The Sun Salutation

From the time I exited grad school, I've practiced (and studied when I found an instructor on my wavelength) tai-chi and yoga. Both are Eastern, and tai-chi was originally a martial art. Both have, in Western incarnations, been promoted more as exercise of mind/body. Both are grounded in the same principle: the center (i.e. the space of the pelvic girdle) is all; all energy flows from it and out to the extremities. Golfers have been known to seek guidance from teachers of one or the other.

Tai-chi has a documented history that goes back some centuries, and has evolved into 4 (or 5, depending) schools. Yang is the most commonly taught, and the one I've studied. Again, when an instructor was available. Yoga, on the other hand, goes back millennia, and hatha form is what is mostly taught in the West. Both practices share a common attribute: each instructor popular enough to have a school/academy/franchise modifies "official" forms to better express his/her view of the fundamental principles of the art. And so it is. I first studied tai-chi with a student of William Chen, who taught a Yang form that looks nothing like the standard 24 step Beijing form. The one I teach now came from Art Ziello, from Don Miller (who is the brother of Julian Miller who taught me my first form in Cambridge too many years ago). And it's different from Art's version, which doesn't follow the official 24.

The same process happens in yoga, perhaps more so. Hatha is the main basic school in the West, but each instructor modifies to suit. And, unlike tai-chi, yoga practice is some arbitrary (well, sort of) combination of poses. The most well known documented version is, likely, "The Sivananda Companion...".

"What in Heaven's name does this have to do with quant and normal databases?" I here from the slackers in the back. Well, this. If you've been paying attention to the software world for more than a few days, you're surely aware of the patent trolls, software patentability, and suits from the trolls aimed at various and sundry. The latest (so far as I know) salvo, came last week when the Supreme Court declined to re-open Vringo's loss in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, usually). The CAFC basically told Vringo to shut up and go home by gutting Vringo's "win" over Google. Ever since, the innterTubes has been a Tower of Babel.

The Blue Corner: "All software is algorithms, thus explicitly not patentable under both the Constitution and Federal law. Copyright is appropriate."
The Red Corner: "Software is unique intellectual property and therefore patentable."

Needless to remind, I'm in the Blue Corner and the Vringo, et al, are in the Red Corner. It bears reminding that the first software patents came from a Patent Office that had no experts in software, and were easily gulled (the account goes on a path I don't agree with, BTW).

What we learned is that things that we were doing in previous months are no longer acceptable. It seems that early last week a memo went out from the powers that be to the examiners handling Bilski-related applications, and in the memo it was explained that merely putting "computer implemented method" in the preamble of the claim is not something that will any longer work to overcome a patentable subject matter rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101.

More recently, not so much. The fact that a Supreme Court, deep in the pockets of the Red Corner generally, would refuse to bless Vringo's attempts is of note. Which brings us to today's news.

Bikram Choudhury has made an attempt to copyright his version of yoga, aka "hot yoga". He's just lost. I suspect that lawyers from the Red Corner cabal have already been on the phone offering any and all assistance to right the grievous wrong. All the way to the Supreme Court. You see, the court found that a sequence of yoga poses was not a copyrightable entity!!! This surprises even me. A sequence of words, as poem or novel or essay, certainly is.

"We wanted to establish that you can't own sequences, Mr. Drost, a founder of Evolation Yoga, said. "Traditionally, you take a teacher's training and move forward with it."

I can hear all those Red Corner sphincters sucking half the planet's atmosphere into their lower colons. It is well established that software is a sequence of discrete steps, taken from a previously established set, either the high-level language defined syntax or the cpu ISA. Now, here is a precedent that an real-world sequence, not even the abstract sort of computer languages, isn't even subject to copyright, let alone patent. There's going to be gallons of Chivas downed around Wall Street this week.

The Simple Truth

Up through my stint with CSC, SQL Server was a minor database in my trek. Once, even, the principal datastore. Along about then, I found simple-talk. Then, much of the discussion was driven by database design and development concerns. Celko was a frequent guest essayist.

In recent times, more of the essays have been couched in coder jargon. Sad.

One that's up on the front page, deals with continuous integration of databases. It's interesting, but what I found the j'accuse moment was this bit from a comment by rogerthat:

The worst times we've had with failing database builds were a result of using code first development (program design refactors database design, somewhat automagically). ... Experience leads us to design the database to handle the cited requirements while still keeping the database flexible (and no, this does not include unrealistic character data lengths).

While rogerthat doesn't use the N word, it's clear from the comment that normalization is the key. There is hope for humanity.

Captain Obvious - part the second

This endeavor's been bleating about the need to use SSD as a matter of course from the beginning. More than half a decade. It is with some amusement that I read this quant/R related post. He who laughs last doesn't get it. Gad. Quants are just as bad as "database developers" who continue to dump flat files in SQL databases. Gad.

a huge increase in performance to the application overall

Well, yeah.

The Tyranny of Average Cost, part the third

Another tidbit, this time from AnandTech.

Yet more worrying for manufacturers, the costs of preparing chips for new nodes isn't just rising but rising quickly, with mask sets already over a million dollars and expected to grow even further thanks to the high costs of developing masks for current multi-patterning technologies.

The Apple paradigm, selling only to the top X% (thought to be 20-ish), can only work for a slim minority of vendors. Moreover, it won't even work for that slim minority if they become the *sole* vendors from some external production process. In simpler words: the Apple paradigm only works, for Apple, iff there are other vendors to support the capex of said external production process. "We lose money on each widget, but make up for it with volume." Without all those, alleged, money losing smartphone vendors, Apple wouldn't have suppliers to eviscerate.

By splitting up a chip in this fashion, the number of transistors laid down on the leading-edge node would be held to a minimum, resulting in a smaller module that would be cheaper to design and cheaper to produce than a full SoC, all the while the other modules would be relatively cheap to produce and cheap to design (if not largely held over from existing designs to begin with).

There was a time, back in the late 70s and early 80s, when IBM held a massive tech lead on the seven dwarves (may have shrunk by one or two, don't recall exactly) with their "thermal conduction module". This was before VLSI and chips as we know them today. It appears that Marvell has discovered old wine and fashioned a new bottle. Smaller, yes, but exactly the same idea.

There will always be some new way to spread total cost, esp. capex. But, the bottom line, so to speak, is finding expanding demand for cycles. WinTel did that for decades. Now, it's the smartphone vendors and telecoms making the yin-yang of sink and supply. Life changes not so much as it appears.

Hubris

Volkswagen demonstrated, once again, that The Masters of Universe make money the old fashioned way, they steal it. So, what does the Angela of death have to say?

"I believe the reputation of the German economy and the trust in the German economy has not been shaken by this to the extent that we are no longer considered a good business location," she told Deutschlandfunk, according to the text of an interview due to be broadcast later on Sunday.

Of course, Germany is a good place to do business. Government is the lap dog of business. Germany didn't define fascism, Mussolini did, but they perfected it. Government for, and by, capital. So long as Germany can export, particularly in the fixed rate Euro, it can sit fat and happy. Without export, the German economy collapses. Much like China.

No Soup For You

Out of curiosity, I went looking at the MS/SQL Server site to check up on the state of the R-in-SS implementation. Not there, yet.

...still work in progress, not available yet.

Sigh.

Told Ya So, part the second

Gentle reader may remember my musings that the ad blocker spewing was so much baloney. The cure is simple: price based on actual views. Seems Sergei and Larry are regular readers. Google henceforth will do so.

Now, was that so hard?