Canon may not even be developing it (yet), they may just be trying to lock out the other dSLR manufacturers.
It sounds like an obvious idea, like software patents - slap together some well-known ideas (fuel cell, body-powered accessories, camera) and voila! "unique" idea. Let's patent it.
IANAPL - will every existing gizmo joined to a fuel cell yield a valid patent?
Going by the rough description in TFA, it sounds like electricity's effect on the ferropolymer causes its bonds to strengthen, or perhaps to magnetically align, increasing rigidity, reducing the material's potential for containing kinetic energy.
If the material's new state caps the amount of kinetic energy it can store, it has to move on - first law of thermodynamics and all.
This may be the next interesting bit in applying their discovery - finding a compatible heat conductor, and also learning the optimal frequency, voltage, current etc. at which to apply voltage.
Yeah, my comment was specific to Notes, which was the root post of this thread, I didn't notice the thread switched to Symphony. See my remark below about Symphony.
ODF is great, just caveat emptor - check it out before you buy, especially if you plan a volume purchase. Usability's important too.
I liked Symphony, used it before IBM purchased Lotus, but I was a budding geek and enjoyed complex software that offered many ways of doing things (it seemed like 123 on steroids.) Back in a day when there were few other choices, I considered it powerful option. Odd that there aren't so many relevant choices in this category today, either.
Because it feels like software designed by committee. "We need feature X, oh but we've run out of 'room' under the menu it should be under, so stick it under the Utility menu under the Tools menu." And so on. Good software takes usability into account, and that evidently didn't continue after IBM bought Lotus.
Back when IBM introduced the PS/2, they offered a hardware option they rather blithely dubbed the "Data Migration Facility." Otherwise known as a cable adapter for connecting two computers together. The style of thinking which produced that product name suffuses and pervades throughout IBM's corporate culture.
That's the best I can do to prepare you for the Lotus Notes experience.
Pelosi's only been in place, what 2.5 yrs? Bush and the Republican congress had been at it for 5 years?
Anyhow, the federal budget process is a negotiation btw President and Congress. It's looking more and more like Pelosi has placed all her bets on Obama scoring a Whitehouse victory, at which time some of these issues may be rectified. Christ, it's nerve-wracking.
That's like siphoning gas from a car, handing it to the car owner, and proudly proclaiming, "Here you go, free gas!"
So, explain to us, with all this great tax cutting, how did tax revenues never cover the federal budget? C'mon, it's simple arithmetic, once you remove the smoke and mirrors...
"Tax and spend" meets "borrow and spend." Who do you think will be paying for the Bush years, a leprechaun with a pot of gold?
It's not that the Bush admin had zero interest in being the party of balanced budgets, they had negative interest! Pushed the throttle all the way, man - he robbed you, me and everybody else. Record deficits, and do you think the Bush tax cuts would somehow never come home to roost? The perfect setup, "We Republicans cut your taxes, and look what the Democrats did they raised taxes." Well, duh.
Republican politicians know their constituency; people like you have short memories, no sense of history, and will vote 'em right back in to rob us all over again.
Ain't it striking how willingly some folk casually toss out "democracy" when their team has the ball? Like they listened to one too many Limbaugh rant against those absurd "civil liberties" and "rights."
Listen for their screams and sobs, after the turnover next year, when they suddenly rediscover that U.S. government is, indeed, of the people, by the people, for the people.
You're right about the licensing. As I recall, at the time NCSA encouraged developers to download, build, use and base their own work from the first and only web browser's source. It was "freely available" for download, though tied to the WWW consortium. Berners-Lee wanted other developers to consider it reference code, if not actually 100% open-source. Much came from it, obviously.
It's also the same source from which Netscape Navigator sprang, although some of the Mosaic developers who jumped ship to code it, and I don't remember if Berners-Lee says in his book whether licensing the source was involved.
Neither the web browser or tabbed browsing originate from open source projects.
False. Somewhere around here I've still got a spool with a copy of the NCSA server and Mosaic sources from way back when. And lookee here, you can still download Mosaic source for X Windows, version 1.2 in the directory called 'old'.
That's what the internet was founded on, open principles, not proprietary, though proprietary wasn't ever excluded. Much of the internet's infrastructure was proprietary early on, and still is. But if you're going to assert that open source software is nicking code and patents from proprietary, let's see some evidence, eh?
Don't know about tabbed browsing, though it's plain for anyone to see that MS was late to that party, and brought with it a very clunky implementation.
The web browser and web server were concepts and implementations that originated within the open-source community.
If MS is accusing the open-source community of absconding with its intellectual property, then why no compunction about incorporating same into their products?
Software *ideas* are just that, ideas. They should not be patented, or patentable, but that's just what's happened and has been encouraged by USPTO. Companies like MS (and many others) rode that bandwagon and have patents that one might call dubious.
Uh huh. It's plain that the first few words of that second paragraph triggered your "oh jeeze this is anti-Bush!" filter, and out tumbled your standard "fucking conspiracy moon-bats!!" rant.
Let's see in a year's time where you sit with Obama, supposing he gets elected. Will you be so staunchly pro-President, whomever it is, or will your evident partisan attitude have you saying the same sorts of things about Obama that I'm saying about Bush today?
And, what do you think of Obama? Do you think he is a militant black Islamic fundamentalist, and quite possibly a closeted gay? Is he preparing to wreak terroristic actions on his own country when he takes office?
I, for one, can't wait for the right wing losers to fully unload with stuff like that, as its connection to reality isn't just missing, it's totally random.
No paper trail is required to prove corruption. All that has to be shown is that your people benefited, that friends, colleagues, former coworkers etc. gained from your decisions while in office.
See if you can let this in. The legal definition of government corruption does not require that you yourself benefit directly from actions you took while in office, in order to qualify for indictment.
It can be your family (Bush Sr., Carlyle Group), your circle of friends, coworkers, former colleagues, etc (Cheney, Halliburton.) Because after you leave office, there are many ways that the benefit can come back to you.
What does it sound like when a government that awards no-bid contracts to companies with direct, tangible connections to the most senior elected and appointed officials? In the beginning, we were told this was necessary due to time constraints; we've now seen nearly seven years of war, and war profits, billions of dollars into the hands of this administration's close friends.
Now we're seeing no-bid oil contracts in Iraq, going to good friends of this administration.
Do you need a Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos to make a determination of corruption, with visible caches of money, cronies spilling out their pockets? No.
Apparently, progress is not available in small packages. The PW4077 turbofan used by the 777 has a diameter just about four times that of the PW308 used on WK2, and produce about ten times the thrust. Having seen pictures of WK2's engines in place, do you think maybe they're just not appropriate?
Different powerplants for much different needs... (insert some kind of pun about engine scale and Scaled here... =)
modern CAD tools... require so much more information... was not needed before as the skill of the machinist was relied upon instead of the accuracy of the model.
The CAD vs. draftsman argument is a moot point when you're talking about a spaceship, built from composites and fancy alloys. Design data gets sent direct to computer-controlled milling machines (that'd be the new-fangled "numerically controlled mill" to an old-timer.) In addition to greater precision and work speed, they have the added benefit of nearly eliminating breakage caused by human error, overheating etc. Even auto drivetrain parts are milled by computer control these days.
You'll have to wait until the next industrial revolution for machinist jobs to start turning up again... a century or two after the current civilization finishes itself off.
Microwaves heat water, remember, so a waterproof phone isn't going to emit much of a signal in a tub fulla water. As one who relies on long wifi links in a region with humid summers, the effect is dramatic - and we're only talking about water in air, much lower density than a container full of water.
That's a really interesting distinction. If I'm reading right at this hour, you're saying that the read device is able to distinguish between on, off and bad media? Something a RAM chip or memory controller can't do, I imagine, because it's receiving a signal from deep inside... good or bad, the media's read indirectly.
ECC can only correct 1-bit errors. It can't correct 2-bit errors (only detect them) and can't even detect nor correct 3-bit (or more) errors.
No, that's just one kind of memory system. There are a number of designs, and recovery also depends on the kind of error. IIRC, one design is somewhat similar to the CD Red Book spec, in that the bits for a given byte are distributed around - a physical byte is composed of bits all from different memory locations. If part or all of one byte goes bad, the rest of the bits and the parity code are unchanged, and the affected bytes can be reconstructed.
Also like Red Book CDs are multiply redundant memory systems, with -just what it sounds like- multiple copies of each byte, and the memory controller arbitrates differences. CDs effectively contain three copies of the data, striped and parity encoded. That's how scratched CDs can still operate error-free (sometimes.) The space shuttle's computer systems are relatively fault-tolerant - multiple redundant computers all running the same programs and data, with a fourth computer evaluating the output of the other computers, looking for failures.
Where there's a will, there's a way, but the will in the mainstream x86 server industry to build truly fault-tolerant computers is slim. It's a specialty, and that makes it very expensive. Stratus, for example, makes a line of fault-tolerant servers, with some of the fail-over in hardware, so they make their 99.999% uptime claim (about 5 minutes downtime per year.)
"Five nines" is a claim I've heard from most top-dollar *nix hosting companies, but have *never* experienced - it's generally been hours of downtime per year. Not even their network infrastructure gets close to 99.999% uptime! Cadillac prices, but downtime contingency planning is all up to the client, even with "managed hosting." They all suck.
I hafta wonder if the bit flipped due to a bad RAM stick?
We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers' objects. However, we didn't have the same protection in place to detect whether this particular internal state information had been corrupted.
Nothing specific about *what* caused the bit to flip.
This comes to mind only because bad RAM on a new server at work caused installation of a stock Perl module to throw excessive errors during the XS compile phase - the same package installed without error on an identical machine 20 minutes earlier. Took over an hour before we realized it was probably hardware. Memtest86 quickly turned up the problem.
Would hashes and the like protect against RAM suddenly going south? Wouldn't any piece of data that passes through main memory be vulnerable to corruption? Makes me wonder why ECC memory isn't being used much anymore... we have various flavors of RAID to protect slow memory from corruption, but not many machines I see have ECC anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Canon may not even be developing it (yet), they may just be trying to lock out the other dSLR manufacturers.
It sounds like an obvious idea, like software patents - slap together some well-known ideas (fuel cell, body-powered accessories, camera) and voila! "unique" idea. Let's patent it.
IANAPL - will every existing gizmo joined to a fuel cell yield a valid patent?
Going by the rough description in TFA, it sounds like electricity's effect on the ferropolymer causes its bonds to strengthen, or perhaps to magnetically align, increasing rigidity, reducing the material's potential for containing kinetic energy.
If the material's new state caps the amount of kinetic energy it can store, it has to move on - first law of thermodynamics and all.
This may be the next interesting bit in applying their discovery - finding a compatible heat conductor, and also learning the optimal frequency, voltage, current etc. at which to apply voltage.
Yeah, my comment was specific to Notes, which was the root post of this thread, I didn't notice the thread switched to Symphony. See my remark below about Symphony.
ODF is great, just caveat emptor - check it out before you buy, especially if you plan a volume purchase. Usability's important too.
I liked Symphony, used it before IBM purchased Lotus, but I was a budding geek and enjoyed complex software that offered many ways of doing things (it seemed like 123 on steroids.) Back in a day when there were few other choices, I considered it powerful option. Odd that there aren't so many relevant choices in this category today, either.
Because it feels like software designed by committee. "We need feature X, oh but we've run out of 'room' under the menu it should be under, so stick it under the Utility menu under the Tools menu." And so on. Good software takes usability into account, and that evidently didn't continue after IBM bought Lotus.
Back when IBM introduced the PS/2, they offered a hardware option they rather blithely dubbed the "Data Migration Facility." Otherwise known as a cable adapter for connecting two computers together. The style of thinking which produced that product name suffuses and pervades throughout IBM's corporate culture.
That's the best I can do to prepare you for the Lotus Notes experience.
Pelosi's only been in place, what 2.5 yrs? Bush and the Republican congress had been at it for 5 years?
Anyhow, the federal budget process is a negotiation btw President and Congress. It's looking more and more like Pelosi has placed all her bets on Obama scoring a Whitehouse victory, at which time some of these issues may be rectified. Christ, it's nerve-wracking.
That's like siphoning gas from a car, handing it to the car owner, and proudly proclaiming, "Here you go, free gas!"
So, explain to us, with all this great tax cutting, how did tax revenues never cover the federal budget? C'mon, it's simple arithmetic, once you remove the smoke and mirrors...
Oh?
"Tax and spend" meets "borrow and spend." Who do you think will be paying for the Bush years, a leprechaun with a pot of gold?
It's not that the Bush admin had zero interest in being the party of balanced budgets, they had negative interest! Pushed the throttle all the way, man - he robbed you, me and everybody else. Record deficits, and do you think the Bush tax cuts would somehow never come home to roost? The perfect setup, "We Republicans cut your taxes, and look what the Democrats did they raised taxes." Well, duh.
Republican politicians know their constituency; people like you have short memories, no sense of history, and will vote 'em right back in to rob us all over again.
Ain't it striking how willingly some folk casually toss out "democracy" when their team has the ball? Like they listened to one too many Limbaugh rant against those absurd "civil liberties" and "rights."
Listen for their screams and sobs, after the turnover next year, when they suddenly rediscover that U.S. government is, indeed, of the people, by the people, for the people.
No, you complete fucknozzle, it's a rehash of GFC, and your opinions aren't worth the two squirts they took to make.
Reliable, cheap, available. Pick any two.
Nice drilling. =)
You're right about the licensing. As I recall, at the time NCSA encouraged developers to download, build, use and base their own work from the first and only web browser's source. It was "freely available" for download, though tied to the WWW consortium. Berners-Lee wanted other developers to consider it reference code, if not actually 100% open-source. Much came from it, obviously.
It's also the same source from which Netscape Navigator sprang, although some of the Mosaic developers who jumped ship to code it, and I don't remember if Berners-Lee says in his book whether licensing the source was involved.
False. Somewhere around here I've still got a spool with a copy of the NCSA server and Mosaic sources from way back when. And lookee here, you can still download Mosaic source for X Windows, version 1.2 in the directory called 'old'.
A quick read of the web's history, such as the Tim Berners-Lee book Weaving the Web, and you'd *learn* that the first web browser was, in fact, open-source.
That's what the internet was founded on, open principles, not proprietary, though proprietary wasn't ever excluded. Much of the internet's infrastructure was proprietary early on, and still is. But if you're going to assert that open source software is nicking code and patents from proprietary, let's see some evidence, eh?
Don't know about tabbed browsing, though it's plain for anyone to see that MS was late to that party, and brought with it a very clunky implementation.
The parent post is right, Microsoft has incorporated BSD-derived code into its operating systems.
The web browser and web server were concepts and implementations that originated within the open-source community.
If MS is accusing the open-source community of absconding with its intellectual property, then why no compunction about incorporating same into their products?
Software *ideas* are just that, ideas. They should not be patented, or patentable, but that's just what's happened and has been encouraged by USPTO. Companies like MS (and many others) rode that bandwagon and have patents that one might call dubious.
Uh huh. It's plain that the first few words of that second paragraph triggered your "oh jeeze this is anti-Bush!" filter, and out tumbled your standard "fucking conspiracy moon-bats!!" rant.
Let's see in a year's time where you sit with Obama, supposing he gets elected. Will you be so staunchly pro-President, whomever it is, or will your evident partisan attitude have you saying the same sorts of things about Obama that I'm saying about Bush today?
And, what do you think of Obama? Do you think he is a militant black Islamic fundamentalist, and quite possibly a closeted gay? Is he preparing to wreak terroristic actions on his own country when he takes office?
I, for one, can't wait for the right wing losers to fully unload with stuff like that, as its connection to reality isn't just missing, it's totally random.
Prepare to assume the "moon-bat" mantle, ArcherB.
No paper trail is required to prove corruption. All that has to be shown is that your people benefited, that friends, colleagues, former coworkers etc. gained from your decisions while in office.
The Halliburton no-bid contracts are an excellent starting point, with many more like them to investigate.
See if you can let this in. The legal definition of government corruption does not require that you yourself benefit directly from actions you took while in office, in order to qualify for indictment.
It can be your family (Bush Sr., Carlyle Group), your circle of friends, coworkers, former colleagues, etc (Cheney, Halliburton.) Because after you leave office, there are many ways that the benefit can come back to you.
What does it sound like when a government that awards no-bid contracts to companies with direct, tangible connections to the most senior elected and appointed officials? In the beginning, we were told this was necessary due to time constraints; we've now seen nearly seven years of war, and war profits, billions of dollars into the hands of this administration's close friends.
Now we're seeing no-bid oil contracts in Iraq, going to good friends of this administration.
Do you need a Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos to make a determination of corruption, with visible caches of money, cronies spilling out their pockets? No.
Apparently, progress is not available in small packages. The PW4077 turbofan used by the 777 has a diameter just about four times that of the PW308 used on WK2, and produce about ten times the thrust. Having seen pictures of WK2's engines in place, do you think maybe they're just not appropriate?
Different powerplants for much different needs... (insert some kind of pun about engine scale and Scaled here... =)
The CAD vs. draftsman argument is a moot point when you're talking about a spaceship, built from composites and fancy alloys. Design data gets sent direct to computer-controlled milling machines (that'd be the new-fangled "numerically controlled mill" to an old-timer.) In addition to greater precision and work speed, they have the added benefit of nearly eliminating breakage caused by human error, overheating etc. Even auto drivetrain parts are milled by computer control these days.
You'll have to wait until the next industrial revolution for machinist jobs to start turning up again... a century or two after the current civilization finishes itself off.
Microwaves heat water, remember, so a waterproof phone isn't going to emit much of a signal in a tub fulla water. As one who relies on long wifi links in a region with humid summers, the effect is dramatic - and we're only talking about water in air, much lower density than a container full of water.
That's a really interesting distinction. If I'm reading right at this hour, you're saying that the read device is able to distinguish between on, off and bad media? Something a RAM chip or memory controller can't do, I imagine, because it's receiving a signal from deep inside ... good or bad, the media's read indirectly.
FSM-damn, there are knowledgeable folk here on /.
No, that's just one kind of memory system. There are a number of designs, and recovery also depends on the kind of error. IIRC, one design is somewhat similar to the CD Red Book spec, in that the bits for a given byte are distributed around - a physical byte is composed of bits all from different memory locations. If part or all of one byte goes bad, the rest of the bits and the parity code are unchanged, and the affected bytes can be reconstructed.
Also like Red Book CDs are multiply redundant memory systems, with -just what it sounds like- multiple copies of each byte, and the memory controller arbitrates differences. CDs effectively contain three copies of the data, striped and parity encoded. That's how scratched CDs can still operate error-free (sometimes.) The space shuttle's computer systems are relatively fault-tolerant - multiple redundant computers all running the same programs and data, with a fourth computer evaluating the output of the other computers, looking for failures.
Where there's a will, there's a way, but the will in the mainstream x86 server industry to build truly fault-tolerant computers is slim. It's a specialty, and that makes it very expensive. Stratus, for example, makes a line of fault-tolerant servers, with some of the fail-over in hardware, so they make their 99.999% uptime claim (about 5 minutes downtime per year.)
"Five nines" is a claim I've heard from most top-dollar *nix hosting companies, but have *never* experienced - it's generally been hours of downtime per year. Not even their network infrastructure gets close to 99.999% uptime! Cadillac prices, but downtime contingency planning is all up to the client, even with "managed hosting." They all suck.
I hafta wonder if the bit flipped due to a bad RAM stick?
Nothing specific about *what* caused the bit to flip.
This comes to mind only because bad RAM on a new server at work caused installation of a stock Perl module to throw excessive errors during the XS compile phase - the same package installed without error on an identical machine 20 minutes earlier. Took over an hour before we realized it was probably hardware. Memtest86 quickly turned up the problem.
Would hashes and the like protect against RAM suddenly going south? Wouldn't any piece of data that passes through main memory be vulnerable to corruption? Makes me wonder why ECC memory isn't being used much anymore... we have various flavors of RAID to protect slow memory from corruption, but not many machines I see have ECC anymore.