The moon has days and nights, just like the Earth. Also, the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth, so we constantly see the same "side" of the moon's surface.
I think the inaccurate term "dark side of the moon" to refer to the side we don't see originally came from the idea of radio darkness (no contact possible directly from Earth), but it's a persistent phrase even after people know the difference.
[Dr McAfee has] a determination to see justice done: Dr. McAfee has offered an award of $25,000BZ (about $12,500USD) for information leading to the capture and arrest of the murderer of his neighbor
That line reminded me an awful lot like:
Lawyers for O.J. Simpson yesterday announced a $500,000 reward for information leading to the "real killer or killers" and filed a motion accusing police of ignoring evidence that points to other possible suspects.
And yet, the IRS has abdicated its obligation to investigate religious organizations that get involved in political endorsements and attacks. Think of all the juicy tax money that could be flowing from the main street hatemongers' castles.
Obviously, lots of testing is going on, and will continue to go on. They use a methodology a lot more reasonable than your "I need to test-drive it" sensibilities, but yes, you'll be able to test drive before you buy your own autocar.
Walk into any Wal*Mart, Tesco, or other low-end mass market department store. Look at the way they communicate, how they decide on things to buy, and how they deal with navigating the aisles. Realize that over half of the people you see in that store drove cars to get there. Rethink your position that most people were raised to be a sensible human.
In other words, remember that half of humanity is below average.
I hope the pre-recorded foghorn caller is included. I think it's offering some travel package, but since the first thing you hear is a loud lighthouse foghorn sound, I haven't listened to the pitch for the last several years. They've been attacking my office line about 3 times a year for the past decade, from different caller ID numbers.
I haven't seen the standard, but it'll likely include a handshake that's a lot like the NFC coils, perhaps even simpler. Check every 250ms with a very short low-power ping, and if there's a compliant device, start supplying higher power to the main coil for inductive charging.
Until you revise the whole way people write software, adding cores is useful to a very limited point. Today's software can be split at one core per thread, or one core per process. If you try to get two cores to work on the same thread, you just increase serial contention, not decrease it.
Even thread-happy Java is only working on maybe 3-5 threads at a time, the rest are sleeping until a device wakes it, or until a certain time has elapsed. A new compiler may be able to help a little bit, but it's just going to be creating very short-lived micro-threads when it detects those few opportunities for them.
Graphics hardware is great for many parallel cores, because it's the same tight problem with different data, endlessly repeated. Multiply these 4x4s please. Fill these pixels please. Endlessly. Same goes for encryption, and maybe a few bits of video game AI logic. Not many other software naturally fits to using many cores.
For instance, in Genesis, God describes His creating all this in terms of days. And we are told later in scripture that a day is to The LORD as thousand years, and a thousand years are as a day. I can accept that 'day', despite the Hebrew word used, may in fact be figurative.
It's so hard to get adherents to follow this line of reasoning or thought. I'm generally agnostic, but if I'm inclined to consider faith, I agree with your description above. I go a step farther, and assign the "thousand years of peace" in Revelations to be the Seventh Day, and that means that we are still IN the Sixth Day, the day of man. This makes Genesis not just a book of the beginning, but a wrapper across the whole timeline of mankind, documenting past and predicting future.
Then again, that's only on the days I am inclined to consider faith. I've recently seen more people describe their faith as "apatheism," not caring if there is a god or not.
This seems like an unrealistic expectation once you remember that nobody bothers bug fixing and optimizing before release any more when they can just promise to ship a patch at some point afterwards
What is not stated in this "Opt Out" disclaimer: PayPal will likely move to close accounts that opted out. It might be forceful and quick, in January. It might be a slower pressure move, done more insidiously, if they wanted to avoid big bad press. But I can't imagine they will move forward for long with a bunch of people who have opted out of their ideal arrangement.
The term meme has evolved (or devolved) rapidly. The "current" use, as far as I've seen, has come to mean "an ugly square graphic of a recognizable image overlaid with some large typeface text describing bumper-sticker philosophy or a barely ironic pop culture observation."
I can't do Libraries of Congress for linear distance, but I think there's something better than a trillion miles.
So I asked Google for "1 trillion miles in au". An astronomical unit (1 AU) is the Sun-to-Earth orbit's average radius. I forget how many miles that is, and that's kind of the point.
1 trillion miles = 10757.8002 Astronomical Units
To put that in perspective, Earth is in a middle ring of our solar system. Pluto is way out there. I ignored other far-flung rocks like Xena or Gabrielle or whatever they're calling them these days.
Google's Calculator doesn't memorize "radius of pluto's orbit in au" but on the Pluto Fact Sheet I found Semimajor axis (AU) 39.48168677.
Diameter of our solar system is then ~80 AU. I did look up the heliopause for a farther "edge of our solar system, and got Starting in May 2012 at 120 AU, Voyager 1 detected a sudden increase in cosmic rays, an apparent signature of approach to the heliopause.. Both are miniscule compared to ~10800 AU for this article's celestial feature.
I remembered that the nearest neighbor star is roughly 4 light years away. Let's not quibble about precision, one digit is enough.
Yes, this follows a long trend of marketing hyperbole and rationalization. For example, a car is voted "best in its class," say the ads. The ads don't explain that the "class" is carefully gerrymandered to only include two models, one of which has been out of production for a decade. I've taught my daughter that every adjective is making the marketing claim less impressive, not more impressive. It may very well be the best four-wheel cross-over sport utility soft-topped off-road casual zero-emission vehicle built in North America, but that's not saying much.
The very first image in the news shows the rover's wheels/chassis surrounding the metal flake. From the photo, I can't tell the scale, but it's directly below the camera, which is aimed straight down at the surface. Distance: roughly zero.
While it's a predictable joke after Antennagate, there is a kernel of truth here. It's a challenge for all cellphone cameras, not just Apple's, to capture the light you want and to weed out the stray light you don't want.
On a dedicated camera, the lens is typically recessed. This does two things: avoids light from the side to bounce around in the optics, and avoids fingerprints on the lens itself. Light from the side, and finger oils on the lens, are big contributors to lens flare. Combining side light and oils on the optics is a recipe for DIY Instagram photos.
On a cellphone, especially Apple's, they try hard not to have recessed areas on the case. It makes the whole phone thicker than it needs to be, and it catches pocket lint and sharp objects like keys or pencils. Luckily, a really flush surface is fairly easy to clean.
So that leaves the side light. If the brightest light sources are behind you, no problem with side-light lens flare. (It may make it harder to see the preview screen though.) If you have a strong light off to your side, and it may be able to fall on the lens, then cupping your hand into a primitive gobo or shield will help a lot.
This is something that bugs me no end: ever since setting lead type, I've known that there is a fairly strict rule in typeface design: all digits are the same width. You can't typeset a useful ledger sheet if the 1 is narrow and the 5 is wide. Usually, all digits are an "en space", the same as the letter N, which is in turn half the "em space" or width of M.
I see bad examples all the time in digital typefaces. Clocks are the usual glaring example, the whole clock shifts around as it rolls through the ones. MS Excel at one time included a bad font file which broke this rule... which brings us back to the ledger sheet example.
I'm a visual person. I like a bit of skeuomorphism. I can agree that many apps take it too far, but there are some kinds of apps where it can benefit, and where it can make things more fun to use.
A few top ways skeuomorph apps can do things wrong:
take too much real estate for artistic masturbation (faux screwmounting, wide bezels, oversized labelling, gears, spiral bookbinding, fancy logo plates
rely on an ancient methodology people won't be familiar with (the Rolodex example is a good one)
break the metaphor (infinitely long three-ring-binder pages)
forcing the metaphor by withholding obvious shortcuts (requiring a separate pencil eraser tool to be selected, when Undo or backspace would suffice)
Non-skeuomorph apps have the same kinds of problems in many cases. Fat margins, "iced" or unstretchable dialog box layouts, inability to copy pretty much any visible text to the clipboard, flat coloring that lets different entities to merge.
I haven't found my ideal window manager yet. It seems like 99% of the mouthbreathing userbase likes fully sovereign/maximized applications. This breaks down on massive displays. It seems like a lot of people like magnetic window edges that "help" align things neatly and nicely at all times. I'm the opposite, I like windows to be scattered and different sizes, and if there are just a little too many, to be overlapping such that no borders line up. This is almost a skeuomorph of a desktop where different papers overlap generally but never exactly.
People seem to go on about making flatter colors and simpler framing, but I like the visual cues of shading and shadow, of increasing or decreasing contrast to draw attention. The Metro stuff looks like a wall of sample paint chips you see in Home Depot, or the funny hospital triage menu interface in Idiocracy. No, I don't want to run "Afternoon Eggshell Delight" nor do I want to have to hunt the wall for it.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. That includes examples of skeuomorphism. However, that's not the reason to throw it out.
In general, I agree with your points about the process and the problems with it. However, your description of what constitutes obviousness is not in line with the USPTO definition. You refer to things being obvious in a couple ways.
Many things are obvious to use, but not to implement. The patent is on the process used to implement something. Whether a person can "figure out how to whack" or "figure out how to pinch" to use the feature is irrelevant. How the software or hardware exploits a certain pattern recognition quirk to decide that this is a meaningful whack vs a stray bobble, or a meaningful pinch vs a stray swipe of a second knuckle, is quite likely not as obvious to the implementers the first time around.
Also, many things are obviously possible in hindsight, where they never occurred to anyone earlier. It's not obvious just because someone who sees the finished invention invariably smacks themselves on the forehead and says "wow, that's so simple and elegant, why didn't I think of it?!" The invention is not hindsight, it's foresight: "I'm amazed nobody else has already done it this way, it seems to solve all the problems!"
In your favor, the actual USPTO definition is that something must not be obvious to a person versed in the art. Many people on slashdot might apply here, but many others are just armchair experts. These are people who would hear nothing more than the phrase "whack to silence" and could implement it themselves without the patent documentation. The point of documenting patents is actually to enrich the public domain (in the long run) with documented methods. If an expert could easily implement it from the elevator speech without a lot of laboratory R&D work, the value of the patent documentation is so poor that it's not worth patenting.
I wrote the following entry on perlmonks.org several years ago. http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=473080 It's nothing specific to the language, so I'll just copy verbatim here.
One, I have a rule I teach to any programmer under my supervision: strategy in comments, tactics in code. Tactics are what you do to get something done. Strategy explains what you want done. In warfare, an officer focuses on strategy: "secure that hill!" "pick the best two devices!" "find the local minimum!" Don't mention the tools you use to get that job done, soldier, unless you're being fiendishly clever. Comments should be in natural human language, while the code should just accomplish those tasks.
Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?
sub process_ring_packet { -# if we have a prior server registered, --# if this packet was received from the prior, ---# if this server created this packet originally, ----# kill the packet, it's completed the trip. -# scan the packet for all object references. -# dispatch packet to object mentioned which we control. -# if any object references remain unhandled, --# if we have a next server registered, ---# send the packet to the next server. }
Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done.
Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.
I have taught my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.
(Of course, the slash ecode tag and lameness filter fought my attempts to include the pseudocode example, where indentation is useful.)
The way to crush a design patent is to show that there is a functional reason you chose that design.
"We moved the message from the top to the bottom so that it would be closer to where the user's finger would be hovering after the previous interaction. Here is expert testimony that says such alignment is more effective." BAM It's not just cosmetic.
"We chose rounded corners with a flush bezel instead of the earlier chunky corners because they will catch less when they are being removed from satchels, purses, and backpack pockets. Here are focus group comments related to that decision." BAM It's not just cosmetic.
A design patent is solely for non-functional design choices. Number of petals on a flower. Color coordination. And so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Was just going to comment on this.
The moon has days and nights, just like the Earth. Also, the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth, so we constantly see the same "side" of the moon's surface.
I think the inaccurate term "dark side of the moon" to refer to the side we don't see originally came from the idea of radio darkness (no contact possible directly from Earth), but it's a persistent phrase even after people know the difference.
That line reminded me an awful lot like:
And yet, the IRS has abdicated its obligation to investigate religious organizations that get involved in political endorsements and attacks. Think of all the juicy tax money that could be flowing from the main street hatemongers' castles.
Obviously, lots of testing is going on, and will continue to go on. They use a methodology a lot more reasonable than your "I need to test-drive it" sensibilities, but yes, you'll be able to test drive before you buy your own autocar.
Walk into any Wal*Mart, Tesco, or other low-end mass market department store. Look at the way they communicate, how they decide on things to buy, and how they deal with navigating the aisles. Realize that over half of the people you see in that store drove cars to get there. Rethink your position that most people were raised to be a sensible human.
In other words, remember that half of humanity is below average.
I hope the pre-recorded foghorn caller is included. I think it's offering some travel package, but since the first thing you hear is a loud lighthouse foghorn sound, I haven't listened to the pitch for the last several years. They've been attacking my office line about 3 times a year for the past decade, from different caller ID numbers.
I haven't seen the standard, but it'll likely include a handshake that's a lot like the NFC coils, perhaps even simpler. Check every 250ms with a very short low-power ping, and if there's a compliant device, start supplying higher power to the main coil for inductive charging.
Until you revise the whole way people write software, adding cores is useful to a very limited point. Today's software can be split at one core per thread, or one core per process. If you try to get two cores to work on the same thread, you just increase serial contention, not decrease it.
Even thread-happy Java is only working on maybe 3-5 threads at a time, the rest are sleeping until a device wakes it, or until a certain time has elapsed. A new compiler may be able to help a little bit, but it's just going to be creating very short-lived micro-threads when it detects those few opportunities for them.
Graphics hardware is great for many parallel cores, because it's the same tight problem with different data, endlessly repeated. Multiply these 4x4s please. Fill these pixels please. Endlessly. Same goes for encryption, and maybe a few bits of video game AI logic. Not many other software naturally fits to using many cores.
It's so hard to get adherents to follow this line of reasoning or thought. I'm generally agnostic, but if I'm inclined to consider faith, I agree with your description above. I go a step farther, and assign the "thousand years of peace" in Revelations to be the Seventh Day, and that means that we are still IN the Sixth Day, the day of man. This makes Genesis not just a book of the beginning, but a wrapper across the whole timeline of mankind, documenting past and predicting future.
Then again, that's only on the days I am inclined to consider faith. I've recently seen more people describe their faith as "apatheism," not caring if there is a god or not.
FTFY
What is not stated in this "Opt Out" disclaimer: PayPal will likely move to close accounts that opted out. It might be forceful and quick, in January. It might be a slower pressure move, done more insidiously, if they wanted to avoid big bad press. But I can't imagine they will move forward for long with a bunch of people who have opted out of their ideal arrangement.
The term meme has evolved (or devolved) rapidly. The "current" use, as far as I've seen, has come to mean "an ugly square graphic of a recognizable image overlaid with some large typeface text describing bumper-sticker philosophy or a barely ironic pop culture observation."
Just think of Minecraft as a world simulation where the Planck constant is equivalent to 1 meter and 1/20 second.
I can't do Libraries of Congress for linear distance, but I think there's something better than a trillion miles.
So I asked Google for "1 trillion miles in au". An astronomical unit (1 AU) is the Sun-to-Earth orbit's average radius. I forget how many miles that is, and that's kind of the point.
1 trillion miles = 10757.8002 Astronomical Units
To put that in perspective, Earth is in a middle ring of our solar system. Pluto is way out there. I ignored other far-flung rocks like Xena or Gabrielle or whatever they're calling them these days.
Google's Calculator doesn't memorize "radius of pluto's orbit in au" but on the Pluto Fact Sheet I found Semimajor axis (AU) 39.48168677.
Diameter of our solar system is then ~80 AU. I did look up the heliopause for a farther "edge of our solar system, and got Starting in May 2012 at 120 AU, Voyager 1 detected a sudden increase in cosmic rays, an apparent signature of approach to the heliopause.. Both are miniscule compared to ~10800 AU for this article's celestial feature.
I remembered that the nearest neighbor star is roughly 4 light years away. Let's not quibble about precision, one digit is enough.
4 light years = 252,958.905 Astronomical Units
Yes, this follows a long trend of marketing hyperbole and rationalization. For example, a car is voted "best in its class," say the ads. The ads don't explain that the "class" is carefully gerrymandered to only include two models, one of which has been out of production for a decade. I've taught my daughter that every adjective is making the marketing claim less impressive, not more impressive. It may very well be the best four-wheel cross-over sport utility soft-topped off-road casual zero-emission vehicle built in North America, but that's not saying much.
The very first image in the news shows the rover's wheels/chassis surrounding the metal flake. From the photo, I can't tell the scale, but it's directly below the camera, which is aimed straight down at the surface. Distance: roughly zero.
I am not just impressed with the vocabulary, but with the sublime self-reference that this line makes, in the context of your reply.
While it's a predictable joke after Antennagate, there is a kernel of truth here. It's a challenge for all cellphone cameras, not just Apple's, to capture the light you want and to weed out the stray light you don't want.
On a dedicated camera, the lens is typically recessed. This does two things: avoids light from the side to bounce around in the optics, and avoids fingerprints on the lens itself. Light from the side, and finger oils on the lens, are big contributors to lens flare. Combining side light and oils on the optics is a recipe for DIY Instagram photos.
On a cellphone, especially Apple's, they try hard not to have recessed areas on the case. It makes the whole phone thicker than it needs to be, and it catches pocket lint and sharp objects like keys or pencils. Luckily, a really flush surface is fairly easy to clean.
So that leaves the side light. If the brightest light sources are behind you, no problem with side-light lens flare. (It may make it harder to see the preview screen though.) If you have a strong light off to your side, and it may be able to fall on the lens, then cupping your hand into a primitive gobo or shield will help a lot.
This is something that bugs me no end: ever since setting lead type, I've known that there is a fairly strict rule in typeface design: all digits are the same width. You can't typeset a useful ledger sheet if the 1 is narrow and the 5 is wide. Usually, all digits are an "en space", the same as the letter N, which is in turn half the "em space" or width of M.
I see bad examples all the time in digital typefaces. Clocks are the usual glaring example, the whole clock shifts around as it rolls through the ones. MS Excel at one time included a bad font file which broke this rule... which brings us back to the ledger sheet example.
I'm a visual person. I like a bit of skeuomorphism. I can agree that many apps take it too far, but there are some kinds of apps where it can benefit, and where it can make things more fun to use.
A few top ways skeuomorph apps can do things wrong:
Non-skeuomorph apps have the same kinds of problems in many cases. Fat margins, "iced" or unstretchable dialog box layouts, inability to copy pretty much any visible text to the clipboard, flat coloring that lets different entities to merge.
I haven't found my ideal window manager yet. It seems like 99% of the mouthbreathing userbase likes fully sovereign/maximized applications. This breaks down on massive displays. It seems like a lot of people like magnetic window edges that "help" align things neatly and nicely at all times. I'm the opposite, I like windows to be scattered and different sizes, and if there are just a little too many, to be overlapping such that no borders line up. This is almost a skeuomorph of a desktop where different papers overlap generally but never exactly.
People seem to go on about making flatter colors and simpler framing, but I like the visual cues of shading and shadow, of increasing or decreasing contrast to draw attention. The Metro stuff looks like a wall of sample paint chips you see in Home Depot, or the funny hospital triage menu interface in Idiocracy. No, I don't want to run "Afternoon Eggshell Delight" nor do I want to have to hunt the wall for it.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. That includes examples of skeuomorphism. However, that's not the reason to throw it out.
In general, I agree with your points about the process and the problems with it. However, your description of what constitutes obviousness is not in line with the USPTO definition. You refer to things being obvious in a couple ways.
Many things are obvious to use, but not to implement. The patent is on the process used to implement something. Whether a person can "figure out how to whack" or "figure out how to pinch" to use the feature is irrelevant. How the software or hardware exploits a certain pattern recognition quirk to decide that this is a meaningful whack vs a stray bobble, or a meaningful pinch vs a stray swipe of a second knuckle, is quite likely not as obvious to the implementers the first time around.
Also, many things are obviously possible in hindsight, where they never occurred to anyone earlier. It's not obvious just because someone who sees the finished invention invariably smacks themselves on the forehead and says "wow, that's so simple and elegant, why didn't I think of it?!" The invention is not hindsight, it's foresight: "I'm amazed nobody else has already done it this way, it seems to solve all the problems!"
In your favor, the actual USPTO definition is that something must not be obvious to a person versed in the art. Many people on slashdot might apply here, but many others are just armchair experts. These are people who would hear nothing more than the phrase "whack to silence" and could implement it themselves without the patent documentation. The point of documenting patents is actually to enrich the public domain (in the long run) with documented methods. If an expert could easily implement it from the elevator speech without a lot of laboratory R&D work, the value of the patent documentation is so poor that it's not worth patenting.
I wrote the following entry on perlmonks.org several years ago. http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=473080 It's nothing specific to the language, so I'll just copy verbatim here.
(Of course, the slash ecode tag and lameness filter fought my attempts to include the pseudocode example, where indentation is useful.)
I first read that as "Comic Book Sans" and thought there'd be a riot of pitchforks coming your way.
The way to crush a design patent is to show that there is a functional reason you chose that design.
"We moved the message from the top to the bottom so that it would be closer to where the user's finger would be hovering after the previous interaction. Here is expert testimony that says such alignment is more effective." BAM It's not just cosmetic.
"We chose rounded corners with a flush bezel instead of the earlier chunky corners because they will catch less when they are being removed from satchels, purses, and backpack pockets. Here are focus group comments related to that decision." BAM It's not just cosmetic.
A design patent is solely for non-functional design choices. Number of petals on a flower. Color coordination. And so on.
Was I the only person who thought the phrase "kicks off" was a bit ambiguous when talking about centenarians?
So now we will be calling it "Hy Perv"?
As with all of the feminist jokes, the punchline is: That's not funny!