So you worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies in a two year period? There is no way anyone could have gotten to known the real needs of clients at that many large companies in that short a period of time. Clearly as a candidate you would have no way of predicting whether or not I would be a good fit for the clients you represent.
This is a small part of why programmers are very rarely served well by recruiters.
Well yes, I think business patents are BS. The basic idea behind patents is that they provide an incentive for the inventor to disclose his invention in exchange for a right to prevent others from practicing the invention. It is a contract between a society and the inventor. The problem in the case of business process patents is that they cannot be kept secret so there is no value to society in this contract. No one in their right mind would enter into a contract like that.
But your point that NDAs work only on business processes is wrong. A company can apply NDAs to many things that they don't want to patent. For example it is common in the chemical industry to sell catalysts tied up with contracts that prohibit the buyer from reverse engineering or even conducting a chemical analysis of the catalyst.
Real software development talent doesn't use recruiters to find jobs. You can't find talent because real talent doesn't need or use the recruiting process.
I haven't sent a resume or otherwise contacted a recruiter since my second job many years ago. Now my network of colleagues is where I go looking if I am considering a job change. They know what the real story is at the companies they are working at. And they don't blow hot air up my ass, or lie or otherwise mislead me about what the nature of the job opening is, and they know whether or not I would be a good fit.
If a company wants to attract solid programming talent they need to treat their existing programmers well. If they do the word will get out.
If they shit on their developers all they will get is shitty developers.
Maybe that is because the USNO contains primary frequency standards, so any attempt to take accurate photographs would result in a violation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The patent office doesn't take market projections into account when evaluating a patent, but the company sure does when it decides to apply or not.
The value of a patent is in the innovation for sure. But quantifying that value requires a market and economic analysis. This analysis has a technical component, but mostly it is profit and cost calculation, and perhaps a strategic assessment as well. That analysis is part of what a company takes in when it decides to proceed with a patent. Few if any companies will reveal their research results unless they feel that a patent will be of some value.
Patentability is a separate issue altogether. That is governed by law and prior art. A good patent lawyer also has technical training in the field he is working in - dual law and science degrees, PhDs are frequently found in the field of patent law. Working with the researcher the lawyer makes an assessment as to the patentability of the invention. Usually patentability assessments are made pretty early in the research process and may even result in changes to the research plan, or outright project cancellations.
There is another choice as well - the invention may give better economic value to the company if it is not patented at all, rather kept as a trade secret. A patent if obtained may turn out to be impossible to enforce, or reveal more than the company thinks appropriate for the value returned. Or it may be that contractual agreements would provide better return than a patent.
Nope, not at all. The value of the invention should be and usually is determined by market studies and financial analysis. Quite often there is a cost engineer involved who will translate lab results into operational cost and manufacturing estimates. Some times a professional economist will help by providing information on things like projected costs of the commodities that go into the product, and the growth potential of the market during the life of the product.
The sales skill of the scientific staff comes into the picture much earlier - getting the funding to conduct the R&D in the first place.
That does not prevent an economic and market evaluation of the potential for the idea. Of course the accuracy of those evaluations may be poor but that is where businesses either fail or succeed in earning their pay.
Poppy cock. The purpose of a patent is to encourage the inventor to share his invention. The return for that is the ability to prevent others from practicing that invention for the period of the patent. It does not create a shortage; the concept is utter non-sense. There is no shortage, in fact the process of creating a patent guarantees that MORE will be available by encouraging the inventor to disclose his idea in return for the patent grant. Prior to the existence of patents inventors used trade secrets, non-disclosure contracts and various means of technical obfuscation to hide their inventions greatly impeding the advance of technologies.
I don't know who this Cole guy is but from this writing he seems to not understand what a patent is or why patents came into existence. At all.
Where I have worked the decision to proceed with a patent application has been made by a review committee including legal, business and scientific representatives. And the cost was borne by the business requesting the application.
"There are a lot of things that are "not inherently illegal" that become the basis of a civil suit after one enters an agreement not to do it."
This is one of the areas the people espousing the abolishment of patent and copyright laws miss. Patents and copyrights are not the only means that can be used to protect intelelctual property; trade secret and contract law also provide many opportunities to control the flow of information. In general these mechanisms are far worse for the society that relies on them than patent and copyrights; one needs to consider what current laws would be replaced with before advocating that they be discontinued.
I'm just saying that this fact becomes less and less important as cheap, commodity hardware with a free Operating System and DBMS becomes more and more "up to" the task. There is an awful lot that you can do with a few of these guys, even if they don't qualify as "big iron".
Data is a gas that fills the container no matter how big it is. Yes commodity hardware can take over the application you were running on big iron two years ago. But the new higher intensity applications are popping out all the time, as newer hardware enables them.
I've been employed in 3 companies that have had varying patent incentive programs over the years. During that time I applied for and was granted 38 patents, in the US and in other nations. None of these were software or business process patents.
The various incentives amounted to an attaboy on the low end up to a hundred shares of stock (worth about $100 per share) per granted patent.
The money was nice, and in some cases there was a reception or dinner involved with a famous speaker which was generally fun. Other times there were plaques, or little trophies inscribed with "Excelsior!" or some such.
Did any of it affect my behavior, or make it more likely I would try to patent something? Not really. Did any of it materially affect my company's business? A little, because it made them feel more comfortable about the security of entering a certain area of business. But none of it really provided the company with a monopoly - there were always alternate technologies that could be used to get the same result, but maybe not as efficiently or cleanly.
If I was going to do it I'd choose the recognition ceremony / famous speaker approach. It meant more to me that the senior management of the company took some time out of their schedule and spent it with the R&D people than than the money or stock did. And think this kind of approach is less likely to distort the inventor's decisions as to what is worth pursuing and what is not. And besides meeting a real live astronaut or Nobel Laureate is way cool.
Solaris doesn't play in the supercomputer market because the Sparc architecture is not cost effective for that application. The big iron that Solaris runs on are enterprise scale database servers, which are optimized for an entirely different set of performance parameters.
I don't give a hoot who backs Smith up. This is a case of FACTUAL ERROR that can be determined from Swiss legislative records. Argument to authority doesn't make incorrect facts go away. Period.
You are totally wrong regarding just about every other aspect of your position as well.
A country MUST establish a patent system BEFORE it has something to protect because afterwards is too late to protect the invention. Allocation of resources to innovation will just not occur until there is a chance of recouping the investment. Pretending otherwise is totally idiotic.
The countries you have cited (Zambia, Bangladesh and Ecuador) ALL HAVE ACTIVE PATENT SYSTEMS. Zambia publishes a patent journal the 25th of every month. You might want to take a subscription.
Again you are taking a very myopic view when it comes to royalties. The outflow of royalties assumes a local license is held. In most cases for small countries this is not true; the product is not manufactured locally. Whatever royalties are lost are counterbalanced by the protection of local innovations that lead to organic internal growth.
Developed countries implement patent systems once they have something to protect. You don't put expensive alarm systems on mud huts.
It's obvious that you don't understand how 90% of the world lives - your viewpoint is overwhelmed by your economic priviledge.
Developed countries don't become developed without establishing a patent system during their ascent. I don't know where you have lived or visited, but a developing country usually is VERY heterogeneous - large areas of mud huts and some islands of world class excellence. Such an environment needs a patent system MORE than a developed country in order to encourage the investment of very scarce resources into innovation.
It is quite obvious that you have no really understanding of the history of technology, the genesis of the industrial revolution or the innovation process. Reading a few books from authors that don't even have their facts straight doesn't qualify you as an expert in the area.
Sanya Reid Smith is clearly incorrect as far as Switzerland and chemical patents goes. The Swiss legislature enacted a law in 1907 that enabled chemical process patents.
Your sources of information clearly have nothing to do with reality.
As far as outflow of royalties - big deal. You are trading the royalties for a institutional structure that will doom your society to being an economic backwater. There is a reason that every nation on the planet that has any serious intent to become developed adopts some sort of patent system. It is simple; the loss in royalties is far outweighed by the benefits to the local economy.
Ah, you have now discovered that there is something known as 'separation of powers' within the US Government. The Executive Branch is charge with enforcing laws. If it doesn't like certain laws it doesn't have to enforce them very hard. It also doesn't have to tell Congress about everything it thinks or does. There is no Congressional oversight of the Executive.
A law that requires the President to retain his emails is very likely to be considered unconstitutional should it be taken to the Supreme Court.
There is a long history of this going right back to the admistration of George Washington who refused to turn some documents associated with a treaty negotiation over to the House of Representatives.
Why do we have these ideas that corporations must be treated in some discriminatory fashion? The economic advantages (you can argue about these if you want) that accrue as the result of copyright law apply to corporations just as much as to individuals. By not treating corps the same as individuals you reduce the economic value here.
Bizarre fashion? If Germany saved so much by copying British ideas, why didn't they gain an economic advantage and supplant the British as the super power of the time?
Yes, it is cheaper to copy the inventions of others than to develop the exact same inventions yourself. But if you are like Germany and did not have the raw materials (i.e. sources of cotton that England had)? Those inventions are worthless. You need inventions that appropriate to the economic needs within your own economy.
Germany didn't save anything. And by copying they did nothing to generate the inventions appropriate to their own needs.
As a result they ended up a second rate power until they got their own technologies going.
Germany used to be quite famous for making fakes of machines used in the British textile manufacturing effort (right down to copying the name of the manufacturer). Many European countries didn't bother with patent protection as it interferred with their ability to make cheap knock offs.
Great Britain was the first country in the world to go through an industrial revolution. This was caused by their adoption of a patent system which rewarded innovators and led to the greatest economic empire the world has ever seen. The fact that other countries did not adopt a patent system until later doomed them to trail Great Britain in development of the institutions needed to support this industrial revolution. The fact that these countries had to copy the British inventions to compete shows how their own (patent less) systems failed to promote innovation within their own societies.
If Einstein had been a chemist, he wouldn't have been working in the Swiss patent office, because at the time, the Swiss believed that you couldn't patent anything chemical. Canada didn't recongize drug patents until the 1960s (if memory serves).
The Swiss did NOT believe that "you could not patent anything chemical". That is ridiculous. What happened in this case is that the Swiss chemical industry wanted to freely use the innovations of the far larger and more successful German chemical industry (operating under a strong patent system), and successfully delayed the introduction of chemical patents until 1907. And by the way Einstein was a very good theoretical chemist (his work on Brownian motion is often taken to be the first absolute proof of atomic theory) AND Einstein worked in the Swiss patent office until 1909, so there is a pretty good chance he DID examine chemical patent applications.
As far as Canada not recognizing drug patents until the 1960's that is poppycock. In fact as far back as 1923 Canada was wrangling with legislation that dealt with the compulsory licensing of drug patents where the active ingredients were made in Canada.
There is a lot of truth to that, however the logic has to be tempered by other considerations as well.
Right now technology stocks as per the NASDAQ index are a historic low P/E ratio, and many companies, not just Microsoft are doing big stock buybacks. Assuming that the normal cyclical fluctuations come into play these companies will be in a great position in the future to raise capital or make acquisitions using stock to complete mergers.
Microsoft may find that as time goes on it will be able to acquire somebody like Yahoo for a far lower effective price because of this buy back.
This is a smart move by Microsoft that will pay back significantly in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
So you worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies in a two year period? There is no way anyone could have gotten to known the real needs of clients at that many large companies in that short a period of time. Clearly as a candidate you would have no way of predicting whether or not I would be a good fit for the clients you represent.
This is a small part of why programmers are very rarely served well by recruiters.
Well yes, I think business patents are BS. The basic idea behind patents is that they provide an incentive for the inventor to disclose his invention in exchange for a right to prevent others from practicing the invention. It is a contract between a society and the inventor. The problem in the case of business process patents is that they cannot be kept secret so there is no value to society in this contract. No one in their right mind would enter into a contract like that.
But your point that NDAs work only on business processes is wrong. A company can apply NDAs to many things that they don't want to patent. For example it is common in the chemical industry to sell catalysts tied up with contracts that prohibit the buyer from reverse engineering or even conducting a chemical analysis of the catalyst.
Real software development talent doesn't use recruiters to find jobs. You can't find talent because real talent doesn't need or use the recruiting process.
I haven't sent a resume or otherwise contacted a recruiter since my second job many years ago. Now my network of colleagues is where I go looking if I am considering a job change. They know what the real story is at the companies they are working at. And they don't blow hot air up my ass, or lie or otherwise mislead me about what the nature of the job opening is, and they know whether or not I would be a good fit.
If a company wants to attract solid programming talent they need to treat their existing programmers well. If they do the word will get out.
If they shit on their developers all they will get is shitty developers.
Maybe that is because the USNO contains primary frequency standards, so any attempt to take accurate photographs would result in a violation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The patent office doesn't take market projections into account when evaluating a patent, but the company sure does when it decides to apply or not.
The value of a patent is in the innovation for sure. But quantifying that value requires a market and economic analysis. This analysis has a technical component, but mostly it is profit and cost calculation, and perhaps a strategic assessment as well. That analysis is part of what a company takes in when it decides to proceed with a patent. Few if any companies will reveal their research results unless they feel that a patent will be of some value.
Patentability is a separate issue altogether. That is governed by law and prior art. A good patent lawyer also has technical training in the field he is working in - dual law and science degrees, PhDs are frequently found in the field of patent law. Working with the researcher the lawyer makes an assessment as to the patentability of the invention. Usually patentability assessments are made pretty early in the research process and may even result in changes to the research plan, or outright project cancellations.
There is another choice as well - the invention may give better economic value to the company if it is not patented at all, rather kept as a trade secret. A patent if obtained may turn out to be impossible to enforce, or reveal more than the company thinks appropriate for the value returned. Or it may be that contractual agreements would provide better return than a patent.
Nope, not at all. The value of the invention should be and usually is determined by market studies and financial analysis. Quite often there is a cost engineer involved who will translate lab results into operational cost and manufacturing estimates. Some times a professional economist will help by providing information on things like projected costs of the commodities that go into the product, and the growth potential of the market during the life of the product.
The sales skill of the scientific staff comes into the picture much earlier - getting the funding to conduct the R&D in the first place.
That does not prevent an economic and market evaluation of the potential for the idea. Of course the accuracy of those evaluations may be poor but that is where businesses either fail or succeed in earning their pay.
Poppy cock. The purpose of a patent is to encourage the inventor to share his invention. The return for that is the ability to prevent others from practicing that invention for the period of the patent. It does not create a shortage; the concept is utter non-sense. There is no shortage, in fact the process of creating a patent guarantees that MORE will be available by encouraging the inventor to disclose his idea in return for the patent grant. Prior to the existence of patents inventors used trade secrets, non-disclosure contracts and various means of technical obfuscation to hide their inventions greatly impeding the advance of technologies.
I don't know who this Cole guy is but from this writing he seems to not understand what a patent is or why patents came into existence. At all.
Nontechnical people generally make up their minds on the potential value of a patent based on information from multiple sources.
Where I have worked the decision to proceed with a patent application has been made by a review committee including legal, business and scientific representatives. And the cost was borne by the business requesting the application.
I've met some of those too, but not at my company, rather in a university cemetery.
"There are a lot of things that are "not inherently illegal" that become the basis of a civil suit after one enters an agreement not to do it."
This is one of the areas the people espousing the abolishment of patent and copyright laws miss. Patents and copyrights are not the only means that can be used to protect intelelctual property; trade secret and contract law also provide many opportunities to control the flow of information. In general these mechanisms are far worse for the society that relies on them than patent and copyrights; one needs to consider what current laws would be replaced with before advocating that they be discontinued.
I'm just saying that this fact becomes less and less important as cheap, commodity hardware with a free Operating System and DBMS becomes more and more "up to" the task. There is an awful lot that you can do with a few of these guys, even if they don't qualify as "big iron".
Data is a gas that fills the container no matter how big it is. Yes commodity hardware can take over the application you were running on big iron two years ago. But the new higher intensity applications are popping out all the time, as newer hardware enables them.
There will always be a need for big iron.
I've been employed in 3 companies that have had varying patent incentive programs over the years. During that time I applied for and was granted 38 patents, in the US and in other nations. None of these were software or business process patents.
The various incentives amounted to an attaboy on the low end up to a hundred shares of stock (worth about $100 per share) per granted patent.
The money was nice, and in some cases there was a reception or dinner involved with a famous speaker which was generally fun. Other times there were plaques, or little trophies inscribed with "Excelsior!" or some such.
Did any of it affect my behavior, or make it more likely I would try to patent something? Not really. Did any of it materially affect my company's business? A little, because it made them feel more comfortable about the security of entering a certain area of business. But none of it really provided the company with a monopoly - there were always alternate technologies that could be used to get the same result, but maybe not as efficiently or cleanly.
If I was going to do it I'd choose the recognition ceremony / famous speaker approach. It meant more to me that the senior management of the company took some time out of their schedule and spent it with the R&D people than than the money or stock did. And think this kind of approach is less likely to distort the inventor's decisions as to what is worth pursuing and what is not. And besides meeting a real live astronaut or Nobel Laureate is way cool.
Solaris doesn't play in the supercomputer market because the Sparc architecture is not cost effective for that application. The big iron that Solaris runs on are enterprise scale database servers, which are optimized for an entirely different set of performance parameters.
I don't give a hoot who backs Smith up. This is a case of FACTUAL ERROR that can be determined from Swiss legislative records. Argument to authority doesn't make incorrect facts go away. Period.
You are totally wrong regarding just about every other aspect of your position as well.
A country MUST establish a patent system BEFORE it has something to protect because afterwards is too late to protect the invention. Allocation of resources to innovation will just not occur until there is a chance of recouping the investment. Pretending otherwise is totally idiotic.
The countries you have cited (Zambia, Bangladesh and Ecuador) ALL HAVE ACTIVE PATENT SYSTEMS. Zambia publishes a patent journal the 25th of every month. You might want to take a subscription.
Again you are taking a very myopic view when it comes to royalties. The outflow of royalties assumes a local license is held. In most cases for small countries this is not true; the product is not manufactured locally. Whatever royalties are lost are counterbalanced by the protection of local innovations that lead to organic internal growth.
Developed countries implement patent systems once they have something to protect. You don't put expensive alarm systems on mud huts.
It's obvious that you don't understand how 90% of the world lives - your viewpoint is overwhelmed by your economic priviledge.
Developed countries don't become developed without establishing a patent system during their ascent. I don't know where you have lived or visited, but a developing country usually is VERY heterogeneous - large areas of mud huts and some islands of world class excellence. Such an environment needs a patent system MORE than a developed country in order to encourage the investment of very scarce resources into innovation.
It is quite obvious that you have no really understanding of the history of technology, the genesis of the industrial revolution or the innovation process. Reading a few books from authors that don't even have their facts straight doesn't qualify you as an expert in the area.
Does this mean that the forecasting simulation for tomorrow's weather will run in less than 24 hours?
Sanya Reid Smith is clearly incorrect as far as Switzerland and chemical patents goes. The Swiss legislature enacted a law in 1907 that enabled chemical process patents.
http://law.fordham.edu/publications/articles/200flspub6401.pdf
Your sources of information clearly have nothing to do with reality.
As far as outflow of royalties - big deal. You are trading the royalties for a institutional structure that will doom your society to being an economic backwater. There is a reason that every nation on the planet that has any serious intent to become developed adopts some sort of patent system. It is simple; the loss in royalties is far outweighed by the benefits to the local economy.
Ah, you have now discovered that there is something known as 'separation of powers' within the US Government. The Executive Branch is charge with enforcing laws. If it doesn't like certain laws it doesn't have to enforce them very hard. It also doesn't have to tell Congress about everything it thinks or does. There is no Congressional oversight of the Executive.
A law that requires the President to retain his emails is very likely to be considered unconstitutional should it be taken to the Supreme Court.
There is a long history of this going right back to the admistration of George Washington who refused to turn some documents associated with a treaty negotiation over to the House of Representatives.
Why do we have these ideas that corporations must be treated in some discriminatory fashion? The economic advantages (you can argue about these if you want) that accrue as the result of copyright law apply to corporations just as much as to individuals. By not treating corps the same as individuals you reduce the economic value here.
There is a theory out there that the P/E ratio should be 1/(fed funds rate) if risk with owning the stock was the same as owning a Treasury Bond.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what the relative risks are right now.
Bizarre fashion? If Germany saved so much by copying British ideas, why didn't they gain an economic advantage and supplant the British as the super power of the time?
Yes, it is cheaper to copy the inventions of others than to develop the exact same inventions yourself. But if you are like Germany and did not have the raw materials (i.e. sources of cotton that England had)? Those inventions are worthless. You need inventions that appropriate to the economic needs within your own economy.
Germany didn't save anything. And by copying they did nothing to generate the inventions appropriate to their own needs.
As a result they ended up a second rate power until they got their own technologies going.
Germany used to be quite famous for making fakes of machines used in the British textile manufacturing effort (right down to copying the name of the manufacturer). Many European countries didn't bother with patent protection as it interferred with their ability to make cheap knock offs.
Great Britain was the first country in the world to go through an industrial revolution. This was caused by their adoption of a patent system which rewarded innovators and led to the greatest economic empire the world has ever seen. The fact that other countries did not adopt a patent system until later doomed them to trail Great Britain in development of the institutions needed to support this industrial revolution. The fact that these countries had to copy the British inventions to compete shows how their own (patent less) systems failed to promote innovation within their own societies.
If Einstein had been a chemist, he wouldn't have been working in the Swiss patent office, because at the time, the Swiss believed that you couldn't patent anything chemical. Canada didn't recongize drug patents until the 1960s (if memory serves).
The Swiss did NOT believe that "you could not patent anything chemical". That is ridiculous. What happened in this case is that the Swiss chemical industry wanted to freely use the innovations of the far larger and more successful German chemical industry (operating under a strong patent system), and successfully delayed the introduction of chemical patents until 1907. And by the way Einstein was a very good theoretical chemist (his work on Brownian motion is often taken to be the first absolute proof of atomic theory) AND Einstein worked in the Swiss patent office until 1909, so there is a pretty good chance he DID examine chemical patent applications.
As far as Canada not recognizing drug patents until the 1960's that is poppycock. In fact as far back as 1923 Canada was wrangling with legislation that dealt with the compulsory licensing of drug patents where the active ingredients were made in Canada.
There is a lot of truth to that, however the logic has to be tempered by other considerations as well.
Right now technology stocks as per the NASDAQ index are a historic low P/E ratio, and many companies, not just Microsoft are doing big stock buybacks. Assuming that the normal cyclical fluctuations come into play these companies will be in a great position in the future to raise capital or make acquisitions using stock to complete mergers.
Microsoft may find that as time goes on it will be able to acquire somebody like Yahoo for a far lower effective price because of this buy back.
This is a smart move by Microsoft that will pay back significantly in the future.
I agree. Energy self-sufficiency would be a huge boon to the US.