Red Hat owns most of the who's-who in the Linux kernel development community (and I don't care what Alan Cox says; the guy walks around with a damn red felt fedora on. He's painted red -- as in Red Hat -- from head to foot). Now, they own the development system that lies at the kernel's side.
Red Hat doesn't "own" anybody, or any part of Linux. The kernel is still controlled ultimately by Linus Torvalds. Alan Cox and others merely are developers employed by Red Hat. If they decide to go closed source, and Alan and others stay with RedHat, well I am sure the Linux community would miss them, but I don't think that would be the end of anything except my use of Red Hat's distributions.
If Red Hat wants to fork off and close any part of GNU/Linux we still have the GPL versions. The development system can be drawn back to the open source community at any time. It was only very recently that ecgs became the 'official' gcc, and if I am not mistaken the non-egcs version is still being used to compile the kernel.
Red Hat could bring Linux to its knees if it wanted, or at least it could make life very difficult for the rest of the distro companies by pulling an Aladdin (restricting the newest versions of GCC to itself, leaving the older dregs to the FSF a la ghostscript).
Exactly what is to prevent the free software community from further taking whatever version of gcc is the latest GPL version, and working from there? From what I understand the problem with ghostscript arose because the author retained copyright rather than turning it over to the FSF like most of the other FSF software because he planned to do commercial licensing from the beginning. Since the FSF owns the gcc copyright I really don't think there is a problem along those lines.
And you guys put them there. Thanks!
Who exactly are 'you guys?'.
All I have heard along this line of reasoning is speculation as to what may happen. I am very reluctant to criticize anyone on the basis that they MAY do something bad in the future, especially when everything the have done in the past has been good. The bogeyman of 'Suits' as you say doesn't hold up to any kind of real examination. The amount of stock that has been sold to the public is not a problem; the original founders still own the majority of the company, and their attitude towards open source has been very good.
how scary it would be to have Microsoft in control of the Internet, he fails to discuss the even scarier proposition: Netscape in control of the Internet
If I had to choose one of the other owning the internet I'd much rather have Netscape. Netscape doesn't control the OS and most of the applications too.
Remember, Microsoft is working on buying up cable companies, it tried a proprietary competitor to the internet (MSN), it has been buying up content like collections of photographs, it has a big interest in NBC, and so on.
I can't think of a more scary situation than having Microsoft dominate the internet server market along with having cable systems and ownership of content providers like NBC.
The more crappy patents we have (IMHO the Y2K Windowing one was the best) the more quickly this mess is either going to get fixed or collapse out of it's own idiocy.
The House and Senate already have a set of reform bills on the table - HR 1907 and S.1798. At least S. 1798 includes a requirement that the GAO examine the quality of business model patents, which of course are starting to multiply like crazy right now. Call or write and complain about software patents too.
I don't care about Apache. The issue is Microsoft, and they have lost market share for 6 out of the 7 last months. Their jump up last month was due to one large free hosting service switching over.
The data I quoted come from the first URL above which is a report published 9/1999 by the ILO. The stats listed there don't come close to a 2% per year productivity gain for continental Europe over teh 1980-1997 reference period.
A part of this is that the US began a huge investment in IT around 1995 that is still continuing. Some economic planners believe that this is the reason for the recent spurt in productivity growth. While it may not continue forever - and the lateness of the economic cycle is a big reason why other sectors are declining in productivity now - there has been no corresponding such investment in Europe which casts a lot of doubt as to whether they will see the same productivity increase.
S. 1798 contains an important clause requiring that the GAO do a study on the 'quality' of patents on business models. This is very important to slashdotters because a large fraction of these business model patents are being generated by internet startups. There was an article on slashdot about one of these recently.
It would be a very good thing if a similar study be done on software patents. Writing your congressman would be a good idea.
Mr. Phelps played a key role in assisting IBM with receiving the largest number of patents in the United States six years in a row."
Looks like we got a celebrity here!
IBM does a hell of a lot of high level hardware R&D. These are the guys whose technology is behind most of the increases in hard disk storage density, pictures of individual atoms in articles in Scientific American, copper chip connectors, and so on. Over the history of corporate R&D at IBM they have one the best records of REAL innovation there is. There patents are generally not two bit losers like Y2K windowing and one-click ordering. Why somebody like this Phelps dude would have anything to do with Graphon escapes me unless it's just because he's a sleezy lawyer type.
1. A method for running an application as an X-Client so as to enable the application to be displayed with an X-Windows manager, the method comprising the steps of:
launching a "WINDOWS/NT" session; invoking an application from within the "WINDOWS/NT" session; monitoring output messages that are sent from the application; determining that one of the monitored output messages is a graphical user interface command; and when the monitored output message is a graphical user interface command, enabling an X-Windows manager program to act on the command, and informing the "WINDOWS/NT" device driver of results of the command that was acted on by the X-Windows manager program, wherein the enabling step includes converting the graphical user interface command from a "WINDOWS/NT" format into a format that is recognized by X-Windows manager program to enable the X-Windows manager program to act on the command.
Re:Can the RIAA be a monopoly?
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 1
Is it possible for the DOJ to pursue the RIAA on anti-trust charges for the abuse of monopolistic powers?
Yes. However 'not acting in the interest of the consumer' is not sufficient.
You have to prove the existance of an actual agreement between RIAA members to fix prices, limit industrial output, share markets, or exclude competition.
And for the rights to do the same thing with mere ideas (as in patents).
Wrong.
Patents don't protect ideas, they protect implementations of ideas. You cannot patent an algorithm, but you can protect the implementation of an algorithm for computer cyptography.
The primary difference between a copyright and a patent is that a copyright protects expressions of ideas, while patents protect implementations of ideas.
I don't mind newbies, it's the clueless that are a pain. Everyone was a newbie at some point in the past. But there are some people that should never touch a computer! If you see them reaching toward a keyboard or mouse you want to rap them across the knuckles with a big old wooden ruler as hard as you can to get the messsage across. You can tell them. They are the ones putting coffee cups on the CD ROM tray and aluminum foil in the dot matrix printer!! It doesn't matter how much time you spend with these people, they will always remain clueless, newbie or not!!
Quite often newbies are very interesting. They will ask questions that you never thought of, make creative suggestions and so on. But these are not the clueless!!
If we get a lot of newbies, great! Be sure to help out the non-clueless. But if I see another post "can I use my WinModem" on RedHat Install I am going to go zerkers!!
All of the angst I have seen about Redhat is speculation. If they screw up we can vote with our feet. It's not like Microsoft where there is only one place to get this stuff. Up until now anyway Redhat has given back a lot to the Linux community. I think that it is pretty rude to slap them around when they haven't done anything bad to the community (so far).
Szulik said in March that he wouldn't want to see the LSB being used by other Linux vendors with less market share to catch up with Red Hat.
Without seen the context, he may mean he intends to support LSB to take away that issue as a selling point for his competitors. If I was a developer and looked at RedHat (non LSB) and everyone else (LSB) I would be tempted to support LSB first. The open nature of Linux makes embrace and extend difficult. Redhat has some serious competition (Corel Suse Turbo Debian Slack) that will be very difficult or impossible to buy out. If these all go LSB, who is going to buy a non LSB RedHat? Not me.
Now Red Hat is swallowing up all who come before them. Hmmm...now where have we seen this strategy employed before?
ALL? Hyperbole for conversational effect, I presume.
One acquisition does not a monopoly make. Cygnus is not a Redhat competitor, rather what they have accomplished is vertical integration.
There is a threat that gcc is now maintained by a for-profit company - oops Cygnus was for profit too, so I guess that hasn't changed. The only issue here is whether RedHat's policies will be any different from Cygnus's.
As to American economic wellbeing, it seems to me that it is more talked about than felt. Sure, a lot of money is being made, but this boom is remarkably unequal in the way its rewards are distributed, and seems to be biting hard into job security. In terms of economic fundamentals it doesn't look so hot either: productivity growth is running at little more than half that of Europe, a high proportion of new jobs are in the `casual work' sector, and the US has a rather worrying balance of payments deficit.
One can always find a bad statistic. The fact is that we are enjoying the longest unbroken economic expansion in the history of the US.
Sure, the balance of trade deficit is high right now, but the reason is not a failing in the US economy, but rather a drop in demand particularly from the far east due to the collapses there. As these economies are starting to recover we are seeing a decline in the negative balance of trade. These deficits while threatening to the US economy have been very important to the stabilizing of the economies of many nations during the past year.
European productivity is currently averaging a gain 22% higher (not anything like twice) than the US rate of increase over the past 15 years. However over the past 2 1/2 years the US productivity rate increase is higher than Europe's, and it is already starting at a level 25% higher per capita than in Europe. In the last quarter it was at an amazing 4.2% rate. What is really astounding is that this is occurring late in the economic cycle where productivity gains usually fall or even go below zero. Europe on the other hand is much earlier in their cycle and given their much higher unemployment rate should be expected to be higher than the cycle weighted average.
The issue of service sector jobs having low pay is one that was bandied about a lot in the 80's - however what has happened during this economic cycle is that the service sector has gained in average wage much faster than the manufacturing sector with a resulting close in the gap in pay. The low wage jobs that are available now are just not getting filled because the unemployment rate is so low. On an anecdotal level my son has to walk to school now because the school district was unable to hire a bus driver for this school year.
In any economy there will be individuals who do better than others. Once concern in the US is that because we have a very heterogeneous makeup these economic disparaties can seem extreme. But it is certain that even at the low level of the economic scale things are better. Welfare roles are at all time lows. The percentage of people living below the poverty line has been dropping for the first time since the 80's. Unemployment (which affects the lower part of the economic spectrum) is at 30 year lows. And the benefits are more widespread than ever. Fully 50% of american households have some participation in the stock market, an all-time high.
In terms of job security, I agree with you that it has decreased. Few workers spend 20 years with one employer any more. On the other hand job efficiency has improved considerably in the past few years. In fact studies have shown that the low unemployment rates we currently have are due to a reduction in the average time one is unemployed after losing a job.
I think that it is great news that the German government is supporting a project like this. However Germany does have more restrictions on certain freedoms than we do in the US - I wonder if they have thought the implications of GPG through completely.
There was a flap recently about amazon.com selling copies of Mien Kampf to German citizens because of their concerns with various forms of Neo-Nazism. I believe they are also struggling with Scientology. Encryption technologies like GPG must be helpful to underground organizations.
The main difference between Germans and Americans seems to be that Germans like to tell everyone what is wrong with their country, whilst Americans like to say that America is the best country in the world.
I don't know if it marketing or not. German history during the 20th century probably has an effect on the perception and confidence of its citizens towards any German goverment today. If you look at US history during the 20th century there have been a lot of times where the it's citizens have been pretty critical of the USA as a whole, too. Prior to the election of FDR things were pretty bad in this country. Ditto during the Vietnam war. Even during the 70's when the economy was doing crummy and there was a lot of hangover from Vietnam the average American didn't have a lot of good things to say about the way the country was going. There was a lot of feeling that we had passed out peak and were going to be supplanted by Japan as the leading economic power in the world.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and having a very strong economy over the past decade Americans are feeling pretty good about how things are going here. I think it's good to enjoy it - these kinds of things don't last forever.
One thing that has escaped internationalization has been programming languages. The keywords in every such language I have seen have been in English.
The fact of the matter is that English is the standard language in many fields where picking a standard is necessary. All airline pilots are expected to communicate with air traffic controllers in English. Scientific journals with international distribution are published in English. If you visit a technical library in Europe you might be very surprised to see how much of the contents are in English.
the high density of immense programming talent in countries such as India and China that do not primarily speak English could create an altogether new kind of code fork.
My suspicion is that probably in India, and maybe in China programming is taught in English.
English has become an extremely important language in India because of the many dialects that are first languages there, a unifying common language is needed to hold the country together. English is not quite as important in China, partly because of its much less developed than India.
You don't seem to grasp how quickly Linux Grew. It came from a 1 man operation to a better operating system that you can't beat the price/performance ratio. As Windows devolves and regresses, linux explode's with growth.
It seems to me to be very difficult to decide what Linux's growth rate is. First you have to decide what you mean by Linux. Do you mean the kernel? GNU/Linux? Open Source that is compatible with the Linux kernel? How many Linux articles there are in ZDNews? Then you have to decide if you want to talk about the user base, or include commercial applications too.
Whichever you choose will determine the perception of growth rate. If you chose the body of open source that Linux is compatible with, well the history goes back a LONG way. Progress has in fact been quite slow over most of that time. Empires have risen and fallen during that time. If you chose GNU/Linux, well, GNU started in 1984. Look at the growth of MS since 1984.
Certainly Linux has increased it's growth rate due to the increase in participation in the internet. But there are a lot of questions with the open source movement yet. Will the application base come to be? Right now the kernel development part of the picture looks good. But where is an applications catalog that includes offsets to most of what is avaiable for Windows going to come from? Heck, it isn't even clear if we are going to get a good browser and a financial planner.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. I run it wherever I can. I go back a long way in computers, and I *HATE* what Microsoft has done to the industry. But Linux is really only starting to scratch the sand on the beach next to the Microsoft Ocean. We have a long way to go before we cross that ocean. It is difficult to extrapolate from where we are today to the other side of that ocean.
Why do people like this author insist on completely ignoring how capitalism is acutally practiced in a modern society? Sure, the ideal concept of unrestrained capitalism has severe problems. But that went out over 100 years ago except in the minds of some academics, libertarians and those who swallowed Ayn Rand.
Modern western societies practice a form of encumbered capitalism where the societal tension is between those who debate how encumbered it should be. Sure, a pure capitalism would be anarchic and probably inefficient. But that is not at all what we have. The system of English common law we live under has been regulating corporate behaviour to a societal moral standard for 300 years; since at least the start of the industrial revolution. Most of the examples of problems with pure capitalism have been adjusted or ameliorated by law and regulation.
The example of tradesmen keeping their technology secret was in fact the prime motivation for the development of a patent system. Now tradesmen are granted a period of exclusivity in exchange for the publishing of their invention. Patents specifically allow for R&D activities to insure further technological benefits from publication. Casting away the concept of rewards for invention makes me very uneasy.
Publication by academics is in fact no particular high minded activity. The root cause for this is to gain continued employment, tenure and grant money. In today's environment such publications are always closely reviewed for potential commercial applications and patentability before they are released to reviewers.
The benefits of rapid technological change that we see today are in fact the result of a enlightened policy that BOTH allows for economic exploitation of ideas and free exchange with the protection of the economic value of the ideas.
The author makes a lot of claims for the success of Linux that I think are very unjustified at this point in it's development. I am not at all sure that anything innovative has or will come out of Linux. Linux has and is feeding off the technology that was developed in closed source environments, and trying very hard to just equal the features of these systems. Where are in fact the new algorithms, or the new technologies that have come out of Linux?
There's just too much money in proprietary drug$. It's also why so little research is being put into finding natural cures. No one can patent tree sap, but if you develop an artificial drug that cures the same thing, you can patent that and kaching! cash in bigtime.
Baloney. Drug companies canvas the earth looking for natural compounds to serve as drugs. Look at the success of Taxol, for example. And comments like 'you can't patent tree sap' are flat out wrong. I'd bet there are HUNDREDS of patents in the PTO files that have to do with tree sap and it's derivatives. Naturally occurring compounds are one of the biggest areas for pharmaceutical research.
Everyone gives William Gibson credit for inventing cyberpunk. Wrong. John Brunner did it 10 years earlier with Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar.
Are there any signs that we are *NOT* going to end up in a world similar to the one described in the book?!
I think Brunner was overly optimistic. I haven't seen any signs of a town with street names like 'Mean Free Path', and if 10 9's existed, it would be tapped.
Since when was *anything* you were taught in any school not "common knowledge"? How can this be considered IP?
When you get a copyright, you do not gain rights to an idea, but rather you gain rights to how you describe the idea. How many physics books are there that describe the law of gravity? Every one of then has copyright held by the author.
If this was about research related materials they might have a point. But then again, if it is research, it will likely be published in some dusty old academic journal anyway.
And that journal will have copyrights held by the author or the journal publisher.
I think that the situation here is very mixed. Many university profs work from manuscripts of textbooks they are preparing. Some use the manuscripts as class notes. Some present slides during class, or rewrite their notes to a blackboard. I think that a good note taker has a very strong chance of actually making a copy of material that is in fact copyright by the professor. Publishing this material on a web site is clearly a violation of the professor's copyright on that material.
Sure, extemporaneous discussion or interpritation by the student is not copyright material. But I bet that a good part of the notes reflect the expression of the idea by the professor which is CERTAINLY at least a derivative work, if not a verbatim copy.
IANAL, but I think the universities are quite clearly correct here when they claim that this sort of thing is in fact a violation of copyright law.
One of the worst cases was the Washington DC police department using the urine samples to screen for pregnancy. There is a mention of this case on the ACLU site.
One of the dirty little secrets about drug testing is that the testing companies are pushing for coverage of a large variety of drugs on the theory that there are a lot of prescription drugs that can be abused. Employers don't mind this sort of testing because it allows them to gather more medical information about the employee. There are a lot of legal problems with just coming out and asking employees about what drugs they take under the ADA even now.
Some indication of this can be seen in here:
http://www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/articles/0298cov. htm. SHRM is the Society of Human Resource Managers.
The following reference describes setting up a drug free workplace that includes random testing, with possible testing for prescription drigs.
http://www.smartbiz.com/sbs/arts/lll5.htm
Here is a reference that mentions that Upjohn Co. tests for some prescription drugs:
Drug testing is a real problem. I wish I had the ability to select employers like you do, but given my profession and age I am kind of stuck with whomever I can find.
The problem with drug-testing, is that, basically, companies have wide discretion in what they can require of their employees.
The problem with drug testing is that a lot of companies test for legal and prescription drugs, too. Anti-depressants. High blood pressure medications. And so on.
As Americans, we have this belief that everybody should learn English to talk to us.
I learned a foreign language in school. I found it to be a nearly complete waste of time. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Americans do not live in a place where they are exposed to non English speaking people. With the exception of some parts of Los Angeles and Miami (that most people would generally not consider desirable holiday destinations) English is the first language in the US. The geography of the US is the determinant here. With time and lack of use the hard won skills of speaking atrophy and are forgotten. Sure, there is some residual benefit, but without practice the skills are lost, and surprisingly quickly.
If I lived in Europe or some other part of the world where I was exposed to people whose native language was not English as a matter of routine, I am sure I would have found it worthwhile to develop my linguistic skills further. But the fact of the matter is that I, like almost all Americans just do not find exposure to other languages a part of daily life.
Americans are mono-lingual for the sole reason that there are very few times in their life where another language would be useful. If the US were parceled up into a bunch of states where each state spoke a different language, you can bet that there would be a lot more interest in being polylingual. But it just isn't so. We aren't like Europe where a large country (say France) is the size of one of our states.
The concept that all Americans believing that others should learn English to speak to us is ridiculous. First it is a stupid stereotype, and second it ignores that it is just a fact that most Americans know only English because they rarely meet people who are not native English speakers.
You are fluent in Russian. Fine. Do you know how many people I have met in my life (I am 49) whose native language was Russian? One. An emigrant who was the fiance of a business acquaintance. How am I supposed to justify spending years of my life learning a skill that would be used maybe for 3 hours over the course of my life?
In Europe you may learn Italian (or at least enough to perform the daily tasks) if you plan to visit Italy on vacation. But after having made the effort you have a skill that you can use frequently. Going to Italy is a two hour drive, which you may do every third summer. You may in fact meet visiting Italians frequently in your home city. How many Americans visit Italy on a frequent basis? Not many. Have you ever met an Italian tourist in the US? I haven't. Ditto German. If you go stand on line in the Louvre you are likely to meet more Germans than French. Go stand in line at the MFA in Boston and you find that there are few tourists from other countries.
It just does not pay for most Americans to become fluent in other languages. If they make the effort they usually find that they never have a chance to use the skills and find that they have wasted their time.
What I want to know is how many Europeans speak non-European languages. Geographically it is no different for a European to be ignorant of Persian than it is for an American to be ignorant of German. I would bet that the answer is that there are no more Europeans that speak Persian than there are Americans.
As far as mechanical translators being useless, well I will agree that in their current incarnation they are in fact useless. But then again people never thought that it would be possible to build a machine that could beat the world champion at chess, either. Who knows what the future of mechanical translation is? Another decade or two of Moore's law and careful programming and you might find that the issues of idiom and context are solved.
IBM did some sort of survey and came up with the conclusion that there were no more than 10,000 web sites that did actual e-commerce on a daily basis. Many of those may be linked into an outsourced service like Yahoo, web911 etc.
All this makes me really wonder what the real market for something like this is.
Of course there are many more applications for a database backed web site than ecommerce, but if you are talking about an expensive high end database like Oracle I think you need some revenue to justify the cost of Oracle.
I am working on a small web based business myself, and the business model I've come up with indicates that if I get 50 tranactions a day I'll be able to buy a beach front house on Diamond Head in three years. I can't imagine why I would want Oracle for this. It's much more effective for me to outsource the financial transactions.
Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat owns most of the who's-who in the Linux kernel development community (and I don't care what Alan Cox says; the guy walks around with a damn red felt fedora on. He's painted red -- as in Red Hat -- from head to foot). Now, they own the development system that lies at the kernel's side.
Red Hat doesn't "own" anybody, or any part of Linux. The kernel is still controlled ultimately by Linus Torvalds. Alan Cox and others merely are developers employed by Red Hat. If they decide to go closed source, and Alan and others stay with RedHat, well I am sure the Linux community would miss them, but I don't think that would be the end of anything except my use of Red Hat's distributions.
If Red Hat wants to fork off and close any part of GNU/Linux we still have the GPL versions. The development system can be drawn back to the open source community at any time. It was only very recently that ecgs became the 'official' gcc, and if I am not mistaken the non-egcs version is still being used to compile the kernel.
Red Hat could bring Linux to its knees if it wanted, or at least it could make life very difficult for the rest of the distro companies by pulling an Aladdin (restricting the newest
versions of GCC to itself, leaving the older dregs to the FSF a la ghostscript).
Exactly what is to prevent the free software community from further taking whatever version of gcc is the latest GPL version, and working from there? From what I understand the problem with ghostscript arose because the author retained copyright rather than turning it over to the FSF like most of the other FSF software because he planned to do commercial licensing from the beginning. Since the FSF owns the gcc copyright I really don't think there is a problem along those lines.
And you guys put them there. Thanks!
Who exactly are 'you guys?'.
All I have heard along this line of reasoning is speculation as to what may happen. I am very reluctant to criticize anyone on the basis that they MAY do something bad in the future, especially when everything the have done in the past has been good. The bogeyman of 'Suits' as you say doesn't hold up to any kind of real examination. The amount of stock that has been sold to the public is not a problem; the original founders still own the majority of the company, and their attitude towards open source has been very good.
how scary it would be to have Microsoft in control of the Internet, he fails to discuss the even scarier proposition: Netscape in control of the Internet
If I had to choose one of the other owning the internet I'd much rather have Netscape. Netscape doesn't control the OS and most of the applications too.
Remember, Microsoft is working on buying up cable companies, it tried a proprietary competitor to the internet (MSN), it has been buying up content like collections of photographs, it has a big interest in NBC, and so on.
I can't think of a more scary situation than having Microsoft dominate the internet server market along with having cable systems and ownership of content providers like NBC.
This company has to be stopped.
The more crappy patents we have (IMHO the Y2K Windowing one was the best) the more quickly this mess is either going to get fixed or collapse out of it's own idiocy.
The House and Senate already have a set of reform bills on the table - HR 1907 and S.1798. At least S. 1798 includes a requirement that the GAO examine the quality of business model patents, which of course are starting to multiply like crazy right now. Call or write and complain about software patents too.
There is a quota, but it includes a requirement that no more than a certain percentage be accepted.
I don't care about Apache. The issue is Microsoft, and they have lost market share for 6 out of the 7 last months. Their jump up last month was due to one large free hosting service switching over.
The data I quoted come from the first URL above which is a report published 9/1999 by the ILO. The stats listed there don't come close to a 2% per year productivity gain for continental Europe over teh 1980-1997 reference period.
A part of this is that the US began a huge investment in IT around 1995 that is still continuing. Some economic planners believe that this is the reason for the recent spurt in productivity growth. While it may not continue forever - and the lateness of the economic cycle is a big reason why other sectors are declining in productivity now - there has been no corresponding such investment in Europe which casts a lot of doubt as to whether they will see the same productivity increase.
S. 1798 contains an important clause requiring that the GAO do a study on the 'quality' of patents on business models. This is very important to slashdotters because a large fraction of these business model patents are being generated by internet startups. There was an article on slashdot about one of these recently.
It would be a very good thing if a similar study be done on software patents. Writing your congressman would be a good idea.
Mr. Phelps played a key role in assisting IBM with receiving the largest number of patents in the United States six years in a row."
Looks like we got a celebrity here!
IBM does a hell of a lot of high level hardware R&D. These are the guys whose technology is behind most of the increases in hard disk storage density, pictures of individual atoms in articles in Scientific American, copper chip connectors, and so on. Over the history of corporate R&D at IBM they have one the best records of REAL innovation there is. There patents are generally not two bit losers like Y2K windowing and one-click ordering. Why somebody like this Phelps dude would have anything to do with Graphon escapes me unless it's just because he's a sleezy lawyer type.
First Claim:
We claim:
1. A method for running an application as an X-Client so as to enable the application to be displayed with an X-Windows manager, the method comprising the steps of:
launching a "WINDOWS/NT" session;
invoking an application from within the "WINDOWS/NT" session;
monitoring output messages that are sent from the application; determining that one of the monitored output messages is a graphical user interface command; and when the monitored output message is a graphical user interface command, enabling an X-Windows manager program to act on the command, and informing the "WINDOWS/NT" device driver of results of the command that was acted on by the X-Windows manager program, wherein the enabling step includes converting the graphical user interface command from a "WINDOWS/NT" format into a format that is recognized by X-Windows manager program to enable the X-Windows manager program to act on the command.
Is it possible for the DOJ to pursue the RIAA on anti-trust charges for the abuse of monopolistic powers?
Yes. However 'not acting in the interest of the consumer' is not sufficient.
You have to prove the existance of an actual agreement between RIAA members to fix prices, limit industrial output, share markets, or exclude competition.
And for the rights to do the same thing with mere ideas (as in patents).
Wrong.
Patents don't protect ideas, they protect implementations of ideas. You cannot patent an algorithm, but you can protect the implementation of an algorithm for computer cyptography.
The primary difference between a copyright and a patent is that a copyright protects expressions of ideas, while patents protect implementations of ideas.
I don't mind newbies, it's the clueless that are a pain. Everyone was a newbie at some point in the past. But there are some people that should never touch a computer! If you see them reaching toward a keyboard or mouse you want to rap them across the knuckles with a big old wooden ruler as hard as you can to get the messsage across. You can tell them. They are the ones putting coffee cups on the CD ROM tray and aluminum foil in the dot matrix printer!! It doesn't matter how much time you spend with these people, they will always remain clueless, newbie or not!!
Quite often newbies are very interesting. They will ask questions that you never thought of, make creative suggestions and so on. But these are not the clueless!!
If we get a lot of newbies, great! Be sure to help out the non-clueless. But if I see another post "can I use my WinModem" on RedHat Install I am going to go zerkers!!
All of the angst I have seen about Redhat is speculation. If they screw up we can vote with our feet. It's not like Microsoft where there is only one place to get this stuff. Up until now anyway Redhat has given back a lot to the Linux community. I think that it is pretty rude to slap them around when they haven't done anything bad to the community (so far).
Szulik said in March that he wouldn't want to see the LSB being used by other Linux vendors with less market share to catch up with Red Hat.
Without seen the context, he may mean he intends to support LSB to take away that issue as a selling point for his competitors. If I was a developer and looked at RedHat (non LSB) and everyone else (LSB) I would be tempted to support LSB first. The open nature of Linux makes embrace and extend difficult. Redhat has some serious competition (Corel Suse Turbo Debian Slack) that will be very difficult or impossible to buy out. If these all go LSB, who is going to buy a non LSB RedHat? Not me.
Now Red Hat is swallowing up all who come before them. Hmmm...now where have we seen this strategy employed before?
ALL? Hyperbole for conversational effect, I presume.
One acquisition does not a monopoly make. Cygnus is not a Redhat competitor, rather what they have accomplished is vertical integration.
There is a threat that gcc is now maintained by a for-profit company - oops Cygnus was for profit too, so I guess that hasn't changed. The only issue here is whether RedHat's policies will be any different from Cygnus's.
Keep your mind open in the meantime.
As to American economic wellbeing, it seems to me that it is more talked about than felt. Sure, a lot of money is being made, but this boom is remarkably unequal in the way its rewards are distributed, and seems to be biting hard into job security. In terms of economic fundamentals it doesn't look so hot either: productivity growth is running at little more than half that of Europe, a high proportion of new jobs are in the `casual work' sector, and the US has a rather worrying balance of payments deficit.
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One can always find a bad statistic. The fact is that we are enjoying the longest unbroken economic expansion in the history of the US.
Sure, the balance of trade deficit is high right now, but the reason is not a failing in the US economy, but rather a drop in demand particularly from the far east due to the collapses there. As these economies are starting to recover we are seeing a decline in the negative balance of trade. These deficits while threatening to the US economy have been very important to the stabilizing of the economies of many nations during the past year.
European productivity is currently averaging a gain 22% higher (not anything like twice) than the US rate of increase over the past 15 years. However over the past 2 1/2 years the US productivity rate increase is higher than Europe's, and it is already starting at a level 25% higher per capita than in Europe. In the last quarter it was at an amazing 4.2% rate. What is really astounding is that this is occurring late in the economic cycle where productivity gains usually fall or even go below zero. Europe on the other hand is much earlier in their cycle and given their much higher unemployment rate should be expected to be higher than the cycle weighted average.
The issue of service sector jobs having low pay is one that was bandied about a lot in the 80's - however what has happened during this economic cycle is that the service sector has gained in average wage much faster than the manufacturing sector with a resulting close in the gap in pay. The low wage jobs that are available now are just not getting filled because the unemployment rate is so low. On an anecdotal level my son has to walk to school now because the school district was unable to hire a bus driver for this school year.
In any economy there will be individuals who do better than others. Once concern in the US is that because we have a very heterogeneous makeup these economic disparaties can seem extreme. But it is certain that even at the low level of the economic scale things are better. Welfare roles are at all time lows. The percentage of people living below the poverty line has been dropping for the first time since the 80's. Unemployment (which affects the lower part of the economic spectrum) is at 30 year lows. And the benefits are more widespread than ever. Fully 50% of american households have some participation in the stock market, an all-time high.
In terms of job security, I agree with you that it has decreased. Few workers spend 20 years with one employer any more. On the other hand job efficiency has improved considerably in the past few years. In fact studies have shown that the low unemployment rates we currently have are due to a reduction in the average time one is unemployed after losing a job.
Some statistics on productivity are available at:
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/235press/pr/1
You may also be interested in a recent speech by Michael Moskow President, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
http://www.frbchi.org/speeches/06_17_99.html
I think that it is great news that the German government is supporting a project like this. However Germany does have more restrictions on certain freedoms than we do in the US - I wonder if they have thought the implications of GPG through completely.
There was a flap recently about amazon.com selling copies of Mien Kampf to German citizens because of their concerns with various forms of Neo-Nazism. I believe they are also struggling with Scientology. Encryption technologies like GPG must be helpful to underground organizations.
The main difference between Germans and Americans seems to be that Germans like to tell everyone what is wrong with their country, whilst Americans like to say that America is the best country in the world.
I don't know if it marketing or not. German history during the 20th century probably has an effect on the perception and confidence of its citizens towards any German goverment today. If you look at US history during the 20th century there have been a lot of times where the it's citizens have been pretty critical of the USA as a whole, too. Prior to the election of FDR things were pretty bad in this country. Ditto during the Vietnam war. Even during the 70's when the economy was doing crummy and there was a lot of hangover from Vietnam the average American didn't have a lot of good things to say about the way the country was going. There was a lot of feeling that we had passed out peak and were going to be supplanted by Japan as the leading economic power in the world.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and having a very strong economy over the past decade Americans are feeling pretty good about how things are going here. I think it's good to enjoy it - these kinds of things don't last forever.
One thing that has escaped internationalization has been programming languages. The keywords in every such language I have seen have been in English.
The fact of the matter is that English is the standard language in many fields where picking a standard is necessary. All airline pilots are expected to communicate with air traffic controllers in English. Scientific journals with international distribution are published in English. If you visit a technical library in Europe you might be very surprised to see how much of the contents are in English.
the high density of immense programming talent in countries such as India and China that do not primarily speak English could create an altogether new kind of code fork.
My suspicion is that probably in India, and maybe in China programming is taught in English.
English has become an extremely important language in India because of the many dialects that are first languages there, a unifying common language is needed to hold the country together. English is not quite as important in China, partly because of its much less developed than India.
You don't seem to grasp how quickly Linux Grew. It came from a 1 man operation to a better operating system that you can't beat the price/performance ratio. As Windows devolves and regresses, linux explode's with growth.
It seems to me to be very difficult to decide what Linux's growth rate is. First you have to decide what you mean by Linux. Do you mean the kernel? GNU/Linux? Open Source that is compatible with the Linux kernel? How many Linux articles there are in ZDNews? Then you have to decide if you want to talk about the user base, or include commercial applications too.
Whichever you choose will determine the perception of growth rate. If you chose the body of open source that Linux is compatible with, well the history goes back a LONG way. Progress has in fact been quite slow over most of that time. Empires have risen and fallen during that time. If you chose GNU/Linux, well, GNU started in 1984. Look at the growth of MS since 1984.
Certainly Linux has increased it's growth rate due to the increase in participation in the internet. But there are a lot of questions with the open source movement yet. Will the application base come to be? Right now the kernel development part of the picture looks good. But where is an applications catalog that includes offsets to most of what is avaiable for Windows going to come from? Heck, it isn't even clear if we are going to get a good browser and a financial planner.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. I run it wherever I can. I go back a long way in computers, and I *HATE* what Microsoft has done to the industry. But Linux is really only starting to scratch the sand on the beach next to the Microsoft Ocean. We have a long way to go before we cross that ocean. It is difficult to extrapolate from where we are today to the other side of that ocean.
Why do people like this author insist on completely ignoring how capitalism is acutally practiced in a modern society? Sure, the ideal concept of unrestrained capitalism has severe problems. But that went out over 100 years ago except in the minds of some academics, libertarians and those who swallowed Ayn Rand.
Modern western societies practice a form of encumbered capitalism where the societal tension is between those who debate how encumbered it should be. Sure, a pure capitalism would be anarchic and probably inefficient. But that is not at all what we have. The system of English common law we live under has been regulating corporate behaviour to a societal moral standard for 300 years; since at least the start of the industrial revolution. Most of the examples of problems with pure capitalism have been adjusted or ameliorated by law and regulation.
The example of tradesmen keeping their technology secret was in fact the prime motivation for the development of a patent system. Now tradesmen are granted a period of exclusivity in exchange for the publishing of their invention. Patents specifically allow for R&D activities to insure further technological benefits from publication. Casting away the concept of rewards for invention makes me very uneasy.
Publication by academics is in fact no particular high minded activity. The root cause for this is to gain continued employment, tenure and grant money. In today's environment such publications are always closely reviewed for potential commercial applications and patentability before they are released to reviewers.
The benefits of rapid technological change that we see today are in fact the result of a enlightened policy that BOTH allows for economic exploitation of ideas and free exchange with the protection of the economic value of the ideas.
The author makes a lot of claims for the success of Linux that I think are very unjustified at this point in it's development. I am not at all sure that anything innovative has or will come out of Linux. Linux has and is feeding off the technology that was developed in closed source environments, and trying very hard to just equal the features of these systems. Where are in fact the new algorithms, or the new technologies that have come out of Linux?
There's just too much money in proprietary drug$. It's also why so little research is being put into finding natural cures. No one can patent tree sap, but if you develop an artificial drug that cures the same thing, you can patent that and kaching! cash in bigtime.
Baloney. Drug companies canvas the earth looking for natural compounds to serve as drugs. Look at the success of Taxol, for example. And comments like 'you can't patent tree sap' are flat out wrong. I'd bet there are HUNDREDS of patents in the PTO files that have to do with tree sap and it's derivatives. Naturally occurring compounds are one of the biggest areas for pharmaceutical research.
Everyone gives William Gibson credit for inventing cyberpunk. Wrong. John Brunner did it 10 years earlier with Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar.
Are there any signs that we are *NOT* going to end up in a world similar to the one described in the book?!
I think Brunner was overly optimistic. I haven't seen any signs of a town with street names like 'Mean Free Path', and if 10 9's existed, it would be tapped.
Since when was *anything* you were taught in any school not "common knowledge"? How can this be considered IP?
When you get a copyright, you do not gain rights to an idea, but rather you gain rights to how you describe the idea. How many physics books are there that describe the law of gravity? Every one of then has copyright held by the author.
If this was about research related materials they might have a point. But then again, if it is research, it will likely be published in some
dusty old academic journal anyway.
And that journal will have copyrights held by the author or the journal publisher.
I think that the situation here is very mixed. Many university profs work from manuscripts of textbooks they are preparing. Some use the manuscripts as class notes. Some present slides during class, or rewrite their notes to a blackboard. I think that a good note taker has a very strong chance of actually making a copy of material that is in fact copyright by the professor. Publishing this material on a web site is clearly a violation of the professor's copyright on that material.
Sure, extemporaneous discussion or interpritation by the student is not copyright material. But I bet that a good part of the notes reflect the expression of the idea by the professor which is CERTAINLY at least a derivative work, if not a verbatim copy.
IANAL, but I think the universities are quite clearly correct here when they claim that this sort of thing is in fact a violation of copyright law.
One of the worst cases was the Washington DC police department using the urine samples to screen for pregnancy. There is a mention of this case on the ACLU site.
. htm. SHRM is the Society of Human Resource Managers.
e sting/motorola
One of the dirty little secrets about drug testing is that the testing companies are pushing for coverage of a large variety of drugs on the theory that there are a lot of prescription drugs that can be abused. Employers don't mind this sort of testing because it allows them to gather more medical information about the employee. There are a lot of legal problems with just coming out and asking employees about what drugs they take under the ADA even now.
Some indication of this can be seen in here:
http://www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/articles/0298cov
The following reference describes setting up a drug free workplace that includes random testing, with possible testing for prescription drigs.
http://www.smartbiz.com/sbs/arts/lll5.htm
Here is a reference that mentions that Upjohn Co. tests for some prescription drugs:
http://www.cesar.umd.edu/wrkp/docs/UPJOHN.txt
And for Motorola:
http://paranoia.lycaeum.org/war.on.drugs/drug.t
Drug testing is a real problem. I wish I had the ability to select employers like you do, but given my profession and age I am kind of stuck with whomever I can find.
The problem with drug-testing, is that, basically, companies have wide discretion in what they can require of their employees.
The problem with drug testing is that a lot of companies test for legal and prescription drugs, too. Anti-depressants. High blood pressure medications. And so on.
As Americans, we have this belief that everybody should learn English to talk to us.
I learned a foreign language in school. I found it to be a nearly complete waste of time. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Americans do not live in a place where they are exposed to non English speaking people. With the exception of some parts of Los Angeles and Miami (that most people would generally not consider desirable holiday destinations) English is the first language in the US. The geography of the US is the determinant here. With time and lack of use the hard won skills of speaking atrophy and are forgotten. Sure, there is some residual benefit, but without practice the skills are lost, and surprisingly quickly.
If I lived in Europe or some other part of the world where I was exposed to people whose native language was not English as a matter of routine, I am sure I would have found it worthwhile to develop my linguistic skills further. But the fact of the matter is that I, like almost all Americans just do not find exposure to other languages a part of daily life.
Americans are mono-lingual for the sole reason that there are very few times in their life where another language would be useful. If the US were parceled up into a bunch of states where each state spoke a different language, you can bet that there would be a lot more interest in being polylingual. But it just isn't so. We aren't like Europe where a large country (say France) is the size of one of our states.
The concept that all Americans believing that others should learn English to speak to us is ridiculous. First it is a stupid stereotype, and second it ignores that it is just a fact that most Americans know only English because they rarely meet people who are not native English speakers.
You are fluent in Russian. Fine. Do you know how many people I have met in my life (I am 49) whose native language was Russian? One. An emigrant who was the fiance of a business acquaintance. How am I supposed to justify spending years of my life learning a skill that would be used maybe for 3 hours over the course of my life?
In Europe you may learn Italian (or at least enough to perform the daily tasks) if you plan to visit Italy on vacation. But after having made the effort you have a skill that you can use frequently. Going to Italy is a two hour drive, which you may do every third summer. You may in fact meet visiting Italians frequently in your home city. How many Americans visit Italy on a frequent basis? Not many. Have you ever met an Italian tourist in the US? I haven't. Ditto German. If you go stand on line in the Louvre you are likely to meet more Germans than French. Go stand in line at the MFA in Boston and you find that there are few tourists from other countries.
It just does not pay for most Americans to become fluent in other languages. If they make the effort they usually find that they never have a chance to use the skills and find that they have wasted their time.
What I want to know is how many Europeans speak non-European languages. Geographically it is no different for a European to be ignorant of Persian than it is for an American to be ignorant of German. I would bet that the answer is that there are no more Europeans that speak Persian than there are Americans.
As far as mechanical translators being useless, well I will agree that in their current incarnation they are in fact useless. But then again people never thought that it would be possible to build a machine that could beat the world champion at chess, either. Who knows what the future of mechanical translation is? Another decade or two of Moore's law and careful programming and you might find that the issues of idiom and context are solved.
IBM did some sort of survey and came up with the conclusion that there were no more than 10,000 web sites that did actual e-commerce on a daily basis. Many of those may be linked into an outsourced service like Yahoo, web911 etc.
All this makes me really wonder what the real market for something like this is.
Of course there are many more applications for a database backed web site than ecommerce, but if you are talking about an expensive high end database like Oracle I think you need some revenue to justify the cost of Oracle.
I am working on a small web based business myself, and the business model I've come up with indicates that if I get 50 tranactions a day I'll be able to buy a beach front house on Diamond Head in three years. I can't imagine why I would want Oracle for this. It's much more effective for me to outsource the financial transactions.