While I appreciate your enlightening contributions, "That's how it is" doesn't quite explain this phenomenon.
Why patent, if the stuff you do is secret and of national security? One would think that foreign powers designing a nuclear weapon would hardly let themselves be deterred by trade laws.
If anything, your military stuff should be a trade secret guarded by armed security police or James Bond or such.
What's next? Copywriting the design of missile nose cones?
Scientists are adventurous. If you gave them a phenomenon that actually had a real chance of disintegrating the planet, someone would eventually do it. Because there was a good chance it would not, and they wanted to investigate the phenomenon.
A bit like people eating fugu. A little nibble. A little nibble further. I can't feel my lips anymore, but I want to nibble a little closer anyway.
I'd rather have a shot of Ebola, thanks. Touchscreens is the devils invention for crippling human appendages.
I don't forsee the QWERTY keymap to go away anytime soon, and as long as people poke at stuff as a means of entering data, they will probably want some sort of moving knobs to poke at. If they want to get rid of the keyboard - for God knows what reason - they will have to come up with something BETTER, not WORSE.
That haptic thing for the blind actually looks very neat and something I could put to good use myself. Imagine being able to touch hands over Skype!
What? You mean the way he makes promises to procure the pangalactic gargleformula, then present a shipload of vagaries that the laymen who sponsors him stare incredulously at for a moment before BAM they rubberstamp another cheque to him?
I have a suggestion: how about scrapping the current concept of patents, and instead award time-limited exclusive rights to entities that SHOW A PRODUCT USING THE COVETED TECHNOLOGY instead of just filing a paper?
I never managed to wrap my head around the fact that I can own the rights to almost anything - as long as nobody else did it first - by just having to file for an application to verify this and pay for the process.
In the next step somebody writes the application as vaguely as possible to give away as little information as possible while trying to grab as much as possible. Then someone will stare incredulously at my application with a stamp twitching in the hand, while tics cause their cheek to spasm. One second and an exaperated curse at the incomprehensible text later, WHAM, I am awarded a billion dollar paper that says I own something I may have never conceived, touched or even spent many minutes pondering about.
Show me an invention that isn't obvious to the expert! They exist, of course - in abundance - yet probably make up for a microscopic fraction of all the patents. But most of the time evolution and developemnt stand on the shoulders of giants and your expert peers will say "Yeah, I thought about that years ago, I just never made anything about it" about your inventions.
Thus, just procuring an idea on paper should not be enough to get a patent. You should also be able to demonstrate that you are actually UTILIZING the concept!
That is ridiculous. If someone takes Linux and puts a simple GUI on it, they aren't depriving the power users of any functionality. You can still pull up xterm and install any application your heart desires.
Further, if someone makes a simple distro they aren't ripping Slackware from your hands. Rest assured that you will always enjoy the availability of elitist distros.
If anything, they just add to the pool of choice.
I wonder if the real gripes about simple Linux isn't about that the 1337 h4X0rZ feel that the unwashed masses are treading their turf. "It took me a decade to learn this crap, it should take you as much as well!"
Nazism = national socialism, not social democracy.
Someone else already posted it, but it needs repeating.
Actually, nazism called itself national socialism but was rather fascist despotism. A bit like all these communist places calling themselves "The people's republic of this and that".
Sort of a self-antonym where you call something the opposite of what it is in order to fool and manipulate people.
Workstation cards are chip for chip identical to their gaming brethren, except that the drivers identify them as such and tweak settings accordingly. You more or less buy a cheap GeForce or Radeon but with a fancier label and a pricetag oriented around corporate budgets.
3D engineering applications use a bit different rendering techniques as far as I heard. Less polygons and more high-order math of some sort. Better visual fidelity at the cost of performance. Also, CAD doesn't need high framerates.
Gaming cards are intentionally nerfed in pro apps to "encourage" you to pay for the workstation card.
They aren't saying that Pakistan is near the Mediterranean, they are saying that since Pakistan gets its traffic THROUGH the Mediterranean, they were affected.
As a consultant, I am replaceable by concept and hired for time-limited operations, so I have nothing to lose from teaching others my work.
Thus, when I got to the last new workspace and was "shown the ropes" I carefully wrote it down, including the tacit knowledge I observed that the regulars were blind to, because they lived and breathed it.
I made sure to use brief and simple language, it was a leaflet for own quick referral I was concatenating, not an educational paid-by-word book for others. "When this do that" "Ask NN when this happens" "Z is slow so do Q instead" "First file J then update register K and enter L in database M", and so on.
It was an ongoing project, so I labeled it by revision number which was a good thing, because this text very soon circulated among regulars and given to newcomers. My boss was delighted.
I also write careful logs on my work which has turned out to be invaluable many times, especially when writing reports and I can just cut&paste from the logs.
Many people hate documentation work. It is probably because they do it wrong. Writing docs should be like speaking to people who are really interested in what you have to say about your work.
Well, the argument was that we want to be able to exert our Fair Use rights all along, right? Watermarks don't interfere with that right - on the contrary, I kind of approve of the idea that my files should have a "Belongs to Michail" stamp - so I find it to be a fair trade-off.
Except of course if someone steals my harddrive and my MP3's end up on the net and authorities accuse me for spreading contraband. That would be un-nice.
I apologize, I misread the "I am amazed you are being paid to look at this" to mean something like "I'm amazed that they pay you since you are obviously a useless hack" and I guess it was my own insecurities speaking. Now that I read the sentence again the true meaning dawned on me.:o Sorry!
I've been ordained the task to evaluate balancing of a crankshaft/conrod-driven machine that is not a piston engine but is otherwise quite similar in build. There could be resources out there already but the math is kind of trivial so I build my own equations.
One thing I found was that parallel twins are nice because you don't need balance weights on the crankshaft, but you still get significant acceleration forces because the conrod is of finite length and nontrivial mass in our application. One balance axle mostly only manage to redirect these forces in another angle (and dampen them very slightly), two can cancel them quite decently.
A 90-degree V-2 is another thing, they do fine with just one balance axle. I haven't looked into more than two reciprocating masses yet.
I am not surprised that this is as you say OLD technology and that the only examples you can pull up are obscurities and ancient british motorcycles, widely reknown for their engineering refinement.
I have a quite long page of math formulas and graphs here telling me that a single balance axle is quite uneffective, while two is an entirely different thing. I can mail you a PDF or two if you like.
But thanks for the insult, I need to feel bad once in a while.
"that makes the Nano the first time a 2-cylinder gasoline engine will be used in a car with a single balancer shaft."
I am very curious as to what they mean with this since I am dorking around with analysis on vibrations of such configurations for a living right now.
A single balance axle makes no sense, it only turns the phase of the vibration direction. You are better off without one at all.
Unless the cylinders are vertical, since then the vibrations would be vertical without a balance axle, causing the car to jump on the suspension. One balance axle might phase the vibrations horizontally instead, causing less power loss through viscoelastic dampening.
Seriously - do you expect me to make a list or draw a graph comparing "innovation" between USA and Europe?
You seem to equate patents with incentive to innovate. That is not correct, most companies live off PRODUCING things, not just owning the rights to them.
But the recent "intellectual property" system have disrupted this. Now you either attempt to own your rights or someone else will. Who produces what suddenly became secondary.
And that is not right, that is a spreading plague on the corporate system. It will wreck capitalism and socialism alike in the end if kept unchecked.
And unchecked it will be, since it is a new system who reinforces the strong over the weak. You are weak, and the strong will make your life expensive and hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Every week there is news of fabulous new technology that will make RAM cheaper, faster and more plentiful.
I suggest we make a tag - "newram" - so that we can search out a list and poke finger and laugh at it later.
Unfortunately, I am too stupid to figure out this tagging thing. Will someone else rise to the occasion?
While I appreciate your enlightening contributions, "That's how it is" doesn't quite explain this phenomenon.
Why patent, if the stuff you do is secret and of national security? One would think that foreign powers designing a nuclear weapon would hardly let themselves be deterred by trade laws.
If anything, your military stuff should be a trade secret guarded by armed security police or James Bond or such.
What's next? Copywriting the design of missile nose cones?
How does this work?
"You are infringing on my patent, the nature of which I can't disclose. Hand over money!"
Scientists are adventurous. If you gave them a phenomenon that actually had a real chance of disintegrating the planet, someone would eventually do it. Because there was a good chance it would not, and they wanted to investigate the phenomenon.
A bit like people eating fugu. A little nibble. A little nibble further. I can't feel my lips anymore, but I want to nibble a little closer anyway.
I'd rather have a shot of Ebola, thanks. Touchscreens is the devils invention for crippling human appendages.
I don't forsee the QWERTY keymap to go away anytime soon, and as long as people poke at stuff as a means of entering data, they will probably want some sort of moving knobs to poke at. If they want to get rid of the keyboard - for God knows what reason - they will have to come up with something BETTER, not WORSE.
That haptic thing for the blind actually looks very neat and something I could put to good use myself. Imagine being able to touch hands over Skype!
What? You mean the way he makes promises to procure the pangalactic gargleformula, then present a shipload of vagaries that the laymen who sponsors him stare incredulously at for a moment before BAM they rubberstamp another cheque to him?
I have a suggestion: how about scrapping the current concept of patents, and instead award time-limited exclusive rights to entities that SHOW A PRODUCT USING THE COVETED TECHNOLOGY instead of just filing a paper?
I never managed to wrap my head around the fact that I can own the rights to almost anything - as long as nobody else did it first - by just having to file for an application to verify this and pay for the process.
In the next step somebody writes the application as vaguely as possible to give away as little information as possible while trying to grab as much as possible. Then someone will stare incredulously at my application with a stamp twitching in the hand, while tics cause their cheek to spasm. One second and an exaperated curse at the incomprehensible text later, WHAM, I am awarded a billion dollar paper that says I own something I may have never conceived, touched or even spent many minutes pondering about.
Show me an invention that isn't obvious to the expert! They exist, of course - in abundance - yet probably make up for a microscopic fraction of all the patents. But most of the time evolution and developemnt stand on the shoulders of giants and your expert peers will say "Yeah, I thought about that years ago, I just never made anything about it" about your inventions.
Thus, just procuring an idea on paper should not be enough to get a patent. You should also be able to demonstrate that you are actually UTILIZING the concept!
That is ridiculous. If someone takes Linux and puts a simple GUI on it, they aren't depriving the power users of any functionality. You can still pull up xterm and install any application your heart desires.
Further, if someone makes a simple distro they aren't ripping Slackware from your hands. Rest assured that you will always enjoy the availability of elitist distros.
If anything, they just add to the pool of choice.
I wonder if the real gripes about simple Linux isn't about that the 1337 h4X0rZ feel that the unwashed masses are treading their turf. "It took me a decade to learn this crap, it should take you as much as well!"
Nazism = national socialism, not social democracy.
Someone else already posted it, but it needs repeating.
Actually, nazism called itself national socialism but was rather fascist despotism.
A bit like all these communist places calling themselves "The people's republic of this and that".
Sort of a self-antonym where you call something the opposite of what it is in order to fool and manipulate people.
Workstation cards are chip for chip identical to their gaming brethren, except that the drivers identify them as such and tweak settings accordingly. You more or less buy a cheap GeForce or Radeon but with a fancier label and a pricetag oriented around corporate budgets.
3D engineering applications use a bit different rendering techniques as far as I heard. Less polygons and more high-order math of some sort. Better visual fidelity at the cost of performance. Also, CAD doesn't need high framerates.
Gaming cards are intentionally nerfed in pro apps to "encourage" you to pay for the workstation card.
They aren't saying that Pakistan is near the Mediterranean, they are saying that since Pakistan gets its traffic THROUGH the Mediterranean, they were affected.
As a consultant, I am replaceable by concept and hired for time-limited operations, so I have nothing to lose from teaching others my work.
Thus, when I got to the last new workspace and was "shown the ropes" I carefully wrote it down, including the tacit knowledge I observed that the regulars were blind to, because they lived and breathed it.
I made sure to use brief and simple language, it was a leaflet for own quick referral I was concatenating, not an educational paid-by-word book for others. "When this do that" "Ask NN when this happens" "Z is slow so do Q instead" "First file J then update register K and enter L in database M", and so on.
It was an ongoing project, so I labeled it by revision number which was a good thing, because this text very soon circulated among regulars and given to newcomers. My boss was delighted.
I also write careful logs on my work which has turned out to be invaluable many times, especially when writing reports and I can just cut&paste from the logs.
Many people hate documentation work. It is probably because they do it wrong. Writing docs should be like speaking to people who are really interested in what you have to say about your work.
I hope this will not be scrapped by a sneering senior executive.
Imaginary Property? I'm going to use that from here on. Thanks!
IP is like old-school colonialism. Wealth acquisition by means of cunning use of flags.
That would be fabulous!
"How have you dealt with trying to turn a reasonable profit on your work while remaining open-sourced?"
Use - or create - an open tool, then get paid for the work you do with the tool.
Well, I think that what you said probably resonates with the average persons' moral sense.
And as such, it was great.
Well, the argument was that we want to be able to exert our Fair Use rights all along, right? Watermarks don't interfere with that right - on the contrary, I kind of approve of the idea that my files should have a "Belongs to Michail" stamp - so I find it to be a fair trade-off.
Except of course if someone steals my harddrive and my MP3's end up on the net and authorities accuse me for spreading contraband. That would be un-nice.
I am hasty and hot headed and misread his post at first, for which I feel stupid.
I apologize, I misread the "I am amazed you are being paid to look at this" to mean something like "I'm amazed that they pay you since you are obviously a useless hack" and I guess it was my own insecurities speaking. Now that I read the sentence again the true meaning dawned on me. :o Sorry!
I've been ordained the task to evaluate balancing of a crankshaft/conrod-driven machine that is not a piston engine but is otherwise quite similar in build. There could be resources out there already but the math is kind of trivial so I build my own equations.
One thing I found was that parallel twins are nice because you don't need balance weights on the crankshaft, but you still get significant acceleration forces because the conrod is of finite length and nontrivial mass in our application. One balance axle mostly only manage to redirect these forces in another angle (and dampen them very slightly), two can cancel them quite decently.
A 90-degree V-2 is another thing, they do fine with just one balance axle. I haven't looked into more than two reciprocating masses yet.
I am not surprised that this is as you say OLD technology and that the only examples you can pull up are obscurities and ancient british motorcycles, widely reknown for their engineering refinement.
I have a quite long page of math formulas and graphs here telling me that a single balance axle is quite uneffective, while two is an entirely different thing. I can mail you a PDF or two if you like.
But thanks for the insult, I need to feel bad once in a while.
"that makes the Nano the first time a 2-cylinder gasoline engine will be used in a car with a single balancer shaft."
I am very curious as to what they mean with this since I am dorking around with analysis on vibrations of such configurations for a living right now.
A single balance axle makes no sense, it only turns the phase of the vibration direction. You are better off without one at all.
Unless the cylinders are vertical, since then the vibrations would be vertical without a balance axle, causing the car to jump on the suspension. One balance axle might phase the vibrations horizontally instead, causing less power loss through viscoelastic dampening.
I am intrigued.
And then you would invoice the army $11000?
Now that you mention it, I think I agree.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/11/07/mobile-trademarks-magenta
Seriously - do you expect me to make a list or draw a graph comparing "innovation" between USA and Europe?
You seem to equate patents with incentive to innovate. That is not correct, most companies live off PRODUCING things, not just owning the rights to them.
But the recent "intellectual property" system have disrupted this. Now you either attempt to own your rights or someone else will. Who produces what suddenly became secondary.
And that is not right, that is a spreading plague on the corporate system. It will wreck capitalism and socialism alike in the end if kept unchecked.
And unchecked it will be, since it is a new system who reinforces the strong over the weak. You are weak, and the strong will make your life expensive and hard.