Well, it might be of concern if the patent was valid. It was filed in 2002. The practice of performing kernel updates on a running system predates this patent by many many years. I personally witnessed PCs running QNX have kernel updates applied without rebooting or service interruption in 1996.
The Internet came from ARPANET, a project of the Department of Defense...the protocols of which were non-proprietary and declassified so educational and research institutions could participate in its development and growth.
and UNIX was invented by AT&T
UNIX was NOT invented by AT&T. It was invented by a team of computer scientists led by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie at Bell Labs. Bell Labs was not wholly owned by AT&T until the 1980s, long after UNIX was invented. The "official" UNIX was not truly owned by AT&T until then, when Bell Labe became a wholly owned unit of AT&T.
Neither had anything to do with OSS.
The internet, and ESPECIALLY UNIX, had EVERYTHING to do with OSS. UNIX was indeed open source (but it wasn't fully Free)--when you got good ol' UNIX for your PDP-11 or whatever you got full access to the source. Also, most drivers and apps were distributed in source form back in the day.
Stallman really got the Free (libre) software movement going when vendors started removing the source code from their distributions, and he and others became frustrated when buggy software would crash their systems and they had lost the ability to patch and recompile their software to work with their specific setups. So, UNIX is in fact a very major reason open source exists today, because a one quite open ecosystem was becoming increasingly closed, and GNU was established to create open source software that would be protected from a similar fate.
Gardening isn't really free. It's just grown the way you want it.
Free (libre) software isn't really free (gratis). It's just developed the way you want it.
If you equated the time it requires to garden, plus seeds/plants, fertilizer and pesticides (if you choose). You'll find that gardening does cost you
If you equate the time it requires to code, plus hardware/backup media, caffeinated beverages and dependencies closed libraries/drivers/dev tools (if you choose), you'll find that Free software does cost.
I'm not sure if BillG really does misunderstand the concept of free software as much as is suggested by the content of his speech, or if he is deliberately spreading misinformation (such as that you cannot charge money for applications built using GPLed code). He also seems to mix up open source and Free software, which is a specific type of open source. GPL is open source but it is actually a particular form of Free software. conversely, Microsoft has released a lot of open source that is in fact not Free (you may see the code but you may not redistribute derivative works, etc).
The real whopper lie he tells (knowingly or not) is that open source (inferring the GPL) prevents people from improving software, which is exactly opposite. It is Microsoft who has created open source licenses that made modification illegal. GPL *protects* the right of others to modify, improve and re-distribute.
The real problem for BillG, I think, is that GPL, and other Free licenses that have similar terms of use, are a "poison pill" that severely hinders one's ability to establish a monopoly.
Anybody else remember the creative term "Veronica" search
Yep, guess that makes you old. Veronica is obviously a "backronym" (the phrase behind it was invented to afterwards to match the word). There is the WWW now, which essentially replaced Gopher space, but before that the 'net was all about FTP. To seach public FTP archives you used "Archive Search", which was contracted to the nickname "Archie". Then Gopher came out which added structure to the big pile of archives, and a Gopher search was made for it. Since it was a search utility "companion" to Archie it was named Veronica (as in the comic book characters).
Later a localhost-only, optimised search utility for a Gopher host was made called....Jughead (because it was the "lazy friend" of Archie and Veronica).
This article reminds me of theories about the 'net eventually becoming sentient...with this big trail of info crumbs we might find our friends Archie, Veronica and Jughead will turn into stalkers...
Yes, of course it is, or will have to be, for any non-nuclear, non-hydro, or non-fossil fuel source to be even remotely economically feasible as a first use low hanging fruit energy substitute.
This just completely defies the laws of physics. The efficiency of transporting power over a line vs. using a truck that is heavier than the "storage cell" you envision, powered by an engine that puts out more energy in heat than as kinetic energy, is just absurd.
Complete elimination of grids would be more reliable. Have fully charged flashlight batteries ever failed during a storm outage? Nope.
Another completely absurd statement, primarily because you assume you'd have fully charged flashlight batteries to start with. I've had some come right out of the package nearly flat (defective batch), and batteries don't hold a charge indefinitely. With Lead Acid, NiMH or LiIon rechargeables you generally want to keep them topped up....oh wait, you do that with a charger...plugged into power from the grid...
Sorry, I'm all for decentralised generation and individual consumers being able to generate into the grid easier, but to say complete absence of a grid would be best is just being stupid. At that small a scale the equipment simply isn't reliable enough. The grid provides quality of service, load balancing and what not.
You seem to suggest that distributed systems are bad, when there are big examples showing the opposite (the internet and the electrical grid actually being very successful examples in fact). What's next, are you going to argue that we disconnect all computers from networks and exchange data by recording it onto physical media and posting it so that postmen can drive it around to its final destination? Are you going to rail against the evil, monopolistic carriers because they had politicians in their pocket and subsidised the building of their networks at the expense of competition?
Yes, politics stinks, but the technology is sound. Seems rather ridiculous to suggest absurd methods are superior to use technically because on corporate and government meddling in what technically is quite workable.
Quite the opposite. Grids are robust and fault tolerant. The problem isn't transmission and distribution, it is generation (big central power plants)
A decentralized power system would be much more economically efficient
You mean decentralised GENERATION. The power grid would not be susceptible to giant blackouts if we didn't have gigawatt power plants able to go off-line because one tower collapses in a forest fire or lightning strike or because a unit tripped when an operator pulled a Homer Simpson. Apart from that the grid is VERY robust--even when a large substation has a trip the transients dissipate within a pretty small area.
Grid = Monopoly
Actually the Internet is a grid consisting of millions of people and businesses. Even the electric grid in North America consists of numerous owners and operators.
It's economically efficient to transport oil and gasoline by tankers and by semi truck to decentralized filling stations.
Wrong. Pipeline networks are more efficient, safer and reliable. There's never been an on-land pipeline catastrophe on the scale of the Exxon Valdez mess. It is only at the retail level where vehicular transport of fuel is preferred (and yes, decentralised filling stations are most efficient--but that requires a network...or grid... of fuel transportation systems).
Natural Gas is another "grid"...it spends most of its life moving around in a network of pipes.
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready.
Why does solar energy need to be transported? Solar energy hits all habitable areas of the world! We don't need to take over 8400 square miles of Arizona with a complex of solar-thermal generating units--that would be foolish! What you do instead is build neighbourhood solar-thermal units to collect the heat, store it geo-thermally and use a heat engine of a sort to generate electricity for the immediate vicinity. The interconnected grid would remain important, as different areas may not capture enough energy to meet local needs at all times.
Gates and Co had an abortive project called Traf-o-Data
That was not only the name of the product, it was the original name of Microsoft too.
Up until the 1970s traffic counters recorded the "hits" on their sensors on paper charts. Legions of clerks then counted the dots on the charts by hand in a manner not unlike the infamous Florida recount (looking at "chads" all day). The tallies were then given to "computers" (that was the job title for the person, not a machine in many if not most cases), or statisticians, to figure out if roads were being over-utilised. This service was performed by traffic analysis companies on contract by municipalities.
BillG and Paul Allen thought all this to be ridiculous as electronic computers were being widely adopted in academia and commerce, so they figured they'd save the municipalities tons of money by making a computer with the new Intel 8008 chip. Paul Allen wrote a simulator/development environment for the WSU mainframe, BillG developed the softwqare for the device itself and another friend built the hardware. It wasn't an "abortive" project--the device was completed and they made several thousand dollars using it to provide hourly traffic data to Washington state municipalities.
The reason for Traf-o-data's shortened lifespan was that the Washington state government started taking the paper tapes and feeding them through their own new computers to analyse the traffic at no cost to the municipalities. That quickly put Traf-o-data and several other companies out of the traffic analysis business in Washington state.
Gates and Allen retired the traf-o-data device and went off to college, but their business partnership remained intact. Within months the January 1975 Popular Electronics appeared with the MITS Altair 8800 as the cover story and gave Gates and Allen the opportunity for their next project. Gates and Allen sent a letter to Ed Roberts (MITS founder and Altair designer) offering to supply a BASIC interpreter...IIRC on Traf-o-data letterhead. (story goes that the address and phone number on the traf-o-data letterhead was for the Gates' Seattle-area residence, and when Roberts phoned one of BillG's parents answered and had no clue what this BASIC thing was about; the letter was actually sent from Harvard where BillG and Allen were studying and they forgot to tell BillG's parents about it--but that's just a story, like the one about IBM's men in dark suits showing up at Mrs. Kildall's doorstep). They modified Allen's 8008 simluator to fully support the 8080 procesor of the Altair and set forth writing the BASIC.
After the demo, Roberts hired them (well, Paul Allen at least was an employee) as MITS software development team, and they dropped out and moved to New Mexico to do business near MITS. Their business continued on the side, independent of MITS, and was re-named from Traf-o-data to Micro-soft (the hyphen disappeared when the company converted from a simple partnership into a corporation. They retained rights to supply BASIC to other computer vendors and end users, and then set about creating 6809 and 6502 ports of BASIC. Their BASIC quicky found its way onto IMSAI, ProcTech, Tandy and Commodore computers and the rest is history.
Perhaps BillG was feeling nostalgic about the Traf-o-data system that REALLY started it all for MSFT (not the Altair 8800 or the IBM 5150 as most people might think) and decided to pay homage to "the founder".
How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.
Ironically, at least here in western Canada (including in the Weyburn oilfields which are in close proximity to where all the interest is in the Bakken formation), industry and governments are investing in "carbon sequestration" technology, and of great interest is injection of CO2 into wells to push previously unrecoverable oil up and out of the ground. The end result is we get more recoverable oil out of each well, plus thousands of tonnes of CO2 are more or less permanently removed from the atmosphere.
The use of such enhanced recovery technology, as well as meeting the power demands of upgrading and refining of oil using nuclear power, would quite significantly reduce the net CO2 footprint of petroleum based fuel.
So five companies control about half of the US refining and marketing space, and the top 10 control nearly three-quarters? Ten customers for over 70% of the market for crude in the US certainly sounds like "only a few significant customers" to me. Your numbers don't disprove my argument, they re-enforce it!
I never contended there was a monopoly, but it's hard to argue that 10 companies controlling over 70% of the business doesn't constitute an oligarchy, and that collusion in such a market is quite a feasibility.
First of all, most of our oil does not [doe.gov] come from Canada and Mexico
But over one third of it does already. A sizeable chunk of the Athabasca fields in Alberta are not yet developed, and the vast majority of Saskatchewan's potentially recoverable oil reserves remain untapped. Billions of dollars are being spent on upgrader and enhanced-recovery facilities in Alberta, and Saskatchewan has recently voted out a long-in-the-tooth socialist government and replaced it with a more business-friendly regime that has vowed to be more aggressive in developing its natural resources.
It is possible (and in fact, in the long term, probable) that in the future over 50% of foreign oil imports into the US will be from Canada and Mexico. Middle eastern foreign policy is less and less about maintaining the power of US-friendly sheiks in return for cheap oil and more about keeping nukes out of the hands of twisted "Islamic" madmen with deluded thoughts of blowing up us "infidels" so they can spend eternity in Allah's kingdom with a harem of 1000 forever-youthful wives.
Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude[sic] with each other, they compete.
There is not a monopoly in E&P, however there is an oligopoly of large, vertically-integrated energy companies (you know, the ones that pull oil out of the ground, refine it themselves and ship it to their own chains of service stations). They've always colluded to some extent, but just like a mafia Don they manage to stay just on the right side of the legal line. Many of these companies share their origin as parts of the former Standard Oil trust. And guess what? They've almost completely re-merged, and the re-constituted corporations are huge in comparison to Standard Oil (Exxon+Mobil, Chevron+Texaco, BP+Amoco...so the huge, top-tier playing field is cut in half and the players themselves are twice as big).
There might be thousands of companies looking for and collecting the crude, but only a handful refine it into fuel and fewer yet sell that fuel to us. Fat lot of good having lots of competition in the crude arena is when they all have just a few significant customers (refiners and marketers). The market can be controlled from both the supply and demand side you know.
She replied with "That's good. Save a tree." I stopped for a second about to explain that the bag was made from petroleum, not trees.
The Bakken Formation is an oil shale deposit, which would probably bear some resemblance to the Athabasca Formation in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan (which is an oil sand deposit). While some success is being had in using "Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage" drilling and recovery techniques to recover Athabasca oil, most of it is recovered through open pit mining. The same will probably be the case with the Bakken oil fields.
Much of the land cleared for strip mining is in fact forested. So, I suppose if we were so much less reliant on oil that we didn't need to exploit oil sands and shales we would, indirectly, "save a tree" by not using a petroleum product.
If all or most software is going open-source, how does a software company make money?
Sort answer: They don't. They go extinct, or shrink down to shadows of their former selves and serve niche markets.
Let me explain: It is entirely possible that "software as a product" could be supplanted by Free, or at least open-source, software. The business model of selling a box with a little plastic disc in it on a store shelf, or even pay-per-download or pay-per-activation, will become obsolete.
There used to be companies out there like Underwood or Olivetti that sold typewriters and typewriter accessories and that was their business. Then computers came around...and then word processing software and decent printers. You might as well ask "if all or most writers are going to computers then how are typewriter companies going to make money?". The answer was, indeed, "they don't". The aforementioned companies did not "get" PCs. They may have tried to make electronic typewriters or whatever but they all eventually went belly up, shrunk, merged with struggling competitors and what not. None of the old names exist as independent businesses anymore and none make any notable revenue from typewriters--they've moved on to make printers, fax machines, portable electronic gadgets, etc.
So to make money in an age of Free and/or open source software domination a (closed/product-oriented) software company has to change into a different kind of company, or close up shop. Simple as that.
Don't say services because services don't provide real cash flow.
Okay, I wont, but that is one of many ways a software company can re-invent itself.
The whole 1st world economy is becoming service oriented! Las Vegas is built on services (people go there, spend thousands and come back with LESS--they paid for entertainment SERVICES). Some auto dealerships make more money on SERVICES than on selling cars!
What I mean is enough cash flow for serious new projects and research.
Woah you are WAY off there. IBM makes serious money from open source, and re-invests considerable amounts in R&D. Furthermore, Free software promotes large-scale collaboration. By building a business around Free software you can amplify the returns on R&D. For every innovation you contribute to a project you could get many more in return from other contributors.
Service work has a relatively low profit margin because there is no way to "ramp up" as it were.
Services provide, in the long term, FAR more profit than product sales. You can only sell so many widgets before you hit a wall in terms of growth. Customers want service constantly.
Once a piece of commercial software is developed it can continue to provide profit with only maintenance costs.
"Maintenance costs" are the issue. Do you think MSFT makes any money at all on hotfixes and service pack releases? Of course not...it is one of their biggest EXPENSES. With closed software customers have already paid sizeable money so they expect to have defects addressed for free. If software ceases to be a product in and of itself and is viewed for what it really is--a "consumable" commodity like hand tools or paper or fuel or whatever--then the revenue stream is the service.
This addresses end-users needs far better than on-size-fits-all-badly packaged software. At the enterprise level especially, the real bread is in integration, customisation, migration, training and so on. Even at the consumer level, services are where the money is. Telecom SERVICE providers make the big bucks on the SERVICE, not on the phones they pretty much give away/sell at cost (where the device maker has to deal with slimmer margins).
Plus you can sell upgrades.
You must have never had to do that, because you make it sound so easy. There has to be a value proposition in it. It is inevitable that you reach a point of diminishing returns, where the "innovations" provided by upgrades become
"Free" software was a concept that I think really emerged with the release of GNU Emacs. Gosling EMACS and Stallman's PDP EMACS may have been "open source" but they weren't truly "Free software". Being that it's 10 years after the FREE software summit that the discussion is around that rather than simply computer programs with widely distributed source code.
In the loosest sense of the definition, open source has existed since at least the 1960s. Computers were not commodities as they are today; they were large, expensive and complex. There were less computers around, and the user community was smaller and more knowledgeable. The industry was driven by hardware and services provided by mainframe vendors (IBM, AKA "Snow white" and the "seven dwarfs", IBM's main competitors). A good deal of software at that time was open source if not Free, because there was little if nothing at all lost by the vendors if the code was freely shared (after all, the systems this software ran on typically were leased with lucrative service agreements and so on).
The 1970s really WERE the decade of decline for open source. When minis like the PDP series and UNIX systems emerged to become a significant part of the market most systems were then bought outright and these smaller systems didn't always require vendor service agreements, so closed software started becoming more important as a revenue stream.
Then, in 1975 the Altair 8800 came out and, for the most part, revolutionised computing by making individual ownership and control of computing resources feasible. I think, however, that it very nearly killed open source software. Thankfully it lived on in the PC space in the form of magazine type-in programs and the like.
Perhaps it was the near-demise of a significant open source community that gave Free software advocates the resolve to succeed. The near-extinction of open source tools in UNIX systems certainly was the prime motivator in the creation of the GNU license (to keep open source code from being co-opted by closed software vendors).
I think the damage done by the rise of closed source in the 1970s and early 80s still shows to this day. For a time, open source sometimes meant you paid dearly monetarily for the privilege to see the code and modify it for your own purposes, and free software was "gratis", not truly Free (or "libre"). And since there is no "gratis" lunchyou paid in some way, whether it was timed lockouts, feature reductions or the like in shareware or through advertising revenue streams.
When I started using Linux in around 1996 and I first got paid to work on Linux systems used commercially in 1997, so I've seen first hand that though it was embraced by academia there was a fair bit of suspicion to overcome with management and nearly total ignorance from end users. I think today business has fully embraced Free software where it is sponsored and backed by "expert" corporations, such as is the case with Linux and Apache by IBM, Red Hat and Novell.
However, the stigma of closed freeware, particularly adware and spyware, remains a major challenge for Free software acceptance amongst naive Windows users. For example, when Firefox 1.0 was released just before 2005 I started advocating it as a safer alternative to IE and FF was viewed with great deal of doubt. I encountered a few people who steadfastly believed that FF was spyware. IE was part of Windows, and most of the offerings out there as an alternative weren't really browsers but "skins" over top the IE engine, and such skins, tool bars, "helper objects" and the like were most often pop-up factories or spyware. Furthermore, Free software apps were behind the curve in terms of creating signed distribution packages, so the Microsoft warning about an unsigned app just reinforced the FUD.
I think that the first decade since the Free software summit was the decade of commercial acceptance (and understanding that Free software isn't the opposite of comme
Rather than banning certain activities like shaving, talking on a cell, fiddling with the radio, or tending to unruly children, train new drivers on how to drive with common every-day distractions
How 'bout a general "driving distracted" law that handles all of it? EACH AND EVERY ONE of those activities is COMPLETELY avoidable by pulling over to the side as soon as conveniently save THEN doing the activity. You do NOT have to channel surf your XM radio. Do your grooming at HOME like a sensible human being. Wait for AFTER the journey for your smoke break--do not light your cigarette at highway speeds or throw it out your window to set the whole prairie ablaze or scorch the car next to you. And, PUT THE DAMN PHONE AWAY!
Unless you have special controls for the handicapped you NEED BOTH YOUR HANDS TO DRIVE...Not your elbows, or your left thumb and your right knee. This is common sense...it is already taught in driver's ed classes and it is required to pass a road test that you signal, obey signs and speed limits and pay attention or you are not granted a driver's permit! Yet, we all gradually end up driving like idiots if we aren't reminded through enforcement.
I agree that drivers could be trained a bit better on managing and minimising distractions, but really, even the mental midgets stupid enough to try to shave and drive at the same time know you aren't "supposed" to. Ideally, traffic violation fines are a reminder not to do stupid things, but at the very least they are a good "stupid tax".
Getting pulled over and getting a ticket for using your cellphone whilst operating a motor vehicle, because you were keying in the location of that officer's speed trap.
If people spent half as much energy worrying about their exercise regimen as they do fretting about whether they should eat carbs or not, people in general would be a lot healthier.
This isn't entirely true. The general public doesn't give enough consideration to their health in general. Neither diet NOR physical activity are given enough attention as we all eat far too many refined carbohydrates and saturated fats AND lead sedentary lives that just aggravate the situation.
I know people who lead physically active lives (typically having physically demanding jobs), are not the slightest bit overweight (quite lean builds in fact) and by outward appearances look physically healthy...but they skip breakfast, and eat cheeseburgers and fries for lunch and supper every day and smoke moderately. They get sick more often and are the types of people who have digestion problems and end up being the people in conversations like "HE had a heart attack? But he looked so healthy!"
Diet certainly IS very important. The problem is that we eat very badly, and when we focus on diet we don't eat balanced diets--we go on "extreme atkins" or try to eat like Jarod or eat carefully, artificially-portioned pre-packaged meals like Nutrisystem so we can lose weight and "look nice".
Diet is JUST AS IMPORTANT as physical activity; you CANNOT say "Oh, I work out every day so I can eat just about anything". Though physical activity provides the most impact on metabolism and many other health factors, it is DIET that has the largest impact on weight. Think about it: It takes mere seconds to a couple of minutes to eat a chocolate bar, which cancels out the calories you expend on 20 minutes of medium-to-intense cardio activity. It's well known that losing weight and/or increasing % of lean body mass has a notable impact on harmful cholesterol...so if you want to lose weight and be more healthy don't use exercise as an excuse to eat those sugar and fat-laden chocolate bars.
ISO won't die--it's just another garbage standard.
on
ISO Approves OOXML
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· Score: 1
IS is just following tradition of other standards entities like IEC and ECMA.
Take a look at the IEC 61158 Fieldbus standard, AKA the "ugly 8-headed beast". It is, by technical standards, an inefficient, inconsistent, complicated mess and even those who supported its ratification concede this. Basically, it takes once-proprietary protocols for SCADA/Process control/automation in verbatim and declared them standards. There is duplication, overlap, etc. all over the place.
You basically don't try to be "fully IEC 61158 compliant"...vendors generally strive to comply with one of the eight "types". Vendors generally stick to the type they invented for the whole product line, then provide converter/bridge devices to one or more others. For example, in North America "Type 2" (ControlNet) is prevalent and is the protocol of choice for Rockwell's Allan-Bradley products since Rockwell was a leading force in its creation. Likewise in Europe (Germany especially) "Type 3" (PROFIBUS) is prevalent and used extensively in Siemens products because Siemens was a steering force in the consortium that created the protocol. Both Rockwell and Siemens create converters to other types like "Type 1" (FOUNDATION Fieldbus).
The whole logic behind this messy standard was not to make an easy-to-follow, fully-implementable standard. The prime motivation was to eliminate trade barriers and promote interoperability (ie. now that the protocols are part of a standard one vendor cannot demand royalties from third parties that inter-operate, nor can interoperability be broken by the original vendor without losing standards compliance).
This serves the purpose well enough, but with OOXML there is a difference: One single vendor invented the format, without any consultation with any other interested parties, and it effectively retains ownership of the format. It is possibly encumbered with patents, and its pledge not to litigate has potential conditions, especially regarding "commercial" implementations. At least with IEC 61158 all the different "types" are from many different vendors, and in most cases the creators either never "owned" the standard (for example, Siemens participated in a consortium at the behest of the German gov't) or the standard was given over to a non vendor-specific entity long before IEC 61158 was ratified (as Rockwell has done with ControlNet). And, since the standard is periodically reviewed some "types" may fall into disuse and be deprecated and new "types" added or old ones expanded to consider new technologies. I fear that OOXML as a standard is vulnerable to disrepair, and lack of wide adoption beyond MSFT because that one vendor so completely controls the standard.
retroactively standardize 20 years of legacy document formats
And this comes as news to who exactly? There is an ancient joke, one I first heard when Windows 3.x was still current:
Q. How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a light bulb? A. NONE. Microsoft just declares darkness to be the new standard in illumination.
MSFT built its success on creating de-factor standards starting with its very first product. Microsoft BASIC was born on the Altair 8800 and was the only serious BASIC implementation on S100 bus systems. MSBASIC was then ported to 680x and 6502, then licensed to Tandy, Commodore then Apple. It became the "standard" dialect of BASIC, and if you wrote MS-BASIC code without using embedded machine language (PEEK, POKE and CALL/SYS/USR), graphics beyond ASCII-art and sound (ie. support "lowest common denominator" hardware) then that code would run unmodified on basically ALL S100-based machines, Commodore machines, TRS-80s and Apple ][s with Applesoft BASIC.
De-facto standardisation is what "embrace and extend" is all about too: MSFT buys or licenses (for a one-time bargain fee) some emerging technology, or blatantly copies it, then adds its own "flavour" to it. Then it leverages its position in the market to make it ubiquitous and thus a "de-facto standard". MSFT bought out SCP and used SCP's CP/M work-alike and its leverage with the IBM deal to make MS-DOS into such a standard. It licensed Mosiac from Spyglass and extended it into IE and made it the "standard" browser, leading to a giant legion of tragically lazy web developers turning out piles of garbage code that was "good enough" because it worked with IE.
All that is new is that MSFT is now pulling out all the stops to make their pseudo-standards into "official" standards because legislation was getting in the way. This started with participation in WWW standards (MSFT was involved early and heavily in CSS, SOAP, ECMAscript/Javascript...), then it got standards approval for.NET back at 1.0 and now it has OOXML. I'm all for MSFT being an active participant in creating standards, however they have a poor track record on compliance:
* They maintained non-standard IE behaviours and extensions in Javascript, and maintained support for its own bastardised scripting dialect VBScript, and continues to do so to this day in the name of "compatibility" that nobody needs anymore.
* Despite being so involved in getting CSS level 1 to fruition, it wasn't until IE7 that they even came close to being serious about complying with the standard...and once again they maintained a broken box model in "quirks mode" to this day in the name of compatibility so that lazy web developers wouldn't have to look at their crap code ever again...even though the WWW is so dynamic that web pages are reworked with regularity anyways.
*.NET is an official standard, and there exists a multi-platform implementation in the form of MONO, but MSFT has done nothing to make extensions from.NET 2.x and later standard...that mess up the embrace and extend strategy.
OOXML will follow just this path, I'm quite sure. Their own Office 2007 doesn't fully and properly comply with even the draft approved by ECMA. MSFT products will NEVER fully comply, but they are first out the door to "support" OOXML, in the same sense that IE "supports" HTML, CSS and Javascript. This ensures that non-complying MSOffice 2007 documents may suffer "fidelity loss" when opened, say, in OO.o, but, as they say, "it's good enough for government work" (ie. it gets them past standrads legislation and ensures agencies favour MSFT because it "works the best" with the most prevalent OOXML dialect).
Furthermore, the copious amounts of deprecated, "backwards compatiblity directives" are basically "de-facto lock-in features". You just KNOW there are tons of Office 95/97/2000 and even WordPerfect docs archived out there. When these are passed through MSOffice 2007 or later and
...if governments go the right direction. The "Net Neutrality" bills in the US fairly closely parallel how the electrical grid was privatised in many places. When de-constructing regulated/mandated monopolies and government-run utilities to create an open market it generally involved legislation enacted to establish a "power pool", whereby those with generation, transmission or distribution facilities were legally required to participate in the "power pool" electricity market if they wanted to be connected to the public grid. The Net Neutrality bills parallel that stipulation (if you provide internet service, you must treat all traffic that traverses your network the same, regardless of origin and endpoint).
The wireless part of things is heading that way too, with phone number portability and frequency and licensing auctions in Canada and the US that encourage new entries in the market as well as some partial measures towards "neutrality" (in Canada, bills have been introduced to require that all carriers allow compatible traffic from all other carriers over their networks at cost plus a limited, reasonable percentage markup).
What is left after universal access is mandated by government is the establishment of a "network pool" to replace outright regulation of prices, so that they properly follow the forces of supply and demand. If the costs to ISPs followed market forces and usage, then it would be more practical to bill customers along the same lines.
One thing to caution about, however, is that though the concept is sound and the end result very desirable and fair, in practice the transition (in the electricity market) has been difficult and tainted. Industry lobbyists are very good at protecting their interests, and those with established generation facilities were given a very easy ride. Barriers to entry for new players were high and auctions were not well managed or publicised. As a result, when the "power pool" markets were put into operation there were only a few players in the market, and the majority were the former monopolists/sold-off former government operations. This allowed the system to be gamed and prices to be manipulated.
ISPs don't tend to have the geographical monopolies that existed in the electrical industry (and deregulation of telephone companies broke down the RBOC monopolies that existed, at least to a degree) so that might help keep manipulation to a minimum. Nonetheless, the ends are positive even if the means aren't perfect.
...than "just blogging" about your idea. To claim prior art, an invention must be reasonably accessible public knowledge AND must not be "abandoned". You can't just come up with some blueprints or computer code or a specification document, publish it in a blog or technical journal and be satisfied that a patent will not eventually be granted to someone else.
You have two choices regarding your patentable ideas:
1. Fully implement your ideas in a complete, functional application and put as much effort as possible into getting it widely distributed. It would be especially beneficial if you made such an implementation work with a widely distributed Free software project (for example, a Linux kernel module, an Apache module, a Perl implementation available on CPAN...). Promote the hell out of it, try to get it included in a Linux or BSD distro, whatever. If the implementation of your concept is ubiquitous, or could be discovered by a cursory search, then you'd have a strong case of prior art and could have patents overturned.
2. Apply for a patent yourself. If you are not interested in creating a full implementation of your idea then you don't have a rock-solid case of prior art, so this would be the best tool at your disposal to protect your invention. Stipulate (perhaps even in the patent submission itself) that free, unrestricted and non-exclusive rights to incorporate the invention is granted on the condition that the derived work MUST be made available under an OSI-approved open license, otherwise steep license fees/royalties are applicable. If you insist that closed implementations require a percentage of revenue or per-user fee, it would keep Microsoft away, as it is known BillG personally as well as the company are extremely loathsome of paying on such terms.
The submitter suggested that he isn't too keen on carrying forward with implementation of the inventions himself, so his idea would likely be considered "abandoned" unless someone friendly to his interests did it for him, so option 1 is out.
I'd say, that if you want protection of your ideas from falling victim to submarine patents or patent troll corporations then you really MUST apply for a patent yourself. The patent and copyright systems around the world may have severe flaws, but if you want to beat patent trolls and copyright cartels then you have to play their game. The Free software community does this widely in the copyright arena and the FSF, on creators behalf, has vigourously enforced copyright in a few cases to make sure the code stays Free, in the same way as Microsoft would enforce copyrights to make sure its own software stays closed (to the extent it served their interests). If you have hardware or software concepts that you believe are patentable and are potentially valuable then it would be wise to use the rights granted by the patent system to enforce your ideals the way copyright is used.
Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns. [...] Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already.
The word "nationalise" makes me cringe. The less the government owns or runs the better. Governments should stick to making rules and making sure they are followed equally by everyone and let private enterprise do their jobs.
However, I find the idea of billing on the electrical model quite compelling. Basically large electrical users are charged based upon "peak demand" (highest MW value over a billing cycle) as well as for energy costs ($ per MWh). Most contracts have a cap on both, and if you go over you are not cut off, but you get a nasty shock on your next bill. However it is a fair system because you pay your fair share to cover the costs of distribution (via peak demand charge) and generation (cost of energy). If you start a whole bank of motors at once and the MW spikes for a minute, you have to pay a charge based on that value for the whole month. The reasoning is that if you max out the capacity of the copper line into your facility it will cost a lot for the utility to upgrade it. The same with surcharges on energy consumption overages--if everyone used more energy than they promised, the utility has to make unexpected upgrades in generation capacity.
Demand and energy charges translated to internet access would be throughput (Mb/s) and total data transferred (Gigs of data each month), and the justification would be the same as for electrical utilities. I would most strongly object to attempts to "nationalise" an "internet grid" though because that is in fact moving in the opposite direction of where (once very severely dysfunctional) electrical utilities are coming from. I think the government's role in all of this is to enact legislation mandating an "open grid" but for private enterprise to retain ownership and management of the assets. It would closely mirror a partially-deregulated, privately-owned electrical system that is becoming predominant. The cables and switches used in backbones would be "transmission", routers and servers (storage and directing of data) would be "generation" and the "last mile" including firewalls and "intelligence" would be "distribution". Corporations and other heavy users could participate in the "internet pool" through methods akin to "co-generation", whereby they generate revenue (or recover costs at least) by providing routers and servers to handle public internet traffic.
Incidentally, the electric grids in North America are NOT significantly government owned--not any more at any rate. Governments might have, say a 25% or less stake in a power pool or in the transmission or distribution systems at most, and taxpayer-funded investment in new infrastructure is also very much a minority stake. Transmission lines tend to be investor-owned assets; distribution lines (the "edges") are what tend to be owned by local levels of government more than anything else.
Historically various governments HAVE owned and (mis)managed the electrical grid. However, as government institutions these state-owned power companies were pretty big drains on the finances, and the capital investments required to increase capacity started outstripping governments' funding abilities. This has lead to a lot of privatisation of state-owned utility assets, especially since the 1990s. Government still plays an important role as overseer/regulator (they enact legislation and establish "commodity markets" for the buying and selling of electricity). The transition was difficult, but I believe if governments had retained and tightened control over electrical utilities we'd right now be subjected to Cuban-style rolling-blackouts. Things are far from perfect, and at the start of it all the elecetrical utilities were downright dysfunctional and government graft/corruption really tainted the process. Hopefully things don't get THAT dysfunctional with telecom before they get better too.
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
Which begs the question: Why the hell hasn't MSFT done its QC/QA job and taken NVidia to task? Why can't it use its dominant, near-monopoly status in the industry for GOOD for a change, instead of for whipping the competition?
These "root cause analysis" numbers were trotted out by MSFT in its defense argument in the "Vista Capable" lawsuit. How does this absolve MSFT of anything here? Wasn't the "Vista capable" label supposed to MEAN something? Don't they do thorough regression tests of systems to make sure that they really ARE capable of running Vista? Why were machines equipped with NVidia chipsets, which relied on drivers responsible for nearly 30 percent of crashes, allowed to be sold as "Vista capable"? In my opinion, it just bolsters the argument that MSFT was negligent and misleading in it's Vista Capable campaign when machines with such crappy drivers are allowed to be pushed out the door on vague assurances that by the time Vista was in wide release the bugs would be squished.
Apple's computers "just work" because they have complete control over the system software and hardware stack and can ensure total quality control. Linux and BSD offer superior reliability and generally better performance because the software is developed and scrutinised by a huge community, and hardware is closely studied or specs are fully disclosed (interestingly the worst Linux drivers happen to be those where hardware specs are most closely guarded). MSFT needs one or the other. They aren't in a position do specify exact hardware as Apple is and Ballmer would be throwing chairs left and right if source code was ever opened up, so they must insist on more control over the drivers supported with their OS and demand more access to hardware specifications so they can assist in making quality drivers. If MSFT ever hopes to have a TRULY quality OS, and they are not willing to move towards a Free software development model, they absolutely MUST exert as much control as possible over the development of system-level software for thrid-party hardware vendors' products (drivers in particular).
I know where I live if the clouds are gone and it isn't raining we get a little hotter.
The quantities and dispersion of chemicals involved in cloud seeding are infinitesimally small in comparison to the amounts of CO2 and CH4 released into the atmosphere, both from natural and man-made sources. Humans no doubt have an impact on climate, however I don't think we've even come close to mastering CONTROL of the climate on a global scale. Cloud seeding is quite localised and doesn't really work precisely enough to give *total* control of weather.
Anyways the effect of cloud cover on temperature varies with geography, seasons and time of day. Clouds can act as thermal isolation in either direction; at midday in the summer an overcast sky can block incoming sunlight and cool things down. However in the winter, or at night, or at other locales, clouds may INCREASE the actual or apparent temperature as they trap heat from leaving an area. Where I live in the winter, a clear, cloudless sky at mid-day usually happens when it is very very COLD (whereas, during a chinook when winter days are warmest there is always a "chinook arch" cloud formation), so I don't think you can associate the presence or absence of clouds with expected temperature.
In any case, cloud seeding doesn't seem to reduce cloud cover significantly. It seems to merely divert the occurrence of precipitation, making the inevitable happen a bit earlier. Some US states have tried to use it to make chronically dry areas get more rainfall that normally falls areas further downwind. In Alberta it is used to induce precipitation before hailstones can form. Hail is when water vapour adheres to small particles and is carried by wind currents to freezing altitudes, where it falls again and collects more moisture before being blown back up again, and cloud seeding makes the water vapour form larger droplets sooner so it falls before it can be caught in the hail-forming cycle. Presumably in Beijing they want to induce rainfall before a system reaches the city.
Nobody has figured out how to stop rain that is already happening, or to create a storm system; we can only trigger rain to happen sooner. I cannot see how this has a significant impact on global temperatures and weather patterns.
South-central Alberta (between Calgary and Red Deer in Western Canada) is known to be one of the worlds more severe "hail belts". Hail has been responsible for hundreds of millions in damage, ranging from crops and houses (penetrating shingles and shakes to the point of damaging the cladding underneath, as well as causing flooding) to automobiles and airplanes (a hail storm in the Calgary area caused a cargo flight to Minneapolis to abort its ascent when tennis-ball-sized hailstones destroyed the cockpit windscreen of the Boeing 727 jet).
For the past dozen years, the government has regularly seeded clouds in its hail damage mitigation programme. As a Calgary resident I can say that it has noticeably reduced the frequency and intensity of hail storms, and has probably contributed to millions of dollars in savings in disaster relief and insurance claims.
Given that this is not only an old practice, but one that occurs frequently around the world, I don't see where the news-worthiness or controversy is in China's application of cloud seeding to divert precipitation from Beijing during Olympic events, aside from the mildly amusing reason behind the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it might be of concern if the patent was valid. It was filed in 2002. The practice of performing kernel updates on a running system predates this patent by many many years. I personally witnessed PCs running QNX have kernel updates applied without rebooting or service interruption in 1996.
Are you stupid or something?
...the protocols of which were non-proprietary and declassified so educational and research institutions could participate in its development and growth.
No, he's actually more informed than you are.
The Internet came from ARPANET, a project of the Department of Defense
and UNIX was invented by AT&T
UNIX was NOT invented by AT&T. It was invented by a team of computer scientists led by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie at Bell Labs. Bell Labs was not wholly owned by AT&T until the 1980s, long after UNIX was invented. The "official" UNIX was not truly owned by AT&T until then, when Bell Labe became a wholly owned unit of AT&T.
Neither had anything to do with OSS.
The internet, and ESPECIALLY UNIX, had EVERYTHING to do with OSS. UNIX was indeed open source (but it wasn't fully Free)--when you got good ol' UNIX for your PDP-11 or whatever you got full access to the source. Also, most drivers and apps were distributed in source form back in the day.
Stallman really got the Free (libre) software movement going when vendors started removing the source code from their distributions, and he and others became frustrated when buggy software would crash their systems and they had lost the ability to patch and recompile their software to work with their specific setups. So, UNIX is in fact a very major reason open source exists today, because a one quite open ecosystem was becoming increasingly closed, and GNU was established to create open source software that would be protected from a similar fate.
Gardening isn't really free. It's just grown the way you want it.
Free (libre) software isn't really free (gratis). It's just developed the way you want it.
If you equated the time it requires to garden, plus seeds/plants, fertilizer and pesticides (if you choose). You'll find that gardening does cost you
If you equate the time it requires to code, plus hardware/backup media, caffeinated beverages and dependencies closed libraries/drivers/dev tools (if you choose), you'll find that Free software does cost.
I'm not sure if BillG really does misunderstand the concept of free software as much as is suggested by the content of his speech, or if he is deliberately spreading misinformation (such as that you cannot charge money for applications built using GPLed code). He also seems to mix up open source and Free software, which is a specific type of open source. GPL is open source but it is actually a particular form of Free software. conversely, Microsoft has released a lot of open source that is in fact not Free (you may see the code but you may not redistribute derivative works, etc).
The real whopper lie he tells (knowingly or not) is that open source (inferring the GPL) prevents people from improving software, which is exactly opposite. It is Microsoft who has created open source licenses that made modification illegal. GPL *protects* the right of others to modify, improve and re-distribute.
The real problem for BillG, I think, is that GPL, and other Free licenses that have similar terms of use, are a "poison pill" that severely hinders one's ability to establish a monopoly.
Anybody else remember the creative term "Veronica" search
Yep, guess that makes you old. Veronica is obviously a "backronym" (the phrase behind it was invented to afterwards to match the word). There is the WWW now, which essentially replaced Gopher space, but before that the 'net was all about FTP. To seach public FTP archives you used "Archive Search", which was contracted to the nickname "Archie". Then Gopher came out which added structure to the big pile of archives, and a Gopher search was made for it. Since it was a search utility "companion" to Archie it was named Veronica (as in the comic book characters).
Later a localhost-only, optimised search utility for a Gopher host was made called....Jughead (because it was the "lazy friend" of Archie and Veronica).
This article reminds me of theories about the 'net eventually becoming sentient...with this big trail of info crumbs we might find our friends Archie, Veronica and Jughead will turn into stalkers...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Yes, of course it is, or will have to be, for any non-nuclear, non-hydro, or non-fossil fuel source to be even remotely economically feasible as a first use low hanging fruit energy substitute.
This just completely defies the laws of physics. The efficiency of transporting power over a line vs. using a truck that is heavier than the "storage cell" you envision, powered by an engine that puts out more energy in heat than as kinetic energy, is just absurd.
Complete elimination of grids would be more reliable. Have fully charged flashlight batteries ever failed during a storm outage? Nope.
Another completely absurd statement, primarily because you assume you'd have fully charged flashlight batteries to start with. I've had some come right out of the package nearly flat (defective batch), and batteries don't hold a charge indefinitely. With Lead Acid, NiMH or LiIon rechargeables you generally want to keep them topped up....oh wait, you do that with a charger...plugged into power from the grid...
Sorry, I'm all for decentralised generation and individual consumers being able to generate into the grid easier, but to say complete absence of a grid would be best is just being stupid. At that small a scale the equipment simply isn't reliable enough. The grid provides quality of service, load balancing and what not.
You seem to suggest that distributed systems are bad, when there are big examples showing the opposite (the internet and the electrical grid actually being very successful examples in fact). What's next, are you going to argue that we disconnect all computers from networks and exchange data by recording it onto physical media and posting it so that postmen can drive it around to its final destination? Are you going to rail against the evil, monopolistic carriers because they had politicians in their pocket and subsidised the building of their networks at the expense of competition?
Yes, politics stinks, but the technology is sound. Seems rather ridiculous to suggest absurd methods are superior to use technically because on corporate and government meddling in what technically is quite workable.
Grids are expensive and security risks.
Quite the opposite. Grids are robust and fault tolerant. The problem isn't transmission and distribution, it is generation (big central power plants)
A decentralized power system would be much more economically efficient
You mean decentralised GENERATION. The power grid would not be susceptible to giant blackouts if we didn't have gigawatt power plants able to go off-line because one tower collapses in a forest fire or lightning strike or because a unit tripped when an operator pulled a Homer Simpson. Apart from that the grid is VERY robust--even when a large substation has a trip the transients dissipate within a pretty small area.
Grid = Monopoly
Actually the Internet is a grid consisting of millions of people and businesses. Even the electric grid in North America consists of numerous owners and operators.
It's economically efficient to transport oil and gasoline by tankers and by semi truck to decentralized filling stations.
Wrong. Pipeline networks are more efficient, safer and reliable. There's never been an on-land pipeline catastrophe on the scale of the Exxon Valdez mess. It is only at the retail level where vehicular transport of fuel is preferred (and yes, decentralised filling stations are most efficient--but that requires a network...or grid... of fuel transportation systems).
Natural Gas is another "grid"...it spends most of its life moving around in a network of pipes.
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready.
Why does solar energy need to be transported? Solar energy hits all habitable areas of the world! We don't need to take over 8400 square miles of Arizona with a complex of solar-thermal generating units--that would be foolish! What you do instead is build neighbourhood solar-thermal units to collect the heat, store it geo-thermally and use a heat engine of a sort to generate electricity for the immediate vicinity. The interconnected grid would remain important, as different areas may not capture enough energy to meet local needs at all times.
Gates and Co had an abortive project called Traf-o-Data
That was not only the name of the product, it was the original name of Microsoft too.
Up until the 1970s traffic counters recorded the "hits" on their sensors on paper charts. Legions of clerks then counted the dots on the charts by hand in a manner not unlike the infamous Florida recount (looking at "chads" all day). The tallies were then given to "computers" (that was the job title for the person, not a machine in many if not most cases), or statisticians, to figure out if roads were being over-utilised. This service was performed by traffic analysis companies on contract by municipalities.
BillG and Paul Allen thought all this to be ridiculous as electronic computers were being widely adopted in academia and commerce, so they figured they'd save the municipalities tons of money by making a computer with the new Intel 8008 chip. Paul Allen wrote a simulator/development environment for the WSU mainframe, BillG developed the softwqare for the device itself and another friend built the hardware. It wasn't an "abortive" project--the device was completed and they made several thousand dollars using it to provide hourly traffic data to Washington state municipalities.
The reason for Traf-o-data's shortened lifespan was that the Washington state government started taking the paper tapes and feeding them through their own new computers to analyse the traffic at no cost to the municipalities. That quickly put Traf-o-data and several other companies out of the traffic analysis business in Washington state.
Gates and Allen retired the traf-o-data device and went off to college, but their business partnership remained intact. Within months the January 1975 Popular Electronics appeared with the MITS Altair 8800 as the cover story and gave Gates and Allen the opportunity for their next project. Gates and Allen sent a letter to Ed Roberts (MITS founder and Altair designer) offering to supply a BASIC interpreter...IIRC on Traf-o-data letterhead. (story goes that the address and phone number on the traf-o-data letterhead was for the Gates' Seattle-area residence, and when Roberts phoned one of BillG's parents answered and had no clue what this BASIC thing was about; the letter was actually sent from Harvard where BillG and Allen were studying and they forgot to tell BillG's parents about it--but that's just a story, like the one about IBM's men in dark suits showing up at Mrs. Kildall's doorstep). They modified Allen's 8008 simluator to fully support the 8080 procesor of the Altair and set forth writing the BASIC.
After the demo, Roberts hired them (well, Paul Allen at least was an employee) as MITS software development team, and they dropped out and moved to New Mexico to do business near MITS. Their business continued on the side, independent of MITS, and was re-named from Traf-o-data to Micro-soft (the hyphen disappeared when the company converted from a simple partnership into a corporation. They retained rights to supply BASIC to other computer vendors and end users, and then set about creating 6809 and 6502 ports of BASIC. Their BASIC quicky found its way onto IMSAI, ProcTech, Tandy and Commodore computers and the rest is history.
Perhaps BillG was feeling nostalgic about the Traf-o-data system that REALLY started it all for MSFT (not the Altair 8800 or the IBM 5150 as most people might think) and decided to pay homage to "the founder".
How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.
Ironically, at least here in western Canada (including in the Weyburn oilfields which are in close proximity to where all the interest is in the Bakken formation), industry and governments are investing in "carbon sequestration" technology, and of great interest is injection of CO2 into wells to push previously unrecoverable oil up and out of the ground. The end result is we get more recoverable oil out of each well, plus thousands of tonnes of CO2 are more or less permanently removed from the atmosphere.
The use of such enhanced recovery technology, as well as meeting the power demands of upgrading and refining of oil using nuclear power, would quite significantly reduce the net CO2 footprint of petroleum based fuel.
So five companies control about half of the US refining and marketing space, and the top 10 control nearly three-quarters? Ten customers for over 70% of the market for crude in the US certainly sounds like "only a few significant customers" to me. Your numbers don't disprove my argument, they re-enforce it!
I never contended there was a monopoly, but it's hard to argue that 10 companies controlling over 70% of the business doesn't constitute an oligarchy, and that collusion in such a market is quite a feasibility.
First of all, most of our oil does not [doe.gov] come from Canada and Mexico
But over one third of it does already. A sizeable chunk of the Athabasca fields in Alberta are not yet developed, and the vast majority of Saskatchewan's potentially recoverable oil reserves remain untapped. Billions of dollars are being spent on upgrader and enhanced-recovery facilities in Alberta, and Saskatchewan has recently voted out a long-in-the-tooth socialist government and replaced it with a more business-friendly regime that has vowed to be more aggressive in developing its natural resources.
It is possible (and in fact, in the long term, probable) that in the future over 50% of foreign oil imports into the US will be from Canada and Mexico. Middle eastern foreign policy is less and less about maintaining the power of US-friendly sheiks in return for cheap oil and more about keeping nukes out of the hands of twisted "Islamic" madmen with deluded thoughts of blowing up us "infidels" so they can spend eternity in Allah's kingdom with a harem of 1000 forever-youthful wives.
Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude[sic] with each other, they compete.
There is not a monopoly in E&P, however there is an oligopoly of large, vertically-integrated energy companies (you know, the ones that pull oil out of the ground, refine it themselves and ship it to their own chains of service stations). They've always colluded to some extent, but just like a mafia Don they manage to stay just on the right side of the legal line. Many of these companies share their origin as parts of the former Standard Oil trust. And guess what? They've almost completely re-merged, and the re-constituted corporations are huge in comparison to Standard Oil (Exxon+Mobil, Chevron+Texaco, BP+Amoco...so the huge, top-tier playing field is cut in half and the players themselves are twice as big).
There might be thousands of companies looking for and collecting the crude, but only a handful refine it into fuel and fewer yet sell that fuel to us. Fat lot of good having lots of competition in the crude arena is when they all have just a few significant customers (refiners and marketers). The market can be controlled from both the supply and demand side you know.
She replied with "That's good. Save a tree." I stopped for a second about to explain that the bag was made from petroleum, not trees.
The Bakken Formation is an oil shale deposit, which would probably bear some resemblance to the Athabasca Formation in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan (which is an oil sand deposit). While some success is being had in using "Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage" drilling and recovery techniques to recover Athabasca oil, most of it is recovered through open pit mining. The same will probably be the case with the Bakken oil fields.
Much of the land cleared for strip mining is in fact forested. So, I suppose if we were so much less reliant on oil that we didn't need to exploit oil sands and shales we would, indirectly, "save a tree" by not using a petroleum product.
If all or most software is going open-source, how does a software company make money?
Sort answer: They don't. They go extinct, or shrink down to shadows of their former selves and serve niche markets.
Let me explain: It is entirely possible that "software as a product" could be supplanted by Free, or at least open-source, software. The business model of selling a box with a little plastic disc in it on a store shelf, or even pay-per-download or pay-per-activation, will become obsolete.
There used to be companies out there like Underwood or Olivetti that sold typewriters and typewriter accessories and that was their business. Then computers came around...and then word processing software and decent printers. You might as well ask "if all or most writers are going to computers then how are typewriter companies going to make money?". The answer was, indeed, "they don't". The aforementioned companies did not "get" PCs. They may have tried to make electronic typewriters or whatever but they all eventually went belly up, shrunk, merged with struggling competitors and what not. None of the old names exist as independent businesses anymore and none make any notable revenue from typewriters--they've moved on to make printers, fax machines, portable electronic gadgets, etc.
So to make money in an age of Free and/or open source software domination a (closed/product-oriented) software company has to change into a different kind of company, or close up shop. Simple as that.
Don't say services because services don't provide real cash flow.
Okay, I wont, but that is one of many ways a software company can re-invent itself.
The whole 1st world economy is becoming service oriented! Las Vegas is built on services (people go there, spend thousands and come back with LESS--they paid for entertainment SERVICES). Some auto dealerships make more money on SERVICES than on selling cars!
What I mean is enough cash flow for serious new projects and research.
Woah you are WAY off there. IBM makes serious money from open source, and re-invests considerable amounts in R&D. Furthermore, Free software promotes large-scale collaboration. By building a business around Free software you can amplify the returns on R&D. For every innovation you contribute to a project you could get many more in return from other contributors.
Service work has a relatively low profit margin because there is no way to "ramp up" as it were.
Services provide, in the long term, FAR more profit than product sales. You can only sell so many widgets before you hit a wall in terms of growth. Customers want service constantly.
Once a piece of commercial software is developed it can continue to provide profit with only maintenance costs.
"Maintenance costs" are the issue. Do you think MSFT makes any money at all on hotfixes and service pack releases? Of course not...it is one of their biggest EXPENSES. With closed software customers have already paid sizeable money so they expect to have defects addressed for free. If software ceases to be a product in and of itself and is viewed for what it really is--a "consumable" commodity like hand tools or paper or fuel or whatever--then the revenue stream is the service.
This addresses end-users needs far better than on-size-fits-all-badly packaged software. At the enterprise level especially, the real bread is in integration, customisation, migration, training and so on. Even at the consumer level, services are where the money is. Telecom SERVICE providers make the big bucks on the SERVICE, not on the phones they pretty much give away/sell at cost (where the device maker has to deal with slimmer margins).
Plus you can sell upgrades.
You must have never had to do that, because you make it sound so easy. There has to be a value proposition in it. It is inevitable that you reach a point of diminishing returns, where the "innovations" provided by upgrades become
...when you count "open source" projects.
"Free" software was a concept that I think really emerged with the release of GNU Emacs. Gosling EMACS and Stallman's PDP EMACS may have been "open source" but they weren't truly "Free software". Being that it's 10 years after the FREE software summit that the discussion is around that rather than simply computer programs with widely distributed source code.
In the loosest sense of the definition, open source has existed since at least the 1960s. Computers were not commodities as they are today; they were large, expensive and complex. There were less computers around, and the user community was smaller and more knowledgeable. The industry was driven by hardware and services provided by mainframe vendors (IBM, AKA "Snow white" and the "seven dwarfs", IBM's main competitors). A good deal of software at that time was open source if not Free, because there was little if nothing at all lost by the vendors if the code was freely shared (after all, the systems this software ran on typically were leased with lucrative service agreements and so on).
The 1970s really WERE the decade of decline for open source. When minis like the PDP series and UNIX systems emerged to become a significant part of the market most systems were then bought outright and these smaller systems didn't always require vendor service agreements, so closed software started becoming more important as a revenue stream.
Then, in 1975 the Altair 8800 came out and, for the most part, revolutionised computing by making individual ownership and control of computing resources feasible. I think, however, that it very nearly killed open source software. Thankfully it lived on in the PC space in the form of magazine type-in programs and the like.
Perhaps it was the near-demise of a significant open source community that gave Free software advocates the resolve to succeed. The near-extinction of open source tools in UNIX systems certainly was the prime motivator in the creation of the GNU license (to keep open source code from being co-opted by closed software vendors).
I think the damage done by the rise of closed source in the 1970s and early 80s still shows to this day. For a time, open source sometimes meant you paid dearly monetarily for the privilege to see the code and modify it for your own purposes, and free software was "gratis", not truly Free (or "libre"). And since there is no "gratis" lunchyou paid in some way, whether it was timed lockouts, feature reductions or the like in shareware or through advertising revenue streams.
When I started using Linux in around 1996 and I first got paid to work on Linux systems used commercially in 1997, so I've seen first hand that though it was embraced by academia there was a fair bit of suspicion to overcome with management and nearly total ignorance from end users. I think today business has fully embraced Free software where it is sponsored and backed by "expert" corporations, such as is the case with Linux and Apache by IBM, Red Hat and Novell.
However, the stigma of closed freeware, particularly adware and spyware, remains a major challenge for Free software acceptance amongst naive Windows users. For example, when Firefox 1.0 was released just before 2005 I started advocating it as a safer alternative to IE and FF was viewed with great deal of doubt. I encountered a few people who steadfastly believed that FF was spyware. IE was part of Windows, and most of the offerings out there as an alternative weren't really browsers but "skins" over top the IE engine, and such skins, tool bars, "helper objects" and the like were most often pop-up factories or spyware. Furthermore, Free software apps were behind the curve in terms of creating signed distribution packages, so the Microsoft warning about an unsigned app just reinforced the FUD.
I think that the first decade since the Free software summit was the decade of commercial acceptance (and understanding that Free software isn't the opposite of comme
Rather than banning certain activities like shaving, talking on a cell, fiddling with the radio, or tending to unruly children, train new drivers on how to drive with common every-day distractions
How 'bout a general "driving distracted" law that handles all of it? EACH AND EVERY ONE of those activities is COMPLETELY avoidable by pulling over to the side as soon as conveniently save THEN doing the activity. You do NOT have to channel surf your XM radio. Do your grooming at HOME like a sensible human being. Wait for AFTER the journey for your smoke break--do not light your cigarette at highway speeds or throw it out your window to set the whole prairie ablaze or scorch the car next to you. And, PUT THE DAMN PHONE AWAY!
Unless you have special controls for the handicapped you NEED BOTH YOUR HANDS TO DRIVE...Not your elbows, or your left thumb and your right knee. This is common sense...it is already taught in driver's ed classes and it is required to pass a road test that you signal, obey signs and speed limits and pay attention or you are not granted a driver's permit! Yet, we all gradually end up driving like idiots if we aren't reminded through enforcement.
I agree that drivers could be trained a bit better on managing and minimising distractions, but really, even the mental midgets stupid enough to try to shave and drive at the same time know you aren't "supposed" to. Ideally, traffic violation fines are a reminder not to do stupid things, but at the very least they are a good "stupid tax".
Getting pulled over and getting a ticket for using your cellphone whilst operating a motor vehicle, because you were keying in the location of that officer's speed trap.
If people spent half as much energy worrying about their exercise regimen as they do fretting about whether they should eat carbs or not, people in general would be a lot healthier.
This isn't entirely true. The general public doesn't give enough consideration to their health in general. Neither diet NOR physical activity are given enough attention as we all eat far too many refined carbohydrates and saturated fats AND lead sedentary lives that just aggravate the situation.
I know people who lead physically active lives (typically having physically demanding jobs), are not the slightest bit overweight (quite lean builds in fact) and by outward appearances look physically healthy...but they skip breakfast, and eat cheeseburgers and fries for lunch and supper every day and smoke moderately. They get sick more often and are the types of people who have digestion problems and end up being the people in conversations like "HE had a heart attack? But he looked so healthy!"
Diet certainly IS very important. The problem is that we eat very badly, and when we focus on diet we don't eat balanced diets--we go on "extreme atkins" or try to eat like Jarod or eat carefully, artificially-portioned pre-packaged meals like Nutrisystem so we can lose weight and "look nice".
Diet is JUST AS IMPORTANT as physical activity; you CANNOT say "Oh, I work out every day so I can eat just about anything". Though physical activity provides the most impact on metabolism and many other health factors, it is DIET that has the largest impact on weight. Think about it: It takes mere seconds to a couple of minutes to eat a chocolate bar, which cancels out the calories you expend on 20 minutes of medium-to-intense cardio activity. It's well known that losing weight and/or increasing % of lean body mass has a notable impact on harmful cholesterol...so if you want to lose weight and be more healthy don't use exercise as an excuse to eat those sugar and fat-laden chocolate bars.
IS is just following tradition of other standards entities like IEC and ECMA.
Take a look at the IEC 61158 Fieldbus standard, AKA the "ugly 8-headed beast". It is, by technical standards, an inefficient, inconsistent, complicated mess and even those who supported its ratification concede this. Basically, it takes once-proprietary protocols for SCADA/Process control/automation in verbatim and declared them standards. There is duplication, overlap, etc. all over the place.
You basically don't try to be "fully IEC 61158 compliant"...vendors generally strive to comply with one of the eight "types". Vendors generally stick to the type they invented for the whole product line, then provide converter/bridge devices to one or more others. For example, in North America "Type 2" (ControlNet) is prevalent and is the protocol of choice for Rockwell's Allan-Bradley products since Rockwell was a leading force in its creation. Likewise in Europe (Germany especially) "Type 3" (PROFIBUS) is prevalent and used extensively in Siemens products because Siemens was a steering force in the consortium that created the protocol. Both Rockwell and Siemens create converters to other types like "Type 1" (FOUNDATION Fieldbus).
The whole logic behind this messy standard was not to make an easy-to-follow, fully-implementable standard. The prime motivation was to eliminate trade barriers and promote interoperability (ie. now that the protocols are part of a standard one vendor cannot demand royalties from third parties that inter-operate, nor can interoperability be broken by the original vendor without losing standards compliance).
This serves the purpose well enough, but with OOXML there is a difference: One single vendor invented the format, without any consultation with any other interested parties, and it effectively retains ownership of the format. It is possibly encumbered with patents, and its pledge not to litigate has potential conditions, especially regarding "commercial" implementations. At least with IEC 61158 all the different "types" are from many different vendors, and in most cases the creators either never "owned" the standard (for example, Siemens participated in a consortium at the behest of the German gov't) or the standard was given over to a non vendor-specific entity long before IEC 61158 was ratified (as Rockwell has done with ControlNet). And, since the standard is periodically reviewed some "types" may fall into disuse and be deprecated and new "types" added or old ones expanded to consider new technologies. I fear that OOXML as a standard is vulnerable to disrepair, and lack of wide adoption beyond MSFT because that one vendor so completely controls the standard.
retroactively standardize 20 years of legacy document formats
.NET back at 1.0 and now it has OOXML. I'm all for MSFT being an active participant in creating standards, however they have a poor track record on compliance:
.NET is an official standard, and there exists a multi-platform implementation in the form of MONO, but MSFT has done nothing to make extensions from .NET 2.x and later standard...that mess up the embrace and extend strategy.
And this comes as news to who exactly? There is an ancient joke, one I first heard when Windows 3.x was still current:
Q. How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a light bulb?
A. NONE. Microsoft just declares darkness to be the new standard in illumination.
MSFT built its success on creating de-factor standards starting with its very first product. Microsoft BASIC was born on the Altair 8800 and was the only serious BASIC implementation on S100 bus systems. MSBASIC was then ported to 680x and 6502, then licensed to Tandy, Commodore then Apple. It became the "standard" dialect of BASIC, and if you wrote MS-BASIC code without using embedded machine language (PEEK, POKE and CALL/SYS/USR), graphics beyond ASCII-art and sound (ie. support "lowest common denominator" hardware) then that code would run unmodified on basically ALL S100-based machines, Commodore machines, TRS-80s and Apple ][s with Applesoft BASIC.
De-facto standardisation is what "embrace and extend" is all about too: MSFT buys or licenses (for a one-time bargain fee) some emerging technology, or blatantly copies it, then adds its own "flavour" to it. Then it leverages its position in the market to make it ubiquitous and thus a "de-facto standard". MSFT bought out SCP and used SCP's CP/M work-alike and its leverage with the IBM deal to make MS-DOS into such a standard. It licensed Mosiac from Spyglass and extended it into IE and made it the "standard" browser, leading to a giant legion of tragically lazy web developers turning out piles of garbage code that was "good enough" because it worked with IE.
All that is new is that MSFT is now pulling out all the stops to make their pseudo-standards into "official" standards because legislation was getting in the way. This started with participation in WWW standards (MSFT was involved early and heavily in CSS, SOAP, ECMAscript/Javascript...), then it got standards approval for
* They maintained non-standard IE behaviours and extensions in Javascript, and maintained support for its own bastardised scripting dialect VBScript, and continues to do so to this day in the name of "compatibility" that nobody needs anymore.
* Despite being so involved in getting CSS level 1 to fruition, it wasn't until IE7 that they even came close to being serious about complying with the standard...and once again they maintained a broken box model in "quirks mode" to this day in the name of compatibility so that lazy web developers wouldn't have to look at their crap code ever again...even though the WWW is so dynamic that web pages are reworked with regularity anyways.
*
OOXML will follow just this path, I'm quite sure. Their own Office 2007 doesn't fully and properly comply with even the draft approved by ECMA. MSFT products will NEVER fully comply, but they are first out the door to "support" OOXML, in the same sense that IE "supports" HTML, CSS and Javascript. This ensures that non-complying MSOffice 2007 documents may suffer "fidelity loss" when opened, say, in OO.o, but, as they say, "it's good enough for government work" (ie. it gets them past standrads legislation and ensures agencies favour MSFT because it "works the best" with the most prevalent OOXML dialect).
Furthermore, the copious amounts of deprecated, "backwards compatiblity directives" are basically "de-facto lock-in features". You just KNOW there are tons of Office 95/97/2000 and even WordPerfect docs archived out there. When these are passed through MSOffice 2007 or later and
...if governments go the right direction. The "Net Neutrality" bills in the US fairly closely parallel how the electrical grid was privatised in many places. When de-constructing regulated/mandated monopolies and government-run utilities to create an open market it generally involved legislation enacted to establish a "power pool", whereby those with generation, transmission or distribution facilities were legally required to participate in the "power pool" electricity market if they wanted to be connected to the public grid. The Net Neutrality bills parallel that stipulation (if you provide internet service, you must treat all traffic that traverses your network the same, regardless of origin and endpoint).
The wireless part of things is heading that way too, with phone number portability and frequency and licensing auctions in Canada and the US that encourage new entries in the market as well as some partial measures towards "neutrality" (in Canada, bills have been introduced to require that all carriers allow compatible traffic from all other carriers over their networks at cost plus a limited, reasonable percentage markup).
What is left after universal access is mandated by government is the establishment of a "network pool" to replace outright regulation of prices, so that they properly follow the forces of supply and demand. If the costs to ISPs followed market forces and usage, then it would be more practical to bill customers along the same lines.
One thing to caution about, however, is that though the concept is sound and the end result very desirable and fair, in practice the transition (in the electricity market) has been difficult and tainted. Industry lobbyists are very good at protecting their interests, and those with established generation facilities were given a very easy ride. Barriers to entry for new players were high and auctions were not well managed or publicised. As a result, when the "power pool" markets were put into operation there were only a few players in the market, and the majority were the former monopolists/sold-off former government operations. This allowed the system to be gamed and prices to be manipulated.
ISPs don't tend to have the geographical monopolies that existed in the electrical industry (and deregulation of telephone companies broke down the RBOC monopolies that existed, at least to a degree) so that might help keep manipulation to a minimum. Nonetheless, the ends are positive even if the means aren't perfect.
...than "just blogging" about your idea. To claim prior art, an invention must be reasonably accessible public knowledge AND must not be "abandoned". You can't just come up with some blueprints or computer code or a specification document, publish it in a blog or technical journal and be satisfied that a patent will not eventually be granted to someone else.
You have two choices regarding your patentable ideas:
1. Fully implement your ideas in a complete, functional application and put as much effort as possible into getting it widely distributed. It would be especially beneficial if you made such an implementation work with a widely distributed Free software project (for example, a Linux kernel module, an Apache module, a Perl implementation available on CPAN...). Promote the hell out of it, try to get it included in a Linux or BSD distro, whatever. If the implementation of your concept is ubiquitous, or could be discovered by a cursory search, then you'd have a strong case of prior art and could have patents overturned.
2. Apply for a patent yourself. If you are not interested in creating a full implementation of your idea then you don't have a rock-solid case of prior art, so this would be the best tool at your disposal to protect your invention. Stipulate (perhaps even in the patent submission itself) that free, unrestricted and non-exclusive rights to incorporate the invention is granted on the condition that the derived work MUST be made available under an OSI-approved open license, otherwise steep license fees/royalties are applicable. If you insist that closed implementations require a percentage of revenue or per-user fee, it would keep Microsoft away, as it is known BillG personally as well as the company are extremely loathsome of paying on such terms.
The submitter suggested that he isn't too keen on carrying forward with implementation of the inventions himself, so his idea would likely be considered "abandoned" unless someone friendly to his interests did it for him, so option 1 is out.
I'd say, that if you want protection of your ideas from falling victim to submarine patents or patent troll corporations then you really MUST apply for a patent yourself. The patent and copyright systems around the world may have severe flaws, but if you want to beat patent trolls and copyright cartels then you have to play their game. The Free software community does this widely in the copyright arena and the FSF, on creators behalf, has vigourously enforced copyright in a few cases to make sure the code stays Free, in the same way as Microsoft would enforce copyrights to make sure its own software stays closed (to the extent it served their interests). If you have hardware or software concepts that you believe are patentable and are potentially valuable then it would be wise to use the rights granted by the patent system to enforce your ideals the way copyright is used.
Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns.
[...]
Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already.
The word "nationalise" makes me cringe. The less the government owns or runs the better. Governments should stick to making rules and making sure they are followed equally by everyone and let private enterprise do their jobs.
However, I find the idea of billing on the electrical model quite compelling. Basically large electrical users are charged based upon "peak demand" (highest MW value over a billing cycle) as well as for energy costs ($ per MWh). Most contracts have a cap on both, and if you go over you are not cut off, but you get a nasty shock on your next bill. However it is a fair system because you pay your fair share to cover the costs of distribution (via peak demand charge) and generation (cost of energy). If you start a whole bank of motors at once and the MW spikes for a minute, you have to pay a charge based on that value for the whole month. The reasoning is that if you max out the capacity of the copper line into your facility it will cost a lot for the utility to upgrade it. The same with surcharges on energy consumption overages--if everyone used more energy than they promised, the utility has to make unexpected upgrades in generation capacity.
Demand and energy charges translated to internet access would be throughput (Mb/s) and total data transferred (Gigs of data each month), and the justification would be the same as for electrical utilities. I would most strongly object to attempts to "nationalise" an "internet grid" though because that is in fact moving in the opposite direction of where (once very severely dysfunctional) electrical utilities are coming from. I think the government's role in all of this is to enact legislation mandating an "open grid" but for private enterprise to retain ownership and management of the assets. It would closely mirror a partially-deregulated, privately-owned electrical system that is becoming predominant. The cables and switches used in backbones would be "transmission", routers and servers (storage and directing of data) would be "generation" and the "last mile" including firewalls and "intelligence" would be "distribution". Corporations and other heavy users could participate in the "internet pool" through methods akin to "co-generation", whereby they generate revenue (or recover costs at least) by providing routers and servers to handle public internet traffic.
Incidentally, the electric grids in North America are NOT significantly government owned--not any more at any rate. Governments might have, say a 25% or less stake in a power pool or in the transmission or distribution systems at most, and taxpayer-funded investment in new infrastructure is also very much a minority stake. Transmission lines tend to be investor-owned assets; distribution lines (the "edges") are what tend to be owned by local levels of government more than anything else.
Historically various governments HAVE owned and (mis)managed the electrical grid. However, as government institutions these state-owned power companies were pretty big drains on the finances, and the capital investments required to increase capacity started outstripping governments' funding abilities. This has lead to a lot of privatisation of state-owned utility assets, especially since the 1990s. Government still plays an important role as overseer/regulator (they enact legislation and establish "commodity markets" for the buying and selling of electricity). The transition was difficult, but I believe if governments had retained and tightened control over electrical utilities we'd right now be subjected to Cuban-style rolling-blackouts. Things are far from perfect, and at the start of it all the elecetrical utilities were downright dysfunctional and government graft/corruption really tainted the process. Hopefully things don't get THAT dysfunctional with telecom before they get better too.
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
Which begs the question: Why the hell hasn't MSFT done its QC/QA job and taken NVidia to task? Why can't it use its dominant, near-monopoly status in the industry for GOOD for a change, instead of for whipping the competition?
These "root cause analysis" numbers were trotted out by MSFT in its defense argument in the "Vista Capable" lawsuit. How does this absolve MSFT of anything here? Wasn't the "Vista capable" label supposed to MEAN something? Don't they do thorough regression tests of systems to make sure that they really ARE capable of running Vista? Why were machines equipped with NVidia chipsets, which relied on drivers responsible for nearly 30 percent of crashes, allowed to be sold as "Vista capable"? In my opinion, it just bolsters the argument that MSFT was negligent and misleading in it's Vista Capable campaign when machines with such crappy drivers are allowed to be pushed out the door on vague assurances that by the time Vista was in wide release the bugs would be squished.
Apple's computers "just work" because they have complete control over the system software and hardware stack and can ensure total quality control. Linux and BSD offer superior reliability and generally better performance because the software is developed and scrutinised by a huge community, and hardware is closely studied or specs are fully disclosed (interestingly the worst Linux drivers happen to be those where hardware specs are most closely guarded). MSFT needs one or the other. They aren't in a position do specify exact hardware as Apple is and Ballmer would be throwing chairs left and right if source code was ever opened up, so they must insist on more control over the drivers supported with their OS and demand more access to hardware specifications so they can assist in making quality drivers. If MSFT ever hopes to have a TRULY quality OS, and they are not willing to move towards a Free software development model, they absolutely MUST exert as much control as possible over the development of system-level software for thrid-party hardware vendors' products (drivers in particular).
I know where I live if the clouds are gone and it isn't raining we get a little hotter.
The quantities and dispersion of chemicals involved in cloud seeding are infinitesimally small in comparison to the amounts of CO2 and CH4 released into the atmosphere, both from natural and man-made sources. Humans no doubt have an impact on climate, however I don't think we've even come close to mastering CONTROL of the climate on a global scale. Cloud seeding is quite localised and doesn't really work precisely enough to give *total* control of weather.
Anyways the effect of cloud cover on temperature varies with geography, seasons and time of day. Clouds can act as thermal isolation in either direction; at midday in the summer an overcast sky can block incoming sunlight and cool things down. However in the winter, or at night, or at other locales, clouds may INCREASE the actual or apparent temperature as they trap heat from leaving an area. Where I live in the winter, a clear, cloudless sky at mid-day usually happens when it is very very COLD (whereas, during a chinook when winter days are warmest there is always a "chinook arch" cloud formation), so I don't think you can associate the presence or absence of clouds with expected temperature.
In any case, cloud seeding doesn't seem to reduce cloud cover significantly. It seems to merely divert the occurrence of precipitation, making the inevitable happen a bit earlier. Some US states have tried to use it to make chronically dry areas get more rainfall that normally falls areas further downwind. In Alberta it is used to induce precipitation before hailstones can form. Hail is when water vapour adheres to small particles and is carried by wind currents to freezing altitudes, where it falls again and collects more moisture before being blown back up again, and cloud seeding makes the water vapour form larger droplets sooner so it falls before it can be caught in the hail-forming cycle. Presumably in Beijing they want to induce rainfall before a system reaches the city.
Nobody has figured out how to stop rain that is already happening, or to create a storm system; we can only trigger rain to happen sooner. I cannot see how this has a significant impact on global temperatures and weather patterns.
South-central Alberta (between Calgary and Red Deer in Western Canada) is known to be one of the worlds more severe "hail belts". Hail has been responsible for hundreds of millions in damage, ranging from crops and houses (penetrating shingles and shakes to the point of damaging the cladding underneath, as well as causing flooding) to automobiles and airplanes (a hail storm in the Calgary area caused a cargo flight to Minneapolis to abort its ascent when tennis-ball-sized hailstones destroyed the cockpit windscreen of the Boeing 727 jet).
For the past dozen years, the government has regularly seeded clouds in its hail damage mitigation programme. As a Calgary resident I can say that it has noticeably reduced the frequency and intensity of hail storms, and has probably contributed to millions of dollars in savings in disaster relief and insurance claims.
Given that this is not only an old practice, but one that occurs frequently around the world, I don't see where the news-worthiness or controversy is in China's application of cloud seeding to divert precipitation from Beijing during Olympic events, aside from the mildly amusing reason behind the project.