Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
What a lot of people who take this kind of position often don't realize is the fact that treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work.
I agree with Mark Lemley that, given the level of IP creation today, total sharing of it would definitely benefit mankind. However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP....
I don't doubt this is true to some extent but whenever I hear this argument for IP I never hear any evidence supporting it. Are there studies? Anecdotes even?
Here's an anecdotal hypothetical for you. Lets say that you, personally, come up with an idea to make a widget. It's going to take about 1 year for you to flesh out the idea, figure out the details and make sure it will work. So you will spend one year of your life working on it. Then it will cost you 1 million dollars to create a product for the idea and bring it to market. This money is paid by you, out of pocket and through borrowing.
Then you bring it to market. One of your competitors (or even a non-competitor who wants to enter the space) steals your idea and launches a competing product. They could not have come up with the idea by themselves. They are bigger than you, so they out-market you. Your product stops being profitable, so you stop making it. You are now out 1 year of your life, and 1 million dollars. From a personal standpoint, you'd have been better off if you never made the product in the first place.
People talk about WPA security and how it's important, but the fact is most home users don't even change the default password for their wireless routers.
There is a difference between not having a technology and not using it. The difference is that people who want to use it can if it's available, while no one can if it's not.
If there was a way to filter the idiots out of the call queue so tech support could help the ones that actually need help (as opposed to the ones that need help reading) I'm sure they'd do it.
Most of the internal corporate environments have this. When you have a problem, you call the help desk and talk to a monkey in "tier-one." Their job is to find your problem on the common-problems sheet and give you a canned answer. This catches most of the "how do I" and "how come I can't" problems. If they can't solve it, it gets forwarded to a "tier-two" support person. They handle the queries that are not on the sheet and have skill and experience. They will diagnose the issue and help you resolve it. Occasionally they will call you back after researching. If they determine that it is a problem with infrastructure, then they will forward the problem for you to a "tier-three" tech who is charged with fixing things that aren't on client machines.
They do this of course, because in a corporate environment, it is not acceptable to leave a problem unsolved, or to frustrate the caller. When that happens, someone's manager complains and it becomes a problem that is costing a department money. This doesn't happen in the consumer market because a customer's problem don't cost the company money, and because the customer can't hold the company accountable.
if I want a list of files in a directory, in Perl it's:
@file = glob($filename."/*");
In Java, I have to do:
File myFile = new File($filename); String[] myList = myFile.list();
It's a small example, and I know I can combine creating the myFile object with getting the file list, but the point is I can't just DO it, I have to prep it and do it.
That's because Java is object oriented. You get the file list for an instance of a directory. The directory represents an ADT that you want to get the attributes of. You don't say "get me a list of files, here is a starting directory" you say "directory, give me your files."
If you want to do it in one line, do:
String[] dirContents = new File($filename).list();
In Java, I'm too busy keeping track of object types
Strict typing prevents many kinds of bugs.
I've found I can put a program together in Perl in a day and it'll take 2-3 to write the same thing in Java.
80% of the cost of software is maintenance (figure may vary depending on who you talk to.) If you are writing programs that can be written in a day, yes, a scripting language is going to suit you better. If you are writing something that is going to take several man-years, then a robust language that focuses on ease of maintenance is going to suit you better.
I think I stopped taking this kind of thing very seriously when I read a study where self-identified MCS sufferers were intentionally exposed to chemicals in a blind test - expose them to chemicals with no detectable odor, and they have no reaction. Expose them to harmless chemicals with a noticeable odor, and they immediately have a "reaction".
My friend used to work at a camp. One day, they made snacks for the kids that had peanuts in them. You couldn't smell or taste them, but there was a fair amount in them. An hour or so after the kids ate the snacks, some of the kids mentioned that they had peanut allergies. My friend said that there were peanuts in the snacks that they just ate. After hearing that, the kids started to have a "reaction."
I don't think speed is an issue with these devices. You likely arent going to be downlaoding a 100meg file to your palm.
I refuse to buy 802.11 devices unless they support WPA. And no 802.11b devices support WPA to my knoledge. I don't want to have to disable encryption on my home network to use my palm on it.
How mandatory ID even prevents terrorist attacks is also not clear to me; all the 9/11 hijackers had valid government-issued ID.
Showing ID does nothing to enhance security. We know that IDs can be easily faked, or secured by bribing officials, and that having a valid ID does not prove that you wont do something bad. The problem is that for this to enhance security, the airlines need an "I will not do something bad" card to determine the intentions of their passengers. ID cards are not it.
The airlines put on this theatre though, since it solves a business problem of theirs. Namely, it prevents people from reselling tickets. If you have to show ID to get on a plane, and that ID has to match the name on the ticket, you can't buy a ticket from someone who doesn't want it anymore. Therefore, you have to buy a new ticket from the airline, so the airline gets more revenue. So, the airlines use ID checks to ensure that tickets can't be resold, and they explain it to the public as "enhancing security" which it isn't.
MD5 has been long suspected to not be collision resistant. As such, it isn't used in applications which require collision resistence.
I don't remember the details (never learned the actual algorithm,) but a while ago someone showed how to get collisions in a weakened version of MD5. [I think they could find a collision after 2 rounds of the algorithm, instead of the usual 4.]
Not being collision resistant isn't so bad. What really matters is being pre-image and second pre-image resistant. But collision resistance implies the other two, so it is the goal.
The algorithm to take MD5's place (and should have once the earlier weakness was shown) is SHA-1.
All that intro, and then you thorw that in there? No reason, no reference, no link, just that? I was all ready to read about WHY and HOW, but you didn't bother with that.
for the poor Chinese manufacturing industry; having all that demand for their products must be horrible for them. Never mind *our* manufacturing industry, which largely doesn't have that opportunity at all. At least, not with Wal-Mart hawking these Chinese DVD players for less than half the price of what a VCR would formerly sell for.
That's how capitalism works. If you can't compete, you're out of the market. That way the resources that you consumed (and wasted since you were using more) are freed for another area of the market to use.
Personally, I believe that there was an issue with old JVMs (at least on Linux) leaking memory, that has now been solved
There was. Very old JVMs used to have problems GCing objects that circularly referenced each other. At least I was told so by some job interviewer once when I looked at him funy after being asked the question.
But what is true; c++ will always be faster than java
Ignoring arguments about programmer ability and design issues, that statement is not necessarily true. There are advantages to compiling an app to byte-code over machine code.
The byte-code can be recompiled to the machine code of the machine that it is running on at runtime to take advantages of the instruction set on that machine. The native compiled first code has to be compiled for the lowest common denominator of machines that it will be running on. If you want to run on most machines, you compile to a Pentium MMX (for example.) When the native code is run on a machine with SSE2 extensions, it still runs as MMX. The byte-code can be recompiled at runtime to use the SSE2.
The second advantage is that the statically compiled code is compiled with a static analyser, profiler and optimizer. The byte-code can be recompiled using a dynamic profiler and optimizer. So the machine code from the byte-code can be re-optimized to favour execution paths that are occurring at runtime, based on data collected at runtime.
Most of the "Java is too slow" arguments are based on observations from programmers who were using it in the 1.0 and 1.1 era, when there were performance problems and the optimizers weren't up to snuff. C# compiles to bytecode, and uses a similar basic class library, but you don't hear people crying "C# is too slow" from the hilltops.
4.1.4 No devices for storing energy either for takeoff or for use in flight shall be permitted. Rotating aerodynamic components, such as rotor blades, used for lift and/or control are exempt from consideration as energy storing devices.,
Those wings have a huge volume, you should be able to get pretty good lift if you filled them with helium. Of course I don't know what the rules would say.
This sounds like a reinsertion of all the technology that has gone into anonymous mailers over the years (see MixMaster.) I hope that they aren't re-inventing everything and repeating the same mistakes. The existing technology should be mostly portable from the application layer to the session or layer.
I was at a presentation by the guy behind MixMaster and was impressed by all the thought that has gone into the various generations of the application. They even had it generating fake messages so you can't do traffic analysis.
It's guerilla marketing, plain and simple, just like Sci-Fi's recent attempt with M. Night Shyamalan's new movie. You're reading about it, so it's working.
I think the first clue was from the post:
The Halo 2 Theatrical trailer ends with the normal Xbox logo, but it also briefly replaces xbox.com with ilovebees.com.
Hmmmm... an unknown website address showing up at the end of a piece of marketing material? Hmmmm... the website has nothing to do with what was being promoted. OH! It's been hacked! How intriguing! There must be something interesting going on here. I am so gullible. Wait! No I'm not. I recognise this as publicity. But I will still talk about it so that the marketers get what they want. Doh! I guess that they won in the end!
The headline should read: "Microsoft marketing gimmick tries to create buzz. Not just astroturf anymore."
I wonder if you can apply the same logic to... a kernel thread scheduler
Unlikely, since the simulation assumes that you can predict when the actor reaches the critical section (car to spot in intersection).
Doing that in a thread scheduler requires you to predict how long it will take a thread to execute before it reaches some critical section. That would allow you to solve the halting problem... which we know is unsolvable.
I have to agree with this. SMTP was designed when all of the machines involved were trusted. That isn't the case anymore. Since a design assumption has been fundamentally broken, it needs to be redesigned.
We shouldn't be grafting band-aids and restricting the network model to fix a single broken protocol. SMTP is the problem. Fix it and leave everything else alone. You wouldn't propose mucking around with TCP because any other application layer protocol was broken.
There are no $1,000,000 coding errors. If it cost that much, then either it was an error case that was enforceable, or the proper quality control and risk management steps weren't taken.
This seems a bit overkill to me. I feel like this is more of a knee-jerk reaction than a solid business move for some reason. Perhaps the real question is not "how far can we boost our market share with these 35 new phones," but instead should be "what's wrong with our existing phones?"
Realistically, you shouldn't have to add this many different products to your line to snag the coveted clamshell and camera buyers.
This is what happens when the marketing group takes over an engineering company. Rather than develop a new product to fix the real reason for the slide (which takes time and money), they go for the quick fix of a new marketing push. This works in the short term (single quarter) as the old technology is not too far behind, but as this is reapplied over and over again, the products that they are pushing fall further and further behind.
This is what happened to Palm when the guy from Pepsi took over. Rather than sink money into R&D (which made the tech company a success in the first place) they focussed on marketing and branding (that is how you sell sugar-water, after all). Then a couple of years later, palm was all marketing and hadn't improved their products while the PocketPCs had marched forward, caught up technically, and then kept going to leave Palm in the dust. Once they realised what was going on, Palm ousted the Pepsi dude and started playing catch-up.
Just my opinion... hopefully I remember the facts correctly.
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What a lot of people who take this kind of position often don't realize is the fact that treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work.
...
I agree with Mark Lemley that, given the level of IP creation today, total sharing of it would definitely benefit mankind. However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
I don't doubt this is true to some extent but whenever I hear this argument for IP I never hear any evidence supporting it. Are there studies? Anecdotes even?
Here's an anecdotal hypothetical for you. Lets say that you, personally, come up with an idea to make a widget. It's going to take about 1 year for you to flesh out the idea, figure out the details and make sure it will work. So you will spend one year of your life working on it. Then it will cost you 1 million dollars to create a product for the idea and bring it to market. This money is paid by you, out of pocket and through borrowing.
Then you bring it to market. One of your competitors (or even a non-competitor who wants to enter the space) steals your idea and launches a competing product. They could not have come up with the idea by themselves. They are bigger than you, so they out-market you. Your product stops being profitable, so you stop making it. You are now out 1 year of your life, and 1 million dollars. From a personal standpoint, you'd have been better off if you never made the product in the first place.
People talk about WPA security and how it's important, but the fact is most home users don't even change the default password for their wireless routers.
There is a difference between not having a technology and not using it. The difference is that people who want to use it can if it's available, while no one can if it's not.
If there was a way to filter the idiots out of the call queue so tech support could help the ones that actually need help (as opposed to the ones that need help reading) I'm sure they'd do it.
Most of the internal corporate environments have this. When you have a problem, you call the help desk and talk to a monkey in "tier-one." Their job is to find your problem on the common-problems sheet and give you a canned answer. This catches most of the "how do I" and "how come I can't" problems. If they can't solve it, it gets forwarded to a "tier-two" support person. They handle the queries that are not on the sheet and have skill and experience. They will diagnose the issue and help you resolve it. Occasionally they will call you back after researching. If they determine that it is a problem with infrastructure, then they will forward the problem for you to a "tier-three" tech who is charged with fixing things that aren't on client machines.
They do this of course, because in a corporate environment, it is not acceptable to leave a problem unsolved, or to frustrate the caller. When that happens, someone's manager complains and it becomes a problem that is costing a department money. This doesn't happen in the consumer market because a customer's problem don't cost the company money, and because the customer can't hold the company accountable.
if I want a list of files in a directory, in Perl it's:
@file = glob($filename."/*");
In Java, I have to do:
File myFile = new File($filename);
String[] myList = myFile.list();
It's a small example, and I know I can combine creating the myFile object with getting the file list, but the point is I can't just DO it, I have to prep it and do it.
That's because Java is object oriented. You get the file list for an instance of a directory. The directory represents an ADT that you want to get the attributes of. You don't say "get me a list of files, here is a starting directory" you say "directory, give me your files."
If you want to do it in one line, do:
String[] dirContents = new File($filename).list();
In Java, I'm too busy keeping track of object types
Strict typing prevents many kinds of bugs.
I've found I can put a program together in Perl in a day and it'll take 2-3 to write the same thing in Java.
80% of the cost of software is maintenance (figure may vary depending on who you talk to.) If you are writing programs that can be written in a day, yes, a scripting language is going to suit you better. If you are writing something that is going to take several man-years, then a robust language that focuses on ease of maintenance is going to suit you better.
I think I stopped taking this kind of thing very seriously when I read a study where self-identified MCS sufferers were intentionally exposed to chemicals in a blind test - expose them to chemicals with no detectable odor, and they have no reaction. Expose them to harmless chemicals with a noticeable odor, and they immediately have a "reaction".
My friend used to work at a camp. One day, they made snacks for the kids that had peanuts in them. You couldn't smell or taste them, but there was a fair amount in them. An hour or so after the kids ate the snacks, some of the kids mentioned that they had peanut allergies. My friend said that there were peanuts in the snacks that they just ate. After hearing that, the kids started to have a "reaction."
Or, put another way: Why not the faster 11g?
I don't think speed is an issue with these devices. You likely arent going to be downlaoding a 100meg file to your palm.
I refuse to buy 802.11 devices unless they support WPA. And no 802.11b devices support WPA to my knoledge. I don't want to have to disable encryption on my home network to use my palm on it.
How mandatory ID even prevents terrorist attacks is also not clear to me; all the 9/11 hijackers had valid government-issued ID.
Showing ID does nothing to enhance security. We know that IDs can be easily faked, or secured by bribing officials, and that having a valid ID does not prove that you wont do something bad. The problem is that for this to enhance security, the airlines need an "I will not do something bad" card to determine the intentions of their passengers. ID cards are not it.
The airlines put on this theatre though, since it solves a business problem of theirs. Namely, it prevents people from reselling tickets. If you have to show ID to get on a plane, and that ID has to match the name on the ticket, you can't buy a ticket from someone who doesn't want it anymore. Therefore, you have to buy a new ticket from the airline, so the airline gets more revenue. So, the airlines use ID checks to ensure that tickets can't be resold, and they explain it to the public as "enhancing security" which it isn't.
MD5 has been long suspected to not be collision resistant. As such, it isn't used in applications which require collision resistence.
I don't remember the details (never learned the actual algorithm,) but a while ago someone showed how to get collisions in a weakened version of MD5. [I think they could find a collision after 2 rounds of the algorithm, instead of the usual 4.]
Not being collision resistant isn't so bad. What really matters is being pre-image and second pre-image resistant. But collision resistance implies the other two, so it is the goal.
The algorithm to take MD5's place (and should have once the earlier weakness was shown) is SHA-1.
That used to be true. No longer.
All that intro, and then you thorw that in there? No reason, no reference, no link, just that? I was all ready to read about WHY and HOW, but you didn't bother with that.
That's how zealots have arguments.
Windows sucks! Linux rules! Your mom uses a Mac!
for the poor Chinese manufacturing industry; having all that demand for their products must be horrible for them. Never mind *our* manufacturing industry, which largely doesn't have that opportunity at all. At least, not with Wal-Mart hawking these Chinese DVD players for less than half the price of what a VCR would formerly sell for.
That's how capitalism works. If you can't compete, you're out of the market. That way the resources that you consumed (and wasted since you were using more) are freed for another area of the market to use.
It's an achademic culture at Google. They have no business sense.
I thought one of the main purposes of P2P was that it is decentralized. A supercomputer cluster is hardly decentralized.
That was my reaction as well. Let's take a peer-to-peer distributed system, and centralize it and have it use a client server model. We are brilliant!
Personally, I believe that there was an issue with old JVMs (at least on Linux) leaking memory, that has now been solved
There was. Very old JVMs used to have problems GCing objects that circularly referenced each other. At least I was told so by some job interviewer once when I looked at him funy after being asked the question.
But what is true; c++ will always be faster than java
Ignoring arguments about programmer ability and design issues, that statement is not necessarily true. There are advantages to compiling an app to byte-code over machine code.
The byte-code can be recompiled to the machine code of the machine that it is running on at runtime to take advantages of the instruction set on that machine. The native compiled first code has to be compiled for the lowest common denominator of machines that it will be running on. If you want to run on most machines, you compile to a Pentium MMX (for example.) When the native code is run on a machine with SSE2 extensions, it still runs as MMX. The byte-code can be recompiled at runtime to use the SSE2.
The second advantage is that the statically compiled code is compiled with a static analyser, profiler and optimizer. The byte-code can be recompiled using a dynamic profiler and optimizer. So the machine code from the byte-code can be re-optimized to favour execution paths that are occurring at runtime, based on data collected at runtime.
Most of the "Java is too slow" arguments are based on observations from programmers who were using it in the 1.0 and 1.1 era, when there were performance problems and the optimizers weren't up to snuff. C# compiles to bytecode, and uses a similar basic class library, but you don't hear people crying "C# is too slow" from the hilltops.
Can they use a battery? As in charge the battery using human power and then run the motor off the battery power???
From the rules:
4.1.4 No devices for storing energy either for takeoff or for use in flight shall be permitted. Rotating aerodynamic components, such as rotor blades, used for lift and/or control are exempt from consideration as energy storing devices.,
Those wings have a huge volume, you should be able to get pretty good lift if you filled them with helium. Of course I don't know what the rules would say.
From the rules:
4.1.1 The machine shall be a heavier-than-air machine. The use of lighter-than- air gases shall be prohibited.
grr... reinsertion = reinvention ... which isnt a real word anyways.
This sounds like a reinsertion of all the technology that has gone into anonymous mailers over the years (see MixMaster.) I hope that they aren't re-inventing everything and repeating the same mistakes. The existing technology should be mostly portable from the application layer to the session or layer.
I was at a presentation by the guy behind MixMaster and was impressed by all the thought that has gone into the various generations of the application. They even had it generating fake messages so you can't do traffic analysis.
what really was the point of this exercise?
Agreed. A single user operating within specs does not make a "load test."
It's guerilla marketing, plain and simple, just like Sci-Fi's recent attempt with M. Night Shyamalan's new movie. You're reading about it, so it's working.
I think the first clue was from the post:
The Halo 2 Theatrical trailer ends with the normal Xbox logo, but it also briefly replaces xbox.com with ilovebees.com.
Hmmmm... an unknown website address showing up at the end of a piece of marketing material? Hmmmm... the website has nothing to do with what was being promoted. OH! It's been hacked! How intriguing! There must be something interesting going on here. I am so gullible. Wait! No I'm not. I recognise this as publicity. But I will still talk about it so that the marketers get what they want. Doh! I guess that they won in the end!
The headline should read: "Microsoft marketing gimmick tries to create buzz. Not just astroturf anymore."
I wonder if you can apply the same logic to... a kernel thread scheduler
Unlikely, since the simulation assumes that you can predict when the actor reaches the critical section (car to spot in intersection).
Doing that in a thread scheduler requires you to predict how long it will take a thread to execute before it reaches some critical section. That would allow you to solve the halting problem... which we know is unsolvable.
... in 15 to 20 years.
Usually it comes in 10 to 15 years. In this case it must take the signal an extra 5 years to get here. Either that, or someone can't do arithmetic.
I have to agree with this. SMTP was designed when all of the machines involved were trusted. That isn't the case anymore. Since a design assumption has been fundamentally broken, it needs to be redesigned.
We shouldn't be grafting band-aids and restricting the network model to fix a single broken protocol. SMTP is the problem. Fix it and leave everything else alone. You wouldn't propose mucking around with TCP because any other application layer protocol was broken.
There are no $1,000,000 coding errors. If it cost that much, then either it was an error case that was enforceable, or the proper quality control and risk management steps weren't taken.
This seems a bit overkill to me. I feel like this is more of a knee-jerk reaction than a solid business move for some reason. Perhaps the real question is not "how far can we boost our market share with these 35 new phones," but instead should be "what's wrong with our existing phones?"
Realistically, you shouldn't have to add this many different products to your line to snag the coveted clamshell and camera buyers.
This is what happens when the marketing group takes over an engineering company. Rather than develop a new product to fix the real reason for the slide (which takes time and money), they go for the quick fix of a new marketing push. This works in the short term (single quarter) as the old technology is not too far behind, but as this is reapplied over and over again, the products that they are pushing fall further and further behind.
This is what happened to Palm when the guy from Pepsi took over. Rather than sink money into R&D (which made the tech company a success in the first place) they focussed on marketing and branding (that is how you sell sugar-water, after all). Then a couple of years later, palm was all marketing and hadn't improved their products while the PocketPCs had marched forward, caught up technically, and then kept going to leave Palm in the dust. Once they realised what was going on, Palm ousted the Pepsi dude and started playing catch-up.
Just my opinion... hopefully I remember the facts correctly.