Form an official international non-profit organization or something of the sort (something like the IEEE, ISO, organizations etc.) where you would submit the source code of your software before you release it (same goes for newer versions). The organization will be bound by a confidentiality agreement if the project is not open source, so that it doesn't reveal the code to any third parties. In that case, you may also have to pay a small fee to keep the organization going, but it should be something even small companies can afford.
So the people of the organization get your code, decide if it is malicious or not, and if not, add it to the whitelist so that any computer may run it. Maybe one should have the right to appeal in case of ambiguous cases. The list is open for all computers to access through the internet, so that all PCs "know" what is allowed and what isn't.
The mostly bloated thing in this issue is the issue itself...
I say we rename the article into "Phoenix". Then we will have a new thing to talk about, but with much less arguments in our way as we browse the discussion topic.
Not exactly. You use your finger to browse on the screen. Just above your finger you will see the cursor. The article says that lifting your finger from the screen selects the item (even more counter-intuitive in my opinion). At least, it says that the cursor will be displayed only when necessary, i.e. if the item is big enough this function will not be activated.
The critical point of water is at 647 K (374 C) and 22.1 MPa. This means that a temperature of 300 C is actually subcritical. No matter how high the pressure gets, water will NOT come in the supercritcal area of its phase diagram for that temperature. Moreover, due to the fact that water molecules form hydrogen bonds (this is why the density of ice is lower than the one of liquid water), the melting line of water goes towards lower temperatures with increasing pressure. Therefore, water at 300 C is liquid. Pediod.
The same day that Microsoft publishes the details (which patents are being violated and in which FOSS project) the comunity will whipe out every code line that can jeopardise the software's legitimacy.
This whole story is only about spreading some FUD about FOSS. They are not even after the money (there is no point in going after someone that owns nothing).
It is true that the argument above is more or less unstable. However, there are always problems like the one you mentioned. I'm working currently as a PhD student on a collaborative project with two other institutes: in one they use Matlab, in the other they use C++, and ourselves prefer Fortran. Now, it is much easier to bring C++ and Fortran together, because they are both programming languages, but it is almost impossible to use a Matlab solver in a C++/Fortran program (too many crazy workarounds). Calling a Fortran routine in Matlab is imaginable, but then you are loosing the advantage of the programming language against the platform: speed.
IMHO: Proprietery platforms are inflexible. Usually people stick to them because of graphics, but that is because people are either poorly informed concerning the tools that are available (e.g. gnuplot) and/or are too lazy to write the necessary scripts in order to use them. Platforms like Matlab/Mathematica/Mathcad provide easy ways to work with solver packages for dealing with e.g. ODEs and stuff like that, but then you run the risk of not knowing exactly how your results were produced. You don't know when and where your e.g. grid-solving technique will fail because all you have read in the company's webside was something like "our solver is the best and the most robust". The situations where you will get an honest whole picture of your software is fairly rare. In the world of programming languages though you can easily get your hands on books like e.g. the Numerical Recipes that will analyse the algorithms and will provide a subroutine/function for the best one.
I suppose yes. After all, in the article it says that they are looking at the position of specific points in the general 3D structure and check their geometrical characteristics (skewness, relative distances, etc). This is what face-recognition software does in 2D right?
This is quite an interesting achievement. The tools that I am familiar with can only search for 2D structures like functional groups (alcohol groups, aromatic rings, etc). At their best, they might give the ability to search for R- and S- stereoisomers, but that is it. This is pretty enough for tasks like solvent design that are quite frequent in the chemical process industry, but in the pharmaceutical R&D they need more powerful tools.
I will give a simple example of an enzyme: These nice molecules catalyze reactions of vital importance in the modern pharmaceutical industry by providing a chemical "lock" where the "keys" (i.e. the reacting molecules) will dock on. This enables them to react and form a new molecule that will then undock from the enzume leaving the "lock" free for the next pair.
These "locks" are actually 3D structures of appropriately aligned molecules. This is where this search ability comes in: The chemist suspects how the appropriate lock would look like for catalyzing his reaction (3D alignment of functional groups), much like someone suspects what the right keywords for a Google search are. Then he feeds the data to the machine and gets the molecules that are likely to be of assistance in his work. After that, he can make experiments testing these enzymes to see if they actually work.
This should speed things up very much in biochemical research. It means less literature research and less failed experiments.
Seeing it as a community project is a good perspective. Nevertheless, the government will in that case be the one that will have the "real" monopoly, since it can control the cost of the services. In addition, governments are elected by the people, and then we may see things like "Schroeder for Kanzler! - get your new cable connection NOW for only 19.99" in the election campaigns...
However, one must be carefull with the taxpayer's money. They should come from a special "eTax" or something, because the usage of the www is still not as broad as the usage of the highways...
I believe that the difference between the groups that this study used was not really the fact that in one group there were "experts" and in the other "non-experts", but that in one group there were "grad-students" and in the other "non-grad-students".
One of the things that one learns while doing his/her PhD is that he/she is NOT an expert in ANY field. It is only a matter of time for some big-headed know-it-all grad student to get crushed in a conference by a more experienced, better informed researcher. Being a grad-student and having research as your job makes you more open to new ideas and other people's opinions.
When you daily come accross many different approaches that try to solve the same problem, you are bound to learn that you must examine them all first before you decide. Otherwise you might miss a good idea that may eventually cost you your PhD. Sure you will have a favourite in the end, but that will be only after giving way to every possible option.
So a grad-student reading a Wikipedia article with an "alternative" (i.e. mistaken) point, would say "Hmm.. why not?", while a non-grad-student could say "WTF is this?" Of course, this would be the case only when the point is more close to being debatable and not obviously wrong.
Most probably SUN will coordinate the whole open-sourcing of Java, like in the case of Open Solaris, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. I expect them to host the CVS server too. This way, it will be possible for all Linux distros to have the same JRE package, while each individual will still be able to play around with the code (that's what Open Source is all about, right?).
In my humble opinion, if someone fixes a bug, then why not commit the new version of the code to the central CVS repository directly? This way everyone will benefit from the fix, and users will not be confused by the many versions that will lay around in the internet (and, in most of the cases, reflect the author's vanity if you ask me...). If you look at it closely, all the big and successfull Open Source project are those that are centraly managed and coordinated (OpenOffice, Mozilla, GCC etc.). For smaller projects SourceForge is a good idea, which in my opinion is more like a battlefield where the survival or the extinction of all new ambicious projects is being judged;-)
As it seems judging on the majority of the comments, the first thing an *experienced* user would do on an XP machine would be to deactivate the MS firewall and install a third party firewall.
But then again, which unexperienced user would set up a LAN with the - advanced I would say - specifications described in the article? So, no real need to patch there... I am suprised they ever found out about this thing. It is easy to forget that all these little Windows tools are for users that will do no more than the occasional browsing and multimedia playback.
There is no such thing as bad publicity. It is fairly sure that all those Google executives really love the fact that Google is being directly connected to the action of "using a search engine to recover information from the internet". They are currently expanding their activities in all possible activities one would use the internet for: random information searching, email, chatting, maps, etc (this is a really long list). I bet they want the same to happen for all other areas of their interest as well. Like, perhaps in future one would say: "What's your google account?" and really mean "What's your email account?".
What they dont't want is some other companies using their name to offer the same services as they do. Can you imagine a website www.nobody_has_heard_of_us_before.com displaying: "Google the internet now! Accurate results in only 0.000000032354 seconds!". Besides, they can not prevent the people from using the word any way they like (and they don't want to). But they can (and should) prevent other firms from using it in the fashion shown above.
In the US there is the so-called "First-sale doctrine". It means that the owner of a legitimate copy may do whatever he/she wants with it as long as the law is not broken (like e.g. in the case where this original copy is used to make illegitimate copies). For example, you can sell it as a used copy in a flee market or in a used goods store because in that case the transaction will be legal (taxes will be payed to the state), and so on.
However, companies have armies of lawyers that can spend years in courts trying to prove that black is white. We on the other side are not able to do this. In case this rediculus patent is applied people will be pissed - no doubt - but they won't be able to make a stand. And given that there will always be people that consume without thinking, it will be profitable for companies to maintain such a lawyer army
Sadly, the only way out of this is to boycott the companies that apply such techiniques. Everyone is responsible for his own conscience, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Form an official international non-profit organization or something of the sort (something like the IEEE, ISO, organizations etc.) where you would submit the source code of your software before you release it (same goes for newer versions). The organization will be bound by a confidentiality agreement if the project is not open source, so that it doesn't reveal the code to any third parties. In that case, you may also have to pay a small fee to keep the organization going, but it should be something even small companies can afford.
So the people of the organization get your code, decide if it is malicious or not, and if not, add it to the whitelist so that any computer may run it. Maybe one should have the right to appeal in case of ambiguous cases. The list is open for all computers to access through the internet, so that all PCs "know" what is allowed and what isn't.
How do you like that?
I tried to look at the website but I can't. Any ideas?
Oh, wait...
Use XP where hardware compatibility and "out of the box" reliability is needed.
Use Vista where a nifty & shiny GUI will make a good impression.
Well, actually, the "laws" of thermodynamics are not laws either. They are axioms!
I say we rename the article into "Phoenix". Then we will have a new thing to talk about, but with much less arguments in our way as we browse the discussion topic.
All friends are REAL, unless declared INTEGER.
Sure! and people can send an SMS to vote who will be thrown out the airlock at the end of the week!
Not exactly. You use your finger to browse on the screen. Just above your finger you will see the cursor. The article says that lifting your finger from the screen selects the item (even more counter-intuitive in my opinion). At least, it says that the cursor will be displayed only when necessary, i.e. if the item is big enough this function will not be activated.
Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram
...I initially read "A Detailed Profile of the Hardon Super Collider".
The InterNet is a little red fox curled around a blue sphere.
There, fixed that for you...
The same day that Microsoft publishes the details (which patents are being violated and in which FOSS project) the comunity will whipe out every code line that can jeopardise the software's legitimacy.
This whole story is only about spreading some FUD about FOSS. They are not even after the money (there is no point in going after someone that owns nothing).
It is true that the argument above is more or less unstable. However, there are always problems like the one you mentioned. I'm working currently as a PhD student on a collaborative project with two other institutes: in one they use Matlab, in the other they use C++, and ourselves prefer Fortran. Now, it is much easier to bring C++ and Fortran together, because they are both programming languages, but it is almost impossible to use a Matlab solver in a C++/Fortran program (too many crazy workarounds). Calling a Fortran routine in Matlab is imaginable, but then you are loosing the advantage of the programming language against the platform: speed.
IMHO: Proprietery platforms are inflexible. Usually people stick to them because of graphics, but that is because people are either poorly informed concerning the tools that are available (e.g. gnuplot) and/or are too lazy to write the necessary scripts in order to use them. Platforms like Matlab/Mathematica/Mathcad provide easy ways to work with solver packages for dealing with e.g. ODEs and stuff like that, but then you run the risk of not knowing exactly how your results were produced. You don't know when and where your e.g. grid-solving technique will fail because all you have read in the company's webside was something like "our solver is the best and the most robust". The situations where you will get an honest whole picture of your software is fairly rare. In the world of programming languages though you can easily get your hands on books like e.g. the Numerical Recipes that will analyse the algorithms and will provide a subroutine/function for the best one.
I suppose yes. After all, in the article it says that they are looking at the position of specific points in the general 3D structure and check their geometrical characteristics (skewness, relative distances, etc). This is what face-recognition software does in 2D right?
This is quite an interesting achievement. The tools that I am familiar with can only search for 2D structures like functional groups (alcohol groups, aromatic rings, etc). At their best, they might give the ability to search for R- and S- stereoisomers, but that is it. This is pretty enough for tasks like solvent design that are quite frequent in the chemical process industry, but in the pharmaceutical R&D they need more powerful tools.
I will give a simple example of an enzyme: These nice molecules catalyze reactions of vital importance in the modern pharmaceutical industry by providing a chemical "lock" where the "keys" (i.e. the reacting molecules) will dock on. This enables them to react and form a new molecule that will then undock from the enzume leaving the "lock" free for the next pair.
These "locks" are actually 3D structures of appropriately aligned molecules. This is where this search ability comes in: The chemist suspects how the appropriate lock would look like for catalyzing his reaction (3D alignment of functional groups), much like someone suspects what the right keywords for a Google search are. Then he feeds the data to the machine and gets the molecules that are likely to be of assistance in his work. After that, he can make experiments testing these enzymes to see if they actually work.
This should speed things up very much in biochemical research. It means less literature research and less failed experiments.
Yeah!
I don't need the start menu too! I hit the windows key, I type "cmd" and
...oh wait..
Seeing it as a community project is a good perspective. Nevertheless, the government will in that case be the one that will have the "real" monopoly, since it can control the cost of the services. In addition, governments are elected by the people, and then we may see things like "Schroeder for Kanzler! - get your new cable connection NOW for only 19.99" in the election campaigns...
However, one must be carefull with the taxpayer's money. They should come from a special "eTax" or something, because the usage of the www is still not as broad as the usage of the highways...
Mach's gut!
Well, it has been said before that UNIX spreads like a virus:d .html
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-downloa
From the book:
The features of a good virus are:
1) Small size
2) Portability
3) Ability to commandeer resources of the host
4) Rapid mutation
One of the things that one learns while doing his/her PhD is that he/she is NOT an expert in ANY field. It is only a matter of time for some big-headed know-it-all grad student to get crushed in a conference by a more experienced, better informed researcher. Being a grad-student and having research as your job makes you more open to new ideas and other people's opinions.
When you daily come accross many different approaches that try to solve the same problem, you are bound to learn that you must examine them all first before you decide. Otherwise you might miss a good idea that may eventually cost you your PhD. Sure you will have a favourite in the end, but that will be only after giving way to every possible option.
So a grad-student reading a Wikipedia article with an "alternative" (i.e. mistaken) point, would say "Hmm.. why not?", while a non-grad-student could say "WTF is this?" Of course, this would be the case only when the point is more close to being debatable and not obviously wrong.
Most probably SUN will coordinate the whole open-sourcing of Java, like in the case of Open Solaris, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. I expect them to host the CVS server too. This way, it will be possible for all Linux distros to have the same JRE package, while each individual will still be able to play around with the code (that's what Open Source is all about, right?).
In my humble opinion, if someone fixes a bug, then why not commit the new version of the code to the central CVS repository directly? This way everyone will benefit from the fix, and users will not be confused by the many versions that will lay around in the internet (and, in most of the cases, reflect the author's vanity if you ask me...). If you look at it closely, all the big and successfull Open Source project are those that are centraly managed and coordinated (OpenOffice, Mozilla, GCC etc.). For smaller projects SourceForge is a good idea, which in my opinion is more like a battlefield where the survival or the extinction of all new ambicious projects is being judged ;-)
As it seems judging on the majority of the comments, the first thing an *experienced* user would do on an XP machine would be to deactivate the MS firewall and install a third party firewall.
But then again, which unexperienced user would set up a LAN with the - advanced I would say - specifications described in the article? So, no real need to patch there... I am suprised they ever found out about this thing. It is easy to forget that all these little Windows tools are for users that will do no more than the occasional browsing and multimedia playback.
For the record, I have iSafer always enabled .
There is no such thing as bad publicity. It is fairly sure that all those Google executives really love the fact that Google is being directly connected to the action of "using a search engine to recover information from the internet". They are currently expanding their activities in all possible activities one would use the internet for: random information searching, email, chatting, maps, etc (this is a really long list). I bet they want the same to happen for all other areas of their interest as well. Like, perhaps in future one would say: "What's your google account?" and really mean "What's your email account?".
What they dont't want is some other companies using their name to offer the same services as they do. Can you imagine a website www.nobody_has_heard_of_us_before.com displaying: "Google the internet now! Accurate results in only 0.000000032354 seconds!". Besides, they can not prevent the people from using the word any way they like (and they don't want to). But they can (and should) prevent other firms from using it in the fashion shown above.
...all the people that I know have already switched to Firefox. The people that refused to switch, I now pretend not to know.
In the US there is the so-called "First-sale doctrine". It means that the owner of a legitimate copy may do whatever he/she wants with it as long as the law is not broken (like e.g. in the case where this original copy is used to make illegitimate copies). For example, you can sell it as a used copy in a flee market or in a used goods store because in that case the transaction will be legal (taxes will be payed to the state), and so on.
However, companies have armies of lawyers that can spend years in courts trying to prove that black is white. We on the other side are not able to do this. In case this rediculus patent is applied people will be pissed - no doubt - but they won't be able to make a stand. And given that there will always be people that consume without thinking, it will be profitable for companies to maintain such a lawyer army
Sadly, the only way out of this is to boycott the companies that apply such techiniques. Everyone is responsible for his own conscience, right?
To tell you the truth, I don't know what kind of CPUs the Windows machines feature. Check the links for more detail.
Excelsior