That's not the level of similarity we're talking about.
Scrolls is a Trading Card style Game. You have 'scrolls' that you collect as you win battles that allow you to build collections (decks) that you use in combat. The scrolls cast spells (effects), or summon creatures that are placed on a grid, which then duke it out turn-based boardgame style.
Elder Scrolls is an RPG. You are a single character with experience levels, equipment, race, class & skills, where the character is directly manipulated for combat, (Throw this type of punch when I click the button), and I don't believe it's turn-based.
The similarity begins and ends with "fantasy setting" and "scrolls"
"Trying to act like one is more complex than the other entirely misses the point that both are complex and made up of many parts many technologies, and many processes."
Eh, the point is that the computer is vastly more complicated and thus causes a lot of problems when people try to patent inventions in that area. I'm not saying patents, or software patents, are wrong or bad, (here, at least), I'm just backing up that the complexity of the issues in question is large enough to create problems when superficial end-user parts are patented.
So, back to complexity: I haven't even begun to talk about how computers are created.
Why have you begun to talk about how cars, sorry, roads, are created? I have no idea a road was an integral part of a car, (It's a completely separate system, which matters when we talk about complexity. Additive instead of multiplicative).
A computer, with all it's hardware and software, is undoubtedly more complex than a car, & all the roads & road rules & traffic lights, and traffic systems.
"You CAN open a computer and look at the inner workings"
You mean I can open it up and see the OS and the HALs and the microscopic circuitry, (some of which is on the scale of atoms now), and the flow of electricity, and the programs & the drivers . . . (etc)?
Most of that only exists in an abstract state, as a state of the hardware. It is unseeable. Now, I can point you to the sourcecode for my OS, but I'm not able to point you to the source for the HALs, except the one in the OS.
I suppose I could get the machine code for everything, but show me the human who could take less than lifetime to understand every bit of the computer through its machine code.
Meanwhile, saying DRM designed 'the rules of the road' for the internet is completely false. DRM wasn't even invented when the precursors to the internet were around.
All this means the upper limit on the complexity of a computer comes down to the programmers and engineers who created each and every single piece of it.
Which is millions and millions of people worldwide. Who have millions and millions of different viewpoints and different ways to get things done.
If you think developing for 3 OS's (windows, Mac, *Unix) is hard, imagine how hard it would be if we never developed standards lower down, and had to also develop for 9 different types of computers with 13 different types of hardware abstraction layers, with 3 different types of processors?
(Actually, you ARE, but there are automated tools that take care of all that for you, thanks to a very finite number of standards)
Because of Mike42 below, I'mma correct myself. Each part of a desktop computers hardware, if we include the HALs outside the OS that govern it, is more complex than a car.
Just because a computer is complex doesn't mean I should understate the complexity of a car ;p
Agh, goddamnit. Long post got deleted by obscure accidental, now disabled, hotkey combination.
I'm not going to type it up again.
Basically: If you're comparing the computer hardware, minus all the HALs, OSs, programs, etc., to a cars hardware, I'd have to say I agree that the complexity is roughly the same neighbourhood.
If, however, you go further and say that including the OS and programs are on the same level, well . ..
In car, ordering matters. We can't put the carburetor at the end of the engine. I'mma simplify, but if a car engine has 500 parts, and we have ten choices for each part, we have 10^500 combinations. Around what, 10^10 of them are working combos? I'm willing to bet that's an over-estimate of all the different possible types of cars.
In a computer, the programming is an abstract interpretation of bits. Each and every single possible interpretation of data is valid. What the data can represent is, itself, infinite.
If we deal with 500 bits, we have 2^500 possibilities on what values the data has, and order still matters amoung those 500 bits, (and pretending that we have a specific type of data to convey so that that's irrelevant), we end up with 500!*2^500, which works out to I think 10^1250? (Head math)
And these days, we deal with streams of billions of bits. Right on our desktop computers. Big companies deal with streams of trillions of bits.
Which is why we adopt standards. But everyone argues over standards, to the point where we have dozens of standards for the same goddamn thing, and . . . well, if you don't compartmentalize, you just can't get work done. Btw, our standards, HALs, and OS's don't fall within the "working" part of the combination. They aren't mathematically proven.
Which is a fancy way of saying that they have bugs, and given their complexity, always will. Keep in mind that these are 'perfect' systems, (being abstract) with no real world problems that would result in problems in a car; like wear & tear, or rust. The computer does. The abstract programs working on them do not.
No, your comparison was incorrect due to the complexity differences.
How can I put it? Let me compare to the architect. The architect builds something beautiful. It is that beauty which we celebrate. His work is possible because of the engineers who figured out concrete and rafters and all sorts of stuff, and probably a few engineers who directly figured out how to build what he imagined. The engineers made it possible, but the architect created something beautiful.
Steve Jobs didn't make something beautiful or complex. He put the finishing touches on something that was already beautiful & complex. He made computers more accessible. If we want to compare to cars, he designed the leather seats. The engineers behind the scenes here are the ones responsible for the beauty, complexity, and utility.
In that analogy, dmr is the architect, and Steve Jobs is the interior designer. And I think that without the complexity of the computer, you would see that much more easily.
Heck, I don't even have a degree yet. When I tried to write the OS, I wasn't even in uni yet.
Of course, I also knew it was a problem way above my head when I started.
"RAM isn't part of the OS level? Hmmm..."
Parts of RAM which used to be in the OS no longer are, yes.
When I started the project, I was using a very old computer, and I had to control a lot of RAM procedures. I vaguely recall allocating sectors and building pointers and something like that. By the time I had given up completely, we had a new computer, and although you still wanted to allocate memory, you did this for internal bookkeeping rather than the fact that it was required by the way the RAM worked.
Of course, I could've been confused from the start and still completely wrong ;p
Also, I drastically simplified how a computer works.
Just in case you weren't sure.
Each part of a desktop computer, with few exceptions) is far more complex than the modern car engine, minus the computer it uses to control its parts, and that's just talking about the hardware.
For cars & plumbing, we have nowhere near the level of complexity, and all the complexity is viewable from the consumer side.
I can go downstairs and look at my pipes. I can open the hood of a car and look at the engine.
You can't do that with a computer.
A car also has only a few primary ways of doing things. You have a combustion engine, a hybrid, an electric, a fuel cell . . . I can list all the possibilities here, very quickly.
I cannot possibly list all the ways to accomplish what a computer does. The list is literally infinite. If we put usability limitations on the possible methods, we still come up with a number like 2^64 for how we could arrange our elements, and that still multiplies by our possible choices of elements to include . . . and how to encode our elements, whether we encode the whole thing before we send it, what encoding scheme to use, do we hash the elements? Do we provide a checksum? Do we . . .?
If I had to make an analogy to cars that was accurate, well, that can't be done, but the right direction would be something like this:
Imagine you have a car, with a car engine. Now we make something out of those cars. Maybe a bigger car that uses a car for each of it's four "wheels". First, we need to build the 'car' to put on top of those four cars. Then, we need a whole bunch of tubes and wires to synchronize those four engines, and team the outputs and inputs from each of them to the central engine in the bigger 'car'. Not only is the 'car' a complete system on it's own, to communicate and control the cars below, that's an entire system on its own.
But we're not done. No, that's just the computer hardware + a hardware abstraction layer.
Now we need an OS. And to communicate between the OS and the computer, we need drivers.
In other words, we need a yet bigger car that uses four of our cars that have cars for wheels. And another system to tie this car to the four cars with cars for wheels.
But we're not done there. We don't have a way for the user to drive the car yet! Well, if he's a technician he can, but it's not user-friendly.
So, using the tools embedded in the OS, we make a nice little program which connects to a steering wheel, brake, and gas, and the program relays the information it gets from those to the OS, which interprets the information and sends commands to the HAL, which interprets that information
and send commands to the hardware.
But wait! We're not done yet! We haven't networked yet! We need an entirely new system just to relay information from one of these user interfaces on cars on cars on cars!
Like . . . a giant car connecting all the UI's on cars on cars on cars. And then to use that giant car, we need another UI.
I'm truly sorry for the horrible, horrible analogy, but really it was you who made it. Hopefully you've seen the error of your ways in making this analogy.
(You'll notice I haven't addressed the patent question)
I think the only way to understand your computer is to write an OS for it from the ground up.
I did that, once. And like all great learning experiences, I now know horrifyingly less than when I started.
(And even if you do this, btw, you'll still be relying on a lot of hardware abstraction layers. Ex: Virtual memory spaces aren't even handled at the level of the OS, they're handled at the RAM & HDD level. You no longer have to reference the specific memory space, or tell the head to read, write, move, or change cylinders, you just reference what space from 0-2^64 you'd like to read from/write to)
"To demonstrate the flaw to First State's IT staff, Mr Webster wrote a script that cycled through each ID number and pulled down the relevant report to his computer. He confirmed the vulnerability affected the firm's full customer database."
What I'm gleaming from multiple sources is that he DID NOT access anyone's reports besides his colleagues; he wrote a script that could access everyone's reports and sent the script to IT guys at the company.
"Next, you need to read the source, wherein Patrick Webster not only admits to illegally accessing other people's accounts, he submitted WRITTEN EVIDENCE to the company of accessing a thousand other accounts as proof of their vulnerability."
The linked source says he only accessed a former colleagues report. Lemme check this on the web with other sources before I call bullshit.
"yet you are willing to swallow Mike's stuff whole, without looking into it."
Are you going to say that of me, as well, if I call you a troll?
"Google does nothing out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it in order to filter more people towards their search and ad properties. They are perhaps the ultimate in middlemen, trying to make money on all sides."
But the way they do it is inoffensive. They don't make money by cheating their partners and telling them they haven't paid off their debts yet. They make money by making things more valuable to people, including the ads.
"You want to bet that band videos on Youtube getting better search rankings than those on independent websites? "
Yes, but not because google will force it towards youtube. Youtube already ranks better, because it has so many links pointing to the host domain, (youtube), and because youtube is fully indexable by google.
In other words, they don't need to force the algorithm if they make the service more valuable to people than other sites; and in the case where people find an independent site more valuable, we can already see by googling that that page pops up first.
"As for your "deliberate misunderstanding", comment, I think you need to open your eyes and understand that not everyone sees things in the same way."
Hmmm . . ..
"The easiest proof? You haven't spent very much time promoting your CwF offerings. You did it one shot, and then ignored it."
And yet here he is, talking to us and replying in the comments.
As it is, I see a lot of past RtB offerings when I look it up, so it doesn't seem to have been 'one-shot' at all. "Not constantly shilling" is a far bit different from that . . .
So yeah, I think Paul is calling it as he sees it, and there is deliberate misunderstanding.
If we forced name-taking, then we'd see the bad AC's take up names, and the good AC's leave, (with some exceptions on both sides but still overall negative).
Basing that on my experiences elsewhere on the internet.
On the post: Court Rules Gamers Are Not Idiots And Not Likely To Be Confused Over 'Scrolls'
Re:
That's not the level of similarity we're talking about.
Scrolls is a Trading Card style Game. You have 'scrolls' that you collect as you win battles that allow you to build collections (decks) that you use in combat. The scrolls cast spells (effects), or summon creatures that are placed on a grid, which then duke it out turn-based boardgame style.
Elder Scrolls is an RPG. You are a single character with experience levels, equipment, race, class & skills, where the character is directly manipulated for combat, (Throw this type of punch when I click the button), and I don't believe it's turn-based.
The similarity begins and ends with "fantasy setting" and "scrolls"
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Eh, the point is that the computer is vastly more complicated and thus causes a lot of problems when people try to patent inventions in that area. I'm not saying patents, or software patents, are wrong or bad, (here, at least), I'm just backing up that the complexity of the issues in question is large enough to create problems when superficial end-user parts are patented.
So, back to complexity: I haven't even begun to talk about how computers are created.
Why have you begun to talk about how cars, sorry, roads, are created? I have no idea a road was an integral part of a car, (It's a completely separate system, which matters when we talk about complexity. Additive instead of multiplicative).
A computer, with all it's hardware and software, is undoubtedly more complex than a car, & all the roads & road rules & traffic lights, and traffic systems.
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re:
You mean I can open it up and see the OS and the HALs and the microscopic circuitry, (some of which is on the scale of atoms now), and the flow of electricity, and the programs & the drivers . . . (etc)?
Most of that only exists in an abstract state, as a state of the hardware. It is unseeable. Now, I can point you to the sourcecode for my OS, but I'm not able to point you to the source for the HALs, except the one in the OS.
I suppose I could get the machine code for everything, but show me the human who could take less than lifetime to understand every bit of the computer through its machine code.
Meanwhile, saying DRM designed 'the rules of the road' for the internet is completely false. DRM wasn't even invented when the precursors to the internet were around.
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re: Re: Not this
All this means the upper limit on the complexity of a computer comes down to the programmers and engineers who created each and every single piece of it.
Which is millions and millions of people worldwide. Who have millions and millions of different viewpoints and different ways to get things done.
If you think developing for 3 OS's (windows, Mac, *Unix) is hard, imagine how hard it would be if we never developed standards lower down, and had to also develop for 9 different types of computers with 13 different types of hardware abstraction layers, with 3 different types of processors?
(Actually, you ARE, but there are automated tools that take care of all that for you, thanks to a very finite number of standards)
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re:
Just because a computer is complex doesn't mean I should understate the complexity of a car ;p
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re: Re: Not this
Which is to say, I can't output {datatype,data}, and read {data,datatype} (or vie versa), but I can in/out {datatype,data} or {data,datatype}.
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re: Not this
I'm not going to type it up again.
Basically: If you're comparing the computer hardware, minus all the HALs, OSs, programs, etc., to a cars hardware, I'd have to say I agree that the complexity is roughly the same neighbourhood.
If, however, you go further and say that including the OS and programs are on the same level, well . ..
In car, ordering matters. We can't put the carburetor at the end of the engine. I'mma simplify, but if a car engine has 500 parts, and we have ten choices for each part, we have 10^500 combinations. Around what, 10^10 of them are working combos? I'm willing to bet that's an over-estimate of all the different possible types of cars.
In a computer, the programming is an abstract interpretation of bits. Each and every single possible interpretation of data is valid. What the data can represent is, itself, infinite.
If we deal with 500 bits, we have 2^500 possibilities on what values the data has, and order still matters amoung those 500 bits, (and pretending that we have a specific type of data to convey so that that's irrelevant), we end up with 500!*2^500, which works out to I think 10^1250? (Head math)
And these days, we deal with streams of billions of bits. Right on our desktop computers. Big companies deal with streams of trillions of bits.
Which is why we adopt standards. But everyone argues over standards, to the point where we have dozens of standards for the same goddamn thing, and . . . well, if you don't compartmentalize, you just can't get work done. Btw, our standards, HALs, and OS's don't fall within the "working" part of the combination. They aren't mathematically proven.
Which is a fancy way of saying that they have bugs, and given their complexity, always will. Keep in mind that these are 'perfect' systems, (being abstract) with no real world problems that would result in problems in a car; like wear & tear, or rust. The computer does. The abstract programs working on them do not.
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re: Re:
How can I put it? Let me compare to the architect. The architect builds something beautiful. It is that beauty which we celebrate. His work is possible because of the engineers who figured out concrete and rafters and all sorts of stuff, and probably a few engineers who directly figured out how to build what he imagined. The engineers made it possible, but the architect created something beautiful.
Steve Jobs didn't make something beautiful or complex. He put the finishing touches on something that was already beautiful & complex. He made computers more accessible. If we want to compare to cars, he designed the leather seats. The engineers behind the scenes here are the ones responsible for the beauty, complexity, and utility.
In that analogy, dmr is the architect, and Steve Jobs is the interior designer. And I think that without the complexity of the computer, you would see that much more easily.
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re:
Of course, I also knew it was a problem way above my head when I started.
"RAM isn't part of the OS level? Hmmm..."
Parts of RAM which used to be in the OS no longer are, yes.
When I started the project, I was using a very old computer, and I had to control a lot of RAM procedures. I vaguely recall allocating sectors and building pointers and something like that. By the time I had given up completely, we had a new computer, and although you still wanted to allocate memory, you did this for internal bookkeeping rather than the fact that it was required by the way the RAM worked.
Of course, I could've been confused from the start and still completely wrong ;p
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Not this
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re: Re:
Just in case you weren't sure.
Each part of a desktop computer, with few exceptions) is far more complex than the modern car engine, minus the computer it uses to control its parts, and that's just talking about the hardware.
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
Re:
I can go downstairs and look at my pipes. I can open the hood of a car and look at the engine.
You can't do that with a computer.
A car also has only a few primary ways of doing things. You have a combustion engine, a hybrid, an electric, a fuel cell . . . I can list all the possibilities here, very quickly.
I cannot possibly list all the ways to accomplish what a computer does. The list is literally infinite. If we put usability limitations on the possible methods, we still come up with a number like 2^64 for how we could arrange our elements, and that still multiplies by our possible choices of elements to include . . . and how to encode our elements, whether we encode the whole thing before we send it, what encoding scheme to use, do we hash the elements? Do we provide a checksum? Do we . . .?
If I had to make an analogy to cars that was accurate, well, that can't be done, but the right direction would be something like this:
Imagine you have a car, with a car engine. Now we make something out of those cars. Maybe a bigger car that uses a car for each of it's four "wheels". First, we need to build the 'car' to put on top of those four cars. Then, we need a whole bunch of tubes and wires to synchronize those four engines, and team the outputs and inputs from each of them to the central engine in the bigger 'car'. Not only is the 'car' a complete system on it's own, to communicate and control the cars below, that's an entire system on its own.
But we're not done. No, that's just the computer hardware + a hardware abstraction layer.
Now we need an OS. And to communicate between the OS and the computer, we need drivers.
In other words, we need a yet bigger car that uses four of our cars that have cars for wheels. And another system to tie this car to the four cars with cars for wheels.
But we're not done there. We don't have a way for the user to drive the car yet! Well, if he's a technician he can, but it's not user-friendly.
So, using the tools embedded in the OS, we make a nice little program which connects to a steering wheel, brake, and gas, and the program relays the information it gets from those to the OS, which interprets the information and sends commands to the HAL, which interprets that information
and send commands to the hardware.
But wait! We're not done yet! We haven't networked yet! We need an entirely new system just to relay information from one of these user interfaces on cars on cars on cars!
Like . . . a giant car connecting all the UI's on cars on cars on cars. And then to use that giant car, we need another UI.
I'm truly sorry for the horrible, horrible analogy, but really it was you who made it. Hopefully you've seen the error of your ways in making this analogy.
(You'll notice I haven't addressed the patent question)
On the post: Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System
I did that, once. And like all great learning experiences, I now know horrifyingly less than when I started.
(And even if you do this, btw, you'll still be relying on a lot of hardware abstraction layers. Ex: Virtual memory spaces aren't even handled at the level of the OS, they're handled at the RAM & HDD level. You no longer have to reference the specific memory space, or tell the head to read, write, move, or change cylinders, you just reference what space from 0-2^64 you'd like to read from/write to)
On the post: Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops... And The Bill
Re:
I think I speak for 99% of the 99% when we say we don't want you around.
On the post: Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops... And The Bill
Re:
What I'm gleaming from multiple sources is that he DID NOT access anyone's reports besides his colleagues; he wrote a script that could access everyone's reports and sent the script to IT guys at the company.
On the post: Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops... And The Bill
Re:
The linked source says he only accessed a former colleagues report. Lemme check this on the web with other sources before I call bullshit.
On the post: Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops... And The Bill
Re: Re:
Better I get fined and jailed than a real criminal be able to grab everyone's info, do the whole identity theft thing and probably get away scot-free.
On the post: YouTube Now Helping Artists Sell The Scarce
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Are you going to say that of me, as well, if I call you a troll?
"Google does nothing out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it in order to filter more people towards their search and ad properties. They are perhaps the ultimate in middlemen, trying to make money on all sides."
But the way they do it is inoffensive. They don't make money by cheating their partners and telling them they haven't paid off their debts yet. They make money by making things more valuable to people, including the ads.
"You want to bet that band videos on Youtube getting better search rankings than those on independent websites? "
Yes, but not because google will force it towards youtube. Youtube already ranks better, because it has so many links pointing to the host domain, (youtube), and because youtube is fully indexable by google.
In other words, they don't need to force the algorithm if they make the service more valuable to people than other sites; and in the case where people find an independent site more valuable, we can already see by googling that that page pops up first.
"As for your "deliberate misunderstanding", comment, I think you need to open your eyes and understand that not everyone sees things in the same way."
Hmmm . . ..
"The easiest proof? You haven't spent very much time promoting your CwF offerings. You did it one shot, and then ignored it."
And yet here he is, talking to us and replying in the comments.
As it is, I see a lot of past RtB offerings when I look it up, so it doesn't seem to have been 'one-shot' at all. "Not constantly shilling" is a far bit different from that . . .
So yeah, I think Paul is calling it as he sees it, and there is deliberate misunderstanding.
On the post: YouTube Now Helping Artists Sell The Scarce
Re: Re:
Basing that on my experiences elsewhere on the internet.
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