Re: Patents Unleashed and the future of Java Programming

From: George Neuner (gneuner2_at_dont.spam.me)
Date: 05/23/04 

Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 07:38:52 -0400

On Sat, 22 May 2004 22:55:27 GMT, Andrew Thompson
<SeeMySites@www.invalid> wrote:

>On Sat, 22 May 2004 04:07:34 -0400, George Neuner wrote:
>> On Fri, 21 May 2004 Andrew Thompson wrote:
>>>On Fri, 21 May 2004 03:39:32 -0400, George Neuner wrote:
>>>
>>>> CS is still more of an art than a
>>>> science and much knowledge has been passed by tradition
>>>
>>>..like what?
>..
>> Have you ever seen documented an algorithm for determining the number
>> of '1' bits in a word? The highest '1' bit in a word? The lowest?
>
>No. I did a quick search on Google groups and
>my most specific searches failed to unearth
>that exact algorithm.
>
>My more general searches showed 1000+ hits, so
>I did not pursue it further.

I don't have the cites for the patent numbers. They were granted
several years ago. I had some correspondence with various members of
ACM regarding them and the prior art database, but the mails are on an
old hard disk in my closet. If I can scare up an uninterupted hour or
two I'll see if I can fish them off.

>Which brings me to the specific question.
>Do you consider usenet in, or out?
>Should usenet be considered a form of publishing?

I said previously that I would accept web pages - but now thinking
about it some more I would have to say not. My position on this
extends to Usenet as well.

The problem with Usenet is the sparsity of archiving. Many Usenet
groups are not archived at all and the ones that are have an epoch
beyond which searching is impossible. Only a few moderated groups are
fully archived and searchable in their entirety. The oldest archives
at uu.net go back only to the 80s (Usenet began in the 60s) and have
you ever tried to find something in there? Google's coverage is good
but uneven: the indexes are windowed by storage and are weighted
toward more popular groups, many groups are simply not indexed at all
and the earliest stuff available is circa 1989.

The Web is even worse because there is virtually no attempt being made
to preserve it for posterity. Links vanish, content is "refreshed" or
"updated", pages are reformatted, static content becomes dynamic, etc.
- all with amazing rapidity. It's been estimated that at any
particular time, 40-50% of the cited URLs are broken. And I've read
guesstimates that up to 90% of the total web is completely unindexed.

This dynamism greatly affects the ability to do research. One of the
more important precepts of publishing is that edition X doesn't
obliterate edition X-1 ... the previous edition is always there for
comparison. When something is written in a book, you have a pretty
good assurance that, barring the end of civilization, the book will
always be somehow available (at least for the last couple of centuries
and even if you have to physically visit the library that entombs it).
You have virtually no assurance for anything on the Internet unless
the particular content you reference happens to be in a deliberately
maintained library. Even then there is the question of whether any
privately maintained library will still exist umpteen years from now.

I would like to consider the Internet publishing - but until there is
some, probably government sponsored, effort to mirror and organize all
that content, I really think that, in general, it simply can't be
considered publishing.

George
=============================================
Send real email to GNEUNER2 at COMCAST o NET

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