IMHO it is much better to become renowned and not make money out of it than waste your money on a patent and get zero return.
The chances of making money out of a patent are slim. Moreover, the cryptography market is "canibalized" - even if your system is, as you claim, a lot better than the existing techniques, most people will still use something that stood the test of time (e.g. RSA, which has become free)
Anyway, the US Patent system allows you to publish your idea one year before you file for a patent. Get some peer reviews (a proof is simply not a proof if kept secret) before embarking on a patent adventure.
While I agree with you that this won't work in the US, let's not forget that Australia has a pretty strong anti-spamming legislation. I hope that ENUM works well-enough to prove the efficiency of antispamming regulations.
The most interesting fact, IMHO, is that Deep Fritz runs on only 8 processors! A draw with the World Chess Champion is thus a major achievement,
as, while it probably still uses a brute force approach (minimax is after all brute force), it's nowhere near Deep Blue in terms of computing power. It is definitely revolutionary in that respect.
Here are, IMHO, the things that are way more important than resolution:
lens system (corner falloff, radial distortion correction)
ISO rating (fortunately most digital cameras do 400 these days)
Color quality & noise (related to the demosaic-ing process)
The megapixel argument is very similar to the CPU clock one (A PIV 1.5 GHz is just 15%-20% faster than a PIII running at 1GHz - on spec 2000, but people still buy clockspeed.)
While X11 is staying alive on the Desktop, it has no place on PDAs - X11 is simply overkill for them (I know, there are X servers for PDAs, but they're < alpha quality).
But their goal is to make it work on WinCE and Linux, so I guess that's great news. That will alow us to develop commercial applications with zero licensing cost for these PDAs
In a country with a GNIPC (gross national income per capita) of ~3000$/year (Worldbank 2000 statistics, most likely smaller now), 200$/"cryptographical" system is not so bad.
There's something even above compatibility (migration path) - namely Moore's law. The goal #1 goal of a CPU company is staying on Moore's curve. Now the problem with x86 is that it is a f*cked up instruction set architecture, and because of its monstruosities (8 registers ? stack-based FP ?) it has become a major hurdle in staying on Moore's curve. Good luck to AMD with their 64 bit thing... I seriously doubt that their 64 bit chip will be any faster than their own Athlon (going from 16 to 32 bits registers is a big deal, from 32 to 64 not so much)
The real question is how fast you can make it and cheap you can retail it.
Speed is made up of roughly 2 components - clock speed and IPC (instructions per cycle).
Clock speed comes from 2 factors - technology and pipelining. Technology implies high level, extremely expensive fabs. Pipelining is a well that has run dry (today's processors do very little in a pipe stage, and it's simply not worth it to make them do less).
IPC you get from a complex core (you usually add more microarchitectural features to the processor to allow it to retire more instructions per cycle). Complexity however implies longer design and (even more important) longer testing. It's no wonder there are so few players left in the microprocessor area (the costs are huge).
A small retail price, obviously, comes from mass production. China is indeed a huge market, but more in terms of population size, not income. China's GNIPC
(gross national income per capita) in 2000, as reported by worldbank, is ~ 750$ per annum.
We strongly disapprove of his political views, but we deal with that disagreement honorably and openly, rather than by trying to cut him out of the credit for his contribution to the system. ...
If you free that Perl simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go ahead. ...
Should we say "GNU/BSD" too?
BSD systems today use some GNU packages, just as the GNU system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately.
It doesn't take a Ph.D. (I'll refrain from using
the term "rocket science" as, IMHO, quite a few areas in computer science are a lot more complex than rocket science) to see why this is happening.
To put it simply, any luser can operate a console. The same is certainly not true for a PC. No matter how easy to use your operating system is, it still
requires a lot more button clicks than a gaming console.
Another reason is the price - you can't make lusers understand that the money they "save" on the price of a console are in fact spent on more expensive games (where royalties charged by the console manufacturer usually account for 15->20% of the price of the game)
I'm truly sorry, but this is a lame excuse - there is still a demand for *good* developers. But it's ALWAYS easier to blame someone else than
yourself.
If we were, let's say, 50 years ago, you'd have said you couldn't get a job because of the color people (instead of the H1Bs).
"If Oracle or DB2 is the Cadillac, then we are the Ferrari"
Now that they support transactions they evolved from Trabant to Honda, but definitely not to Ferari. MySQL still lacks important features - like subselects, or a non brain-dead query rewriter/optimizer(MySQL is indeed lightning fast, but only for relatively simple queries).
The problem, IMHO, is that a lot of developers learn databases on-the-fly (in a non-rigurous manner), and as a consequence have no idea what to expect from a DB.
Never believe the marketing department (of either side in this story)
Indeed, there are a lot of idiots in this world... but I don't think that an accountant could do that, unless there was some money for her as well. Think about it...
You steal ~2mil $ from your company and wire it to offshore accounts. When the fraud is discovered, claim idiocy and stay 3 years in prison. But after 3 years you are with 2 milion $.
I remember seeing IBM demos trying to create development systems that anyone could drag and drop their own programs together.
I agree with you that they indeed *tried* to do that, but they ended up with a system (Visual Age) that was in fact a lot harder to use than a traditional "notepad-style" environment.
Not everybody can do programming, it requires a special kind of imperative, cause-effect type of thinking. Such visual tools will (maybe) manage to make one aspect of programming easier, but I don't think they'll ever manage to make the whole easier enough so that aunt Tillie could do, let's say, her own custom expense manager. And the reason lies in the fact that most software projects are unique in at least one aspect. This uniqueness in most cases requires a Turing-complete programmer.
Visual Age was eventually replaced by Eclipse which is, in terms of the programming interface, as standard as you can get.
Microsoft's plan is quite obvious - they want the lionshare of the media distribution in the "new" digital world. That's the whole point of DRM - you *can't* distribute digital media using today's technology, the p2p piracy would be simply too large. Screwing other OSs in the meanwhile is just an added bonus, but certainly not their main goal - I mean, if you look at the numbers, they don't really have a competition
I was one of the people who responded to Duval's call in March. I thought I was doing a good thing (and actually still am)- giving some money to the company who created the distribution I had been using for one year on a couple of computers. The fact that I was getting something extra for my money was an even bigger incentive
The months have passed and I have discovered that the "benefits" were only marketing "painting"
the extra rpms were in their vast majority obtainable from their vendors
StarOffice 6.0 - well, you actually pay for it. Only 120$+ members can get it, not the 60$ ones
the unsupported rpms, made by volunteers, sometimes cause more trouble than.tar.gz source compiling
direct trading ? yeah sure, what a benefit. Even if I were investing with my heart, I would still prefer a regular stock market.
not to mention that we, mandrake club members, don't even have a priority ftp!
Overall, I don't consider I was ripped off. The quality of Mandrake is reasonably good. And because the distro is so user-friendly I'm actually migrating my girlfriend to Linux as well (with some Codeweavers help). But there's no real advantage in MDK Club, and I fear the worst for Mandrake in the next year, when the 2001 March memberships will expire.
More important than the relationship with the chip manufacturer is, IMHO, the relationship with Microsoft - the direct competitor. An X86 Mac OS X is nothing but Microsoft's biggest nightmare in terms of what it can do to the PC market.
So I strongly believe that such a project would serve as a trumpcard in negociations with Microsoft more than with the CPU manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
The chances of making money out of a patent are slim. Moreover, the cryptography market is "canibalized" - even if your system is, as you claim, a lot better than the existing techniques, most people will still use something that stood the test of time (e.g. RSA, which has become free)
Anyway, the US Patent system allows you to publish your idea one year before you file for a patent. Get some peer reviews (a proof is simply not a proof if kept secret) before embarking on a patent adventure.
1000 liters is just a cubic meter. I wouldn't call it a "pond"
<p>
The Raven
The Raven
The Raven
The Raven.
lens system (corner falloff, radial distortion correction)
ISO rating (fortunately most digital cameras do 400 these days)
Color quality & noise (related to the demosaic-ing process)
The megapixel argument is very similar to the CPU clock one (A PIV 1.5 GHz is just 15%-20% faster than a PIII running at 1GHz - on spec 2000, but people still buy clockspeed.)
The Raven
But their goal is to make it work on WinCE and Linux, so I guess that's great news. That will alow us to develop commercial applications with zero licensing cost for these PDAs
The Raven
The Raven
One of the signs an economy is in free-fall.
The Raven
There's something even above compatibility (migration path) - namely Moore's law. The goal #1 goal of a CPU company is staying on Moore's curve. Now the problem with x86 is that it is a f*cked up instruction set architecture, and because of its monstruosities (8 registers ? stack-based FP ?) it has become a major hurdle in staying on Moore's curve. Good luck to AMD with their 64 bit thing ... I seriously doubt that their 64 bit chip will be any faster than their own Athlon (going from 16 to 32 bits registers is a big deal, from 32 to 64 not so much)
The Raven
Speed is made up of roughly 2 components - clock speed and IPC (instructions per cycle).
Clock speed comes from 2 factors - technology and pipelining. Technology implies high level, extremely expensive fabs. Pipelining is a well that has run dry (today's processors do very little in a pipe stage, and it's simply not worth it to make them do less).
IPC you get from a complex core (you usually add more microarchitectural features to the processor to allow it to retire more instructions per cycle). Complexity however implies longer design and (even more important) longer testing. It's no wonder there are so few players left in the microprocessor area (the costs are huge).
A small retail price, obviously, comes from mass production. China is indeed a huge market, but more in terms of population size, not income. China's GNIPC (gross national income per capita) in 2000, as reported by worldbank, is ~ 750$ per annum.
Allow me to be skeptical :))
(as always
The Raven.
We strongly disapprove of his political views, but we deal with that disagreement honorably and openly, rather than by trying to cut him out of the credit for his contribution to the system.
...
If you free that Perl simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go ahead.
...
Should we say "GNU/BSD" too?
BSD systems today use some GNU packages, just as the GNU system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately.
jeez ...
The Raven
To put it simply, any luser can operate a console. The same is certainly not true for a PC. No matter how easy to use your operating system is, it still requires a lot more button clicks than a gaming console.
Another reason is the price - you can't make lusers understand that the money they "save" on the price of a console are in fact spent on more expensive games (where royalties charged by the console manufacturer usually account for 15->20% of the price of the game)
The Raven
If we were, let's say, 50 years ago, you'd have said you couldn't get a job because of the color people (instead of the H1Bs).
The Raven
Vlad
Now that they support transactions they evolved from Trabant to Honda, but definitely not to Ferari. MySQL still lacks important features - like subselects, or a non brain-dead query rewriter/optimizer(MySQL is indeed lightning fast, but only for relatively simple queries). The problem, IMHO, is that a lot of developers learn databases on-the-fly (in a non-rigurous manner), and as a consequence have no idea what to expect from a DB.
Never believe the marketing department (of either side in this story)
The Raven.
You steal ~2mil $ from your company and wire it to offshore accounts. When the fraud is discovered, claim idiocy and stay 3 years in prison. But after 3 years you are with 2 milion $.
The Raven
I mean, did they C14 date it :) ??
Speculation is the mother of all science (except math)
The Raven
I agree with you that they indeed *tried* to do that, but they ended up with a system (Visual Age) that was in fact a lot harder to use than a traditional "notepad-style" environment.
Not everybody can do programming, it requires a special kind of imperative, cause-effect type of thinking. Such visual tools will (maybe) manage to make one aspect of programming easier, but I don't think they'll ever manage to make the whole easier enough so that aunt Tillie could do, let's say, her own custom expense manager. And the reason lies in the fact that most software projects are unique in at least one aspect. This uniqueness in most cases requires a Turing-complete programmer.
Visual Age was eventually replaced by Eclipse which is, in terms of the programming interface, as standard as you can get.
The Raven
Did you even bother looking it up on google?
Star Trek particles
What's so difficult to believe about 118 ? I mean, we know from Star Trek that much heavier elments exist, like the Ilium 629.
The Raven.
Do Cell Phones Make Us Stupid?
The months have passed and I have discovered that the "benefits" were only marketing "painting"
the extra rpms were in their vast majority obtainable from their vendors
StarOffice 6.0 - well, you actually pay for it. Only 120$+ members can get it, not the 60$ ones
the unsupported rpms, made by volunteers, sometimes cause more trouble than .tar.gz source compiling
direct trading ? yeah sure, what a benefit. Even if I were investing with my heart, I would still prefer a regular stock market.
not to mention that we, mandrake club members, don't even have a priority ftp!
Overall, I don't consider I was ripped off. The quality of Mandrake is reasonably good. And because the distro is so user-friendly I'm actually migrating my girlfriend to Linux as well (with some Codeweavers help). But there's no real advantage in MDK Club, and I fear the worst for Mandrake in the next year, when the 2001 March memberships will expire.
The Raven
So I strongly believe that such a project would serve as a trumpcard in negociations with Microsoft more than with the CPU manufacturer.
The Raven.