I have no doubt we have, but the (stupidity/amount of prior art for some) of these patents is insane. MS didn't have a network stack in their system when I first saw smileys, yet microsoft files to patent emoticon method. Initially this made me laugh, then it made me worried but ultimately I think this as a positive thing:
It made me crack up laughing
It may focus the might of that greatest of patent bullies, IBM, against the US patent system.
Hopefully y'all will trash said patent system and stop your companies trying to persuade(bribe) our politicians into introducing it here.
Note: bribes can be of the form of cheap software for schools, jobs/investment in depressed areas or of course hard cash.
We had a touch of this phenomenon in Ireland, again government, health service & It infrastructure. Initially it seemed like a good idea. The Personel, Payroll And Related Systems (PPARS) project was supposed manage payroll and personel, however the personel in question worked for 7 different health boards at the time each of which defined the roles and set pay scales independantly. The system was "specified" between '95 and '97 It was built on SAP R/3 and was to be delivered in '99 for under €10m. Then they set about specifying it again and discovered that they were dealing with different terms and conditions for each health board, different definitions of experience, training, grade... not quite a one off contract per emloyee.
Anyway 5 years and €17m later the thing isn't working yet, so naturally the govt. decides to expand it to cover the whole fscking halth service. This doesn't work out too well so they threw consultants at it. Eventually 10 years after the project begun they have blown 131m and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
Since then we've managed to blow €53m on e-voting which resulted in machines that were found to be crap at elections, though good at chess! It is my firm belief that the govt shouldn't be allowed near a presentation on IT products, they think it makes them look modern and consequently some shill ends up doing nicely out of trying to bankrupt the place.
</RANT$gt;
I don't live in the UK, and consequently don't pay your license fee, owever I do receive the 4 BBC chanels for adults on satelite and consequently I would have assumed the reason no one bothers with a Tivo is that the channels with ads (ITV Channel 4 and all the total drivel) aren't worth watching. Whereas the above 4 plus the 2 for kids plus all the regional variations of BBC (That can be fun, working out why certain history progs aren't shown in Scotland or NI) are brilliant telly.
The States on the other hand manages to make what is already the least watchable telly on the planet un-viewable with ads, or did when I was over there anyway.
I think people misunderestimate the power of Ubuntu to evangelise.
I've tried most major distros over the years (must get round to Gentoo), my sister however used to work in DTP on a Mac before getting a PC at home.
Until recently she was using a Win2K machine to manage her new business from home, I introduced her to Ubuntu through gcompris, her family were out in our place for a meal, it was raining and her 5 year old was in need of entertainment, I sat him in front of gcompris and silence (apart from some really iritating music) descended, her fella was most impressed by the quality of the educational software and my sister was surprised by how easy Ubuntu is to use.
I called round to them, set up a dual boot, selected apropriate packages and now they are rarely in Windows.
Ubuntu/gnome offers a simple interface, Synaptic makes package management straightforward, I could carry on for a while but essentially Ubuntu is a beautiful distro to introduce people to Linux with, though perhaps less educational than Slackware back in the day!
The Irish version did at least have a paper tamper seal on the EPROMS. This wasn't present on the dutch machines, though they have promised them for their forthcomming elections.
Though the waste of € 52 million on the purchase and storage of these machines has been one of the more notable fsck-ups of our current govt.
What kind of half-wit turns over the election process to a black box provider?
Where have all the teachings of the Age of Enlightenment gone ?
Some time in the middle of the last century arts faculties in universities worldwide decided that everything was a narative and open to interpretation.
They then started teaching this fscking nonsense to mutton headed arts students who went on to become journalists, lawyers and politicians.
The upshot of this is that people no longer recognise reason as absolute, eg.
"It could be that I got better because my imune system fought off the infection, I however choose to accept the reality in which angels cured me because they were in awe of my fabulousness", becomes a valid way of thinking.
This sort of post-modernist crap has to fought on every ocasion it arises.
From their site Over the Internet: Your connection to VaporStream uses secure SSL technology, creating a secure line between your computer and our network.
They claim you send your destination mail address first, then separately the message, the recipient gets a notification with your address, this is discarded when the message is opened.
Nothing you'd actually call a new technology anywhere in sight but patant pending notices left and right!
Moral of the history: if you are going to overprice so you get a "no", make sure your price is so high there is absolutely no chance they will say yes.
My pricing structure for detestable jobs tends to be to make sure it's priced suficiently high that I am willing to do it for that money, (why yes I guess that does make me a whore)
In fairness copyright does protect work. The two are very different, to take the literature analogy a patent on "A story in which two people triumph over adversity, falling in love with each other in the process" would be worth a shedload of money if literature were patantable. Scene II act i of Romeo and Juliet cannot be copyrighted in another work of literature in it's entireity.(bad example but I don't read much fiction)
On a seperate nut related issue, I'm from Ireland, the same country that has given us that shaven monkey McCreevy. Last time out FF(McCreevy's party) were the only ones to vote in favour of this POS idea. I'll be harassing my MEPs on this issue and would appreciate assistance in producing a clear spiteless explanation of why patents are wrong that an elected polititian could understand. My local MEPs are two profesional politicos (one in McCreevy's party) and an ex-jounalist.
Try it for yourself, get into a conversation with an enviro and propose some solution that allows Civilization as we understand it to continue.
Woah, take it easy there thunder....
I think you'll find that many of us lazy left-wing enviro-pinko hippie scum believe very strongly in western democracy, some of us, (guilty), may feel that 18th Century laizez faire liberalism proved disastrous in the past and may not be the ideal form for capatilism to take in the 21st century.
That said, I think Iran is nuts to persue nuclear tech, they have huge potential for far less poluting forms of energy, tidal & solar, they also have a few barrels of squished T-Rex left.
Until we come up with either a safe way of disposing of waste that remains toxic for 24k+ years or a safe nuclear reaction,(fusion), I would tend to oppose nuclear, though it may be the only viable solution if we can't restrain our consumption or find alternative, though inevitably dearer, sources of energy.
How many trees would I need to plant to completely off-set my car's CO2 release Try here
Granted, the "new" equilibrium might be at a higher global-average temp and CO2 level than it was before we started burning oil and coal
Just a bit higher, the last time this carbon was available in our atmosphere 30-ton lizzards were the dominant life form.
There is a possibility that the higher temperature we settle on will be a shade too warm for humans to live in any but the polar/temperate zones, (well, the dry bits at least).
a few GUI things to make life easier for people using search+replace
You must be joking. Regex search and replace is not powerful enough?
%s/^\([^:]\)\(:[^$]*\)/\1 is in this file, and this is their record \1\2/
Show me any GUI that could make the above (admiditly pointless) substitution more efficiently using a GUI and I'll eat my lunch!
Funny and all though your remark is you are entirely correct. Writing a version of blackjack used to be an impresive feat "when I were a lad"(TM). For kids today, if it doesn't render a credible 3D world, play music(not ^G), and generally act as a complete Multimedia experience no one is impressed anymore. The bar has been set higher and klutzes like me who never got into polygon topography maps just wouldn't have the impetus to code themselves as the bar was set to high.
Of course you could just point and click in an IDE and have a 250M app that provides you with a windowed environment and voila the same functionality but with theme music and a spinning globe in the background. You'll still need the same 30 lines of logic.
Sorry I had to... When I were a lad we had to buy Spectrum magazine and type in pages of uninteligable register commands, then we'd run the program and we'd discover we mistyped a garachter on the first page and then you'd go to bed and try again tomorrow, but you tell that to young people today, and they won't believe you!
Perhaps not a BSEE, but who do you think are tasking the courses such as BSc(Hons) Forensic Computing, offeredd by my local college? And where are they aiming to go on graduation?
Cops in uniform, on the beat may not be overly educated, but don't assume that no brains exist within the system
Slashdot Mirror
Bizarrely enough, not only are they funding it (along with the rest of the developed world), they will sign the consortium agreement today.
Note: bribes can be of the form of cheap software for schools, jobs/investment in depressed areas or of course hard cash.
Anyway 5 years and €17m later the thing isn't working yet, so naturally the govt. decides to expand it to cover the whole fscking halth service. This doesn't work out too well so they threw consultants at it. Eventually 10 years after the project begun they have blown 131m and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
Since then we've managed to blow €53m on e-voting which resulted in machines that were found to be crap at elections, though good at chess! It is my firm belief that the govt shouldn't be allowed near a presentation on IT products, they think it makes them look modern and consequently some shill ends up doing nicely out of trying to bankrupt the place. </RANT$gt;
The States on the other hand manages to make what is already the least watchable telly on the planet un-viewable with ads, or did when I was over there anyway.
I think that's the plan. ;)
They can pull out of this market, and still have a stranglehold
Terms and conditions apply, you may not use this linnk if you live in a country with fscked software patenting laws
I've tried most major distros over the years (must get round to Gentoo), my sister however used to work in DTP on a Mac before getting a PC at home.
Until recently she was using a Win2K machine to manage her new business from home, I introduced her to Ubuntu through gcompris, her family were out in our place for a meal, it was raining and her 5 year old was in need of entertainment, I sat him in front of gcompris and silence (apart from some really iritating music) descended, her fella was most impressed by the quality of the educational software and my sister was surprised by how easy Ubuntu is to use.
I called round to them, set up a dual boot, selected apropriate packages and now they are rarely in Windows.
Ubuntu/gnome offers a simple interface, Synaptic makes package management straightforward, I could carry on for a while but essentially Ubuntu is a beautiful distro to introduce people to Linux with, though perhaps less educational than Slackware back in the day!
Though the waste of € 52 million on the purchase and storage of these machines has been one of the more notable fsck-ups of our current govt.
What kind of half-wit turns over the election process to a black box provider?
Yes but does it run Minix
Unfortunately the precedent in the states has been set.Randal Schwartz got done for a far less outrageous test of a client companies system.
Finaly a keyboard the cat won't try to use
They then started teaching this fscking nonsense to mutton headed arts students who went on to become journalists, lawyers and politicians.
The upshot of this is that people no longer recognise reason as absolute, eg.
"It could be that I got better because my imune system fought off the infection, I however choose to accept the reality in which angels cured me because they were in awe of my fabulousness", becomes a valid way of thinking.
This sort of post-modernist crap has to fought on every ocasion it arises.
Over the Internet: Your connection to VaporStream uses secure SSL technology, creating a secure line between your computer and our network.
They claim you send your destination mail address first, then separately the message, the recipient gets a notification with your address, this is discarded when the message is opened.
Nothing you'd actually call a new technology anywhere in sight but patant pending notices left and right!
My pricing structure for detestable jobs tends to be to make sure it's priced suficiently high that I am willing to do it for that money, (why yes I guess that does make me a whore)
On a seperate nut related issue, I'm from Ireland, the same country that has given us that shaven monkey McCreevy. Last time out FF(McCreevy's party) were the only ones to vote in favour of this POS idea. I'll be harassing my MEPs on this issue and would appreciate assistance in producing a clear spiteless explanation of why patents are wrong that an elected polititian could understand. My local MEPs are two profesional politicos (one in McCreevy's party) and an ex-jounalist.
Woah, take it easy there thunder....
I think you'll find that many of us lazy left-wing enviro-pinko hippie scum believe very strongly in western democracy, some of us, (guilty), may feel that 18th Century laizez faire liberalism proved disastrous in the past and may not be the ideal form for capatilism to take in the 21st century.
That said, I think Iran is nuts to persue nuclear tech, they have huge potential for far less poluting forms of energy, tidal & solar, they also have a few barrels of squished T-Rex left.
Until we come up with either a safe way of disposing of waste that remains toxic for 24k+ years or a safe nuclear reaction,(fusion), I would tend to oppose nuclear, though it may be the only viable solution if we can't restrain our consumption or find alternative, though inevitably dearer, sources of energy.
Try here
Granted, the "new" equilibrium might be at a higher global-average temp and CO2 level than it was before we started burning oil and coal
Just a bit higher, the last time this carbon was available in our atmosphere 30-ton lizzards were the dominant life form.
There is a possibility that the higher temperature we settle on will be a shade too warm for humans to live in any but the polar/temperate zones, (well, the dry bits at least).
You must be joking. Regex search and replace is not powerful enough?
%s/^\([^:]\)\(:[^$]*\)/\1 is in this file, and this is their record \1\2/
Show me any GUI that could make the above (admiditly pointless) substitution more efficiently using a GUI and I'll eat my lunch!
Of course you could just point and click in an IDE and have a 250M app that provides you with a windowed environment and voila the same functionality but with theme music and a spinning globe in the background. You'll still need the same 30 lines of logic.
Sorry I had to ...
When I were a lad we had to buy Spectrum magazine and type in pages of uninteligable register commands, then we'd run the program and we'd discover we mistyped a garachter on the first page and then you'd go to bed and try again tomorrow, but you tell that to young people today, and they won't believe you!
- You have to work unpaid overtime
- You get sod all holidays
- You can be let go without stated cause
What happened to that whole goverment of, by and for the people?Well that's the snag with capitalism, you need capital to play.
Actually to include her title,
Ms Window S.
Perhaps not a BSEE, but who do you think are tasking the courses such as BSc(Hons) Forensic Computing, offeredd by my local college? And where are they aiming to go on graduation?
Cops in uniform, on the beat may not be overly educated, but don't assume that no brains exist within the system