I know it's cliched, but remember what Thomas Edison said: "Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"
Do a search for Edison and Tesla, or Edison and Swan, etc. Edison's real talent was as a salesman more than as an inventor. (Tesla in particular has some interesting quotes about him that relates to this famous quote - Tesla worked with Edison for a while, and grew frustrated by his lack of creativity: too much perspiration and not enough inspriration, so to speak)
Maybe we need root registries in Cuba -- somewhere where big international corps. don't have much influence.
Seriously though, I've thought about stuff like this before -- I think that we should set up some new TLDs with our own root servers -- leave.com,.net etc. altogether so there won't be any direct conflicts (I always thought it would be cool to have the domain slashdot.slash [pronounced slash-dot-dot-slash])
Actually, it seems that what they're selling is comparable to a Beowulf cluster (if not actually a beowulf cluster). I don't remember the actual quote, but they say that unlike traditional supercomputers, this one is actual a group of 4 computers with Intel Itanium (still sounds funny to say that) processors.
So, how many companies are demoing computers on this chip? And w/ what OSes? (I know, I'm sure this has been gone over a thousand times, but I wasn't paying attention.)
Let me be the first one to say... Give me a break.
Re:Anything you darn-well want to!
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I assume that there shouldn't be any problem playing back uncompressed 16bit 48KHz audio -- the bandwidth is far less than 10-base-T and there's not a lot of processing involved -- this may be just the device to build a tiny DAT-quality field-recorder...
Hmmm.... may be time to pick up one of these puppys...
I was thinking of something similar to that as a sort of quick-fix for the problem (truthfully I still have a bit of a problem with patents in general, but that's for a different post [or not]).
Accepting for the moment that patents are neccessary, the length of patents needs to be shortened and variable. The idea is that you need to allow an inventor to get a fair return for the time and money spent inventing something that can easily be copied. I can see that for some types of product this may need to be a reasonably long period of time (perhaps 10 years, still shorter than the current patent period). But some products are such huge money-makers, and the societal costs of having a monopoly-pricing on really neccessary products is so high, that the patent length should really be shortened to perhaps 2 years.
One of the most egregious examples is pharmaceutical patents. The rate of innovation is such that many pharmaceuticals (think prozac) become obsolete before the patent term is over, and there is a new crop of high-priced patented replacements. Think of how much money would have been saved if the patent on Prozac had expired 5 years ago. Ely-Lily (I think) still would have made their bucket-full of money, and they still would be making money (because for some reason people still buy branded drugs even when you can get a generic for less than half the money), but it might actually be possible to treat acute depression without spending your life savings on medication.
Of course I still think that most software-patents should just be thrown out altogether;-)
Well, 99% uptime still means that you have one hour and 41 minutes of down time every week! That sounds about right for NT. (My linux server was last rebooted 71 days ago, and that was because someone pulled the plug out of the wall).
Microsoft talks about the Linux community as if it's something monolithic like a competing company. I understand that that's probably the only way they know how to respond to something, and even if they did understand us it's still in their interest to denigrate linux I guess.
It's mostly interesting to see how threatened they apparently are by linux -- the OS that just won't die!
I'm sure that people will actually buy these things and Microsoft will probably make money, for a while. I think that what's beginning to sink in (for some, anyway), though, is that fighting free software is kind of like fighting the undead -- there's not much you can really do to stop it. I wonder if it's sunk in with Microsoft that with Linux, Gnu, etc. (and even the whole internet, in a way) they're not really up against a product per se, but a whole new paradigm -- where people are making money not from owning information but by actually performing services and doing work -- and we all know that you can't make billions that way.
Which brings us to this: At what point does the pursuit of points supercede the importance of posting insightful, relevant comments? And we know it will come to that, for some posters.
Actually, I think that's a reason why it shouldn't say your current level on your homepage. That way the only way to find out what your score is is to actually post a message, and you don't want to post a stupid message (which will probably get moderated down) just to find out your score.
Yes, but at least here it has to get challenged -- in the IBM license it just has to appear "likely" that there will be a challenge. It seems that IBM can basically terminate the license at will by claiming that they found a patent infringement or something, whereas in Apple's case someone actually has to file suit first. --
At least this one actually requires there to be a claim of infringement, rather than just that one is "likely". I'm not sure that there is a way around this for a company the size of Apple -- they have to protect themselves if someone incorporates (inadvertantly) patented code. The way software patents are these days it could pretty easily happen. I guess the other option is to do what netscape did and spin off a separate non-profit company.
Slashdot Mirror
Do a search for Edison and Tesla, or Edison and Swan, etc. Edison's real talent was as a salesman more than as an inventor. (Tesla in particular has some interesting quotes about him that relates to this famous quote - Tesla worked with Edison for a while, and grew frustrated by his lack of creativity: too much perspiration and not enough inspriration, so to speak)
Maybe we need root registries in Cuba -- somewhere where big international corps. don't have much influence.
.com, .net etc. altogether so there won't be any direct conflicts (I always thought it would be cool to have the domain slashdot.slash [pronounced slash-dot-dot-slash])
Seriously though, I've thought about stuff like this before -- I think that we should set up some new TLDs with our own root servers -- leave
Actually, it seems that what they're selling is comparable to a Beowulf cluster (if not actually a beowulf cluster). I don't remember the actual quote, but they say that unlike traditional supercomputers, this one is actual a group of 4 computers with Intel Itanium (still sounds funny to say that) processors.
So, how many companies are demoing computers on this chip? And w/ what OSes? (I know, I'm sure this has been gone over a thousand times, but I wasn't paying attention.)
Let me be the first one to say... Give me a break.
I assume that there shouldn't be any problem playing back uncompressed 16bit 48KHz audio -- the bandwidth is far less than 10-base-T and there's not a lot of processing involved -- this may be just the device to build a tiny DAT-quality field-recorder...
Hmmm.... may be time to pick up one of these puppys...
I was thinking of something similar to that as a sort of quick-fix for the problem (truthfully I still have a bit of a problem with patents in general, but that's for a different post [or not]).
;-)
Accepting for the moment that patents are neccessary, the length of patents needs to be shortened and variable. The idea is that you need to allow an inventor to get a fair return for the time and money spent inventing something that can easily be copied. I can see that for some types of product this may need to be a reasonably long period of time (perhaps 10 years, still shorter than the current patent period). But some products are such huge money-makers, and the societal costs of having a monopoly-pricing on really neccessary products is so high, that the patent length should really be shortened to perhaps 2 years.
One of the most egregious examples is pharmaceutical patents. The rate of innovation is such that many pharmaceuticals (think prozac) become obsolete before the patent term is over, and there is a new crop of high-priced patented replacements. Think of how much money would have been saved if the patent on Prozac had expired 5 years ago. Ely-Lily (I think) still would have made their bucket-full of money, and they still would be making money (because for some reason people still buy branded drugs even when you can get a generic for less than half the money), but it might actually be possible to treat acute depression without spending your life savings on medication.
Of course I still think that most software-patents should just be thrown out altogether
Well, 99% uptime still means that you have one hour and 41 minutes of down time every week! That sounds about right for NT. (My linux server was last rebooted 71 days ago, and that was because someone pulled the plug out of the wall).
Microsoft talks about the Linux community as if it's something monolithic like a competing company. I understand that that's probably the only way they know how to respond to something, and even if they did understand us it's still in their interest to denigrate linux I guess.
It's mostly interesting to see how threatened they apparently are by linux -- the OS that just won't die!
I'm sure that people will actually buy these things and Microsoft will probably make money, for a while. I think that what's beginning to sink in (for some, anyway), though, is that fighting free software is kind of like fighting the undead -- there's not much you can really do to stop it. I wonder if it's sunk in with Microsoft that with Linux, Gnu, etc. (and even the whole internet, in a way) they're not really up against a product per se, but a whole new paradigm -- where people are making money not from owning information but by actually performing services and doing work -- and we all know that you can't make billions that way.
These are certainly interesting times.
Which brings us to this: At what point does the pursuit of points supercede the importance of posting insightful, relevant comments? And we know it will come to that, for some posters.
Actually, I think that's a reason why it shouldn't say your current level on your homepage. That way the only way to find out what your score is is to actually post a message, and you don't want to post a stupid message (which will probably get moderated down) just to find out your score.
the 68K Macs don't have Open Firmware. PCI-generation PowerMacs can boot directly to another OS.
Yes, but at least here it has to get challenged -- in the IBM license it just has to appear "likely" that there will be a challenge. It seems that IBM can basically terminate the license at will by claiming that they found a patent infringement or something, whereas in Apple's case someone actually has to file suit first.
--
At least this one actually requires there to be a claim of infringement, rather than just that one is "likely". I'm not sure that there is a way around this for a company the size of Apple -- they have to protect themselves if someone incorporates (inadvertantly) patented code. The way software patents are these days it could pretty easily happen. I guess the other option is to do what netscape did and spin off a separate non-profit company.
----