The problem with your suggestion is that, in the grand scheme of things, it's a purely arbitrary distinction. Machines engage in processes to manipulate matter; software engages in processes to manipulate data.
What needs to be done to fix the patent system is to increase the burden of originality and non-obviousness. Just as patents should not be awarded for obvious machines, patents should not be awarded for obvious software; intricate and original machines as well as intricate and original software should be protected by patent (for a short time, at least).
At the end of the BBC article, they mention that there are already prototypes based on reflectivity. Presumably, this would make the tags easily readable with an on-camera flash, possibly an infrared one.
This part could make the tags a viable, low-cost alternative to RFID -- as long as your application involves line-of-sight, a 5-cent bokode looks pretty appealing next to a two dollar RFID tag.
Getting OLPC off the ground was a huge undertaking whose backers did not all share the same vision.
The whole point of Sugar was to make the XO a universal, personal educational computing device, free of the cultural barriers and prejudices that are inherent in something like Windows. The people who pursued this vision of OLPC were the idealists.
Then there were, to use a generous term, the pragmatists. They didn't see the use in building a new, universal education platform. To them, the developing world may well have just been millions of children waiting to grow up to work at offshore call centers, and getting them familiar with The Way The World Works was the first priority.
Obviously, the latter won, and to be honest, I don't think their tamer, "more realistic" vision of OLPC will ever make the same mark on the world that a Sugar-powered XO would have.
Wow, I don't think I've read the name D'Nealian in eighteen years.
The problem with D'Nealian, if I am to attempt to reinterpret vague memories from a second-grade me, was that too many of the characters had awkward strokes that didn't seem to really improve the clarity of the characters. I seem to recall smoothing out some of the hand motions later to make them easier to write.
Of course, today, my handwriting is mostly printing with the occasional, semi-inadvertent script ligature between commonly paired characters.
Yup, we can't listen in at all, especially to you confounded anti-Putin dissidents! You can go ahead and discuss anything you want over Skype, and there's no way we'll target you, intercept your call, use it to find some obscure law you've broken, rustle up some evidence, and send you on a whirlwind tour of the Russian justice system!
Most likely, this is an attempt at a linguistic intensification of the idiom "on steroids." There was a time when steroid use was more of a taboo and to reference it in casual conversation was marginally titillating, but perhaps "on crack" comes closer to attaining that mischievousness today.
Even though it doesn't really make sense (steroids increase muscle mass, but crack doesn't really increase anything except an extreme imbalance of neurotransmitters) it fits with our general cultural pattern of intensifying language. "Going ape," for instance, was an appropriate term for wild human behavior as apes tend to be associated with wild movements, but "going apeshit," while sounding more intense, doesn't make any semantic sense in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.
I don't have any numbers, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people most frequently killed by drunk bicyclists are drunk bicyclists.
In the 1940s, it was thought that Japan would take over the world militarily, in the 1980s, it was thought that Japan would take over the world economically, and in the 2000s, it was thought that Japan would take over the world culturally.
Your car has four wheels and an internal combustion engine, traits shared by the 1907 Holsman Model 3. Have you stopped to consider the intense danger this poses to you?
But wait: The Holsman was built in a time before ABS, crumple zones, air bags, or even seatbelts. One might presume your 2003 Nissan Altima to be a little safer.
Chernobyl was a nuclear plant built with all the safety precautions of early automobiles. Comparing it with modern TVA-built plants is just as valid as the above Slashdot Car Analogy.
I've always assumed soundtracks like the one in Elevated are done in a tracker -- but I'm guessing the tracker file has to be hugely modified or perhaps even just used as a guide to hardcode the note data for something like this. How do you guys work together for that?
By the way: Elevated's music is magnificent. Does Christian Ronde have any albums out?
Sell your e-book through one of the commercial services that the iPhone's most popular ebook reader Stanza supports. Your book will be available to over a million iPhone / Touch users (not to mention the other outlets the particular book store may have), and since Stanza purchases are downloaded to the device, they can be read anywhere.
Further, the app store is not a place to sell a book. I don't want an icon for a single book on my app launcher any more than I want an icon for an album on there. I want to go into Stanza to read, just like I want to go into iPod mode to listen.
Unfortunately, that's a hack, and a kludgy one at best. I don't wat to start having apps update by an entire version number while pretending to be the last version -- would you want Office 2007 downloading a "patch" that's actually the full binary of Office 2010, laying dormant on your hard drive until you pay to unlock it?
Hockenberry is right on just about every point and Apple would do well take that criticism to heart if they want to keep WebOS' inevitable growth coming out of Windows Mobile defectors instead of iPhone defectors.
Where are the hundreds of thousands of millions of tax dollars in bank bailouts that could have gone to help pay my overpriced healthcare pla... Ooh! Kelly Clarkson!
In fact, technologies like this could be useful in doing controlled release of earthquakes, such that you can pick the time it can occur so people are ready for it.
This is a really interesting idea, the kind of stuff that makes for thoughtful sci-fi and even more thought in real life. What if we could tell the Big One was coming in the next decade but had the technology to loose its destruction at a time of our choosing?
How would such a thing be done? How would you convince the populace and governing bodies that it was necessary? How could you make absolutely sure it was necessary?
How would insurers decide to react? Where would everyone go? What about those refuse to leave? Are there temporary measures that could improve structural stability for 24 hours? What about people who couldn't afford them?
What are the potentials for abuse? How would the specifics of the release be affected by politics? If there were a way to control where the greatest damage would occur, how would it be chosen? Who would choose? Would the people in the way have a say? What kind of legal liability would those involved at different levels have?
A controlled quake release could save thousands, even tens of thousands of lives. But once there's an element of human control to unexpected disaster, all bets are off as to how our civilization deals with the responsibility.
What you're not considering are all the other Flash-based sites that don't trade in pointless crap -- the far more subtle ones where you have to take a peek at the context menu just to be sure they aren't actually using some particularly clever JavaScript.
These are the sites that use but don't abuse Flash, and are the best candidates for HTML 5's more lightweight environment. If the designers and developers of these sites can be convinced it's worth migrating from Flash for the decreased overhead, they just might.
The only thing that would get any of the above-mentioned companies on board would be for HTML 5 to take off to such a degree that they feel their authoring environments are threatened enough that they need to adapt.
And as arguably their support would be instrumental in HTML5 taking off in the dynamic browser-based media market, it's pretty much a catch-22.
Unless some new player lands on the scene with a well-designed and powerful authoring environment built from the ground up for HTML 5. Then things could get really interesting.
I'm still hoping that some day,/. will add a variant on the "funny" mod that encapsulates the sentiment "Your post made me laugh grimly as I considered the all-too-real plausibility of your joke."
The more people to whom you are accountable, the more transparent your organization should be. Of course there are occasions upon which certain, highly-accountable things need to be temporarily withheld from disclosure, but they should be explicitly reasoned and have a timeline for their eventual dissemination to those holding them accountable.
It's strange. Normally this kind of thing is avoided entirely by console makers in that it's not simply a nominally enhanced experience that isn't integral to the gameplay (see classic rumble packs), but rather it splits the functional requirements of the userbase entirely in two.
It's really going to hinder the studio adoption of the tech, leading to either outright avoidance of it or including optional support in a way that isn't really integral to the game, making it a useless upgrade anyway.
I'd wager right here that the only games to make any real use of MotionPlus will be first-party.
Metroid Prime 3 says it can be done just fine for very casual players.
Very cute, but it's really not that different from a mouse-and-keyboard setup. Which, you know, those rather un-casual Counterstrike types tend to like.
The Sixaxis, as utilized in the otherwise middling PS3 Super Smash Brothers clone Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic, does exactly what I'd hoped Nintendo would have done with SSB on the Wii.
The controls are generally as you would expect, but there are some wonderful little motion-based touches: Want to try pulling off a particularly big whack? You jolt the controller in the direction you're punching. Ground-pound area-of-effect attack? Jolt the controller downward as you punch.
Oh, and there's a "meditate" mode where you can float in the air, trading off becoming a sitting duck for some health regeneration -- you do this by flipping the controller upside down. Brilliant!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your suggestion is that, in the grand scheme of things, it's a purely arbitrary distinction. Machines engage in processes to manipulate matter; software engages in processes to manipulate data.
What needs to be done to fix the patent system is to increase the burden of originality and non-obviousness. Just as patents should not be awarded for obvious machines, patents should not be awarded for obvious software; intricate and original machines as well as intricate and original software should be protected by patent (for a short time, at least).
At the end of the BBC article, they mention that there are already prototypes based on reflectivity. Presumably, this would make the tags easily readable with an on-camera flash, possibly an infrared one.
This part could make the tags a viable, low-cost alternative to RFID -- as long as your application involves line-of-sight, a 5-cent bokode looks pretty appealing next to a two dollar RFID tag.
Getting OLPC off the ground was a huge undertaking whose backers did not all share the same vision.
The whole point of Sugar was to make the XO a universal, personal educational computing device, free of the cultural barriers and prejudices that are inherent in something like Windows. The people who pursued this vision of OLPC were the idealists.
Then there were, to use a generous term, the pragmatists. They didn't see the use in building a new, universal education platform. To them, the developing world may well have just been millions of children waiting to grow up to work at offshore call centers, and getting them familiar with The Way The World Works was the first priority.
Obviously, the latter won, and to be honest, I don't think their tamer, "more realistic" vision of OLPC will ever make the same mark on the world that a Sugar-powered XO would have.
Wow, I don't think I've read the name D'Nealian in eighteen years.
The problem with D'Nealian, if I am to attempt to reinterpret vague memories from a second-grade me, was that too many of the characters had awkward strokes that didn't seem to really improve the clarity of the characters. I seem to recall smoothing out some of the hand motions later to make them easier to write.
Of course, today, my handwriting is mostly printing with the occasional, semi-inadvertent script ligature between commonly paired characters.
Yup, we can't listen in at all, especially to you confounded anti-Putin dissidents! You can go ahead and discuss anything you want over Skype, and there's no way we'll target you, intercept your call, use it to find some obscure law you've broken, rustle up some evidence, and send you on a whirlwind tour of the Russian justice system!
Most likely, this is an attempt at a linguistic intensification of the idiom "on steroids." There was a time when steroid use was more of a taboo and to reference it in casual conversation was marginally titillating, but perhaps "on crack" comes closer to attaining that mischievousness today.
Even though it doesn't really make sense (steroids increase muscle mass, but crack doesn't really increase anything except an extreme imbalance of neurotransmitters) it fits with our general cultural pattern of intensifying language. "Going ape," for instance, was an appropriate term for wild human behavior as apes tend to be associated with wild movements, but "going apeshit," while sounding more intense, doesn't make any semantic sense in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.
I don't have any numbers, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people most frequently killed by drunk bicyclists are drunk bicyclists.
In the 1940s, it was thought that Japan would take over the world militarily, in the 1980s, it was thought that Japan would take over the world economically, and in the 2000s, it was thought that Japan would take over the world culturally.
Your car has four wheels and an internal combustion engine, traits shared by the 1907 Holsman Model 3. Have you stopped to consider the intense danger this poses to you?
But wait: The Holsman was built in a time before ABS, crumple zones, air bags, or even seatbelts. One might presume your 2003 Nissan Altima to be a little safer.
Chernobyl was a nuclear plant built with all the safety precautions of early automobiles. Comparing it with modern TVA-built plants is just as valid as the above Slashdot Car Analogy.
I've always assumed soundtracks like the one in Elevated are done in a tracker -- but I'm guessing the tracker file has to be hugely modified or perhaps even just used as a guide to hardcode the note data for something like this. How do you guys work together for that?
By the way: Elevated's music is magnificent. Does Christian Ronde have any albums out?
There's a vastly better way of going about this.
Sell your e-book through one of the commercial services that the iPhone's most popular ebook reader Stanza supports. Your book will be available to over a million iPhone / Touch users (not to mention the other outlets the particular book store may have), and since Stanza purchases are downloaded to the device, they can be read anywhere.
Further, the app store is not a place to sell a book. I don't want an icon for a single book on my app launcher any more than I want an icon for an album on there. I want to go into Stanza to read, just like I want to go into iPod mode to listen.
Unfortunately, that's a hack, and a kludgy one at best. I don't wat to start having apps update by an entire version number while pretending to be the last version -- would you want Office 2007 downloading a "patch" that's actually the full binary of Office 2010, laying dormant on your hard drive until you pay to unlock it?
Hockenberry is right on just about every point and Apple would do well take that criticism to heart if they want to keep WebOS' inevitable growth coming out of Windows Mobile defectors instead of iPhone defectors.
So in other words, the content of the file is there but it's not much use without the header and metadata?
Not installing apps, not adding a bunch of "friends" you don't know, and setting your profile to "private" will go a long way.
Not posting potentially embarassing things will go even further.
Where are the hundreds of thousands of millions of tax dollars in bank bailouts that could have gone to help pay my overpriced healthcare pla... Ooh! Kelly Clarkson!
This is a really interesting idea, the kind of stuff that makes for thoughtful sci-fi and even more thought in real life. What if we could tell the Big One was coming in the next decade but had the technology to loose its destruction at a time of our choosing?
How would such a thing be done? How would you convince the populace and governing bodies that it was necessary? How could you make absolutely sure it was necessary?
How would insurers decide to react? Where would everyone go? What about those refuse to leave? Are there temporary measures that could improve structural stability for 24 hours? What about people who couldn't afford them?
What are the potentials for abuse? How would the specifics of the release be affected by politics? If there were a way to control where the greatest damage would occur, how would it be chosen? Who would choose? Would the people in the way have a say? What kind of legal liability would those involved at different levels have?
A controlled quake release could save thousands, even tens of thousands of lives. But once there's an element of human control to unexpected disaster, all bets are off as to how our civilization deals with the responsibility.
I think he's saying the "giant razor blade" was his approach chart holder.
This is rapidly approaching sig material.
What you're not considering are all the other Flash-based sites that don't trade in pointless crap -- the far more subtle ones where you have to take a peek at the context menu just to be sure they aren't actually using some particularly clever JavaScript.
These are the sites that use but don't abuse Flash, and are the best candidates for HTML 5's more lightweight environment. If the designers and developers of these sites can be convinced it's worth migrating from Flash for the decreased overhead, they just might.
The only thing that would get any of the above-mentioned companies on board would be for HTML 5 to take off to such a degree that they feel their authoring environments are threatened enough that they need to adapt.
And as arguably their support would be instrumental in HTML5 taking off in the dynamic browser-based media market, it's pretty much a catch-22.
Unless some new player lands on the scene with a well-designed and powerful authoring environment built from the ground up for HTML 5. Then things could get really interesting.
I'm still hoping that some day, /. will add a variant on the "funny" mod that encapsulates the sentiment "Your post made me laugh grimly as I considered the all-too-real plausibility of your joke."
It's a pretty simple equation, really:
As power increases, so should transparency.
The more people to whom you are accountable, the more transparent your organization should be. Of course there are occasions upon which certain, highly-accountable things need to be temporarily withheld from disclosure, but they should be explicitly reasoned and have a timeline for their eventual dissemination to those holding them accountable.
It's strange. Normally this kind of thing is avoided entirely by console makers in that it's not simply a nominally enhanced experience that isn't integral to the gameplay (see classic rumble packs), but rather it splits the functional requirements of the userbase entirely in two.
It's really going to hinder the studio adoption of the tech, leading to either outright avoidance of it or including optional support in a way that isn't really integral to the game, making it a useless upgrade anyway.
I'd wager right here that the only games to make any real use of MotionPlus will be first-party.
Very cute, but it's really not that different from a mouse-and-keyboard setup. Which, you know, those rather un-casual Counterstrike types tend to like.
The Sixaxis, as utilized in the otherwise middling PS3 Super Smash Brothers clone Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic, does exactly what I'd hoped Nintendo would have done with SSB on the Wii.
The controls are generally as you would expect, but there are some wonderful little motion-based touches: Want to try pulling off a particularly big whack? You jolt the controller in the direction you're punching. Ground-pound area-of-effect attack? Jolt the controller downward as you punch.
Oh, and there's a "meditate" mode where you can float in the air, trading off becoming a sitting duck for some health regeneration -- you do this by flipping the controller upside down. Brilliant!