I am building one now, and they do allow you to create a native installer for all three platforms. The only thing that sucks is that you have to build the installer on said platform. Not that big a deal with vmware, but still kind of annoying.
Do we really need these pesky pronouns? Putting labels like your pen, your mug, your red stapler on stuff is equally crazy, isn't it? Al link/button labeled Profile/Account/Settings... is just fine. There is no surprise in clicking on something labeled "profile" resulting in your profile being brought up, what else would you expect? My profile?
Just imagine the immense satisfaction of delivering a well executed spinning kick to one of these things when it drives up to you on a Monday morning squeaking "Hey, what's happening?" - ka-zonk!
Does that include factoring large prime numbers? If a good approximation would exist for that, wouldn't that make public-key encryption pretty useless?
Included in that handwave about probability distributions was a caveat about not being handed pathological instances of problems. Encryption harnesses pathological instances and wouldn't be covered by such a handwave.
(Is there ever any other reason to generate multi-hundred digit numbers and try to factor them? Honest question, if anybody's got a fun answer, though I am asking about something actually useful that you know about, not something hypothetical.)
Actually, it's quite hard to come up with good primes for RSA. They need to avoid lots of properties, because researches have found efficient attacks on numbers with those properties.
Factoring numbers is already suspected to be much easier than NP-complete.
That is because factoring prime numbers is in the intersection between NP and co-NP. Co-NP is the set of problems where a "NO" answer is easily checkable with a certificate. If NP ?= co-NP is as much a question as P ?= NP. (I.e. no known proof either way, but every expects them to be unequal.)
Public-key encryption schemes would simply need to avoid reasonable circumstances. I suspect "product of two large primes" falls outside the "reasonable circumstances" for factoring.
It's even harder than that. There are lots of known attacks, if you are not careful with your choice of prime numbers. (`Careful' is equal to `choosing pathological instances'.)
I find it quite practical that a certain type of people started to attach these rockstar/ninja labels to themselves. This way it becomes very easy to spot the douchebags.
The same goes for job listings that state these terms. Why would a smart person care to work for a company that actively seeks to hire douchebags?
As with 99designs, there is a high risk here for the buyer to end up paying for plagiarism and rip-offs. People with low/non-exiting ethics will throw together rip-offs and submit them to a broad range of "contests" hoping that a fraction of them will lead to money. The buyers on the other hand will find themselves liable for using the rip-off.
Interesting approach and I think it is a good direction. There are some differences though: sharing the files on the net is releasing them to a potentially broader audience. The patrons in a bar don't get to take home the music they listen to on their mp3 player. Maybe a comparison to unlicensed broadcasting is more appropriate?
There is a distinct legal difference between performance of a work and copying.... if you were recording the thing at the bar and then distributing copies - it would be the latter.
The point the judge is making here is more like "Hey - in performance related damages - we punish violators who knowingly and blatantly refused to follow the law to their direct commercial benefit, and the only pay a few thousand bucks in damages compared to the licensing fees. (4, or 5 figures in the extreme.)
Now, even though it's not the same issue precisely, it seems grossly out of place that a person at home who shared some music with a few people for non-commercial reasons is being assessed damages in the 6 to 7 figure ranges...and that just seems absurd.
I mean seriously - some Mom goes out and shares a song on some bittorrent setup - and we're saying she owes a MILLION DOLLARS?
The high figures seem to result from the fact that the *AA argue that the file was _potentially_ shared with _millions_ of people around the internet. I wonder why they are not required to prove every single instance of downloading that they claiming damages from...
Great example of the problem with software patents. Landmark has a method for music-matching. They would love to be the only one having access to that technology. The confusion starts where the patent system is meant to only protect how their particular implementation matches music and not the concept of music matching at all. They on the other hand argue, that the method described by the author is similar to what they have patented - after all, it uses the same fundamental CS concepts such as hash-table lookups etc...
As other mentioned, the idea with patents was to offer people a limited time monopoly on their innovations in exchange for publishing them so others could use/enhance these ideas instead of reinventing the wheel over and over. I have not seen one instance where this works out for software...
This is quite amusing to me personally. I am named as the inventor of a patent which makes claims that appear practically identical to the Landmark one (mine is owned by Macrovision, for whom I used to work). I wonder how many times the damn thing has been patented!
The problem is with the (utterly broken IMO) US legal system (that unfortunately tends to "colonize" more and more foreign legal systems). Because they have a patent, they can efficiently scare away many hobbyists or commercial developers who could compete with them with litigation costs.
This is not how it works. In the patent application you have to describe how your invention works.
In software patents, the implementation is described in such general terms that a lot of the time, any implementation can be said to use the method described in the patent. This is my biggest problem with software patents: once you abstract your solution enough, it isn't of much use to anybody, hence the value of the patent to the general public is null while it still allows you to block out competitors that want to find a solution to the same/similar problem although your patent is of no help to them actually solving the problem.
It is this skewed relationship that drives me crazy. Licensing a software patent only allows you to come up with your own solution a lot of the time, it does not save you the development cost.
If you license a patent for some industrial process it saves you huge amounts of research cost so licensing the patent is actually attractive.
Software should only be patentable if the patent provides actual value in solving the problem it claims to solve. Since useable software implementation are so specific, this may rule out patenting software at all.
Microsoft is currently suing Apple over the page turn on the iPad's ebook reader.
They have a patent on the idea of using a page turning gesture to go to the next page in a book on a computer, together with the idea of showing a page is turning.
No code, no description of how to render it - just the idea of taking an everyday action (turning over a page) and using it to do the same thing on a computer
Not in the US, although implementation patents are easier to defend you can write very broad patents.
You can have a business method patent, eg look at the prices charged by various retailers and buy the lowest one, or even a patent on the plot of a novel. Both of these have been patented in the US.
Your 'invention' no longer has to be workable for it to be patented nor do you have to demonstrate a working implementation.
That's the issue with a lot of software patents on things like H264 - the patent can simply be on the concept of compressing video, you don't have to invent a particular encoding scheme.
But the law was not intended to work that way. This is why bilski has gone so far. They were trying to do exactly what you describe and they probably won't get the patent in the end. The supreme court will probably find some way to not revolutionize patents by making the decision so specific that only this case will be affected.
The supreme court decided to let people fight it out in court.
What this means is that patents only work for cartels of large companies forming a patent pool to keep a technology (eg. H264) to themselves and patent trolls who have no other business so can't be violating any other patents.
For anyone else - even if you have a patent on a real invention, and can afford to defend it in court, you are likely to be violating dozens of the large company's patents (how could you know) and so are going to lose.
they have a patent the idea of music-matching, not the implementation.
This is indeed the exact opposite of how the patent system is supposed to work. But it is none-the-less a description of how the patent system is more and more winding up working.
This is the outcome that patent trolls hope for. And this has been going on even before software patents. Look up the story about Feynman and the nuclear airplane.
I loved this story when I read it in "Surely you are Joking..." It is exactly how it still works at large Tech-Corps. Number of Patents filed is a metric the PHBs love to use in order to determine the innovativeness of departments and there is a nice bonus for submitting your ideas to the patent-process. Middle management is running around asking people whether they could think of anything they could submit because that will make the department look good - and there you go... loads of BS-patents and I bet you that Dollar that this is exactly how he Microsoft page-turn-gesture-thing became a patent.
Indeed, with enough magical legal verbiage and enough slightly unrelated drawing, you could. It probably would not be a valid patent, or maybe only valid on some not too interesting point, but validity does not really matters for patent holder playing cold war with their portfolio...
