As a result, the technologies and patents just got locked away inside the government and went unused.
This is a crock. Government research into basic technologies for the space program, NASA, military (especially aviation) programs and the department of energy have delivered incredible advancements without 25 years of waiting for greedy bastards to loose their monopolistic attitude. The issue now isn't the patent. It's the fact that I can use patents to shelf a technology or prevent it's application, period. We really need better definition of reasonable license fees and possible shortening the length of time something can be patented... then there's the issue of what is actually patentable.
First, an institution creates an idea for curing a disease, like "let's inhibit this protein as a cure multiple sclerosis." Taxpayer dollars cover that step. Second, a company takes that idea and spends $$$$$$$ to develop a drug that executes this principle.
Two bad things happen under this model:
1) I am being forced to invest in your company by paying your R&D costs.
2) You are patenting a scientific fact (the principal by which a medication or class of medications works).
The result is that pharma companies / university "partners" operate without having to make real economic R&D decisions (as long as you can fool the agency writing your grant) and are incented to force research just for the sake of getting patentable grants. Second, because you've locked up the scientific facts that are used to engineer an invention, not just how your specific invention actually works, you lock out more than just a few competitors. The result is that state of the art in MS medication is late 70s early 80s era interferon based protiens that help a little bit and cost a metric ton (my father is a doctor with MS - and has and will continue to suffer because research moves at a snails pace). So much so that most of those insurers you suggest will pay for it will not. So I get to pay again with my tax money via medicaid/medicare or the VA.
Patents in their current for:
1) Stifle innovation by locking away facts instead of protecting inventions. See genetic patents and software patents as examples. 2) Are in force for too long a time. Many patents are obsolete before the 25 years expire. 3) Allow technologies that could have great benefit to mankind to be shelved for 25 years or more for no other reason than greeed. 4) Allow one person to patent the application of a nother's actual invention. My patented software requires IBM's computer to work. WTF is this? 5) Are way, way too expensive to litigate.
Grammatik is still a part of the WP product line. It is a quantum leap better than nearly anything I've seen. It also integrated a writer's handbook which allowed you to understand not just that there was an error, but why that error was thre. In college I learned more about English from Grammatik than I did from all of my the English classes combined.
Shame that there isn't a stand alone verson still around. It was truly outstanding, and still to this day is vastly superior to anything I've used.
Anyone hurting or killing others on purpose (that haven't been sentenced to death in a court of law) is a fucking terrorist
What do you call call a nation where the courts are largely of the kangaroo variety?
The mere presence of a court or legal system does not necessarily equate to justice, or for that matter, the rule of law. As an an example, I submit the old Soviet government of russia, and the Taliban.
Something that has been troubling me lately is the fact that when asked "what do you do?" or "describe yourself?" people answer with something like:
"I am a ______. I went to ______ University."
In other words, you are what your job is and you owe your job to the school you paid to educate you and give you credentials by which you got your job. So what. There's a great way to make your mark on the world. If you are shopping or reconsidering your Computer Science program, search for one where you get the foundation that lets you answer "what do you do" or "who are you" as follows:
"I'm a father of ____ who enjoys (non-work stuff). I'm involved with building ______,_____ (insert interesting topics) for _____ (company)."
Don't be a robot when you grow up. Have an identity that is greater than simply what you do. Don't focus your education on the job so much. Study something you want to know about and will be able to use your tallents and abilities to further the field - either in it's application or in the core body of knowledge.
One other thing - most of the people that don't make it in the real world (at least working for me) identify themselves as being their job. Their highest order of value in life is the work they perform. They do great work and are easy to work with until one day the parameters change or what they do becomes less relevent and valued. Then all hell breaks loose - and they becom almost a cancer, finding fault with everyone who suggests they change or that what they are doing is passe. Those who realize their job is one small part of their identity deal with change better and often are able to better prepare for the future.
Drop the five flavors of Windows Vista Useless Edition and just give us:
MS Windows Vista for Home MS Windows Vista for Work
Or better yet:
MS Windows Vista with an installer that installs what you need based on how you are using the computer. If you have super-ultra-value features worth paying for, just sell those add ons seperately.
If I'm blocked from attending a town hall meeting put on by my President because I'm a Democrat, I'm not very free.
If it is a staged, campaign event why are you surprised?
If elections can be decided by a court, I'm not very free.
Our nation has no mechanisim for dealing with inconclusive elections. The courts simply said the election stands as counted. The winner as of now wins. The recount and re-recount and re-re-recount until your guy wins process stops now. It's over, get on with life.
If neoconservatives can threaten to impeach judges because they don't decide cases based on religious contrine, I'm not very free.
LOL - freedom of speech isn't a freedom when they don't say what you want there is it.
If big businesses can invest their money wisely enough to buy off a Congress, I'm not very free. (See the energy, telecommunications, defense, highway bills.)
As long as the voters let them.
If oil companies formerly run by our Vice President get no-bid contracts and take over Iraqi oil fields, I'm not very free.
I'm not sure how this affects my freedom unless I'm in the oil business.
If my uncle down south, along with others, is asked to leave his church because he's a card-carrying Democrat, I'm not very free.
Actually, that would be your uncle, and last time I looked private institutions have the right to have their own membership standards. Had this been a governement program, your uncle would have had constitutional protections.
If wealthy people get billions of dollars and, as a result, we cripple state budgets and tens of thousands of people die because of a Hurricane, I'm not very free.
I'm not sure how a natural disaster killing people affects your freedom.
If people who lost billions are given billions to rebuild, perhaps it's because of the businesses, jobs and infrastructure they own supporting the millions that live there.
You make it sound like the displaced should be grateful that their countrymen came to their aid. Isn't that what being part of a country is all about? All working together for the common good and to overcome tragedy?
It's important that those helping be acknowledged and complimented for helping instead of treated to a dose of entitlement mentality media scrutiny - if we want them to help again next time.
That said, scrutiny of those who let us all down on the response to Katrina is appropriate.
Where is your compassion for your fellow man?
It was a compasionate decision to prevent the potential incitement of a riot in the worlds largest living room.
This is an example of what happens when you remove the public from participation in routine activites. One reason the gov't especially on public information systems should invite citizens to give them feedback is to prevent this kind of problem: people with older computers can't file. (this is a much bigger problem than Mac/Linux)
Back in the day, FEMA was drilled and had a civilian function though the Civil Defense program. FEMA was well drilled and practiced at large scale disasters because it was busy preparing to deal with what happens after a massive nuclear strike. In the 80s much of FEMAs prepositioned assets were sold off (as opposed to updated) - handy stuff like surgical kits, sealed ready for action truck-in hospitals, pre-built emergency clinics, ready to go tent towns and prepositioned ration reserves. I bought some stuff at a local government auction when it happened, too (nice tents, cots, surgical kits make nice fly tying tools).
The cold war era FEMA would have easily handled this disaster. The military commad structure would not have been nearly so worried about waiting for approval from a clueless governor or a mayor who was stuck in a location with limited communication capacity. Sometimes it is better to ask forgiveness from the politicians than the public.
Microsoft is showing it's anticompetitive true colors on this one. Would be smart if they focused on compatibility as their customers aren't asking - they are saying we will not buy it if it does not meet our standards.
Forcing your standards on customers is dangerous - after all it's their data and their business, not yours.
Blah, blah, Oracle is hard. Get a DBA and a real developer. This is what they're paid for.
I think this point is precisely what the MySQL crowd is not articulating: MySQL has enabled countless businesses to do things thy could not have done without an expensive RDBMS. That is why my hat is off to MySQL and Postgress. When you get big enough you need someone you can sue or show a support agreement to shareholders, then Oracle has you back.
Regardless, we all spend too much time sniping about how one thing is better than the other and a lot of times lose site of what makes Open Source special versus the Oracles of the world: freedom to pursue your dreams (even if you are low on cash).
communism is an economic system comparable to capitalism.
Communism is an artificial economic system that was designed to get us humans off our base economic system that had been in place since the first prostitute lowered prices when the second (and better looking one) opened up shop in a lean-to near by. The idea was to increase the value of labor and therefore the common man's lot in life would be much better.
Communism, while grand in it's aspirations, really suffered from bad implementations. When you centralize planning, for example, you really need to make sure the plan is a good one.
But doesn't the very existence of such companies constitute a sufficient counter-argument?
Exactly - all of these companies have prospered in the face of competiton from MS. And the more MS tries to conquer niches the more MS looses focus on it's core.
Originally TCP/IP and the internet client apps were not included on the floppy version of Win95 (yes, there was a floppy version). You had to get Microsoft Plus! for Win95 to get the internet.
I think, but am not sure it was the OEM and CD based versions that came with the TCP/IP stack that you could install if you knew what you were doing.
Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it now.
Lesson to developers: look for ways to revolutionize your target audience's life if you want to be highly successful. To this day, that is the secret sauce for software.
Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so? Here are my thoughts.
1) Backwards compatibility. Apple has a reputation which to this day has not been fixed for marooning owners of older gear. The III wasn't compatible with the II just as the 68000 powered macs were largely incompatible with the PPC units (although the use of emulation mitigated this somewhat) and OSX vs System 9,8,7.
Ironically, Apple has been a true innovator because they are unafraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
What does happen should MS stock tank is the MS would be unable to sell new stock to raise money and would face incredible pressure from investors to use those coffers to buy back stock to limit investor losses.
That said, the chances of MS stock tanking are about as likely as GE or IBM tanking.
Inacom died right about the time Red Hat took off so Linux wasn't even in the picture. Inacom (Valcom+Sears Business Systems) did ceede the low end retail market when they and Computerland (which later became Vanstar) controlled it in the 80s. When the two companies merged in the mid 90s (by then Inacom and Vanstar) they focused their entire business on corporate sales, over 500 workstations, ceeding the low end of commercial sales to smaller local VARS who quickly figured out that services + Dell (or any other MFG not incumbent in the account) could get them in the door at any of Inacom's larger customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this is well intended.
There's a road that goes someplace really bad that's paved with these things.
As a result, the technologies and patents just got locked away inside the government and went unused.
This is a crock. Government research into basic technologies for the space program, NASA, military (especially aviation) programs and the department of energy have delivered incredible advancements without 25 years of waiting for greedy bastards to loose their monopolistic attitude. The issue now isn't the patent. It's the fact that I can use patents to shelf a technology or prevent it's application, period. We really need better definition of reasonable license fees and possible shortening the length of time something can be patented... then there's the issue of what is actually patentable.
First, an institution creates an idea for curing a disease, like "let's inhibit this protein as a cure multiple sclerosis." Taxpayer dollars cover that step. Second, a company takes that idea and spends $$$$$$$ to develop a drug that executes this principle.
Two bad things happen under this model:
1) I am being forced to invest in your company by paying your R&D costs.
2) You are patenting a scientific fact (the principal by which a medication or class of medications works).
The result is that pharma companies / university "partners" operate without having to make real economic R&D decisions (as long as you can fool the agency writing your grant) and are incented to force research just for the sake of getting patentable grants. Second, because you've locked up the scientific facts that are used to engineer an invention, not just how your specific invention actually works, you lock out more than just a few competitors. The result is that state of the art in MS medication is late 70s early 80s era interferon based protiens that help a little bit and cost a metric ton (my father is a doctor with MS - and has and will continue to suffer because research moves at a snails pace). So much so that most of those insurers you suggest will pay for it will not. So I get to pay again with my tax money via medicaid/medicare or the VA.
Patents in their current for:
1) Stifle innovation by locking away facts instead of protecting inventions. See genetic patents and software patents as examples.
2) Are in force for too long a time. Many patents are obsolete before the 25 years expire.
3) Allow technologies that could have great benefit to mankind to be shelved for 25 years or more for no other reason than greeed.
4) Allow one person to patent the application of a nother's actual invention. My patented software requires IBM's computer to work. WTF is this?
5) Are way, way too expensive to litigate.
Don't defend greed.
I agree with you. While I suspect thtat this has good intentions, this is the same thing as the patriot act or even gestapo.
This is worse by a mile than patriot. Even so it doesn't make patriot right.
We won WWII, but yet, much of what we fought against, seems like it is coming into being anyways.
Right now we don't have crackpots out to conquer all of europe and the south pacific at least this week... and Bush is gone in a couple of years.
Grammatik is still a part of the WP product line. It is a quantum leap better than nearly anything I've seen. It also integrated a writer's handbook which allowed you to understand not just that there was an error, but why that error was thre. In college I learned more about English from Grammatik than I did from all of my the English classes combined.
Shame that there isn't a stand alone verson still around. It was truly outstanding, and still to this day is vastly superior to anything I've used.
Making the world a place nobody wants to blow up is a better goal than tempting self destruction.
Until we all agree on what is worth not blowing up... I'm not sure there is any other way to ensure the peace.
I vote for a preemtpive impeachment before the man in charge of the button can do anything dumb.
You actually want Cheany more in charge?
Wow. Now I understand how we ended up with possibly the worst democrat candidate since the last worse-than-Mondale candidate.
As things stand, the majority of USA citizens that can be bothered to vote want Bush.
The current situation is the result of the choice between:
a) bad and worse
b) dumb and dumber
c) unelectable and less than unelectable
d) funny joke and not so funny joke
e) all of the above
When the democrats have someone who is marginally electable, they win.
Anyone hurting or killing others on purpose (that haven't been sentenced to death in a court of law) is a fucking terrorist
What do you call call a nation where the courts are largely of the kangaroo variety?
The mere presence of a court or legal system does not necessarily equate to justice, or for that matter, the rule of law. As an an example, I submit the old Soviet government of russia, and the Taliban.
Something that has been troubling me lately is the fact that when asked "what do you do?" or "describe yourself?" people answer with something like:
"I am a ______. I went to ______ University."
In other words, you are what your job is and you owe your job to the school you paid to educate you and give you credentials by which you got your job. So what. There's a great way to make your mark on the world. If you are shopping or reconsidering your Computer Science program, search for one where you get the foundation that lets you answer "what do you do" or "who are you" as follows:
"I'm a father of ____ who enjoys (non-work stuff). I'm involved with building ______,_____ (insert interesting topics) for _____ (company)."
Don't be a robot when you grow up. Have an identity that is greater than simply what you do. Don't focus your education on the job so much. Study something you want to know about and will be able to use your tallents and abilities to further the field - either in it's application or in the core body of knowledge.
One other thing - most of the people that don't make it in the real world (at least working for me) identify themselves as being their job. Their highest order of value in life is the work they perform. They do great work and are easy to work with until one day the parameters change or what they do becomes less relevent and valued. Then all hell breaks loose - and they becom almost a cancer, finding fault with everyone who suggests they change or that what they are doing is passe. Those who realize their job is one small part of their identity deal with change better and often are able to better prepare for the future.
Drop the five flavors of Windows Vista Useless Edition and just give us:
MS Windows Vista for Home
MS Windows Vista for Work
Or better yet:
MS Windows Vista with an installer that installs what you need based on how you are using the computer. If you have super-ultra-value features worth paying for, just sell those add ons seperately.
If I'm blocked from attending a town hall meeting put on by my President because I'm a Democrat, I'm not very free.
If it is a staged, campaign event why are you surprised?
If elections can be decided by a court, I'm not very free.
Our nation has no mechanisim for dealing with inconclusive elections. The courts simply said the election stands as counted. The winner as of now wins. The recount and re-recount and re-re-recount until your guy wins process stops now. It's over, get on with life.
If neoconservatives can threaten to impeach judges because they don't decide cases based on religious contrine, I'm not very free.
LOL - freedom of speech isn't a freedom when they don't say what you want there is it.
If big businesses can invest their money wisely enough to buy off a Congress, I'm not very free. (See the energy, telecommunications, defense, highway bills.)
As long as the voters let them.
If oil companies formerly run by our Vice President get no-bid contracts and take over Iraqi oil fields, I'm not very free.
I'm not sure how this affects my freedom unless I'm in the oil business.
If my uncle down south, along with others, is asked to leave his church because he's a card-carrying Democrat, I'm not very free.
Actually, that would be your uncle, and last time I looked private institutions have the right to have their own membership standards. Had this been a governement program, your uncle would have had constitutional protections.
If wealthy people get billions of dollars and, as a result, we cripple state budgets and tens of thousands of people die because of a Hurricane, I'm not very free.
I'm not sure how a natural disaster killing people affects your freedom.
If people who lost billions are given billions to rebuild, perhaps it's because of the businesses, jobs and infrastructure they own supporting the millions that live there.
Troll.
You make it sound like the displaced should be grateful that their countrymen came to their aid. Isn't that what being part of a country is all about? All working together for the common good and to overcome tragedy?
It's important that those helping be acknowledged and complimented for helping instead of treated to a dose of entitlement mentality media scrutiny - if we want them to help again next time.
That said, scrutiny of those who let us all down on the response to Katrina is appropriate.
Where is your compassion for your fellow man?
It was a compasionate decision to prevent the potential incitement of a riot in the worlds largest living room.
What is up with the recent flood of press release regurgitation here? How exactly is a mouse that does exactly nothing new make the news?
This is an example of what happens when you remove the public from participation in routine activites. One reason the gov't especially on public information systems should invite citizens to give them feedback is to prevent this kind of problem: people with older computers can't file. (this is a much bigger problem than Mac/Linux)
Back in the day, FEMA was drilled and had a civilian function though the Civil Defense program. FEMA was well drilled and practiced at large scale disasters because it was busy preparing to deal with what happens after a massive nuclear strike. In the 80s much of FEMAs prepositioned assets were sold off (as opposed to updated) - handy stuff like surgical kits, sealed ready for action truck-in hospitals, pre-built emergency clinics, ready to go tent towns and prepositioned ration reserves. I bought some stuff at a local government auction when it happened, too (nice tents, cots, surgical kits make nice fly tying tools).
The cold war era FEMA would have easily handled this disaster. The military commad structure would not have been nearly so worried about waiting for approval from a clueless governor or a mayor who was stuck in a location with limited communication capacity. Sometimes it is better to ask forgiveness from the politicians than the public.
Thank you for expressing what I've been trying to say for years.
Microsoft is showing it's anticompetitive true colors on this one. Would be smart if they focused on compatibility as their customers aren't asking - they are saying we will not buy it if it does not meet our standards.
Forcing your standards on customers is dangerous - after all it's their data and their business, not yours.
Blah, blah, Oracle is hard. Get a DBA and a real developer. This is what they're paid for.
I think this point is precisely what the MySQL crowd is not articulating: MySQL has enabled countless businesses to do things thy could not have done without an expensive RDBMS. That is why my hat is off to MySQL and Postgress. When you get big enough you need someone you can sue or show a support agreement to shareholders, then Oracle has you back.
Regardless, we all spend too much time sniping about how one thing is better than the other and a lot of times lose site of what makes Open Source special versus the Oracles of the world: freedom to pursue your dreams (even if you are low on cash).
Sounds like someone got funding from combining two of the coolest buzzwords from the 1950s.
communism is an economic system comparable to capitalism.
Communism is an artificial economic system that was designed to get us humans off our base economic system that had been in place since the first prostitute lowered prices when the second (and better looking one) opened up shop in a lean-to near by. The idea was to increase the value of labor and therefore the common man's lot in life would be much better.
Communism, while grand in it's aspirations, really suffered from bad implementations. When you centralize planning, for example, you really need to make sure the plan is a good one.
But doesn't the very existence of such companies constitute a sufficient counter-argument?
Exactly - all of these companies have prospered in the face of competiton from MS. And the more MS tries to conquer niches the more MS looses focus on it's core.
Originally TCP/IP and the internet client apps were not included on the floppy version of Win95 (yes, there was a floppy version). You had to get Microsoft Plus! for Win95 to get the internet.
I think, but am not sure it was the OEM and CD based versions that came with the TCP/IP stack that you could install if you knew what you were doing.
Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it now.
Lesson to developers: look for ways to revolutionize your target audience's life if you want to be highly successful. To this day, that is the secret sauce for software.
Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so? Here are my thoughts.
1) Backwards compatibility. Apple has a reputation which to this day has not been fixed for marooning owners of older gear. The III wasn't compatible with the II just as the 68000 powered macs were largely incompatible with the PPC units (although the use of emulation mitigated this somewhat) and OSX vs System 9,8,7.
Ironically, Apple has been a true innovator because they are unafraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
Ironically, because Apple doesn't
What does happen should MS stock tank is the MS would be unable to sell new stock to raise money and would face incredible pressure from investors to use those coffers to buy back stock to limit investor losses.
That said, the chances of MS stock tanking are about as likely as GE or IBM tanking.
Inacom died right about the time Red Hat took off so Linux wasn't even in the picture. Inacom (Valcom+Sears Business Systems) did ceede the low end retail market when they and Computerland (which later became Vanstar) controlled it in the 80s. When the two companies merged in the mid 90s (by then Inacom and Vanstar) they focused their entire business on corporate sales, over 500 workstations, ceeding the low end of commercial sales to smaller local VARS who quickly figured out that services + Dell (or any other MFG not incumbent in the account) could get them in the door at any of Inacom's larger customers.