I couldn't agree more. Over the last ten years my family has owned a series of commercial low end computers from HP, Dell, and eMachines. Each one has crapped out after 3-4 years. The PC I built from scratch, in 1999, still running. Despite being moved ~6 times and hundreds of miles, numerous hard drive additions and removals, living for months at a time without a side panel, and residing for the past year in my parents' garage, unheated or cooled, it is still going strong, nearly seven years since it was built. I truly believe that the big companies put inferior components into their consumer PCs, knowing that consumers as a whole do not have institutional memories like the tech support and purchasing departments of large companies and governmental offices.
We have one, it's called prosecution laches. It applies when an inventor delays getting his patent granted to allow for the industry that it is in to make more money, so that when he pops up with it, the licenses for this "new technology" will be worth more. Unfortunately, 1) patents take 2 years on average to be granted anyway, which is enough time in software for the industry to mature and 2) it is only applied in extreme cases - it was created to deal with an inventor whose patents were granting 40-50 years after invention.
IANAL yet, but I am taking my exam for Patent Law and Policy in a few hours.
The constitution center just opened. It is very tech oriented and interactive. You'll get to see the wonderful foundation of freedom that we Americans are giving up for "safety" nowadays. While you're in Philly you can check out the new museum of money, which is the history of the US mint. Of course, you can't leave without getting a famous cheesesteak at Pat's or Geno's.
If only we had this when I was an undergraduate learning to program on Ada. Instead we were thrown into the mysteries of vi and ADA at the same time, with no hint of the existence of such a thing as an IDE or even a text editor that behaved in some way related to what we were used to. Nothing like learning to program on a language that won't let you compile if you have a few spaces in the wrong place, and a text editor that is even more baffling at first glance. My lab TA thought I was a natural programmer since I was always done first. In actuality, I was the first person to figure out that we had ftp access and to download then damn files and edit it on windows . I'm sorry, but vi never made any sense to me. Maybe that's why I'm in law school now
althought IANAL, I am a law student, and for the most part I agree with rjt's comment. I would add one thing though. This is a tort action (like a car accident) and as such, if there is a real chance of winning a large amount of damages, you will be able to find an attorney who will take this on contingency, i.e. work for free and take a percentage of your winnings. I would recommend opening the yellow pages and finding an attorney in your areas that handles slander/libel cases. You may want to look for one who specializes in cyberlaw/Internet cases, as this one can have some interesting consequences depending on the nature and location of your friend's business, the location of the forum's servers, and the location of his/her attacker.
The downside of this is that if she doesn't think she can win it, no attorney is going to spend her time and money litigating it, so don't be surprised if your friend is SOL on this one.
This goes along with the territory though. Think of how complex systems are now. It's ridiculous to try to expect everyone to know the internals of everything they use. It's good for a sysadmin to understand as much as possible about the system, but black box is so integral to computer science that to complain against it seems a tad ridiculous. Think of all the protocols that flow through the most basic user's monitor every day...to criticize a sysadmin or anyone else for wanting them to just work is just too hash.
Aha, a reason for patents. Intel is so willing to tell everyone what is going on behind the scenes is because the easier it is to program for a chip, the more likely it is to be used. If there were no patents, however, they couldn't release the internals because copycats could then undercut them on price. Since Intel has a patent(s) on each chip, they can afford to be forthcoming with the design.
The balance is actually in the current patent laws. Patent applications must prove that the invention is "Non-obvious." The reason that we have so man "obvious" patents is that 1) examiners are overworked and likely to just grant the patent and let the courts fight it out later. 2) Internet technologies and the state of the art are advancing more rapidly than patent examiners can stay current in. This also adds to reason number 1. That is why I still believe in the patent system. Just give it some time to correct itself. Slowly the patent office will get more CS people who are skilled in Internet "technologies." The boom is also slowing, which will allow examiners to spend more time with each patent. Anyway, patents and IP are kind of my thing, so if you have any mroe questions, please post them below.
Yes it's a shame that people will die in the meantime, but how about all those people that would die if the cure was never found? I hate to tell you, but drug companies are businesses . They want to make money. If everyone could use the research that they spent their hard earned money on, they wouldn't do it in the first place. This bait and switch thing is wrong, no doubt, but please leave the communist anti-patent rants to another article.
There is a differrence there. Sun is not really a hardware or a software company...it's more of a solution's provider. You can't just get what they sell off any shelf and expect it to work perfectly for your mission critical, distributed, real-time, mass storage needs. Apple sells PCs, which are supposed to work out of the box. Additionally, a lot of their hardware is stuff you really can't get very many places...at least not as many places as you can get a pc. Lastly, I dare say that Sun has a lot loess invested in its interface to its OS (CDE and whatever shell they use as default) than Apple.
"...a separate entity to deal with technology patents"
Exactly what patent isn't a technology patent? Jeez, how computer centric can you be? patents are for things that are new. Technology is by definition, of or relating to new stuff. I agree that there should more computer oriented patent examiners and judges, but give the system time. It is a great system that has worked for many years, let it correct itself.
My school has a similar deal for the OS class to use every semester. Unfortunately, low level internals was never taught...we ended up just using the machines to create mutexes and semaphores and shm's in programs and using systems calls to see that they were there. I heard in the future they are going to start doing low level stuff. Also, we looked at the QNX Neutrino architecture as a case study.
At my college we learn Ada first because we have one of the inventors of Ada on our CS faculty. I must say though that it has some definite benefits as a teaching language. The compiler finds a lot of stuff for that comes to bite you in the ass later (during execution) in C. The reason it is a pain in the ass is that it will also give you errors for having the incorrect number of spaces of indentation in a block. Pointers are also much more of an ordeal in Ada than in C. It also takes care of a lot of the passing by reference vs. passing by value stuff that is such a pain in C. All in all I have to say I actually prefer Ada because it makes post compilation debugging so much easier than C.
There are several problems with that setup. First and foremost is that it only runs on GSM networks, which are practically nonexistant in America. Secondly, it only gives a 9600 connection, which may not be a big deal now with monochrome palms. In the future as more devices go color and pictures become more important this will be seen as quite a limitation.
>> However, we have laws in place to prevent people from actually using those viruses. </BLOCKQUOTE> Laws don't prevent anyone from doing anything, they merely punish those who have been caught.
<BLOCKQUOTE>And we have anti-piracy laws (and open-source!) to take care of software cracks. And we have anti-piracy laws (and open-source!) to take care of software cracks. </BLOCKQUOTE>
So in your opinion software cracks are taken care of?
Nonetheless I agree with the ruling that code is speech. Now this leaves a way for M$ to get out of the monopoly rap: Open the source to Windows and IE and say it was their way of expressing how they felt that an integrated browser offerred the best posssible computer experience!
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. Over the last ten years my family has owned a series of commercial low end computers from HP, Dell, and eMachines. Each one has crapped out after 3-4 years. The PC I built from scratch, in 1999, still running. Despite being moved ~6 times and hundreds of miles, numerous hard drive additions and removals, living for months at a time without a side panel, and residing for the past year in my parents' garage, unheated or cooled, it is still going strong, nearly seven years since it was built. I truly believe that the big companies put inferior components into their consumer PCs, knowing that consumers as a whole do not have institutional memories like the tech support and purchasing departments of large companies and governmental offices.
Red
We have one, it's called prosecution laches. It applies when an inventor delays getting his patent granted to allow for the industry that it is in to make more money, so that when he pops up with it, the licenses for this "new technology" will be worth more. Unfortunately, 1) patents take 2 years on average to be granted anyway, which is enough time in software for the industry to mature and 2) it is only applied in extreme cases - it was created to deal with an inventor whose patents were granting 40-50 years after invention.
IANAL yet, but I am taking my exam for Patent Law and Policy in a few hours.
The constitution center just opened. It is very tech oriented and interactive. You'll get to see the wonderful foundation of freedom that we Americans are giving up for "safety" nowadays. While you're in Philly you can check out the new museum of money, which is the history of the US mint. Of course, you can't leave without getting a famous cheesesteak at Pat's or Geno's.
If only we had this when I was an undergraduate learning to program on Ada. Instead we were thrown into the mysteries of vi and ADA at the same time, with no hint of the existence of such a thing as an IDE or even a text editor that behaved in some way related to what we were used to. Nothing like learning to program on a language that won't let you compile if you have a few spaces in the wrong place, and a text editor that is even more baffling at first glance. My lab TA thought I was a natural programmer since I was always done first. In actuality, I was the first person to figure out that we had ftp access and to download then damn files and edit it on windows . I'm sorry, but vi never made any sense to me. Maybe that's why I'm in law school now
The Patent Office has a kids page. My mother is actually a Philadelphia elementary school teacher and she used it in class once. It went well
althought IANAL, I am a law student, and for the most part I agree with rjt's comment. I would add one thing though. This is a tort action (like a car accident) and as such, if there is a real chance of winning a large amount of damages, you will be able to find an attorney who will take this on contingency, i.e. work for free and take a percentage of your winnings. I would recommend opening the yellow pages and finding an attorney in your areas that handles slander/libel cases. You may want to look for one who specializes in cyberlaw/Internet cases, as this one can have some interesting consequences depending on the nature and location of your friend's business, the location of the forum's servers, and the location of his/her attacker.
The downside of this is that if she doesn't think she can win it, no attorney is going to spend her time and money litigating it, so don't be surprised if your friend is SOL on this one.
This goes along with the territory though. Think of how complex systems are now. It's ridiculous to try to expect everyone to know the internals of everything they use. It's good for a sysadmin to understand as much as possible about the system, but black box is so integral to computer science that to complain against it seems a tad ridiculous. Think of all the protocols that flow through the most basic user's monitor every day...to criticize a sysadmin or anyone else for wanting them to just work is just too hash.
These patents are defensive mechanisms. They allow you to put information in the public domain quickly. This allows you to deny a competitor a patent.
Aha, a reason for patents. Intel is so willing to tell everyone what is going on behind the scenes is because the easier it is to program for a chip, the more likely it is to be used. If there were no patents, however, they couldn't release the internals because copycats could then undercut them on price. Since Intel has a patent(s) on each chip, they can afford to be forthcoming with the design.
Oh, so he plays Mao
The balance is actually in the current patent laws. Patent applications must prove that the invention is "Non-obvious." The reason that we have so man "obvious" patents is that 1) examiners are overworked and likely to just grant the patent and let the courts fight it out later. 2) Internet technologies and the state of the art are advancing more rapidly than patent examiners can stay current in. This also adds to reason number 1. That is why I still believe in the patent system. Just give it some time to correct itself. Slowly the patent office will get more CS people who are skilled in Internet "technologies." The boom is also slowing, which will allow examiners to spend more time with each patent. Anyway, patents and IP are kind of my thing, so if you have any mroe questions, please post them below.
Yes it's a shame that people will die in the meantime, but how about all those people that would die if the cure was never found? I hate to tell you, but drug companies are businesses . They want to make money. If everyone could use the research that they spent their hard earned money on, they wouldn't do it in the first place. This bait and switch thing is wrong, no doubt, but please leave the communist anti-patent rants to another article.
There is a differrence there. Sun is not really a hardware or a software company...it's more of a solution's provider. You can't just get what they sell off any shelf and expect it to work perfectly for your mission critical, distributed, real-time, mass storage needs. Apple sells PCs, which are supposed to work out of the box. Additionally, a lot of their hardware is stuff you really can't get very many places...at least not as many places as you can get a pc. Lastly, I dare say that Sun has a lot loess invested in its interface to its OS (CDE and whatever shell they use as default) than Apple.
"...a separate entity to deal with technology patents"
Exactly what patent isn't a technology patent? Jeez, how computer centric can you be? patents are for things that are new. Technology is by definition, of or relating to new stuff. I agree that there should more computer oriented patent examiners and judges, but give the system time. It is a great system that has worked for many years, let it correct itself.
yeah, like the one for my school... http://www.gwu.edu
My school has a similar deal for the OS class to use every semester. Unfortunately, low level internals was never taught...we ended up just using the machines to create mutexes and semaphores and shm's in programs and using systems calls to see that they were there. I heard in the future they are going to start doing low level stuff. Also, we looked at the QNX Neutrino architecture as a case study.
uh, sun?
At my college we learn Ada first because we have one of the inventors of Ada on our CS faculty. I must say though that it has some definite benefits as a teaching language. The compiler finds a lot of stuff for that comes to bite you in the ass later (during execution) in C. The reason it is a pain in the ass is that it will also give you errors for having the incorrect number of spaces of indentation in a block. Pointers are also much more of an ordeal in Ada than in C. It also takes care of a lot of the passing by reference vs. passing by value stuff that is such a pain in C. All in all I have to say I actually prefer Ada because it makes post compilation debugging so much easier than C.
There are several problems with that setup. First and foremost is that it only runs on GSM networks, which are practically nonexistant in America. Secondly, it only gives a 9600 connection, which may not be a big deal now with monochrome palms. In the future as more devices go color and pictures become more important this will be seen as quite a limitation.