Yep. John Donoghue (of Brown) has been working on this stuff for a few years, and his former postdoc, implant engineer Nikos Hatsopoulos is another key person at Cyberkinetics. But this is really Donoghue's baby.
They've adopted the Richard Normann's (of Bionic Tech) implants (the Utah grid), and they are working fairly well for time periods up to a year. You can expect them to be the first to do human studies, and for quite a lot to be learned about the brain in the process, as well as dramatic improvements in the lives of their test patients.
I'm quite excited to see how it goes for them, and hope for the best.
The purpose of the company is to make money for its execs - everything else is just tools to achieve that agenda. Really, that is how the execs view it. More profits translates directly to more executive compensation.
The real issue is what happens when everyone acts this way (outsourcing abroad). The US trade deficit goes up. Money is being shipped out of the US for goods and services, and it is not coming back. As trade barriers fall, this is a natural occurrence - the "third world" will have access to much of the jobs that were formerly inaccessible, and much of that associated wealth.
Hopefully, the US budget deficit will not interact with the trade deficit - or this tower of cards could fall.
A lot of people say Gimp is difficult to use. Is it difficult for people who are used to Photoshop or is it difficult for everybody?
I haven't used image manipulation programs and would like to learn the basics. There are courses for Photoshop. Would it help me to take one of them?
Gimp users that use Photoshop have at least as much, and probably more, trouble getting used to Photoshop as Photoshop users have getting used to Gimp.
If you have more money than time, take the course. If you have plenty of time, download Gimp and give it a whirl.
Did they market something novel and useful, or did they invent a novel and useful technology to make their device function?
I think it is difficult to claim this is not an invention. Compression, playback, and time shifting are all quite different from a VCR.
In addition, if you invent something that SERVES THE EXACT SAME ROLE BUT USES A DIFFERENT MECHANISM, it is still 100% patentable. Patents are dependent on mechanisms, and not functions.
Their competitors somehow came up with the same technology (or Tivo wouldn't be threatening to sue). Did this happen because all their engineers invented the same non-obvious technology, or was it just really obvious once you use an embedded computer?
Or is it because TiVO existed for a year before Echostar got started, and they simply copied TiVO using the same mechanisms?
Invention is a tricky business. Once something is out there, it is easy (with enough money) to copy it quickly.
When I covered a bit of patent law in Electronics we were taught that for a patent to not be overturned, you'd need to be able to take reasonably skilled professionals in the industry and state the same problem and requirements. If they could easily independently invent the device described in the patent, the patent was too obvious.
That is the commonly described standard. However, the patent examiner does not have reasonably skilled professionals around to test every patent. Instead, he uses the more common test that 1) he could not find prior art and 2) there is nothing existing in the patent database and 3) it is not obvious to HIM after reading through the related patents in the database.
Now, a company like TiVO will secure IP as part of their startup to MAKE MONEY. They will secure as much as possible. This allows them to secure a lot of venture capital. Competing products undercut their business, so of course TiVO will challenge them, while at the same time taking their invention to the market as fast as possible.
This appears to me more like things patent law was written for. They clearly invented something novel and useful, and secured IP, and are taking it to the market as fast as possible. They're the BEST CASE for someone to have defendable IP.
There may be a case to be made on the length of protection - as the market seemingly moves really fast relative to the 17 or 20 years of protection...
One idea that could be a step toward a fix for this problem -- and it's not just with chemistry patents -- is to require that a company holding a patent actually be using that patent in a product.
No, I don't think this is the solution. First of all, individuals hold patents, not companies. And, secondly, often the idea for the invention requires investment for implementation.
But I think requiring a working implementation within some liberal period, say, 3 years, after the patent is granted would be useful. With this in mind, 99.5% of all patents would be thrown out in 3 years, and the patent minefield would be cleared.
Of course, that still leaves the silly but implemented patents like 1-click shopping. Changes in length of time for protection are probably enough for that. The protection time should be granted based on the field - business and software methods should have a shorter period of protection than industrial machines.
With this in place, the only patents cranking on for 20 years will be non-obvious, implemented, material inventions, a far cry from the current state of the patent office.
Patents require disclosure of everything necessary for a skilled person to recreate the invention.
But, NTFS uses several inventions, and some code to tie them all together. Whereas you should be able to determine all the patentable bits, it may be REALLY tough to figure out all the details.
I read the Sorenson video codec patents once, to see how they encode video. It was a nearly useless endeavor.
Required: - BS degree in relevant field - 4 years minimum QA experience - 2 years testing web applications using Oracle and/or DB2 database - 2 years testing web applications using WebLogic and/or WebSphere application server [*previous experience with coding in a rice paddy.]
Pay rate: $10-$15/hr
OK, the rice paddy part wasn't actually in the ad.
I know. I just got a Mac laptop. It's not quite as nice for Unix hacking, but pretty close, and the advantages for other computing tasks are substantial. Once you spend 5 years on linux (or unix) alone, and start working with a Mac OS X everyday, you get a different perspective.
But linux lacks several things for the desktop. The most obvious is far-reaching attention to detail. Mac OS X is a nice desktop OS, and has about 10% of the desktops in use already. It was built over Unix in a few years.
What does it have that linux lacks??? Well, here is a list. 1) Far reaching attention to detail and consistency across all apps 2) A reason to upgrade. iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes. These make the'newest' functions of computers for end-users much easier. Ever try to make a movie for online distribution under linux? Ever use it for online photos? Sure, you can do both, but in OS X they are easy, and the interfaces are consistent with all other apps.
This all amounts to only a tiny amount of programming work, but an enormous amount of control of the user interface in all the GUI apps that are distributed. Whereas achieving the first is easy, achieving the second may be the Achilles heel of Open Source.
IBM has always pursued a LARGE number of patents, and has largely used them defensively. Until it uses a patent against a linux user, I'd let the jury stay out. Companies LOVE getting IP in patents, it gives them options. Then they can decide to use them or not.
IBM has poured an enormous amount of money into linux development, and this has already benefited all linux users.
On the desktop, there is no reason why not. Mac built a good desktop over Unix is just a few years - in linux most of the tools are already in place. A well packaged solution is not far away at all - it would just take a concerted effort to provide consistency to the users - this would mean far reaching attention to detail across all packaging for the linux solution.
And this is really what separates something like OS X from something like RedHat. OS X attempts to provide consistency and attention to detail across everything they package, RedHat and other linux distros just throw in the kitchen sink and leave it to the users to sort out the inconsistencies.
In the current climate this article is completely redundant, if it can be conceived of it has not only been patented but there are defensive patents surrounding it's use, offensive patents surrounding it's use while painted a different colour and more than likely several publicly traded companies bidding on the future rights to sell a cut down version for kids.
Whereas I get where you are coming from, I think if you actually patented stuff you might feel differently. As a part of prototyping and inventing something, you inevitably discover things about how the invention needs to work that are non-obvious to anyone that has never built a prototype. This aspect of inventing things has not changed.
Patents based only on a drawing on a napkin are usually not even worth as much as the napkin. A working prototype and non-obvious patent is worth much much much more.
The retina degenerates, and remodels itself. Current approaches to vision rescue will have to be refined.
Haven't looked at the thesis yet, so keep that in mind.
But these same issues occured in consideration of the cochlear implant. I work with its creators. People supposed that it NEEDED thousands of stimulation points and had to work perfectly.
It had one electrode, and dramatically improved the lives of its users. The same would occur in a retinal prosthetic. If you could get a working prototype with 1 or 10 or 20 electrodes, and get feedback from volunteers (and there are plenty of these), and go from there, you will have a working prosthetic quickly.
With one electrode, you could detect big changes in lighting, day from night, doors opening in dark rooms, etc. These are all things that are trivial to us, but incredibly useful to a blind man.
If you try instead to imagine and solve all the possible problems ahead of time, it'll take forever.
Vision rescue is a different beast however, and will require a more intimate knowledge of pathological processes and normal retinal functioning.
Not really, I suspect pretty decent retinal prosthetics will be available within 5 years. Like the cochlear implants, they will be horribly imperfect at first, but will dramatically improve the lives of their users. If you cannot see at all, even a few pixels makes like a lot better.
The road from the first working implementation to a really good implementation is comparably easier.
For the retina the challenges are 1) minimal heat production. The eye doesn't cool really well, and stimulating electrodes are gonna generate heat 2) hermetically sealed. The eye will be cut open, the implant inserted, and the eye will be sewn shut, and the outside of the eye will heal. Then, you have to remotely power the implant, while generating minimal heat, and convert visual input to stimulation of retinal neurons.
But even these issues are completely tractable with current technology. And, there is a ton of money being thrown at it, with 4-5 centers nationwide working on it, and a company called 2ndSight.
For an additional 10 dB of noise reduction I wouldn't recommend the effort.
Even single-walled sound booths provide 35-40 dB.
Buy a new quite drive instead. Getting below 30 dB should be the standard to shoot for. If all computer parts were 30 dB or less, you wouldn't even notice the computer at all. In this case re-engineering the disk to be quiet to begin with is probably best.
$50 million is worth it to them, as a marketing investment.
Remember, this is a company that BANKS $1 billion a month. They make so much money they don't even have a good way to re-invest it in growth for their company, they let it rot in a bank instead.
Microsoft can no longer do this, or they risk losing their customer base. The death of Microsoft is going to be that people no longer upgrade machines every three years. There are too many Windows98 machines still around. If Microsoft breaks Samba in an upgrade, it will also break Windows98.
Of course IE is still broken. Microsoft fixes things when it makes them money, not when they are broken. IE has a monopoly, it doesn't matter if a few things are broken, everyone will still use it.
Yeesh, no kidding. I haven't heard someone kick and scream so loudly about ctrl-c and ctrl-v before. At least Windows has this support consistent across programs - I've had more than a few weird idiosyncracies between differing Linux programs and cutting/pasting to and from them, though it's much improved with today's distributions than before.
I am glad you got his point, but sad that you missed the entire satire.
He wrote the review in the same tone and manner as the vast majority of linux reviews written by Windows users are written.
His biggest mistake was not having 3/4 of the review focussed on the install program.
ISPs can start preventing their DNS servers from talking to the bad guys DNS servers. Thus, all spammer domains will fail to resolve.
A smart spammer will simply move his DNS around. He only needs one "good" DNS, and a machine to re-direct at that address.
We now have a list of trojan'ed machines. Just do DNS queries, find out the ISPs involved, and have them go after the infected machines.
Right, this could be easy - but it is far easier to portscan and/or sniff packets to find compromised machines. But either way, this takes a lot of time. And, it is a no win situation for an ISP. Do you break into your customer's machine to fix it? Do you cut him off? Do you selectively firewall him (thus raising your administrative costs)? It is a no win situation, so the ISP just lets the machine be.
On University subnets the routers are starting to firewall bad ports when virii get loose. They do it on a moment's notice, and send all admins a list of bad IP addresses.
The real issue is that REALLY SMART REALLY GOOD hackers are leading the spam movement. They provide spammers with scripts that compromise machines and use them to re-route spam, so that the sender of the email is untraceable from the email itself. The spammers pay the hackers a LOT of money for these scripts, which are updated regularly. This is a HUGE industry, and one that will not go away easily.
There is too much money involved, and the ones with the knowledge, the hackers, are not the ones doing the spamming, so they view themselves as untouchable.
Just devel times at one site, depending on whether the programmers were paired or not. The pair takes twice as long as a single programmer, which is four times the man hours.
Maybe for debugging it is a smarter idea, but I doubt it.
You're confusing refactoring with rewriting, aren't you?
No, I've had to refactor before. But when only one of the pair thinks a refactor is necessary, a warning bell oughta ring.
Slashdot Mirror
Who would this other group be?
Yep. John Donoghue (of Brown) has been working on this stuff for a few years, and his former postdoc, implant engineer Nikos Hatsopoulos is another key person at Cyberkinetics. But this is really Donoghue's baby.
They've adopted the Richard Normann's (of Bionic Tech) implants (the Utah grid), and they are working fairly well for time periods up to a year. You can expect them to be the first to do human studies, and for quite a lot to be learned about the brain in the process, as well as dramatic improvements in the lives of their test patients.
I'm quite excited to see how it goes for them, and hope for the best.
Executive compensation is way out of whack...
The purpose of the company is to make money for its execs - everything else is just tools to achieve that agenda. Really, that is how the execs view it. More profits translates directly to more executive compensation.
The real issue is what happens when everyone acts this way (outsourcing abroad). The US trade deficit goes up. Money is being shipped out of the US for goods and services, and it is not coming back. As trade barriers fall, this is a natural occurrence - the "third world" will have access to much of the jobs that were formerly inaccessible, and much of that associated wealth.
Hopefully, the US budget deficit will not interact with the trade deficit - or this tower of cards could fall.
A lot of people say Gimp is difficult to use. Is it difficult for people who are used to Photoshop or is it difficult for everybody?
I haven't used image manipulation programs and would like to learn the basics. There are courses for Photoshop. Would it help me to take one of them?
Gimp users that use Photoshop have at least as much, and probably more, trouble getting used to Photoshop as Photoshop users have getting used to Gimp.
If you have more money than time, take the course. If you have plenty of time, download Gimp and give it a whirl.
Did they market something novel and useful, or did they invent a novel and useful technology to make their device function?
I think it is difficult to claim this is not an invention. Compression, playback, and time shifting are all quite different from a VCR.
In addition, if you invent something that SERVES THE EXACT SAME ROLE BUT USES A DIFFERENT MECHANISM, it is still 100% patentable. Patents are dependent on mechanisms, and not functions.
Their competitors somehow came up with the same technology (or Tivo wouldn't be threatening to sue). Did this happen because all their engineers invented the same non-obvious technology, or was it just really obvious once you use an embedded computer?
Or is it because TiVO existed for a year before Echostar got started, and they simply copied TiVO using the same mechanisms?
Invention is a tricky business. Once something is out there, it is easy (with enough money) to copy it quickly.
When I covered a bit of patent law in Electronics we were taught that for a patent to not be overturned, you'd need to be able to take reasonably skilled professionals in the industry and state the same problem and requirements. If they could easily independently invent the device described in the patent, the patent was too obvious.
That is the commonly described standard. However, the patent examiner does not have reasonably skilled professionals around to test every patent. Instead, he uses the more common test that 1) he could not find prior art and 2) there is nothing existing in the patent database and 3) it is not obvious to HIM after reading through the related patents in the database.
Now, a company like TiVO will secure IP as part of their startup to MAKE MONEY. They will secure as much as possible. This allows them to secure a lot of venture capital. Competing products undercut their business, so of course TiVO will challenge them, while at the same time taking their invention to the market as fast as possible.
This appears to me more like things patent law was written for. They clearly invented something novel and useful, and secured IP, and are taking it to the market as fast as possible. They're the BEST CASE for someone to have defendable IP.
There may be a case to be made on the length of protection - as the market seemingly moves really fast relative to the 17 or 20 years of protection...
One idea that could be a step toward a fix for this problem -- and it's not just with chemistry patents -- is to require that a company holding a patent actually be using that patent in a product.
No, I don't think this is the solution. First of all, individuals hold patents, not companies. And, secondly, often the idea for the invention requires investment for implementation.
But I think requiring a working implementation within some liberal period, say, 3 years, after the patent is granted would be useful. With this in mind, 99.5% of all patents would be thrown out in 3 years, and the patent minefield would be cleared.
Of course, that still leaves the silly but implemented patents like 1-click shopping. Changes in length of time for protection are probably enough for that. The protection time should be granted based on the field - business and software methods should have a shorter period of protection than industrial machines.
With this in place, the only patents cranking on for 20 years will be non-obvious, implemented, material inventions, a far cry from the current state of the patent office.
Patents require disclosure of everything necessary for a skilled person to recreate the invention.
But, NTFS uses several inventions, and some code to tie them all together. Whereas you should be able to determine all the patentable bits, it may be REALLY tough to figure out all the details.
I read the Sorenson video codec patents once, to see how they encode video. It was a nearly useless endeavor.
Never underestimate the power of Bill Gates to slow down a faster processor to the point that the consumer wants something even faster.
"640K should be enough for anyone."
An actual posting about 6 months ago.
Required:
- BS degree in relevant field
- 4 years minimum QA experience
- 2 years testing web applications using Oracle and/or DB2 database
- 2 years testing web applications using WebLogic and/or WebSphere application server
[*previous experience with coding in a rice paddy.]
Pay rate: $10-$15/hr
OK, the rice paddy part wasn't actually in the ad.
I know. I just got a Mac laptop. It's not quite as nice for Unix hacking, but pretty close, and the advantages for other computing tasks are substantial. Once you spend 5 years on linux (or unix) alone, and start working with a Mac OS X everyday, you get a different perspective.
Well, those things are already there too.
But linux lacks several things for the desktop. The most obvious is far-reaching attention to detail. Mac OS X is a nice desktop OS, and has about 10% of the desktops in use already. It was built over Unix in a few years.
What does it have that linux lacks??? Well, here is a list.
1) Far reaching attention to detail and consistency across all apps
2) A reason to upgrade. iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes. These make the'newest' functions of computers for end-users much easier. Ever try to make a movie for online distribution under linux? Ever use it for online photos? Sure, you can do both, but in OS X they are easy, and the interfaces are consistent with all other apps.
This all amounts to only a tiny amount of programming work, but an enormous amount of control of the user interface in all the GUI apps that are distributed. Whereas achieving the first is easy, achieving the second may be the Achilles heel of Open Source.
IBM has always pursued a LARGE number of patents, and has largely used them defensively. Until it uses a patent against a linux user, I'd let the jury stay out. Companies LOVE getting IP in patents, it gives them options. Then they can decide to use them or not.
IBM has poured an enormous amount of money into linux development, and this has already benefited all linux users.
On the desktop, there is no reason why not. Mac built a good desktop over Unix is just a few years - in linux most of the tools are already in place. A well packaged solution is not far away at all - it would just take a concerted effort to provide consistency to the users - this would mean far reaching attention to detail across all packaging for the linux solution.
And this is really what separates something like OS X from something like RedHat. OS X attempts to provide consistency and attention to detail across everything they package, RedHat and other linux distros just throw in the kitchen sink and leave it to the users to sort out the inconsistencies.
It won't take long.
Good luck. Tell him I send my best.
-Dave
In the current climate this article is completely redundant, if it can be conceived of it has not only been patented but there are defensive patents surrounding it's use, offensive patents surrounding it's use while painted a different colour and more than likely several publicly traded companies bidding on the future rights to sell a cut down version for kids.
Whereas I get where you are coming from, I think if you actually patented stuff you might feel differently. As a part of prototyping and inventing something, you inevitably discover things about how the invention needs to work that are non-obvious to anyone that has never built a prototype. This aspect of inventing things has not changed.
Patents based only on a drawing on a napkin are usually not even worth as much as the napkin. A working prototype and non-obvious patent is worth much much much more.
The retina degenerates, and remodels itself. Current approaches to vision rescue will have to be refined.
Haven't looked at the thesis yet, so keep that in mind.
But these same issues occured in consideration of the cochlear implant. I work with its creators. People supposed that it NEEDED thousands of stimulation points and had to work perfectly.
It had one electrode, and dramatically improved the lives of its users. The same would occur in a retinal prosthetic. If you could get a working prototype with 1 or 10 or 20 electrodes, and get feedback from volunteers (and there are plenty of these), and go from there, you will have a working prosthetic quickly.
With one electrode, you could detect big changes in lighting, day from night, doors opening in dark rooms, etc. These are all things that are trivial to us, but incredibly useful to a blind man.
If you try instead to imagine and solve all the possible problems ahead of time, it'll take forever.
BTW, did you work with Normann?
Vision rescue is a different beast however, and will require a more intimate knowledge of pathological processes and normal retinal functioning.
Not really, I suspect pretty decent retinal prosthetics will be available within 5 years. Like the cochlear implants, they will be horribly imperfect at first, but will dramatically improve the lives of their users. If you cannot see at all, even a few pixels makes like a lot better.
The road from the first working implementation to a really good implementation is comparably easier.
For the retina the challenges are
1) minimal heat production. The eye doesn't cool really well, and stimulating electrodes are gonna generate heat
2) hermetically sealed. The eye will be cut open, the implant inserted, and the eye will be sewn shut, and the outside of the eye will heal. Then, you have to remotely power the implant, while generating minimal heat, and convert visual input to stimulation of retinal neurons.
But even these issues are completely tractable with current technology. And, there is a ton of money being thrown at it, with 4-5 centers nationwide working on it, and a company called 2ndSight.
It'll happen.
You kidding - their legal lost the antitrust case, horribly, and half a billion to a shoestring called Eolas.
The A players are in marketing and sales.
For an additional 10 dB of noise reduction I wouldn't recommend the effort.
Even single-walled sound booths provide 35-40 dB.
Buy a new quite drive instead. Getting below 30 dB should be the standard to shoot for. If all computer parts were 30 dB or less, you wouldn't even notice the computer at all. In this case re-engineering the disk to be quiet to begin with is probably best.
$50 million is worth it to them, as a marketing investment.
Remember, this is a company that BANKS $1 billion a month. They make so much money they don't even have a good way to re-invest it in growth for their company, they let it rot in a bank instead.
Microsoft can no longer do this, or they risk losing their customer base. The death of Microsoft is going to be that people no longer upgrade machines every three years. There are too many Windows98 machines still around. If Microsoft breaks Samba in an upgrade, it will also break Windows98.
Of course IE is still broken. Microsoft fixes things when it makes them money, not when they are broken. IE has a monopoly, it doesn't matter if a few things are broken, everyone will still use it.
Yeesh, no kidding. I haven't heard someone kick and scream so loudly about ctrl-c and ctrl-v before. At least Windows has this support consistent across programs - I've had more than a few weird idiosyncracies between differing Linux programs and cutting/pasting to and from them, though it's much improved with today's distributions than before.
I am glad you got his point, but sad that you missed the entire satire.
He wrote the review in the same tone and manner as the vast majority of linux reviews written by Windows users are written.
His biggest mistake was not having 3/4 of the review focussed on the install program.
ISPs can start preventing their DNS servers from talking to the bad guys DNS servers. Thus, all spammer domains will fail to resolve.
A smart spammer will simply move his DNS around. He only needs one "good" DNS, and a machine to re-direct at that address.
We now have a list of trojan'ed machines. Just do DNS queries, find out the ISPs involved, and have them go after the infected machines.
Right, this could be easy - but it is far easier to portscan and/or sniff packets to find compromised machines. But either way, this takes a lot of time. And, it is a no win situation for an ISP. Do you break into your customer's machine to fix it? Do you cut him off? Do you selectively firewall him (thus raising your administrative costs)? It is a no win situation, so the ISP just lets the machine be.
On University subnets the routers are starting to firewall bad ports when virii get loose. They do it on a moment's notice, and send all admins a list of bad IP addresses.
The real issue is that REALLY SMART REALLY GOOD hackers are leading the spam movement. They provide spammers with scripts that compromise machines and use them to re-route spam, so that the sender of the email is untraceable from the email itself. The spammers pay the hackers a LOT of money for these scripts, which are updated regularly. This is a HUGE industry, and one that will not go away easily.
There is too much money involved, and the ones with the knowledge, the hackers, are not the ones doing the spamming, so they view themselves as untouchable.
Personally, I've done everything but pair programming.
You haven't nearly lived the XP experience.
4 times? Cite your source, please.
Just devel times at one site, depending on whether the programmers were paired or not. The pair takes twice as long as a single programmer, which is four times the man hours.
Maybe for debugging it is a smarter idea, but I doubt it.
You're confusing refactoring with rewriting, aren't you?
No, I've had to refactor before. But when only one of the pair thinks a refactor is necessary, a warning bell oughta ring.