It seems like a watch is the wrong form factor for this thing. The idea is really cool, and I think I might actually buy one if it was made as a desk clock, but I wouldn't want that enormous hockey-puck-sized-thing strapped to my wrist all day.
I am not trying to discredit your numbers, but take this into note. Most of the hardware they sell probably also generates software revenue, but software can be sold completely separate of hardware.
Oh, no problem at all -- I don't really care a whole lot whether the numbers are given a lot of credence at all -- after all, they're IBM's numbers, not mine. I simply looked, and didn't quite see where the parent comment seemed to fit with reality. In all honesty, it's still possible that it might though -- just for an obvious example, as you've noted, it may be that most of their software sales are really tied to hardware sales. When I said I didn't really understand the parent comment, I was being honest -- I'm not sure it's wrong, but based on the financial data I'm not quite sure what makes it obviously right either. These are supplied to prospective investors, so I'm sure they try to put the best face on things they can, so these numbers should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, at least to somebody like me who's not a financial analyst, it's not particularly obvious that their future is anywhere close to all doom and gloom by any means.
The titantic that is software arm of IBM is sinking.
Hmm...I'm not quite sure how you'd decide that. According to IBM's latest 10-Q report, in the quarter ending 30 Sept. 2005, their software division had revenues of a little over 3.8 billion US dollars, and costs of 483 million US dollars. By contrast, their hardware division had revenues of 5.12 billion dollars, but costs of 3.2 billion dollars. IOW, they're showing a gross quarterly profit of about 3.3 billion dollars from software, and only about 1.9 billion from hardware. Looked at on a percentage basis, software looks even better for them: it constitutes almost 18% of their revenues, but only about 3% of their costs.
Their highest revenue division is services -- but even with the largest revenues, this still has slightly lower profits than their software (about 300 million less per quarter than software).
As far as sinking goes: their revenue from software is up about 200 million dollars per quarter from a year ago, while their costs are up only about 20 million dollars a quarter. IOW, their total sales are growing, and they're getting better profit margins too!
Just for comparison, Microsoft's latest 10-Q [warning: Word format, of course] shows they have about 9.6 billion in quarterly revenues (total) and costs of about 6.3 billion, for a gross profit of a bit under 2.6 billion. IOW, IBM's software division produces more profit than Microsoft!
In fairness, that comparison probably isn't entirely accurate: in Microsoft's case, it's taking essentially all expenses into account, including things like R&D (1.5 billion dollars a quarter!) which probably aren't accounted for on a divisional basis at IBM (though I didn't dig through things enough to be sure about that).
Obsolete before printing?
on
Pro Perl Debugging
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmm...let's see: the basic idea here is that the book is devoted to the (text mode) debugger built into Perl, but even the review comes barely short of flat-out stating that nearly nobody is ever likely to be happy with this, and anybody doing any real work will want to use an IDE with a GUI-style debugger instead.
I suppose this might be handy a bit the same way knowing something like ed or vi is handy for anybody using UNIX (or similar) systems -- even the absolute strangest distribution (or installation) will almost inevitably include at least that much and it's pretty consistent. OTOH, debugging Perl on a machine that hasn't really been equipped for it doesn't sound to me like a lot better idea than using ed to write most of my code...
Never buy your electronics from front stores in the New York City area.
I'm afraid this is a bit like Sturgeon's law for camera stores -- of course 90% of the bad dealers in in NYC -- 90% of all the dealers are in NYC. Unfortunately, buying from dealers elsewhere doesn't really seem to raise your percentages much (if at all). Just for an obvious example, one particularly notorious scammer operated (still operates?) out of Washington or Oregon, if memory serves. At the same time, two thirds of the reputable dealers are New York.
In the end, it's all pretty simple: KEH, B&H and Adorama are about the only online camera stores worth considering. Of course, most online electronics/computer stores have at least some camera equipment, and if they're good otherwise, they'll probably do a perfectly fine job of shipping cameras as well. Just keep in mind that to them it's basically just a box -- as long as you're shopping the web page and don't expect them to supply you with any advice, they're fine. If you want to talk to a salesperson and get decent advice about what you should buy, you just about need to talk to a dedicated photography store (though dpreview.com, photo.net, etc. might be more useful, especially if you've narrowed things down so you want real detail on a few candidates, not just general guidance based on the kinds of pictures you usually take). If you drop by Photo.net after reading this, you're morally obliged to look at My Portofolio there.:-)
For years, there has been one encryption scheme that has been known to be 100% secure (at least against a simple cipertext-only attack): the one-time pad. This is most often (but not necessarily) implemented as a simple XOR between bits in a key stream and bits in the text to be encrypted. The receiver decrypts the message by re-XORing the received bits with the same key stream to retrieve the original data.
As I mentioned, this is 100% secure, and any reasonably well-written book on cryptography will confirm that. To be 100% secure, however, the keystream must be as large as the data being encrypted, and must be absolutely random -- any degree of predictability can lead to breakage (e.g. search for "Venona").
The biggest shortcoming of a one-time pad is the key: first you have to generate an absolutely random key, and then you have to distribute that key to the people at both ends of the communication securely. The usual problem is that if you can communicate that key reliably, then you could normally communicate the data reliably just as easily. As such, a one-time pad is typically only useful in fairly limited situations like a spy receiving a DVD-ROM full of key material during a f2f visit, then using the key out in the field. For more typical scenarios it's rarely useful though.
This scheme seems to cure one, but definitely not both of those problems. It's basically a way of using two one-time pads simultaneously, so that the receiver can deduce the sender's key at any point, but what is transmitted over the wire basically depends on both his own key and his partner's key (not exactly an XOR, but a bit like it). If all the attacker does is collect the voltages on the line, I wouldn't be too surprised if this really is secure.
That doesn't mean there aren't any shortcomings though. One obvious problem is that both ends still have to generate absolutely, 100% random keys. Another problem is a man in the middle attack. If the pattern of resistor changes can be predicted, then the attacker only has to find the value once at one end to break all subsequent communications over the channel. Since the scheme doesn't (at least by itself) provide any kind of confirmation of who's on the other end of a line, a man in the middle has a pretty easy time with things.
Another approach would be to tap into the line at two points, preferably widely separated. Since the current only travels over the wire at (about) 2/3rds the speed of light, when one end changes a resistor, the change in voltage/current will be detectable first closer to that end, and some time later at the other end. Two widely separated measurments would allow an attacker to figure out which end changed resistors at any given time. Ultimately, the degree of separation does't even have to be particularly huge -- larger separation just reduces the precision of timing necessary, but even one foot apart gives about a nanosecond.
Where? There is a field for "primary examiner" but there is no other use of the word "primary" on their advanced search page. Other times (for example, Office Actions), the PTO refers to the first named inventor. But, as I said above, the inventor being named first could be listed first for almost any reason (alphabetically, seniority, etc.)
In the databases themselves, which you can obtain from the PTO, if you wish. The price list is available here if you're interested.
According to the relevant law (35 USC 115):
The applicant shall make oath that he believes himself to be the original and first inventor of the process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or improvement thereof, for which he solicits a patent; and shall state of what country he is a citizen.
Presumably, they normally list the person who signs this as the primary inventor (though there is a provision for somebody else to do this in the inventor's behalf, such as if the inventor has since died).
There is absolutely no way to determine who is a "primary" inventor and who is a "secondary" inventor. Just because they are listed in a certain order doesn't mean they are listed in order of seniority. They could very well be listed by seniority.
The PTO databases include a field specifically for the primary inventor, though I'm certainly not attempting to vouch for the accuracy of the data they provide.
select user_id, num_patents from (
select
u.id user_id, count(p.id) num_patents
from
patents p, users u
where
u.id = p.user_id
and p.status in ('APPROVED', 'ACTIVE', 'QUITE SILLY')
group by
u.id
order by
num_patents desc ) where rowcount < 11
Hmmm...would you settle for:
select top 10 [primary inventor], count(*) from data group by [primary inventor] order by count(*) desc
I'm pretty sure you were joking, but I only sort of am -- that's what produced the list I posted a ways downthread...
As I read this,/. was displaying a fortune cookie that alluded to 42 as the meaning of life. A rather interesting coincidence, since I suspect the original questioner didn't really think through and understand the question very well. For example, if one person is the secondary inventor on three patents, while another is the primary inventor on two patents, which is the more prolific inventor?
So, I'm going to restrict the question a little bit. First of all, I'm only going to look at the primary inventor on any given patent. Second, I'm going to ignore the fact that not every name on earth uniquely identifies an individual person. Finally, for the sake of letting my computer get back to more important things like folding protiens, I'm only going to look at about the last 10 years worth of patents (and in fairness, I haven't updated my database for the last few months either, so it's possible the last couple might have changed since then -- and it's quite possible all of these numbers are now a bit higher). Finally, I'm restricting this to US Utility patents, not plant patents, design patents, etc.
Within those guidelines, the top 10 inventors and number of patents credited to each are:
Shunpei Yamazaki: 744
Donald E. Weder: 702
Kia Silverbrook: 602
Mark I. Gardner: 344
Salman Akram: 321
Warren M. Farnworth: 280
Ravi Kumar Arimilli: 269
Leonard Forbes: 238
Jay S. Walker: 223
Jennifer L. Hillman: 222
Nicely enough, all of these names even look like ones that stand a reasonable possibility of being unique (among patenting inventors).
Lyrics can be a work all by themselves, but when written together with their accompanying music, they're often considered to be a single work.
Doing a few searches at the copyright office all of the songs I looked for specifically mentioned copyrights on both the words and the music, but perhaps I was unlucky or just mis-interpreting the results.
Still, just the lyrics is not the entire song. You aren't including the notes, the tempo, the instruments, etc.
As noted elsethread, copyright law is quite specific in saying that the lyrics are covered.
The courts have established guidelines for the the questions to ask in determing whether something is fair use, and your argument doesn't seem to fit them very closely at all. That's not to say that there are no arguments possible -- certainly you could make a pretty good argument on the "transformative" criterion and probably as to the effect (or lack thereof) on the potential market as well. OTOH, I'm pretty sure almost any judge around would utterly reject your argument on the basis of the amount of the original that was taken -- and to qualify as fair use, you need to meet all the criteria they set.
So, you can certainly justify putting up a web page with "ok, I listened to this song on the radio, and here are the lyrics as I understood them" and calling it fair use.
You may be able to justify it to yourself. If you honestly think a judge is going to buy it, well, you're probably pretty safe -- because you're almost certainly too busy doing drugs to every really create such a web site at all.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
As noted up-thread, it covers the music and the words.
If you take away the instumentation, you're left with just the lyrics. So that shouldn't be copyrightable?
Regardless of whether it should or shouldn't be, it is.
But, again, it's that old question: Does music industry stupidity make it OK to violate copyright? There are two types of people: Those who petulently say "Well they suck so it's OK I do something bad" and then the Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings of the world who say, "Yes, they are wrong. We will call them on that, but we will never lower ourselves in doing so." Who do you respect more?
At least IMO, this is really beside the point. The real point is (or should be, anyway) whether the person who made the tool should be blamed for how people decide to use it. If somebody uses this tool to violate a law, then I think that person is to blame for doing so -- just like if they did so without the tool. At least to all appearances, this tool also has uses that don't break any laws (such as finding the lyrics to songs that aren't under copyright).
What we have here is equivalent to somebody attempting to make all hammers and pry-bars illegal because either could be used to commit burglary. Of course, the virus of illogic that leads to this kind of nonsense is pretty widespread -- just for an obvious example, attempts at "gun control" legislation are equally stupid and illogical (to state the truth at the expense of any karma I may have ever had).
Then again, in fairness, I should point out that it's open to considerable question whether (for example) didn't violate copyright law in this comment. You don't seem to have placed your comment in the public domain, and I copied quite a substantial portion if it without any (explicit) permission. Even if I hadn't quoted any of it in my reply, my comment is clearly derived from your's and I made a copy of the entire comment in the memory of my computer to be able to read it. NOw, should I be prosecuted for reading your comment? Do you respect me less for having done so?
It seems clear to me that copyright law really does need some updating to deal with the realities of the present time -- but the DMCA is about as far from the right thing as humanly possible.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
However, copyright law provides fair use exemption depending on the nature of the infringement. A non-profit lyrics site for the purposes of lyric criticism would be fairly safe. A company publishing lyrics and selling ads... less so. A company selling a product designed to search for lyrics... probably not protected at all.
Fair use covers quoting small portions of a work, not "quoting" the whole thing. While you're correct that a product designed to search for lyrics probably isn't covered under Fair Use, that's only because it doesn't need to be -- it would only need to be covered under fair use if it copied at least some of the lyrics, and that doesn't seem to be the case here at all. Here, it seems to be purely a matter of helping people to find lyrics -- which they might then copy, and it might then be illegal; but they might not copy them, and even if they do, it might well be legal (e.g. on songs that no longer fall under copyright).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
But aren't lyrics not copyrighted or are the hundreds of sites out there that give song lyrics away for free underground criminal enterprises?
Yes lyrics are subject to copyright. This particular quote is from US law, but I'm reasonably certain all countries that follow the Berne Convention (and most at least claims to) have similar rules.
Of course, Fair Use is a possibility as well -- but almost certainly not in the case of quoting the lyrics to a complete song.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
But you'd be including a bunch of old, slow, 8- and 16-bit cores that aren't very well tested, don't include consttaints, and are a bitch to implement (I've tried.)
Well, I have to admit I've only used a couple of them, but I don't recall having had a lot more trouble using them than using commercial cores. As far as speed goes, I suppose it's largely a question of what you want. Most of what I've built was almost entirely custom hardware, with roughly the smallest CPU I could use to handle a few things where speed didn't matter.
In my case, I used a free clone of a Z80. Having an instruction set I already knew (albeit had partially forgotten) was handy. As far as speed goes, well, it was quite a bit faster than I needed -- not to mention a lot faster than what I lusted after back when I was running CP/M...
In the end, I s'pose it depends on what you're after. If you want a CPU for a general-purpose computer, then you're absolutely right: most of the free cores are close to useless (and FPGAs mostly are too). If you want to build some custom hardware, and want a CPU to handle things that aren't worth the trouble of implementing in hardware, then FPGAs are likely to work pretty well for you -- and so are the free CPU cores.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Parent should be modded up -- there haven't been many other intelligent comments on this story.
Contrary to TFA's claim, I suspect for a lot of people, Sun's previous attempt at open-sourcing a core (to the microSPARC) would be a lot more interesting if you wanted to put the design on an FPGA (unfortunately, I'm not at all sure this is still available). I'm not sure how well it would work on an FPGA either, but at least it stands a whole lot better chance, and it's probably still plenty of CPU for most typical FPGA-based designs.
Then again, www.opencores.org, www.fpga4fun.com, etc., already have quite a number of CPU cores available, many without the likelihood of patent problems, and such that are likely to accompany using a SPARC core. Better still, quite a few of these have already been tested in various FPGAs and a few have been put into ASICs as well.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
If you don't break the law, chances are they won't even want to bother watching you. And if you do break the law, you can't really complain.
But yes, it is in the constitution that they can't do that, so it shouldn't be allowed. But that's the only reason against it.
Nonsense. Just for a single extremely obvious possibility, consider a cop deciding to track (and blackmail) people who park at/near a gay bar, strip club, etc. Many perfectly legal actions are still open to being misinterpreted, abused, etc.
The constitution was written to bar unreasonable search and seizure -- and that most certainly does bar placing people under surveillance without reasonable cause to believe they have in the past, are currently, or soon will be involved in the commission of a crime.
The constitution was written that way for a very good reason: because a system that lacks such a guarantee is extremely open to all manner of abuse.
For one more example, this would also be extraordinarily open to racial profiling -- there are already pretty clearly documented instances of people being stopped for driving where cops thought they didn't belong simply because of the color of their skin. Right now it happens more or less by accident, but a system that tracked where people are driving would make it quite trivial to turn such accidents into a widely enforced (even if unofficial) policy.
A system such as this would be open to far more abuses than legitimate uses. The ostensible reason for it is almost entirely nonsense anyway. Fuel taxes already pay for highways on a pay-per-use basis, and do so much more accurately than a system that was based primarily or exclusively on mileage traveled. Fuel usage correlates much more closely with highway wear than simple mileage could even hope for.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
And how many examples of important inventions that would be very difficult to reverse engineer can you name? Remember that this is the age of electron microscopes and mass spectrography. The only thing patents could be usefull on these days is manufacturing methods.
An electron microscope or gas chromatagraph does reverse engineering about the way a word processor writes a novel.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Re:Moving to finer geometeries is not panning out
on
Nanotechnology Gets Finer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Currently, the Intels, AMDs, ATIs & Nvidias ship with 90nm chips.
At least the last time I noticed, nVidia was still using 110 nm. ATI's latest X1 series (R520-based) use 90 nm fabrication, but I'm not aware of these being available as real products yet. The previous generation (e.g. X800) were 110 nm, unless memory serves me poorly.
TI and IBM also produce 90 nm chips. IBM (same page as above) claims to have a 65 nm ASIC production capability on line as well, though I don't know whether they have any real customers for it.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I would have expected it to be more. But the, what do I know what these things cost? Anyone know how much the previous generation factories cost?
It's been in the billion+ range for quite a while. It depends not only on geometry, but also on capacity. Based on the price (and owner) I'd guess this is quite a large, high-capacity fab. Then again, 300 mm wafers translate almost directly to fairly high capacity, and I doubt anybody's building equipment for 45 nm to work with smaller wafers.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I don't see why there needs to be.... but i'm no math genius.
The hard lower limit is based on the sizes of the atoms involved, but you can't really get very close to a single atom thick without radically changing designs. For example, one of the thinner parts in a typical CMOS circuit is the gate oxide layer. In typical semiconductors, this is composed of silicon dioxide. The problem is that if that is made only a single atom thick, at a given spot you don't really have silicon dioxide anymore; you only have silicon or oxygen. With current designs, you need to maintain a layer that's thick enough to still be silicon dioxide -- i.e. molecule-sized, not atom-sized.
Realistically, even getting close to that is pretty difficult anyway. Even at the present time, the gate oxide layers are starting to cause problems -- the gate oxide layer is supposed to act as an insulator, so no direct current flows through it. In reality, a little direct current will inevitably "leak" through, but in the past it's been pretty small. In current designs, the gate oxide layer is getting thin enough that this leakage current is becoming a substantial part of the total power drawn by the part.
There are ways around that, such as using a different material. When you thin the oxide layer, the conductors connected to each side of it can be smaller, and still maintain the same capacitance. Another way to achieve the same objective is to use a material with a higher dielectric constant (traditionally abbreviated as "K").
Silicon dioxide is also used to insulate between other conductors on the chip as well. Here, you generally want to reduce the capacitance between the conductors though, because increased capacitance leads to increased cross-talk (the signal on one conductor creating noise in a conductor nearby).
Therefore, semiconductor materials people are working in both directions: low-K dielectrics for insulation, that maintain the same (or lower) capacitance between conductors with thinner insulation, as well as high-K dielectrics to allow thicker gate-oxide layers (reducing leakage) while maintaining the increased capacitance of a thinner layer. These, however, typically lead to substantially more difficult (read: costly) manufacturing. Of cousre, there are a lot of other possibilities as well, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, some designs use strained silicon -- actually "straining" the lattice of silicon molecules in the crystal formation so they're either closer together or further apart. Other designs change the basic wafer construction -- a traditional wafer is simply a layer of silicon. SOI is Silicon On Insulator -- a later of insulation, with a thin layer of silicon over the type. Again, creating the wafer this way costs some extra, but more importantly (at least to the designer) a transistor built this way has something of a memory effect -- the way it acts at any given time depends not only on the voltage applied right now, but also on its previous state. While this may be usable for embedded memory it can be a real PITA for everything else.
Anyway, I suspect the real limit will be mostly economic: a current fabrication facility costs a LOT of money -- around 1 1/2 billion US dollars (non-US residents feel free to assume I really meant 1 milliard Euro).
This expense has already lead to a couple of things: even large companies often can't afford to build a fab on their own anymore, so they often have to form/join some sort of consortium to build a modern fab. Another business model simply separates the companies into two halves: fabless design houses, and then a few companies that just fabricate designs for various others. For an obvious example, neither nVidia nor ATI does their own fabrication -- they design chips that are then built (along with a lot of other people's) by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Of course, TSMC ha
Sony's fiscal year is one quarter away from the calendar year, so their fiscal third quarter ends at the end of this year, and the earnings results should show up around the third week of January.
For those pointing out Sony's recent increase in stock prices: it's true, but (as has also been pointed out elsethread) one of Sony's major strengths was that it used to think in terms of a lot more than just the next few months, or even the next couple of years -- they prospered primarily by building one of the strongest brand names on earth.
I'd also add that Sony's increasing stock price does NOT seem to stem from their music division. Their most recent quarterly report includes the following tid-bit (near the top of page 3):
Effective April 1, 2005, Sony no longer breaks out its music business as a reportable segment as it no longer meets the materiality threshold.
This basically means that Sony's music business has shrunk (at least a percentage of their business as a whole) to the point that they're no longer required to report it as a business segment of its own -- instead, it's just part of "Other." Though the US SEC doesn't seem to have a specific requirement of what the threshold of materiality is, the commonly accepted number seems to be 5%.
At least to me, that's an indication that while the company as a whole may be perceived as doing reasonably well, their music division really isn't doing well at all. Some of this may be related to their forming Sony BMG (i.e. joint venture between Sony and Bertelsmann AG) and part of it may be related to their buying a big part of MGM.
Their game sales are up, electronics sales are almost flat, and music sales are down quite badly -- though in their financial statements they admit to the truth: music sales aren't down because of people "stealing" music, it's things like "Sales at SMEJ decreased compared to the same quarter of the previous fiscal year due to the absence in the current quarter of a best selling album..." (page 6 of report cited above).
The bottom line is that Sony expects a net loss of about 10 billion Yen this fiscal year despite a small (1%) increase in overall sales.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like one of these or these?
Oh, no problem at all -- I don't really care a whole lot whether the numbers are given a lot of credence at all -- after all, they're IBM's numbers, not mine. I simply looked, and didn't quite see where the parent comment seemed to fit with reality. In all honesty, it's still possible that it might though -- just for an obvious example, as you've noted, it may be that most of their software sales are really tied to hardware sales. When I said I didn't really understand the parent comment, I was being honest -- I'm not sure it's wrong, but based on the financial data I'm not quite sure what makes it obviously right either. These are supplied to prospective investors, so I'm sure they try to put the best face on things they can, so these numbers should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, at least to somebody like me who's not a financial analyst, it's not particularly obvious that their future is anywhere close to all doom and gloom by any means.
Hmm...I'm not quite sure how you'd decide that. According to IBM's latest 10-Q report, in the quarter ending 30 Sept. 2005, their software division had revenues of a little over 3.8 billion US dollars, and costs of 483 million US dollars. By contrast, their hardware division had revenues of 5.12 billion dollars, but costs of 3.2 billion dollars. IOW, they're showing a gross quarterly profit of about 3.3 billion dollars from software, and only about 1.9 billion from hardware. Looked at on a percentage basis, software looks even better for them: it constitutes almost 18% of their revenues, but only about 3% of their costs.
Their highest revenue division is services -- but even with the largest revenues, this still has slightly lower profits than their software (about 300 million less per quarter than software).
As far as sinking goes: their revenue from software is up about 200 million dollars per quarter from a year ago, while their costs are up only about 20 million dollars a quarter. IOW, their total sales are growing, and they're getting better profit margins too!
Just for comparison, Microsoft's latest 10-Q [warning: Word format, of course] shows they have about 9.6 billion in quarterly revenues (total) and costs of about 6.3 billion, for a gross profit of a bit under 2.6 billion. IOW, IBM's software division produces more profit than Microsoft!
In fairness, that comparison probably isn't entirely accurate: in Microsoft's case, it's taking essentially all expenses into account, including things like R&D (1.5 billion dollars a quarter!) which probably aren't accounted for on a divisional basis at IBM (though I didn't dig through things enough to be sure about that).
I suppose this might be handy a bit the same way knowing something like ed or vi is handy for anybody using UNIX (or similar) systems -- even the absolute strangest distribution (or installation) will almost inevitably include at least that much and it's pretty consistent. OTOH, debugging Perl on a machine that hasn't really been equipped for it doesn't sound to me like a lot better idea than using ed to write most of my code...
I'm afraid this is a bit like Sturgeon's law for camera stores -- of course 90% of the bad dealers in in NYC -- 90% of all the dealers are in NYC. Unfortunately, buying from dealers elsewhere doesn't really seem to raise your percentages much (if at all). Just for an obvious example, one particularly notorious scammer operated (still operates?) out of Washington or Oregon, if memory serves. At the same time, two thirds of the reputable dealers are New York.
In the end, it's all pretty simple: KEH, B&H and Adorama are about the only online camera stores worth considering. Of course, most online electronics/computer stores have at least some camera equipment, and if they're good otherwise, they'll probably do a perfectly fine job of shipping cameras as well. Just keep in mind that to them it's basically just a box -- as long as you're shopping the web page and don't expect them to supply you with any advice, they're fine. If you want to talk to a salesperson and get decent advice about what you should buy, you just about need to talk to a dedicated photography store (though dpreview.com, photo.net, etc. might be more useful, especially if you've narrowed things down so you want real detail on a few candidates, not just general guidance based on the kinds of pictures you usually take). If you drop by Photo.net after reading this, you're morally obliged to look at My Portofolio there. :-)
As I mentioned, this is 100% secure, and any reasonably well-written book on cryptography will confirm that. To be 100% secure, however, the keystream must be as large as the data being encrypted, and must be absolutely random -- any degree of predictability can lead to breakage (e.g. search for "Venona").
The biggest shortcoming of a one-time pad is the key: first you have to generate an absolutely random key, and then you have to distribute that key to the people at both ends of the communication securely. The usual problem is that if you can communicate that key reliably, then you could normally communicate the data reliably just as easily. As such, a one-time pad is typically only useful in fairly limited situations like a spy receiving a DVD-ROM full of key material during a f2f visit, then using the key out in the field. For more typical scenarios it's rarely useful though.
This scheme seems to cure one, but definitely not both of those problems. It's basically a way of using two one-time pads simultaneously, so that the receiver can deduce the sender's key at any point, but what is transmitted over the wire basically depends on both his own key and his partner's key (not exactly an XOR, but a bit like it). If all the attacker does is collect the voltages on the line, I wouldn't be too surprised if this really is secure.
That doesn't mean there aren't any shortcomings though. One obvious problem is that both ends still have to generate absolutely, 100% random keys. Another problem is a man in the middle attack. If the pattern of resistor changes can be predicted, then the attacker only has to find the value once at one end to break all subsequent communications over the channel. Since the scheme doesn't (at least by itself) provide any kind of confirmation of who's on the other end of a line, a man in the middle has a pretty easy time with things.
Another approach would be to tap into the line at two points, preferably widely separated. Since the current only travels over the wire at (about) 2/3rds the speed of light, when one end changes a resistor, the change in voltage/current will be detectable first closer to that end, and some time later at the other end. Two widely separated measurments would allow an attacker to figure out which end changed resistors at any given time. Ultimately, the degree of separation does't even have to be particularly huge -- larger separation just reduces the precision of timing necessary, but even one foot apart gives about a nanosecond.
In the databases themselves, which you can obtain from the PTO, if you wish. The price list is available here if you're interested.
According to the relevant law (35 USC 115):
Presumably, they normally list the person who signs this as the primary inventor (though there is a provision for somebody else to do this in the inventor's behalf, such as if the inventor has since died).
The PTO databases include a field specifically for the primary inventor, though I'm certainly not attempting to vouch for the accuracy of the data they provide.
Hmm...somehow Dave Barry's line about closed captioning for the humor impaired springs to mind.
Hmmm...would you settle for:
I'm pretty sure you were joking, but I only sort of am -- that's what produced the list I posted a ways downthread...
So, I'm going to restrict the question a little bit. First of all, I'm only going to look at the primary inventor on any given patent. Second, I'm going to ignore the fact that not every name on earth uniquely identifies an individual person. Finally, for the sake of letting my computer get back to more important things like folding protiens, I'm only going to look at about the last 10 years worth of patents (and in fairness, I haven't updated my database for the last few months either, so it's possible the last couple might have changed since then -- and it's quite possible all of these numbers are now a bit higher). Finally, I'm restricting this to US Utility patents, not plant patents, design patents, etc.
Within those guidelines, the top 10 inventors and number of patents credited to each are:
Nicely enough, all of these names even look like ones that stand a reasonable possibility of being unique (among patenting inventors).
Doing a few searches at the copyright office all of the songs I looked for specifically mentioned copyrights on both the words and the music, but perhaps I was unlucky or just mis-interpreting the results.
As noted elsethread, copyright law is quite specific in saying that the lyrics are covered.
The courts have established guidelines for the the questions to ask in determing whether something is fair use, and your argument doesn't seem to fit them very closely at all. That's not to say that there are no arguments possible -- certainly you could make a pretty good argument on the "transformative" criterion and probably as to the effect (or lack thereof) on the potential market as well. OTOH, I'm pretty sure almost any judge around would utterly reject your argument on the basis of the amount of the original that was taken -- and to qualify as fair use, you need to meet all the criteria they set.
You may be able to justify it to yourself. If you honestly think a judge is going to buy it, well, you're probably pretty safe -- because you're almost certainly too busy doing drugs to every really create such a web site at all.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
As noted up-thread, it covers the music and the words.
Regardless of whether it should or shouldn't be, it is.
At least IMO, this is really beside the point. The real point is (or should be, anyway) whether the person who made the tool should be blamed for how people decide to use it. If somebody uses this tool to violate a law, then I think that person is to blame for doing so -- just like if they did so without the tool. At least to all appearances, this tool also has uses that don't break any laws (such as finding the lyrics to songs that aren't under copyright).
What we have here is equivalent to somebody attempting to make all hammers and pry-bars illegal because either could be used to commit burglary. Of course, the virus of illogic that leads to this kind of nonsense is pretty widespread -- just for an obvious example, attempts at "gun control" legislation are equally stupid and illogical (to state the truth at the expense of any karma I may have ever had).
Then again, in fairness, I should point out that it's open to considerable question whether (for example) didn't violate copyright law in this comment. You don't seem to have placed your comment in the public domain, and I copied quite a substantial portion if it without any (explicit) permission. Even if I hadn't quoted any of it in my reply, my comment is clearly derived from your's and I made a copy of the entire comment in the memory of my computer to be able to read it. NOw, should I be prosecuted for reading your comment? Do you respect me less for having done so?
It seems clear to me that copyright law really does need some updating to deal with the realities of the present time -- but the DMCA is about as far from the right thing as humanly possible.
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Fair use covers quoting small portions of a work, not "quoting" the whole thing. While you're correct that a product designed to search for lyrics probably isn't covered under Fair Use, that's only because it doesn't need to be -- it would only need to be covered under fair use if it copied at least some of the lyrics, and that doesn't seem to be the case here at all. Here, it seems to be purely a matter of helping people to find lyrics -- which they might then copy, and it might then be illegal; but they might not copy them, and even if they do, it might well be legal (e.g. on songs that no longer fall under copyright).
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Yes lyrics are subject to copyright. This particular quote is from US law, but I'm reasonably certain all countries that follow the Berne Convention (and most at least claims to) have similar rules.
Of course, Fair Use is a possibility as well -- but almost certainly not in the case of quoting the lyrics to a complete song.
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Well, I have to admit I've only used a couple of them, but I don't recall having had a lot more trouble using them than using commercial cores. As far as speed goes, I suppose it's largely a question of what you want. Most of what I've built was almost entirely custom hardware, with roughly the smallest CPU I could use to handle a few things where speed didn't matter.
In my case, I used a free clone of a Z80. Having an instruction set I already knew (albeit had partially forgotten) was handy. As far as speed goes, well, it was quite a bit faster than I needed -- not to mention a lot faster than what I lusted after back when I was running CP/M...
In the end, I s'pose it depends on what you're after. If you want a CPU for a general-purpose computer, then you're absolutely right: most of the free cores are close to useless (and FPGAs mostly are too). If you want to build some custom hardware, and want a CPU to handle things that aren't worth the trouble of implementing in hardware, then FPGAs are likely to work pretty well for you -- and so are the free CPU cores.
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Contrary to TFA's claim, I suspect for a lot of people, Sun's previous attempt at open-sourcing a core (to the microSPARC) would be a lot more interesting if you wanted to put the design on an FPGA (unfortunately, I'm not at all sure this is still available). I'm not sure how well it would work on an FPGA either, but at least it stands a whole lot better chance, and it's probably still plenty of CPU for most typical FPGA-based designs.
Then again, www.opencores.org, www.fpga4fun.com, etc., already have quite a number of CPU cores available, many without the likelihood of patent problems, and such that are likely to accompany using a SPARC core. Better still, quite a few of these have already been tested in various FPGAs and a few have been put into ASICs as well.
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Nonsense. Just for a single extremely obvious possibility, consider a cop deciding to track (and blackmail) people who park at/near a gay bar, strip club, etc. Many perfectly legal actions are still open to being misinterpreted, abused, etc.
The constitution was written to bar unreasonable search and seizure -- and that most certainly does bar placing people under surveillance without reasonable cause to believe they have in the past, are currently, or soon will be involved in the commission of a crime.
The constitution was written that way for a very good reason: because a system that lacks such a guarantee is extremely open to all manner of abuse.
For one more example, this would also be extraordinarily open to racial profiling -- there are already pretty clearly documented instances of people being stopped for driving where cops thought they didn't belong simply because of the color of their skin. Right now it happens more or less by accident, but a system that tracked where people are driving would make it quite trivial to turn such accidents into a widely enforced (even if unofficial) policy.
A system such as this would be open to far more abuses than legitimate uses. The ostensible reason for it is almost entirely nonsense anyway. Fuel taxes already pay for highways on a pay-per-use basis, and do so much more accurately than a system that was based primarily or exclusively on mileage traveled. Fuel usage correlates much more closely with highway wear than simple mileage could even hope for.
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An electron microscope or gas chromatagraph does reverse engineering about the way a word processor writes a novel.
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At least the last time I noticed, nVidia was still using 110 nm. ATI's latest X1 series (R520-based) use 90 nm fabrication, but I'm not aware of these being available as real products yet. The previous generation (e.g. X800) were 110 nm, unless memory serves me poorly.
TI and IBM also produce 90 nm chips. IBM (same page as above) claims to have a 65 nm ASIC production capability on line as well, though I don't know whether they have any real customers for it.
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It's been in the billion+ range for quite a while. It depends not only on geometry, but also on capacity. Based on the price (and owner) I'd guess this is quite a large, high-capacity fab. Then again, 300 mm wafers translate almost directly to fairly high capacity, and I doubt anybody's building equipment for 45 nm to work with smaller wafers.
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The hard lower limit is based on the sizes of the atoms involved, but you can't really get very close to a single atom thick without radically changing designs. For example, one of the thinner parts in a typical CMOS circuit is the gate oxide layer. In typical semiconductors, this is composed of silicon dioxide. The problem is that if that is made only a single atom thick, at a given spot you don't really have silicon dioxide anymore; you only have silicon or oxygen. With current designs, you need to maintain a layer that's thick enough to still be silicon dioxide -- i.e. molecule-sized, not atom-sized.
Realistically, even getting close to that is pretty difficult anyway. Even at the present time, the gate oxide layers are starting to cause problems -- the gate oxide layer is supposed to act as an insulator, so no direct current flows through it. In reality, a little direct current will inevitably "leak" through, but in the past it's been pretty small. In current designs, the gate oxide layer is getting thin enough that this leakage current is becoming a substantial part of the total power drawn by the part.
There are ways around that, such as using a different material. When you thin the oxide layer, the conductors connected to each side of it can be smaller, and still maintain the same capacitance. Another way to achieve the same objective is to use a material with a higher dielectric constant (traditionally abbreviated as "K").
Silicon dioxide is also used to insulate between other conductors on the chip as well. Here, you generally want to reduce the capacitance between the conductors though, because increased capacitance leads to increased cross-talk (the signal on one conductor creating noise in a conductor nearby).
Therefore, semiconductor materials people are working in both directions: low-K dielectrics for insulation, that maintain the same (or lower) capacitance between conductors with thinner insulation, as well as high-K dielectrics to allow thicker gate-oxide layers (reducing leakage) while maintaining the increased capacitance of a thinner layer. These, however, typically lead to substantially more difficult (read: costly) manufacturing. Of cousre, there are a lot of other possibilities as well, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, some designs use strained silicon -- actually "straining" the lattice of silicon molecules in the crystal formation so they're either closer together or further apart. Other designs change the basic wafer construction -- a traditional wafer is simply a layer of silicon. SOI is Silicon On Insulator -- a later of insulation, with a thin layer of silicon over the type. Again, creating the wafer this way costs some extra, but more importantly (at least to the designer) a transistor built this way has something of a memory effect -- the way it acts at any given time depends not only on the voltage applied right now, but also on its previous state. While this may be usable for embedded memory it can be a real PITA for everything else.
Anyway, I suspect the real limit will be mostly economic: a current fabrication facility costs a LOT of money -- around 1 1/2 billion US dollars (non-US residents feel free to assume I really meant 1 milliard Euro).
This expense has already lead to a couple of things: even large companies often can't afford to build a fab on their own anymore, so they often have to form/join some sort of consortium to build a modern fab. Another business model simply separates the companies into two halves: fabless design houses, and then a few companies that just fabricate designs for various others. For an obvious example, neither nVidia nor ATI does their own fabrication -- they design chips that are then built (along with a lot of other people's) by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Of course, TSMC ha
About 1997 -- or early 1998 if you consider the Pentium Pro purely a server chip and consider the Pentium II as the first of this line on the desktop.
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Sony's fiscal year is one quarter away from the calendar year, so their fiscal third quarter ends at the end of this year, and the earnings results should show up around the third week of January.
For those pointing out Sony's recent increase in stock prices: it's true, but (as has also been pointed out elsethread) one of Sony's major strengths was that it used to think in terms of a lot more than just the next few months, or even the next couple of years -- they prospered primarily by building one of the strongest brand names on earth.
I'd also add that Sony's increasing stock price does NOT seem to stem from their music division. Their most recent quarterly report includes the following tid-bit (near the top of page 3):
This basically means that Sony's music business has shrunk (at least a percentage of their business as a whole) to the point that they're no longer required to report it as a business segment of its own -- instead, it's just part of "Other." Though the US SEC doesn't seem to have a specific requirement of what the threshold of materiality is, the commonly accepted number seems to be 5%.
At least to me, that's an indication that while the company as a whole may be perceived as doing reasonably well, their music division really isn't doing well at all. Some of this may be related to their forming Sony BMG (i.e. joint venture between Sony and Bertelsmann AG) and part of it may be related to their buying a big part of MGM.
Their game sales are up, electronics sales are almost flat, and music sales are down quite badly -- though in their financial statements they admit to the truth: music sales aren't down because of people "stealing" music, it's things like "Sales at SMEJ decreased compared to the same quarter of the previous fiscal year due to the absence in the current quarter of a best selling album..." (page 6 of report cited above).
The bottom line is that Sony expects a net loss of about 10 billion Yen this fiscal year despite a small (1%) increase in overall sales.
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