Luis Villa, in a post to FoRK:
I have found that [mail] threading is overrated, in part because I’ve realized that any conversation so baroque as to actually require threading probably isn’t worth following.
Even though I wrote a threader for MH, I have to admit by now that he has a point ;)
Tags: discussion, mail, threading
Patents: in a recent discussion about games and patents, it emerged that these common elements are patented:
Looks like software patenting is coming to computer games in a big way. I’m not sure how any game on a modern platform can avoid the ’streamed loading’ patent.
Naturally, I can remember playing games on the Commodore 64 in the 1980s that included these…
Tags: computer, discussion, game, ghost, loading, looks, patents, platform, screen, software, way
Dublin: Sorry to the non-Dublin readership, I’m sure you all are getting quite bored of this by now. But anyway…
According to jd on the discussion page, the new owner of the Stag’s Head is Louis Fitzgerald, who picked it up for EUR 5.8 million.
Reportedly, he’s ‘the biggest publican in Dublin’ (sic), and owns The Quays in Temple Bar, The Palmerstown House in Palmerstown, The Big Tree on Dorset Street and The Poitin Stil in Rathcoole — and Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. Quite an empire.
I’ll have to leave the speculation on Fitzgerald’s pros and cons to more recent residents of Dublin, but I agree with jd’s comment: ‘hope he does half a good as job as the Shaffrys, and the bicycles are left outside rather than on the ceiling,’ Amen to that.
Tags: discussion, dublin, fitzgerald, head, louis, non, owner, page, palmerstown, readership, stag
Web: Bernie Goldbach points to a site that’s news to me: AnotherFriend.com. It’s an Irish dating site.
I’ve had the odd discussion comparing dating culture in the US (organised ‘dating’) and Ireland and the UK (where it’s a lot more casual), and I must say, I was really convinced that the Friendster/craigslist-style organised, web-mediated dating just wouldn’t fly.
Seems I was wrong! Right now, there’s 157 people online on the site, with a good half of those being logged-in, chatting users, and about 75% of those in turn being premium, paying members. Wow, not bad.
Politics: TheyWorkForYou.com is a triumph. The most incredibly detailed, and web-aware, hypertextual database of political activity I’ve seen yet. The web-awareness — full of scraping, links, RSS and even community — is what makes it amazing; the concept of being able to read news of your representative’s latest speeches and voting record in your RSS aggregator is incredible. We need to get this out there for every country in the world.
It certainly beats Today in Parliament, that’s for sure ;)
Aside: nice choice of username for the ‘Site News’ weblog:
Some sites linking to this entry
An error occurred: Connection error: Access denied for user: ‘fawkesmt’@'localhost’ (Using password: YES)
Wierd: Incredible footage (WMV stream) of a guy who went nuts, converted a caterpillar earthmover into what is essentially a tank, and went on a GTA-style rampage through the streets of Granby, 15 miles west of Denver, Colorado. In the process, he destroys the local bank, the newspaper, and several stores, seemingly working on the basis of (several) personal grudges.
Tags: anotherfriend, com, culture, discussion, error, friendster, lot, news, rss, site, web
Patents: There’s a good discussion over at Joi Ito’s weblog on software patents.
Unfortunately, there’s a persistent, and popular, fallacy that crops up quite frequently in these discussions, and does so here in the comments:
‘much of the processing of patents has been, to use understatement, deficient. An invention that is ’silly or obvious’ will likely not pass the approrpiate legal test - if this test is applied by people who understand the inventive technology …. while I agree with most of your observations about deficiencies, I fail to see the logic in your solution (to simply outlaw these kinds of inventions).’
So, what the commenter is saying is that the patenting of software and business methods would be acceptable, if only the ‘inventive bar’ was raised so that trivial patents were not granted.
The problem with this is that:
that they patent ideas instead of physical inventions.
A parallel would be to allow the patenting of plot-lines in fiction, meter in poetry, or combinations of ingredients and cooking methods in recipes. These are all ideas, transformed into output ‘products’ by performing them as input on a set of hardware (books, cooking equipment), in the same way as software patents and business method patents are abstract ideas that operate on input, generating output, when implemented on a CPU. So, should they be patentable, too?
Patenting of physical designs is fundamentally different from patenting of abstract ideas in one key way. Physical designs must function correctly under real-world physics, and this requires extensive up-front design and prototyping, before they can be turned into mass-produced products.
Abstract ideas can be developed mentally, and the up-front work required before the idea can be put down on paper is trivial by comparison.
Consider these EPO patents: EP0807891 (Sun’s ’shopping cart’ patent) or EP0689133 (Adobe’s ‘tabbed palette window’ patent). The up-front work required to devise these applications is trivial to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of UI design; the hard part appears to be writing the legalese, and I understand the patent lawyers take care of that part. ;)
Compare with US patent D0450164, a design patent for a Dyson washing machine. The level of detail, and extensive specifications, is massive, and it’s clear a lot of work had gone into the process before the patent application was filed.
In addition, the commenter assumes that extensive prior art searches really do take place. From what I’ve heard from patent applicants, and from what I’ve observed in the range of granted software patents, this is cursory at best, and generally performed by the patent lawyer and the examiner, not the applicant themselves.
I’ve even observed a few patents where prior art, cited in the patent, implemented exactly what was claimed!
Tags: business, cooking, discussion, input, output, patent, patents, problem, software, test, way
Humour: xscreensaver, the default (and greatest) screensaver on most free UNIX distros, may contain R-rated content, as this mail to the Fedora discussion list notes.
Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an ‘erect penis’ when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:
$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis erect penis flaccid penis
Tags: content, default, discussion, humour, list, lunch, mail, screensaver, surprise, unix, xscreensaver
Funny: he’s commanding Captain America to do what?
(via Memepool.)
Tags: clone, discussion, google, javascript, link, pagerank, site, spam, spammer, trick, use
Richard Dawkins: why Prince Charles is so wrong (via BB).
An interesting read, if only because Richard Dawkins misses several massive chunks of the anti-GMO argument, as several folks point out on the BB discussion board. Firstly, the profit drive is the only thing driving deployed GM products, and that’s already been shown to produce unsafe results, in the UK with BSE. Secondly, as one of the posters says, ‘Oh, yeah – Dawkins is absolutely right (in comparing GM to modifying running software): Nothing to gripe about when people tinker with your mission critical apps’.
Tags: anti, argument, board, discussion, drive, firstly, gmo, profit, read, thing
In the last few weeks, there’s been a growing discussion of what’s being perceived as an ‘anti-American’ point of view in Europe; see Thomas Friedman on the subject. On the other side, The New York Review of Books carries an interesting essay on this subject: Anti-Europeanism in America. It contains this revealing summary of a December 2002 study:
Asked to choose one of four statements about American versus European approaches to diplomacy and war, 30 percent of Democratic voters but only 6 percent of Republican voters chose ‘The Europeans seem to prefer diplomatic solutions over war and that is a positive value Americans could learn from.’ By contrast only 13 percent of Democrats but 35 percent of Republicans (the largest single group) chose ‘The Europeans are too willing to seek compromise rather than to stand up for freedom even if it means war, and that is a negative thing.’
The divide was even clearer when respondents were asked to pick between two statements about ‘the way in which the war on Iraq should be conducted.’ Fifty-nine percent of Republicans as opposed to just 33 percent of Democrats chose ‘The US must remain in control of all operations and prevent its European allies from limiting the States’ room to maneuver.’ By contrast, 55 percent of Democrats and just 34 percent of Republicans chose ‘It is imperative that the United States allies itself with European countries, even if it limits its ability to make its own decisions.’
It seems a hypothesis worth investigating that actually it’s Republicans who are from Mars and Democrats who are from Venus.
Tags: american, contrast, discussion, new, percent, point, side, subject, view, war
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
