As far as I understand it, when one party takes another to court over patent infringement, the validity of the patent in question is not ever an issue. It's only about whether or not that patent has been infringed. The party being sued would have to have the patent invalidated in a seperate case, and presumambly have that done before the conclusion of the original infringement case.
Presumably this is to prevent every patent infringement hearing turning into a patent validity hearing.
It would be perfect - a dual boot Mac. My reason for not buying a Mac is that when I get to the point of buying a new computer, I generally can't afford to go and buy *two* new computers - and I have enough reasons for needing to have a Windows box that I get a PC. If with my next computer purchase I could buy a Mac and dual boot it with Windows, then that would be great for me - I'd be able to try out the platform without the cutting myself off from the Windows world. And their computers are might purdy, to boot. (Although I'd have to get a mouse with a sensible amount of buttons for it... )
Just think... the just fill 'er up and long duration flights of glow plug engines without the mess and noise, with the the quietness and (hopefully) cleanness of electric motors, without having to worry about having four charged battery sets because you've only got 5 minutes flight time/ battery...
I think they just wanted to be able to make it into something that they would find more useful. Okay, they tried to 'embrace and extend' it, but I don't think that was a deliberate attempt to prevent interoperability with other systems - more just that they saw it useful and didn't really give a shit about the interoperbility.
When Sun sued Microsoft, they were suddenly in a position where they really wanted a Java-like technology, without someone else telling them what they could and couldn't do with it. Naturally, they dropped Java in favour of their own technology,.net + C#.
If Java hadn't sued Microsoft - sure, they would have put a whole load of MS-specific stuff in there, but it would probably dominate the Desktop by now. Sure, there'd be a lof of Java stuff that only works on MS boxes, but it'd probably still be quite easy to develop cross-platform if you wanted to.
My point is that it handled reserving rooms, scheduling, calendaring, meeting requests, address book etc... - all of that from a single system integrated into the email client. Sure, we could have written our own system to handle all of that, but why bother when there's one already avaliable? I don't really think it would have ended up any cheaper.
There's a big difference between banning the information and suggesting that a large news site does not post it on its front page. One is censorship, the other is being editorially responsible.
If in a few years time, new cars are comepletly wirelessly networked and an exploit came out that could allow someone to remotely 'turn off' the brakes as a car went past - do you think that slashdot should still link to an.exe that performs the exploit on its front page? Because if you don't it seems to me that you're only paying lip service to your 'free and frank and convenient exchange of knowledge' logic.
Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean that nobody else does. I used to work for a software company of about 200 people, and the calendaring aspects were very useful, especially for booking meeting rooms and the like. If we hadn't had a system for handling that kind of thing, things could have got quite chaotic - it's vital that if you have in important customer visiting that you've got a meeting room avaliable to talk with them ready...
... except the calendar. Exactly! You get a company of any size, and the caledaring, scheduling and resource management aspects of Exchange become really useful. Just because you say you don't like being on the clock doesn't mean that it's not useful for everybody else.
I'd imagine that there's a lot of money to be made launching satellites. The south of India is only about 10 degrees north of the equator, so I'd have thought they'd be in a reasonable position to launch. A mission to the moon seems like a good way to get things going - getting a probe out there would probably give investors the confidence they need to trust their satellites to an Indian launch system.
People seem to be criticising India for doing such things when they still have many problems with poverty, but it seems to be that they are moving in the right direction - concentrating hard on getting an increasingly skilled workforce, and moving beyond doing just blue-collar work. Yes, they have poverty to address, but they need the economy, education and skilled jobs available to move people out of poverty.
My original point was going to be that Blizzard would only see about 15%-20% of the retail price anyway, but then I noticed that they published WCIII themselves. The developer doesn't normally get the lion's share of the retail price - that normally gets shared out between the retail outlets and the publisher.
Blizzard won't make $60 million out of it - remember that if it costs $60 retail, it probably costs something like $40 wholesale. Once you've taken off shipping, production costs etc you're probably talking about $20/box - $20 million. subtract from that the cost of development, advertising etc and suddely that $60 million is looking a lot more like $6 million.
If Sony is raing in about $5 million/month and as the article says, only spends about 40% of that on maintainance, upkeep, development etc..., then they're putting away $36 million/year.
I'm looking forward to seeing what World of Warcraft is like though...!
Firstly, the money paid will presumably be passed on the consumer. Secondly, it means that companies are more likely to start using their own proprietary compression rather than JPEG, which reduces the utility of the devices. It's going to be a pain in the ass if you've gotta convert all your pictures into JPEGs yourself, rather than have the camera do it for you.
Xboxes have 8Gb of hard drive space. I don't think they're particularly well suited for webserving (where do you get the hardware support etc...?) but I suppose it could be done, once Linux is ported to it.
Here in the UK you can buy one-use-only fuel cells for recharging your mobile phone. They'll provide 2 or 3 charges, I think. Useful if you're travelling, I suppose. You can get them in Tescos (one of the big UK supermarket chains).
Windows XP has a very cool thing called 'Remote Assistance', which is quite VNC-like. Using such a system you could go through the problem with your Mum/Dad/Brother/Sister/Son/Daughter/Friend on their screen while they watch - and it includes built-in voice communication so you can talk them through it while you do it, if they're using the internet on their only landline.
IIRC, the stuff they made the original CDs out of was sensitive to light and over a period of years would gradually turn yellow. They only found this out after CDs hed been around for a while.
Shame that they couldn't find something equally tough to make them out of though.
DirectX was already at version 3 when the first OpenGL game came out (GLQuake) - even then it was only using a GL minidriver.
Up until that point all 3d-accelerated games had all been written specifically for certain cards - i.e. 3dfx, Rendition, PowerVR etc...
Direct3D was much more a way of freeing developers from writing a different engine backend for every graphics card out there, and a way of persuading developers to write their games in Windows rather than DOS (there were still a lot of DOS 3d-accelerated games out there then!). At the time nobody really considered OpenGL for game use because the consumer cards out there didn't support OpenGL - To be a proper OpenGL implementation, you have to support *all* the base OpenGL features. This was unlike Direct3D, in which you didn't have to and the capabilities of the card could (allegedly) be found out by querying the driver. Therefore, none of the consumer cards had OpenGL - as to have a full driver, quite a bit of functionality would have had to have been implemented in software - not acceptable for gaming.
It wasn't until 3dfx got together with id and they produced the GLQuake/3dfx miniGLdriver combination that people started considering OpenGL, and just ignoring the parts of the standard that they couldn't do on their cards.
Therefore, in many ways the article has it the wrong way round - OpenGL for consumer cards was in many respects a reaction to DirectX, and the fact that people wanted an alternative to Direct3D which at the time was still rather rough around the edges.
I would have said that for most people, using Linux places more restrictions on them than Windows, simply due to the fact that there is more software out there for Windows (for the average user) than there is for Linux.
You choose your OS for philosophical reasons, but many choose pragmatic reasons.
AA performance basically comes down to memory bandwidth. Yes, the Voodoo 5 6000 did have a stupidly high bandwidth (11-12Gb/s), which still just about beats Nvidia's Ti4600 10.4Gb/s
It has little to do with the number of GPUs you've got. The Voodoo 5 probably had to have several just to keep up with the bandwidth it had.
So what was so great about the Voodoo 5 6000? they put a huge amount of bandwidth into a card when it just wasn't economically viable. I'm sure that nVidia and ATI probably both had internal test setups that could equal it, but they both had the sense not to try and make a commercial product out of it until the cost of fast RAM came down.
As far as I am aware the V5 6000 didn't have any particularly special AA tricks, which nVidia seem to have now (compare Geforce3 AA performance with GeForce4 Ti...) so I'd imagine that the Ti4600 would beat the V5 nowadays, on 4x AA at least. Shame they don't have a higher AA mode, but with the next gen of games coming out, you wouldn't be able to afford it anyway, even with e Ti4600 or a V5 6000.
Of course, the V5 had no pixel or vertex shaders (which is gonna hurt image quality) and no hardware T&L. As the majority of current games are still CPU-bound, that's gonna hurt the Voodoo 5.
I don't think that the government should get involved - I simply think that it's a shame that there isn't a standard for IM in the same way as there is with email, as it's the users who suffer most. Surely you can't believe that the current system, where you may have to have 3 or 4 clients open to contact everybody you know is preferable to a system where all the systems can interoperate?
Standardising on a standard would be a Good thing, and I don't think it would result in less choice. What it would mean is that you could choose your service provider and client by the quality of their services and features, rather than by the amount of your friends that are on that service - just like email. It's a royal pain in the ass having to have three different clients on my machine at once, or go to a multi-system program that invariably breaks whenever the protocol on one of them is changed....
Imagine a world where you could only talk on email to other people on that email system!
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I understand it, when one party takes another to court over patent infringement, the validity of the patent in question is not ever an issue. It's only about whether or not that patent has been infringed. The party being sued would have to have the patent invalidated in a seperate case, and presumambly have that done before the conclusion of the original infringement case.
Presumably this is to prevent every patent infringement hearing turning into a patent validity hearing.
... it's Windows on a Mac.
It would be perfect - a dual boot Mac. My reason for not buying a Mac is that when I get to the point of buying a new computer, I generally can't afford to go and buy *two* new computers - and I have enough reasons for needing to have a Windows box that I get a PC. If with my next computer purchase I could buy a Mac and dual boot it with Windows, then that would be great for me - I'd be able to try out the platform without the cutting myself off from the Windows world. And their computers are might purdy, to boot. (Although I'd have to get a mouse with a sensible amount of buttons for it... )
Just think... the just fill 'er up and long duration flights of glow plug engines without the mess and noise, with the the quietness and (hopefully) cleanness of electric motors, without having to worry about having four charged battery sets because you've only got 5 minutes flight time/ battery...
I think they just wanted to be able to make it into something that they would find more useful. Okay, they tried to 'embrace and extend' it, but I don't think that was a deliberate attempt to prevent interoperability with other systems - more just that they saw it useful and didn't really give a shit about the interoperbility.
.net + C#.
When Sun sued Microsoft, they were suddenly in a position where they really wanted a Java-like technology, without someone else telling them what they could and couldn't do with it. Naturally, they dropped Java in favour of their own technology,
If Java hadn't sued Microsoft - sure, they would have put a whole load of MS-specific stuff in there, but it would probably dominate the Desktop by now. Sure, there'd be a lof of Java stuff that only works on MS boxes, but it'd probably still be quite easy to develop cross-platform if you wanted to.
My point is that it handled reserving rooms, scheduling, calendaring, meeting requests, address book etc... - all of that from a single system integrated into the email client. Sure, we could have written our own system to handle all of that, but why bother when there's one already avaliable? I don't really think it would have ended up any cheaper.
There's a big difference between banning the information and suggesting that a large news site does not post it on its front page. One is censorship, the other is being editorially responsible.
.exe that performs the exploit on its front page? Because if you don't it seems to me that you're only paying lip service to your 'free and frank and convenient exchange of knowledge' logic.
If in a few years time, new cars are comepletly wirelessly networked and an exploit came out that could allow someone to remotely 'turn off' the brakes as a car went past - do you think that slashdot should still link to an
Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean that nobody else does. I used to work for a software company of about 200 people, and the calendaring aspects were very useful, especially for booking meeting rooms and the like. If we hadn't had a system for handling that kind of thing, things could have got quite chaotic - it's vital that if you have in important customer visiting that you've got a meeting room avaliable to talk with them ready...
... except the calendar. Exactly! You get a company of any size, and the caledaring, scheduling and resource management aspects of Exchange become really useful. Just because you say you don't like being on the clock doesn't mean that it's not useful for everybody else.
Ease of install is important when you are evaluating several possible solutions to your problem.
I'd imagine that there's a lot of money to be made launching satellites. The south of India is only about 10 degrees north of the equator, so I'd have thought they'd be in a reasonable position to launch. A mission to the moon seems like a good way to get things going - getting a probe out there would probably give investors the confidence they need to trust their satellites to an Indian launch system.
People seem to be criticising India for doing such things when they still have many problems with poverty, but it seems to be that they are moving in the right direction - concentrating hard on getting an increasingly skilled workforce, and moving beyond doing just blue-collar work. Yes, they have poverty to address, but they need the economy, education and skilled jobs available to move people out of poverty.
My original point was going to be that Blizzard would only see about 15%-20% of the retail price anyway, but then I noticed that they published WCIII themselves. The developer doesn't normally get the lion's share of the retail price - that normally gets shared out between the retail outlets and the publisher.
Blizzard won't make $60 million out of it - remember that if it costs $60 retail, it probably costs something like $40 wholesale. Once you've taken off shipping, production costs etc you're probably talking about $20/box - $20 million. subtract from that the cost of development, advertising etc and suddely that $60 million is looking a lot more like $6 million.
If Sony is raing in about $5 million/month and as the article says, only spends about 40% of that on maintainance, upkeep, development etc..., then they're putting away $36 million/year.
I'm looking forward to seeing what World of Warcraft is like though...!
Spanked hard pubically, eh?
My, you are kinky.
Firstly, the money paid will presumably be passed on the consumer. Secondly, it means that companies are more likely to start using their own proprietary compression rather than JPEG, which reduces the utility of the devices. It's going to be a pain in the ass if you've gotta convert all your pictures into JPEGs yourself, rather than have the camera do it for you.
Xboxes have 8Gb of hard drive space. I don't think they're particularly well suited for webserving (where do you get the hardware support etc...?) but I suppose it could be done, once Linux is ported to it.
Please tell me you told her about Bresenham's integer circle drawing algorithmn...
Here in the UK you can buy one-use-only fuel cells for recharging your mobile phone. They'll provide 2 or 3 charges, I think. Useful if you're travelling, I suppose. You can get them in Tescos (one of the big UK supermarket chains).
Windows XP has a very cool thing called 'Remote Assistance', which is quite VNC-like. Using such a system you could go through the problem with your Mum/Dad/Brother/Sister/Son/Daughter/Friend on their screen while they watch - and it includes built-in voice communication so you can talk them through it while you do it, if they're using the internet on their only landline.
No need to go anywhere.
IIRC, the stuff they made the original CDs out of was sensitive to light and over a period of years would gradually turn yellow. They only found this out after CDs hed been around for a while.
Shame that they couldn't find something equally tough to make them out of though.
DirectX was already at version 3 when the first OpenGL game came out (GLQuake) - even then it was only using a GL minidriver.
Up until that point all 3d-accelerated games had all been written specifically for certain cards - i.e. 3dfx, Rendition, PowerVR etc...
Direct3D was much more a way of freeing developers from writing a different engine backend for every graphics card out there, and a way of persuading developers to write their games in Windows rather than DOS (there were still a lot of DOS 3d-accelerated games out there then!). At the time nobody really considered OpenGL for game use because the consumer cards out there didn't support OpenGL - To be a proper OpenGL implementation, you have to support *all* the base OpenGL features. This was unlike Direct3D, in which you didn't have to and the capabilities of the card could (allegedly) be found out by querying the driver. Therefore, none of the consumer cards had OpenGL - as to have a full driver, quite a bit of functionality would have had to have been implemented in software - not acceptable for gaming.
It wasn't until 3dfx got together with id and they produced the GLQuake/3dfx miniGLdriver combination that people started considering OpenGL, and just ignoring the parts of the standard that they couldn't do on their cards.
Therefore, in many ways the article has it the wrong way round - OpenGL for consumer cards was in many respects a reaction to DirectX, and the fact that people wanted an alternative to Direct3D which at the time was still rather rough around the edges.
I would have said that for most people, using Linux places more restrictions on them than Windows, simply due to the fact that there is more software out there for Windows (for the average user) than there is for Linux.
You choose your OS for philosophical reasons, but many choose pragmatic reasons.
AA performance basically comes down to memory bandwidth. Yes, the Voodoo 5 6000 did have a stupidly high bandwidth (11-12Gb/s), which still just about beats Nvidia's Ti4600 10.4Gb/s
It has little to do with the number of GPUs you've got. The Voodoo 5 probably had to have several just to keep up with the bandwidth it had.
So what was so great about the Voodoo 5 6000? they put a huge amount of bandwidth into a card when it just wasn't economically viable. I'm sure that nVidia and ATI probably both had internal test setups that could equal it, but they both had the sense not to try and make a commercial product out of it until the cost of fast RAM came down.
As far as I am aware the V5 6000 didn't have any particularly special AA tricks, which nVidia seem to have now (compare Geforce3 AA performance with GeForce4 Ti...) so I'd imagine that the Ti4600 would beat the V5 nowadays, on 4x AA at least. Shame they don't have a higher AA mode, but with the next gen of games coming out, you wouldn't be able to afford it anyway, even with e Ti4600 or a V5 6000.
Of course, the V5 had no pixel or vertex shaders (which is gonna hurt image quality) and no hardware T&L. As the majority of current games are still CPU-bound, that's gonna hurt the Voodoo 5.
I don't think that the government should get involved - I simply think that it's a shame that there isn't a standard for IM in the same way as there is with email, as it's the users who suffer most. Surely you can't believe that the current system, where you may have to have 3 or 4 clients open to contact everybody you know is preferable to a system where all the systems can interoperate?
So that's what that is....
So does that mean that using MSN I can talk to AIM users? I didn't manage to find any information on how to get that set up...
Standardising on a standard would be a Good thing, and I don't think it would result in less choice. What it would mean is that you could choose your service provider and client by the quality of their services and features, rather than by the amount of your friends that are on that service - just like email. It's a royal pain in the ass having to have three different clients on my machine at once, or go to a multi-system program that invariably breaks whenever the protocol on one of them is changed....
Imagine a world where you could only talk on email to other people on that email system!