After digesting this issue for a couple days I have come up with this...
Intentionally or not, Microsoft has trained corporate America to wait until the first service pack or two before adopting their new operating systems. The new hardware specs for Vista will provide a further incentive for companies to delay the 'upgrade.'
Microsoft has come up with a short-term pump-up for Vista that was briefly referenced in another thread here and was supported by a friend of mine who is in CS @ a local university... students recieving free installs are being run through an e-commerce application with the price fields zeroed... which means they are being counted as sales. I wonder how many other individuals are recieving free licenses through this method for corporate evaluation etc...
Microsoft then releases public attacks to slow corporate adoption of competing products. In 9-12 months the market will naturally have reduced the overhead for upgrading to Vista and Microsoft will have time to release some major patches.
Profit!!!
Vista is not the only product they are using delaying tactics with. In 4th Qtr '06 MS dropped Virtual Machine licenses from $499 for corporate to $99 after announcing the delay of Viridian, their new upgrade.
Sad thing is... these tactics will probably work. Good thing is Microsoft does not appear to have a winning legal strategy. Not that they need one, but we probably won't be seeing C&D notices out of this.
American educational systems have many issues, and often times I see new hires recieving training on the job that should have been a prerequisite for hire.
That being said, there is a tremendous disadvantage for experienced American IT workers in the marketplace. The reason I see newbies getting trained on the job for things they should have known beforehand is because so many companies pass over quality applicants for cheaper hires.
Case in point: One of my employers cut costs by laying off almost all internal tech support workers... then hiring receptionist level people into the positions. When a remote location called the newbies with an issue that was not covered on one of their bulleted help sheets they ended up waiting several days for a call back from one of the few experienced techs that remained. One retail location that I know of waited three days with 50% of their POS terminals down before someone called them back who knew how to walk them through setting up a simple switch (ie: plugging in a few cat5 cables) until on-site could get to them. I handled many of these complaints.
There is a glut of talented American IT workers. You don't see many of them because they have had to change fields.
Maybe some people feel a sense of entitlement... but many more are pissed about this issue because they are tired of being screwed after spending their time gaining valuable education and experience that has made them essentially unemployable. This is doubly true for anyone over 40.
Before Vista rolled out they had already dropped key functionality and pushed back the date.
Viridian (MS Virtualization update for those not following along) was supposed to be released 4th qtr '06, but was pushed to '07 and they just announced that they are dropping promised functionality. I believe I read that some of that dropped functionality was designed to deal heavily w/multi-processor/multi-core technology.
360 is popular but makes no cash. Zune is getting hammered.
I would agree that their current strategy was formed before the general publc knew Vista was going to be a dog. MS has known it is in danger for quite a while. Not the same as actually being on the ropes for a company with as much market inertia as they have, but starting to look scary.
They must have known their ship was taking on water long before the general public became aware.
"It's possible that if anti-virus software had never been created, we wouldn't be dealing with the level of worm and bot sophistication that we face today."
And if we didn't use antibiotics we wouldn't be seeing the current evolutionary pace of biological malware.
TFA presents some points for discussion, but this doesn't strike me as one of them.
Kudos to the Japanese. I find myself asking if America could stage a conversion of this sort at this time? Hmmm... probably not.
How about another sort of conversion... say trying to implement an affordable healthcare system? Hell, I would love to be able to afford health insurace.
How about a more thouroughly reviewed/reviewable patent system, not just for software, but across the board?
Most other 'first world' nations have these things. Their implementations differ. Some work better than others.
All of these issues are related.
If you can cite a reason that America lacks these things other than special interest profit motive I would love to hear it. Maybe you could also apply that reason to my governments consistent resistance to acknowledging human influenced environmental change (many highly placed officials deny it exists!)
Congratulations to the Japanese for joining the ranks of countries taking measures to fortify and secure their information systems through diversification. Not to be unpatriotic or anything, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that this move and others like it will do serious harm to certain American companies, and force some true competition for government contracts here in the states.
You make an excellent point, but there is a difference that has developed over the past hundred years or so.
Information is no longer garnered from sources that you can evaluate through direct personal experience with the source. There is no prior period in history where individuals recieved their immediate information via sources that they could not use direct personal experience to evaluate, or to hold accountable for erroneous actions motivated by the receipt of erroneous information.
If I choose to believe information delivered through my television it is a leap of faith. There is no one to rebuke for the receipt of bad info upon which I base my actions. Figureheads may change, but the channels through which information is distributed remain.
Um... your comment does not make a whole lot of sense. The point of a democracy is to allow the populace access to information from which they make decisions that will guide their governmental institutions.
There is no democracy without access to unbiased information. The practice of manipulating information is anti-democracy and anti-America. My point is that information manipulation is now the status-quo.
Americans are not supposed to agree or disagree with governmental agendas, but to set the agendas.
No one is even pretending that American mass media is for the dissemination of unbiased facts anymore. Read the article, read the slashdot summary... all of it contains biased wording.
I accept that this may be modded offtopic. It just pisses me off that everyone is pushing their agendas via a medium that has such potential to empower.
The media climate has reached a point where even if I were to put together a youtube series depicting the life of veterans after returning to the states, chronicling both their triumphs and their tragedies, the series would be politicized by all the f*cking pundits and bloggers and politicians to where very few people could view it without preconcieved notions about my own personal opinions about war, politics, and the state of our democracy.
Anyone else out there feel like you can't even trust what you see with your own eyes anymore? Do any other Americans out there feel like it is damn near impossible to speak directly to your fellow countrymen without having your words filtered through the opinions of the talking heads that fill their t.v. screens and babble out of their radios?
That is why I had a hard time coming up with OSS examples. The philosophy works well for incremental OSS releases because community participation is essential to the development process. *.0 releases are a different story, and the last FF.0 release was not up to par.
Proprietary vendors using the same release philosophy is akin to selling a car that needs a shitload of work, but selling it at a new car price anyhow, knowing you will make money off bringing that car up to standards because the customer has no option but to pay you to fix it.
I have just one point to make. Slashdot and related sites that post these stories provide a forum for presentation of arguements. Anyone researching this subject who ends up on this thread will be presented with a number of insightful points made against SAS in OSS.
Both posting this story and replying to it are in the interest of community education. Other than that I agree with your comment.
have a historical reputation for fleeing battles once things start getting ugly. I believe this was cited as a significant factor in early American wars where oponents employed German mercenaries, but it has been a while since I studied all that.
As a developer who primarily targets MS platforms I can tell you that most of my peers are in it for the money just like the mercenaries. More tellingly, I know many MS developers who get as far away from tech as possible during their weekends/time off. Doesn't sound like a recipe for inspiration or the creation of products that inspire cultish fandom.
As for me? I am into MS because I am a niche programmer, and most all of my customers are locked in with proprietary niche market apps. They couldn't just switch accounting systems and migrate to Linux... they would have to identify and migrate to numerous small specialty apps to match their current level of functionality.
BTW, I was really pissed about the mudslinging directed toward the Mono project on a recent thread. There are plenty of us out here who want to see Linux make inroads in small markets where MS has ruled for years, and Mono is the best hope we have.
All too often releases are made for reasons other than having a release ready product. While I notice this mostly in the proprietary world, the last release of FF jumps to mind as an OSS example.
I love FF, but felt the last release was rushed to prevent IE from getting all the headlines. I seem to recall some high profile bugs and gripes about the release feeling more like an incremental... none of which helped FF's profile in the non-OSS world.
As for proprietary examples... um... where would I start?
'Release early, release often,' is quoted regularly by developers on a major MS development board to which I belong. The practice is considered standard by those developers, but I find it repugnant. Then again, I aspire to design products that need only be upgraded as their environment changes, not to add/fix things that should have been implemented and extensively excercised in the *.0 package. But then, I also have the benefit of being a niche developer servicing industries that possess a slower adoption rate, which gives me more time to mature my products without excessive external pressures.
Anyhow, if it takes nine years to produce the software that will continue to build on Bugzilla's previous success than I am glad they took nine years to do it.
While the article raises some interesting concerns it seems more likely to me that living in a completely anti-microbal environment would be more dangerous. You would have to spike the astronauts immune systems and slowly reintegrate them into the world when they returned.
Anyhow, my suggestion would be including an extremely small temporary habitat that the astronauts occupy every so often while the main quarters are made inhospitable to living organisms. Maybe some combinations of prevasive UV, dehumidification, and extreme heat? It wouldn't matter that the microbes will reenter the main hab with the astronauts if you did this often enough... they would not have enough time to multiply.
Then again, I know nothing about this branch of science.
I disagree. My view is that patent enforcement would become almost impossible for anyone. A a small developer all I want is the freedom to innovate in my niche market by pursuing my own development schemes I shouldn't have to worry about who may have patented a concept that I hacked out in my home office and was completely unaware was patented.
My opinion is that the system cannot be broken any worse than it is. My opinion is based on patent reviews I have done that cover such a broad range that many commonplace task implementations are technically open to lawsuit. Any enterprise level system I develop is liable to be crushed if it takes off.
Everyone take heed. The patent lawsuit is not such a huge deal in the case of Amazon because they are not going away, but all the big players use selective lawsuits which is what bugs the hell out of me.
Under the current system big companies wait for smaller companies to become profitable and then they pounce. If one company sues another for patent infringement they should be obligated to sue all infringers. So as the owner of a small company I should be able to name co-defendants who also appear to use similar technology, and with how broad patents are these days it should not be hard to find big players who might be committing similar patent infringements.
If those bigger players are found to be implementing technology similar to what I am being sued for then they should be required to join the defense.
LP had plenty of gripes with the marketing departments doing things like taking the most expensive new release DVD box sets and displaying them all over the store to get exposure. This also put them at risk for loss. In stores that implemented locking cases because their loss numbers were way too high their sales also plummeted. A middle ground was never found before I left.
As for removing the content or just having a display copy... that unfortunately would require a massive redesign of most multimedia retail locations. There is simply nowhere to keep all of that stock off of the sales floor & out of people's reach.
But I tend to agree that the retailers I worked for created a lot of their own problems.
I worked in retail management with a focus on loss prevention. The connection between hard-core drug addicts and reselling stolen multimedia was insane.
90% of the chronic offenders we prosecuted cited drug money as their motivation and the resellers in New England, my market, were often little more than enablers. One employee of a major reseller in the area told me 'off the record' that a guy we had busted recently came in several times a day for several MONTHS with DVD box-sets still shrink wrapped and stickered from one of our stores. When I asked why they didn't call us he just shrugged.
These new regulations are short-sighted and egregious, but it is possible the RIAA is not solely to blame. The war on drugs is still going on and from what I saw, shoplifting multimedia is a habit of choice for drug offenders.
Some numbers: It was not unusual to see multimedia loss numbers from a single location at my former company top $100k for a single year. New box set titles @ the time I was doing this resold between 40-60 cents on the dollar within the first two weeks of release. So a single box-store multimedia outlet could have been subsidizing local criminals with an average of +/- $50k/year.
I don't like the new laws, but the RIAA is most likely not solely to blame.
It doesn't mention this in TFA, but tech support management apps that I have seen could easily fit on 1/2 a screen w/a tabbed interface. Your main tasks are to lookup the customers, record billable time, notate key points of the problem, read some stepped hep files, and pass it on if the fix is not simple.
And considering this was developed in India there just might be something to this.
I agree with you mostly, but the concept that the 'first world' should be held accountable for compensating the companies is just wrong.
Viruses spread without regard to income or borders. Education can only do so much to prevent a disease like AIDS, and even less with regards to more virulent infections of which there are many.
If ever open source, community funded development was needed it is needed in the fight against illness. It is completely unreasonable that this research & its results are being ransomed at a U.S. pay scale under U.S. patent laws.
This is one of the more refreshing threads I have read on this site in a while.
One note on the whole retractable lens thing... and this is way out there but something I incorporated in a sci-fi story of mine. With the seemingly unhaltable progress towards a totally monitored society why not just provide an interface to the public monitoring devices. In fact, this could be used to halt discretionary use of such systems (where privileged individuals are not held to account for indescretions while others are).
Reducing the level of privacy allowed individuals seems to be a primary objective of many developed countries. I will leave it to the reader to decide why this is the case.
Anyhow, assuming that the concept that things done in public are legal to photograph remains unchallenged why not profit off access to the public monitoring systems. Youtube takes on a whole new meaning when posters are able to troll (future) hi-res public surveillance systems for fodder.
Don't get me wrong, I would rather not have these systems at all, but the public in general does not seem to care about the tradeoffs involved in being monitored every minute of the day.
Think of American football and the recently introduced ability to move to multiple vantage points on the field contiguously. Using this technology you could record your special or artistic moments after the fact from the best vantage possible... Much more efficiently than you could with a personal camera.
Looking back on this period in Novell history from some point down the line you will see a deal with Microsoft followed relatively closely by several key personnel departures.
Whatever the case, Novell is going to be linked to the M$ deal for some time with business decisions, personnel moves, and market value all discussed in relation to it.
After all... It was a big deal if only for symbolic value. Perspectives were changed as a result.
While manufacturing processes that enable chipmakers to accomplish this type of feat are innovation I wonder if the designs themselves are going to be considered original.
There wouldn't be any issue with proving prior art.
Slashdot Mirror
After digesting this issue for a couple days I have come up with this...
Intentionally or not, Microsoft has trained corporate America to wait until the first service pack or two before adopting their new operating systems. The new hardware specs for Vista will provide a further incentive for companies to delay the 'upgrade.'
Microsoft has come up with a short-term pump-up for Vista that was briefly referenced in another thread here and was supported by a friend of mine who is in CS @ a local university... students recieving free installs are being run through an e-commerce application with the price fields zeroed... which means they are being counted as sales. I wonder how many other individuals are recieving free licenses through this method for corporate evaluation etc...
Microsoft then releases public attacks to slow corporate adoption of competing products. In 9-12 months the market will naturally have reduced the overhead for upgrading to Vista and Microsoft will have time to release some major patches.
Profit!!!
Vista is not the only product they are using delaying tactics with. In 4th Qtr '06 MS dropped Virtual Machine licenses from $499 for corporate to $99 after announcing the delay of Viridian, their new upgrade.
Sad thing is... these tactics will probably work. Good thing is Microsoft does not appear to have a winning legal strategy. Not that they need one, but we probably won't be seeing C&D notices out of this.
I hope this is all that's behind this.
Regards.
American educational systems have many issues, and often times I see new hires recieving training on the job that should have been a prerequisite for hire.
That being said, there is a tremendous disadvantage for experienced American IT workers in the marketplace. The reason I see newbies getting trained on the job for things they should have known beforehand is because so many companies pass over quality applicants for cheaper hires.
Case in point: One of my employers cut costs by laying off almost all internal tech support workers... then hiring receptionist level people into the positions. When a remote location called the newbies with an issue that was not covered on one of their bulleted help sheets they ended up waiting several days for a call back from one of the few experienced techs that remained. One retail location that I know of waited three days with 50% of their POS terminals down before someone called them back who knew how to walk them through setting up a simple switch (ie: plugging in a few cat5 cables) until on-site could get to them. I handled many of these complaints.
There is a glut of talented American IT workers. You don't see many of them because they have had to change fields.
Maybe some people feel a sense of entitlement... but many more are pissed about this issue because they are tired of being screwed after spending their time gaining valuable education and experience that has made them essentially unemployable. This is doubly true for anyone over 40.
Regards.
Before Vista rolled out they had already dropped key functionality and pushed back the date.
Viridian (MS Virtualization update for those not following along) was supposed to be released 4th qtr '06, but was pushed to '07 and they just announced that they are dropping promised functionality. I believe I read that some of that dropped functionality was designed to deal heavily w/multi-processor/multi-core technology.
360 is popular but makes no cash. Zune is getting hammered.
I would agree that their current strategy was formed before the general publc knew Vista was going to be a dog. MS has known it is in danger for quite a while. Not the same as actually being on the ropes for a company with as much market inertia as they have, but starting to look scary.
They must have known their ship was taking on water long before the general public became aware.
Regards.
From TFA:
"It's possible that if anti-virus software had never been created, we wouldn't be dealing with the level of worm and bot sophistication that we face today."
And if we didn't use antibiotics we wouldn't be seeing the current evolutionary pace of biological malware.
TFA presents some points for discussion, but this doesn't strike me as one of them.
Did I really just type 'biological malware?'
Regards.
Kudos to the Japanese. I find myself asking if America could stage a conversion of this sort at this time? Hmmm... probably not.
How about another sort of conversion... say trying to implement an affordable healthcare system? Hell, I would love to be able to afford health insurace.
How about a more thouroughly reviewed/reviewable patent system, not just for software, but across the board?
Most other 'first world' nations have these things. Their implementations differ. Some work better than others.
All of these issues are related.
If you can cite a reason that America lacks these things other than special interest profit motive I would love to hear it. Maybe you could also apply that reason to my governments consistent resistance to acknowledging human influenced environmental change (many highly placed officials deny it exists!)
Congratulations to the Japanese for joining the ranks of countries taking measures to fortify and secure their information systems through diversification. Not to be unpatriotic or anything, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that this move and others like it will do serious harm to certain American companies, and force some true competition for government contracts here in the states.
Regards.
You make an excellent point, but there is a difference that has developed over the past hundred years or so.
Information is no longer garnered from sources that you can evaluate through direct personal experience with the source. There is no prior period in history where individuals recieved their immediate information via sources that they could not use direct personal experience to evaluate, or to hold accountable for erroneous actions motivated by the receipt of erroneous information.
If I choose to believe information delivered through my television it is a leap of faith. There is no one to rebuke for the receipt of bad info upon which I base my actions. Figureheads may change, but the channels through which information is distributed remain.
Regards.
Um... your comment does not make a whole lot of sense. The point of a democracy is to allow the populace access to information from which they make decisions that will guide their governmental institutions.
There is no democracy without access to unbiased information. The practice of manipulating information is anti-democracy and anti-America. My point is that information manipulation is now the status-quo.
Americans are not supposed to agree or disagree with governmental agendas, but to set the agendas.
Regards.
No one is even pretending that American mass media is for the dissemination of unbiased facts anymore. Read the article, read the slashdot summary... all of it contains biased wording.
I accept that this may be modded offtopic. It just pisses me off that everyone is pushing their agendas via a medium that has such potential to empower.
The media climate has reached a point where even if I were to put together a youtube series depicting the life of veterans after returning to the states, chronicling both their triumphs and their tragedies, the series would be politicized by all the f*cking pundits and bloggers and politicians to where very few people could view it without preconcieved notions about my own personal opinions about war, politics, and the state of our democracy.
Anyone else out there feel like you can't even trust what you see with your own eyes anymore? Do any other Americans out there feel like it is damn near impossible to speak directly to your fellow countrymen without having your words filtered through the opinions of the talking heads that fill their t.v. screens and babble out of their radios?
Regards.
That is why I had a hard time coming up with OSS examples. The philosophy works well for incremental OSS releases because community participation is essential to the development process. *.0 releases are a different story, and the last FF .0 release was not up to par.
Proprietary vendors using the same release philosophy is akin to selling a car that needs a shitload of work, but selling it at a new car price anyhow, knowing you will make money off bringing that car up to standards because the customer has no option but to pay you to fix it.
I believe we are in agreement in general.
Regards.
I have just one point to make. Slashdot and related sites that post these stories provide a forum for presentation of arguements. Anyone researching this subject who ends up on this thread will be presented with a number of insightful points made against SAS in OSS.
Both posting this story and replying to it are in the interest of community education. Other than that I agree with your comment.
Regards.
have a historical reputation for fleeing battles once things start getting ugly. I believe this was cited as a significant factor in early American wars where oponents employed German mercenaries, but it has been a while since I studied all that.
As a developer who primarily targets MS platforms I can tell you that most of my peers are in it for the money just like the mercenaries. More tellingly, I know many MS developers who get as far away from tech as possible during their weekends/time off. Doesn't sound like a recipe for inspiration or the creation of products that inspire cultish fandom.
As for me? I am into MS because I am a niche programmer, and most all of my customers are locked in with proprietary niche market apps. They couldn't just switch accounting systems and migrate to Linux... they would have to identify and migrate to numerous small specialty apps to match their current level of functionality.
BTW, I was really pissed about the mudslinging directed toward the Mono project on a recent thread. There are plenty of us out here who want to see Linux make inroads in small markets where MS has ruled for years, and Mono is the best hope we have.
Regards.
All too often releases are made for reasons other than having a release ready product. While I notice this mostly in the proprietary world, the last release of FF jumps to mind as an OSS example.
I love FF, but felt the last release was rushed to prevent IE from getting all the headlines. I seem to recall some high profile bugs and gripes about the release feeling more like an incremental... none of which helped FF's profile in the non-OSS world.
As for proprietary examples... um... where would I start?
'Release early, release often,' is quoted regularly by developers on a major MS development board to which I belong. The practice is considered standard by those developers, but I find it repugnant. Then again, I aspire to design products that need only be upgraded as their environment changes, not to add/fix things that should have been implemented and extensively excercised in the *.0 package. But then, I also have the benefit of being a niche developer servicing industries that possess a slower adoption rate, which gives me more time to mature my products without excessive external pressures.
Anyhow, if it takes nine years to produce the software that will continue to build on Bugzilla's previous success than I am glad they took nine years to do it.
Regards.
While the article raises some interesting concerns it seems more likely to me that living in a completely anti-microbal environment would be more dangerous. You would have to spike the astronauts immune systems and slowly reintegrate them into the world when they returned.
Anyhow, my suggestion would be including an extremely small temporary habitat that the astronauts occupy every so often while the main quarters are made inhospitable to living organisms. Maybe some combinations of prevasive UV, dehumidification, and extreme heat? It wouldn't matter that the microbes will reenter the main hab with the astronauts if you did this often enough... they would not have enough time to multiply.
Then again, I know nothing about this branch of science.
Regards.
If nothing else they broke the 'release early and often' cycle. That's worth something.
I disagree. My view is that patent enforcement would become almost impossible for anyone. A a small developer all I want is the freedom to innovate in my niche market by pursuing my own development schemes I shouldn't have to worry about who may have patented a concept that I hacked out in my home office and was completely unaware was patented.
My opinion is that the system cannot be broken any worse than it is. My opinion is based on patent reviews I have done that cover such a broad range that many commonplace task implementations are technically open to lawsuit. Any enterprise level system I develop is liable to be crushed if it takes off.
Regards.
Everyone take heed. The patent lawsuit is not such a huge deal in the case of Amazon because they are not going away, but all the big players use selective lawsuits which is what bugs the hell out of me.
Under the current system big companies wait for smaller companies to become profitable and then they pounce. If one company sues another for patent infringement they should be obligated to sue all infringers. So as the owner of a small company I should be able to name co-defendants who also appear to use similar technology, and with how broad patents are these days it should not be hard to find big players who might be committing similar patent infringements.
If those bigger players are found to be implementing technology similar to what I am being sued for then they should be required to join the defense.
No more assassination through selective lawsuits.
Regards.
LP had plenty of gripes with the marketing departments doing things like taking the most expensive new release DVD box sets and displaying them all over the store to get exposure. This also put them at risk for loss. In stores that implemented locking cases because their loss numbers were way too high their sales also plummeted. A middle ground was never found before I left.
As for removing the content or just having a display copy... that unfortunately would require a massive redesign of most multimedia retail locations. There is simply nowhere to keep all of that stock off of the sales floor & out of people's reach.
But I tend to agree that the retailers I worked for created a lot of their own problems.
Regards.
Recommended .safe a few weeks ago.
3 9216
*rummage* oh, here's the link:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/10/12
Regards.
this move is in part related to drug use.
I worked in retail management with a focus on loss prevention. The connection between hard-core drug addicts and reselling stolen multimedia was insane.
90% of the chronic offenders we prosecuted cited drug money as their motivation and the resellers in New England, my market, were often little more than enablers. One employee of a major reseller in the area told me 'off the record' that a guy we had busted recently came in several times a day for several MONTHS with DVD box-sets still shrink wrapped and stickered from one of our stores. When I asked why they didn't call us he just shrugged.
These new regulations are short-sighted and egregious, but it is possible the RIAA is not solely to blame. The war on drugs is still going on and from what I saw, shoplifting multimedia is a habit of choice for drug offenders.
Some numbers:
It was not unusual to see multimedia loss numbers from a single location at my former company top $100k for a single year. New box set titles @ the time I was doing this resold between 40-60 cents on the dollar within the first two weeks of release. So a single box-store multimedia outlet could have been subsidizing local criminals with an average of +/- $50k/year.
I don't like the new laws, but the RIAA is most likely not solely to blame.
It doesn't mention this in TFA, but tech support management apps that I have seen could easily fit on 1/2 a screen w/a tabbed interface. Your main tasks are to lookup the customers, record billable time, notate key points of the problem, read some stepped hep files, and pass it on if the fix is not simple.
And considering this was developed in India there just might be something to this.
Regards.
I agree with you mostly, but the concept that the 'first world' should be held accountable for compensating the companies is just wrong.
Viruses spread without regard to income or borders. Education can only do so much to prevent a disease like AIDS, and even less with regards to more virulent infections of which there are many.
If ever open source, community funded development was needed it is needed in the fight against illness. It is completely unreasonable that this research & its results are being ransomed at a U.S. pay scale under U.S. patent laws.
Regards.
Again. Last time the use of generics derailed the debate. Who knows what will happen this time, but the issue dovetails nicely.
Regards.
This is one of the more refreshing threads I have read on this site in a while.
One note on the whole retractable lens thing... and this is way out there but something I incorporated in a sci-fi story of mine. With the seemingly unhaltable progress towards a totally monitored society why not just provide an interface to the public monitoring devices. In fact, this could be used to halt discretionary use of such systems (where privileged individuals are not held to account for indescretions while others are).
Reducing the level of privacy allowed individuals seems to be a primary objective of many developed countries. I will leave it to the reader to decide why this is the case.
Anyhow, assuming that the concept that things done in public are legal to photograph remains unchallenged why not profit off access to the public monitoring systems. Youtube takes on a whole new meaning when posters are able to troll (future) hi-res public surveillance systems for fodder.
Don't get me wrong, I would rather not have these systems at all, but the public in general does not seem to care about the tradeoffs involved in being monitored every minute of the day.
Think of American football and the recently introduced ability to move to multiple vantage points on the field contiguously. Using this technology you could record your special or artistic moments after the fact from the best vantage possible... Much more efficiently than you could with a personal camera.
Regards.
Looking back on this period in Novell history from some point down the line you will see a deal with Microsoft followed relatively closely by several key personnel departures.
Whatever the case, Novell is going to be linked to the M$ deal for some time with business decisions, personnel moves, and market value all discussed in relation to it.
After all... It was a big deal if only for symbolic value. Perspectives were changed as a result.
Regards.
While manufacturing processes that enable chipmakers to accomplish this type of feat are innovation I wonder if the designs themselves are going to be considered original.
There wouldn't be any issue with proving prior art.
Regards.