I think that the PTO would reduce its own effort a great deal, and issue more deserving software patents if it would set a simple objective standard for the novelty requirement.
Do you recall the old Hayes modem trick of using one second of inactivity before and after the +++ to distinguish it from three plus signs occurring in data so that file transfers wouldn't throw the modem into command mode?
Some coworkers and I invented that.
Not for Hayes, and not that exact procedure, but we did come up with the same general idea, before Hayes patented it. Had the company we did this for not gone under, we probably would have had a legal battle on our hands. We would have won it (IMO, IANAL) on prior art, provided we weren't bankrupted by legal fees (and Hayes was the 800lb gorilla in those days).
The problem here is that we didn't do anything special. Any competent engineer given the same problem would have come up with a similar solution. To me, that fails the novelty test. If you need to challenge a patent, it should be legal to put some random engineer (or even an undergrad) on the stand and tell him or her to solve the particular problem the patent addresses. If their solution is similar enough to the patent, the patent is thrown out.
What's wrong with this is that it generates no real revenue. Sure the site running the ad can theoretically charge more based on higher clickthrough rates, but you're not clicking through with any real intention of purchasing from the advertiser.
Eventually, the advertiser will observe a low revenue-to-clickthrough ratio and refuse to pay the higher ad rate. They may even cancel the ad if they suspect clickbots or some other artificial clickthrough inflation.
I'm a crusty old greenscreener who lived through the Unix fragmentation of the 80's and I fear this is happening all over again with Linux. Ask any ISV (independent software vendor) how much of a nightmare their porting center is if they support more than a couple flavors of Unix.
The key to widespread Linux acceptance is ISV support. That's right, commercial, closed source products people have been using for years, whether or not there's an open-source "equivalent" (e.g., Photoshop vs. Gimp).
The big applications have to run on Linux for Linux to penetrate anywhere other than, well, here. And as the whole FrameMaker thing showed us, that's not a foregone conclusion even for applications with Unix origins, much less things that come from the M$ world (e.g., convincing Intuit to port Quicken to Linux).
ISV support on Linux, over the long term, will be inversely proportional to how difficult it is to develop a distribution-independent application.
[And I won't even get into whether or not an open-source product can ever avail itself of "closed" resources like the Pantone color database Photoshop uses or Avery's office stationery specs that M$ Office knows about.]
You can get DSL? I'm getting the ongoing RSN response from the cable company and all the DSL providers.
I think I'm going to complain to whoever in the municipal government is in charge of the cable franchise. Our cable company got bought by one of the Very Large Cable Companies of America, who treat our franchise like the bastard son at the family reunion. We're last in line for everything except new PPV and home shopping channels.
Modems suck, too.
ObTopic: Nobody I know who has satellite data service likes it, for all the reasons talked about here.
Advertising is killing itself by saturation. Advertisers consider any flat surface to be fair game. I realized this when the squeegee a gas station attendant[1] used to clean my windshield had advertising on its handle, meant to be read from the driver's seat.
What the advertisers don't get is that it's having the effect you describe--it's so ubiquitous that nobody notices any of it any more (sort of like the 1-800-GAMBLER signs in the casinos).
I'd be scared to death to open a franchise like this. We had a FuncoLand not far from us where I got all sorts of cool games, but the store is gone now. And look where their web site takes you. Good luck finding any more bricks or mortar.
If I were going to do this sort of thing, I'd have two parts. The first would be an exchange for used modern games, sort of like FuncoLand was. The second would be the classic stuff including REAL(tm) arcade video games and pinball machines.
The problem is whether there'd be enough time left over from running the store to do all the dealing and tinkering necessary for the arcade inventory. Oh, and if it were me, I'd go for premium-price, mint-condition games, instead of the $250 barely-works variety.
It still amazes me how man Ms. Pac Man, Galaxian, Centipede, etc., arcade games are still around.
There's guardianship, and then there's guardianship. That freshman probably wasn't old enough to drink anyway, so the culpability lies with lax law enforcement. But, if you're over 18, the university should not be able to take away your rights as an adult, unless you signed a contract allowing them to do so (e.g. accepting their rules against pr0n).
The notion that it's dangerous to be away from your parents for the first time applies equally to moving away from home under any scenario, not just going away to college.
Another area of unenforceability pops up when the contract is overly broad. I worked for several contract houses whose contracts said I couldn't work for "any current or potential client" for some period of time.
IANAL, but I never believed this would never hold up in court, because McDonald's could be considered a "potential" client if the contract house claimed they might "potentially" start farming out burger-flippers. Therefore the clause really said that I couldn't hold a job of any sort for that time period.
So, I signed the contracts, went about my merry way, changed jobs at will, and never heard anything from anybody. The real intent behind the clause was to a) keep me from being hired by the client I worked for, and b) keep me from changing contract houses while working for the same client.
Sidebar: Eventually I was hired by a client, because the client's contract with the consulting firm had a buyout clause in it. Regardless of what your contract says, make sure you know what's in the client's contract! It can often work to your advantage.
Don't be surprised if they're really targeting one or more niche markets they don't talk about publicly. Consider that HP uses its lowest-end HP-UX machines, rather than PCs, as front-end controllers for its largest servers. It's good to have a dirt-cheap (to build, if not to sell) box for purposes like this. Sun might be doing the same thing.
When I considered relocating to SLC, the weird liquor laws didn't bother me, but what put me off for good was when a local warned me that my kid would, sooner or later, come home saying, "So-and-so's parents won't let me play with him any more because we're not Mormons. Daddy, what's a Mormon?"
No, color specification. You can say that your logo's shade of red is "Pantone XYZ", and you'll get pretty much exactly the same red on your printed material, your trade-show doodads, the sides of your trucks, etc.
Don't know too much more about it than that, because the whole concept of color gives me a headache--it's enough to make me go out and buy a Mac just for the built-in color correction.
In any case, lack of Pantone support pretty much shuts the Gimp out of the professional high-end DTP realm, moreso than lack of CMYK, IMO.
1. The 300GPM shower. Not only is it an inordinate load on the local water system (assuming he's not got his own well and water tower), but real waterfalls are much more fun!
2. The 3000ft^3 subwoofer. Who needs it? A couple of decent off-the-shelf 4x18" cabinets can blow even rich people's roofs off. And for a room the size of, say, a 25-seat home theater, you won't need even that much for spine-massaging, earbleed bass.
But intra-LATA toll calls aren't. It's often more expensive to call the nearest town outside your local calling area (via the local phone company) than it is to call the next state (via a LD carrier).
It wasn't that long ago that isolated small towns didn't even need the first three digits. Until "outlawed" by the NANP, towns served by a single three-digit exchange in a single CO could and often did permit four-digit dialing within the exchange.
Guess again. That case was over a legal technicality (albeit one with far reaching states'-rights ramifications). There are literally dozens of other court actions that could affect the final outcome that have nothing to do with this case.
It is significant that the decision is unsigned, given the pundits' comments regarding a unanimous decision versus a divided decision.
For that matter, would we each perceive better graphics if we could get monitors whose phosphors exactly matched the colors of our retinas (and then tweaked standard RGB signals to match)?
As they imply in the article, you're not going to have a significantly larger color space if the fourth color you see is close to one of the other three.
What I want is an Epson Stylus Photo Eye that has six colors...
Better yet, how about user-definable pigments? Tired of everything looking red under that neon in the club? Ever wanted to help Grandma make green and purple polyester go together?
Slashdot Mirror
But you could also get a single pipe into your neighbor's house. See this article describing someone who did this.
For that matter, who needs the theme? All you need is the replay THWOK. There's nothing like that anywhere in videoland.
REAL(tm) pinball machines never have more than five digits.
Do you recall the old Hayes modem trick of using one second of inactivity before and after the +++ to distinguish it from three plus signs occurring in data so that file transfers wouldn't throw the modem into command mode?
Some coworkers and I invented that.
Not for Hayes, and not that exact procedure, but we did come up with the same general idea, before Hayes patented it. Had the company we did this for not gone under, we probably would have had a legal battle on our hands. We would have won it (IMO, IANAL) on prior art, provided we weren't bankrupted by legal fees (and Hayes was the 800lb gorilla in those days).
The problem here is that we didn't do anything special. Any competent engineer given the same problem would have come up with a similar solution. To me, that fails the novelty test. If you need to challenge a patent, it should be legal to put some random engineer (or even an undergrad) on the stand and tell him or her to solve the particular problem the patent addresses. If their solution is similar enough to the patent, the patent is thrown out.
What's wrong with this is that it generates no real revenue. Sure the site running the ad can theoretically charge more based on higher clickthrough rates, but you're not clicking through with any real intention of purchasing from the advertiser.
Eventually, the advertiser will observe a low revenue-to-clickthrough ratio and refuse to pay the higher ad rate. They may even cancel the ad if they suspect clickbots or some other artificial clickthrough inflation.
The 355th day of the 113th month?
I'm a crusty old greenscreener who lived through the Unix fragmentation of the 80's and I fear this is happening all over again with Linux. Ask any ISV (independent software vendor) how much of a nightmare their porting center is if they support more than a couple flavors of Unix.
The key to widespread Linux acceptance is ISV support. That's right, commercial, closed source products people have been using for years, whether or not there's an open-source "equivalent" (e.g., Photoshop vs. Gimp).
The big applications have to run on Linux for Linux to penetrate anywhere other than, well, here. And as the whole FrameMaker thing showed us, that's not a foregone conclusion even for applications with Unix origins, much less things that come from the M$ world (e.g., convincing Intuit to port Quicken to Linux).
ISV support on Linux, over the long term, will be inversely proportional to how difficult it is to develop a distribution-independent application.
[And I won't even get into whether or not an open-source product can ever avail itself of "closed" resources like the Pantone color database Photoshop uses or Avery's office stationery specs that M$ Office knows about.]
I think I'm going to complain to whoever in the municipal government is in charge of the cable franchise. Our cable company got bought by one of the Very Large Cable Companies of America, who treat our franchise like the bastard son at the family reunion. We're last in line for everything except new PPV and home shopping channels.
Modems suck, too.
ObTopic: Nobody I know who has satellite data service likes it, for all the reasons talked about here.
Advertising is killing itself by saturation. Advertisers consider any flat surface to be fair game. I realized this when the squeegee a gas station attendant[1] used to clean my windshield had advertising on its handle, meant to be read from the driver's seat.
What the advertisers don't get is that it's having the effect you describe--it's so ubiquitous that nobody notices any of it any more (sort of like the 1-800-GAMBLER signs in the casinos).
[1] There is no self-serve gas in NJ.
In a rack, hard disks shouldn't be "fragile". OTOH, flash memory wears out after some number of thousands of writes. So much for /tmp...
If I were going to do this sort of thing, I'd have two parts. The first would be an exchange for used modern games, sort of like FuncoLand was. The second would be the classic stuff including REAL(tm) arcade video games and pinball machines.
The problem is whether there'd be enough time left over from running the store to do all the dealing and tinkering necessary for the arcade inventory. Oh, and if it were me, I'd go for premium-price, mint-condition games, instead of the $250 barely-works variety.
It still amazes me how man Ms. Pac Man, Galaxian, Centipede, etc., arcade games are still around.
There's guardianship, and then there's guardianship. That freshman probably wasn't old enough to drink anyway, so the culpability lies with lax law enforcement. But, if you're over 18, the university should not be able to take away your rights as an adult, unless you signed a contract allowing them to do so (e.g. accepting their rules against pr0n).
The notion that it's dangerous to be away from your parents for the first time applies equally to moving away from home under any scenario, not just going away to college.
Another area of unenforceability pops up when the contract is overly broad. I worked for several contract houses whose contracts said I couldn't work for "any current or potential client" for some period of time.
IANAL, but I never believed this would never hold up in court, because McDonald's could be considered a "potential" client if the contract house claimed they might "potentially" start farming out burger-flippers. Therefore the clause really said that I couldn't hold a job of any sort for that time period.
So, I signed the contracts, went about my merry way, changed jobs at will, and never heard anything from anybody. The real intent behind the clause was to a) keep me from being hired by the client I worked for, and b) keep me from changing contract houses while working for the same client.
Sidebar: Eventually I was hired by a client, because the client's contract with the consulting firm had a buyout clause in it. Regardless of what your contract says, make sure you know what's in the client's contract! It can often work to your advantage.
Don't be surprised if they're really targeting one or more niche markets they don't talk about publicly. Consider that HP uses its lowest-end HP-UX machines, rather than PCs, as front-end controllers for its largest servers. It's good to have a dirt-cheap (to build, if not to sell) box for purposes like this. Sun might be doing the same thing.
When I considered relocating to SLC, the weird liquor laws didn't bother me, but what put me off for good was when a local warned me that my kid would, sooner or later, come home saying, "So-and-so's parents won't let me play with him any more because we're not Mormons. Daddy, what's a Mormon?"
No, color specification. You can say that your logo's shade of red is "Pantone XYZ", and you'll get pretty much exactly the same red on your printed material, your trade-show doodads, the sides of your trucks, etc.
Don't know too much more about it than that, because the whole concept of color gives me a headache--it's enough to make me go out and buy a Mac just for the built-in color correction.
In any case, lack of Pantone support pretty much shuts the Gimp out of the professional high-end DTP realm, moreso than lack of CMYK, IMO.
But do you pronounce the trailing 'i'?
OBTopic: Fluxx -- highly recommended! "Starbucks" == coffee + money.
1. The 300GPM shower. Not only is it an inordinate load on the local water system (assuming he's not got his own well and water tower), but real waterfalls are much more fun!
2. The 3000ft^3 subwoofer. Who needs it? A couple of decent off-the-shelf 4x18" cabinets can blow even rich people's roofs off. And for a room the size of, say, a 25-seat home theater, you won't need even that much for spine-massaging, earbleed bass.
But intra-LATA toll calls aren't. It's often more expensive to call the nearest town outside your local calling area (via the local phone company) than it is to call the next state (via a LD carrier).
It wasn't that long ago that isolated small towns didn't even need the first three digits. Until "outlawed" by the NANP, towns served by a single three-digit exchange in a single CO could and often did permit four-digit dialing within the exchange.
No, that was the NRA. Oh wait. Same thing.
Never mind.
It is significant that the decision is unsigned, given the pundits' comments regarding a unanimous decision versus a divided decision.
Whether anyone thinks Amazon is the M$ of online bookstores is not my concern.
Try A Quarter Century of Unix.
...in .cshrc et al.
For that matter, would we each perceive better graphics if we could get monitors whose phosphors exactly matched the colors of our retinas (and then tweaked standard RGB signals to match)?
As they imply in the article, you're not going to have a significantly larger color space if the fourth color you see is close to one of the other three.
What I want is an Epson Stylus Photo Eye that has six colors...
Better yet, how about user-definable pigments? Tired of everything looking red under that neon in the club? Ever wanted to help Grandma make green and purple polyester go together?