Except thats not what is happening... What is ususally labeled a patent troll, is someone who buys up patents with no intention of ever doing anything with the invention covered. The simply sit on the patent until someone invents (and markets and promotes) something (often only vaguely) simmilar and then they sue them. This is basically what is happening in the NTP vs. RIM case. NTP has never used these patens to create a product or invest the money the poor inventor lacked to commercialize his idea. This is a parasitic behaviour at best.
While I would tend to agree that abusing goto statements will lead to unreadable code, avoiding them at all cost can have the same or even worse effect! I once hat to work with a piece of legacy c++ code where the original authors needed to use a goto statement. iHaving been told over and over that goto statements are evil, they ended up using a do, break, while(0) construct wrapend in a couple of #define's making the whole thing utterly unreadable. A goto would have explained excately what they intended, instead I had to go hunt for their definitions to figure out what was going on....
Hmm... that's still a 100.000 x 100.000 x 100.000 data set. Which, if my math is not completely off, would corrospond to a 1mm^3 resolution in a 100m * 100m * 100m cube. Not too bad really!
Indoor positioning using wireless signal strength
on
Forget GPS, Hello WPS
·
· Score: 1
I did my masters thesis on this a year ago. I used Java on an iPAQ 5555 (with a little bit of native C++ through JNI) and a Java server using a MySQL database.
Using 6 access points covering a fairly large building, I managed to get an accuracy of about 4-8 meters. The trick it seemed was how you filtered the raw signal strength data, a better (slower) filter gave better accuracy but much longer response times. The 4-8 meter accuracy with around 7 seconds response time proved the best tradeoff for my application.
I am not at home for the next few days, but if anybody is interested in recieving a copy of the thesis or the code for the system, please write a comment in my journal.
I used to think that patents had something to do with inventing something new and non-trivial... Just shows how naive I've been... Today it seems, You can get a patent on anything that has not been explicitly described in a patent by someone else.
We actually did just this as an assignmet in a software engineering class a while back. We had to write a simple life simulator, and then a new assignmet was handed out that changed the original specifications.
The last part of the assignment was to make our life-forms compatible with that of at least one other group. This last part proved quite interesting as, even though the critters were technically compatible with the other groups environment, many of the assumptions our two groups had made about the world (such as sight radius of each creature, how much food a creature needs, how fine grained the world was...) made the creatyres behave rather weird.
Still, it is a good way to be forced to write code that is easy to refactor from start!
If the original program can be written in 3 days, chances are a good programmer can write a new one that matches the changed specifications from scratch in one day. Is this cheating?:-P
It is good to se that some governemts are actually begining to consider the potential benefits of using F/OSS software. I susspect that this is a trend that will increase dramatically over the next few years. As a few govnernments sets sucessful examples of F/OSS deplyment others will follow!
From skimming through the review, I saw no mention of Eclipse. I wrote a large part of my Masters Thesis in Java on a Linux machine. Sure, Í could use vi, emacs or whatever and a command line compiler, but for me Eclipse is the Java development tool of choice.
BTW. the ret of my project was Java for a HP iPAQ 5555 which, interestinly enough was developed on Windows using IBM websphere device developer, which is based on Eclipse
It has been a long running discussion in my project lab at the university, how to make a p2p program (in our example, Skype) work between two networks using NAT-firewalls.
Seems like somebody finally came up with the answer!:-)
And tomorrow, hell freezes over...
OQO has got to be the king of vapor, and now they are actually ready to sell a product!? Now what were the odds of that at your local bookmaker? Someone could have made a fortune.
Might be a pretty cool device from what I have previously read about it though!
I really feel bad for Sun now.. Which makes me quite confused!
I though we were supposed to hate Sun this month, after they made shady deals with Microsoft and were planning to attack Linux by Proxy, through Redhat....
But then again, we always champion the looser or the little guy it seems.... wait... thats unless the user is a little guy and is called SCO, in which case it is okay to hate the underdog and love the big corporation (IBM).... So what will it be/.? Do we like Sun this weak or not?
Ok, poor attemps at being funny aside, this is not just an "overly broad patent being granted by the USPO" (tm) but a patent that, bogus or not, actually stood up in court... Now THATS scary!!
I guess I should have added a "for instance" in there somewhere...:-)
I am in no way trying to belittle Java, I was just trying to state one example where I considder Java to be a god choice, and one example where Java would be a bad choice! This is not the same as stating that Java should ONLY be used for "lightweight temporary code"
I have Just written the majority of the code for my master thesis in Java on different platforms (The only thing not written in Java is a very small amount of hardware near code) This could of course be considdered a prototype system, but the base system should be quite easy to mature into a real world system
I have been involved in large projects where Java was used with great sucess and others where Java was used, but it became painfully obvious to all invovled that it was not the optimal choice for this particular application.
In typical/. style, as soon as Java is as much as mentioned, everybody expects the flame wars to erupt, and they always do...
I try to stay pragmatic about the programming languages that I use. For some jobs, Java would be my last choice, and for some it seems a natural fit. When writing hardware near code, or platform dependant stuff on driver level, nobody in their right mind would attempt to use Java. For high level rapid prototyping, Java is a often a quick and easy way of getting things done.
I use OpenOffice on a daily basis. In short, it does all the things I need it to. If there are features in Microsoft Office that OpenOffice Does not support, I obviously don't need them. But maybe thats just me...
I dont agree that shiny new features are whats needed to make people switch to another office suite. I would guess that most people use less than 20% of the features already available in Word (Or OO.o or whatever). Its really a hen and egg situation, people will use what everybody else is using, so while most people are still using Microsoft Office, people have no real reason to use anything else.
I guess it still boils down to marketing money, there are simply not enough fancy commercials for OpenOffice, hence very few people other than the/. crowd and other techies know about it.
Just my.02 kr. (Local currency in Denmark)
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing one of the most powerful features of Amarok then! :-)
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Dynamic_Playlist_Walkthrough
Damn, no mod points! This post deserves them though.
:-)
Had me laughing out very loud!
Except thats not what is happening... What is ususally labeled a patent troll, is someone who buys up patents with no intention of ever doing anything with the invention covered. The simply sit on the patent until someone invents (and markets and promotes) something (often only vaguely) simmilar and then they sue them. This is basically what is happening in the NTP vs. RIM case. NTP has never used these patens to create a product or invest the money the poor inventor lacked to commercialize his idea. This is a parasitic behaviour at best.
While I would tend to agree that abusing goto statements will lead to unreadable code, avoiding them at all cost can have the same or even worse effect! I once hat to work with a piece of legacy c++ code where the original authors needed to use a goto statement. iHaving been told over and over that goto statements are evil, they ended up using a do, break, while(0) construct wrapend in a couple of #define's making the whole thing utterly unreadable. A goto would have explained excately what they intended, instead I had to go hunt for their definitions to figure out what was going on....
Torrent: The only known object on the www to actually benefit from a good slashdotting
:-)
Tried the sites dl. link and got about 5 kb/s. the torrent is maxing out my adsl a ~220 kb/s
ROFL
/. but damn dude its close!! :-)
Thats not the funniest reply I have ever seen on
Hmm... that's still a 100.000 x 100.000 x 100.000 data set. Which, if my math is not completely off, would corrospond to a 1mm^3 resolution in a 100m * 100m * 100m cube. Not too bad really!
I did my masters thesis on this a year ago. I used Java on an iPAQ 5555 (with a little bit of native C++ through JNI) and a Java server using a MySQL database.
Using 6 access points covering a fairly large building, I managed to get an accuracy of about 4-8 meters. The trick it seemed was how you filtered the raw signal strength data, a better (slower) filter gave better accuracy but much longer response times. The 4-8 meter accuracy with around 7 seconds response time proved the best tradeoff for my application.
I am not at home for the next few days, but if anybody is interested in recieving a copy of the thesis or the code for the system, please write a comment in my journal.
Freespirit
I used to think that patents had something to do with inventing something new and non-trivial... Just shows how naive I've been...
Today it seems, You can get a patent on anything that has not been explicitly described in a patent by someone else.
We actually did just this as an assignmet in a software engineering class a while back. We had to write a simple life simulator, and then a new assignmet was handed out that changed the original specifications.
The last part of the assignment was to make our life-forms compatible with that of at least one other group. This last part proved quite interesting as, even though the critters were technically compatible with the other groups environment, many of the assumptions our two groups had made about the world (such as sight radius of each creature, how much food a creature needs, how fine grained the world was...) made the creatyres behave rather weird.
Still, it is a good way to be forced to write code that is easy to refactor from start!
If the original program can be written in 3 days, chances are a good programmer can write a new one that matches the changed specifications from scratch in one day. Is this cheating? :-P
It is good to se that some governemts are actually begining to consider the potential benefits of using F/OSS software. I susspect that this is a trend that will increase dramatically over the next few years. As a few govnernments sets sucessful examples of F/OSS deplyment others will follow!
Luckily not everybody buys into the FUD.
- nhnFreespirit
And the makers will of course claim that they are providing a valuable public service by keeping peoples pc's updated! Bvah!
nhnFreespirit
Ok, so after a little more skimming, Eclipse IS mentioned, but more as a side note.... :-)
From skimming through the review, I saw no mention of Eclipse. I wrote a large part of my Masters Thesis in Java on a Linux machine. Sure, Í could use vi, emacs or whatever and a command line compiler, but for me Eclipse is the Java development tool of choice.
BTW. the ret of my project was Java for a HP iPAQ 5555 which, interestinly enough was developed on Windows using IBM websphere device developer, which is based on Eclipse
Freespirit
It has been a long running discussion in my project lab at the university, how to make a p2p program (in our example, Skype) work between two networks using NAT-firewalls.
:-)
Seems like somebody finally came up with the answer!
Freespirit
And tomorrow, hell freezes over... OQO has got to be the king of vapor, and now they are actually ready to sell a product!? Now what were the odds of that at your local bookmaker? Someone could have made a fortune. Might be a pretty cool device from what I have previously read about it though!
I really feel bad for Sun now.. Which makes me quite confused!
/.? Do we like Sun this weak or not?
I though we were supposed to hate Sun this month, after they made shady deals with Microsoft and were planning to attack Linux by Proxy, through Redhat....
But then again, we always champion the looser or the little guy it seems.... wait... thats unless the user is a little guy and is called SCO, in which case it is okay to hate the underdog and love the big corporation (IBM).... So what will it be
Ok, poor attemps at being funny aside, this is not just an "overly broad patent being granted by the USPO" (tm) but a patent that, bogus or not, actually stood up in court... Now THATS scary!!
I guess I should have added a "for instance" in there somewhere... :-)
I am in no way trying to belittle Java, I was just trying to state one example where I considder Java to be a god choice, and one example where Java would be a bad choice! This is not the same as stating that Java should ONLY be used for "lightweight temporary code"
I have Just written the majority of the code for my master thesis in Java on different platforms (The only thing not written in Java is a very small amount of hardware near code) This could of course be considdered a prototype system, but the base system should be quite easy to mature into a real world system
I have been involved in large projects where Java was used with great sucess and others where Java was used, but it became painfully obvious to all invovled that it was not the optimal choice for this particular application.
In typical /. style, as soon as Java is as much as mentioned, everybody expects the flame wars to erupt, and they always do...
I try to stay pragmatic about the programming languages that I use. For some jobs, Java would be my last choice, and for some it seems a natural fit. When writing hardware near code, or platform dependant stuff on driver level, nobody in their right mind would attempt to use Java. For high level rapid prototyping, Java is a often a quick and easy way of getting things done.
I use OpenOffice on a daily basis. In short, it does all the things I need it to. If there are features in Microsoft Office that OpenOffice Does not support, I obviously don't need them. But maybe thats just me... I dont agree that shiny new features are whats needed to make people switch to another office suite. I would guess that most people use less than 20% of the features already available in Word (Or OO.o or whatever). Its really a hen and egg situation, people will use what everybody else is using, so while most people are still using Microsoft Office, people have no real reason to use anything else. I guess it still boils down to marketing money, there are simply not enough fancy commercials for OpenOffice, hence very few people other than the /. crowd and other techies know about it.
Just my .02 kr. (Local currency in Denmark)