrite, uploading vectors to the 1541, which the 1541 would perform calculations in parallel with the C64, then at the end of the screen, the C64 fetch the results from the 1541, and incorporate them into the next screen frame.
Equally, GPU provides similar capability if so used.
> What's the problem with scribbling "www.sashdot.org" on a sheet of paper?
High density of content: potentially the semacode can store URL, name, location, lat/long and a swath of content. Meaning that even if you are not "network connected", you can still extract useful information.
This would be great for hearing/visual impaired people.
> Isn't it also possible that they just strung together code from a bunch of worms which did each of those things independently?
Requiring a considerble effort of reverse engineering, reconstruction and then integration?
Possible, and if so, then just as valid a reason for lauding it.
(on technical grounds, not ethical)
It's not that simple: forensics: examine the earliest locations of the virus, exam the nature of its source code - cross check against other source code. Granted, a dedicated genius can evade this, but not all virus writers are dedicated genius. I think there's a good analogy to standard forensics (I watch CSI, which granted is a popular misconception of what forensics is really like, but it shows some sense of the direction).
Fantastic idea, I would suggest you look at the L4Ka and related projects (http://l4ka.org/projects/hazelnut/).
Please do not create a new project from scratch: there are enough.
What is needed though is adapting existing operating systems (e.g. Linux, BSD, etc) to work in these virtualised environments. Further to this, also supporting co-ooperative virtualise environments.
Your efforts in this area would be very well looked upon.