One idea I thought of, unrelated to the new law discussed here, is that there should be an open registry of ideas, so that anyone who wants to make sure her ideas cannot be patented by others, but doesn't want to file for patents on those ideas (or just doesn't need the monopoly privilege that goes with a patent, only the protection from others gaining this privilege) can publish their ideas so that they are recorded and accessible, and can be easily claimed as "prior art" if later a patent has to be nullified.
I read an SF short story a while back which had, I think, the "Free IP Foundation" as an element of the story. If I remember correctly, it was in a big fat book titled something along the lines of "Zblorgs collection of short stories from SF writers you've never heard of before, issue #48" (or maybe not).
The main character was this guy who basically travelled around and solved problems for people, and donating every patentable idea to this foundation, and living off his reputation (and donations). Of course, the Evil Establishment couldn't stand the idea of ideas going unpatented and 4. Profit !!! not being made. In the end, it was revealed that the guy's lover/dominatrix worked for the (Evil) government and was supposed to gently persuade him to Do The Right Thing For The Country and start working commercially.
Apart for the bit about S/M being the more common option rather than "regular" (ie unsafe) sex, I thought the premise of the story was pretty realistic, with a "Free IP Foundation" holding a big patent portfolio seeming like something that might even exist today.
There are two and a half things that bug the hell out of me with the current CLI:
1. The tab completion behavior. A unix shell (well, the one I'm used to, not even sure which) will complete only up to the point where its unique, and then I can hit Ctrl-D to see possible completions. A lot more predictable than tabbing through all completions that might fit what you've typed...the distinction between "characters I typed myself" and "characters showing up because I'm cycling through" has no visual cue, even though it completely controls what files get shown.
I feel the opposite way, sort of, but I grew up on KingCON on the Amiga.
(Of course, KingCON was configurable -- I had it so that <tab> completed up to the first difference, <tab> again gave a list of matches, and following <tab>s cycled through that list (and back to the point where all matched, if I remember correctly).)
I certainly don't agree that it's a tradeoff between predictability and user friendliness. Both ways are obviously equally predictable as long as you're not using one shell and expecting another.
Instead of arguing about which way is right, we should be arguing for configurability in shells, I think.
One of my biggest pet peeves, which I really do not have the ability, knowledge, persuasion and time to fix is scrolling in GNU screen. I love screen, but it works as a terminal embedded in a terminal, so has the same environment as a shell does...can not assume much about parent terminal. Thus if I run screen inside a gnome-terminal, I lose the ability to use the terminals scroll bar to scroll inside screen
I agree completely. This sucks.
And not to mention the fact that we have terminal emulators with tabs, and screen can use multiple windows (screen windows), but there's no link between the two. Hell, screen can even use multiple X windows as views into the same instance and I still can't integrate it nicely into a tab-using terminal emulator.
Your solution would be similar to sending X events to change the position of the scroll bar. IMO that way is pretty broken. What should be done is escape sequences for specifying the scrolling to the terminal that are standardized for each terminal (with the necessary termcap abstraction of course).
[lots of functionality]
The problem is convincing people to implement all the needed escape sequences.
No shit. (IMHO it would be completely useless outside one or two specific terminal emulators.)
I'd prefer to see a solution where X events and escape codes both are equal frontends to some internal mechanism instead. Escape codes are a sort-of-natural extension when you're dealing with physical terminals and printers, but just feel unnatural in a graphical environment. Again, IMHO.
Didn't The Simpsons also make that particular prediction?
Anyway, according to Wikipedia:Motor_neurone_disease, ALS affects the nerve cells so this particular technology wouldn't help Hawking anyway, it seems.
If you look closely at the larger size version of the right hand photo, you can see that it appears to disappear down into hos shoe; so it makes sense to assume it would already have feet. Either that, or it's attached to his heel, which isn't likely.
(Show me the loading dock exo-skeleton from "Aliens" and I'll say "Well, I can get a forklift for 1/1000th of the price...")
The demonstration makes more sense when you consider that the Japanese have been looking into this kind of technology for the purpose of health care. Even if you are perfectly able to lift a "small Japanese woman" with only moderate effort, doing that maybe 10-20 times a day, five days a week for 15 years is a different thing altogether.
I believe that is why we see the references to "an aging population" and "technology geared toward the elderly" at the end of the article as well.
And that's why he's lifting a person, and not a heavy crate. For the "Alien" scenario we already have forklifts. (And they work now.)
I vaguely remember something similar being available for Palm (or was it some other PDA?).
The way it worked was that you had a picture of something, say, a car, and you had to touch the stylus to various points on the picture to proceed. I'd bet our visual memory is pretty damn good at that type of thing.
(Yes, I know we're all thinking "Boobs!" now.)
Don't know if it was one of those password safe type programs or not. Good idea, anyway.
So the trailer will be out, but I can't see it? (Yeah, I'm one of those.) Arrghh...
Where do I find someone who's geeky enough to have heard of Firefly but not geeky enough to refuse to watch potential spoilers? Do such people even exist?
The fact that you can play it on the piano and it still sounds so good probably says something about the nature of Nintendo game music. Like, that it probably was composed "off-line" to begin with.
You could try Linus Akesson's *
Parallax for Piano (12MB MP3) version of Parallax
(7KB SID) as a comparison. I doubt this 11-or-so-minute piece was ever intended to be heard coming from anything but a C64. It sounds very "un-pianolike" to my untrained ears, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The main character was this guy who basically travelled around and solved problems for people, and donating every patentable idea to this foundation, and living off his reputation (and donations). Of course, the Evil Establishment couldn't stand the idea of ideas going unpatented and 4. Profit !!! not being made. In the end, it was revealed that the guy's lover/dominatrix worked for the (Evil) government and was supposed to gently persuade him to Do The Right Thing For The Country and start working commercially.
Apart for the bit about S/M being the more common option rather than "regular" (ie unsafe) sex, I thought the premise of the story was pretty realistic, with a "Free IP Foundation" holding a big patent portfolio seeming like something that might even exist today.
Does anyone know which one I'm talking about?
(Of course, KingCON was configurable -- I had it so that <tab> completed up to the first difference, <tab> again gave a list of matches, and following <tab>s cycled through that list (and back to the point where all matched, if I remember correctly).)
I certainly don't agree that it's a tradeoff between predictability and user friendliness. Both ways are obviously equally predictable as long as you're not using one shell and expecting another.
Instead of arguing about which way is right, we should be arguing for configurability in shells, I think.
And not to mention the fact that we have terminal emulators with tabs, and screen can use multiple windows (screen windows), but there's no link between the two. Hell, screen can even use multiple X windows as views into the same instance and I still can't integrate it nicely into a tab-using terminal emulator.
No shit. (IMHO it would be completely useless outside one or two specific terminal emulators.)I'd prefer to see a solution where X events and escape codes both are equal frontends to some internal mechanism instead. Escape codes are a sort-of-natural extension when you're dealing with physical terminals and printers, but just feel unnatural in a graphical environment. Again, IMHO.
Anyway, according to Wikipedia:Motor_neurone_disease, ALS affects the nerve cells so this particular technology wouldn't help Hawking anyway, it seems.
If you look closely at the larger size version of the right hand photo, you can see that it appears to disappear down into hos shoe; so it makes sense to assume it would already have feet. Either that, or it's attached to his heel, which isn't likely.
(Show me the loading dock exo-skeleton from "Aliens" and I'll say "Well, I can get a forklift for 1/1000th of the price...")
The demonstration makes more sense when you consider that the Japanese have been looking into this kind of technology for the purpose of health care. Even if you are perfectly able to lift a "small Japanese woman" with only moderate effort, doing that maybe 10-20 times a day, five days a week for 15 years is a different thing altogether.
I believe that is why we see the references to "an aging population" and "technology geared toward the elderly" at the end of the article as well.
And that's why he's lifting a person, and not a heavy crate. For the "Alien" scenario we already have forklifts. (And they work now.)
I vaguely remember something similar being available for Palm (or was it some other PDA?).
The way it worked was that you had a picture of something, say, a car, and you had to touch the stylus to various points on the picture to proceed. I'd bet our visual memory is pretty damn good at that type of thing.
(Yes, I know we're all thinking "Boobs!" now.)
Don't know if it was one of those password safe type programs or not. Good idea, anyway.
Where do I find someone who's geeky enough to have heard of Firefly but not geeky enough to refuse to watch potential spoilers? Do such people even exist?
Yes, you are soundink wery much the same... (It's almost funny if you followed the GP link.)
I don't understand how "USA! USA! USA!" can possibly top "geeky correct". It's so obvious the right way is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS it hurts.
How TF can a date format that automatically sorts correctly be wrong?
You could try Linus Akesson's * Parallax for Piano (12MB MP3) version of Parallax (7KB SID) as a comparison. I doubt this 11-or-so-minute piece was ever intended to be heard coming from anything but a C64. It sounds very "un-pianolike" to my untrained ears, anyway.
* That's how he spells it, on his webpage anyway.