Has Sony not used [the scroll wheel] on cell phones, too?
They certainly have, it was used on the old Nokia 7100s too (one of my favourite monochrome screen phones)... and they certainly had hierarchical menus. What's more, as we all know, phones and 'media players' have converged anyway, so what's the ('technical') difference?
Never mind prior art claims between these patents, it's only the inclusion of the words 'portable media player', or similar, that stops the whole stack from being toppled by very clear prior art... This system is clearly ridiculous.
You've just been trolled! But since you have, I might as well correct you as well...
TBL didn't really 'invent' the WWW, it was a development and practicalisation of the hypertext ideas of Nelson, taken together with the benefits of, and incremental improvements upon, existing digital publishing systems like gopher. Sir Tim has a great practical mind and implemented a pretty good system for the task in hand, which turned out to be more generally useful (despite its flaws in scaling up)...
The full interview with TBL is only to be broadcast later in the year. The 'highlights' in the Newsnight programme (just finished) were quite different from this article... in a bad way. All they did was talk about terrorism and pornography for nine minutes, and the Semantic Web for one!
As a researcher in the Semantic Web area (specifically Semantic Web Services), I'm very disappointed by both edits...
There's a huge difference between a "Writer" and a "blogger"
Too right! Owning a blog doesn't make you a writer - and regularly updating a blog or a podcast does not make you a journalist - any more than owning a camcorder makes you a director.
not an excuse for not indexing the entire Internet
Try not to sound like a clueless journalist: it's the Web that's being indexed, not "the entire Internet" (just like a residential phone directory catalogues certain endpoints, not the network).
I wonder how much the (powered) light output is diminished for a feature that will be used for a vanishingly small part of the useful lifetime of each tube...
Thanks, I did commercial development for 16 bit Windows myself, I don't need a skewed history lesson...
In my opinion it wasn't the 32 bit transition that gave Microsoft their leverage (that was the icing on the cake), it was rather WfW 3.11 (though admittedly in combination with NT 3.51). People were still running Word Perfect and Lotus etc. (Office was not the turning point), but they couldn't throw away their Netware quick enough...
It's precisely and only because they first had the support of users that they could then impose these kind of contracts on OEMs and ISVs to preserve their dominance (which, as has been pointed out time and time again, almost any company in their position would have done).
What's more, Microsoft Research has been very active in the Haskell community, where monads are bread and butter. Perhaps some marketing genius went to one of their presentations and took something away - one word out of context!
"More contradiction", yes, implied there already are such with the Torah itself. You don't have to look forward as far as Moses - the two creation stories contradict one another... and one uses a plural name for the creator!
If these people really want to mix Science and Religion in schools, why not turn the argument back on them?
Examine the inference they'd like to make from their new argument of 'intelligent design'.
They'd like us to believe that a perceived intelligent design behind life on Earth implies a singular creator, as in the stories of the Torah. (Bible? Well, if you must, but it only adds more contradiction on top of the stories in the Torah... The Qur'an is the more sensible extension, but let's not go down that route!)
This reasoning is flawed, however: why should there be just one creator? (In fact, are the Torah myths even so clear?)
What's more, observation suggests something rather different - the redundancy in design, the dead ends (even if you don't accept the fossil record, we have evidence of this during our written history), all are suggestive of 'design by committee'.
If we're going to make a 'leap of faith', I'd suggest (and I really would, if I were put in this situation as an educator) that a more logical inference is the creation myths of some of the older religions, take Hinduism for instance.
It would only take a few kids to go home saying, "I'm going to become a Hindu - I was convinced by the discussion about Intelligent Design," before they came out from behind their masks and started directly preaching again...
While very insightful (I think the moderation on/. has ground to a halt), your "recomputing/rerendering the scene parallax in realtime" betrays your having forgotten that we're talking about film here...
Exactly - mentioned in the article are LCD glasses with the old 'blank one eye out every odd/even frame' trick. Bearable as a novelty for short IMAX films, but never likely to be a regular occurrence with feature films...
Where are "your props"?
Learn to speak English, build a credible research basis (which may involve taking research training in the form of a PhD, and which will definitely involve implementing prototypes), and then publish...
Google only owns "about 3% of the company" - do you think everything that IBM or Microsoft have a minority investment in (lots!) should be tagged with their logos?
Exactly. Dia's support for UML is like an almost 'complete works of Shakespeare' - in reality only Hamlet's soliloquy because 'that's all people want anyway'...
I'm not sure that RMS has it right - he seems to confuse the council (of ministers) with the committee (made up of commissioners) in contrasting their power, motivations and (most importantly) democratic status with the parliament.
As far as I understand it, it's like this:
the European Parliament is made up of MEPs for whom we all vote in our individual member states;
the Council of the European Union contains ministers from the governments of our member states (whom we also elect);
the European Commision contains commissioners we don't get to elect, or make answerable to our will.
It was also my impression that the commission was the problem on software patents - they're just as easily swayed by big business (into and out of Europe, as well as within) as by European citizens. What's more, their role was deliberately designed so as to not be overly swayed by national governments.
To answer your final question: a directive simply directs the member states to implement guidelines in their national law (which is how 'Euro law' is achieved - agreed by consensus, individually implemented).
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind prior art claims between these patents, it's only the inclusion of the words 'portable media player', or similar, that stops the whole stack from being toppled by very clear prior art... This system is clearly ridiculous.
TBL didn't really 'invent' the WWW, it was a development and practicalisation of the hypertext ideas of Nelson, taken together with the benefits of, and incremental improvements upon, existing digital publishing systems like gopher. Sir Tim has a great practical mind and implemented a pretty good system for the task in hand, which turned out to be more generally useful (despite its flaws in scaling up)...
As a researcher in the Semantic Web area (specifically Semantic Web Services), I'm very disappointed by both edits...
I wonder how much the (powered) light output is diminished for a feature that will be used for a vanishingly small part of the useful lifetime of each tube...
In my opinion it wasn't the 32 bit transition that gave Microsoft their leverage (that was the icing on the cake), it was rather WfW 3.11 (though admittedly in combination with NT 3.51). People were still running Word Perfect and Lotus etc. (Office was not the turning point), but they couldn't throw away their Netware quick enough...
And that's when contracts started to change!
It's precisely and only because they first had the support of users that they could then impose these kind of contracts on OEMs and ISVs to preserve their dominance (which, as has been pointed out time and time again, almost any company in their position would have done).
If not, shut the hell up - you don't know what you're talking about...
If so, do you seriously think it was aggressive marketing that killed that rubbish off?
Legally there's no right of appeal, yes, but there's also nothing to compel the company to speak to those sorry excuses for 'journalists' either...
What's more, Microsoft Research has been very active in the Haskell community, where monads are bread and butter. Perhaps some marketing genius went to one of their presentations and took something away - one word out of context!
"More contradiction", yes, implied there already are such with the Torah itself. You don't have to look forward as far as Moses - the two creation stories contradict one another... and one uses a plural name for the creator!
If these people really want to mix Science and Religion in schools, why not turn the argument back on them?
Examine the inference they'd like to make from their new argument of 'intelligent design'.
They'd like us to believe that a perceived intelligent design behind life on Earth implies a singular creator, as in the stories of the Torah. (Bible? Well, if you must, but it only adds more contradiction on top of the stories in the Torah... The Qur'an is the more sensible extension, but let's not go down that route!)
This reasoning is flawed, however: why should there be just one creator? (In fact, are the Torah myths even so clear?)
What's more, observation suggests something rather different - the redundancy in design, the dead ends (even if you don't accept the fossil record, we have evidence of this during our written history), all are suggestive of 'design by committee'.
If we're going to make a 'leap of faith', I'd suggest (and I really would, if I were put in this situation as an educator) that a more logical inference is the creation myths of some of the older religions, take Hinduism for instance.
It would only take a few kids to go home saying, "I'm going to become a Hindu - I was convinced by the discussion about Intelligent Design," before they came out from behind their masks and started directly preaching again...
Agreed, that's the real point of your message when it comes to the subject in hand.
While very insightful (I think the moderation on /. has ground to a halt), your "recomputing/rerendering the scene parallax in realtime" betrays your having forgotten that we're talking about film here...
Exactly - mentioned in the article are LCD glasses with the old 'blank one eye out every odd/even frame' trick. Bearable as a novelty for short IMAX films, but never likely to be a regular occurrence with feature films...
Where are "your props"? Learn to speak English, build a credible research basis (which may involve taking research training in the form of a PhD, and which will definitely involve implementing prototypes), and then publish...
RAR also has a compression layer, so is easier to use than .tar.gzip's
I don't think minority shareholders are going to jail over this...
Google only owns "about 3% of the company" - do you think everything that IBM or Microsoft have a minority investment in (lots!) should be tagged with their logos?
Exactly. Dia's support for UML is like an almost 'complete works of Shakespeare' - in reality only Hamlet's soliloquy because 'that's all people want anyway'...
As far as I understand it, it's like this:
It was also my impression that the commission was the problem on software patents - they're just as easily swayed by big business (into and out of Europe, as well as within) as by European citizens. What's more, their role was deliberately designed so as to not be overly swayed by national governments.
To answer your final question: a directive simply directs the member states to implement guidelines in their national law (which is how 'Euro law' is achieved - agreed by consensus, individually implemented).
Dia seems to support e.g. class diagrams nicely, but has no real idea what a 'state machine' (i.e. statechart) is...
What kind of diagrams are you drawing?