If they put them on a pricing schedule that goes up over time, and start them at $300k today, we'll see a dramatic reduction in frivilous patents.
This only screws the little guy over and ensures that bigger corporations will keep patenting. 300k to a Microsoft, IBM or pharmaceutical company is small fries. To a small business owner or full-time dreamer like me, it breaks the bank. It's an artificial barrier to entry that does not address the real problems.
The threshold should not be financial, it should be by virtue of technical merit. Set the bar higher, the terms shorter, etc. Have a maximum duration over which a patent owner must implement said patent, or forfeit it, similar to enforcement of trademarks (see trademark dilution). It's not precisely the same concept, but I think it's a virtuous idea.
I was 21 when my first son was born, my mom was 42 at the time, and it was her first grandchild.
Like you said, more than enough time to finish college (although I'm still working on the PhD, 4 years later). And, IMO, there's something for having the kids while you are young and still have the energy. Just an observation.
"Duh duh... duh duh... duh duh... Salsa shark! We're gonna need a bigger boat! Man goes into cage, cage goes into salsa. Shark's in the salsa. Our shark."
I love what he's doing but I said "damn, damn, damn" when he went on and on about about his experiences as a lawyer. Something tells me that might be the difference between Monster pursuing and not pursuing this case. Had he not laid all his cards out on the table, he might have got the fight he was looking for, and showed Monster they can't bully everyone around. Part of me is afraid that won't happen now.
But either way, I'm glad he's sticking up for himself, and not just himself but making it public. Others will catch on, I hope, and be able to use similar arguments and techniques to evaluate settling versus taking a stand.
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Oddly, they're saying a language which is slower for people to write, and considerably more obscure than most languages, is the reason something is done under-budget and quickly? It seems like those traits would make it more secure, but take much longer to make...
You need to make a distinction: they weren't writing new code, they were updating existing code. This is a very important distinction. We are all aware of "code rot", etc. and how over time documentation gets lost, people have to re-learn a piece of code based purely on the source, etc. However they took an older piece of code and revamped it, right on time and under budget. This is notable, and may be attributable to some of the properties of Ada.
Maybe, maybe not, but there's a good chance it had something to do with Ada.
There are very good reasons why WIFI can't always be installed. No one ever wants to hear it, but it's true
If it's so true, I'm sure you won't have any problems explaining it to me, now will you? I'm too many years and too far removed from the people and situation at my university, but you claim to understand so why don't you tell us what you think now?
People love the "We installed WIFI ourselves and all was joyous" stories. But you never hear the, "We installed WIFI ourselves and breached security on the network/ate up all the DHCP addresses/allowed a guy with a trivial WEP breaking program to sniff everyone's network passwords" story.
I don't disagree. My point was, IT is a service, and when they stop becoming a service and start becoming a beaurocracy then you have stuff like this happen.
There are very good reasons why WIFI can't always be installed.
On a college campus? Where the students are charged several hundred bucks a semester in "IT fees" and then can't use their notebooks on campus? I'm curious to hear it.
Yes, they're end users. But they don't sound like customers. They sound like employees.
In which case they should toe the god damn line, because they're fucking shit up for other people.
Yes, enterprise IT can be frustrating. But your cheeky little wifi hack maybe just took down three buildings of network,
resulting in thousands of dollars of lost productivity. Actually happened, in my org - 100% true story.
My IT department is fine - I don't see them but once or twice a year and my computer works well enough. But a similar problem to the one you described occurred at the college I'm working on my PhD at. (I heard this story second hand, might be an error or two, but I trust the source) The engineering department wanted WiFi in the building in order to hook up the conference rooms and let students use wireless in the classroom. Seems simple enough, especially in this day and age. A formal request was made. And rejected by IT. Random bitching and moaning. So after a few months of inaction, the engineering department installed a few routers themselves, under the radar.
See, the problem is when IT gets in the way of business. IT is a service, not an administration. So when it starts acting like one, with bureaucracy, with stupid shit to get stuff done (a friend of mine, engineer in another company, had to wait three weeks (!!!) to get an approved, paid for compiler he needed installed on his laptop???) then yes, we go under the radar to get work done, which might I remind you is why we get paid. Apologies in advance if we ever cross paths.
it would prevent the game from getting stale - guess what? when your character dies you have to (*gasp*) PLAY THE SAME GAME OVER AGAIN! How is that NOT stale? In a permadeath situation you get to relevel in the same leveling spots, with the same quests, and grind the same bullshit you were grinding before.
One problem it would solve is the skew of "player age", that is, a bunch of capped level characters with the best gear they can possibly attain for their play style. In the "real world" the population distribution is not even, but is more distributed than in a MMO. This creates a very skewed world that is designed for the higher levels and essentially it's a runaway train. You need the next expansion to get the next 10 levels and the next round of gear and pacify the sheeple for a year while you build the next expansion.
There are ways to solve this that don't involve permadeath from combat, or a single combat scenario. Game designers just need to have balls and not design to the lowest common denominator.
As someone who played D2 for several years in between MMO's and school, their method of "random generation" was hardly random. Unique monster were still the same uniques with the same drops. There were a few rare monsters (who were unique, randomly generated) and the maps were randomly generated in the sense the geometry was different but the mobs were the same and the art was the same, and if you played for more than a month you figured out hey, I've seen this "random map" before.
By the "vocal" community perhaps. Industry tends to use it pretty hardcore. I've been through three engineering (mechanical/aerospace) jobs in the last three years, and all three, when using Linux, used Red Hat.
So while people piss and moan on/. and other forums, and praise Ubuntu or whatever flavor of the month, real work does get done on Red Hat and similar distros. It's just that you wouldn't hear about it, unless you were really **doing** it.
Does anyone know of a benchmarking of the top OSs showing performance as core numbers increase for various activities?
It's easy in my case, since I write my own engineering code. Restrict the number of cores your program is allowed to access. Compare.
Now if you are using commercial software, it's pretty case dependant, but in some areas of work (video rendering is one) software is already utilizing 8 cores, no problem.
I suspect that what we will find is that performance increases diminish as the number of processors increase due to fundamental multi-core architecture problems involving moving data intra as well as inter chip even before we get to issues involving how to best allocate the workload.
I haven't seen this. My data set is pretty small: a quad core Opteron and a dual core Athlon x2. Scaling from 1-4 processors on the Opteron returns rather linear performance increases. Scaling on the x2 is just 2 data points. I will admit my work is very low I/O.
I'd love to build me a dual quad-core Xeon box at home and play with those numbers, but I just don't have the financial reserves at the moment... wife, kids, college keep sucking it away:)
a handful of C compiler #pragma directives from intel isn't going to make this work.
That's OpenMP, and depending on the program, it can work wonders. In an hour I parallelized 90% of a finite element CFD code with it. Yes, it sucks for fine-grained parallelization.
Intel's product is Threaded Building Blocks, and is not built around pragmas, and is both commercial and OSS. It's pretty slick and will let you do the more fine-grained optimizations.
It's a matter of these multi-core "general purpose" CPUs are only really useful for a fairly limited set of specific problems.
Not entirely true, it's just useful for problems that need a processor.
I write this from a quad xeon machine, repurposed as my dev box, as CPU1 grinds away at about 75% all day long, the rest idle.
... obviously, you have more processor than you need. I, on the other hand, have a quad core Opteron that is currently over 350% utilization. I tank it almost 24/7.
the ridiculously parallel problem of rendering is handled by the GPU
Not for long. Raytracing is making a comeback.
As for me, I'm seeing AMD's multiple specific purpose core approach as being more viable, as far as actually making my next desktop computer perform faster.
If you can't even tank one core of your Xenon, it's doubtful.
"Even after decades of research and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on making multithreaded programming easier, threaded applications are still a pain in the ass to write."
I'd caveat that by saying "threading arbitrary program X is a pain in the ass." There are plenty of useful programs that are easily parallelized.
Canada spends half the amount and scores higher in a lot of the comparisons than the USA.
I have friends in Canada, and grew up close to the Canada-America border, so now I know you're spouting BS. Yes, Canada is cheaper, but the service is crap in comparison. Mortality rates for most cancers, heart attacks, etc. is substatnially lower. Wikipedia will confirm:
One of the major complaints about the Canadian health care system is waiting times, whether for a specialist, major elective surgery, such as hip replacement, or specialized treatments, such as radiation for breast cancer. Studies by the Commonwealth Fund found that 24% of Canadians waited 4 hours or more in the emergency room, vs. 12% in the U.S.; 57% waited 4 weeks or more to see a specialist, vs. 23% in the U.S.[42]
In a 2003 survey of hospital administrators conducted in Canada, the U.S., and three other countries, 21% of Canadian hospital administrators, but less than 1% of American administrators, said that it would take over three weeks to do a biopsy for possible breast cancer on a 50-year-old woman; 50% of Canadian administrators versus none of their American counterparts said that it would take over six months for a 65-year-old to undergo a routine hip replacement surgery.
Give me numbers. Show me less cost and same value, or same cost and better value, and I'll believe you. Every proposal for national health care plans by every Democrat out there that I have seen shows me paying more, and getting no more value. No thanks.
Compare Microsoft to Apple, and you have a software manufacturer who dabbles in hardware (Microsoft) and a hardware manufacturer who dabbles in software (Apple).
If software was so integral to apple, then why don't they sell licenses for generic PC's? Because it's all about the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
If they put them on a pricing schedule that goes up over time, and start them at $300k today, we'll see a dramatic reduction in frivilous patents.
This only screws the little guy over and ensures that bigger corporations will keep patenting. 300k to a Microsoft, IBM or pharmaceutical company is small fries. To a small business owner or full-time dreamer like me, it breaks the bank. It's an artificial barrier to entry that does not address the real problems.
The threshold should not be financial, it should be by virtue of technical merit. Set the bar higher, the terms shorter, etc. Have a maximum duration over which a patent owner must implement said patent, or forfeit it, similar to enforcement of trademarks (see trademark dilution). It's not precisely the same concept, but I think it's a virtuous idea.
Until you find out it's a small mechanical SMT component that's probably custom manufactured, you can't even find a replacement for.
Not to mention the target audience doesn't exactly have an electronics store in their backyard. Or a soldering iron. Or perhaps even an outlet.
(Cue Kung Pow... "Let me know, if you see a Radio Shack")
Is this the good research or the cow-whale crossbreed research?
Ah yes. The sea cow.
The GPL attempts to stipulate terms which are roughly: share and share alike.
Whereas the BSD license says "here, use it as you want it, no restrictions."
The GPL is like a mommy or the matron at the sandbox who says "ok kids now let's play nice." The BSD (and similar) license simply says "play."
I was 21 when my first son was born, my mom was 42 at the time, and it was her first grandchild.
Like you said, more than enough time to finish college (although I'm still working on the PhD, 4 years later). And, IMO, there's something for having the kids while you are young and still have the energy. Just an observation.
Salsadot...
"Duh duh... duh duh... duh duh... Salsa shark! We're gonna need a bigger boat! Man goes into cage, cage goes into salsa. Shark's in the salsa. Our shark."
I love what he's doing but I said "damn, damn, damn" when he went on and on about about his experiences as a lawyer. Something tells me that might be the difference between Monster pursuing and not pursuing this case. Had he not laid all his cards out on the table, he might have got the fight he was looking for, and showed Monster they can't bully everyone around. Part of me is afraid that won't happen now.
But either way, I'm glad he's sticking up for himself, and not just himself but making it public. Others will catch on, I hope, and be able to use similar arguments and techniques to evaluate settling versus taking a stand.
Oddly, they're saying a language which is slower for people to write, and considerably more obscure than most languages, is the reason something is done under-budget and quickly? It seems like those traits would make it more secure, but take much longer to make...
You need to make a distinction: they weren't writing new code, they were updating existing code. This is a very important distinction. We are all aware of "code rot", etc. and how over time documentation gets lost, people have to re-learn a piece of code based purely on the source, etc. However they took an older piece of code and revamped it, right on time and under budget. This is notable, and may be attributable to some of the properties of Ada.
Maybe, maybe not, but there's a good chance it had something to do with Ada.
I was responding to your comment,
There are very good reasons why WIFI can't always be installed. No one ever wants to hear it, but it's true
If it's so true, I'm sure you won't have any problems explaining it to me, now will you? I'm too many years and too far removed from the people and situation at my university, but you claim to understand so why don't you tell us what you think now?
People love the "We installed WIFI ourselves and all was joyous" stories. But you never hear the, "We installed WIFI ourselves and breached security on the network/ate up all the DHCP addresses/allowed a guy with a trivial WEP breaking program to sniff everyone's network passwords" story.
I don't disagree. My point was, IT is a service, and when they stop becoming a service and start becoming a beaurocracy then you have stuff like this happen.
There are very good reasons why WIFI can't always be installed.
On a college campus? Where the students are charged several hundred bucks a semester in "IT fees" and then can't use their notebooks on campus? I'm curious to hear it.
Yes, they're end users. But they don't sound like customers. They sound like employees.
In which case they should toe the god damn line, because they're fucking shit up for other people.
Yes, enterprise IT can be frustrating. But your cheeky little wifi hack maybe just took down three buildings of network,
resulting in thousands of dollars of lost productivity. Actually happened, in my org - 100% true story.
My IT department is fine - I don't see them but once or twice a year and my computer works well enough. But a similar problem to the one you described occurred at the college I'm working on my PhD at. (I heard this story second hand, might be an error or two, but I trust the source) The engineering department wanted WiFi in the building in order to hook up the conference rooms and let students use wireless in the classroom. Seems simple enough, especially in this day and age. A formal request was made. And rejected by IT. Random bitching and moaning. So after a few months of inaction, the engineering department installed a few routers themselves, under the radar.
See, the problem is when IT gets in the way of business. IT is a service, not an administration. So when it starts acting like one, with bureaucracy, with stupid shit to get stuff done (a friend of mine, engineer in another company, had to wait three weeks (!!!) to get an approved, paid for compiler he needed installed on his laptop???) then yes, we go under the radar to get work done, which might I remind you is why we get paid. Apologies in advance if we ever cross paths.
it would prevent the game from getting stale - guess what? when your character dies you have to (*gasp*) PLAY THE SAME GAME OVER AGAIN! How is that NOT stale? In a permadeath situation you get to relevel in the same leveling spots, with the same quests, and grind the same bullshit you were grinding before.
One problem it would solve is the skew of "player age", that is, a bunch of capped level characters with the best gear they can possibly attain for their play style. In the "real world" the population distribution is not even, but is more distributed than in a MMO. This creates a very skewed world that is designed for the higher levels and essentially it's a runaway train. You need the next expansion to get the next 10 levels and the next round of gear and pacify the sheeple for a year while you build the next expansion.
There are ways to solve this that don't involve permadeath from combat, or a single combat scenario. Game designers just need to have balls and not design to the lowest common denominator.
As someone who played D2 for several years in between MMO's and school, their method of "random generation" was hardly random. Unique monster were still the same uniques with the same drops. There were a few rare monsters (who were unique, randomly generated) and the maps were randomly generated in the sense the geometry was different but the mobs were the same and the art was the same, and if you played for more than a month you figured out hey, I've seen this "random map" before.
By the "vocal" community perhaps. Industry tends to use it pretty hardcore. I've been through three engineering (mechanical/aerospace) jobs in the last three years, and all three, when using Linux, used Red Hat.
/. and other forums, and praise Ubuntu or whatever flavor of the month, real work does get done on Red Hat and similar distros. It's just that you wouldn't hear about it, unless you were really **doing** it.
So while people piss and moan on
Those are low-resolution photos of someone's driveway.
Correction: these are low-resolution photos taken from someones driveway, which is private property.
Sure, I grew up on a gravel road, but my gravel public lanes never came complete with garage doors!.
They were clearly and undeniably in the couples' driveway.
Does anyone know of a benchmarking of the top OSs showing performance as core numbers increase for various activities?
:)
It's easy in my case, since I write my own engineering code. Restrict the number of cores your program is allowed to access. Compare.
Now if you are using commercial software, it's pretty case dependant, but in some areas of work (video rendering is one) software is already utilizing 8 cores, no problem.
I suspect that what we will find is that performance increases diminish as the number of processors increase due to fundamental multi-core architecture problems involving moving data intra as well as inter chip even before we get to issues involving how to best allocate the workload.
I haven't seen this. My data set is pretty small: a quad core Opteron and a dual core Athlon x2. Scaling from 1-4 processors on the Opteron returns rather linear performance increases. Scaling on the x2 is just 2 data points. I will admit my work is very low I/O.
I'd love to build me a dual quad-core Xeon box at home and play with those numbers, but I just don't have the financial reserves at the moment... wife, kids, college keep sucking it away
Last I checked, shareholders were members of the subset "public"
a Winnebago!
a handful of C compiler #pragma directives from intel isn't going to make this work.
... obviously, you have more processor than you need. I, on the other hand, have a quad core Opteron that is currently over 350% utilization. I tank it almost 24/7.
That's OpenMP, and depending on the program, it can work wonders. In an hour I parallelized 90% of a finite element CFD code with it. Yes, it sucks for fine-grained parallelization.
Intel's product is Threaded Building Blocks, and is not built around pragmas, and is both commercial and OSS. It's pretty slick and will let you do the more fine-grained optimizations.
It's a matter of these multi-core "general purpose" CPUs are only really useful for a fairly limited set of specific problems.
Not entirely true, it's just useful for problems that need a processor.
I write this from a quad xeon machine, repurposed as my dev box, as CPU1 grinds away at about 75% all day long, the rest idle.
the ridiculously parallel problem of rendering is handled by the GPU
Not for long. Raytracing is making a comeback.
As for me, I'm seeing AMD's multiple specific purpose core approach as being more viable, as far as actually making my next desktop computer perform faster.
If you can't even tank one core of your Xenon, it's doubtful.
"Even after decades of research and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on making multithreaded programming easier, threaded applications are still a pain in the ass to write."
I'd caveat that by saying "threading arbitrary program X is a pain in the ass." There are plenty of useful programs that are easily parallelized.
Kinda hard to do without puncturing the tire. Read up on it: here. Michelin at least seems to mount it inside the laminas of the tire.
Of course you could always surround your tires in tin foil if you are THAT paranoid.
I thought we celebrated that day, every day :)
Canada spends half the amount and scores higher in a lot of the comparisons than the USA.
I have friends in Canada, and grew up close to the Canada-America border, so now I know you're spouting BS. Yes, Canada is cheaper, but the service is crap in comparison. Mortality rates for most cancers, heart attacks, etc. is substatnially lower. Wikipedia will confirm:
One of the major complaints about the Canadian health care system is waiting times, whether for a specialist, major elective surgery, such as hip replacement, or specialized treatments, such as radiation for breast cancer. Studies by the Commonwealth Fund found that 24% of Canadians waited 4 hours or more in the emergency room, vs. 12% in the U.S.; 57% waited 4 weeks or more to see a specialist, vs. 23% in the U.S.[42]
In a 2003 survey of hospital administrators conducted in Canada, the U.S., and three other countries, 21% of Canadian hospital administrators, but less than 1% of American administrators, said that it would take over three weeks to do a biopsy for possible breast cancer on a 50-year-old woman; 50% of Canadian administrators versus none of their American counterparts said that it would take over six months for a 65-year-old to undergo a routine hip replacement surgery.
Give me numbers. Show me less cost and same value, or same cost and better value, and I'll believe you. Every proposal for national health care plans by every Democrat out there that I have seen shows me paying more, and getting no more value. No thanks.
FireWire
Smeg!
Compare Microsoft to Apple, and you have a software manufacturer who dabbles in hardware (Microsoft) and a hardware manufacturer who dabbles in software (Apple).
If software was so integral to apple, then why don't they sell licenses for generic PC's? Because it's all about the hardware.