A JDBC driver that will only accept requests for fields in the order that the fields are listed in the database. (According to Microsoft this is a performance enhancement).
Data import functionality that returns the message "operation succesfully completed" when in fact the import failed.
Lack of text based export equivalent to pg_dump or mysqldump.
Error messages like "Authorization Failed or Syntax Error"
Use of integer for internal time format so that you can't express millisecond times cleanly. A royal PITA if your programmer is saving Java date objects as longs in the database, and you want to report them as a formatted time.
I don't see a five-year cap on a Section 155 extension
Yes, but Section 155 covers only the following circumstance:
"if such composition or process has been subjected to a regulatory review by the Federal Food and Drug Administration pursuant to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act leading to the publication of regulation permitting the interstate distribution and sale of such composition or process and for which there has thereafter been a stay of regulation of approval imposed pursuant to section 409 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act which stay was in effect on January 1, 1981"
That is the FDA had a stay in place on January 1, 1981 on the material in question. This is a grandfather clause covering what was in practice when the Hatch-Waxman act was passed. It has nothing to do with current practice.
I see both five-year and fourteen-year caps on a Section 156 extension
No you don't.
Section 156 reads:
"if the period remaining in the term of a patent after the date of the approval of the approved product under the provision of law under which such regulatory review occurred when added to the regulatory review period as revised under paragraphs (1) and (2) exceeds fourteen years, the period of extension shall be reduced so that the total of both such periods does not exceed fourteen years"
This states that the extension plus remaining patent life cannot be more than 14 years, NOT that the extension can be 14 years.
the relevent clause is:
"not to exceed 5 years from the date of expiration of the original patent term"
One thing is cleary true is that the theatre industry has overbuilt and has way too much capacity for the volume of viewers they are getting. Perhaps the problems theatre chains are having making money are what has Hollywood spooked.
Personally I don't think DVD's are going to put Hollywood out of business at all - they will just have a different way to deliver their product.
What would the world be like if there was no IP to speak of?
We can take an example from England early in the industrial revolution, where machinery was sealed in iron boxes, or even further back in time when Kings would intentional cripple their blacksmiths so their sword making technology couldn't escape.
Everything would be kept as trade secrets, under non-disclosure agreements.
Anyone remember the wheel, the steam engine, + others.
The steam engine was patented, as was pretty much all technology developed after 1700.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bls te amengine.htm http://www.gsn.uk.com/watt.html
The fact is that the patent system has been around since the early industrial revolution, and a lot of historians cite the development of the patent system as the root cause of the rapid development of technology in the industrial world over the past 300 years. Anyone proposing that patents be abandonded really needs to consider the early history of the patent system, and what went on before patents were introduced.
These developing countries are soveriegn nations, after all. They can adopt any internal IP polices they want, much like the US did in it's past. And the fact is that they do. It's up to these countries to decide what is in their own self-interest,
CRT's are made using a very high quality optical glass that is up to 40% lead. This is extremely bad from an environmental point of view. CRT's also consume a LOT of energy.
LCDs are better from an energy point of view than CRTs, however they all use some form of backlighting that may include a mercury vapor lamp. Mercury is very bad news, way worse than lead on a per pound basis, however much less is used in a LCD than lead in a CRT.
OLED's don't require backlighting so they should be the lowest energy consumer of all, and the articles I have read don't list any metals used in their production that are an evironmental problem. So OLEDs look very promising from both a energy and disposal point of view. The only questions would be the toxicity of the organic layer, and the hazards of the manufacturing process. Since manufacturing is likely to be in a pretty high quality environment in a limited number of locations, it is unlikely to be anywhere as significant as disposal. Unfortunately we don't know what the organic layer is going to be if and when these devices reach mass production, however I think that the likelihood is pretty good that it isn't going to be as bad as lead or mercury.
USA patent law already grants a term extension in such cases. The current term of a U.S. patent is filing date + 20 years + whatever time is necessary to secure a required federal safety certification for a patented product.
Incorrect. The Hatch-Waxman act provides a 5-year maximum extension for FDA approval. The AVERAGE length of the approval process is curently running 9 years. This means that 50% of medications are not even approved until 4 years after the patent clock starts ticking. Then of course, there is the lead time needed to get the product to market which is probably another 2-3 years.
Actually it is quite unclear as to WHAT the hell the author was trying to say in regards to the time period.
"Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less".
"Within almost a few years, often less" What the hell is that supposed to mean? Less than a few years? Is that one year? The usual progression is one, few, several, many. So if it's less than a few years, it's ONE year. Three years is in fact generous.
Not to mention he presents NOT ONE IOTA of data to back this up.
The fact is that this article is writen by someone quite incapable of forming a coherent argument or expression of that argument. In other words, IT'S A CROCK!
You left out some other important features of MIcrosoft's NTFS:
1. No published specifications so anyone wanting to access it from another OS is S.O.L. unless they want to try to reverse engineer the filesystem.
2. Microsoft has threatened some Linux kernel contributors (who have had exposure to NTFS in a NDA context) with legal action for contributing to NTFS drivers for Linux.
3. Potential for DCMA action against reverse engineering attempts.
4. Gratuitous file system changes with the apparent intention of breaking previous open source NTFS drivers.
5. Recent patent licensing activity aimed at preventing development of GPL code that is compatable with CIFS.
Maybe you will get consumers to listen to DVD-A at home in their audio system. CD's have some very real quality limitations and the times I've heard DVD-A on newly mastered material it sounded better than CDs. I do question what advantage DVD is going to have with, say "Abbey Road".
The big problem to me is going to be handling the ORIGINAL DVD-A in the car, boat, portable player, DVD drive at work, laptop etc.
Until I can make a copy of the DVD I bought, and use it in the ubiquitous fashion I use CD's now, I AIN'T INTERESTED.
I have a decent DD5.1 setup with some nice B&W speakers,
I can't tell the difference between the a CD and a compressed MP3,
Either you have a hearing problem, or you haven't played your MP3's on your B&W system. The loss of fidelity is VERY obvious on any system with a reasonable frequency response.
I'm not gonna run out to the store and by a newfangled DVD player, DD receiver and speakers
Yes, I can see the investment to show off DVD-A running into good money. You probably will want two additional speakers, a player, and a reciever with 6 channel audio in. Fortunately for me, my HT system has everything except the player.
for instance, slapper requires that you install gcc on your server. if anyone installs a compiler on a production server, the response should be "WTF!!!"
I don't think I have ever seen a Linux server being run in a production environment that didn't have gcc installed. Most of us don't have the luxury of homogeneous server installations where gcc-free installations are practical.
Now, of course there are other measures that could stop slapper that are a lot more practical - chrooting, tripwire, etc. are some of them.
While I certainly don't agree with RMS's point of view on everything by a long shot, I think it is valuable to have his opinions around for discussion. The FSF has been a seminal contributer to the Open Source movement, and many of use use their software on a daily basis.
I also think that a lot of us find BitKeeper's anti-competitive free-beer license troubling, although nobody should be particularly shocked since there are other components in the BitKeeper license that are clearly not 'Open Source'. If for whatever reasons you feel that the use of Bitkeeper is inappropriate for your work, fine. I have severe doubts that the anticompetitive clauses are tolerable in a project like the Linux kernel since they might prevent some entities from making what might be a valuable contributuion to the project, or prevent somebody from working on another project in addition to the Linux kernel. That is a very dubious situtation for an open source project like the kernel to be in.
I hope that the upshot of this will be rapid progress on an open alternative to BitKeeper - I expect that it will be. I've long felt that CVS is a rather crude system, and open source development, especially large projects like Mozilla and the Linux kernel deserve better. Ultimately I think the Bitkeeper license will backfire, and there will soon be an open source choice with a similar or better feature set.
How is this a good article? It looks to me like a very poorly thought out editorial to me, indeed.
For example the author cites the idea that most commercial value of IP is realized during the first three years. Maybe for a pop tune, or a movie, but certainly that is not the case for the vast majority of patents. New drugs take several years to pass FDA certification; the average time to market for an industrial invention in most industries is 7 years. A shorter term for patent coverage is not appropriate in most cases.
Perhaps the current period of copyrights is over-long, but how does that translate to the concept that such laws don't serve a useful purpose? It's a complete non-sequetuer.
The fact is that the history of the industrial revolution, and in particular the great lengths that were taken by companies to conceal the technologies they were using prior to the development of the patent system clearly show the value of a contract between govenrment and the inventor where public disclosure is exchanged for an exclusive right to practice the invention.
The alternative is to go back to the practices of the time where technological instrumentailities were kept as secret as possible by their inventors, to the great detriment of technological progress, and indeed society as a whole.
The American Chemical Society (ACS.org) and affiliated sections are full of resources for this sort of thing. Every year they put on a big program called National Chemistry Week'. The National Academy of Sciences (nas.edu, nationalacademies.org) has outreach programs as well.
If you knew anything about Aus. Patent Law, you would know that these Innovation Patents are granted without examination, and have no enforcability until examination, which occurs AFTER the patent is granted.
Under this system you can patent anythng, but that patent means nothing after examination. Thus I could patent the process of calling you an idiot for posting something like this, and have a patent granted in due course.
Here is a story published by the BBC, and the obvious response from the Australian Patent Office as to it's likelyhood of passing examination.
something that is trivial to someone trained in the field doesnt appear to be very trivial for the patent examiners which is what's landed us all in the mess we're in with the patent system now.
Patent examiners that I have dealt with were all technical professionals trained in the field that they were examining in. In fact, they usually had a very good overview of the areas they were working in because of their exposure to patent applications that were not yet published.
If there is a criticism to be made, it's the term 'ordinary skill in the art'. This means that anyone with above average skill is going to be generating lots of patentable ideas.
One pitfall that a lot of people fall into when looking at patents is the 'oh that's obvious' trap. The problem with this assesment is that in hindsight, a lot of things look obvious that are in fact not at all so at the time of invention, which might have been several years before the reading.
I think all this patenting should be dropped. First of all they should limit patenting to things that are really revolutionary. Secondly, having a patent should not be profitable. It would be just to get credits as being first.
Them why the HELL with anyone file for a patent? Instead it would be much more profitable to just keep the invention secret, and tie it up with restrictive licensing terms and trade secret protections.
You think patents hinder progress? Consider the alternative - no patents to read, and everything kept as trade secrets. This was what was going on during the start of the industrial revolution - all kinds of equipment was being sold in sealed, welded shut boxes that had to be sent back to the factory if anything went wrong. England had lawes that forbid the export of ANY mechanical devices (there were famous cases where things like sewing machines were smuggled out to Americas).
This sort of stuff was so obviously hindering the growth of the industrial revolution that goverments of the time instituted patent systems to encourage companies to divulge their inventions. The result was a huge improvement over not having a patent system.
It is UNBELIEVABLE how many people crtitcizing the patent system have no sense of history, or the reasons behind the institution of the patent system,
Slashdot Mirror
The best error message I ever received was from an older version of Eudora on the Mac.
If you close all the windows for Eurora but still have the appliaction open, nad start typing a message it will respond with:
"You might as well stop typing because nobody is listening".
Totally Zen.
Surely you jest. LIbraries are the oldest and ultimate repository of geek-ness. WHat could be more 31337.
Interestingly, the world's first library just reopened a couple of days ago.
Or you could visit this extraordinary place.
what problems did you have?
...
Hmmmm
A JDBC driver that will only accept requests for fields in the order that the fields are listed in the database. (According to Microsoft this is a performance enhancement).
Data import functionality that returns the message "operation succesfully completed" when in fact the import failed.
Lack of text based export equivalent to pg_dump or mysqldump.
Error messages like "Authorization Failed or Syntax Error"
Use of integer for internal time format so that you can't express millisecond times cleanly. A royal PITA if your programmer is saving Java date objects as longs in the database, and you want to report them as a formatted time.
That is why Linux will win no matter what Microsoft does.
Said after a day of wrestling with SQL Server 2000.
I don't see a five-year cap on a Section 155 extension
Yes, but Section 155 covers only the following circumstance:
"if such composition or process has been subjected to a regulatory review by the Federal Food and Drug Administration pursuant to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act leading to the publication of regulation permitting the interstate distribution and sale of such composition or process and for which there has thereafter been a stay of regulation of approval imposed pursuant to section 409 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act which stay was in effect on January 1, 1981"
That is the FDA had a stay in place on January 1, 1981 on the material in question. This is a grandfather clause covering what was in practice when the Hatch-Waxman act was passed. It has nothing to do with current practice.
I see both five-year and fourteen-year caps on a Section 156 extension
No you don't.
Section 156 reads:
"if the period remaining in the term of a patent after the date of the approval of the approved product under the provision of law under which such regulatory review occurred when added to the regulatory review period as revised under paragraphs (1) and (2) exceeds fourteen years, the period of extension shall be reduced so that the total of both such periods does not exceed fourteen years"
This states that the extension plus remaining patent life cannot be more than 14 years, NOT that the extension can be 14 years.
the relevent clause is:
"not to exceed 5 years from the date of expiration of the original patent term"
Which is what I stated in the first place.
The Cher Act [imdb.com]?
Surely you can do better.
One thing is cleary true is that the theatre industry has overbuilt and has way too much capacity for the volume of viewers they are getting. Perhaps the problems theatre chains are having making money are what has Hollywood spooked.
Personally I don't think DVD's are going to put Hollywood out of business at all - they will just have a different way to deliver their product.
What would the world be like if there was no IP to speak of?
s te amengine.htm
We can take an example from England early in the industrial revolution, where machinery was sealed in iron boxes, or even further back in time when Kings would intentional cripple their blacksmiths so their sword making technology couldn't escape.
Everything would be kept as trade secrets, under non-disclosure agreements.
Anyone remember the wheel, the steam engine, + others.
The steam engine was patented, as was pretty much all technology developed after 1700.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl
http://www.gsn.uk.com/watt.html
The fact is that the patent system has been around since the early industrial revolution, and a lot of historians cite the development of the patent system as the root cause of the rapid development of technology in the industrial world over the past 300 years. Anyone proposing that patents be abandonded really needs to consider the early history of the patent system, and what went on before patents were introduced.
These developing countries are soveriegn nations, after all. They can adopt any internal IP polices they want, much like the US did in it's past. And the fact is that they do. It's up to these countries to decide what is in their own self-interest,
A 6-month publication cycle would be very unusual.
My guess is that the impact would be less.
CRT's are made using a very high quality optical glass that is up to 40% lead. This is extremely bad from an environmental point of view. CRT's also consume a LOT of energy.
LCDs are better from an energy point of view than CRTs, however they all use some form of backlighting that may include a mercury vapor lamp. Mercury is very bad news, way worse than lead on a per pound basis, however much less is used in a LCD than lead in a CRT.
OLED's don't require backlighting so they should be the lowest energy consumer of all, and the articles I have read don't list any metals used in their production that are an evironmental problem. So OLEDs look very promising from both a energy and disposal point of view. The only questions would be the toxicity of the organic layer, and the hazards of the manufacturing process. Since manufacturing is likely to be in a pretty high quality environment in a limited number of locations, it is unlikely to be anywhere as significant as disposal. Unfortunately we don't know what the organic layer is going to be if and when these devices reach mass production, however I think that the likelihood is pretty good that it isn't going to be as bad as lead or mercury.
USA patent law already grants a term extension in such cases. The current term of a U.S. patent is filing date + 20 years + whatever time is necessary to secure a required federal safety certification for a patented product.
Incorrect. The Hatch-Waxman act provides a 5-year maximum extension for FDA approval. The AVERAGE length of the approval process is curently running 9 years. This means that 50% of medications are not even approved until 4 years after the patent clock starts ticking. Then of course, there is the lead time needed to get the product to market which is probably another 2-3 years.
Maybe that's why copyrights and patents are different entities.
I know that, you know that, however the author of the article lumps the two together in his attack on IP in general.
Actually it is quite unclear as to WHAT the hell the author was trying to say in regards to the time period.
"Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less".
"Within almost a few years, often less" What the hell is that supposed to mean? Less than a few years? Is that one year? The usual progression is one, few, several, many. So if it's less than a few years, it's ONE year. Three years is in fact generous.
Not to mention he presents NOT ONE IOTA of data to back this up.
The fact is that this article is writen by someone quite incapable of forming a coherent argument or expression of that argument. In other words, IT'S A CROCK!
You left out some other important features of MIcrosoft's NTFS:
1. No published specifications so anyone wanting to access it from another OS is S.O.L. unless they want to try to reverse engineer the filesystem.
2. Microsoft has threatened some Linux kernel contributors (who have had exposure to NTFS in a NDA context) with legal action for contributing to NTFS drivers for Linux.
3. Potential for DCMA action against reverse engineering attempts.
4. Gratuitous file system changes with the apparent intention of breaking previous open source NTFS drivers.
5. Recent patent licensing activity aimed at preventing development of GPL code that is compatable with CIFS.
All in all I would rather use ANYTHING ELSE.
Maybe you will get consumers to listen to DVD-A at home in their audio system. CD's have some very real quality limitations and the times I've heard DVD-A on newly mastered material it sounded better than CDs. I do question what advantage DVD is going to have with, say "Abbey Road".
The big problem to me is going to be handling the ORIGINAL DVD-A in the car, boat, portable player, DVD drive at work, laptop etc.
Until I can make a copy of the DVD I bought, and use it in the ubiquitous fashion I use CD's now, I AIN'T INTERESTED.
I have a decent DD5.1 setup with some nice B&W speakers,
I can't tell the difference between the a CD and a compressed MP3,
Either you have a hearing problem, or you haven't played your MP3's on your B&W system. The loss of fidelity is VERY obvious on any system with a reasonable frequency response.
I'm not gonna run out to the store and by a newfangled DVD player, DD receiver and speakers
Yes, I can see the investment to show off DVD-A running into good money. You probably will want two additional speakers, a player, and a reciever with 6 channel audio in. Fortunately for me, my HT system has everything except the player.
But anybody who distributed it is not a part of the contract and has no liability at all.
Except for copyright and trademark infringement.
for instance, slapper requires that you install gcc on your server. if anyone installs a compiler on a production server, the response should be "WTF!!!"
I don't think I have ever seen a Linux server being run in a production environment that didn't have gcc installed. Most of us don't have the luxury of homogeneous server installations where gcc-free installations are practical.
Now, of course there are other measures that could stop slapper that are a lot more practical - chrooting, tripwire, etc. are some of them.
While I certainly don't agree with RMS's point of view on everything by a long shot, I think it is valuable to have his opinions around for discussion. The FSF has been a seminal contributer to the Open Source movement, and many of use use their software on a daily basis.
I also think that a lot of us find BitKeeper's anti-competitive free-beer license troubling, although nobody should be particularly shocked since there are other components in the BitKeeper license that are clearly not 'Open Source'. If for whatever reasons you feel that the use of Bitkeeper is inappropriate for your work, fine. I have severe doubts that the anticompetitive clauses are tolerable in a project like the Linux kernel since they might prevent some entities from making what might be a valuable contributuion to the project, or prevent somebody from working on another project in addition to the Linux kernel. That is a very dubious situtation for an open source project like the kernel to be in.
I hope that the upshot of this will be rapid progress on an open alternative to BitKeeper - I expect that it will be. I've long felt that CVS is a rather crude system, and open source development, especially large projects like Mozilla and the Linux kernel deserve better. Ultimately I think the Bitkeeper license will backfire, and there will soon be an open source choice with a similar or better feature set.
How is this a good article? It looks to me like a very poorly thought out editorial to me, indeed.
For example the author cites the idea that most commercial value of IP is realized during the first three years. Maybe for a pop tune, or a movie, but certainly that is not the case for the vast majority of patents. New drugs take several years to pass FDA certification; the average time to market for an industrial invention in most industries is 7 years. A shorter term for patent coverage is not appropriate in most cases.
Perhaps the current period of copyrights is over-long, but how does that translate to the concept that such laws don't serve a useful purpose? It's a complete non-sequetuer.
The fact is that the history of the industrial revolution, and in particular the great lengths that were taken by companies to conceal the technologies they were using prior to the development of the patent system clearly show the value of a contract between govenrment and the inventor where public disclosure is exchanged for an exclusive right to practice the invention.
The alternative is to go back to the practices of the time where technological instrumentailities were kept as secret as possible by their inventors, to the great detriment of technological progress, and indeed society as a whole.
The American Chemical Society (ACS.org) and affiliated sections are full of resources for this sort of thing. Every year they put on a big program called National Chemistry Week'. The National Academy of Sciences (nas.edu, nationalacademies.org) has outreach programs as well.
Revitalization of PC sales as 5+ GHz P4's make photorealistic 3D real-time porn virtual reality possible.
Did you know, that the wheel has been patented?
4 18 165.stm
B-A-L-O-N-E-Y
If you knew anything about Aus. Patent Law, you would know that these Innovation Patents are granted without examination, and have no enforcability until examination, which occurs AFTER the patent is granted.
Under this system you can patent anythng, but that patent means nothing after examination. Thus I could patent the process of calling you an idiot for posting something like this, and have a patent granted in due course.
Here is a story published by the BBC, and the obvious response from the Australian Patent Office as to it's likelyhood of passing examination.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1
something that is trivial to someone trained in the field doesnt appear to be very trivial for the patent examiners which is what's landed us all in the mess we're in with the patent system now.
Patent examiners that I have dealt with were all technical professionals trained in the field that they were examining in. In fact, they usually had a very good overview of the areas they were working in because of their exposure to patent applications that were not yet published.
If there is a criticism to be made, it's the term 'ordinary skill in the art'. This means that anyone with above average skill is going to be generating lots of patentable ideas.
One pitfall that a lot of people fall into when looking at patents is the 'oh that's obvious' trap. The problem with this assesment is that in hindsight, a lot of things look obvious that are in fact not at all so at the time of invention, which might have been several years before the reading.
I think all this patenting should be dropped. First of all they should limit patenting to things that are really revolutionary. Secondly, having a patent should not be profitable. It would be just to get credits as being first.
Them why the HELL with anyone file for a patent? Instead it would be much more profitable to just keep the invention secret, and tie it up with restrictive licensing terms and trade secret protections.
You think patents hinder progress? Consider the alternative - no patents to read, and everything kept as trade secrets. This was what was going on during the start of the industrial revolution - all kinds of equipment was being sold in sealed, welded shut boxes that had to be sent back to the factory if anything went wrong. England had lawes that forbid the export of ANY mechanical devices (there were famous cases where things like sewing machines were smuggled out to Americas).
This sort of stuff was so obviously hindering the growth of the industrial revolution that goverments of the time instituted patent systems to encourage companies to divulge their inventions. The result was a huge improvement over not having a patent system.
It is UNBELIEVABLE how many people crtitcizing the patent system have no sense of history, or the reasons behind the institution of the patent system,