Schlumberger & Halliburton have very large software arms. There are many geo/petro-techinical and business applications that they sell that are (at least client-side) MS Windows-only or MS Windows-native. My experience supports your statement.
If no other purpose, then a printed manual will be that piece of visceral evidence that Linux supporters need to convice PHBs that Linux is a real product with real support. Many traditional commercial products ship with poor and/or out-of-date printed documentation, but it seems to be a token of seriousness or evidence of having met the minimum bar to entry for RealBusinessTools (R)(TM).
I did not make myself clear. I wholly agree with you about RTI, and I hope they get spanked. They are abusing the system. I don't want them protected.
If I understand dada correctly, we should just abolish legal protections altogether, because they don't work and there aren't a lot of little guys out there making it. Well I agree with the latter part: but thats because of the brokenness not the presence of the system.
I do not have an alternative system formulated, but I submit that *do* need some kind of invention protecting system, and at the same time we *do* need get rid of the currernt one.
In summary: what we have for invention protection is not acceptable. But replace it, don't just delete it.
I agree with the front half of your criticism: the system is broken and makes lawyers rich. Yet without some kind of protection, corporations can cut out the middle man and outright steal ideas and take them to market faster or cheaper than the upstart/mom&pop inventor can. Again, I agree that as it is the little folk have little recourse, de facto. I guess all I am saying is that some kind of legal protection system is not only good in principle, but is actually needed; but a whole brand new, reworked, better system.
Not a bad approach for starters. It would be important to also have different classes of users represented, e.g., novice, proficient, expert.
Also, it would be useful to construct a set of metrics like number-of-clicks-to-achieve task x. Then calculate some average number of clicks or layers of dialogues or number-of-clickables-on-screen, number of distinct ways to perform one particular action or whatever. Also average number of non-resolvable problems that result in call to helpdesk. Interpretation can come later, but like parent post, I would say definitely first get some data from design and from real-world usage.
Even if you don't care about radio, I think there is a greater danger: this will establish legislative precedence, somewhat similar to what legal precedence does for court cases. At that point the media technologies that you do care about will be at further risk.
I've worked with a v40z. Very impressive. I was surprised at how little l2/l3 cache was available when compared to the counterpart IBM POWER offerings.
Currently it maxes out at 32GB of RAM, but supposedly they will have a BIOS update in a while that will let it go up to 64GB, and will allow dual-core Opterons, for a total of 8-ways.
Clearly a new, standard definition for "nanotechnology" is needed. I submit that the definition should minimally duplicate existing fields of technology/engineering/science; as others have stated, many popular uses of "nanotech" refer to something that is merely chemistry, or hydrodynamics, or electronics, et cetera.
I submit that an appropriate domain for the term "nanotechnology" is something more in line with Eric K. Drexler's ("Engines of Creation" is a great layman's read!) work: sub-micron scale machines. To clarify: "In physics, a simple machine is any device that only requires the application of a single force to work" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine ). Perhaps such a definition would need some small modification as atomic forces factor in much more prominently at the nano-level, yet I think it is a solid starting point.
It clearly follows that the technology cited in this article, while noble, novel and useful, is not nanotech, as it is not machinery, at least not by this initial suggested definition.
Using blacklists in novel ways is particularly important as false-positives increase. Perhaps in conjunction with other suggestions here, there could be a meta-RBL that did not collect its own entries but instead was populated with the set of entries that was the intersection of of all of the actual lists. Or maybe populated with entries that appeared in at least 2/3 of the source lists.
There would be the added benefit of domain admins. only needing to query one list: the meta-list that in turn collected from the source lists.
http://www.internet2.edu/resources/Internet2Overvi ew.htm
contains "Download of 'The Matrix' DVD" slide. I know that this is merely an example and not really the issue at hand, but amusing nonetheless, and leads to an important question: at what point is the act and the intention no longer separable for legal purposes? Or further, the act, the intention and the end-results/side-effects?
Slashdot Mirror
Schlumberger & Halliburton have very large software arms. There are many geo/petro-techinical and business applications that they sell that are (at least client-side) MS Windows-only or MS Windows-native. My experience supports your statement.
I can tell you that the geologists & engineers in many oil & gas companies find google earth to be a very handy & time-saving tool.
If no other purpose, then a printed manual will be that piece of visceral evidence that Linux supporters need to convice PHBs that Linux is a real product with real support. Many traditional commercial products ship with poor and/or out-of-date printed documentation, but it seems to be a token of seriousness or evidence of having met the minimum bar to entry for RealBusinessTools (R)(TM).
I did not make myself clear. I wholly agree with you about RTI, and I hope they get spanked. They are abusing the system. I don't want them protected. If I understand dada correctly, we should just abolish legal protections altogether, because they don't work and there aren't a lot of little guys out there making it. Well I agree with the latter part: but thats because of the brokenness not the presence of the system. I do not have an alternative system formulated, but I submit that *do* need some kind of invention protecting system, and at the same time we *do* need get rid of the currernt one. In summary: what we have for invention protection is not acceptable. But replace it, don't just delete it.
I agree with the front half of your criticism: the system is broken and makes lawyers rich. Yet without some kind of protection, corporations can cut out the middle man and outright steal ideas and take them to market faster or cheaper than the upstart/mom&pop inventor can. Again, I agree that as it is the little folk have little recourse, de facto. I guess all I am saying is that some kind of legal protection system is not only good in principle, but is actually needed; but a whole brand new, reworked, better system.
Not a bad approach for starters. It would be important to also have different classes of users represented, e.g., novice, proficient, expert.
Also, it would be useful to construct a set of metrics like number-of-clicks-to-achieve task x. Then calculate some average number of clicks or layers of dialogues or number-of-clickables-on-screen, number of distinct ways to perform one particular action or whatever. Also average number of non-resolvable problems that result in call to helpdesk. Interpretation can come later, but like parent post, I would say definitely first get some data from design and from real-world usage.
Here is what Gary Gygax is up to lately: http://www.lejendary.com/
Technically not free; your taxes fund them. Yet this only adds weight to your point: you've already paid for this service!
Even if you don't care about radio, I think there is a greater danger: this will establish legislative precedence, somewhat similar to what legal precedence does for court cases. At that point the media technologies that you do care about will be at further risk.
I've worked with a v40z. Very impressive. I was surprised at how little l2/l3 cache was available when compared to the counterpart IBM POWER offerings. Currently it maxes out at 32GB of RAM, but supposedly they will have a BIOS update in a while that will let it go up to 64GB, and will allow dual-core Opterons, for a total of 8-ways.
I submit that an appropriate domain for the term "nanotechnology" is something more in line with Eric K. Drexler's ("Engines of Creation" is a great layman's read!) work: sub-micron scale machines. To clarify: "In physics, a simple machine is any device that only requires the application of a single force to work" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine ). Perhaps such a definition would need some small modification as atomic forces factor in much more prominently at the nano-level, yet I think it is a solid starting point.
It clearly follows that the technology cited in this article, while noble, novel and useful, is not nanotech, as it is not machinery, at least not by this initial suggested definition.
Using blacklists in novel ways is particularly important as false-positives increase. Perhaps in conjunction with other suggestions here, there could be a meta-RBL that did not collect its own entries but instead was populated with the set of entries that was the intersection of of all of the actual lists. Or maybe populated with entries that appeared in at least 2/3 of the source lists. There would be the added benefit of domain admins. only needing to query one list: the meta-list that in turn collected from the source lists.
http://www.internet2.edu/resources/Internet2Overvi ew.htm
contains "Download of 'The Matrix' DVD" slide. I know that this is merely an example and not really the issue at hand, but amusing nonetheless, and leads to an important question: at what point is the act and the intention no longer separable for legal purposes? Or further, the act, the intention and the end-results/side-effects?