Last week I had a series of meetings with attorneys and accountants about a new software product. It really helped me understand the corporate mindset that pervades the industry:
* IP, in and of itself is valued by attorneys because it generates huge ammounts of billable work. No attorney in his or her right mind would recommend using anything that resembels an open source license. Too many barriers to litigation and legal fees. No huge lawsuits, no complex negotiations.
* Accountants like IP because it is valued however you need it to be.
So when I threw out the idea of GPLing the software, the result was almost comical:
* One attorney tried to explain how he needed to read the GPL. And bill me hours to do so. (not going to happen) * One attorney suggested I'd be giving away a cash cow. I asked him: yours or mine. And the answer was a "what do you mean by that?" (struck a nerve here) * My accountant said the intangible asset would be useful at the end of the year, and that an open source license may dilute the value of the asset.
It's very clear to me now why most business people see Google as a threat: intellectual property speculation has replaced the bilking investors with electric lemonade stands and WebVans full of irrational exuberance of the late 90's as the trendy way to make money out of thin air. Reality is going to be absolutely harsh to IP squatters & speculators:
* Innovation renders entire swaths of intellectual property useless. In the case of copyright, style and fashion relegate properties to the clearance bin or worse.
* For every piece of prime real estate, there are thousands of acres of desert, swampland, uninhabitable mountain terrain and tundra. Investors, many of which think the latest biotech idea will pay off in 10-15 years will find out that their idea isn't the winner - and will find out that a worthless patent is about as useful as an EPA superfund site is a location for a strip mall.
* Easments, emminent domain and the like have not been established in the IP world, and for the public good they will have to be. And the best ideas are often the ones that will eventually be taken via emminent domain. After all, if I can take your office park in NJ because I can put a bigger one up that will generate more tax revenue, why not take, say your one click buy or miracle drug patent because I can put it to better use for the common good?
I hope that Greenspan's last act parallels his cooling of the internet bubble: throwing a barrel of icewatter on the out of control party that the current IP feeding frenzy has become.
The thing is that ID can't be discussed in academic halls for it's a joke and about as close as scientific as the word of the Bible.
This is the attitude that is poisioning science - instead arrogantly deciding that you know best, let the scientific process continue. Even exploration that starts down the wrong path or is motivated by a notion of the world that is wrong can lead to discovery. If everyone accepted the prevailing theory on everything, we'd still think the world is flat and that matter consisted of earth wind and fire. Now that evolution has rightly taken it's place as the prevailing thory, science has a duty to question it until we arrive at an even better understanding of how speciation and biological diversity work.
Most modern science fiction TV shows have much more deeper characters, more sophisticated intercharacter relationships and often have plot arcs that last more than 60 minutes. It also helps that 90% of everything else is recycled and rehashed.
Clickthrough rate is an awful way to measure the success of an ad campaign. CTR doesn't do anything to help you understand how well your ads relate to sales or visitor action. A better way to do it is to use cost per conversion (sale or action). Measure how much it costs to get a sale and track it on a keyword by keyword basis. A high CPC indicates that fraud, bounces (one page view and done) or technical problems are killing your campaign.
BTW - thre are tools that can help cut down on click fraud substantially. One such tool that has been helpful is AdWatcher.
There is a very powerful and positive reason to keep ID and Evoluton in the curriculum - depending on your point of view, neither may be good pure science, but both cause students and even grown up scientists asking very fundamental and serious questions. The kind of questions that lead some to dedicate their lives to finding answers that benefit all of us.
Questions like where did we come from. How do we explain major changes in speciation? Why are things the way there are? How did they become that way? How do things change? Why is there shuch diversity in life? Is there a God, flying spaghetti monster, higher power, or not?
Science fails when people stop asking questions - and when ideas are supressed by political means, questions that need to be explored are never asked. Even if you do not believe in god, or if you do, there is one thing about the evolution debate I've come to appreciate: real scientific discovery and real leaps in human knowledge only occur when people are allowed to question established beliefs. At present, evolution is an incumbent, accepted scientific belief, and as such should be questioned intensely. As the universe being created in seven days was before that. And the world being flat before that.
There is a reason that science is at a low point in America, and is has absolutely nothing to do with ID vs. evolution. Politics and patents have replaced discovery as the highest order of value for the professional scientist. That ID vs. Evolution is being debated in government halls instead of academic halls is a tradgedy of epic proportions.
It is a tool. Does your socket wrench teach you how to build a house? Do your credit cards tell you how to spend your money?
In defense of the person you refer to as "idiot", I've never seen a socket wrench with language specific context sensitive help, debugger, context sensitive suggestions to correct errors and an online reference library built in before. Bad analogy. Regardless, my credit card company keeps sending me ways to spend my money. Every month my statement has 1 page of bill and about 18 little inserts all with ideas of how to make the bill expand from one to six pages. Not nearly as educational as the IDE:)
Your point is right that if you are using the IDE to learn a language: it's not the best idea. But an IDE can be very helpful, especially when new programmers are facing learning thousands of calls in an API as large as Windows. I know Turbo-C helped me learn a great deal back in the day.
There are probably three reaasons that Palm has faltered:
No commitment to backwards compatibility. SW for my PalmPilot Pro wouldn't run on my Visor, and the stuff for the Visor would not run on my smartphone, and the software for the smartphone would not run on my Treo.
No multiasking. Palm was a lot like a generation one Mac or PC that could sometimes switch from application to application but could not really multitask.
What ideas will be left that aren't patented, copyrighted and/or DRMed in 20 years? How much of the penny will WIPO and governments eventually shave to adminstrate all of this? I'm not even sure more broadcast/webcast rules do anything good even for big media.
Our government has slashed V.A. benefits, they have forced recruits into double and triple tours of duty, they have sent our troops into battle underprotected and underinformed. The result is the quagmire in Iraq.
I'm a Gulf era vet. VA benefits are part of the package you sign up for. I have different benefits than my Dad, a Viet Nam vet, and my Grandfather, a WWII vet. All of us got a fair deal: we got what we signed up for, as all of us volunteered.
VA benefits are not an entitlement like welfare. They are part of a defined benefit plan that you chose to accept when you get hired.
As a vet, I do not feel like we went into Iraq underprepared for battle - we did come in with a poor plan for after the war.
The result is the quagmire in Iraq.
Quagmire is an overused expression that really doesn't apply. We're not seeing 100s of US troops arriving in body bags with no prospect of stopping the enemy as in Viet Nam. Iraq has not been fought to a stalemate. Iraq is not a proxy war between democracy and communism gone wrong. The only thing that has changed since the war is the number of crackpots threatening to make our streets run red with blood with the means to do so has been reduced by 2: sadam and Quadafi.
A sad day indeed would be the day that our software was sequestered away on some server in a Sun or Microsoft basement, opaque and tamper proof.
And this is exactly what DRM is all about. It's ironic to see Microsoft, the company that delivered royalty-free development tools back in the day when it was common to charge a royalty now trying to turn everything into b-central.
(get the 'trial' from microsoft and find tweaknt to remove the timebomb, don't worry about activation it should no problem).
I suspect someone in Redmond might have a problem with this. Using Linux and Samba would be a much better idea, and easy to do with a distribution like Ubuntu, Mephis or Suse.
Sun, MS and all the other large corporate players forget that freedom is the most important feature of any computer. The PC revolution was about finally having a powerful computer that you could do what you wanted with. Anything. Games, Business, Art, Music (ok, not on a PC until relatively recently), whatever it was that you wanted to - the PC was yours.
It started when suddenly you could choose a computer from a bevy of different manufacturers that could run the same software and even accept the same upgrades and accessories. The universe of possibilites was huge!
It was the feeling you got when you looked at a $5 shareware rack and saw someone buying the program you wrote!
It was the feeling that busines people got when they saw that software like dBase and 1-2-3 eliminated repetitive clerical work that kept small business small and big business huge.
It was the feeling that small publishers got when their LaserWriter spit out the first copy of their 2,400 subscriber newsletter... and it looked as good as what any newspaper could print.
It was the feeling that kids would get when they typed RUN after building a simple game in GW-Basic (and grew into Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal and the amazing array of choices in development tools).
It was the feeling that somehow the world was smaller when you heard the chirp-chirp-buzz of your 2400BPS modem connect with a bbs.
It was being able to upgrade and modify and customize your machine, like you Dad did his car - to perform how you wanted it to and to do the things you wanted it to.
Now people like Schwartz say the PC is dead because big corporations want to "harness the power" of your cell phone, game console and PC and rent it back to you... Whatever. Useless. Clueless. People want freedom. Not walls, restrictions and tollbooths.
It's a matter of time until someone makes the PC of convergent cell phones - one where the user has control, the software stack is simple, elegant and compatible, and there's no toll booths for developers. Users control it. Just like I do my PC.
And incidentally, Open Source software feels to me a lot like a continuation of the PC revolution - with one difference - this time we know that it's about freedom. Last time it was simply fun.
DRM & Out of Control Intellectual Property Law
on
The Digital Dark Age
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While file formats and media have presented a problem, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that digital information has an extended lifetime, and the most valuable information will be converted into newer formats as well as more simple and fundamental formats. Simple formats like ASCII text have handled the test of time. I'm more concerned by the potential lockdown of information through overzealous use of DRM technology backed by overbroad intellectual property laws. Just like the last dark age, the next one will be the result of people trying to control other people.
Sony is not exactly having a good year. They just announced 10,000 layoffs, a massive restructure and many initiatives to recoup their market position. They've lost dominance in:
* Portable Audio. iPod has replace Walkman. * TV
They flat out left the door open in Portable Audio by futzing around with DRM and propritary stuff. Now they face an uphill they may never climb.
I think the article would have been beter served to discus how closed source *nix is under fire from open source *nix. The assertion that linux wins and unix looses is silly. Both are flavors of the same set of concepts. The real winners are computer users and businesses who can now unlock greater potential in their hardware and network by using a more powerful operating system with an incredible array to development tools. Notice how the Macintosh improved when it was injected with it's dose of open source unix goodness with os/x.
Let's set aside the "vendor acknowledged vulnerabilites" and discuss the one cold fact that matters: we don't really know what's secure or not in IE because we cannot check the source code. That allows an exploit to exist that not even Symantec knows about.
If you are marketing consumer software, the answers are very different than business software. Here are typical splits. You really need to get someone with in industry experince to help you on the deal or you will get screwed or nowhere.
Business SW Developer 35-60% Outsource Support Org 15-25% (you may not need) Reseller/Distributor - 10-40% MDF: 1-10% (ammount rebated for advertising costs)
In the retail model, very typically the developer is paying support costs, so watch your margins. Again if your product is any good, you really need a software veteran on your team before you get ass-fscked.
* Too many homo sapiens breathing. * Anything with a smokestack or chimney (even if the building is vacant) * Anything with the word Nuclear in it * Gasious emmissions from farm animal killing facilities such as farms, stockyards, chicken coops, etc. * The unjust war in ______ (fill in nation)caused by unjust American foreign policies. * Shrinking wetlands
I'm sure I left something out. Shame on me, my city shall be leveled by a ____________ (fill in the global warming caused natural disaster).
The MX was obsolete before it entered service due to the accuracy, survivability and range of the Trident (submarine launched ICBM). I look forward to the day when nuclear weapons are no longer required to hold the relative peace.
Last I checked, neither NASA, the defense department, nor the department of energy was much interested in manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
There is NIH and it's suborganizations like NCI - not to mention USDA. I heare they let a few grants last year:)
You always have the choice of not buying it.
Don't buy and suffer. Don't buy and die. Not much of a choice, is it? You could also ask Limbaugh about Vicodin....
Every patent application must demonstrate that the invention is useful for a specific purpose.
The problem is that is not what is happening in reality. See software patents. See genetic patents. See patents like the ones Eli Lilly & Co applied for in trying to keep the Prozac monopoly going.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week I had a series of meetings with attorneys and accountants about a new software product. It really helped me understand the corporate mindset that pervades the industry:
* IP, in and of itself is valued by attorneys because it generates huge ammounts of billable work. No attorney in his or her right mind would recommend using anything that resembels an open source license. Too many barriers to litigation and legal fees. No huge lawsuits, no complex negotiations.
* Accountants like IP because it is valued however you need it to be.
So when I threw out the idea of GPLing the software, the result was almost comical:
* One attorney tried to explain how he needed to read the GPL. And bill me hours to do so. (not going to happen)
* One attorney suggested I'd be giving away a cash cow. I asked him: yours or mine. And the answer was a "what do you mean by that?" (struck a nerve here)
* My accountant said the intangible asset would be useful at the end of the year, and that an open source license may dilute the value of the asset.
It's very clear to me now why most business people see Google as a threat: intellectual property speculation has replaced the bilking investors with electric lemonade stands and WebVans full of irrational exuberance of the late 90's as the trendy way to make money out of thin air. Reality is going to be absolutely harsh to IP squatters & speculators:
* Innovation renders entire swaths of intellectual property useless. In the case of copyright, style and fashion relegate properties to the clearance bin or worse.
* For every piece of prime real estate, there are thousands of acres of desert, swampland, uninhabitable mountain terrain and tundra. Investors, many of which think the latest biotech idea will pay off in 10-15 years will find out that their idea isn't the winner - and will find out that a worthless patent is about as useful as an EPA superfund site is a location for a strip mall.
* Easments, emminent domain and the like have not been established in the IP world, and for the public good they will have to be. And the best ideas are often the ones that will eventually be taken via emminent domain. After all, if I can take your office park in NJ because I can put a bigger one up that will generate more tax revenue, why not take, say your one click buy or miracle drug patent because I can put it to better use for the common good?
I hope that Greenspan's last act parallels his cooling of the internet bubble: throwing a barrel of icewatter on the out of control party that the current IP feeding frenzy has become.
On another note the paper is a proposal at the moment. You can be sure there will be some serious lobbying from the industry in the next month or so.
:)
If telemarketers are so well loved in Austrailia as they are in the US, the lobyists will have a very hard time watering the bill down
The thing is that ID can't be discussed in academic halls for it's a joke and about as close as scientific as the word of the Bible.
This is the attitude that is poisioning science - instead arrogantly deciding that you know best, let the scientific process continue. Even exploration that starts down the wrong path or is motivated by a notion of the world that is wrong can lead to discovery. If everyone accepted the prevailing theory on everything, we'd still think the world is flat and that matter consisted of earth wind and fire. Now that evolution has rightly taken it's place as the prevailing thory, science has a duty to question it until we arrive at an even better understanding of how speciation and biological diversity work.
I was doing CRM systems when many US states passed do not call lists. The result was impressive in two ways:
* The calls at home absolutely stopped after the lists went into effect.
* You could stop an telemarketer cold with one sentence: I'm on the do not call list.
* Call centers had to re-invent their business to focus on inbound calls.
* Companies had to learn that marketing is the stuff that makes the company phone ring.
* Internet advertising asploded.
Most modern science fiction TV shows have much more deeper characters, more sophisticated intercharacter relationships and often have plot arcs that last more than 60 minutes. It also helps that 90% of everything else is recycled and rehashed.
Clickthrough rate is an awful way to measure the success of an ad campaign. CTR doesn't do anything to help you understand how well your ads relate to sales or visitor action. A better way to do it is to use cost per conversion (sale or action). Measure how much it costs to get a sale and track it on a keyword by keyword basis. A high CPC indicates that fraud, bounces (one page view and done) or technical problems are killing your campaign.
BTW - thre are tools that can help cut down on click fraud substantially. One such tool that has been helpful is AdWatcher.
There is a very powerful and positive reason to keep ID and Evoluton in the curriculum - depending on your point of view, neither may be good pure science, but both cause students and even grown up scientists asking very fundamental and serious questions. The kind of questions that lead some to dedicate their lives to finding answers that benefit all of us.
Questions like where did we come from. How do we explain major changes in speciation? Why are things the way there are? How did they become that way? How do things change? Why is there shuch diversity in life? Is there a God, flying spaghetti monster, higher power, or not?
Science fails when people stop asking questions - and when ideas are supressed by political means, questions that need to be explored are never asked. Even if you do not believe in god, or if you do, there is one thing about the evolution debate I've come to appreciate: real scientific discovery and real leaps in human knowledge only occur when people are allowed to question established beliefs. At present, evolution is an incumbent, accepted scientific belief, and as such should be questioned intensely. As the universe being created in seven days was before that. And the world being flat before that.
There is a reason that science is at a low point in America, and is has absolutely nothing to do with ID vs. evolution. Politics and patents have replaced discovery as the highest order of value for the professional scientist. That ID vs. Evolution is being debated in government halls instead of academic halls is a tradgedy of epic proportions.
It is a tool. Does your socket wrench teach you how to build a house? Do your credit cards tell you how to spend your money?
:)
In defense of the person you refer to as "idiot", I've never seen a socket wrench with language specific context sensitive help, debugger, context sensitive suggestions to correct errors and an online reference library built in before. Bad analogy. Regardless, my credit card company keeps sending me ways to spend my money. Every month my statement has 1 page of bill and about 18 little inserts all with ideas of how to make the bill expand from one to six pages. Not nearly as educational as the IDE
Your point is right that if you are using the IDE to learn a language: it's not the best idea. But an IDE can be very helpful, especially when new programmers are facing learning thousands of calls in an API as large as Windows. I know Turbo-C helped me learn a great deal back in the day.
I think that the entire purpose of the IT centre is to save a corporation's money.
No one ever saved a dime by spending money. Even if it is on cool stuff.
There are probably three reaasons that Palm has faltered:
No commitment to backwards compatibility. SW for my PalmPilot Pro wouldn't run on my Visor, and the stuff for the Visor would not run on my smartphone, and the software for the smartphone would not run on my Treo.
No multiasking. Palm was a lot like a generation one Mac or PC that could sometimes switch from application to application but could not really multitask.
Too much nickel and dime.
What ideas will be left that aren't patented, copyrighted and/or DRMed in 20 years? How much of the penny will WIPO and governments eventually shave to adminstrate all of this? I'm not even sure more broadcast/webcast rules do anything good even for big media.
Our government has slashed V.A. benefits, they have forced recruits into double and triple tours of duty, they have sent our troops into battle underprotected and underinformed. The result is the quagmire in Iraq.
I'm a Gulf era vet. VA benefits are part of the package you sign up for. I have different benefits than my Dad, a Viet Nam vet, and my Grandfather, a WWII vet. All of us got a fair deal: we got what we signed up for, as all of us volunteered.
VA benefits are not an entitlement like welfare. They are part of a defined benefit plan that you chose to accept when you get hired.
As a vet, I do not feel like we went into Iraq underprepared for battle - we did come in with a poor plan for after the war.
The result is the quagmire in Iraq.
Quagmire is an overused expression that really doesn't apply. We're not seeing 100s of US troops arriving in body bags with no prospect of stopping the enemy as in Viet Nam. Iraq has not been fought to a stalemate. Iraq is not a proxy war between democracy and communism gone wrong. The only thing that has changed since the war is the number of crackpots threatening to make our streets run red with blood with the means to do so has been reduced by 2: sadam and Quadafi.
A sad day indeed would be the day that our software was sequestered away on some server in a Sun or Microsoft basement, opaque and tamper proof.
And this is exactly what DRM is all about. It's ironic to see Microsoft, the company that delivered royalty-free development tools back in the day when it was common to charge a royalty now trying to turn everything into b-central.
(get the 'trial' from microsoft and find tweaknt to remove the timebomb, don't worry about activation it should no problem).
I suspect someone in Redmond might have a problem with this. Using Linux and Samba would be a much better idea, and easy to do with a distribution like Ubuntu, Mephis or Suse.
Sun, MS and all the other large corporate players forget that freedom is the most important feature of any computer. The PC revolution was about finally having a powerful computer that you could do what you wanted with. Anything. Games, Business, Art, Music (ok, not on a PC until relatively recently), whatever it was that you wanted to - the PC was yours.
It started when suddenly you could choose a computer from a bevy of different manufacturers that could run the same software and even accept the same upgrades and accessories. The universe of possibilites was huge!
It was the feeling you got when you looked at a $5 shareware rack and saw someone buying the program you wrote!
It was the feeling that busines people got when they saw that software like dBase and 1-2-3 eliminated repetitive clerical work that kept small business small and big business huge.
It was the feeling that small publishers got when their LaserWriter spit out the first copy of their 2,400 subscriber newsletter... and it looked as good as what any newspaper could print.
It was the feeling that kids would get when they typed RUN after building a simple game in GW-Basic (and grew into Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal and the amazing array of choices in development tools).
It was the feeling that somehow the world was smaller when you heard the chirp-chirp-buzz of your 2400BPS modem connect with a bbs.
It was being able to upgrade and modify and customize your machine, like you Dad did his car - to perform how you wanted it to and to do the things you wanted it to.
Now people like Schwartz say the PC is dead because big corporations want to "harness the power" of your cell phone, game console and PC and rent it back to you... Whatever. Useless. Clueless. People want freedom. Not walls, restrictions and tollbooths.
It's a matter of time until someone makes the PC of convergent cell phones - one where the user has control, the software stack is simple, elegant and compatible, and there's no toll booths for developers. Users control it. Just like I do my PC.
And incidentally, Open Source software feels to me a lot like a continuation of the PC revolution - with one difference - this time we know that it's about freedom. Last time it was simply fun.
While file formats and media have presented a problem, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that digital information has an extended lifetime, and the most valuable information will be converted into newer formats as well as more simple and fundamental formats. Simple formats like ASCII text have handled the test of time. I'm more concerned by the potential lockdown of information through overzealous use of DRM technology backed by overbroad intellectual property laws. Just like the last dark age, the next one will be the result of people trying to control other people.
Sony is not exactly having a good year. They just announced 10,000 layoffs, a massive restructure and many initiatives to recoup their market position. They've lost dominance in:
* Portable Audio. iPod has replace Walkman.
* TV
They flat out left the door open in Portable Audio by futzing around with DRM and propritary stuff. Now they face an uphill they may never climb.
Can we please get a way filter creationism vs. evoloution posts?
The irony of asking for this in a "censorship" thread has not escaped me...
I think the article would have been beter served to discus how closed source *nix is under fire from open source *nix. The assertion that linux wins and unix looses is silly. Both are flavors of the same set of concepts. The real winners are computer users and businesses who can now unlock greater potential in their hardware and network by using a more powerful operating system with an incredible array to development tools. Notice how the Macintosh improved when it was injected with it's dose of open source unix goodness with os/x.
Let's set aside the "vendor acknowledged vulnerabilites" and discuss the one cold fact that matters: we don't really know what's secure or not in IE because we cannot check the source code. That allows an exploit to exist that not even Symantec knows about.
If you are marketing consumer software, the answers are very different than business software. Here are typical splits. You really need to get someone with in industry experince to help you on the deal or you will get screwed or nowhere.
Business SW
Developer 35-60%
Outsource Support Org 15-25% (you may not need)
Reseller/Distributor - 10-40%
MDF: 1-10% (ammount rebated for advertising costs)
Retail SW
Developer - 40-60%
Distributor - 5-30%
Retailer - 10-30%
MDF:1-5% (ammount rebated for advertising costs)
In the retail model, very typically the developer is paying support costs, so watch your margins. Again if your product is any good, you really need a software veteran on your team before you get ass-fscked.
Global Warming is obviously caused by SUVs
You are leaving out the other causes:
* Too many homo sapiens breathing.
* Anything with a smokestack or chimney (even if the building is vacant)
* Anything with the word Nuclear in it
* Gasious emmissions from farm animal killing facilities such as farms, stockyards, chicken coops, etc.
* The unjust war in ______ (fill in nation)caused by unjust American foreign policies.
* Shrinking wetlands
I'm sure I left something out. Shame on me, my city shall be leveled by a ____________ (fill in the global warming caused natural disaster).
The MX was obsolete before it entered service due to the accuracy, survivability and range of the Trident (submarine launched ICBM). I look forward to the day when nuclear weapons are no longer required to hold the relative peace.
Last I checked, neither NASA, the defense department, nor the department of energy was much interested in manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
:)
There is NIH and it's suborganizations like NCI - not to mention USDA. I heare they let a few grants last year
You always have the choice of not buying it.
Don't buy and suffer. Don't buy and die. Not much of a choice, is it? You could also ask Limbaugh about Vicodin....
Every patent application must demonstrate that the invention is useful for a specific purpose.
The problem is that is not what is happening in reality. See software patents. See genetic patents. See patents like the ones Eli Lilly & Co applied for in trying to keep the Prozac monopoly going.
Thanks - this looks like grammatik reborn.