Transmeta seems like it must have been a really fun place to work over the past few years. I've been lucky enough to find a few great groups of people to work with, but Transmeta seems to have all the ingredients. I like smart people, I like a large number, and I love it when they bring dinner in! Cool.
Code morphing looks to be a very clever trick, building support for optimizing compilers into the processor architecture for runtime compilation of machine code.
So, let's say it's successful (it isn't guaranteed). Once this architecture (actually, I guess it's a family of architectures from what I've read before) establishes itself, wouldn't code written to run "native" run better? By this I mean, code that does not do the things that are harder or more "heat" expensive to emulate. Aren't they neglecting an opportunity for OEMs to create even zippier devices by pitching it only as an x86 emulator? Using the Palms formerly known as Pilot for the standard, there's not a lot of software there, the apps aren't very rich: a device that did that by default, with WinCE running as an app would be kinda cool.
You are engaging in the most classic of geek fallacies, that if you can think of some definition of a word that opens a hole for some interpretation that you'd like to see, that you win. Bill Gates is still learning the folly of this kind of thinking.Your standard [for patent obviousness] degenerates into...
What my standard degenerates into is the law legal system that governs the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world. Ever heard of "guilt beyond reasonable doubt"? Well, who defines reasonable? Ever heard of "good faith effort"? Who defines good faith? Therefore, by your reasoning, our entire legal system is a failure. But it's not.
Phrases like "shouting match" (and its vulgar cousins) should be reserved for situations where there is no arbiter. When there is an arbiter, as in court, experts are called to testify, just as you suggest, and the judge and jury decide. In the case of an "obviousness" standard, it's quite simple. There is no "prior art" for "one-click" ordering. But any number of experts, myself included, would be happy to testify that we've been in product planning meetings where we discussed leaving non-volatile cookies on client browsers, and where we discussed inserting confirmation "screens" (with attendant mouseclicks) to make sure that the user did not order something by accident. If management had said, "this is too difficult, can't we make the ordering process simpler, with just one click, mistakes be damned?", then any engineer I know would have arrived at the solution chosen by Amazon: it is just that obvious. The "idea" of one-click is not patentable. If a solution to the one-click idea is obvious to a practitioner of the art, the solution is not patentable either.
Obviousness is as workable a legal standard as any. Is the sytem perfect? Do health insurance companies always make the right call as to whether a procedure is experimental or necessary? No. Does the system work pretty well? Yes. What causes the system to break? Despicable self-interest shown by litigants who range from O.J. to Amazon, when brought before stupid and biased arbiters.
sorta like Don Quixote got smoked by the windmill? I thought that for a lawyer in a plum job to come off looking like a windmill was worse than for a run-of-the-mill geek to come off looking run-of-the-mill. But I just read the transcript. Your comment suggests to me that the audio might have been worse for the whitehat with the moderate hatsize.
When Tim O'Reilly can best you in an argument, you know you're in trouble:)
We don't patent obvious inventions. We just don't. And if you believe that it's obvious, and you've got prior art to show that it is obvious, send it on in
our patent system is in the hands of a moron. Dickenson doesn't understand the difference between "obvious" and "prior art". If there is prior art, it doesn't matter if it's obvious. Obvious is for the case where there is no prior art.
And saying that the one-click patent was very narrow: Barnes and Noble used two clicks so they didn't infringe? That is the stupidest reasoning ever!
People don't hate lawyers because they are stupid. We hate them because they are stupid and have influence over anything.
Intel's income in 1999 was $8 billion; that's the important number, not revenue. the $158 million must be compared with the $8 billion, and you can see it is much more significant (not to mention, Intel has to "work" to increase the $8 billion, but Rambus does the work to increase the $158 million so it's likely to be worth more.
Furthermore, executives get compensated largely through options. Options have an strike price, the price that you pay for the real shares if and when you exercise the option. Your income when you do this is the difference between the share price and the exercise price, but the exercise price must be, more or less, the price of the stock when the options are granted. So, executive compensation is not based on overall profits, but on growth of profits, and here is where the $158million looms quite large. It is a very significant number to Intel's executives. In the long run... wait, today's Intel executives care less about the long run than Intel's shareholders do.
don't tell me what you are not going to do with data about me; you need to tell me what you are going to do with it.
But in order for that to be meaningful, you need to tell me what data you have.
How about put a time limit on it? OK, I skiied there last year, go ahead, send me a reminder this year. But if I don't ski there this year, forget about me, OK? You, and all of your friends.
OT: how come/. is only inhabited by trolls this weekend? Is it sunny spring in U.S. as well, or what?
In the US it's a 3-day holiday weekend Memorial Day (initially our Civil War remembrance, but now remembers all war dead). It is a big travel weekend, when people reopen their summer vacation homes, and all universities have ended their spring semesters by now as well so students are back home again.
yeah, but it's worth it! when will the record industry realize that we will have our singles! trying to force us to buy entire CDs to hear our favorite songs will just lead to more numbers stations.
9. carefully constructed parody of slashdot appears and gets moderated up, ostensibly making fun of slashdot but clearly mired in it, simultaneously complaining about yet adding to the noise.
slashdot would be better if we ditched all the emotion. Emotion is stuff that does not matter.
they used to transmit "data" when there was no message, but now they sending downloads of Dr. Dre and Metallica to agents in the field who have been thrown off of Napster
Has anybody checked that the 4-cd set isn't just audio? wouldn't that been a good joke to pull on the crypto community;)
to keep the program "honest", I would treat it more like a venture capital/entrepreneurship program. establish "businesses" that have some customer-seeking goal and purpose. A business or small industry would need to hire all sorts of people giving opportunities to a wider variety of the locals, and it would be teaching some important sales, marketing, and financial skills (those are "technologies" too) that will help to create a wider infrastructure in an underdeveloped economy.
The charitable portion of the project would be pouring in the free training, but the success could be measured by these projects becoming self-sustaining. I guess I'm thinking of a higher tech version of what the Grameen Bank has been doing in Bangladesh, where they put together a group of locals who each accept individual loans, but agree to "cover" each other and share the risk of default. These people (women, I think) embark in small industry, using the loans (very small) to buy a sewing machine or something, but the model has proven quite effective in allowing families to achieve real financial independence (no, we're not talking about early retirement here:)
So, I like the idea of a realistic but forward looking project: grounded in creating self-sustaining commercial enterprises, but one which is also teaching more high tech and the other aspects of a modern service economy than the Grameen program strives for.
No, I haven't given in, and I don't like it... but if it turns out that they know exactly who I am and exactly what I've purchased everywhere I've been, and they've figured out already what I need, they might as goddamn well know where to deliver it. I can picture it now: as each of us drives around, we'll be chased by UPS and FedEx trucks.
no, you're wrong. in your bullet example, before the impact the momentum is m*v while the energy is (m*v^2)/2 Note (a) how different the units are and (b) you can't convert one to the other.
furthermore, immediately after the non-ideal impact of a bullet, the energy dissipates as a variety of things (heat, kinetic, sound, etc) but the momentum is strictly conserved.
as far as the relativistic effects you describe (which would not really impact our flywheel), my memory of that stuff is much more fuzzy, but momentum remains different from energy.
1) What evidence is there that TrustE being on a board of directors wouldn't be anything but good? Past history, please?
just a few months ago, Real Networks was caught red-handed violating their users' privacy in direct violation of Real Network's own stated policies. Real Networks displayed the un-TrustE seal of approval and un-TrustE let them completely off the hook, no punishment, reprimand, nothing.
There are numerous other examples of un-TrustE never lifting a finger to punish the people that pay money--hey, what a coincidence--into un-TrustE's coffers.... and you would know this if you did any of the research you keep whining about. This is the reality you've failed to master. Perhaps if you get to the 200-levels?
But, please explain how writing software and giving it away is imposing anything, including a price? That's just not what the word "impose" means.
and moderators: please explain how using language accurately and exhibiting knowledge of economics can be more overrated than doing neither? sheesh. anyway, I gotta go to a party so I can't stick around to continue to set you all straight.
I didn't see the whazzup-Elian spoof, but it sounds like typical stupid adolescent internet humor: "funny" because it's irreverent, but on closer inspection has little intrinsic humor.
I did see a "drop the chulupa" spoof of the picture: that's funny. It has a number of parallels that make the picture fit into the context of the original ads. I don't imagine any connections in the whazzup example... am I missing something? as I said, I didn't see it.
You keep saying that a "free" price is "artificial". Note that the marginal cost of one more copy of a piece of software is essentially zero and since consumer copying of Linux is unrestricted, free is not an artificial price; it is natural and fully in keeping with accepted (capitalist) economic theory.
The same (capitalist) economic theory also says markets do always choose, but admits markets are not always perfect. In the economics sense of the word, "perfect markets" (often mistakenly called free markets) can only be achieved when certain conditions are met, including no "externalities". "Network externalities" (e.g. "my friends use Word's proprietary format so I want/need to use Word too") are one example of how markets can allow participants only imperfect choices. Another example of a market imperfection would be, "...but Word is not available for Linux, so I need Windows, but Windows is controlled by a monopolist guilty of price-gouging and 'tying'".
The the only things I rail against (and I will grandstand to be heard:) are imperfect markets and fuzzy economics.
So, while it is completely on-topic to respond to a post and point out how it is flawed, you've expressed a desire to hear my opinion on the original question (or, at least you complained that I didn't offer it:) No time to write down the whole economic argument, but as an overview: yes, in the short run, "free-beer" apps with no opened source can hinder the emergence of opened source alternatives, but in the long run will not. Due to the above mentioned network externalities, harm could theoretically be done to the prospects for open source platforms also, but I don't think that will happen, at all in the long run, nor much in the short run.
Your view of how markets work is too simplistic and utopian. It is not in keeping with either reality or accepted economic theory.
Trying to impose some sort of external, artificial pricing model (i.e., "free") is at odds with the underlying economy and society in which most of us live.
This idea of yours is like that of an 18th century farmer who can't imagine a world where 95% of the population is not also farmers. Food production once consumed all of our collective attention; now food is so cheap hardly anybody works on it and the rest of us don't even think about it.
Guess what? Software is cheaper. Once software is written, it is essentially free to duplicate it, and once rights are given to duplicate it, and to duplicate its source code (and once monopolists are brought to heel), then we can see that charging for software becomes the absurdity. Think of the Bible. Once, all the literate people in the world spent their time copying it. Then Gutenberg devoted his machine to copying it. Now, Gideon's leave them for free in hotels and motels. [note to *BSD: you know what to do] But this doesn't lead to the economic collapse that your theory would forecast. In fact, it leads to economic growth.
It's like you said, the market will pick the best solution after weighing costs and benefits. Once the OS is free, we take it and use it as the raw material for some other value creating activity. "Can't work for free" doesn't mean we have to start charging for OSes: once we stop having to pay for them, we are free to work on other things that we can charge for. And so it will be with office applications. They are too ubiquitous to hold value for long and once freely copiable versions arrive, free they will become and remain. The economic loss to the "farmers" who used to charge for them will be more than made up by the savings of hungry consumers who used to pay for them. That's how the economy works.
p.s. AMD is never going to be anything more than a thorn in Intel's side. Intel is too big, too well-established, and too rich to suffer more than minor setbacks.
Yes! Thank you for saying it. Moderate that man up! AMD, AMD, AMD, that's all I ever hear! They are going nowhere, and big established all-powerful Intel is going to give them a spanking, just like the spanking that Microsoft is getting from big established all-powerful IBM. It may not be apparent now, but it's happening. IBM just needs to finish spanking Compaq. Once Microchannel is established, watch out...
The question is mixing together two different issues.
free for non-profit... until/if the OSs get market share, then happy hour finishes and the free-beer becomes expensive-beer
The "free for non-profit, pay for commercial" question is different from the "free to gain market share, pay once you are addicted" (which perhaps we should call the Microsoft model: remember when Office could be had as a competitive upgrade for $99?) And, you've entirely left out the question of whether the source is opened.
I think the key here is whether the source is opened, in the sense of, can the user see the source? A model that has not been explored in a long time is the "you pay for software, you get to see the source, you don't get to redistribute the source." Now, before you start flaming me, I'm not proposing that model, I'm saying that I never hear it proposed. If the user of software is always entitled to see the source, we will never be beholden to monopolists and their unproductive anti-social value destroying proprietary non-standards. Whether a community can develop and give away free beer on a sustainable basis is an open question, but there would be a reasonable limit on Microsoft's (and Sun's, and Oracle's) raping of the customer if their API's, protocols and formats were open. Opened source achieves this. Would it allow their competitor's to "steal" their copyrighted code? No! because in this system the competitors code would also be opened.
From an economics perspective, the pay only for commercial use model is an extreme form of price discrimination, but it meshes well with the reality of sales and metering anyway: companies selling software always go after the corporate account. One sale represents a whole bunch of licenses. Conversely, it is really expensive to sell to individuals. So, give to individuals who bootleg like crazy anyway and sell to corporatists (threw that in for Katzian nitwits) who pay and are easy to monitor makes the most sense as a way of competing in a highly competitive market that includes Free and Open source licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
Code morphing looks to be a very clever trick, building support for optimizing compilers into the processor architecture for runtime compilation of machine code.
So, let's say it's successful (it isn't guaranteed). Once this architecture (actually, I guess it's a family of architectures from what I've read before) establishes itself, wouldn't code written to run "native" run better? By this I mean, code that does not do the things that are harder or more "heat" expensive to emulate. Aren't they neglecting an opportunity for OEMs to create even zippier devices by pitching it only as an x86 emulator? Using the Palms formerly known as Pilot for the standard, there's not a lot of software there, the apps aren't very rich: a device that did that by default, with WinCE running as an app would be kinda cool.
What my standard degenerates into is the law legal system that governs the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world. Ever heard of "guilt beyond reasonable doubt"? Well, who defines reasonable? Ever heard of "good faith effort"? Who defines good faith? Therefore, by your reasoning, our entire legal system is a failure. But it's not.
Phrases like "shouting match" (and its vulgar cousins) should be reserved for situations where there is no arbiter. When there is an arbiter, as in court, experts are called to testify, just as you suggest, and the judge and jury decide. In the case of an "obviousness" standard, it's quite simple. There is no "prior art" for "one-click" ordering. But any number of experts, myself included, would be happy to testify that we've been in product planning meetings where we discussed leaving non-volatile cookies on client browsers, and where we discussed inserting confirmation "screens" (with attendant mouseclicks) to make sure that the user did not order something by accident. If management had said, "this is too difficult, can't we make the ordering process simpler, with just one click, mistakes be damned?", then any engineer I know would have arrived at the solution chosen by Amazon: it is just that obvious. The "idea" of one-click is not patentable. If a solution to the one-click idea is obvious to a practitioner of the art, the solution is not patentable either.
Obviousness is as workable a legal standard as any. Is the sytem perfect? Do health insurance companies always make the right call as to whether a procedure is experimental or necessary? No. Does the system work pretty well? Yes. What causes the system to break? Despicable self-interest shown by litigants who range from O.J. to Amazon, when brought before stupid and biased arbiters.
sorta like Don Quixote got smoked by the windmill? I thought that for a lawyer in a plum job to come off looking like a windmill was worse than for a run-of-the-mill geek to come off looking run-of-the-mill. But I just read the transcript. Your comment suggests to me that the audio might have been worse for the whitehat with the moderate hatsize.
We don't patent obvious inventions. We just don't. And if you believe that it's obvious, and you've got prior art to show that it is obvious, send it on in
our patent system is in the hands of a moron. Dickenson doesn't understand the difference between "obvious" and "prior art". If there is prior art, it doesn't matter if it's obvious. Obvious is for the case where there is no prior art.
And saying that the one-click patent was very narrow: Barnes and Noble used two clicks so they didn't infringe? That is the stupidest reasoning ever!
People don't hate lawyers because they are stupid. We hate them because they are stupid and have influence over anything.
Furthermore, executives get compensated largely through options. Options have an strike price, the price that you pay for the real shares if and when you exercise the option. Your income when you do this is the difference between the share price and the exercise price, but the exercise price must be, more or less, the price of the stock when the options are granted. So, executive compensation is not based on overall profits, but on growth of profits, and here is where the $158million looms quite large. It is a very significant number to Intel's executives. In the long run... wait, today's Intel executives care less about the long run than Intel's shareholders do.
Fair enough?
you can't self-regulate yourself. You can regulate yourself, you can self-regulate, but... now, go self-flagellate yourself :)
In the US it's a 3-day holiday weekend Memorial Day (initially our Civil War remembrance, but now remembers all war dead). It is a big travel weekend, when people reopen their summer vacation homes, and all universities have ended their spring semesters by now as well so students are back home again.
yeah, but it's worth it! when will the record industry realize that we will have our singles! trying to force us to buy entire CDs to hear our favorite songs will just lead to more numbers stations.
9. carefully constructed parody of slashdot appears and gets moderated up, ostensibly making fun of slashdot but clearly mired in it, simultaneously complaining about yet adding to the noise.
slashdot would be better if we ditched all the emotion. Emotion is stuff that does not matter.
Has anybody checked that the 4-cd set isn't just audio? wouldn't that been a good joke to pull on the crypto community ;)
The charitable portion of the project would be pouring in the free training, but the success could be measured by these projects becoming self-sustaining. I guess I'm thinking of a higher tech version of what the Grameen Bank has been doing in Bangladesh, where they put together a group of locals who each accept individual loans, but agree to "cover" each other and share the risk of default. These people (women, I think) embark in small industry, using the loans (very small) to buy a sewing machine or something, but the model has proven quite effective in allowing families to achieve real financial independence (no, we're not talking about early retirement here :)
So, I like the idea of a realistic but forward looking project: grounded in creating self-sustaining commercial enterprises, but one which is also teaching more high tech and the other aspects of a modern service economy than the Grameen program strives for.
No, I haven't given in, and I don't like it... but if it turns out that they know exactly who I am and exactly what I've purchased everywhere I've been, and they've figured out already what I need, they might as goddamn well know where to deliver it. I can picture it now: as each of us drives around, we'll be chased by UPS and FedEx trucks.
ya know how there's often a Burger King across the street from a McDonald's? now they can send you the "right" coupon if you're in the "wrong" place.
furthermore, immediately after the non-ideal impact of a bullet, the energy dissipates as a variety of things (heat, kinetic, sound, etc) but the momentum is strictly conserved.
as far as the relativistic effects you describe (which would not really impact our flywheel), my memory of that stuff is much more fuzzy, but momentum remains different from energy.
just a few months ago, Real Networks was caught red-handed violating their users' privacy in direct violation of Real Network's own stated policies. Real Networks displayed the un-TrustE seal of approval and un-TrustE let them completely off the hook, no punishment, reprimand, nothing.
There are numerous other examples of un-TrustE never lifting a finger to punish the people that pay money--hey, what a coincidence--into un-TrustE's coffers.... and you would know this if you did any of the research you keep whining about. This is the reality you've failed to master. Perhaps if you get to the 200-levels?
you can't convert momentum to energy... both are conserved :)
you mean, "melting the ice from the south pole." the ice at the north pole is floating and if melted it would not change the water level.
But, please explain how writing software and giving it away is imposing anything, including a price? That's just not what the word "impose" means.
and moderators: please explain how using language accurately and exhibiting knowledge of economics can be more overrated than doing neither? sheesh. anyway, I gotta go to a party so I can't stick around to continue to set you all straight.
I did see a "drop the chulupa" spoof of the picture: that's funny. It has a number of parallels that make the picture fit into the context of the original ads. I don't imagine any connections in the whazzup example... am I missing something? as I said, I didn't see it.
The same (capitalist) economic theory also says markets do always choose, but admits markets are not always perfect. In the economics sense of the word, "perfect markets" (often mistakenly called free markets) can only be achieved when certain conditions are met, including no "externalities". "Network externalities" (e.g. "my friends use Word's proprietary format so I want/need to use Word too") are one example of how markets can allow participants only imperfect choices. Another example of a market imperfection would be, "...but Word is not available for Linux, so I need Windows, but Windows is controlled by a monopolist guilty of price-gouging and 'tying'".
The the only things I rail against (and I will grandstand to be heard :) are imperfect markets and fuzzy economics.
So, while it is completely on-topic to respond to a post and point out how it is flawed, you've expressed a desire to hear my opinion on the original question (or, at least you complained that I didn't offer it :) No time to write down the whole economic argument, but as an overview: yes, in the short run, "free-beer" apps with no opened source can hinder the emergence of opened source alternatives, but in the long run will not. Due to the above mentioned network externalities, harm could theoretically be done to the prospects for open source platforms also, but I don't think that will happen, at all in the long run, nor much in the short run.
Trying to impose some sort of external, artificial pricing model (i.e., "free") is at odds with the underlying economy and society in which most of us live.
This idea of yours is like that of an 18th century farmer who can't imagine a world where 95% of the population is not also farmers. Food production once consumed all of our collective attention; now food is so cheap hardly anybody works on it and the rest of us don't even think about it.
Guess what? Software is cheaper. Once software is written, it is essentially free to duplicate it, and once rights are given to duplicate it, and to duplicate its source code (and once monopolists are brought to heel), then we can see that charging for software becomes the absurdity. Think of the Bible. Once, all the literate people in the world spent their time copying it. Then Gutenberg devoted his machine to copying it. Now, Gideon's leave them for free in hotels and motels. [note to *BSD: you know what to do] But this doesn't lead to the economic collapse that your theory would forecast. In fact, it leads to economic growth.
It's like you said, the market will pick the best solution after weighing costs and benefits. Once the OS is free, we take it and use it as the raw material for some other value creating activity. "Can't work for free" doesn't mean we have to start charging for OSes: once we stop having to pay for them, we are free to work on other things that we can charge for. And so it will be with office applications. They are too ubiquitous to hold value for long and once freely copiable versions arrive, free they will become and remain. The economic loss to the "farmers" who used to charge for them will be more than made up by the savings of hungry consumers who used to pay for them. That's how the economy works.
Yes! Thank you for saying it. Moderate that man up! AMD, AMD, AMD, that's all I ever hear! They are going nowhere, and big established all-powerful Intel is going to give them a spanking, just like the spanking that Microsoft is getting from big established all-powerful IBM. It may not be apparent now, but it's happening. IBM just needs to finish spanking Compaq. Once Microchannel is established, watch out ...
free for non-profit ... until/if the OSs get market share, then happy hour finishes and the free-beer becomes expensive-beer
The "free for non-profit, pay for commercial" question is different from the "free to gain market share, pay once you are addicted" (which perhaps we should call the Microsoft model: remember when Office could be had as a competitive upgrade for $99?) And, you've entirely left out the question of whether the source is opened.
I think the key here is whether the source is opened, in the sense of, can the user see the source? A model that has not been explored in a long time is the "you pay for software, you get to see the source, you don't get to redistribute the source." Now, before you start flaming me, I'm not proposing that model, I'm saying that I never hear it proposed. If the user of software is always entitled to see the source, we will never be beholden to monopolists and their unproductive anti-social value destroying proprietary non-standards. Whether a community can develop and give away free beer on a sustainable basis is an open question, but there would be a reasonable limit on Microsoft's (and Sun's, and Oracle's) raping of the customer if their API's, protocols and formats were open. Opened source achieves this. Would it allow their competitor's to "steal" their copyrighted code? No! because in this system the competitors code would also be opened.
From an economics perspective, the pay only for commercial use model is an extreme form of price discrimination, but it meshes well with the reality of sales and metering anyway: companies selling software always go after the corporate account. One sale represents a whole bunch of licenses. Conversely, it is really expensive to sell to individuals. So, give to individuals who bootleg like crazy anyway and sell to corporatists (threw that in for Katzian nitwits) who pay and are easy to monitor makes the most sense as a way of competing in a highly competitive market that includes Free and Open source licensing.