And that's why things like this shouldn't be patentable.
The purpose of patents is to encourage people to openly document their techniques. We give them a temporary protection on the idea in exchange for a concise explanation of how to implement it. The trouble with a patent like this is that it really is obvious. What would they need to explain here? All we're talking about is a relational database with another indexed value, namely, the physical location of something.
The problem is that the value equation is radically skewed here. You're taking a concept that's easy to implement and pretty damn obvious and locking it up for years to what end? So that 17 years down the line we'll have this wonderfully written explanation of a concept that was stunningly obvious in the first place? Society is giving up an awful lot and getting no value from it in the end.
There are things that legitimately should get protection. Complex non-obvious algorithms. Encryption. Data compression. Things that actually aren't obvious, that actually require some explanation.
Our current system only accomplishes two things:
1) Creates a money making process for patent trolls that provide no productive economic output 2) Provides patent arsenals for large corporations to defend their turf against newcomers
The time when patents were the realm of the individual creative inventor are long long gone.
What would be a revolution is a smart phone that doesn't crash and have to be rebooted periodically like all my Treo did and my T-Mobile Dash does. You know, a phone that... works? Working would be a solid leap forward:)
It helps that the phone has a real browser and supports Ajax, but it's still limited. And how much fun will it be when you're important apps aren't working because you're in a tunnel, or the middle of nowhere where edge service is spotty. Eventually they'll need to provide a way for people to write apps for it.
I think once they've established the credibility of the phone and that it's reliable, they'll be better positioned to open the platform up a bit more. Hell, they could put together a certification program that would get third party apps access to the Itunes store, or some such. They could make sure the apps are solid, and take a cut of the money at the same time.
I can take the Itunes video and watch it on my IPod, or watch it on my AppleTV. Well, in my case I don't have an AppleTV, but I hook my MacBook up to the TV and use the handy remote control and do things that way. I've watched video through ABC.com's site before and the quality is decent, but I have to be at my computer to do it. Watching it on my TV isn't practical and I can't take it with me. It's okay if I want to catch up on a series and not pay $2 an episode.
Frankly what I hope to have some day is the ability to just do paid subscriptions for all of the shows I watch. Even if I'm paying for each individual show it would save me a whole lot of money if I could cut back on my cable package or eliminate it entirely. If I dropped cable all together and bought the shows I actually watch I'd probably cut my annual costs in half.
See, here's what happens. A key gets published, they revoke it. Another key gets published, they revoke it. This goes on for a while, and then suddenly everybody buying blu-ray players can't play their damn movies because a bunch of keys don't work. So then they go return the player to BestBuy and say it doesn't work, and get another one. Then that one doesn't work either. Then they give up all together and just stick with DVD's.
These people need to realize that for all of Hollywood's fears about mass copying of their films, the far greater fear they should have is that they'll simply drive people away from bothering in the first place. Rather than wasting all their efforts on preventing piracy that's going to happen anyhow, they should work on making the films as broadly available and easy to obtain for consumers who will happily pay money to see them.
The thing is, if he makes this stand and pisses them off there are any number of ways to punish him that don't run afoul of the law. No future promotions or raises. Cross promotions to jobs that are in some way unpleasant. When they make these moves they can vaguely site his poor job performance. Maybe down the line it might get to a jury, but even if he won, how's it all going to look when he submits his resume to the next employer?
Personally I'd talk to a lawyer and see what they have to say. You want to make sure your ass is covered while you look for a new job.
The man's dead, show some respect. Let's have a moment of silence in his honor. Oh... wait, my moment of silence is actually encrypted using DRM that I lost the license key for. I'd reverse engineer it but I don't want to get in trouble...
Average mortgage rates during the Carter administration were over 15%! I don't even pay credit cards 15%!!! Inflation was through the roof (12%). Devaluation of the dollar. Gas shortages.
All of those are the same thing. Inflation being through the roof is a devaluation of the dollar by definition. Mortgages were 15% because inflation was at 12% and no sane man will loan you money for less than inflation. Inflation, ultimately was caused by a steep increase in commodity prices, namely oil. There's little a president can do to mitigate that situation, and to his credit, of any president, he spoke the most bluntly about the need to address that in a strategic way.
As for the debt, the debt, as a percentage of GDP, which is what's important, went down under carter:
Of course in raw dollars it went up because inflation was at 12%.
Carter may have banned wine at the white house but I don't recall him trying to get prayer in schools, outlaw abortion, birth control, etc. He could be a total religious wackaloon for all I care so long as he makes no law about what I should be doing.
He didn't demoralize and dimsantle the army. The demoralizing was the after effects of the Vietnam war. Filling the ranks with people who don't want to be there in a war with a poorly understood purpose caused serious long term problems for the military.
The B-1B, who needs them when you've got ICBM's and cruise missiles?
The one thing I will concur on was that he blew the Iranian situation by giving the Shah asylum. He should have kept our collective nose out of it. Had he done that, the Ayatollah would not have had that moment of glory, and he'd never have come to power. Though arguably, it was previous administrations trying to put the Shah in power that are more to blame for this.
Carter was a lousy politician, pure and simple. He's a good and smart man who was way ahead of the curve on the dangers that are posed to us by being dependent on middle eastern oil, amongst other things. I would say that he was a rather mediocre president overall.
I'm glad my car doesn't go 200mph, because the temptation of all that raw horsepower will be too great to resist. High speed pursuits and law enforcement derived beatings will certainly ensue. It's a used geo metro for me.
Apple has not made their place in the market by an excess of features. They've establishes themselves by taking what's already out there and just making it work. There were a ton of mp3 players out before the ipod. The problem they had was that none of them quite got the combination of form factor and ease of use right. There's tons of mp3 players that offer FM radio, and voice recording, but not the IPod. Yet the Ipod dominates because it doesn't try to do anything it isn't good at.
Putting 3G on the phone would just make it more expensive than it already is and offer little benefit to most of their customers. It's certainly something they can offer down the road once 3G is more common.
Frankly I think a good programmer is somebody who writes well documented and designed code. I don't think somebody's knowledge of the low level assembly programming necessarily helps with that. I'd rather somebody wrote somewhat inefficient code that I could read and, as needed, optimize, then have some spaghetti pile that nobody could understand but was lightning fast.
The labels are hurting the industry with DRM. Apple is willing to ditch it wholesale (i.e., isn't interested in iTunes/iPod "lock-in").
Actually Apple is 100% interested in the iTunes/iPod lock in. Jobs is saying, "hey if the music industry does something they'd never do in a million years, so will I!"
It's great PR to say it and it's unlikely to come to fruition, so why not say it? Jobs and Apple are not nearly that benevolent.
The thing with the newton is that it wasn't something anybody really needed. It was bulky and it wasn't very good at what it did. On the other hand the IPhone, seemingly improves on what a lot of other products out there offer, and it's something people actually want.
As for the price, it's $150 more than the top end IPod. Is that really so astronomically expensive considering that it does so much more than a regular IPod?
Don't get me wrong, if the interface doesn't work as well as it appears, then it may very well bomb. But from what I've seen so far, the criticism mostly stems from concerns about price and having to switch cellphone carriers. I don't think that's really going to be the stumbling point.
First of all I've heard that the Internet is going to collapse about once a year since '97. So I'm not going to believe it until I hear my DSL modem crying in agony.
Second of all, eliminating net neutrality would make the problem worse. Why? Because it would get all these companies using complex routers to figure out how to prioritize all that data. The limitations expressed here are not bandwidth, but rather processing power limitations. It's about routing. Routing packets is a shit load easier when you don't have to dynamically figure out what the hell they are all doing.
Apple is all about price structure. For them it basically boils down to a simple reality. Today they are charging $350 for their top of the line IPod that will play video. This phone will do everything that IPod will do (give or take storage space) AND it's a phone. Isn't it worth $150 to dump that extra device and to be the coolest kid on the block? If they priced it any lower, they'd be canibalizing their IPod sales for what would ultimately be a lower margin product.
That company laid me off and shut down the office a year later:)
Also, I think a lot of it depends on the nature of the network and how you use it. My take is to use those relationships to establish credibility, that is, I expect I can get the jobs on my own skills, but knowing somebody helps establish that when you say you can do something you're in fact capable of it.
I think you point out why Dell, etc, are being pretty smart in rolling this out more slowly. In addition to the obvious driver instability, etc, this really comes down to having enough support resources. If you sent it all out at once you're call centers would collapse under the weight of it. If you send it out piece meal then you can spread the increased demand out over a longer period and thus end up providing a better experience.
Basically the question is: what pisses off a customer more, having to wait a couple months to get their upgrade or getting their upgrade and then spending days trying to wrestle with tech support because they are overwhelmed.
Basically what it boils down to is that these areas benefit from the fact that there's already a bunch of people with the needed resources already there. As much as we'd like to think the Internet makes location irrelevant, the reality is that we're social creatures and we'll always have an affinity for meeting people in person. We get jobs, build companies and get investment, primarily, through the social networks we create. It's possible to do these things without social networks but it is WAY harder.
In my career since College I've worked in two cities and have worked in five companies. Of those five companies, I was hired totally cold by only one of them. In all the other cases, I knew somebody who worked for the company who I'd worked for/with in the past and was able to use that to get my foot in the door. Now take that concept and multiply it thousands of times amongst the social networks that develop in a limited geographic area with a strong focus on a particular kind of business.
So I think ultimately it's less about the cash in the valley, and more about the people there. The cash follows the people and the ideas.
Some company makes it so I can download HD videos straight to my computer. But god it's slow on my old 1.5/384 DSL. So I go to my phone company and say, "hey, can I get something faster?" They then hook me up with 10/1 fiber or some such at a higher price. Meanwhile, they go and buy more bandwidth from their upstream providers. The upstream providers buy more pipes to connect to their peers, etc. Simple supply and demand.
Invariably fluctuations will cause bandwidth, latency, etc, to fluctuate, but it's in the interest of network companies to minimize that to keep customers (at least where competition exists).
The drug metaphor should really be that you get picked up by the cops for getting a legal prescription filled at your local Walgreens.
The problem with all of this is that it costs those companies a pittance to send out those take down notices and it causes a lot of trouble for the people who get them. The burden should be on them to have solid evidence and, if they don't, to leave people the hell alone.
It doesn't quite matter whether I'm actually right or not. If I was going to start up a company to develop software in that market, I'd now have to either pay a royalty to blackboard, or take my chances in court. One bright side is that a recent supreme court ruling established that you can sue blackboard beforehand to get a judgment on the validity of their patent. But still that will cost quite a bit of money.
That's the problem is that the patent system heavily favors the people that get the patent, whether it's valid or not.
Glancing at the patent, there are two key pieces. There's a piece that talks about having a role based system where there are specifically teacher, student, and administrator roles. There's also a piece that talks about how files would be managed in that environment, permitting uploads, role based access, etc.
I wrote a system in 1997, predating this by at least three years that did pretty much what they are saying (your patent lawyer mileage may vary). My system was a modification of an existing open source forum product that created the ability for Teachers to come in and create classrooms that students could subscribe to. Any person could be a teacher by creating a classroom, but within the context of a given classroom there was a distinct role of teacher and student.
They filed their patent in 2000. They are at least three years too late. I also know that there was other software out at the time that provided similar capabilities because, to some extent, I was competing with those products at the time.
First of all, core 2 duo would be two cores at 3.4Ghz so even in a totally perfect world, you're at best getting a collective 6.8Ghz. Furthermore, it isn't a perfect world. There's a certain amount of overhead in distributing tasks to each processor. Furthermore, the performance is limited based on how well threaded the applications are that you're running. A badly threaded application will likely never be faster than that 3.4Ghz on one core.
Though I think the practicality of doing the kind of recording you're talking about is minimal, the underlying truth is valid: where there's a will there's a way.
What we are talking about here is basically securing something. You are securing data against copying. Ask anybody in the security industry if there's such a thing as a security system that cannot be broken. If they say that such a beast exists, they are trying to sell you said mythological creature and you should run quickly.
All you can do with security is hope to make something secure enough that it's not worth somebody's trouble to break it. The problem is that only one person has to break the security to make the entire security regime worthless. Furthermore, efforts to increase the security generally increase the complexity and risk making it difficult for legitimate customers to make use of the product.
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And that's why things like this shouldn't be patentable.
The purpose of patents is to encourage people to openly document their techniques. We give them a temporary protection on the idea in exchange for a concise explanation of how to implement it. The trouble with a patent like this is that it really is obvious. What would they need to explain here? All we're talking about is a relational database with another indexed value, namely, the physical location of something.
The problem is that the value equation is radically skewed here. You're taking a concept that's easy to implement and pretty damn obvious and locking it up for years to what end? So that 17 years down the line we'll have this wonderfully written explanation of a concept that was stunningly obvious in the first place? Society is giving up an awful lot and getting no value from it in the end.
There are things that legitimately should get protection. Complex non-obvious algorithms. Encryption. Data compression. Things that actually aren't obvious, that actually require some explanation.
Our current system only accomplishes two things:
1) Creates a money making process for patent trolls that provide no productive economic output
2) Provides patent arsenals for large corporations to defend their turf against newcomers
The time when patents were the realm of the individual creative inventor are long long gone.
What would be a revolution is a smart phone that doesn't crash and have to be rebooted periodically like all my Treo did and my T-Mobile Dash does. You know, a phone that... works? Working would be a solid leap forward :)
It helps that the phone has a real browser and supports Ajax, but it's still limited. And how much fun will it be when you're important apps aren't working because you're in a tunnel, or the middle of nowhere where edge service is spotty. Eventually they'll need to provide a way for people to write apps for it.
I think once they've established the credibility of the phone and that it's reliable, they'll be better positioned to open the platform up a bit more. Hell, they could put together a certification program that would get third party apps access to the Itunes store, or some such. They could make sure the apps are solid, and take a cut of the money at the same time.
I can take the Itunes video and watch it on my IPod, or watch it on my AppleTV. Well, in my case I don't have an AppleTV, but I hook my MacBook up to the TV and use the handy remote control and do things that way. I've watched video through ABC.com's site before and the quality is decent, but I have to be at my computer to do it. Watching it on my TV isn't practical and I can't take it with me. It's okay if I want to catch up on a series and not pay $2 an episode.
Frankly what I hope to have some day is the ability to just do paid subscriptions for all of the shows I watch. Even if I'm paying for each individual show it would save me a whole lot of money if I could cut back on my cable package or eliminate it entirely. If I dropped cable all together and bought the shows I actually watch I'd probably cut my annual costs in half.
See, here's what happens. A key gets published, they revoke it. Another key gets published, they revoke it. This goes on for a while, and then suddenly everybody buying blu-ray players can't play their damn movies because a bunch of keys don't work. So then they go return the player to BestBuy and say it doesn't work, and get another one. Then that one doesn't work either. Then they give up all together and just stick with DVD's.
These people need to realize that for all of Hollywood's fears about mass copying of their films, the far greater fear they should have is that they'll simply drive people away from bothering in the first place. Rather than wasting all their efforts on preventing piracy that's going to happen anyhow, they should work on making the films as broadly available and easy to obtain for consumers who will happily pay money to see them.
The thing is, if he makes this stand and pisses them off there are any number of ways to punish him that don't run afoul of the law. No future promotions or raises. Cross promotions to jobs that are in some way unpleasant. When they make these moves they can vaguely site his poor job performance. Maybe down the line it might get to a jury, but even if he won, how's it all going to look when he submits his resume to the next employer?
Personally I'd talk to a lawyer and see what they have to say. You want to make sure your ass is covered while you look for a new job.
The man's dead, show some respect. Let's have a moment of silence in his honor. Oh... wait, my moment of silence is actually encrypted using DRM that I lost the license key for. I'd reverse engineer it but I don't want to get in trouble...
Okay, first of all:
g if
Average mortgage rates during the Carter administration were over 15%! I don't even pay credit cards 15%!!!
Inflation was through the roof (12%).
Devaluation of the dollar.
Gas shortages.
All of those are the same thing. Inflation being through the roof is a devaluation of the dollar by definition. Mortgages were 15% because inflation was at 12% and no sane man will loan you money for less than inflation. Inflation, ultimately was caused by a steep increase in commodity prices, namely oil. There's little a president can do to mitigate that situation, and to his credit, of any president, he spoke the most bluntly about the need to address that in a strategic way.
As for the debt, the debt, as a percentage of GDP, which is what's important, went down under carter:
http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/National-Debt-GDP.
Of course in raw dollars it went up because inflation was at 12%.
Carter may have banned wine at the white house but I don't recall him trying to get prayer in schools, outlaw abortion, birth control, etc. He could be a total religious wackaloon for all I care so long as he makes no law about what I should be doing.
He didn't demoralize and dimsantle the army. The demoralizing was the after effects of the Vietnam war. Filling the ranks with people who don't want to be there in a war with a poorly understood purpose caused serious long term problems for the military.
The B-1B, who needs them when you've got ICBM's and cruise missiles?
The one thing I will concur on was that he blew the Iranian situation by giving the Shah asylum. He should have kept our collective nose out of it. Had he done that, the Ayatollah would not have had that moment of glory, and he'd never have come to power. Though arguably, it was previous administrations trying to put the Shah in power that are more to blame for this.
Carter was a lousy politician, pure and simple. He's a good and smart man who was way ahead of the curve on the dangers that are posed to us by being dependent on middle eastern oil, amongst other things. I would say that he was a rather mediocre president overall.
I'm glad my car doesn't go 200mph, because the temptation of all that raw horsepower will be too great to resist. High speed pursuits and law enforcement derived beatings will certainly ensue. It's a used geo metro for me.
Apple has not made their place in the market by an excess of features. They've establishes themselves by taking what's already out there and just making it work. There were a ton of mp3 players out before the ipod. The problem they had was that none of them quite got the combination of form factor and ease of use right. There's tons of mp3 players that offer FM radio, and voice recording, but not the IPod. Yet the Ipod dominates because it doesn't try to do anything it isn't good at.
Putting 3G on the phone would just make it more expensive than it already is and offer little benefit to most of their customers. It's certainly something they can offer down the road once 3G is more common.
Frankly I think a good programmer is somebody who writes well documented and designed code. I don't think somebody's knowledge of the low level assembly programming necessarily helps with that. I'd rather somebody wrote somewhat inefficient code that I could read and, as needed, optimize, then have some spaghetti pile that nobody could understand but was lightning fast.
The labels are hurting the industry with DRM. Apple is willing to ditch it wholesale (i.e., isn't interested in iTunes/iPod "lock-in").
Actually Apple is 100% interested in the iTunes/iPod lock in. Jobs is saying, "hey if the music industry does something they'd never do in a million years, so will I!"
It's great PR to say it and it's unlikely to come to fruition, so why not say it? Jobs and Apple are not nearly that benevolent.
The thing with the newton is that it wasn't something anybody really needed. It was bulky and it wasn't very good at what it did. On the other hand the IPhone, seemingly improves on what a lot of other products out there offer, and it's something people actually want.
As for the price, it's $150 more than the top end IPod. Is that really so astronomically expensive considering that it does so much more than a regular IPod?
Don't get me wrong, if the interface doesn't work as well as it appears, then it may very well bomb. But from what I've seen so far, the criticism mostly stems from concerns about price and having to switch cellphone carriers. I don't think that's really going to be the stumbling point.
First of all I've heard that the Internet is going to collapse about once a year since '97. So I'm not going to believe it until I hear my DSL modem crying in agony.
Second of all, eliminating net neutrality would make the problem worse. Why? Because it would get all these companies using complex routers to figure out how to prioritize all that data. The limitations expressed here are not bandwidth, but rather processing power limitations. It's about routing. Routing packets is a shit load easier when you don't have to dynamically figure out what the hell they are all doing.
Apple is all about price structure. For them it basically boils down to a simple reality. Today they are charging $350 for their top of the line IPod that will play video. This phone will do everything that IPod will do (give or take storage space) AND it's a phone. Isn't it worth $150 to dump that extra device and to be the coolest kid on the block? If they priced it any lower, they'd be canibalizing their IPod sales for what would ultimately be a lower margin product.
That company laid me off and shut down the office a year later :)
Also, I think a lot of it depends on the nature of the network and how you use it. My take is to use those relationships to establish credibility, that is, I expect I can get the jobs on my own skills, but knowing somebody helps establish that when you say you can do something you're in fact capable of it.
How many IT people out there have been forced to use second rate software because that's what was sold to their boss by the guy he plays golf with? :)
I think you point out why Dell, etc, are being pretty smart in rolling this out more slowly. In addition to the obvious driver instability, etc, this really comes down to having enough support resources. If you sent it all out at once you're call centers would collapse under the weight of it. If you send it out piece meal then you can spread the increased demand out over a longer period and thus end up providing a better experience.
Basically the question is: what pisses off a customer more, having to wait a couple months to get their upgrade or getting their upgrade and then spending days trying to wrestle with tech support because they are overwhelmed.
Basically what it boils down to is that these areas benefit from the fact that there's already a bunch of people with the needed resources already there. As much as we'd like to think the Internet makes location irrelevant, the reality is that we're social creatures and we'll always have an affinity for meeting people in person. We get jobs, build companies and get investment, primarily, through the social networks we create. It's possible to do these things without social networks but it is WAY harder.
In my career since College I've worked in two cities and have worked in five companies. Of those five companies, I was hired totally cold by only one of them. In all the other cases, I knew somebody who worked for the company who I'd worked for/with in the past and was able to use that to get my foot in the door. Now take that concept and multiply it thousands of times amongst the social networks that develop in a limited geographic area with a strong focus on a particular kind of business.
So I think ultimately it's less about the cash in the valley, and more about the people there. The cash follows the people and the ideas.
Just like they do today?
Some company makes it so I can download HD videos straight to my computer. But god it's slow on my old 1.5/384 DSL. So I go to my phone company and say, "hey, can I get something faster?" They then hook me up with 10/1 fiber or some such at a higher price. Meanwhile, they go and buy more bandwidth from their upstream providers. The upstream providers buy more pipes to connect to their peers, etc. Simple supply and demand.
Invariably fluctuations will cause bandwidth, latency, etc, to fluctuate, but it's in the interest of network companies to minimize that to keep customers (at least where competition exists).
The drug metaphor should really be that you get picked up by the cops for getting a legal prescription filled at your local Walgreens.
The problem with all of this is that it costs those companies a pittance to send out those take down notices and it causes a lot of trouble for the people who get them. The burden should be on them to have solid evidence and, if they don't, to leave people the hell alone.
It doesn't quite matter whether I'm actually right or not. If I was going to start up a company to develop software in that market, I'd now have to either pay a royalty to blackboard, or take my chances in court. One bright side is that a recent supreme court ruling established that you can sue blackboard beforehand to get a judgment on the validity of their patent. But still that will cost quite a bit of money.
That's the problem is that the patent system heavily favors the people that get the patent, whether it's valid or not.
Glancing at the patent, there are two key pieces. There's a piece that talks about having a role based system where there are specifically teacher, student, and administrator roles. There's also a piece that talks about how files would be managed in that environment, permitting uploads, role based access, etc.
I wrote a system in 1997, predating this by at least three years that did pretty much what they are saying (your patent lawyer mileage may vary). My system was a modification of an existing open source forum product that created the ability for Teachers to come in and create classrooms that students could subscribe to. Any person could be a teacher by creating a classroom, but within the context of a given classroom there was a distinct role of teacher and student.
They filed their patent in 2000. They are at least three years too late. I also know that there was other software out at the time that provided similar capabilities because, to some extent, I was competing with those products at the time.
So I call BS on their patent.
How do the following get counted:
* Time spent chatting with your SO online
* Time spent with your SO in a room together both using computers where you're talking with eachother, etc
Seems like those would be time on computer as well as time with SO. Then the question becomes how quality that time is considered to be.
First of all, core 2 duo would be two cores at 3.4Ghz so even in a totally perfect world, you're at best getting a collective 6.8Ghz. Furthermore, it isn't a perfect world. There's a certain amount of overhead in distributing tasks to each processor. Furthermore, the performance is limited based on how well threaded the applications are that you're running. A badly threaded application will likely never be faster than that 3.4Ghz on one core.
Though I think the practicality of doing the kind of recording you're talking about is minimal, the underlying truth is valid: where there's a will there's a way.
What we are talking about here is basically securing something. You are securing data against copying. Ask anybody in the security industry if there's such a thing as a security system that cannot be broken. If they say that such a beast exists, they are trying to sell you said mythological creature and you should run quickly.
All you can do with security is hope to make something secure enough that it's not worth somebody's trouble to break it. The problem is that only one person has to break the security to make the entire security regime worthless. Furthermore, efforts to increase the security generally increase the complexity and risk making it difficult for legitimate customers to make use of the product.