Often the "Rock Stars" are either programmers who self identify with this and often have some form of seniority; or are blowhards who have the upper management sold on their amazing mad skills. A quick bit of digging will turn out that the database "overhaul" that he did in one weekend that would have taken mere mortals 6 months that resulted in the reports running 20x faster was actually an upgrade of an 8 year old server with an 8 CPU SSD drived, 64GB beasty; so a 20x improvement is actually a bit of a disappointment. Another sign of rockstars is often certifications coming out of the wazoo. I agree with previous posters: Cowboy is probably the better title.
Sometimes the RockStars are stupid but it is even worse when they are really smart. That is when they start coding in assembler knowing that they are creating a dependency on them of mega proportions.
A term I like is rarefied programmers. These programmers are usually quiet and usually leave people scratching their heads; not in confusion; but with puzzlement as to why they didn't see such an easy solution. The code is usually small and understood by all. Often things just get done and all around them benefit. An interesting way to detect these programmers is that they use an odd mix of the old an new. They might be using C++ right along with some NoSQL solution. C++ because they are very good at it and NoSQL because it was the logical tool for the job.
Where these rarefied programmers can get into conflict and "cause trouble" is when they have to deal with the RockStars. Some RockStar with management support will reject unit testing (slows me down) insist on using something (cool) like Go and then need to alter the Linux Kernel as it (I have witnessed this). The rarefied programmer will move on and take the two best programmers with them.
I have noticed quite a few people blaming MBAs for the problems of RockStar programmers; this is due to RockStars providing the MBAs with a good story for sales. "Our guy was the first certified Oracle DBA in the state." "Our guy singlehandedly programmed a NASA Sub system." "Our guy is certified to level 20." "Our guy worked 20 straight days for 16 hours a day to finish a project." MBAs need zest and sizzle or they don't get an obscene bonus. Why do they get the obscene bonus because they golf with the CEO and brag about how they have a RockStar programmer.
The rarefied programmer is usually too boring for the MBAs. "Our guy found an open source product so we canceled my pet project and just used the OS product." "Our guy added unit testing; whatever the hell that is." "Our guy switched the programmer's editor from Eclipse to Sublime Text 2" "Our guy showed the accountants how to make a better macro."
The rivets in airplanes are only now being partially replaced. This has always been a what the heck for me. The main difference between a jet in Mad Men and now is the smoking. All kinds of little things since 1960's air travel make it mostly safer such as the detection of wind shear but is almost nasty that a jet from 50 years ago could operate today almost unnoticed. There seems to be a cultural rejection of anything that is significantly better. One guy crudely glued a nosecone and tail onto his honda giving it an extremely low air resistance; resulting in something like doubling his mileage but it made my culturally tuned self cringe. How is it that even someone as techno desiring as myself would reject such a great improvement as weirdo? Keep in mind that this was crudely added on; not wind tunnel tested; or done by an artist. There was a huge amount of room for improvement yet no car manufacturer has run with it. Think of the early ugly honda hybrids with the covered rear tires. Again rejected. We should be clapping as these cars go by seeing that they literally improve our lives with less pollution and reliance on fossil fuels. But our sense of what is proper overrides this.
How can we possibly think outside the box when there is such a huge cultural pressure to conform at all costs? Even the people who generally think of themselves as non conformists fit into a few acceptable boxes of non conformity.
One of the solutions should be via money. Science degrees would be subsidized by those getting business degrees. Society could take a leap and say that scientists doing fundamental R&D don't pay income taxes.(Along with other tax benefits to R&D) That would then prove that we value innovation over say bankers and hedge fund managers.
I love the idea of less web surfing. I have observed that paired programming is great for weak programmers. The sort who can sort of program but aren't really that good. Two of them together usually add up to one good programmer. Two good programmers often add up to a great programmer, but the great programmers often move quickly enough that there is little or no benefit to their pairing. Just sit them really near each other.
Basically it seems that paired programming eliminates weaknesses rather than emphasizing strengths. It would be interesting to sit the genius but gaff prone programmer with the squarely center of the box but obsessively bug free programmer. If they didn't kill each other the pair might be a powerhouse.
In less managed offices often a what would be an otherwise very good programmer sucks because of surfing, phoning, texting, being late, leaving early, lack of focus, or yacking. Pairing them up would shame them out of many of these behaviors.
A wonderful side benefit from paired programming is that the programmers quickly each learn tricks from the other. But this works best if the pairs are periodically rotated. Also pairs are less likely to get stuck and spin their wheels on any given problem. Depending on the complexity and R&D involved this can be a huge win. But if the programming is simple and somewhat rote then there is little benefit. Another rarely sung benefit is that those poor lost programmers are less able to hide the fact that they are, in fact, totally lost.
I don't think that pair programming is a panacea but a solution to some problems. The key is to identify if you have these problems in your work environment.
Someone who comes to me with their tech problems got suckered by this one. But luckily the person is quite stubborn and regularly ignores me so they ended up telling the scammers that they were doing it wrong and did it their own way. The only thing that was changed was the default home page which this person translated as installed a virus.
I hate to sound fanboyish but one other bit of mac magic for one relative who is a physical destroyer of laptops (has the money to deal with it) is that a time machine restore works when jumping to a newer machine with a newer OS. That is where the real magic lay. Every desktop icon, bookmark, cookie, even the field presets in firefox; all back the way they were before the previous laptop was crushed. In the last disaster the only setting that was wrong was this new "natural" scroll that Lion does. I couldn't imagine finding every stupid setting and trying to move them to a new windows machine. I never can remember where Outlook keeps it stuff and every time I move it from one machine to another it never works quite right.
It sounds like Asus is somewhat in the correct direction but zero bloatware is the only amount I will accept anymore.
A few years ago I spoke to a senior executive at Dell. She told me that when they sell a basic system they might even lose a few bucks. But if they sell a norton subscription or Microsoft Office that they make a hefty commission and that is where the profit lay.
This is the sort of mangled thinking that drove the US car industry in the 70s and early 80s; where bizarre manipulations of the customers was the first order of business and it became inconceivable that the route to success was to make good cars that customers wanted. Even Lee Iaccoca is credited with the K-Car being what saved Chrysler. On paper it did save the company but the K-Car was such a pile of trash that it just showed how far behind the likes of Honda they had fallen. In the end Chrysler lurched from one crises to the next until it was basically dead. Most of the computer companies are doing the same. HP printer and their ridiculous ink costs would be a good example of the MBA thinking where the business model is basically "We'll annoy people out of their money."
Or that Dell loaded 2nd rate computers up with bloatware and dumped what used to be Awesome support. Yes that used to be awesome with a capital A. Now they run neck and neck with Best Buy for customer horror stories.
I am the tech guy for my large family. I am totally sick of them buying various computers, dell, HP, acer, or whatnot and my being expected to pull their asses out of the fire when the bloated pile of crap blows up. I am one inch from throwing them across the room when I go to hit shift and keep hitting the stupid \| button that makes up half of the shift key on most crap computers these days. Then it takes hours to remove all the norton AV trials and whatnot. If I try to wipe the OS it is near impossible to find a matching version of Windows OS that will match their product key. Basically I haven't used windows much since XP so I hate supporting vista and windows 7, I suspect that I will just shrug when presented with a windows 8 problem. I'll just fearmonger them with suggestions that windows 8 is spying on them.
For all the complaints I have about mac (Cost being #1) there is no bloatware and with a timecapsule set up, restores, and upgrades are brain dead. Worst support issue I've had with a mac in a long time was iCloud being a royal pain in the ass.
In a few cases I have managed to get them over to a good desktop running Linux and the support issues have been completely limited to printer drivers. I suspect that some of these machines might still be running 8 years from now.
What I don't understand is why there isn't somebody trying to sell me a good Raspberry Pi: Say 1.5Ghz dual core, 2-4G ram, 16G SSD, OK video (enough for HD Youtube), and wireless. Say $99. A tiny little box that looks like a USB hub. I would leave a trail of those in family houses. That computer would take the world by storm. If the SSD was removable then for support all I would need is the SD card.
The OnStar system is one of many deal breakers that would prevent me from buying a GM product; that along with a zillion horror stories. Seeing that many people feel the same way all this does is open up an easy way for competitors to compete. They just won't put that feature in. Their advertising becomes easy, "Look we didn't screw up your purchase."
The only companies that will put these sort of features in are usually defending some other business model. So Apple will put in measures to defend iTunes. Google will put in measures to defend their store, and it looks like Microsoft is thinking about measures to defend either their OS or their store.
But does anyone really think that the server manufacturers are going to make servers that make it hard to install Linux? Also Microsoft is becoming weaker and weaker. They certainly have some weight to throw around but even if they bully a few desktop manufacturers into forcing some protection onto their systems no doubt they will just release a "server only" motherboard that doesn't have any protection and is a complete copy of the desktop except something like the BIOS will boot up and say "Server BIOS". Not to mention that other MB manufacturers will just tell MS to go pound sand.
Also does anyone think that say the Raspberry Pi will give a hoot as to what MS has to say?
The real war on General purpose computing is the trend people using smart phones and tablets. These devices do almost everything the average user needs. It is the more power user types who need what is becoming the specialty hardware of a desktop that they can control. As a programmer I need to be able to install the OpenCV libraries and whatnot but my mother wants the fewest clicks to get to her mail.
Also keep in mind that the seemingly locked down iPhone has done as well as it has due to the fact that it is far less locked down than the phones that proceeded it including the blackberry. Often you would buy a phone from Telus or Sprint only to find that they had crippled some features such as custom ring tones so as to sell you ring tones. When Apple introduced the iPhone they didn't let the Telcos crap up their phones. Can you imagine what the Telcos would have done to the iPhones if they could. All kinds of custom backgrounds, remove the app store and replace it with one of their own, make it so you can't upload your own music, can't surf via WiFi. Again these companies would have crippled the iPhone to protect their other business model.
Again as a programmer if Apple were to lock down the next version of the OS, I would not upgrade and then begin exploring other options. As it stands my next phone will almost certainly be something like an Openmoko.
PS The business model that GM seems to be defending is the fact that the government is their primary lifeline. They know who is buttering their bread and it certainly isn't the consumer.
Information is power; If a government is forced to be wide open then they lose power. Open information should replace or be added to the 2nd Amendment. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to act as a brake on out of control government. But at this point in history a bunch of guys running around with 9mm pistols isn't going to change a thing. But open information can change everything. Corrupt contracts become a whole lot harder if the whole process becomes open. Things like ACTA become impossible if every step of the lobbyists become open and accountable. When I am talking open I mean really really open. Things like the DHS would be wide open. The only time I would think the government should be allowed to be even slightly closed would be open investigations which would require a judge to say, OK this is closed for 30 days. Then wiretaps and whatnot would be effective. But the second the investigation ends the records are instantly open.
All finance should be open right down to the paperclips. Wasteful spending can't happen if everyone can take a peek into their area of expertise and say, "Whoa there cowboy. You don't buy laptops for $2000 and a service plan of another $1000 per year." Or "That isn't the right concrete for an overpass. It will fall down in 10 years."
Think of the steps that had to be taken in private in order to create the Dick Murtha Airport.
Keep in mind that there are Nordic countries where they publish income tax records onto the internet. They do record who looks though. So you can see your neighbour's taxes but they can see that you are a nosy bastard. The result has been some fantastically rich people somehow claiming around $100,000 in income being busted by people finding this and then it becoming front page news.
How many times have the police gotten out of control where the whole thing was dealt with "internally"? Open government would end this.
I find the 12 hour a day people come from 5 camps, the first are compensating for the fact that they actually suck. They know in their hearts that they suck so they put on a dog and pony show about how "dedicated" they are. Then they have something to lord over the actually productive people who are in for 8 hours or less. An easy way to detect these people is that they don't have any sense of proportion. They are working on a project to save some printer ink or whatnot and get mad at someone else taking time off for a very sick family member.
The next group (and often overlapping with the first group) just have OCD and don't know any other way. They would work 24 hours a day if they could. As with all things OCD they can't explain why they are driven to do what they do but they think something bad will happen if they don't. An easy way to tell this type is by the size of their spreadsheets. I have met OCD types with time management spreadsheets that went into the double letter columns.
Another group are screw-ups or frauds and don't leave because they need to control the whole situation and make sure that people don't step into their position for a moment and detect the fraud. This type often either avoids vacation or breaks it up into short little one so that nobody takes over.
The least frequent is someone who is determined to succeed at something where the benefits to success are huge, curing cancer or something and they are actually contributing to the end goal with every hour they put in.
The saddest is the over stressed employee who works for a crappy company where they have to give "110%" just to keep their jobs. Sort of the Glengarry Glen Ross thing of "First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place is you're fired." These places tend to be family run where the family feels that every low paid employee should work as hard as they did once when they first started the business.
In almost all of the above situations the person is a bully and even if they are productive their insanity drives the the best employees away resulting in a slow but sure gutting of the company. The horrible problem is that for a short while it usually generates results. So you bring in the new type A manager and boom the team doubles productivity. Manager gets huge bonus. But a 6 months later 3 of the very best people have left. A year later those 3 have recruited 6 more of the very best. The remaining dregs develop ulcers and huge mistakes start to happen. The golden child manager successfully blames those who have left for the new problems. Then the golden child moves on to something new and more lucrative highlighting their success where they doubled productivity when they took over.
You are mostly quite correct. Canada does have a better system but it is broken in more subtle ways. Campaign contributions are quite limited and sometimes even enforced. But with such a paucity of money the politicians and rich find other ways. One way is to own the media. The media in Canada is owned by a very few a good example would be izzy asper. The publications that guy owned were pretty one sided.
The other way that Canadian politicians completely blow it to compensate for their small pots of election money is to pay big bucks for events and whatnot. These events are then handled by advertising agencies. Then the same agency will "help out" with the campaigns of their friends. This "help" is all volunteer help so it doesn't show up on the books. The other half of that is that the advertising agencies will get famous people to appear in something and then mysteriously this same famous person will show up at a few fundraisers for the politicians.
The last and oldest way is the same as the world round which is to give lots of paving/construction business/building permits to their very wealthy friends and then the fundraisers will never be dry. Many decades ago the Liberal government handed out all kinds of goodies to their most loyal friends via the CRTC in the form of cable, telco, and radio licenses. Until recently you had a small cadre of some of the richest most influential Canadians as supporters. It is fading now through mergers and deaths.
And as for attack ads they are new to Canada but they are here. So our next election will be a choice among three: an NDP who thinks their best years didn't just happen. Or a technocrat who is trying to turn Canada into the US. Or either a liberal who nobody cares about or one who would have starred on "rich kids of instagram" 15 years ago (depending on who the liberals end up with).
In my opinion the key is to assume that a group of boobs are going to get elected. The solution is to not beat our heads against the wall to find a better electoral system but to switch to an open government so that we can quickly cull the worst of the boobs. Bev Oda is a Canadian politician who was spending money like a drug lord but open information as to that spending resulted in her being booted. If all communications, spending, travel, budgets, etc were instantly open to the public the worst of these bozos would be thrown overboard in a week and the others would watch their step. Then it would matter less as to who was elected.
The VP is generally considered a waste product. You don't pick your VP to match your views you pick your VP to fill in the blanks in your own personality. Romney is generally a centrist so he needs a fairly right wing VP. Romney being a Mormon needs a more "Christian" VP although I am surprised he didn't pick a protestant. Also you pick a VP from a swing state. Wisconsin could go either way and has an OK number of electoral collage votes. But at the same time you can't make it look like you have picked a token VP that is unbelievable. Obama has the black vote locked up so a black VP would be a waste and might actually lose Romney some white vote. The same with women voters. A token woman would doubtfully unlock many votes and again might have lost votes that he otherwise owns. The key for both candidates is to get out the existing vote and that is who you are picking the VP for. When I say lose votes I mean that they stay home not that they vote for the other guy.
Where I worry is that Romney's wealth is built upon going into companies that aren't performing well and unlocking hidden wealth. Often this came by doing short term things like cutting R&D. The wealth would be "unlocked" and they would sell the company and make a pile of money. They did other interesting short term things like loading these companies up with debt. This all was great for them when they could cut and run but a country is the opposite. When you look at a policy now you need to think about the implications a century from now.
If defense were to be cut in half and schools spending doubled the implications on defense would be immediate. But the benefits from the school increases might be 20 years down the road. But it would be glorious 20 years from now.
I am a Canadian but it looks like the US suffers from the common malady of all democracies. Somehow we end up with choices that are all crap. In my life I have had the option of voting for one politician who turned out to be good. Somehow we need to be able to weed out these guys earlier in the process. Or maybe eliminate the party system?
How can we have any hope that these guys(most world politicians) will spend wisely on science when they won't even listen to the majority of the population who want the war on drugs to end. Not a peep on an issue that is destroying the culture and economy of the US. This goes way past the issue of who some guy picked to be his spare.
This is what class action suits are for. Do you think the executives are taking any cuts or are they paying themselves huge bonuses for how smart they are. This is a classic MBA style move. They might save a few bucks and it looked good on a spread sheet; but now I have labeled Joyent as a waste product in my head. Thus if at some future time I am shopping for a replacement for my present hosting I would just strike Joyent off the list. Before this I had never heard of them. Good PR Job Joyent.
From my limited legal knowledge where a case like this lay is if the original offer was an accident then they would have some weak ground to stand on. Otherwise this is a simple case of not honoring a contract. The other key is that you paid money. If the offer had been free it would weaken your position. Kraft once printed a boatload of KD packages with a winning minivan. They got most back but still a pile of people "Won" a minivan. They didn't each get a minivan but after a legal tussle they did get something. If the "Winners" had even the slightest bit of legal ground to stand on then you would be solid.
Their only hope is that the contract says something like, "We reserve the right to screw you if we feel like it." But even then Judges rarely let someone use such a clause to change the overall flavor of a contract as contracts are usually boiled down to you offer something in exchange for something else. If one party does their agreed part then the other party is obliged to do theirs. Wishful thinking or saying, "No more free ride for those guys" doesn't change the reality that existed when the contract was signed. The only probable room for a contract dispute would be as to the definition of lifetime. Your lifetime? The estate's lifetime. The lifetime of your company? And the other possible dispute would be if they declared bankruptcy. How would you fit in as a creditor?
I suspect that the best they could hope for would be they refund you your money prorated for the "Lifetime" used. So say 60 year lifetime. You signed up 5 years ago. Then they would have to refund 55/60ths of what you paid. But you could argue that this is unexpected and that moving costs so you want more. Messy for them.
Canada even has at least one financial company looks exactly like Canada's version of Countrywide. The main thing missing with this company is that the head guy doesn't quite have the tan of the Countrywide guy; close though.
One difference between Canada's property bubble and the US one is that the ratings people have already started to lower the ratings on Canada's banks. I guess the ratings people have two advantages, one is that they might have learned something from the US disaster and two is that they are far away from the wrath of the Canadian banks and regulators who otherwise might be able to get them to alter reality.
To respond to the OP's question. Canada has huge regional disparities. Centered in Southern Alberta there is a mountain of cash; but that cash is totally dependent on the price of oil remaining high. If oil were to drop below the extraction costs, say $60, a huge amount of the money in Alberta just drys up. BC has quite a healthy economy and is not too bad. Ontario is trying to rediscover itself after decades of manufacturing that depended on a low Canadian dollar which was bumped way up by Alberta oil. Quebec is just weird. Eastern Canada, called the Maritimes has zero money outside of Newfoundland. The key to understanding Canada is that we specialize in hacking things out of the ground and sea. So if the world commodities market is strong then so are we. Other than Quebec being petulant Canada is a very stable place where the two biggest riots in a while were about student fees and hockey. Canada is self sufficient in food and oil so in theory could weather a world swamping storm. So if your research is in something that comes out of the sea or ground then someone will have work for you to do.
The main downside to Canada is that we are next to the US and can't move away if trouble starts brewing there.
Ah but my suggestion is that the clock partially starts when the sales start. Or a certain number of years. That way if a drug takes a while to go through the pipe then my 10 years hasn't started. But this way if some company completely hits a home run, say curing all cancers, and wants 1 million per dose then they will only get 10 years from that golden goose. Right now if you hit that home run I suspect that regulatory approval would be near instant and it would be 2032 before it went generic.
Keep in mind that one of the reasons for the slow pipeline is that most new drugs suck. They are only arguably better than existing ones and only through intense marketing are the drug companies able to sell their $100 per dose drug over the just as good older $0.05 per dose drug.
Also there would be another patent reform for drugs. Often a drug is given a patent for one use only to be granted a later patent for another use. So you might have a stomach drug that is also good at 50mg for helping pregnant women. As doctors note this second use the company comes along and patents it. So as the 100mg stomach pills go off patent the drug companies go after doctors who tell pregnant women to just buy the older stomach pills and cut them in two. The difference in price can be 100x.
I agree that big data is often crazy big. I wonder how some of this data is even moved around. 60 gigabits sounds amazing. But if the system is set up with map reduce or other cool tap into the data often something can be simply crafted that will produce stunningly useful data. Other times what appears to be big data turns out to be not that big. It was the salesman who made his solution sound more ingenious than it was.
And yes carefully crafted python scripts can often perform interesting data analysis on petabytes, even on a laptop. Brute force no, statistical sampling, yes.
If your discrete math/information theory skills are up to snuff you can usually avoid brainbendingly(for the CPU/GPU) difficult math and boil it down to something more elegant. If you properly apply some higher math to a carefully selected subset you often can make shockingly precise and accurate statements about the whole to a known level of certainty. So I am not saying some idiot with a few python scripts, but if you have the talent around you might be able to avoid a multi million dollar consulting company. Not applicable to all data but unless you are talking about specific medical records or financial transactions interesting generalizations are often worth much more than simple subtotals. Worth trying out first.
There are a few people with massive data sets. But often what seems huge to the people buying these systems is actually quite small. They might say, "We have 1000 stores inventory and sales data; that is huge." But it is really a few hundred gigs with a few hundred megs of data being generated per day. It would only be massive if you printed it out. I witnessed one consulting company charging 5000 every time to print out a report that was based on a fairly simple SQL statement. Their excuse was that it wasn't in the original spec and was maintenance requiring a DBA a whole day. The database was a few gigs; the report a few dozen pages.
The point is to make them ask for what might actually be a reasonable amount, instead of abusing the system. If a company worth 10 million is being sued for 1 billion then any sale in progress will collapse. But if they are being sued for $500,000 then the value of the company drops during litigation but can still go through. Also the big number impress the jury. They feel bad knocking 300 million down to the actual value of $30,000 so they don't and knock it down to a few million. But if it had started $50,000 they are more likely to hit the $30,000 that would fit the damages calculated.
The big number lawsuits just create unnecessary stress.
This also can destroy other financing. If your bank sees your tiny company being sued for a billion then your line of credit can dry up fast.
Have you ever met one of the sales people from these companies? They are really really good. They take closing a sale to a whole new level. These salespeople don't walk in off the street and say, "Hey would you guys like a 50 million dollar data analysis package?" In governments they work at the highest levels. Then the directive to put out a tender that only fits one company suddenly comes out of nowhere and poof a mega project takes off. With companies they work at the board of directors level. So again suddenly a team of "consultants" shows up and determines what is needed is a multi million dollar data analysis system. Other approaches is that they buy out a consulting company that is already entrenched with a government or large corporation. If you fight the system their "consultants" will discover that you are a useless tool and recommend your replacement. If you are reluctant then they offer you a crazy training package and that you should come to their booth at some in a trade show in an exotic local.
If all that doesn't work then they always just have the buy out. That is where they find a decision maker they can't take out but they offer her a juicy job that she will take shortly after the contract is signed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun
So big data may or may not be a complete fad but it is another way for sales people to fool upper management into buying a zillion dollar system instead of running a few well crafted python scripts on a dedicated machine and feeding them into an open source graphing solution such as Graphite.
When congress finally crafts a law to eliminate patent abuse an easy measure of success is if companies like this are destroyed. Not hurt but close up shop like most of the buggy whip companies. When a company exists only to sue vibrant and healthy companies they are a parasite, that is they provide no value to society while simultaneously damaging it.
The politicians blah blah about cutting red tape and creating jobs but what about protecting us from evil like this? I can't imagine the flowering of new developments that would take place without bloodsuckers like these.
One of the things that hold third world countries back is that if you have the slightest bit of success some Mr Big / Warlord / Village chief / Crimelord / Well connected bureaucrat will come along and take whatever you have. There are few property rights in these countries. Yet in the western world the bloodsuckers have perverted the very thing that use to make us successful (property rights) where they do the very thing that those property rights were supposed to prevent.
My suggestions for IP reform are to significantly raise the bar as to what an invention really is. If someone invents a cool new battery don't let someone patent the use of that battery in everything. Shorten the life of a patent from 20 years to 10 years after the first significant use of that product. (or 20 years whichever comes first)
Software patents; how about no.
Change the lifetimes for different categories of patent. Drug patents, 10 years. Material patents 15 years. Electronic patents 5 years.
Limit the damages to a tiny percentage of the wholesale value of a product.
Only allow the original inventors or companies that are implementing the product to launch a lawsuit. If you are sitting on a stack of patents they all you are doing is holding back the progress of humanity.
If a company has more than 30% of a market then make the licensing of their patents mandatory for a nominal cost.
Don't let universities charge too much for patents. Yet don't let their professors hive of some research to create a company and then patent the crap out of it.
Have an independent government department for patent invalidation. Having the patent office invalidate a patent is having them say they were wrong. Also judges need to be able to invalidate a patent.
Again raise the bar for what gets patented. I'm looking at you one-click-purchase!
If a suit asks for one amount and wins a much lower amount then the difference should be deducted from the awarded amount. So if they ask for a billion and win 100 million then you subtract 900 million resulting in 0 (zero dollars). This should be for all lawsuits.
Lastly if a lawfirm sues for a patent that later becomes invalidated then they can be hit with treble damages. (That is treble what they demanded.)
The medium of eInk is completely different than an LED type display. eInk is damn good for a page turning book, as in a novel or something where you read the pages slowly and in order. eInk is terrible for skimming where you flick back and fourth or where the data is highly formatted such as a textbook.
LED is awesome for stuff you read quickly such as video (many frames per second) a web page, twitter, facebook, etc. But even then the size determines what you will read. A larger screen (iPad or bigger) is good for skimming a textbook, or a magazine. I don't want to read a magazine or textbook on a 7 inch screen. Even though the screen is book size and the weight will be more book like I suspect that people will not want to read 50 shades of stupid on a smaller iPad. So that basically leaves it to be used for games, video, and other things that you would do with a really big phone.
I would say that the revolutionary size would be to bump up the normal iPad so that it doesn't have that huge bezel and a genuine 10+ inch screen; at least the size of a National Geographic. Then I can really do the textbook/magazine thing really well.
The revolutionary thing to do with eInk would be to make it way tougher (2 dead kindles in this house) and keep making it crisper. I am not sure that colour is even that important. Colour might make it easier to sell in Staples but only if it doesn't come at the expense of lightness/crispness/cost/ or battery. I wouldn't mind the screen being a notch bigger but at most another inch.
I didn't use math much past counter++; until I learned some hard core math. Then I had a new hammer and the math in my code grew to the point where I now need GPUs to keep up. I love OpenCL.Discrete math rocks. I look back at my old pathetic basic algebra self and shudder.
Often it is useful for either figuring out what is going to happen when some set of algorithms get pounded (instead of just coding up a script to bash them) or in cool analysis of data that otherwise just sat silently in some log file.
Or have a crap ISP like Eastlink that has always throttled uploading of any kind. When I upload using ftp or ssh I am lucky to get 60kbs sustained. 1.6mbs down. The CRTC needs to gets its ass in gear and get some real competition. Toronto isn't all of Canada.
With most of the dry lock bags they start getting scuffed and become fogged and translucent instead of transparent. A quick wipe with Armor All and transparency returns. I use some double tough ziplock freezer bags as well and the Armor All works to clean them up as well.
Often investor driven companies find "buying opportunities" and then milk them for all they are worth missing the whole point that made the company successful. (Think Sears) I can see myself trying to explain open source to a group of MBAs for a week and still having zero impact.
"So if we open the source we can force people to use our code?"
"If we stop development won't people just keep buying the same old buggy junk?"
"So the L in LGPL means they buy a license?"
"Can we patent C++?"
"How much did we pay our lawyers to draw up this LGPL license."
"Nothing, then they can't be very good lawyers."
"Can we sue these wx People to stop them from giving away a GUI api for free?"
"I don't use linux. I think we should stop shipping a linux version."
"I only use a BlackBerry. RIM is offering me personally $50,000 if we stop development for iOS and Android. I think we should first develop a BB version."
"We have to figure out a way to legally stop people from forking."
My prediction is that QT is dead if they release the iOS and Android version as commercial only versions. It won't die that day but that is the day the hour glass is turned for the last time.
This is like religion in the 1600's and earlier controlling the government to take out those who didn't play by their rules. We are better off with the separation of church and state and will be better off with a massive reduction in the breadth and depth of copyright/patent rules. I agree that it is good that if someone writes a book that the publishing industry can't just rip them off. But I disagree that the writer of Happy Birthday is still able to control who sings his song all these years later. Even the same with the Beatles. By this point people should be at least able to rework them into something modern and potentially more interesting. I suspect that much of the lack of variety in pop music is that they don't dare do something interesting that might be similar to something done
Copyright rules at this point would be like a guy who you hired 50 years ago to paint one of your apartments is somehow able to demand 30% of the rent from that unit. He may have done a really really nice job but when you look at copyright as where the public good lay it would be better for all if these things came available way faster. Also the restrictions should be more relaxed. A song is the majority of a composition. Any copyright on a few riffs should be done in a year or two.
The same with a story. The whole composition might have a decade or two of protection but the characters and storyline should lose out in a few years. It is definitely time for new blood in the Star Wars series but even Harry Potter characters should be fair game soon if JK can't be bothered with continuing their journey.
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Often the "Rock Stars" are either programmers who self identify with this and often have some form of seniority; or are blowhards who have the upper management sold on their amazing mad skills. A quick bit of digging will turn out that the database "overhaul" that he did in one weekend that would have taken mere mortals 6 months that resulted in the reports running 20x faster was actually an upgrade of an 8 year old server with an 8 CPU SSD drived, 64GB beasty; so a 20x improvement is actually a bit of a disappointment. Another sign of rockstars is often certifications coming out of the wazoo. I agree with previous posters: Cowboy is probably the better title.
Sometimes the RockStars are stupid but it is even worse when they are really smart. That is when they start coding in assembler knowing that they are creating a dependency on them of mega proportions.
A term I like is rarefied programmers. These programmers are usually quiet and usually leave people scratching their heads; not in confusion; but with puzzlement as to why they didn't see such an easy solution. The code is usually small and understood by all. Often things just get done and all around them benefit. An interesting way to detect these programmers is that they use an odd mix of the old an new. They might be using C++ right along with some NoSQL solution. C++ because they are very good at it and NoSQL because it was the logical tool for the job.
Where these rarefied programmers can get into conflict and "cause trouble" is when they have to deal with the RockStars. Some RockStar with management support will reject unit testing (slows me down) insist on using something (cool) like Go and then need to alter the Linux Kernel as it (I have witnessed this). The rarefied programmer will move on and take the two best programmers with them.
I have noticed quite a few people blaming MBAs for the problems of RockStar programmers; this is due to RockStars providing the MBAs with a good story for sales. "Our guy was the first certified Oracle DBA in the state." "Our guy singlehandedly programmed a NASA Sub system." "Our guy is certified to level 20." "Our guy worked 20 straight days for 16 hours a day to finish a project." MBAs need zest and sizzle or they don't get an obscene bonus. Why do they get the obscene bonus because they golf with the CEO and brag about how they have a RockStar programmer.
The rarefied programmer is usually too boring for the MBAs. "Our guy found an open source product so we canceled my pet project and just used the OS product." "Our guy added unit testing; whatever the hell that is." "Our guy switched the programmer's editor from Eclipse to Sublime Text 2" "Our guy showed the accountants how to make a better macro."
The rivets in airplanes are only now being partially replaced. This has always been a what the heck for me. The main difference between a jet in Mad Men and now is the smoking. All kinds of little things since 1960's air travel make it mostly safer such as the detection of wind shear but is almost nasty that a jet from 50 years ago could operate today almost unnoticed. There seems to be a cultural rejection of anything that is significantly better. One guy crudely glued a nosecone and tail onto his honda giving it an extremely low air resistance; resulting in something like doubling his mileage but it made my culturally tuned self cringe. How is it that even someone as techno desiring as myself would reject such a great improvement as weirdo? Keep in mind that this was crudely added on; not wind tunnel tested; or done by an artist. There was a huge amount of room for improvement yet no car manufacturer has run with it. Think of the early ugly honda hybrids with the covered rear tires. Again rejected. We should be clapping as these cars go by seeing that they literally improve our lives with less pollution and reliance on fossil fuels. But our sense of what is proper overrides this.
How can we possibly think outside the box when there is such a huge cultural pressure to conform at all costs? Even the people who generally think of themselves as non conformists fit into a few acceptable boxes of non conformity.
One of the solutions should be via money. Science degrees would be subsidized by those getting business degrees. Society could take a leap and say that scientists doing fundamental R&D don't pay income taxes.(Along with other tax benefits to R&D) That would then prove that we value innovation over say bankers and hedge fund managers.
I love the idea of less web surfing. I have observed that paired programming is great for weak programmers. The sort who can sort of program but aren't really that good. Two of them together usually add up to one good programmer. Two good programmers often add up to a great programmer, but the great programmers often move quickly enough that there is little or no benefit to their pairing. Just sit them really near each other.
Basically it seems that paired programming eliminates weaknesses rather than emphasizing strengths. It would be interesting to sit the genius but gaff prone programmer with the squarely center of the box but obsessively bug free programmer. If they didn't kill each other the pair might be a powerhouse.
In less managed offices often a what would be an otherwise very good programmer sucks because of surfing, phoning, texting, being late, leaving early, lack of focus, or yacking. Pairing them up would shame them out of many of these behaviors.
A wonderful side benefit from paired programming is that the programmers quickly each learn tricks from the other. But this works best if the pairs are periodically rotated. Also pairs are less likely to get stuck and spin their wheels on any given problem. Depending on the complexity and R&D involved this can be a huge win. But if the programming is simple and somewhat rote then there is little benefit. Another rarely sung benefit is that those poor lost programmers are less able to hide the fact that they are, in fact, totally lost.
I don't think that pair programming is a panacea but a solution to some problems. The key is to identify if you have these problems in your work environment.
Someone who comes to me with their tech problems got suckered by this one. But luckily the person is quite stubborn and regularly ignores me so they ended up telling the scammers that they were doing it wrong and did it their own way. The only thing that was changed was the default home page which this person translated as installed a virus.
I hate to sound fanboyish but one other bit of mac magic for one relative who is a physical destroyer of laptops (has the money to deal with it) is that a time machine restore works when jumping to a newer machine with a newer OS. That is where the real magic lay. Every desktop icon, bookmark, cookie, even the field presets in firefox; all back the way they were before the previous laptop was crushed. In the last disaster the only setting that was wrong was this new "natural" scroll that Lion does. I couldn't imagine finding every stupid setting and trying to move them to a new windows machine. I never can remember where Outlook keeps it stuff and every time I move it from one machine to another it never works quite right.
It sounds like Asus is somewhat in the correct direction but zero bloatware is the only amount I will accept anymore.
A few years ago I spoke to a senior executive at Dell. She told me that when they sell a basic system they might even lose a few bucks. But if they sell a norton subscription or Microsoft Office that they make a hefty commission and that is where the profit lay.
This is the sort of mangled thinking that drove the US car industry in the 70s and early 80s; where bizarre manipulations of the customers was the first order of business and it became inconceivable that the route to success was to make good cars that customers wanted. Even Lee Iaccoca is credited with the K-Car being what saved Chrysler. On paper it did save the company but the K-Car was such a pile of trash that it just showed how far behind the likes of Honda they had fallen. In the end Chrysler lurched from one crises to the next until it was basically dead. Most of the computer companies are doing the same. HP printer and their ridiculous ink costs would be a good example of the MBA thinking where the business model is basically "We'll annoy people out of their money."
Or that Dell loaded 2nd rate computers up with bloatware and dumped what used to be Awesome support. Yes that used to be awesome with a capital A. Now they run neck and neck with Best Buy for customer horror stories.
I am the tech guy for my large family. I am totally sick of them buying various computers, dell, HP, acer, or whatnot and my being expected to pull their asses out of the fire when the bloated pile of crap blows up. I am one inch from throwing them across the room when I go to hit shift and keep hitting the stupid \| button that makes up half of the shift key on most crap computers these days. Then it takes hours to remove all the norton AV trials and whatnot. If I try to wipe the OS it is near impossible to find a matching version of Windows OS that will match their product key. Basically I haven't used windows much since XP so I hate supporting vista and windows 7, I suspect that I will just shrug when presented with a windows 8 problem. I'll just fearmonger them with suggestions that windows 8 is spying on them.
For all the complaints I have about mac (Cost being #1) there is no bloatware and with a timecapsule set up, restores, and upgrades are brain dead. Worst support issue I've had with a mac in a long time was iCloud being a royal pain in the ass.
In a few cases I have managed to get them over to a good desktop running Linux and the support issues have been completely limited to printer drivers. I suspect that some of these machines might still be running 8 years from now.
What I don't understand is why there isn't somebody trying to sell me a good Raspberry Pi: Say 1.5Ghz dual core, 2-4G ram, 16G SSD, OK video (enough for HD Youtube), and wireless. Say $99. A tiny little box that looks like a USB hub. I would leave a trail of those in family houses. That computer would take the world by storm. If the SSD was removable then for support all I would need is the SD card.
The OnStar system is one of many deal breakers that would prevent me from buying a GM product; that along with a zillion horror stories. Seeing that many people feel the same way all this does is open up an easy way for competitors to compete. They just won't put that feature in. Their advertising becomes easy, "Look we didn't screw up your purchase."
The only companies that will put these sort of features in are usually defending some other business model. So Apple will put in measures to defend iTunes. Google will put in measures to defend their store, and it looks like Microsoft is thinking about measures to defend either their OS or their store.
But does anyone really think that the server manufacturers are going to make servers that make it hard to install Linux? Also Microsoft is becoming weaker and weaker. They certainly have some weight to throw around but even if they bully a few desktop manufacturers into forcing some protection onto their systems no doubt they will just release a "server only" motherboard that doesn't have any protection and is a complete copy of the desktop except something like the BIOS will boot up and say "Server BIOS". Not to mention that other MB manufacturers will just tell MS to go pound sand.
Also does anyone think that say the Raspberry Pi will give a hoot as to what MS has to say?
The real war on General purpose computing is the trend people using smart phones and tablets. These devices do almost everything the average user needs. It is the more power user types who need what is becoming the specialty hardware of a desktop that they can control. As a programmer I need to be able to install the OpenCV libraries and whatnot but my mother wants the fewest clicks to get to her mail.
Also keep in mind that the seemingly locked down iPhone has done as well as it has due to the fact that it is far less locked down than the phones that proceeded it including the blackberry. Often you would buy a phone from Telus or Sprint only to find that they had crippled some features such as custom ring tones so as to sell you ring tones. When Apple introduced the iPhone they didn't let the Telcos crap up their phones. Can you imagine what the Telcos would have done to the iPhones if they could. All kinds of custom backgrounds, remove the app store and replace it with one of their own, make it so you can't upload your own music, can't surf via WiFi. Again these companies would have crippled the iPhone to protect their other business model.
Again as a programmer if Apple were to lock down the next version of the OS, I would not upgrade and then begin exploring other options. As it stands my next phone will almost certainly be something like an Openmoko.
PS The business model that GM seems to be defending is the fact that the government is their primary lifeline. They know who is buttering their bread and it certainly isn't the consumer.
Information is power; If a government is forced to be wide open then they lose power. Open information should replace or be added to the 2nd Amendment. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to act as a brake on out of control government. But at this point in history a bunch of guys running around with 9mm pistols isn't going to change a thing. But open information can change everything. Corrupt contracts become a whole lot harder if the whole process becomes open. Things like ACTA become impossible if every step of the lobbyists become open and accountable. When I am talking open I mean really really open. Things like the DHS would be wide open. The only time I would think the government should be allowed to be even slightly closed would be open investigations which would require a judge to say, OK this is closed for 30 days. Then wiretaps and whatnot would be effective. But the second the investigation ends the records are instantly open.
All finance should be open right down to the paperclips. Wasteful spending can't happen if everyone can take a peek into their area of expertise and say, "Whoa there cowboy. You don't buy laptops for $2000 and a service plan of another $1000 per year." Or "That isn't the right concrete for an overpass. It will fall down in 10 years."
Think of the steps that had to be taken in private in order to create the Dick Murtha Airport.
Keep in mind that there are Nordic countries where they publish income tax records onto the internet. They do record who looks though. So you can see your neighbour's taxes but they can see that you are a nosy bastard. The result has been some fantastically rich people somehow claiming around $100,000 in income being busted by people finding this and then it becoming front page news.
How many times have the police gotten out of control where the whole thing was dealt with "internally"? Open government would end this.
I find the 12 hour a day people come from 5 camps, the first are compensating for the fact that they actually suck. They know in their hearts that they suck so they put on a dog and pony show about how "dedicated" they are. Then they have something to lord over the actually productive people who are in for 8 hours or less. An easy way to detect these people is that they don't have any sense of proportion. They are working on a project to save some printer ink or whatnot and get mad at someone else taking time off for a very sick family member.
The next group (and often overlapping with the first group) just have OCD and don't know any other way. They would work 24 hours a day if they could. As with all things OCD they can't explain why they are driven to do what they do but they think something bad will happen if they don't. An easy way to tell this type is by the size of their spreadsheets. I have met OCD types with time management spreadsheets that went into the double letter columns.
Another group are screw-ups or frauds and don't leave because they need to control the whole situation and make sure that people don't step into their position for a moment and detect the fraud. This type often either avoids vacation or breaks it up into short little one so that nobody takes over.
The least frequent is someone who is determined to succeed at something where the benefits to success are huge, curing cancer or something and they are actually contributing to the end goal with every hour they put in.
The saddest is the over stressed employee who works for a crappy company where they have to give "110%" just to keep their jobs. Sort of the Glengarry Glen Ross thing of "First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place is you're fired." These places tend to be family run where the family feels that every low paid employee should work as hard as they did once when they first started the business.
In almost all of the above situations the person is a bully and even if they are productive their insanity drives the the best employees away resulting in a slow but sure gutting of the company. The horrible problem is that for a short while it usually generates results. So you bring in the new type A manager and boom the team doubles productivity. Manager gets huge bonus. But a 6 months later 3 of the very best people have left. A year later those 3 have recruited 6 more of the very best. The remaining dregs develop ulcers and huge mistakes start to happen. The golden child manager successfully blames those who have left for the new problems. Then the golden child moves on to something new and more lucrative highlighting their success where they doubled productivity when they took over.
You are mostly quite correct. Canada does have a better system but it is broken in more subtle ways. Campaign contributions are quite limited and sometimes even enforced. But with such a paucity of money the politicians and rich find other ways. One way is to own the media. The media in Canada is owned by a very few a good example would be izzy asper. The publications that guy owned were pretty one sided.
The other way that Canadian politicians completely blow it to compensate for their small pots of election money is to pay big bucks for events and whatnot. These events are then handled by advertising agencies. Then the same agency will "help out" with the campaigns of their friends. This "help" is all volunteer help so it doesn't show up on the books. The other half of that is that the advertising agencies will get famous people to appear in something and then mysteriously this same famous person will show up at a few fundraisers for the politicians.
The last and oldest way is the same as the world round which is to give lots of paving/construction business/building permits to their very wealthy friends and then the fundraisers will never be dry. Many decades ago the Liberal government handed out all kinds of goodies to their most loyal friends via the CRTC in the form of cable, telco, and radio licenses. Until recently you had a small cadre of some of the richest most influential Canadians as supporters. It is fading now through mergers and deaths.
And as for attack ads they are new to Canada but they are here. So our next election will be a choice among three: an NDP who thinks their best years didn't just happen. Or a technocrat who is trying to turn Canada into the US. Or either a liberal who nobody cares about or one who would have starred on "rich kids of instagram" 15 years ago (depending on who the liberals end up with).
In my opinion the key is to assume that a group of boobs are going to get elected. The solution is to not beat our heads against the wall to find a better electoral system but to switch to an open government so that we can quickly cull the worst of the boobs. Bev Oda is a Canadian politician who was spending money like a drug lord but open information as to that spending resulted in her being booted. If all communications, spending, travel, budgets, etc were instantly open to the public the worst of these bozos would be thrown overboard in a week and the others would watch their step. Then it would matter less as to who was elected.
It is a question of Justice. Small claims is the best way to get your money back; class action is the best way to get them back.
The VP is generally considered a waste product. You don't pick your VP to match your views you pick your VP to fill in the blanks in your own personality. Romney is generally a centrist so he needs a fairly right wing VP. Romney being a Mormon needs a more "Christian" VP although I am surprised he didn't pick a protestant. Also you pick a VP from a swing state. Wisconsin could go either way and has an OK number of electoral collage votes. But at the same time you can't make it look like you have picked a token VP that is unbelievable. Obama has the black vote locked up so a black VP would be a waste and might actually lose Romney some white vote. The same with women voters. A token woman would doubtfully unlock many votes and again might have lost votes that he otherwise owns. The key for both candidates is to get out the existing vote and that is who you are picking the VP for. When I say lose votes I mean that they stay home not that they vote for the other guy.
Where I worry is that Romney's wealth is built upon going into companies that aren't performing well and unlocking hidden wealth. Often this came by doing short term things like cutting R&D. The wealth would be "unlocked" and they would sell the company and make a pile of money. They did other interesting short term things like loading these companies up with debt. This all was great for them when they could cut and run but a country is the opposite. When you look at a policy now you need to think about the implications a century from now.
If defense were to be cut in half and schools spending doubled the implications on defense would be immediate. But the benefits from the school increases might be 20 years down the road. But it would be glorious 20 years from now.
I am a Canadian but it looks like the US suffers from the common malady of all democracies. Somehow we end up with choices that are all crap. In my life I have had the option of voting for one politician who turned out to be good. Somehow we need to be able to weed out these guys earlier in the process. Or maybe eliminate the party system?
How can we have any hope that these guys(most world politicians) will spend wisely on science when they won't even listen to the majority of the population who want the war on drugs to end. Not a peep on an issue that is destroying the culture and economy of the US. This goes way past the issue of who some guy picked to be his spare.
This is what class action suits are for. Do you think the executives are taking any cuts or are they paying themselves huge bonuses for how smart they are. This is a classic MBA style move. They might save a few bucks and it looked good on a spread sheet; but now I have labeled Joyent as a waste product in my head. Thus if at some future time I am shopping for a replacement for my present hosting I would just strike Joyent off the list. Before this I had never heard of them. Good PR Job Joyent.
From my limited legal knowledge where a case like this lay is if the original offer was an accident then they would have some weak ground to stand on. Otherwise this is a simple case of not honoring a contract. The other key is that you paid money. If the offer had been free it would weaken your position. Kraft once printed a boatload of KD packages with a winning minivan. They got most back but still a pile of people "Won" a minivan. They didn't each get a minivan but after a legal tussle they did get something. If the "Winners" had even the slightest bit of legal ground to stand on then you would be solid.
Their only hope is that the contract says something like, "We reserve the right to screw you if we feel like it." But even then Judges rarely let someone use such a clause to change the overall flavor of a contract as contracts are usually boiled down to you offer something in exchange for something else. If one party does their agreed part then the other party is obliged to do theirs. Wishful thinking or saying, "No more free ride for those guys" doesn't change the reality that existed when the contract was signed. The only probable room for a contract dispute would be as to the definition of lifetime. Your lifetime? The estate's lifetime. The lifetime of your company? And the other possible dispute would be if they declared bankruptcy. How would you fit in as a creditor?
I suspect that the best they could hope for would be they refund you your money prorated for the "Lifetime" used. So say 60 year lifetime. You signed up 5 years ago. Then they would have to refund 55/60ths of what you paid. But you could argue that this is unexpected and that moving costs so you want more. Messy for them.
Canada even has at least one financial company looks exactly like Canada's version of Countrywide. The main thing missing with this company is that the head guy doesn't quite have the tan of the Countrywide guy; close though.
One difference between Canada's property bubble and the US one is that the ratings people have already started to lower the ratings on Canada's banks. I guess the ratings people have two advantages, one is that they might have learned something from the US disaster and two is that they are far away from the wrath of the Canadian banks and regulators who otherwise might be able to get them to alter reality.
To respond to the OP's question. Canada has huge regional disparities. Centered in Southern Alberta there is a mountain of cash; but that cash is totally dependent on the price of oil remaining high. If oil were to drop below the extraction costs, say $60, a huge amount of the money in Alberta just drys up. BC has quite a healthy economy and is not too bad. Ontario is trying to rediscover itself after decades of manufacturing that depended on a low Canadian dollar which was bumped way up by Alberta oil. Quebec is just weird. Eastern Canada, called the Maritimes has zero money outside of Newfoundland. The key to understanding Canada is that we specialize in hacking things out of the ground and sea. So if the world commodities market is strong then so are we. Other than Quebec being petulant Canada is a very stable place where the two biggest riots in a while were about student fees and hockey. Canada is self sufficient in food and oil so in theory could weather a world swamping storm. So if your research is in something that comes out of the sea or ground then someone will have work for you to do.
The main downside to Canada is that we are next to the US and can't move away if trouble starts brewing there.
Ah but my suggestion is that the clock partially starts when the sales start. Or a certain number of years. That way if a drug takes a while to go through the pipe then my 10 years hasn't started. But this way if some company completely hits a home run, say curing all cancers, and wants 1 million per dose then they will only get 10 years from that golden goose. Right now if you hit that home run I suspect that regulatory approval would be near instant and it would be 2032 before it went generic.
Keep in mind that one of the reasons for the slow pipeline is that most new drugs suck. They are only arguably better than existing ones and only through intense marketing are the drug companies able to sell their $100 per dose drug over the just as good older $0.05 per dose drug.
Also there would be another patent reform for drugs. Often a drug is given a patent for one use only to be granted a later patent for another use. So you might have a stomach drug that is also good at 50mg for helping pregnant women. As doctors note this second use the company comes along and patents it. So as the 100mg stomach pills go off patent the drug companies go after doctors who tell pregnant women to just buy the older stomach pills and cut them in two. The difference in price can be 100x.
I agree that big data is often crazy big. I wonder how some of this data is even moved around. 60 gigabits sounds amazing. But if the system is set up with map reduce or other cool tap into the data often something can be simply crafted that will produce stunningly useful data. Other times what appears to be big data turns out to be not that big. It was the salesman who made his solution sound more ingenious than it was.
And yes carefully crafted python scripts can often perform interesting data analysis on petabytes, even on a laptop. Brute force no, statistical sampling, yes.
If your discrete math/information theory skills are up to snuff you can usually avoid brainbendingly(for the CPU/GPU) difficult math and boil it down to something more elegant. If you properly apply some higher math to a carefully selected subset you often can make shockingly precise and accurate statements about the whole to a known level of certainty. So I am not saying some idiot with a few python scripts, but if you have the talent around you might be able to avoid a multi million dollar consulting company. Not applicable to all data but unless you are talking about specific medical records or financial transactions interesting generalizations are often worth much more than simple subtotals. Worth trying out first.
There are a few people with massive data sets. But often what seems huge to the people buying these systems is actually quite small. They might say, "We have 1000 stores inventory and sales data; that is huge." But it is really a few hundred gigs with a few hundred megs of data being generated per day. It would only be massive if you printed it out. I witnessed one consulting company charging 5000 every time to print out a report that was based on a fairly simple SQL statement. Their excuse was that it wasn't in the original spec and was maintenance requiring a DBA a whole day. The database was a few gigs; the report a few dozen pages.
The point is to make them ask for what might actually be a reasonable amount, instead of abusing the system. If a company worth 10 million is being sued for 1 billion then any sale in progress will collapse. But if they are being sued for $500,000 then the value of the company drops during litigation but can still go through. Also the big number impress the jury. They feel bad knocking 300 million down to the actual value of $30,000 so they don't and knock it down to a few million. But if it had started $50,000 they are more likely to hit the $30,000 that would fit the damages calculated.
The big number lawsuits just create unnecessary stress.
This also can destroy other financing. If your bank sees your tiny company being sued for a billion then your line of credit can dry up fast.
Have you ever met one of the sales people from these companies? They are really really good. They take closing a sale to a whole new level. These salespeople don't walk in off the street and say, "Hey would you guys like a 50 million dollar data analysis package?" In governments they work at the highest levels. Then the directive to put out a tender that only fits one company suddenly comes out of nowhere and poof a mega project takes off. With companies they work at the board of directors level. So again suddenly a team of "consultants" shows up and determines what is needed is a multi million dollar data analysis system. Other approaches is that they buy out a consulting company that is already entrenched with a government or large corporation. If you fight the system their "consultants" will discover that you are a useless tool and recommend your replacement. If you are reluctant then they offer you a crazy training package and that you should come to their booth at some in a trade show in an exotic local.
If all that doesn't work then they always just have the buy out. That is where they find a decision maker they can't take out but they offer her a juicy job that she will take shortly after the contract is signed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun
So big data may or may not be a complete fad but it is another way for sales people to fool upper management into buying a zillion dollar system instead of running a few well crafted python scripts on a dedicated machine and feeding them into an open source graphing solution such as Graphite.
When congress finally crafts a law to eliminate patent abuse an easy measure of success is if companies like this are destroyed. Not hurt but close up shop like most of the buggy whip companies. When a company exists only to sue vibrant and healthy companies they are a parasite, that is they provide no value to society while simultaneously damaging it.
The politicians blah blah about cutting red tape and creating jobs but what about protecting us from evil like this? I can't imagine the flowering of new developments that would take place without bloodsuckers like these.
One of the things that hold third world countries back is that if you have the slightest bit of success some Mr Big / Warlord / Village chief / Crimelord / Well connected bureaucrat will come along and take whatever you have. There are few property rights in these countries. Yet in the western world the bloodsuckers have perverted the very thing that use to make us successful (property rights) where they do the very thing that those property rights were supposed to prevent.
My suggestions for IP reform are to significantly raise the bar as to what an invention really is. If someone invents a cool new battery don't let someone patent the use of that battery in everything. Shorten the life of a patent from 20 years to 10 years after the first significant use of that product. (or 20 years whichever comes first)
Software patents; how about no. Change the lifetimes for different categories of patent. Drug patents, 10 years. Material patents 15 years. Electronic patents 5 years.
Limit the damages to a tiny percentage of the wholesale value of a product.
Only allow the original inventors or companies that are implementing the product to launch a lawsuit. If you are sitting on a stack of patents they all you are doing is holding back the progress of humanity.
If a company has more than 30% of a market then make the licensing of their patents mandatory for a nominal cost.
Don't let universities charge too much for patents. Yet don't let their professors hive of some research to create a company and then patent the crap out of it.
Have an independent government department for patent invalidation. Having the patent office invalidate a patent is having them say they were wrong. Also judges need to be able to invalidate a patent.
Again raise the bar for what gets patented. I'm looking at you one-click-purchase!
If a suit asks for one amount and wins a much lower amount then the difference should be deducted from the awarded amount. So if they ask for a billion and win 100 million then you subtract 900 million resulting in 0 (zero dollars). This should be for all lawsuits.
Lastly if a lawfirm sues for a patent that later becomes invalidated then they can be hit with treble damages. (That is treble what they demanded.)
The medium of eInk is completely different than an LED type display. eInk is damn good for a page turning book, as in a novel or something where you read the pages slowly and in order. eInk is terrible for skimming where you flick back and fourth or where the data is highly formatted such as a textbook.
LED is awesome for stuff you read quickly such as video (many frames per second) a web page, twitter, facebook, etc. But even then the size determines what you will read. A larger screen (iPad or bigger) is good for skimming a textbook, or a magazine. I don't want to read a magazine or textbook on a 7 inch screen. Even though the screen is book size and the weight will be more book like I suspect that people will not want to read 50 shades of stupid on a smaller iPad. So that basically leaves it to be used for games, video, and other things that you would do with a really big phone.
I would say that the revolutionary size would be to bump up the normal iPad so that it doesn't have that huge bezel and a genuine 10+ inch screen; at least the size of a National Geographic. Then I can really do the textbook/magazine thing really well.
The revolutionary thing to do with eInk would be to make it way tougher (2 dead kindles in this house) and keep making it crisper. I am not sure that colour is even that important. Colour might make it easier to sell in Staples but only if it doesn't come at the expense of lightness/crispness/cost/ or battery. I wouldn't mind the screen being a notch bigger but at most another inch.
I didn't use math much past counter++; until I learned some hard core math. Then I had a new hammer and the math in my code grew to the point where I now need GPUs to keep up. I love OpenCL.Discrete math rocks. I look back at my old pathetic basic algebra self and shudder.
Often it is useful for either figuring out what is going to happen when some set of algorithms get pounded (instead of just coding up a script to bash them) or in cool analysis of data that otherwise just sat silently in some log file.
Or have a crap ISP like Eastlink that has always throttled uploading of any kind. When I upload using ftp or ssh I am lucky to get 60kbs sustained. 1.6mbs down. The CRTC needs to gets its ass in gear and get some real competition. Toronto isn't all of Canada.
With most of the dry lock bags they start getting scuffed and become fogged and translucent instead of transparent. A quick wipe with Armor All and transparency returns. I use some double tough ziplock freezer bags as well and the Armor All works to clean them up as well.
Often investor driven companies find "buying opportunities" and then milk them for all they are worth missing the whole point that made the company successful. (Think Sears) I can see myself trying to explain open source to a group of MBAs for a week and still having zero impact.
"So if we open the source we can force people to use our code?"
"If we stop development won't people just keep buying the same old buggy junk?" "So the L in LGPL means they buy a license?" "Can we patent C++?"
"How much did we pay our lawyers to draw up this LGPL license."
"Nothing, then they can't be very good lawyers."
"Can we sue these wx People to stop them from giving away a GUI api for free?"
"I don't use linux. I think we should stop shipping a linux version."
"I only use a BlackBerry. RIM is offering me personally $50,000 if we stop development for iOS and Android. I think we should first develop a BB version."
"We have to figure out a way to legally stop people from forking."
My prediction is that QT is dead if they release the iOS and Android version as commercial only versions. It won't die that day but that is the day the hour glass is turned for the last time.
This is like religion in the 1600's and earlier controlling the government to take out those who didn't play by their rules. We are better off with the separation of church and state and will be better off with a massive reduction in the breadth and depth of copyright/patent rules. I agree that it is good that if someone writes a book that the publishing industry can't just rip them off. But I disagree that the writer of Happy Birthday is still able to control who sings his song all these years later. Even the same with the Beatles. By this point people should be at least able to rework them into something modern and potentially more interesting. I suspect that much of the lack of variety in pop music is that they don't dare do something interesting that might be similar to something done
Copyright rules at this point would be like a guy who you hired 50 years ago to paint one of your apartments is somehow able to demand 30% of the rent from that unit. He may have done a really really nice job but when you look at copyright as where the public good lay it would be better for all if these things came available way faster. Also the restrictions should be more relaxed. A song is the majority of a composition. Any copyright on a few riffs should be done in a year or two.
The same with a story. The whole composition might have a decade or two of protection but the characters and storyline should lose out in a few years. It is definitely time for new blood in the Star Wars series but even Harry Potter characters should be fair game soon if JK can't be bothered with continuing their journey.