Indeed it's very difficult to become a SAP consultant. What you say is not a theory but a basic economic law. The more a market is difficult enter, the more you can keep your prices high. A market with low entry barriers becomes quickly a commodity market and prices are droved towards production costs. This is why MS and the like intentionally introduces artificial barriers into their Markets, one of the most famous example is Word data format.
The big problem of all these patents, is that they are patenting functionalites and not the way they are implmented, they patent the "what" and not the "how". I believe that the office patent dosen't even require a working prototype anymore. That means that you can patent any funky functionality you want and no one can include ever include in a software again, no matter HOW HE DOES IT !! so in fact in practice this patenting ideas and not the way they are implemented.
I was eating with a senior exec of a major (F100) company who used to be a Sun shop. Scott had gone out to talk to them and his answer to everything was about stopping Microsoft
Sourceforge search capabilities really suck big time, for instance you can't search all the forums of the same project in the same time, you need to visit each forum and then do your search. This is really rediculous. It seems that the commercial version of SF has this functionality, but I think they won't install it in SF.net any time soon as they dedicate nearly all the ressource to the commercial version, they only do comstic changes to SF.net once in a while.
Wiki is indeed a very nice tool to create collaborative documentation. It's also very useful to organise your own notes, links, or what you have gathered on the Web. I use TWiki http://twiki.org since two years, it's one of the best wikis in my opinion, I put in it everything I need, my todo lists, my install notes, interesting articles, a very nice way to create you own knowledge base.
SF has been a wonderful gift to the FOS community and still is, but it's interface really sucks badly. It's very difficult to search the archives for instance which is one of the most important things in my opinion. I want to find easily if someone has had the same problem and how he has solved it and this is very difficult in SF. VA have concentrated all their efforts on the entreprise version and haven't updated sf.net for two or three years. Now there is some hope Tim Purdue one of the guys behind SF has reinitiated the GPL branch http://gforge.org/ and has integrated some patchs from the Debian branch and it looks quite promising.
software radios learning from interaction with their users and acting in their best interest.
Oh no no please not that ! I hate it when a software try to guess what I wan to do, this is the obsession of Billy Gate and it's one reason why Microsoft software sucks. I hate it when Word pretends to guess my formatting or what I want to type, because it's most of the Wrong ! one of the first thing I do is to deactivate the option which makes that possible.
The next trend is that hard as drives costs will continue to drop, you will see more and more of them in consumer products market, like hifi, vcr, and so on, to store music, movies, TV and radio programs, and those devices have never enough hard drive space.
An other important thing to mention is that geeks are prescriptors too. Their familiy and friends listen to their opinion and ask them technical questions. I told countless friends about Google at it's begining, and they have all adopted it. This is what is called viral Marketing.
> Ahhh, so the onus is on me to pay extra out of my wallet to maintain my privacy
Google is free, having access to a free search engine is not a "constitutional right" as far as I know; so no one force you to use google, if you are not happy with their policy, just don't use it, or use an other search engine wich suit you more.
What I kown is that I can't leave without google, and I will be really pissed if it dispears. MSN will replace them probably as the dominant search engine, talk about an alternative ! it will be time to be really paranoid then. Google needs to make money to survive and many of the things which are listed help them to target their vistors better to attract more advertising.
Yes but it's a known fact that USPTO does not look for prior art, they nearly grant everything to everybody (I am slightly exagerting) and as they are paid per patent granted, their interest is to grant the biggest number of them. the USPTO has not the desire, nor the ressources or even the skill to bother scanning the huge prior art which exist all over the place, which are billions billions of source code and programs.
Most of the time prior art disputes are resolved in court when someone has enough money to challenge the patent, and this is why the process is skrewed, and open sources projects obviously can't do that.
This is alas often also true for Open Source projects, many open source projects maintainers refuse to apply patches too. I think this depends on a lot of factors, for instance whether he has enough confidence in other people's work or not; many maintainers just simply don't want their baby spoiled by wanabe hackers for instance, who don't understand the whole architecture. It often takes a lot of time working together to accept other people work. As it has been said, Linus way of doing things is remarquable as he has accepted patches from the begining and he knows how to work with other people, while keeping track of the whole Linux source code, which is very very difficult in practice and a lot of work, as he needs to review all the code which goes into the kernel.
This is alas always the case when you are a member of a minority, whenever an arab, or a black, or whatever minority there is in a country does something wrong, people always say (or most of the time think) ah those arabs, or those blacks, or whatever ! maybe this what we call racism. You need to judge peope one by one, whether they did good or bad according to their own personality and not according to their ethnic origin.
In the case of Disney it's a copyright problem,this is very different, under american law and many other countries, patents are valid for 20 years, period.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it's very difficult to become a SAP consultant. What you say is not a theory but a basic economic law. The more a market is difficult enter, the more you can keep your prices high. A market with low entry barriers becomes quickly a commodity market and prices are droved towards production costs. This is why MS and the like intentionally introduces artificial barriers into their Markets, one of the most famous example is Word data format.
Yes SAP is really entreprise class RDBS, it has even an Oracle 7 emulation feature.
The big problem of all these patents, is that they are patenting functionalites and not the way they are implmented, they patent the "what" and not the "how". I believe that the office patent dosen't even require a working prototype anymore. That means that you can patent any funky functionality you want and no one can include ever include in a software again, no matter HOW HE DOES IT !! so in fact in practice this patenting ideas and not the way they are implemented.
This seems to be translated from English by an automatic translation engine :)
:
In French you would say
Moquez vous de nous tant que vous voulez, mais au moins nous on a une connection WiFi pour nos ordinateurs.
Sorry I didn't understand the last sentence !
Which means at least 2 or three times a year ! a national sport here.
I was eating with a senior exec of a major (F100) company who used to be a Sun shop. Scott had gone out to talk to them and his answer to everything was about stopping Microsoft
:)
That's because he reads Slashdot a lot
Sourceforge search capabilities really suck big time, for instance you can't search all the forums of the same project in the same time, you need to visit each forum and then do your search. This is really rediculous. It seems that the commercial version of SF has this functionality, but I think they won't install it in SF.net any time soon as they dedicate nearly all the ressource to the commercial version, they only do comstic changes to SF.net once in a while.
Wiki is indeed a very nice tool to create collaborative documentation. It's also very useful to organise your own notes, links, or what you have gathered on the Web. I use TWiki http://twiki.org since two years, it's one of the best wikis in my opinion, I put in it everything I need, my todo lists, my install notes, interesting articles, a very nice way to create you own knowledge base.
As far as I know SapDB http://www.sapdb.org is GPL/LGPL and has an Oracle 7.0 compatibility mode, so a more acurate number is at most 7 or 8 years !!
SF has been a wonderful gift to the FOS community and still is, but it's interface really sucks badly. It's very difficult to search the archives for instance which is one of the most important things in my opinion. I want to find easily if someone has had the same problem and how he has solved it and this is very difficult in SF. VA have concentrated all their efforts on the entreprise version and haven't updated sf.net for two or three years. Now there is some hope Tim Purdue one of the guys behind SF has reinitiated the GPL branch http://gforge.org/ and has integrated some patchs from the Debian branch and it looks quite promising.
oops sorry "I am a dog from andalucia of course" !
Maybe you want to mean "je suis Un chien andalou", I a dog from andalucia ?
Yes this awfully looks like a stab in the back for Linux ! well I guess that's just business !
software radios learning from interaction with their users and acting in their best interest.
Oh no no please not that ! I hate it when a software try to guess what I wan to do, this is the obsession of Billy Gate and it's one reason why Microsoft software sucks. I hate it when Word pretends to guess my formatting or what I want to type, because it's most of the Wrong ! one of the first thing I do is to deactivate the option which makes that possible.
This this unlucky as China is now member of WTO and is supposed to respect international untellectual property.
The next trend is that hard as drives costs will continue to drop, you will see more and more of them in consumer products market, like hifi, vcr, and so on, to store music, movies, TV and radio programs, and those devices have never enough hard drive space.
An other important thing to mention is that geeks are prescriptors too. Their familiy and friends listen to their opinion and ask them technical questions. I told countless friends about Google at it's begining, and they have all adopted it. This is what is called viral Marketing.
> Ahhh, so the onus is on me to pay extra out of my wallet to maintain my privacy
Google is free, having access to a free search engine is not a "constitutional right" as far as I know; so no one force you to use google, if you are not happy with their policy, just don't use it, or use an other search engine wich suit you more.
What I kown is that I can't leave without google, and I will be really pissed if it dispears. MSN will replace them probably as the dominant search engine, talk about an alternative ! it will be time to be really paranoid then. Google needs to make money to survive and many of the things which are listed help them to target their vistors better to attract more advertising.
And while you are at it ! I have a very small penis ! could you help me please ?
Yes but it's a known fact that USPTO does not look for prior art, they nearly grant everything to everybody (I am slightly exagerting) and as they are paid per patent granted, their interest is to grant the biggest number of them. the USPTO has not the desire, nor the ressources or even the skill to bother scanning the huge prior art which exist all over the place, which are billions billions of source code and programs.
Most of the time prior art disputes are resolved in court when someone has enough money to challenge the patent, and this is why the process is skrewed, and open sources projects obviously can't do that.
That was IBM, not Sun http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/20/125721 8&mode=thread
This is alas often also true for Open Source projects, many open source projects maintainers refuse to apply patches too. I think this depends on a lot of factors, for instance whether he has enough confidence in other people's work or not; many maintainers just simply don't want their baby spoiled by wanabe hackers for instance, who don't understand the whole architecture. It often takes a lot of time working together to accept other people work. As it has been said, Linus way of doing things is remarquable as he has accepted patches from the begining and he knows how to work with other people, while keeping track of the whole Linux source code, which is very very difficult in practice and a lot of work, as he needs to review all the code which goes into the kernel.
Yes indeed this is very insightful, but the people doing usability studies, at least for KDE are not developers, they ar emainly KDE users.
This is alas always the case when you are a member of a minority, whenever an arab, or a black, or whatever minority there is in a country does something wrong, people always say (or most of the time think) ah those arabs, or those blacks, or whatever ! maybe this what we call racism. You need to judge peope one by one, whether they did good or bad according to their own personality and not according to their ethnic origin.
In the case of Disney it's a copyright problem,this is very different, under american law and many other countries, patents are valid for 20 years, period.