Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Novell (Score 1, Interesting) 209

Wow. Novell just did something that

a) They're good at.

b) It's hard for the FOSS community to do.

c) Helps the FOSS community a lot.

I think I speak for just about everyone when I give a hearty "Thanks!" to Novell.

Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.

[Sigh] Yes, this is always where the argument gets uncomfortable, because you're forced into a position of attacking someone's current source of income, and that pretty much always makes people unhappy.

You're posting AC and didn't link to the patent, so I assume that you don't want people to know who you are. This is a little unfortunate, since I have to be abstract. However, I can say that, despite reading a number of software patents, I have seen not one idea that I would consider novel enough and intelligent enough in software to warrant a patent -- stuff that wouldn't have been produced without a patent in place and that actually helps mankind. The RSA patent qualifies as a non-trivial, very helpful patent, but the ideas behind RSA were developed without a patent as a driver, more as a personal interest. It is possible, of course, that RSA would not have been publicized in such an event, though, so I'll give RSA a pass. Other than that, though, I've seen a huge flood of bullshit patents. If I go to the USPTO and search for "computer", the hits that come up are a mass of ridiculous, obvious (in the conventional sense, not the legal sense unfortunately used to determine patent validity) patents.

So, I can't see your patent and say "that should really not be a patent". However, I don't understand why, if you have the ability to come up with a new mechanism, you can't simply implement it and make money from that.
User Journal

Journal Journal: On use/quoting of Slashdot content I've written. 3

I've had one particularly scrupulous person ask whether reprinting things that I've written on Slashdot is acceptable. I consider any content I've written freshly for Slashdot to be public domain -- it'd be nice (though not a requirement) for you to attribute me (as 0x0d0a on Slashdot). You can use what I've written here however you'd like.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Gcc 3.3.3 optimization

I'm putting this in my journal instead of a Slashdot post because the lameness filter keeps eating my Slashdot post. If you have a response, please just respond to my Slashdot post.

I was empirically analyzing the gcc 3.3.3 optimizer a couple of days ago. Some interesting points:

User Journal

Journal Journal: Fixing the Workstation Color Model 8

Currently, the color model used on workstation computers is very lacking in dynamic range. It cannot reach levels that are nearly bright enough. The real world contains sun sparkling on the water, car headlights, and the outdoors. Currently, a normal computer environment can only reproduce the brightness of a sheet of paper. This is a blocking issue to producing realistic virtual worlds and images.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Fixing the Login Screen 7

As mentioned here, one security problem with passwords is accidently typing one's password into the username field when logging into a system. This can be a problem if the password is being entered in an environment where other people are watching the screen.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Fixing the *IX filesystem 6

(reprinted from here).

I know of no distros that grant a user ownership of part of the hierarchy beneath their home directory. An example of this would make /home/ltorvalds be owned by Mr. Torvalds, but ltorvalds' $HOME be /home/ltorvalds/private.

Why is this important?

Slashdot Top Deals

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.

Working...