I have a patent (1354m151345y4) on displaying text on a computer monitor. I also have one (135m34534) where the user hits a little button to enter information into a computer.
Finally, I have a patent (0), whereby users enter information at a website, and it can be viewed by other users. This information can be sorted by date or into "threads," or topics. An administrator can assign a number to the post, which can be used to indicate the quality of the information contained therein.
CmdrTaco, beware! All zero of my lawyers are hunting you down!
Don't like the dancing icons? Try turning them off in the Dock Preferences. Don't like the way the Finder works? Change your prefs. (Ok, granted, there needs to be a way to turn off the minimizing animation. But heck, it, too, has a function: so the newbies can see where their windows go.)
This is a beta OS compiled with debug code. So it is going to be quite slow. In fact, the incremental release to OS X pb (cryptically called "Build 2E14") offers quite a bit of performance improvement. The final release should be even better, when the debug stuff is stripped out.
Oh, yeah, if you don't like the eye candy of the iBook (and no one says you have to), go for the pro model Powerbook G4. Yep, they're expensive, but a price-feature comparison is very favorable for the PB G4.
Oh, and by the way, lest you think Apple's only innovation is colors, look up from your C:> prompt and consider this:
- Quicktime, which has been around for a decade, enabled applications to work with several image/audio/video formats with ease (as opposed to having to incorporate several different image libraries, or even worse, have image apps be incompatible)
- Without Apple's foresight and marketing, USB would be rotting in the crypts of obscure RFC documents
- Similarly with wireless
- Apple has a patent on Firewire
- The combination of Firewire and iMovie brought video editing within the reach of a large audience
If you need Windows, go out and use Windows. If you need Linux, go out and use Linux. Or OS/2 or Amiga/OS or even VMS. Nobody cares. But before making a sweeping statement that some company or other has no innovation (even MS has their innovations, though I don't care for the direction their innovation is taking), read your history books.
A child's way of thinking about punishment would be to "right the wrong." The embarrassment of having to admit guilt publicly (along with the lost business resulting from the incident) is the deterrent.
But we live in a world where a woman can get lots of money from McDonald's because she spilled her OWN coffee in her OWN lap, but she happened to be in a McDonald's at the time.
Maybe we should think harder about the child's way of thinking. Right now the $5G lawsuit looks like a get-quick-rich-and-legally scheme. It makes me sick.
St. Steve has been known to feed the rumor mill and pull other stunts.
Read the c|net and MacCentral articles with a healthy dose of skepticism and check the Mac web in a week or two.
not quite as cool, but
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
During one of my exams for a class in developmental disabilities, I developed a great pain in my right arm after writing vigorously for three straight hours. It persisted for several weeks, so I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with a nasty case of tendonitis of the elbow. It was recommended that I keep handwriting to a minimum, if possible (advice I keep to this day). I brought this up with my instructor, and he allowed me to use a laptop to type the answers to all the questions on subsequent exams (including the final!)
While I had no internet connection, I thought it cool that he allowed this (this was back in 1996). It was a small step toward using technology to close the gap in education.
I hope this trend toward creative uses of computers in education continues.
Re:Developers, Large Shops in Panic: OS X ain't Ma
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Being able to, say, write completely featured styled text editors with 13 lines of code is completely counterproductive. Having to go to one place to get your tasks done instead of all over the screen is counterproductive. Having a full-fledged API to write extensions and control panels instead of having to implement some hooks, and, often, weird programming practices is counterproductive.
I don't understand why a company just producing closing arguments for an antitrust case against them would go off and munch another company. Then again, they probably will just throw lawyers at this case until everybody forgets about it.
So, what do we do? Force everyone who wants to vote online to get a secure digital signature (which, of course, the NSA, FBI, and CIA would all want backdoors for--bring up questions about whether they could fix elections). You would also have to have a transition period for online voting as an "experiment," i.e. allow the old voting system to remain in place. Of course, you would have to assure that someone who voted online didn't also vote by hand...
Also, not everyone in the U.S. has equal access to computers, nor the ability to operate one properly (no comments about 'we need a meritocracy anyway':P). That issue in itself would undermine any proposal within the next ten years.
I don't see it happening anytime soon, though I can imagine lots of people talking about it.
I never realized that the two technologies were competing. It must be a slow news day at Infoworld.
Besides, if anyone wants Firewire on their Intel machine, I'm sure it could be arranged. After all, Intel made it so you couldn't overclock a PIII and firingsquad.com did it on the first day of getting the chip. (The point being that Intel really cannot control what devices people can or cannot use; some company of geeks somewhere will deliver the goods if there is high enough demand.)
Wouldn't the first key be more than enough of a hole? Scenario. Be VERY generous, and give M$ the benefit of the doubt (regular programming will resume in a moment...) that the text of their response is true. This means that M$ has control of what crypto algorithms you can install into Windoze using their API, theoretically those which "comply with the export laws." Doesn't that possibly mean they will only approve those which have a backdoor? Of course, you could (as I would probably do anyway, if I ever had the desire to program a Windoze machine) skip the API entirely.
So what? You shouldn't have to ask people to not start murdering, robbing houses, diverting tax funds into shady government projects, or any of the other crappy things that people can do. But this is the real world, and it's time to wake up and smell the bullshit. And you shouldn't have to get a lawyer to tell people to clean up their bullshit, but you often do. Sucks, but it's part of life.
The idea is that the commercial site has usurped ownership/copyright of the words. Hey, dude, I say you document actions (when you put up your article, when you saw theirs, when you contacted them, their response, names if possible, everything you can think of). Send one more notice thorough snail mail, with a phone call follow up, insisting that they remove any indication that they own copyright. If refused, then follow the lawyer/bark letter advice.
One thing that I'm learning from the Apple lawsuits (both by and against them): you have to take legal action or you effectively lose ownership. Sucks, but that's the way the court sees it and the way you will have to treat it if you want help from the legal system.
Most people only know about the existence of one distribution: the normal distribution (aka bell curve, Gaussian distribution, many others). The fact is that statisticians routinely use quite a few different distributions, some (called "heavy-tailed") which are used to simulate "rare events."
A few comments on the article:
Nothing follows the Gaussian distributions (the "normal distribution" is really a family). This is something humans constructed to understand their world. By the same token, nothing follows this new distribution (yet another page in my handbook, I guess). They just do "well enough" (in addition, the normal distribution is the easiest of all to work with).
Why is this a big deal? In fact, who was using the normal distribution to predict earthquakes and airplane crashes, anyway? There are different, more realistic models for this; a lot of studies are being done on "heavy tails" for rare event prediction, etc. etc. Again, just another distribution in the statistician's handbook.
For that matter, the use of the Gaussian (and all the models that assume it) need to be re-examined in other fields. E.g. there is evidence that indicates that intelligence follows a bimodal distribution (many people tend to be near one of two "areas" of intelligence, instead of near one grand average like the Gaussian case).
I guess this article shows the general public's lack of understanding of statistics, not that statistics is that easy to understand in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a patent (1354m151345y4) on displaying text on a computer monitor. I also have one (135m34534) where the user hits a little button to enter information into a computer.
Finally, I have a patent (0), whereby users enter information at a website, and it can be viewed by other users. This information can be sorted by date or into "threads," or topics. An administrator can assign a number to the post, which can be used to indicate the quality of the information contained therein.
CmdrTaco, beware! All zero of my lawyers are hunting you down!
Oops ...
"- same for wireless"
should be
"- same for IEEE 802.11/DSSS"
if anyone cares.
Don't like the dancing icons? Try turning them off in the Dock Preferences. Don't like the way the Finder works? Change your prefs. (Ok, granted, there needs to be a way to turn off the minimizing animation. But heck, it, too, has a function: so the newbies can see where their windows go.)
This is a beta OS compiled with debug code. So it is going to be quite slow. In fact, the incremental release to OS X pb (cryptically called "Build 2E14") offers quite a bit of performance improvement. The final release should be even better, when the debug stuff is stripped out.
Oh, yeah, if you don't like the eye candy of the iBook (and no one says you have to), go for the pro model Powerbook G4. Yep, they're expensive, but a price-feature comparison is very favorable for the PB G4.
Oh, and by the way, lest you think Apple's only innovation is colors, look up from your C:> prompt and consider this:
- Quicktime, which has been around for a decade, enabled applications to work with several image/audio/video formats with ease (as opposed to having to incorporate several different image libraries, or even worse, have image apps be incompatible)
- Without Apple's foresight and marketing, USB would be rotting in the crypts of obscure RFC documents
- Similarly with wireless
- Apple has a patent on Firewire
- The combination of Firewire and iMovie brought video editing within the reach of a large audience
If you need Windows, go out and use Windows. If you need Linux, go out and use Linux. Or OS/2 or Amiga/OS or even VMS. Nobody cares. But before making a sweeping statement that some company or other has no innovation (even MS has their innovations, though I don't care for the direction their innovation is taking), read your history books.
A child's way of thinking about punishment would be to "right the wrong." The embarrassment of having to admit guilt publicly (along with the lost business resulting from the incident) is the deterrent.
But we live in a world where a woman can get lots of money from McDonald's because she spilled her OWN coffee in her OWN lap, but she happened to be in a McDonald's at the time.
Maybe we should think harder about the child's way of thinking. Right now the $5G lawsuit looks like a get-quick-rich-and-legally scheme. It makes me sick.
St. Steve has been known to feed the rumor mill and pull other stunts.
Read the c|net and MacCentral articles with a healthy dose of skepticism and check the Mac web in a week or two.
During one of my exams for a class in developmental disabilities, I developed a great pain in my right arm after writing vigorously for three straight hours. It persisted for several weeks, so I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with a nasty case of tendonitis of the elbow. It was recommended that I keep handwriting to a minimum, if possible (advice I keep to this day). I brought this up with my instructor, and he allowed me to use a laptop to type the answers to all the questions on subsequent exams (including the final!)
While I had no internet connection, I thought it cool that he allowed this (this was back in 1996). It was a small step toward using technology to close the gap in education.
I hope this trend toward creative uses of computers in education continues.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Being able to, say, write completely featured styled text editors with 13 lines of code is completely counterproductive. Having to go to one place to get your tasks done instead of all over the screen is counterproductive. Having a full-fledged API to write extensions and control panels instead of having to implement some hooks, and, often, weird programming practices is counterproductive.
I don't understand why a company just producing closing arguments for an antitrust case against them would go off and munch another company. Then again, they probably will just throw lawyers at this case until everybody forgets about it.
Internet voting would be a wonderful thing if ...
...
:P). That issue in itself would undermine any proposal within the next ten years.
(conditions to numerous to be listed)
So, what do we do? Force everyone who wants to vote online to get a secure digital signature (which, of course, the NSA, FBI, and CIA would all want backdoors for--bring up questions about whether they could fix elections). You would also have to have a transition period for online voting as an "experiment," i.e. allow the old voting system to remain in place. Of course, you would have to assure that someone who voted online didn't also vote by hand
Also, not everyone in the U.S. has equal access to computers, nor the ability to operate one properly (no comments about 'we need a meritocracy anyway'
I don't see it happening anytime soon, though I can imagine lots of people talking about it.
I believe it is $.25 per port, but not by Apple's choice.
I never realized that the two technologies were competing. It must be a slow news day at Infoworld.
Besides, if anyone wants Firewire on their Intel machine, I'm sure it could be arranged. After all, Intel made it so you couldn't overclock a PIII and firingsquad.com did it on the first day of getting the chip. (The point being that Intel really cannot control what devices people can or cannot use; some company of geeks somewhere will deliver the goods if there is high enough demand.)
Wouldn't the first key be more than enough of a hole? Scenario. Be VERY generous, and give M$ the benefit of the doubt (regular programming will resume in a moment ...) that the text of their response is true. This means that M$ has control of what crypto algorithms you can install into Windoze using their API, theoretically those which "comply with the export laws." Doesn't that possibly mean they will only approve those which have a backdoor? Of course, you could (as I would probably do anyway, if I ever had the desire to program a Windoze machine) skip the API entirely.
Is the PR department out of the office today? That response sounds unprofessional. And a poor attempt at being silver-tongued.
So what? You shouldn't have to ask people to not start murdering, robbing houses, diverting tax funds into shady government projects, or any of the other crappy things that people can do. But this is the real world, and it's time to wake up and smell the bullshit. And you shouldn't have to get a lawyer to tell people to clean up their bullshit, but you often do. Sucks, but it's part of life.
One thing that I'm learning from the Apple lawsuits (both by and against them): you have to take legal action or you effectively lose ownership. Sucks, but that's the way the court sees it and the way you will have to treat it if you want help from the legal system.
A few comments on the article:
I guess this article shows the general public's lack of understanding of statistics, not that statistics is that easy to understand in the first place.