The problem is that the patent office is ill-equiped to consider the issue of "obvious to one skilled in the art". Their criteria for the examiner essentially are:
1) has it been patented yet? 2) can I find this technique specifically documented in an industry publication?
Even though the separate techniques employed are all well and thoroughly documented, the examiner was unable to find the combination of them anywhere in publication. So the examiner gets put in a rather awkward spot: even though you and I know it's obvious, he's got to find some justification for his rejection. That's not a simple task.
In that context, OSS becomes a double-edged sword. It's a punching bag for these kinds of lawsuits because the source code is on display, but it can also potentially provide documentation of prior art.
Not to nitpick too much, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft is actually selling Windows 7 with a downgrade right to XP. In any event, XP isn't going to suddenly stop working. MS is just ending support for it. In 3 years. You'll still be able to get the back catalog of service packs and patches for some time, but no new fixes will be developed. I think this is entirely reasonable. It's quite expensive for MS to maintain that infrastructure for a product that is no longer producing revenue.
Really, the mistake that Microsoft made was not releasing an interim OS between XP and Vista. That 6 year gap was too long and Vista was a dog. Like a lot of people and businesses, I skipped Vista and went straight to Windows 7, but no sooner that I had to. So a viable replacement for XP will have been on the market for 5 years by the time XP support finally ends. No other software vendor that I deal with has ever supported a deprecated product that long.
I'll even watch things on Netflix even when I have the disc on my shelf sitting 5 feet away. It's faster, there's nothing to change or put away and I don't have to get my ass off the couch.
I haven't bought a DVD since I got the netflix streaming. I do, on occasion, still use the DVD player for things that aren't available via streaming. If it dies, I'll replace it with a blu-ray device. (these things seem to have around a 3 year lifespan). It's only been in the past year, or so, that they've gotten cheap enough that I'd buy one when the need arose. I do plan to get an internet connected TV in the near future. What would be kind of nice is if I could get one with a Wii built in. Just hang it on the wall with nothing else to plug in.
More likely George won the right to not be bankrupt and spend the next 6 years dealing with ongoing litigation. Anyone who faults him for cutting his losses is an asshole.
Have you ever dug through endless man pages trying to find and understand the one obscure switch you need to make your command work? You're right, a picture (GUI) is worth a thousand words. A good GUI is a very worthwhile thing.
Pretty much. I've bought more music in the past 6 months than I have in probably the last decade. Cheap, easy, safe, and legal.
However, there's probably more sneakernet trading going on than ever before. If you've got 8 gigs of music on a USB stick, it's really trivial to plug it into your buddies computer and copy the whole thing over. You know the quality is good and there's no risk of getting sued.
I suspect one of the reasons for this is that Microsoft has taken the view, in the last 6-7 years, that the GPU can be used for accellerating and enhancing the desktop experiance (Aero, IE9). Their other goal, to a certain extent, is cross platform compatibility. Making it possible to write casual games from Windows, phone, and xbox.
Disclaimer: I wrote a game way back in 1994, directly interfacing the VGA card. In straight x86 assembly. I was total bare metal 17 years ago. I haven't really kept up on game development much since then. However, I wrote a clone of it in XNA recently. It took me about 4 hours to replicate 9 months of work from 1994. That includes the time to download, install, and learn XNA. My, how things have changed.
So much this. I did a trade show in December. Everyone had a 2d barcode on their badge with all sorts of information. Getting a good scan can be an exercise in frustration. Also, there was a lack of good software for managing the data (and inconsistent formats from badge to badge!) I found it much easier to trade business cards and just write notes on the back as soon as the prospects left my booth.
I don't doubt that the business card is in decline (netcraft confirms it!), but it doesn't want to get on the cart yet.
Well, it's good to see this development finally comming. A lot of companies have been working on this for years, so I'll believe it when I can actually play it and it doesn't suck.
Of course, I was also playing with a real football long before the first Madden game was ever released.
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell? There's a ton of good jobs for people that can write C# web apps pushing data in and out of a business data base. All it would take is a 2 year program that teaches web development, c#, sql, and business processes. That business process part is really important too. Your program specs are going to look like gibberish to you if you don't have a basic understanding of accounting, purchasing, and billing.
The 4 year programs aren't any better, and often worse. There aren't any in my area that teach on Microsoft. Lots of theory, little practicality. They, at least generally get some training on source control. They don't, however, teach business processes. Absolutely vital. You can't help the user if you don't speak their language.
I was a little surpirsed to learn it was still being produced. I thought it had quietly been discontinued. I don't personally know anyone who operates an Itanium based server.
If I wanted to get out of jury duty, I'd just give them my slashdot ID (which I also use on Fark, Reason and Volokh). That should provide both the prosecution and defense plenty of reasons to excuse me. That or my stubborn refusal to answer questions without legal representation present.
Although, I have no objection to jury duty as long as the trial doesn't last more than a week or so.
So... to rain on your parade a little bit, considder this: Using very optimistic numbers, if a battery pack lasts 70,000 miles and replacement costs $3500, then the battery adds 5 cents per mile. The battery is more than the electricity. You still end up with better numbers than a Prius, which also has a similar battery proposition. However, gas has got to get pretty damn expensive before electric/hybrid makes more economic sense than buying a much cheaper Corolla or Camry.
Because solar electricity is not economically viable. Wind? Sure. In any event, charging electric cars is tedious and there are limits to battery technology.
Want a better solution? How about a home hydrogen station powered by a roof mounted wind turbine. Add a hydrogen tank to your car and just introduce H2 into the air intake. Simple, low tech. It's a suplement to traditional fossil fuels, not a replacement. Run out of H2? The car just continues on gasoline.
Neither solar nor battery tech seems economically viable to me. I don't know about wind and H2. I'm curious as to what a home sized H2 system could retail for and what the ongoing maintenance costs would be. Adding H2 to a conventional car would be really cheap.
Ummm, no. He was clearly accessing the system in a manner not intended. I don't lock the door to my house, but if you come and look through my things, you're still tresspassing, and it's still illegal.
Nonsense. The phones can vibrate, and with a little creative programming, you can turn one into a very conveniant marital aid. How you get it clean afterwards is anyone's guess.
Are they installing random applications off the internet?
Yes. It's been a tough thing to educate them out of. It's gotten better with Win 7, where running as non-admin is a viable option (and my kid is no longer allowed to install anything on her computer). The other challenge has been to make sure that their copy of Flash player was up to date. I've had to fix plenty of systems over the last few years where someone has gotten served a malicious flash ad at an otherwise trustworthy site.
For buisness use, I'd love to eliminate the local hard drives of my users. They're one of the most common parts to fail, and the local OS gets corrupted all the time (only the cheap ass power supplies we use fail more). There should be an immutable network copy of the OS that they load at boot time. And installing applications should be as simple as copying an image onto your server and setting the licensing information. Actually, I'd run the same setup at home, too. My wife and kid trash their copy of Windows far too often. At least Windows 7 is easier to lock down and run as non-admin than XP was.
Conveniantly, the actual 1965 article is linked in the summary above. Specifically, it was about the cost-effectiveness of adding components to in integrated circuit. Circuits with few components aren't cost effective to build, and cuircits with more components have lower yields, making them not ideal either. At the time, the component count was doubling on a yearly basis, and Moore predicted that this would continue for the near term (5-10 years), but that the longer term trend was unlikely. And so it was with time between component count doubling increasing from 12 moths to 18 to 24 to whatever it is today. I remember in the early 90s, processor performance was easily doubling every 2 years, and it certainly hasn't been that way the last 4-5 years.
I'm not sure if that's trolling or ignorance. The amount of power required on both ends is prohibative. Remember, power dissapation is a function of distance squared. You double the distance and you need 4 times as much power. I'm not sure how high those satellites are, but it's a lot more than the typical 2-3 miles you might have to your nearby cell tower. About the only way you can make it work is if you have a hybrid phone that makes 99% of its calls via a land based cell network. Sat phones fail because they don't do what most people need, and most people don't need what they do.
There is a huge market for satellite communications, but it's not for making phone callse, it's for low volume remote data acquisition. It's actually what my product does, only we use GSM networks because it's a lot easier and cheaper.
Another way to cut CO2 emissions in half is just to cut the human population in half. So I've gone one up from vegetarian: I've gone cannibal. Eating onther humans not only saves us from the effects of eating traditional meat, but it also cuts out the emissions of everyone I eat. As I am extra concerned about social issues, I only eat the elderly, thus ensuring the future solvancy of Social Security and Medicare.
Soylent Green isn't just tasty, it's the right thing to do.
I had a similar experiance in high school, only I had 2 flasks stacked one on top of the other and I was using the gas to blow the top beaker into the air. Mr. Ericson threw down the gauntlet and said if I was going to do that in his lab, I'd better produce a calibration curve to maximize the explosion.
My product is a fine example of both a good idea and a good implementation. What I've learned over the past several years is that you also need two more things: financing and marketing. It takes time and several iterations to get a polished product to market. Then you need someone who can sell it. See Apple as an example. Jobs was a capable engineer, but also a great salesman. Woz was an unmitigated genius. Jobs is still running the company because he can sell the product. Apple thrives as a company because there's an alpha personality driving the company.
In my own company, I have a salesman, and his ability to drive sales makes it profitable for me to employ him. Don't underestimate the value of good management, either. Success requires all of the above: ideas, engineering, sales, marketing, and management.
As a work of parody, I don't think Apple has any kind of a case for trademark or copyright infringement. The most likely case I would think is that California confers on people a right of publicity. Again, I think this is a work of parody, and a very good one at that. I can't tell if it's meant to be an homage or a mockery of Jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the patent office is ill-equiped to consider the issue of "obvious to one skilled in the art". Their criteria for the examiner essentially are:
1) has it been patented yet?
2) can I find this technique specifically documented in an industry publication?
Even though the separate techniques employed are all well and thoroughly documented, the examiner was unable to find the combination of them anywhere in publication. So the examiner gets put in a rather awkward spot: even though you and I know it's obvious, he's got to find some justification for his rejection. That's not a simple task.
In that context, OSS becomes a double-edged sword. It's a punching bag for these kinds of lawsuits because the source code is on display, but it can also potentially provide documentation of prior art.
Not to nitpick too much, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft is actually selling Windows 7 with a downgrade right to XP. In any event, XP isn't going to suddenly stop working. MS is just ending support for it. In 3 years. You'll still be able to get the back catalog of service packs and patches for some time, but no new fixes will be developed. I think this is entirely reasonable. It's quite expensive for MS to maintain that infrastructure for a product that is no longer producing revenue.
Really, the mistake that Microsoft made was not releasing an interim OS between XP and Vista. That 6 year gap was too long and Vista was a dog. Like a lot of people and businesses, I skipped Vista and went straight to Windows 7, but no sooner that I had to. So a viable replacement for XP will have been on the market for 5 years by the time XP support finally ends. No other software vendor that I deal with has ever supported a deprecated product that long.
I'll even watch things on Netflix even when I have the disc on my shelf sitting 5 feet away. It's faster, there's nothing to change or put away and I don't have to get my ass off the couch.
I haven't bought a DVD since I got the netflix streaming. I do, on occasion, still use the DVD player for things that aren't available via streaming. If it dies, I'll replace it with a blu-ray device. (these things seem to have around a 3 year lifespan). It's only been in the past year, or so, that they've gotten cheap enough that I'd buy one when the need arose. I do plan to get an internet connected TV in the near future. What would be kind of nice is if I could get one with a Wii built in. Just hang it on the wall with nothing else to plug in.
More likely George won the right to not be bankrupt and spend the next 6 years dealing with ongoing litigation. Anyone who faults him for cutting his losses is an asshole.
Have you ever dug through endless man pages trying to find and understand the one obscure switch you need to make your command work? You're right, a picture (GUI) is worth a thousand words. A good GUI is a very worthwhile thing.
Pretty much. I've bought more music in the past 6 months than I have in probably the last decade. Cheap, easy, safe, and legal.
However, there's probably more sneakernet trading going on than ever before. If you've got 8 gigs of music on a USB stick, it's really trivial to plug it into your buddies computer and copy the whole thing over. You know the quality is good and there's no risk of getting sued.
I suspect one of the reasons for this is that Microsoft has taken the view, in the last 6-7 years, that the GPU can be used for accellerating and enhancing the desktop experiance (Aero, IE9). Their other goal, to a certain extent, is cross platform compatibility. Making it possible to write casual games from Windows, phone, and xbox.
Disclaimer: I wrote a game way back in 1994, directly interfacing the VGA card. In straight x86 assembly. I was total bare metal 17 years ago. I haven't really kept up on game development much since then. However, I wrote a clone of it in XNA recently. It took me about 4 hours to replicate 9 months of work from 1994. That includes the time to download, install, and learn XNA. My, how things have changed.
Depending on pricing, that's going to be one of the first things I do. Bye bye NewWorldDan@vanitydomain.net, hello NewWorldDan@vanitydomain.xxx.
There will also be pictures of puppies. And maybe kittens. We'll see.
So much this. I did a trade show in December. Everyone had a 2d barcode on their badge with all sorts of information. Getting a good scan can be an exercise in frustration. Also, there was a lack of good software for managing the data (and inconsistent formats from badge to badge!) I found it much easier to trade business cards and just write notes on the back as soon as the prospects left my booth.
I don't doubt that the business card is in decline (netcraft confirms it!), but it doesn't want to get on the cart yet.
Well, it's good to see this development finally comming. A lot of companies have been working on this for years, so I'll believe it when I can actually play it and it doesn't suck.
Of course, I was also playing with a real football long before the first Madden game was ever released.
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell? There's a ton of good jobs for people that can write C# web apps pushing data in and out of a business data base. All it would take is a 2 year program that teaches web development, c#, sql, and business processes. That business process part is really important too. Your program specs are going to look like gibberish to you if you don't have a basic understanding of accounting, purchasing, and billing.
The 4 year programs aren't any better, and often worse. There aren't any in my area that teach on Microsoft. Lots of theory, little practicality. They, at least generally get some training on source control. They don't, however, teach business processes. Absolutely vital. You can't help the user if you don't speak their language.
(ok, rant over)
I was a little surpirsed to learn it was still being produced. I thought it had quietly been discontinued. I don't personally know anyone who operates an Itanium based server.
If I wanted to get out of jury duty, I'd just give them my slashdot ID (which I also use on Fark, Reason and Volokh). That should provide both the prosecution and defense plenty of reasons to excuse me. That or my stubborn refusal to answer questions without legal representation present.
Although, I have no objection to jury duty as long as the trial doesn't last more than a week or so.
So... to rain on your parade a little bit, considder this: Using very optimistic numbers, if a battery pack lasts 70,000 miles and replacement costs $3500, then the battery adds 5 cents per mile. The battery is more than the electricity. You still end up with better numbers than a Prius, which also has a similar battery proposition. However, gas has got to get pretty damn expensive before electric/hybrid makes more economic sense than buying a much cheaper Corolla or Camry.
Because solar electricity is not economically viable. Wind? Sure. In any event, charging electric cars is tedious and there are limits to battery technology.
Want a better solution? How about a home hydrogen station powered by a roof mounted wind turbine. Add a hydrogen tank to your car and just introduce H2 into the air intake. Simple, low tech. It's a suplement to traditional fossil fuels, not a replacement. Run out of H2? The car just continues on gasoline.
Neither solar nor battery tech seems economically viable to me. I don't know about wind and H2. I'm curious as to what a home sized H2 system could retail for and what the ongoing maintenance costs would be. Adding H2 to a conventional car would be really cheap.
Ummm, no. He was clearly accessing the system in a manner not intended. I don't lock the door to my house, but if you come and look through my things, you're still tresspassing, and it's still illegal.
Nonsense. The phones can vibrate, and with a little creative programming, you can turn one into a very conveniant marital aid. How you get it clean afterwards is anyone's guess.
Are they installing random applications off the internet?
Yes. It's been a tough thing to educate them out of. It's gotten better with Win 7, where running as non-admin is a viable option (and my kid is no longer allowed to install anything on her computer). The other challenge has been to make sure that their copy of Flash player was up to date. I've had to fix plenty of systems over the last few years where someone has gotten served a malicious flash ad at an otherwise trustworthy site.
For buisness use, I'd love to eliminate the local hard drives of my users. They're one of the most common parts to fail, and the local OS gets corrupted all the time (only the cheap ass power supplies we use fail more). There should be an immutable network copy of the OS that they load at boot time. And installing applications should be as simple as copying an image onto your server and setting the licensing information. Actually, I'd run the same setup at home, too. My wife and kid trash their copy of Windows far too often. At least Windows 7 is easier to lock down and run as non-admin than XP was.
Conveniantly, the actual 1965 article is linked in the summary above. Specifically, it was about the cost-effectiveness of adding components to in integrated circuit. Circuits with few components aren't cost effective to build, and cuircits with more components have lower yields, making them not ideal either. At the time, the component count was doubling on a yearly basis, and Moore predicted that this would continue for the near term (5-10 years), but that the longer term trend was unlikely. And so it was with time between component count doubling increasing from 12 moths to 18 to 24 to whatever it is today. I remember in the early 90s, processor performance was easily doubling every 2 years, and it certainly hasn't been that way the last 4-5 years.
rofl.
I'm not sure if that's trolling or ignorance. The amount of power required on both ends is prohibative. Remember, power dissapation is a function of distance squared. You double the distance and you need 4 times as much power. I'm not sure how high those satellites are, but it's a lot more than the typical 2-3 miles you might have to your nearby cell tower. About the only way you can make it work is if you have a hybrid phone that makes 99% of its calls via a land based cell network. Sat phones fail because they don't do what most people need, and most people don't need what they do.
There is a huge market for satellite communications, but it's not for making phone callse, it's for low volume remote data acquisition. It's actually what my product does, only we use GSM networks because it's a lot easier and cheaper.
Another way to cut CO2 emissions in half is just to cut the human population in half. So I've gone one up from vegetarian: I've gone cannibal. Eating onther humans not only saves us from the effects of eating traditional meat, but it also cuts out the emissions of everyone I eat. As I am extra concerned about social issues, I only eat the elderly, thus ensuring the future solvancy of Social Security and Medicare.
Soylent Green isn't just tasty, it's the right thing to do.
I had a similar experiance in high school, only I had 2 flasks stacked one on top of the other and I was using the gas to blow the top beaker into the air. Mr. Ericson threw down the gauntlet and said if I was going to do that in his lab, I'd better produce a calibration curve to maximize the explosion.
My product is a fine example of both a good idea and a good implementation. What I've learned over the past several years is that you also need two more things: financing and marketing. It takes time and several iterations to get a polished product to market. Then you need someone who can sell it. See Apple as an example. Jobs was a capable engineer, but also a great salesman. Woz was an unmitigated genius. Jobs is still running the company because he can sell the product. Apple thrives as a company because there's an alpha personality driving the company.
In my own company, I have a salesman, and his ability to drive sales makes it profitable for me to employ him. Don't underestimate the value of good management, either. Success requires all of the above: ideas, engineering, sales, marketing, and management.
As a work of parody, I don't think Apple has any kind of a case for trademark or copyright infringement. The most likely case I would think is that California confers on people a right of publicity. Again, I think this is a work of parody, and a very good one at that. I can't tell if it's meant to be an homage or a mockery of Jobs.