"Sure, the general purpose computer is known, but if the algorithm is not, and the patent claims the computer performing that algorithm, then it's not blindingly obvious."
That's right, the algorithm itself may not be obvious, but algorithms are not patentable! That's settled law.
The patent attorneys try to get around that by patenting a "method" or a "device" instead, which just happens to embody the algorith. But when you read carefully there is no method (other than hiring a coder to program the algorithm into the computer) and no device (other than a general purpose computer doing exactly what it was designed to do.
If they would actually write an application for a special purpose machine that only implements this one algorithm (instead of any algorithm you want to hand it) and that machine itself incorporated innovations, then those should probably be patentable. But that would require actual R&D expenditures, and risks, and still would not be the gold mine that a patent on the simple idea of using a ubiquitous general purpose computer to execute a known algorithm could be.
I can understand why patent attorneys want to make more money more easily, but why should society be forced to pay the cost?
"When you see some output on the screen, do you know which part of that output is generated by hardware and which part by software? Obviously not."
Obvious nonsense. It's all 'generated' by the hardware. By a general purpose computer doing what a general purpose computer does - processing input and producing output according to fixed mathematical rules.
"Anything you can do in hardware, you can do in software and vice versa."
Not true. The one and only thing you can do 'in software' is read input perform mathematical operations and output the result. Any effect that you want to produce in the outside world (aside from trivial side-effects) has to be done by producing the correct number and sending it to the correct output hardware, which actually produces the effect. Not the computer itself.
Now it's true, you can produce the number using a program on a general purpose computer, or you could instead construct a special purpose machine that does only this one algorithm and does it much faster. So what? That has NOTHING to do with patent eligibility, or with whether or not the algorithm is math. A special purpose machine might be patent eligible, as it might incorporate innovations that for instance bring the cost of implementation down considerably and let them compete where they previously could not. Fine. That does NOT mean that the algorithm itself is patentable, or that using a general purpose machine to execute the same algorithm is patentable (which in the modern world would be extremely close to, perhaps indistinguishable from, the same thing.)
"There are plenty of patented electronic (hardware) and mechanical machines that do what humans can do by hand. That doesn't make them unpatentable."
No one said computers are not patentable. Let me repeat that. No one said COMPUTERS were not patentable. We are talking about software. And software is not the computer. Software is a number to be given the computer as input. Very different things.
"It's been argued that had Huffman implemented his famous compression algorithm in hardware rather than software he would have been granted a patent."
Which would be (relatively) fine. Because if he implemented it in hardware, and got a patent on that, it would only cover the specific techniques he came up with to facilitate implementing it in hardware. It would not necessarily cover all hardware implementations (it would almost certainly be possible to design another hardware implementation of the same algorithm by doing it differently in at least one key respect) and it would certainly not cover using a general purpose computer to implement the algorithm (a completely obvious step once the algorithm is known since the one and only purpose of a computer is to implement algorithms.)
It's a number on the disk. A series of binary digits. The program can be stored as electrical potentials, or as dots of ink, gaps in a punchcard, the list can always be expanded. But the program is not the electrical potential, or the bits of ink, or even the empty space. It's simply a number.
A number, in this case, which is mathematically equivalent to the algorithm for translating yet another number (the recipes file on the disk) into still another number. That third number is the number which can then be sent to the printer, and result in the recipes being printed out on paper for you.
The computer has no semantics, no concepts, it simply accepts numbers as inputs, performs mathematical operations based on that input, and sends numbers as output. Just exactly like the people that used to be employed as computers before someone figured out how to make a machine that could do it faster.
"But, if you claim a computer configured to perform certain new and non-obvious functions, it can't be implemented wholly in algorithmic terms. It's a device, not the blueprints..."
And that argument fails on the additional grounds of the novelty requirement.
Using a general purpose computer to execute an algorithm can only be described as blindingly obvious, since this is the one and only function of a general purpose computer.
"Going further, all possible inventions can be described as a series of mathematical algorithms."
They can be described *using* a series of mathematical algorithms, but they have substance beyond those algorithms. Software does not. Software has no physical existence, it's an entirely abstract thing, a number, nothing more.
"As it was explained to me by a patent attorney, what is colloquially known as a "software patent" really isn't. Rather, it's a patent on the resulting machine that software transforms a general purpose machine (computer) into. "
Sophistry. The general purpose machine is a general purpose machine at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, and every single moment in between. It does not magically become something else just because you feed it an algorithm. It executes algorithms, that is the one and only purpose and function of a general purpose computer.
"If I had a black box wherein you fed in paper tape encoding data on one end and different paper tape with the data compressed came out the other end (thus taking less tape), that would be a data compression machine. Certainly, if the black box had no software at all but was instead a bunch of gears and such, i.e., totally mechanical, you'd have to agree that the machine would be patentable. "
The machine itself, sure. The underlying algorithm it implements, no. Anyone that can figure out a different machine to accomplish the same task can still do so legally, and it actually does not have to be very different either, as long as one or another element that's critical to the patent claim is different.
And using a general purpose computer to execute the algorithm certainly should never be patented - using a general purpose computer to execute algorithms is not just obvious, it's blindingly obvious, it is the one and only thing that a general purpose computer can ever be used to do!
"There's no patent controlling high-speed weaving machines because weaving was invented forever ago."
*Mechanical* weaving was first demonstrated in 1785, the idea itself only shows up shortly before that, and patents are quite a bit older than that. The original mechanical loom was, in fact, patented. But importantly that patent was not understood to foreclose others from the field - it only covered his specific innovations. The same inventor received numerous patents over the next decades on various specific improvements he came up with, and in fact he partially funded his own research by licensing those patents to others. But it was never necessary to license a patent from him in order to work on your own mechanical loom designs - and a good thing that.
If you are actually referring to the long history of hand-weaving as controlling here, then the similarly long history of human computers should have the same affect in computing as well.
"A patent to control compression of sensory data (visual, audio, etc.) used in multimedia by eliminating some of the data would be fully patentable in 1975."
Not if the method of doing so is simply to apply a mathemical formula, which in fact all the methods for doing so are.
"No one at the time had considered lossy codecs."
I am not at all certain that is true, but even if so, so what? It might well meet the novelty test. It's still math, and thus not patentable, regardless of novelty.
"Deaths divided by serious injuries is a nonsensical metric."
No metric can really be nonsensical in and of itself, what's nonsensical is to use a metric that does not relate to the context.
In this case, the context has to do with a claim of 'guaranteed death' in an accident with a car. So deaths divided by serious injuries actually doesnt look like nonsense. It's a proxy for 'deaths vs non-fatal outcomes in accidents with cars.' Which does not appear to be immediately available.
"Hint: Go find the total miles driven in cars and motorcycles."
That would be a better metric of generalised safety, but it seems to have little relevance to the claim of 'guaranteed death.'
"What size of an area should you have the right to block all signals?"
I think it's a good question, and one where law has gone a bit off it's logical wheels for commercial consideration.
Have you ever thought about the fact that at any given moment most of us have radio signals from hundreds of different sources beaming through across our property and even through our body, without anyone ever having to ask permission?
Now to a degree that makes sense. The benefit of having radio bandwidth available and the quite low levels of risk involved (at least as best we know) from exposure make it seem quite petty to attempt to block them completely, all the time. But it always seemed to me that at the very least, if someone is beaming a signal through my property without my permission, surely I then have a right to at least take a look at the signal. I mean, if they want it to be private, and they are sending it across my property without permission, surely at the very least it's their responsibility to encrypt and not my fault if they fail at that. I really am not the 'pirate tv' type - those people like tv - but among the few occasions when I have enjoyed it was when I used to pick up raw feeds, particularly the parts that never made it onto the regular broadcasts. The conversations people had while waiting for the signal that they were going on-air. Obviously I wasnt *intended* to see that, but it was broadcast through me and my property without my permission in a form I could read, so just how do they generate not only a right to penetrate me with radio waves as will, but even a right to force me to (figuratively, at least) close my eyes and not peek while they do it?
IIRC there was an early precedent or two supporting that outlook, but then someone started making money selling satellite TV and saw a threat to their system and eventually got precedents to the contrary, so you have no recognized right to read their signal, even though it's being broadcast through your property against your will, and even if it's so poorly encypted as to be transparent, am I correct?
And now this subject comes up. I know the ban on jammers is not new, of course, but this discussion of it is. And I really dont see why anyone else should have a say if I want to temporarily jam one of these signals, on my own property, for any number of reasons; as long as my jammer does not disrupt usage for those who are not on my property, how can this possibly be anyone elses concern?
"Hardware patents are really the same way: a system of gears, levers, and cams placed in a certain order create a pair of timed shuttles that can weave fabric at high speeds."
Sure. And the way patents were applied to physical machines, what you just mentioned is not patentable, while (at least before today) courts kept ruling the computer equivalent was.
There is no patent controlling high speed mechanical weaving machines. There are a number of patents on high speed mechanical weaving, but they tend toward very specific innovations, tricks that allowed manufacture of a comb or a reed or an electric motor or what have you that was superior for this specific application. And the disclosures are specific enough to allow someone to read the application and implement it.
In software, we do see patents that appear to cover much broader scopes, more analogous to what you said; "a system of gears, levers, and cams placed in a certain order create a pair of timed shuttles that can weave fabric at high speeds" and boom you own all mechanical weaving for the next 50 years. Without doing anything but combining the idea of weaving, which humans have been doing for thousands of years, with mechanical engineering, which only really took off a few centuries back and is much more recent.
Notice that disclosure here, the price you are supposed to be paying for the patent*, does not really help anyone trying to build such a device, not the way that for instance US2993130 will actually enable you to build a special kind of electric motor and also to understand exactly why that sort of motor is so much better for use in an electric loom than the ones everybody had been using before it.
The software equivalent to US2993130 is imaginable, and it's quite possible it exists, but I do not believe I or anyone I know has ever seen it in the wild.
"There's nothing wrong with software patents."
Well regardless of whether or not you believe they should be allowed, there's a huge problem with them legally, even if we appear stuck for another generation before the people that simply do not understand it finally die and are replaced.
And that's the fact that software is math and the law firmly and clearly states math is not patentable.
There are all sorts of slick and sophisticated arguments that very highly paid patent lawyers have come up with to try and deny this, but of course they are all completely full of crap.
Every bit of software that has ever existed, or ever will exist, is a number. A computer does absolutely nothing other than read a number from an input device and based on mathematical rules output a number to an output device in response. The complete contents of your hard drive is a number. The program that knows how to communicate with your videocard is a substring of that number, and that letter to aunt martha you saved and never sent is another substring of that number. When you turn the computer on, a number is read from a specific point on the hard drive, and input to the cpu, which in response sends out more numbers, which cause more numbers to be read from various devices and input in turn. This is all the computer does, all day, all night, it is all it is capable of doing.
*- Patent lawyers may want to think that their fees, and the fees of the patent office, are the price you are supposed to pay for patents, but in reality the price is supposed to be letting everyone else in on the 'discovery' of something you could have otherwise exploited as a trade secret.
Clearly not the case with software patents where people routinely file patents quietly and just wait for companies to independently invent what they describe so they can sue.
"Here is an example. An aerospace customer of mine wants to use their CAD and engineering apps from terminals on the shop floor. They do not want to put a high dollar workstation in that environment but they do want the full graphics. The current methods for doing this don't really work acceptably with todays video resolutions, much less with retina/4K resolutions."
CAD is one of those applications I mentioned where you actually need the video bandwidth. Trying to do CAD on a dumb terminal with a remote client doing the processing is just not the right way to go about this. It wont work well with X and it also wont work well with any alternatives, real or imaginary, to X.
Pointing to poor performance in this application as a failing of X in the context of a situation where none of the purported challengers would do the job any better (or, in fact, at all) seems particularly perverse to me. It's like saying my old semi-tractor is having trouble pulling steep grades with heavy loads, so let's replace it with a Ferrari two-seater. Huh?
The correct solution here is probably to mount the guts of the workstations in some sort of protected enclosure that will shield them from environmental hazards, but still in the same general area, and just use long cables to connect input and and output devices at the desks.
"Creating a truly universal protocol is a daunting if not impossible task."
This is true. Everyone likes to criticize X, but X actually gives us something close enough for many purposes. The projects attempting to replace X have not aimed at creating this truly universal protocol, nor have they even aimed at the much more accessible goal of simply producing a protocol that is a bit closer to perfect than the one we have. No, they have avoided taking on this crucial task entirely.
I think that is more than enough reason to discount their 'replacements.' It's not a replacement for X when it does not even attempt to provide the same functionality we already have with X.
Get back to me when one of them mans up and provides network transparency at least as good and at least as useful as X does, and until then I really dont want to hear about them. I cant say they failed, they havent even attempted to do the job.
"Do you really want to try to move 4K bitmaps over the network?"
I dont want to touch a 4k bitmap in any way shape or form. Particularly not over the network.
"Some of the things that are "eye candy" for you are going to be needed for the applications and interfaces that are coming"
You have to be more specific. Something is 'coming.' Lovely. Is it something I might actually want on my computer for some reason, or is it more flashy marketing and idiotic overblown effects that I will just be looking for a way to disable? More likely the second I think.
There are a very small set of applications which have a genuine need for that kind of bandwidth devoted to video. And it's really not rocket science to figure out it's better to run those on your workstation instead of doing it remotely.
Windows XP thru 7 I could see you saying have a better UI, I could certainly quibble (it's conspicuously missing basic functions at some levels, but still relatively polished and complete in other ways) but that rings true on some level.
But Windows 8? Renders your judgement out of date I think.
I had a shell account on a Vax earlier, but if it had X I did not have access to a Graphic Workstation to access it and never knew. The first time I saw X was in my C instructors office, she had the graphics workstation, I am thinking it was an SGI actually but I am not sure. The server was definitely HP/UX, the department had a number of them in a kind of cluster, you got a login on a particular machine but if it was busy it would just authenticate you and pass you to another.
I still didnt have a graphical workstation to access it at that point, only got to play with it a few minutes on the teachers machine. The next brush was using that account with Desqview/X to run remote apps on the same servers from my PC in my office.
This would have been during the 80s and very early 90s.
Rather than letting some government agency subject to inevitable capture make up rules for the industry, this would be better addressed with legislation. Simply make it a rule that ISPs have to be ISPs only so they dont have all these conflicts of interest. The reason American ISPs hate the internet is because they are huge conglomerates with lots of operations whose profits are threatened by the internet.
Of course the chances of the US Congress passing a clean bill that does one thing well and isnt loaded down with pork barrel spending on unrelated issues, and amendments effectively reversing the intended affect, approximate zero.
You missed his point. 4G has a definition, LTE and the other junk being sold as 4g does not make it. Marketing, as marketing normally does, simply lied and mislabeled what they actually had (improved 3g) as what people wanted to buy (4g) and made the sale anyway.
So now we are talking about 5g or 6g but we do not actually have 4g availability yet.
"But, for the most part, the main thing I noticed was the sluggishness of a high latency connection. It wasn't always clear if a site had been blocked or it it was just failing to load because incompetent web admins insist upon loading hundreds of scripts that each take the latency hit. I'd have sites take multiple seconds to load as a result."
Request policy and noscript solves this problem along with a great many others in one go.
"I'd take a shottie over a Tommy gun and offhand pistol any day."
Depending the smoothbore, I'd probably take the Tommy but I would keep the pistol tucked away as a weapon of last resort rather than waste ammo trying to fire it offhand. Is he using an aimbot?
Slashdot Mirror
"Sure, the general purpose computer is known, but if the algorithm is not, and the patent claims the computer performing that algorithm, then it's not blindingly obvious."
That's right, the algorithm itself may not be obvious, but algorithms are not patentable! That's settled law.
The patent attorneys try to get around that by patenting a "method" or a "device" instead, which just happens to embody the algorith. But when you read carefully there is no method (other than hiring a coder to program the algorithm into the computer) and no device (other than a general purpose computer doing exactly what it was designed to do.
If they would actually write an application for a special purpose machine that only implements this one algorithm (instead of any algorithm you want to hand it) and that machine itself incorporated innovations, then those should probably be patentable. But that would require actual R&D expenditures, and risks, and still would not be the gold mine that a patent on the simple idea of using a ubiquitous general purpose computer to execute a known algorithm could be.
I can understand why patent attorneys want to make more money more easily, but why should society be forced to pay the cost?
"When you see some output on the screen, do you know which part of that output is generated by hardware and which part by software? Obviously not."
Obvious nonsense. It's all 'generated' by the hardware. By a general purpose computer doing what a general purpose computer does - processing input and producing output according to fixed mathematical rules.
"Anything you can do in hardware, you can do in software and vice versa."
Not true. The one and only thing you can do 'in software' is read input perform mathematical operations and output the result. Any effect that you want to produce in the outside world (aside from trivial side-effects) has to be done by producing the correct number and sending it to the correct output hardware, which actually produces the effect. Not the computer itself.
Now it's true, you can produce the number using a program on a general purpose computer, or you could instead construct a special purpose machine that does only this one algorithm and does it much faster. So what? That has NOTHING to do with patent eligibility, or with whether or not the algorithm is math. A special purpose machine might be patent eligible, as it might incorporate innovations that for instance bring the cost of implementation down considerably and let them compete where they previously could not. Fine. That does NOT mean that the algorithm itself is patentable, or that using a general purpose machine to execute the same algorithm is patentable (which in the modern world would be extremely close to, perhaps indistinguishable from, the same thing.)
"There are plenty of patented electronic (hardware) and mechanical machines that do what humans can do by hand. That doesn't make them unpatentable."
No one said computers are not patentable. Let me repeat that. No one said COMPUTERS were not patentable. We are talking about software. And software is not the computer. Software is a number to be given the computer as input. Very different things.
"It's been argued that had Huffman implemented his famous compression algorithm in hardware rather than software he would have been granted a patent."
Which would be (relatively) fine. Because if he implemented it in hardware, and got a patent on that, it would only cover the specific techniques he came up with to facilitate implementing it in hardware. It would not necessarily cover all hardware implementations (it would almost certainly be possible to design another hardware implementation of the same algorithm by doing it differently in at least one key respect) and it would certainly not cover using a general purpose computer to implement the algorithm (a completely obvious step once the algorithm is known since the one and only purpose of a computer is to implement algorithms.)
It's just a number.
It's a number on the disk. A series of binary digits. The program can be stored as electrical potentials, or as dots of ink, gaps in a punchcard, the list can always be expanded. But the program is not the electrical potential, or the bits of ink, or even the empty space. It's simply a number.
A number, in this case, which is mathematically equivalent to the algorithm for translating yet another number (the recipes file on the disk) into still another number. That third number is the number which can then be sent to the printer, and result in the recipes being printed out on paper for you.
The computer has no semantics, no concepts, it simply accepts numbers as inputs, performs mathematical operations based on that input, and sends numbers as output. Just exactly like the people that used to be employed as computers before someone figured out how to make a machine that could do it faster.
Negative. The map is not the territory. Your body is not the same thing as a diagram of your body.
"But, if you claim a computer configured to perform certain new and non-obvious functions, it can't be implemented wholly in algorithmic terms. It's a device, not the blueprints..."
And that argument fails on the additional grounds of the novelty requirement.
Using a general purpose computer to execute an algorithm can only be described as blindingly obvious, since this is the one and only function of a general purpose computer.
"Going further, all possible inventions can be described as a series of mathematical algorithms."
They can be described *using* a series of mathematical algorithms, but they have substance beyond those algorithms. Software does not. Software has no physical existence, it's an entirely abstract thing, a number, nothing more.
"As it was explained to me by a patent attorney, what is colloquially known as a "software patent" really isn't. Rather, it's a patent on the resulting machine that software transforms a general purpose machine (computer) into. "
Sophistry. The general purpose machine is a general purpose machine at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, and every single moment in between. It does not magically become something else just because you feed it an algorithm. It executes algorithms, that is the one and only purpose and function of a general purpose computer.
"If I had a black box wherein you fed in paper tape encoding data on one end and different paper tape with the data compressed came out the other end (thus taking less tape), that would be a data compression machine. Certainly, if the black box had no software at all but was instead a bunch of gears and such, i.e., totally mechanical, you'd have to agree that the machine would be patentable. "
The machine itself, sure. The underlying algorithm it implements, no. Anyone that can figure out a different machine to accomplish the same task can still do so legally, and it actually does not have to be very different either, as long as one or another element that's critical to the patent claim is different.
And using a general purpose computer to execute the algorithm certainly should never be patented - using a general purpose computer to execute algorithms is not just obvious, it's blindingly obvious, it is the one and only thing that a general purpose computer can ever be used to do!
"There's no patent controlling high-speed weaving machines because weaving was invented forever ago."
*Mechanical* weaving was first demonstrated in 1785, the idea itself only shows up shortly before that, and patents are quite a bit older than that. The original mechanical loom was, in fact, patented. But importantly that patent was not understood to foreclose others from the field - it only covered his specific innovations. The same inventor received numerous patents over the next decades on various specific improvements he came up with, and in fact he partially funded his own research by licensing those patents to others. But it was never necessary to license a patent from him in order to work on your own mechanical loom designs - and a good thing that.
If you are actually referring to the long history of hand-weaving as controlling here, then the similarly long history of human computers should have the same affect in computing as well.
"A patent to control compression of sensory data (visual, audio, etc.) used in multimedia by eliminating some of the data would be fully patentable in 1975."
Not if the method of doing so is simply to apply a mathemical formula, which in fact all the methods for doing so are.
"No one at the time had considered lossy codecs."
I am not at all certain that is true, but even if so, so what? It might well meet the novelty test. It's still math, and thus not patentable, regardless of novelty.
"Deaths divided by serious injuries is a nonsensical metric."
No metric can really be nonsensical in and of itself, what's nonsensical is to use a metric that does not relate to the context.
In this case, the context has to do with a claim of 'guaranteed death' in an accident with a car. So deaths divided by serious injuries actually doesnt look like nonsense. It's a proxy for 'deaths vs non-fatal outcomes in accidents with cars.' Which does not appear to be immediately available.
"Hint: Go find the total miles driven in cars and motorcycles."
That would be a better metric of generalised safety, but it seems to have little relevance to the claim of 'guaranteed death.'
"What size of an area should you have the right to block all signals?"
I think it's a good question, and one where law has gone a bit off it's logical wheels for commercial consideration.
Have you ever thought about the fact that at any given moment most of us have radio signals from hundreds of different sources beaming through across our property and even through our body, without anyone ever having to ask permission?
Now to a degree that makes sense. The benefit of having radio bandwidth available and the quite low levels of risk involved (at least as best we know) from exposure make it seem quite petty to attempt to block them completely, all the time. But it always seemed to me that at the very least, if someone is beaming a signal through my property without my permission, surely I then have a right to at least take a look at the signal. I mean, if they want it to be private, and they are sending it across my property without permission, surely at the very least it's their responsibility to encrypt and not my fault if they fail at that. I really am not the 'pirate tv' type - those people like tv - but among the few occasions when I have enjoyed it was when I used to pick up raw feeds, particularly the parts that never made it onto the regular broadcasts. The conversations people had while waiting for the signal that they were going on-air. Obviously I wasnt *intended* to see that, but it was broadcast through me and my property without my permission in a form I could read, so just how do they generate not only a right to penetrate me with radio waves as will, but even a right to force me to (figuratively, at least) close my eyes and not peek while they do it?
IIRC there was an early precedent or two supporting that outlook, but then someone started making money selling satellite TV and saw a threat to their system and eventually got precedents to the contrary, so you have no recognized right to read their signal, even though it's being broadcast through your property against your will, and even if it's so poorly encypted as to be transparent, am I correct?
And now this subject comes up. I know the ban on jammers is not new, of course, but this discussion of it is. And I really dont see why anyone else should have a say if I want to temporarily jam one of these signals, on my own property, for any number of reasons; as long as my jammer does not disrupt usage for those who are not on my property, how can this possibly be anyone elses concern?
"Hardware patents are really the same way: a system of gears, levers, and cams placed in a certain order create a pair of timed shuttles that can weave fabric at high speeds."
Sure. And the way patents were applied to physical machines, what you just mentioned is not patentable, while (at least before today) courts kept ruling the computer equivalent was.
There is no patent controlling high speed mechanical weaving machines. There are a number of patents on high speed mechanical weaving, but they tend toward very specific innovations, tricks that allowed manufacture of a comb or a reed or an electric motor or what have you that was superior for this specific application. And the disclosures are specific enough to allow someone to read the application and implement it.
In software, we do see patents that appear to cover much broader scopes, more analogous to what you said; "a system of gears, levers, and cams placed in a certain order create a pair of timed shuttles that can weave fabric at high speeds" and boom you own all mechanical weaving for the next 50 years. Without doing anything but combining the idea of weaving, which humans have been doing for thousands of years, with mechanical engineering, which only really took off a few centuries back and is much more recent.
Notice that disclosure here, the price you are supposed to be paying for the patent*, does not really help anyone trying to build such a device, not the way that for instance US2993130 will actually enable you to build a special kind of electric motor and also to understand exactly why that sort of motor is so much better for use in an electric loom than the ones everybody had been using before it.
The software equivalent to US2993130 is imaginable, and it's quite possible it exists, but I do not believe I or anyone I know has ever seen it in the wild.
"There's nothing wrong with software patents."
Well regardless of whether or not you believe they should be allowed, there's a huge problem with them legally, even if we appear stuck for another generation before the people that simply do not understand it finally die and are replaced.
And that's the fact that software is math and the law firmly and clearly states math is not patentable.
There are all sorts of slick and sophisticated arguments that very highly paid patent lawyers have come up with to try and deny this, but of course they are all completely full of crap.
Every bit of software that has ever existed, or ever will exist, is a number. A computer does absolutely nothing other than read a number from an input device and based on mathematical rules output a number to an output device in response. The complete contents of your hard drive is a number. The program that knows how to communicate with your videocard is a substring of that number, and that letter to aunt martha you saved and never sent is another substring of that number. When you turn the computer on, a number is read from a specific point on the hard drive, and input to the cpu, which in response sends out more numbers, which cause more numbers to be read from various devices and input in turn. This is all the computer does, all day, all night, it is all it is capable of doing.
*- Patent lawyers may want to think that their fees, and the fees of the patent office, are the price you are supposed to pay for patents, but in reality the price is supposed to be letting everyone else in on the 'discovery' of something you could have otherwise exploited as a trade secret.
Clearly not the case with software patents where people routinely file patents quietly and just wait for companies to independently invent what they describe so they can sue.
"Here is an example. An aerospace customer of mine wants to use their CAD and engineering apps from terminals on the shop floor. They do not want to put a high dollar workstation in that environment but they do want the full graphics. The current methods for doing this don't really work acceptably with todays video resolutions, much less with retina/4K resolutions."
CAD is one of those applications I mentioned where you actually need the video bandwidth. Trying to do CAD on a dumb terminal with a remote client doing the processing is just not the right way to go about this. It wont work well with X and it also wont work well with any alternatives, real or imaginary, to X.
Pointing to poor performance in this application as a failing of X in the context of a situation where none of the purported challengers would do the job any better (or, in fact, at all) seems particularly perverse to me. It's like saying my old semi-tractor is having trouble pulling steep grades with heavy loads, so let's replace it with a Ferrari two-seater. Huh?
The correct solution here is probably to mount the guts of the workstations in some sort of protected enclosure that will shield them from environmental hazards, but still in the same general area, and just use long cables to connect input and and output devices at the desks.
"Creating a truly universal protocol is a daunting if not impossible task."
This is true. Everyone likes to criticize X, but X actually gives us something close enough for many purposes. The projects attempting to replace X have not aimed at creating this truly universal protocol, nor have they even aimed at the much more accessible goal of simply producing a protocol that is a bit closer to perfect than the one we have. No, they have avoided taking on this crucial task entirely.
I think that is more than enough reason to discount their 'replacements.' It's not a replacement for X when it does not even attempt to provide the same functionality we already have with X.
Get back to me when one of them mans up and provides network transparency at least as good and at least as useful as X does, and until then I really dont want to hear about them. I cant say they failed, they havent even attempted to do the job.
"Do you really want to try to move 4K bitmaps over the network?"
I dont want to touch a 4k bitmap in any way shape or form. Particularly not over the network.
"Some of the things that are "eye candy" for you are going to be needed for the applications and interfaces that are coming"
You have to be more specific. Something is 'coming.' Lovely. Is it something I might actually want on my computer for some reason, or is it more flashy marketing and idiotic overblown effects that I will just be looking for a way to disable? More likely the second I think.
There are a very small set of applications which have a genuine need for that kind of bandwidth devoted to video. And it's really not rocket science to figure out it's better to run those on your workstation instead of doing it remotely.
Windows XP thru 7 I could see you saying have a better UI, I could certainly quibble (it's conspicuously missing basic functions at some levels, but still relatively polished and complete in other ways) but that rings true on some level.
But Windows 8? Renders your judgement out of date I think.
I had a shell account on a Vax earlier, but if it had X I did not have access to a Graphic Workstation to access it and never knew. The first time I saw X was in my C instructors office, she had the graphics workstation, I am thinking it was an SGI actually but I am not sure. The server was definitely HP/UX, the department had a number of them in a kind of cluster, you got a login on a particular machine but if it was busy it would just authenticate you and pass you to another.
I still didnt have a graphical workstation to access it at that point, only got to play with it a few minutes on the teachers machine. The next brush was using that account with Desqview/X to run remote apps on the same servers from my PC in my office.
This would have been during the 80s and very early 90s.
It's used every day, just not by you.
Very good points.
Rather than letting some government agency subject to inevitable capture make up rules for the industry, this would be better addressed with legislation. Simply make it a rule that ISPs have to be ISPs only so they dont have all these conflicts of interest. The reason American ISPs hate the internet is because they are huge conglomerates with lots of operations whose profits are threatened by the internet.
Of course the chances of the US Congress passing a clean bill that does one thing well and isnt loaded down with pork barrel spending on unrelated issues, and amendments effectively reversing the intended affect, approximate zero.
"Unless the device can accurately detect if there is a passenger or not."
She prefers to be called the 'navigator.'
You missed his point. 4G has a definition, LTE and the other junk being sold as 4g does not make it. Marketing, as marketing normally does, simply lied and mislabeled what they actually had (improved 3g) as what people wanted to buy (4g) and made the sale anyway.
So now we are talking about 5g or 6g but we do not actually have 4g availability yet.
I never checked it anyway, but I still never see ads here, because they are apparently all ecmascript monstrosities.
I would actually be fine with seeing ads but apparently the advertisers are not fine with being web-accessible.
"But, for the most part, the main thing I noticed was the sluggishness of a high latency connection. It wasn't always clear if a site had been blocked or it it was just failing to load because incompetent web admins insist upon loading hundreds of scripts that each take the latency hit. I'd have sites take multiple seconds to load as a result."
Request policy and noscript solves this problem along with a great many others in one go.
"I'd take a shottie over a Tommy gun and offhand pistol any day."
Depending the smoothbore, I'd probably take the Tommy but I would keep the pistol tucked away as a weapon of last resort rather than waste ammo trying to fire it offhand. Is he using an aimbot?