Probably not, but our software is only installed on maybe 300 machines. Microsoft's software is installed on 600 million. Every time you double number of users, you alsodouble the number of reported bugs. A certain percentage of those bugs will be considered severe.
So while we can release software with two or three known bugs and not have to worry about it too much, Microsoft doing the same thing could result in millions of unusable machines. Rarely is their QA that bad.
The other option, of course, is to keep slipping release dates until every bug is cleared up. Since they've been trying that with XPSP2, people here have been giving them serious hell. So I think Microsoft just can't win with their detractors -- they just can't look at things objectively. And personally I don't think it matters that much to anybody. A lot of people hate Bob Dylan, too...didn't stop him from making songs that made him and his cover artists very rich.
As you should be aware, in technology, you do something first, then you improve on it. It's sort of like building a house of cards. You start by using half the deck to hold up one card -- then you remove supports until you worry about its stability.
Every gadget you use in your daily life started as a technology demo at least twice as large and half as fast. My buddy, for his senior EE project at college, built a wireless computing suit that weighed about 80 lbs. If he were marketing it, he could get much smaller components, much lighter screen, more efficient batteries, embedded bluetooth instead of dongles, etc. The end result would be WAY lighter. That doesn't mean the demo wasn't impressive.
I'm sorry if this project doesn't live up to your expectations. But realize: these are just some kids doing a project. Give them some fucking credit, and when their AutoUAV company releases mass produced machines with the same specs, THEN you can complain.
Oh of course -- because a technology demo -- like a UAV that flies itself-- is completely unimpressive unless it's hyperefficient and has a tiny footprint.
Give me a break, man. It's a STUDENT PROJECT. They probably had a few months to do it. And you expect them to build their own OS and heavily optimize code? The REASON they used embedded XP/C# (besides getting them free from MS) was that they are efficient environments for rapid development that are easy to learn. There's very little bizarre apocrypha in C#, and when you're strapped for time that's way more important than impressing embedded developers.
Mission critical how? I've never written a bomb tracking program in C#, but I've never been asked to. With that said, I'd trust.NET as much as I trust Java or Perl -- the framework is quite robust and the execution environment (CLI) is reliable.
I have programs I've written in.NET that have been up on client machines for months. Garbage collection means no danger of memory leaks (and no, I've never seen a slowdown due to GC, it is much more subtle than GC in Java 1.3 which would basically shut down your app for a few seconds), and all of my socket manipulations are wrapped in self healing stubs that catch failures and exceptions and restart the information queue where it left off. Our clients have never seen a bug in the data layer or the framework itself (though our presentation layer has had plenty of bugs...we follow the Microsoft development philosophy here, get it to clients on day X with an acceptable feature-to-bug ratio so they can start getting the most essential work done and we can fix the rest incrementally).
This is using Framework 1.0; there have been two versions since then with performance, stability and feature enhancements.
Diseducative is not a word, i wouldn't know what it would mean if it were one. Do you mean anti-education? If so, you do realize that education does not mean forcing the child to jump through hoops, right? That the first step young children take towards learning is falling in love with something...and then wanting to do it themselves?
I mean, I grew up on the Commodore myself. The hard way -- I didn't own one, I used to stay after school. I started a computer club...at 2:30 we'd run through the school assembling parts from different classrooms and start working on games or whatever. It was fun...but it'd be as much fun if I didn't have to type LOAD "*" and the thing just worked. After all, there's about three hundred times as much power and functionality in today's computers...bypassing all the programming bullshit we HAD to do back then is a good thing.
Oh, and just to counter the "I love open source whee" nature of your post: I gave my brother a copy of the Visual Studio for C# last week, and he's already making some pretty awesome little programs. And unlike Linux based programs, he can give them to his friends. Someday soon somebody's gonna make a 3D Logo and we're gonna have a modern software revolution on our hands...though it's locus will probably be Calcutta...
Women DO want female-themed cars -- cars that are practical and homey and safe but still a little cute. Hence the VW New Beetle, the Cabrio, the Saturn LX, the Scion xA, the Matrix and the Yukon XL (the ultimate in "i'm a powerful modern woman and you can't rape me because my car is bigger than your whole house").
My wife bought a Subaru Impreza Sport. It's a teeny tiny little station wagon with a hatch that looks like a button nose. It's got a torquey H4 engine and all wheel drive...but I still feel a little wierd driving the thing.
I don't know if kids want kid-themed electronics (which are usually crap, like that black and white mini TV and video camera they tried to sell me when I was ten), but they definitely want SIMPLIFIED electronics. Modern PCs and laptops have too many wierd angles in the design, stupid preloaded programs and not enough FUN. Give a kid a version of XP with none of the accessibility options, none of the disk utilities, none of the backup utilities or video card tweaks but three or four extra 3D games and you've got a goldmine on your hand. If it looks like Mickey Mouse, ok whatever.
Niche markets for low volume in the computer world don't work
Tell that to all the white box companies, man.
Personally, I think this idea could work. Why? Because it's almost small enough and cheap enough to collect. My buddy has four or five special edition Dreamcasts, six or seven special edition Xboxs, etc. He gave me some wierd blue Saturn for christmas a few years back.
Computers in the low end are cheap as high end consoles. So why not collect 'em?
It was when I read Bill Gates' book. I don't want to tell you where the link lead, but let's just say after seeing that site I was not shocked by Goatse in the least.
"Use of the TM and SM symbols may be governed by local, state, or foreign laws and the laws of a pertinent jurisdiction to identify the marks that a party claims rights to. The federal registration symbol, the R enclosed within a circle, may be used once the mark is actually registered in the USPTO. Even though an application is pending, the registration symbol may not be used before the mark has actually become registered.
The federal registration symbol should only be used on goods or services that are the subject of the federal trademark registration. "
The FAQ clears up a lot of misconceptions the average slashdotter has about copyright and patents, and we'd have a better environment here if everybody would just RTFFAQ.
I'd gladly host her site for free, just for the controversy.
Because I have no doubt she'll win, and in the mean time you can't buy better ghetto publicity than a publisher of paperbacks trying to strong arm a young mother into giving up her domain name so they can give it to a victim of an online sexual predator. That's like a puppy fighting with a kitten -- two strong appeals to your sense of humanity, duking out over a friggin' email address?
Anyhow, you really want to cheese off Penguin? Don't Goatse the site Katie.com...instead, use it to post erudite and insightful critiques of the book, call into question the events inside and the validity of its conclusions. After all, they're marketing the book with YOUR website on it...might as well use your website to convince people not to buy their book. Shit, I'll volunteer for that, too...got to put this rhetoric degree to use for something besides mod 5 posts.
Incidentally, after a quick USPTO.GOV search, it appears Penguin didn't register katie.com, either. Since the owner of katie.com has prior art going back to 1996, I think she could still register her trademark...and sue the SHIT out of Penguin for misuse of her domain name. But IANAL...I'm a computer guy with a rhetoric degree and outrage that anybody could be so greedy to cash in on their own tragedy as to threaten a young mother.
My point is not that LASIK is not effective for some. It's that a 97% success rate means one in thirty people has had their eyesight DAMAGED by the process and many of that 97% have only had their sight marginally improved (e.g. they still need glasses). There are far more accurate systems than the LASIK name brand, ones with success above 99% and with little or no danger of permanent sight loss. Furthermore, these systems often cost about the same or less than LASIK.
Either way, I'm sticking with my glasses until there's no chance at all of vision loss.
The myth that copyright infringemnt and stealing are the same thing is midlessly supporting the corporate line that wants to keep the average person oblivious to their rights.
And the myth that the two are somehow different from a moral standpoint is mindlessly supporting the belief that infringement is somehow better than theft because one is not deprived of property. This is bullshit. Infringement and theft have legal distinctions, for sure, but so do grand theft auto and embezzlement. They're both crimes. They're both undertaken by thieves. I refer to scam artists, defrauders, tax dodges and user interface cloners as theives as well. See, I use the word "thief" to denote that somebody is taking property they have no right to have...whether the property is something finitie like a toaster or infinite like the concept of making a toaster.
"Theft" has legal and moral meanings that don't apply to copyright infringement.
I agree. When you steal something from me, you deprive me of that thing. And if I was smart enough to insure it, I get a new one. If I catch you doing it, I can call the police and they will come and get you with no cost to me. You will go to jail, as consequence for deriving someone of their property, because we are a society which attaches value to symbols and objects. Theft carries with it strong fiscal and social penalities.
When you infringe on somebody's copyright, you are in essence depriving them of potential livelihood -- but since no physical item is in question, it can't be insured. If I catch you doing it, I can call the police but they won't do anything, as copyright is a civil matter. If I catch you doing it a LOT, maybe I can get the FBI involved, but only if the infringement is above a certain dollar amount. I could sue you, but it's extremely difficult for me to get any information about you, as copyright infringement isn't a "crime" and therefore though you are taking something without my consent, I can't really do anything about it. On the off chance that I catch you and know who you are, I can contact a lawyer and spend my own money to sue you. If the suit goes to trial, maybe I can convince the judge that you were, for sure, the one copying material against my consent. If so, he may award me damages...which would probably come out of your future paychecks to the tune of less than a hundred dollars per month.
Steal a thing, you've got that thing with little harm to me and a clear route to prosecution. Infringe copyright, you've stolen my entire potential livelihood with plenty of harm to me and a rocky road to civil damages. You're right. Copyright infringement isn't the same thing as theft. It's a lot worse.
Actually, I don't have to go diving for this. I was looking for a way to do different contextual searches and googling didn't turn up anything I liked. Searching the USPTO brought up ideas like this. Now, I didn't like this implementation (and it was a bit too web heavy, I don't subscribe to the "everything is a page" mentality), but I liked some of the ideas that were plainly described, and luckiy, not included in the claims. So I used them in my own search and merge.
"Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or compositions of matters, or any new useful improvement thereof.
Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture"
Software can receive patents for design (interface appearance or overall look and feel, such as Apple's Aqua UI patents) or utility (new algorithmic functions but also new overall uses, such as a web browser that runs on a ballpoint pen -- even if you're just using Apache and standard tech).
The "novel" and "non-obvious" parts are not so clear as you seem to think they are. The novel part does not mean that everything in your interface has to be novel...especially if your product is built on a number of others, such as a new way of attaching a spring to a suspension system or a new way of searching a database with the same syntax of other methods. The non-obvious part just means you can't make cosmetic changes -- it does not necessarily mean you can't use a similar system in some new area not covered by the patent and not have it be a new, patentable product.
If you perfect a new way of searching magazines, it might be non-obvious to use it to search books...but would not be non-obvious to use it to search through a stack of hay. Remember, your patent wouldn't be on the search mechanism, it'd be on its application to books and magazines (and ther other guy's on searching hay).
I don't like to dis on plumbers...I've met good and bad plumbers and have decided their job is a lot like mine. There are talentless fucks who know how to use a wrench and think that qualifies them to tell somebody how to architect the sewage and fresh water delivery systems for a house. Then there are truly brilliant, experienced, solutions minded water management specialists who can't thaw a pipe without screwing it up.
The guys who connected me with the town water were a good pair...one was great at visualizing how to move the water into the house (he even ran us a line from the well to the outside for watering plants and another upstairs for beermaking), the other was good at using the backhoe and braising the copper.
Software's the same way...you want an equal number of workers and thinkers.
Also keep in mind that warezkids never really PLAY a game. They shoot through the first couple levels, turn on cheat codes, go to the end guy and then move on to the next game.
This is one of the major reasons I stopped pirating software: I didn't enjoy it.
I mean, shit, I went from moving six or seven games a week to buying one every three months and really, really playing it. I try to put in at least fifty hours per game. And when you get right down to it, $1 per hour or less for quality entertainment isn't so bad. And if you buy the games used 6 months after they come out, you enjoy them even more. For one thing, they're cheaper. For another, all the patches and FAQs mean you're playing the game full force and able to enjoy it without bugs or confusing gameplay dynamics getting in your way. I just recently got into Diablo 2...paid $17 for it AND the expansion, and it's really been filling my nights. Graphics are a bit dated, but I'm playing it for the comraderie with five of my friends, some of whom have ancient machines (I myself have a Mac). And I'm having fun.
Hey man, I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake 2 as well. RtCW has some seriously badass enemies and your character is very vulnerable...you really have to think about what weapon to use due to differences in recoil factors, shot capacity, damage, rate of fire, time to reload, ammunition availability, etc. And the enemies are pretty sneaky...not really great, but good enough that I have to reload from save points fairly often.
And Quake 2...want to talk about your adrenaline rush, there was NO SUCH THING before Q2 man.
You make a lot of assumptions. I work for a non-contract software company with definite products in a specific market. I won't tell you what products or what market, because I haven't cleared this post with my boss and he's very stern about giving our competitors any ideas. See, there's a lot of cloning that goes on in niche markets...company A builds a product, then company B builds a product that does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way for $100 less. This isn't really fair, because most of our budget (as I've mentioned) is R&D. If we had the ability to take somebody else's program and make one that just did that, we could afford to sell our software for $100 too (and indeed we've done that in the past)...but in that model of development, the people who had the idea in the first place are never compensated. Which makes having ideas a libaility, not an asset.
Ask yourself, what have you done that is truly new and innovative in software that noone else in the industry didn't already think of or would find obvious if they were working towards similar goals.
I don't have to ask myself that. It isn't what patents are about. Patents are about protecting development of specific products so other people can't do the exact same thing. We spent a long time researching the most intuitive way to handle the differences between our clients' address databases. There were at least seven different entry methods used, some of them broke out addresses, some of them broke out names, some of them used fields for things other than what they claimed to...basically, there was a lot of different information, and they needed to merge it all. What we did was build an on demand contextual data mapper...it performs fuzzy searches on the fields of these databases, and "clumps" them together based on the percentage of matching fields and the exactness of the match. Nothing new, nothing somebody else couldn't think up if they were good with regular expressions, Tries and SQL -- but nobody did. And it's driving the sales of our product, because it cuts the work to associate records -- many of our clients no longer have to hire temps to spend weeks pruning bad data.
There's a strong amount of "Gee, I could have thought of that" in software, because good software works exactly how you think it should. But the fact is, they didn't think of it, and if they did, they didn't do anything about it. Thanks to patent law, they can't just do what we did and charge $100 less...they have to do it a different way, and hope it's better. This helps insure that competition is based on innovation, and not just undercutting prices. It helps protect R&D which helps those who make new products.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, but our software is only installed on maybe 300 machines. Microsoft's software is installed on 600 million. Every time you double number of users, you alsodouble the number of reported bugs. A certain percentage of those bugs will be considered severe.
So while we can release software with two or three known bugs and not have to worry about it too much, Microsoft doing the same thing could result in millions of unusable machines. Rarely is their QA that bad.
The other option, of course, is to keep slipping release dates until every bug is cleared up. Since they've been trying that with XPSP2, people here have been giving them serious hell. So I think Microsoft just can't win with their detractors -- they just can't look at things objectively. And personally I don't think it matters that much to anybody. A lot of people hate Bob Dylan, too...didn't stop him from making songs that made him and his cover artists very rich.
As you should be aware, in technology, you do something first, then you improve on it. It's sort of like building a house of cards. You start by using half the deck to hold up one card -- then you remove supports until you worry about its stability.
Every gadget you use in your daily life started as a technology demo at least twice as large and half as fast. My buddy, for his senior EE project at college, built a wireless computing suit that weighed about 80 lbs. If he were marketing it, he could get much smaller components, much lighter screen, more efficient batteries, embedded bluetooth instead of dongles, etc. The end result would be WAY lighter. That doesn't mean the demo wasn't impressive.
I'm sorry if this project doesn't live up to your expectations. But realize: these are just some kids doing a project. Give them some fucking credit, and when their AutoUAV company releases mass produced machines with the same specs, THEN you can complain.
Oh of course -- because a technology demo -- like a UAV that flies itself-- is completely unimpressive unless it's hyperefficient and has a tiny footprint.
Give me a break, man. It's a STUDENT PROJECT. They probably had a few months to do it. And you expect them to build their own OS and heavily optimize code? The REASON they used embedded XP/C# (besides getting them free from MS) was that they are efficient environments for rapid development that are easy to learn. There's very little bizarre apocrypha in C#, and when you're strapped for time that's way more important than impressing embedded developers.
Mission critical how? I've never written a bomb tracking program in C#, but I've never been asked to. With that said, I'd trust .NET as much as I trust Java or Perl -- the framework is quite robust and the execution environment (CLI) is reliable.
.NET that have been up on client machines for months. Garbage collection means no danger of memory leaks (and no, I've never seen a slowdown due to GC, it is much more subtle than GC in Java 1.3 which would basically shut down your app for a few seconds), and all of my socket manipulations are wrapped in self healing stubs that catch failures and exceptions and restart the information queue where it left off. Our clients have never seen a bug in the data layer or the framework itself (though our presentation layer has had plenty of bugs...we follow the Microsoft development philosophy here, get it to clients on day X with an acceptable feature-to-bug ratio so they can start getting the most essential work done and we can fix the rest incrementally).
I have programs I've written in
This is using Framework 1.0; there have been two versions since then with performance, stability and feature enhancements.
Ok.
Diseducative is not a word, i wouldn't know what it would mean if it were one. Do you mean anti-education? If so, you do realize that education does not mean forcing the child to jump through hoops, right? That the first step young children take towards learning is falling in love with something...and then wanting to do it themselves?
I mean, I grew up on the Commodore myself. The hard way -- I didn't own one, I used to stay after school. I started a computer club...at 2:30 we'd run through the school assembling parts from different classrooms and start working on games or whatever. It was fun...but it'd be as much fun if I didn't have to type LOAD "*" and the thing just worked. After all, there's about three hundred times as much power and functionality in today's computers...bypassing all the programming bullshit we HAD to do back then is a good thing.
Oh, and just to counter the "I love open source whee" nature of your post: I gave my brother a copy of the Visual Studio for C# last week, and he's already making some pretty awesome little programs. And unlike Linux based programs, he can give them to his friends. Someday soon somebody's gonna make a 3D Logo and we're gonna have a modern software revolution on our hands...though it's locus will probably be Calcutta...
Women DO want female-themed cars -- cars that are practical and homey and safe but still a little cute. Hence the VW New Beetle, the Cabrio, the Saturn LX, the Scion xA, the Matrix and the Yukon XL (the ultimate in "i'm a powerful modern woman and you can't rape me because my car is bigger than your whole house").
My wife bought a Subaru Impreza Sport. It's a teeny tiny little station wagon with a hatch that looks like a button nose. It's got a torquey H4 engine and all wheel drive...but I still feel a little wierd driving the thing.
I don't know if kids want kid-themed electronics (which are usually crap, like that black and white mini TV and video camera they tried to sell me when I was ten), but they definitely want SIMPLIFIED electronics. Modern PCs and laptops have too many wierd angles in the design, stupid preloaded programs and not enough FUN. Give a kid a version of XP with none of the accessibility options, none of the disk utilities, none of the backup utilities or video card tweaks but three or four extra 3D games and you've got a goldmine on your hand. If it looks like Mickey Mouse, ok whatever.
Niche markets for low volume in the computer world don't work
Tell that to all the white box companies, man.
Personally, I think this idea could work. Why? Because it's almost small enough and cheap enough to collect. My buddy has four or five special edition Dreamcasts, six or seven special edition Xboxs, etc. He gave me some wierd blue Saturn for christmas a few years back.
Computers in the low end are cheap as high end consoles. So why not collect 'em?
Say, that would be a rather insidious way to get a render farm and write it off as a tax loss.
I think all websites in books and movies should end in .www or .web or .co, thus solving the problem.
You would not BELIEVE the stink the other das Megabytes raised when I registered dasmegabyte.org.
It was when I read Bill Gates' book. I don't want to tell you where the link lead, but let's just say after seeing that site I was not shocked by Goatse in the least.
Well, you could look that question up. Here's the answer straight from the horse's ass: the US Patent and Trademark Office FAQ:
"Use of the TM and SM symbols may be governed by local, state, or foreign laws and the laws of a pertinent jurisdiction to identify the marks that a party claims rights to. The federal registration symbol, the R enclosed within a circle, may be used once the mark is actually registered in the USPTO. Even though an application is pending, the registration symbol may not be used before the mark has actually become registered.
The federal registration symbol should only be used on goods or services that are the subject of the federal trademark registration. "
The FAQ clears up a lot of misconceptions the average slashdotter has about copyright and patents, and we'd have a better environment here if everybody would just RTFFAQ.
I'd gladly host her site for free, just for the controversy.
Because I have no doubt she'll win, and in the mean time you can't buy better ghetto publicity than a publisher of paperbacks trying to strong arm a young mother into giving up her domain name so they can give it to a victim of an online sexual predator. That's like a puppy fighting with a kitten -- two strong appeals to your sense of humanity, duking out over a friggin' email address?
Anyhow, you really want to cheese off Penguin? Don't Goatse the site Katie.com...instead, use it to post erudite and insightful critiques of the book, call into question the events inside and the validity of its conclusions. After all, they're marketing the book with YOUR website on it...might as well use your website to convince people not to buy their book. Shit, I'll volunteer for that, too...got to put this rhetoric degree to use for something besides mod 5 posts.
Incidentally, after a quick USPTO.GOV search, it appears Penguin didn't register katie.com, either. Since the owner of katie.com has prior art going back to 1996, I think she could still register her trademark...and sue the SHIT out of Penguin for misuse of her domain name. But IANAL...I'm a computer guy with a rhetoric degree and outrage that anybody could be so greedy to cash in on their own tragedy as to threaten a young mother.
My point is not that LASIK is not effective for some. It's that a 97% success rate means one in thirty people has had their eyesight DAMAGED by the process and many of that 97% have only had their sight marginally improved (e.g. they still need glasses). There are far more accurate systems than the LASIK name brand, ones with success above 99% and with little or no danger of permanent sight loss. Furthermore, these systems often cost about the same or less than LASIK.
Either way, I'm sticking with my glasses until there's no chance at all of vision loss.
Hey...if it's that, or pull an Interplay, pre-announce all you like.
I'm willing to wait for a great game, as opposed to being unable to receive said game because the company is no longer able to pay its bills.
Getting LASIK to improve your eyesight is like getting kicked in the crotch to improve your fertility.
I hope you didn't like that $3200.
The myth that copyright infringemnt and stealing are the same thing is midlessly supporting the corporate line that wants to keep the average person oblivious to their rights.
And the myth that the two are somehow different from a moral standpoint is mindlessly supporting the belief that infringement is somehow better than theft because one is not deprived of property. This is bullshit. Infringement and theft have legal distinctions, for sure, but so do grand theft auto and embezzlement. They're both crimes. They're both undertaken by thieves. I refer to scam artists, defrauders, tax dodges and user interface cloners as theives as well. See, I use the word "thief" to denote that somebody is taking property they have no right to have...whether the property is something finitie like a toaster or infinite like the concept of making a toaster.
"Theft" has legal and moral meanings that don't apply to copyright infringement.
I agree. When you steal something from me, you deprive me of that thing. And if I was smart enough to insure it, I get a new one. If I catch you doing it, I can call the police and they will come and get you with no cost to me. You will go to jail, as consequence for deriving someone of their property, because we are a society which attaches value to symbols and objects. Theft carries with it strong fiscal and social penalities.
When you infringe on somebody's copyright, you are in essence depriving them of potential livelihood -- but since no physical item is in question, it can't be insured. If I catch you doing it, I can call the police but they won't do anything, as copyright is a civil matter. If I catch you doing it a LOT, maybe I can get the FBI involved, but only if the infringement is above a certain dollar amount. I could sue you, but it's extremely difficult for me to get any information about you, as copyright infringement isn't a "crime" and therefore though you are taking something without my consent, I can't really do anything about it. On the off chance that I catch you and know who you are, I can contact a lawyer and spend my own money to sue you. If the suit goes to trial, maybe I can convince the judge that you were, for sure, the one copying material against my consent. If so, he may award me damages...which would probably come out of your future paychecks to the tune of less than a hundred dollars per month.
Steal a thing, you've got that thing with little harm to me and a clear route to prosecution. Infringe copyright, you've stolen my entire potential livelihood with plenty of harm to me and a rocky road to civil damages. You're right. Copyright infringement isn't the same thing as theft. It's a lot worse.
Actually, I don't have to go diving for this. I was looking for a way to do different contextual searches and googling didn't turn up anything I liked. Searching the USPTO brought up ideas like this. Now, I didn't like this implementation (and it was a bit too web heavy, I don't subscribe to the "everything is a page" mentality), but I liked some of the ideas that were plainly described, and luckiy, not included in the claims. So I used them in my own search and merge.
From the USPTO:
"Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or compositions of matters, or any new useful improvement thereof.
Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture"
Software can receive patents for design (interface appearance or overall look and feel, such as Apple's Aqua UI patents) or utility (new algorithmic functions but also new overall uses, such as a web browser that runs on a ballpoint pen -- even if you're just using Apache and standard tech).
The "novel" and "non-obvious" parts are not so clear as you seem to think they are. The novel part does not mean that everything in your interface has to be novel...especially if your product is built on a number of others, such as a new way of attaching a spring to a suspension system or a new way of searching a database with the same syntax of other methods. The non-obvious part just means you can't make cosmetic changes -- it does not necessarily mean you can't use a similar system in some new area not covered by the patent and not have it be a new, patentable product.
If you perfect a new way of searching magazines, it might be non-obvious to use it to search books...but would not be non-obvious to use it to search through a stack of hay. Remember, your patent wouldn't be on the search mechanism, it'd be on its application to books and magazines (and ther other guy's on searching hay).
Or get a lighted keyboard, or a simple dim USB LED dongle.
Playing Diablo 2 with my backlit PowerBook keyboard while on the toilet is one of life's simple pleasures.
I don't like to dis on plumbers...I've met good and bad plumbers and have decided their job is a lot like mine. There are talentless fucks who know how to use a wrench and think that qualifies them to tell somebody how to architect the sewage and fresh water delivery systems for a house. Then there are truly brilliant, experienced, solutions minded water management specialists who can't thaw a pipe without screwing it up.
The guys who connected me with the town water were a good pair...one was great at visualizing how to move the water into the house (he even ran us a line from the well to the outside for watering plants and another upstairs for beermaking), the other was good at using the backhoe and braising the copper.
Software's the same way...you want an equal number of workers and thinkers.
Also keep in mind that warezkids never really PLAY a game. They shoot through the first couple levels, turn on cheat codes, go to the end guy and then move on to the next game.
This is one of the major reasons I stopped pirating software: I didn't enjoy it.
I mean, shit, I went from moving six or seven games a week to buying one every three months and really, really playing it. I try to put in at least fifty hours per game. And when you get right down to it, $1 per hour or less for quality entertainment isn't so bad. And if you buy the games used 6 months after they come out, you enjoy them even more. For one thing, they're cheaper. For another, all the patches and FAQs mean you're playing the game full force and able to enjoy it without bugs or confusing gameplay dynamics getting in your way. I just recently got into Diablo 2...paid $17 for it AND the expansion, and it's really been filling my nights. Graphics are a bit dated, but I'm playing it for the comraderie with five of my friends, some of whom have ancient machines (I myself have a Mac). And I'm having fun.
Hey man, I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake 2 as well. RtCW has some seriously badass enemies and your character is very vulnerable...you really have to think about what weapon to use due to differences in recoil factors, shot capacity, damage, rate of fire, time to reload, ammunition availability, etc. And the enemies are pretty sneaky...not really great, but good enough that I have to reload from save points fairly often.
And Quake 2...want to talk about your adrenaline rush, there was NO SUCH THING before Q2 man.
You make a lot of assumptions. I work for a non-contract software company with definite products in a specific market. I won't tell you what products or what market, because I haven't cleared this post with my boss and he's very stern about giving our competitors any ideas. See, there's a lot of cloning that goes on in niche markets...company A builds a product, then company B builds a product that does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way for $100 less. This isn't really fair, because most of our budget (as I've mentioned) is R&D. If we had the ability to take somebody else's program and make one that just did that, we could afford to sell our software for $100 too (and indeed we've done that in the past)...but in that model of development, the people who had the idea in the first place are never compensated. Which makes having ideas a libaility, not an asset.
Ask yourself, what have you done that is truly new and innovative in software that noone else in the industry didn't already think of or would find obvious if they were working towards similar goals.
I don't have to ask myself that. It isn't what patents are about. Patents are about protecting development of specific products so other people can't do the exact same thing. We spent a long time researching the most intuitive way to handle the differences between our clients' address databases. There were at least seven different entry methods used, some of them broke out addresses, some of them broke out names, some of them used fields for things other than what they claimed to...basically, there was a lot of different information, and they needed to merge it all. What we did was build an on demand contextual data mapper...it performs fuzzy searches on the fields of these databases, and "clumps" them together based on the percentage of matching fields and the exactness of the match. Nothing new, nothing somebody else couldn't think up if they were good with regular expressions, Tries and SQL -- but nobody did. And it's driving the sales of our product, because it cuts the work to associate records -- many of our clients no longer have to hire temps to spend weeks pruning bad data.
There's a strong amount of "Gee, I could have thought of that" in software, because good software works exactly how you think it should. But the fact is, they didn't think of it, and if they did, they didn't do anything about it. Thanks to patent law, they can't just do what we did and charge $100 less...they have to do it a different way, and hope it's better. This helps insure that competition is based on innovation, and not just undercutting prices. It helps protect R&D which helps those who make new products.