Mass chronic layoffs are rarely, if ever, used to keep a company afloat.
You weren't discussing just any company. This is a company that has more debt than it can handle and *will go out of business* unless they do something. What they will do (roughly) is this:
1. Secure financing for restructuring costs 2. Go chapter 11 to protect company assets from ceditors 3. Pay off and/or work out long-term plans on as much debt as possible to avoid liquidation of essential assets 4. Sell some non-core assets and/or business units 5. Restructure
Restructuring is the hard part. The goal there is to re-shape your business so that you can afford what debt you come out of chapter 11 with (mostly your new debt that consolidated some of your old). Debt payments are expensive, and you have to do something to assure the courts that your credit will be good, or you won't get out of chapter 11.
So, you cut costs where you can, sell off anything that you don't actually need (Worldcom made some acquisitions that didn't make a whole lot of sense anyway) and close the ones you can't sell. This is where the bulk of the layoffs will usually come from. You don't lay off people who are required for your core business unless you have to, since that's where your revenue will have to come from post-chapter-11.
It's not about trying to screw over your employees or make your earnings look good (the accounting mess that got them where they are was about earnings). It's about getting the money together to pay off debt.
AOL makes $48M a month in subscription revenue. They laid off 2000 people at one point last year. Why? Their combined monthly salaries are pocket change to a company with 23 million subscribers?
Ok let's do the math. Let's assume those 2000 people only cost AOL an average of $50,000/yr each (that's basically a smidge over minimum wage plus benefits plus social security plus unemployment insurance plus accounting and hr and other overhead). If these were more senior people that number is usually between $100,000 to $200,000 per employee.
Take that $50,000 and divide by 12. You get a little over $4,000 per month per person, so for 2,000 people that's $8million per month. However, you actually have to shrink that number a bit because some of the layoffs will come from overhead areas like accounting and HR (less people, less overhead).
Let's call it (and this is really just ballpark) $5,000,000 per month. So you say that they have $48,000,000 per month in revenue. So, you're talking about reducing your costs by about 10% of your total revenue by laying off those 2,000 people.
This is all arm-waving without being able to see AOL's books, but you can see how laying off staff can quickly put a company's earnings back in line to the point that they not only make investors happy, but they're able to pay their debts. Event a profitable company is constantly incurring debt, and if it ever gets out of control, you end up in Enron/Worldcom land. Very bad. Do not do.
Lay offs are not the only and often not the best solution, but any comprehensive restructuring cannot afford to ignore layoffs (even in those few private companies that view layoffs as harmful to their long-term health such as Fidelity Investments).
I'm not an accountant, but I've had enough exposure to the theory and the practice of corporate accounting that I don't have the innocent "if only people weren't evil it would all work" view. Running a business is insanely hard, and there comes a time where you have to make the choice to keep the business running or lay people off. It's always painful because you know these people rely on you, but you have to think of the health of the whole company and help those you can. Even Japan had to learn this lesson (which was totally foreign to their way of doing business until the 90s).
Evolution is the best mail client I've used, and I've used a LOT of them. I still use mutt a fair amount for quick things (the way I use vi for quick things and emacs for large work). I loved emacs' VM mode mailer, but evolution adopted it's virtual mailbox concept and made it easier to use (though not quite as powerful as emacs').
MH was always a pain to use. pine and elm were more limited than mutt. Mozilla was nice, but too limited.
The things I like about Evolution:
Virtual mailboxes -- insanely useful feature. I have a virtual mailbox for example that shows me any mail from a known list of friends across all of my IMAP and local mailboxes.
Wonderfully smooth and responsive IMAP and POP handling
Very good handling of attachments and all sorts of strange document types
Drag and drop between accounts
Well protected against malicious HTML mail (doesn't do javascript or load images by default, etc).
Excellent searching capabilities
Had you had some problems with it that made you unhappy?
That's a rather silly outlook. Critisizing how they got where they are is one thing, but at this point keeping people on to the detriment of the company would not help those people (they might have a few weeks or months more employment at most). Laying people off and/or selling non-profitable business units is the best thing that can be done for the company and the employees that are left at the end.
Destroying careers is bad business, but then so is mis-managing revenue. Worldcom made a major, MAJOR Internet bid at just the wrong time. They're paying for that and how they handled the down-turn. They'll recover.
There's a problem with your theory. They may have to lay off many of the technitians that are required to keep their networks running. They may continue to nominally provide pipe, but will routing loops take longer to resolve? Will QoS get hosed? Will fiber cuts cause more downtime than they should?
I'm confident in WCOME's long-term outlook (so much so I bought 8500 shares of their stock at the fire sale), but the short-term may not be pretty.
What's even scarier is being on an XP box, starting up a shell, typing "startx", get an xterm, run "ssh -XCfc blowfish me@linuxbox evolution" and getting a usable mail client on windows!:-)
Contempt and animosity? How so? Any more so than the boomers showed for the establishment in the 60s?! Please, this is a joke. Anyone who doesn't care about the strength of research and engineering for future generations is probably not in the target audience for such public debate.
The difference in most computer products (software atleast) is that they can be duplicated with little cost or effort on the part of the duplicator
I'm too young to remeber it, but if you look back, you will find that when photocopiers were introduced the same arguments were made about books. Oddly, what has destroyed the value of books is not the the increased publishing power of the consumer, but of the publisher. Publishers have flooded the market with cheap, bad books that make the wave of pulps in the middle of last century look like a local reading circle, and now they only stay in business by flagrant market manipulation and ripping off authors as often as possible.
Here is the fallacy: we start this discussion with the idea that the software market has to be as safe for the publishers as any other market. Why do we think this way? Why is it unreasonable to say that software is a risky business where it's hard to control end-users? Why do we have to guarantee a stable and safe market in an inherently unstable and unsafe medium? How does a software publisher earn that right?
Certainly, we should punish those who break the law, and copyright law infringement is no exception (though note that until the DMCA it was a civil matter, not a criminal one). But, I don't see that that gives anyone the right to tell me how I can interact with my legally purchaced CDs or operating system software. Fair use should not be trampled on just because you would prefer to have a well-ordered market that makes you money whenever you release a new version or add-on.
When someone mentions they gave up Linux for Windows everyone on slashdot supported MS, and ran against Linux.
Not I, but that's sort of beside the point.
But, a few stories later, we find ourselves reaming MS. Now MS tries to address subjects YOU WANT THEM TO ADDRESS, and the linux community is in an uproar.
Adressing the subjuct really doesn't do anything. We're concerned about the prospect of OS/hardware DRM and the many possible abuses thereof, not the arm-waving of a convicted market-manipulating monopoly. The simple fact is that MS cannot be trusted, just as Enron cannot be trusted, but that too is beside the point. If Red Hat and Intel were colluding on DRM I would be worried too. This is the sort of thing that could lead us down the road to hardware that does not allow us to write our own drivers or run our own operating systems. It gives large companies (like MS) the hooks to start abusing competitors (especially open source).
Personally, I just don't see this article as being anti-MS so much as anti-corporate. When has Slashdot ever flinched from that possition? What shocked you about that? Did you come to slashdot expecting Forbes?
You know, I think we need to start thinking of the hackers of years gone by. This sort of clear, concrete idea of what's at stake will really help get through to the baby-boomer engineering crowd and explain, "You know that radio you took apart when you were a kid? For the next generation, it will come with an EULA and be protected from tampering by at least 4 fedral laws that carry fines and prison terms."
There is a generation out there, most of whom have no idea what this generation think, but who will feel compelled to action if they think future engineers and tinkerers will be disuaded from early experimentation.
How can we get that message out? Where do we tell that story? Certainly there are media outlets like Popular Science, Scientific American, etc.
Anyone out there a well credited sociologist and want to take on the comparison of 1950s/60s egineering boomers with the early 2000s hackers and the threats to their future that boomers never had to worry about?
This is all true, but taking the long view, I'll be happy with the current state of affairs if we're able to get some patent reforms in the next 10 years. Open source will still be around in 20, 30 or 100 years. Will this little two-bit company? Probably not.
You don't need to use something to replace JPEG... probably. Realistically, the people they're going to go after for JPEG use are the manufacturers of products that use it (digital cameras, image editors, etc) and make a lot of money doing so. This is why Sony was an early target.
If all you do is take an image out of your camera and put it up on your site, you're not infringing their patent anyway (IANAL, so go ask yours), the camera maker is.
I suggest that everyone take a deep breath and then those few of you involved in deciding what image formats are used by open source software should get together and start working on a long-term solution. JPEG is very nice, and if it's still the best technology in town in 17 years (or the only one that's unencumbered), we'll go back to using it.
And you can. Your definition of use involves prodouction deployment, does it? Authors of software-related books are well used to using pre-alpha versions of software for research material. I'm sure he would not have as hard a time as you think.
As mentioned in a previous post, can we add this to the list of "handy quotes that were never said", right up there with Al Gore "inventing the internet"?
Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. He DID however, claim responsibility for it, which is partially true. He was one of the senators who lobbied for the funding that DARPA needed for many projects which included the creation of a research network (ARPANet) which would eventually evolve into the Internet.
What upset me about the statement was the fact that he was tacitly taking credit for the foresight to fund the creation of the Internet, when he almost certainly had no clue what rammifications ARPANet would have.
Since before the down turn, MS has been unprofitable enough to have to use creative bookkeeping [economist.com] including such as withholding dividends, avoiding taxes and cost shifting.
The way things are going it'll only be news when a large US corporation is found to have uncooked books...
I think you're reaching here. I'm not a fan of MS, but nothing stated here could be characterized as "cooking" the books. Certainly, they are trying to maximize what small revenue they have during the downturn (as everyone is), but until someone demonstrates that MS has done something unsavory accounting-wise, I don't think it's reasonable to start throwing that kind of accusation around.
In email from Bill Gates he denies the quote, but instead of offering up context for its origin or any explanation of why the quote originated, he waxes on about memory limitations. He even claims credit ("I and many others have said") for "Moore's Law", though he uses a mildly modified form of the assertion (1 extra bit every 2 years).
As rebuttals go, it's pretty weak. I'd love to hear from the original citer on when/where it was quoted from.
I'm a big fan of The West Wing too, but I have to say if it starts having popup-ads, I'm outa there. Same goes for Buffy, Jeremiah, South Park and Witchblade. TV just isn't worth it any more. I'll pack it up and sell my TiVo to someone who doesn't mind the ads.
I'm confused by that attitude. How can 2 years be too short when the average software product cycle is 6 months to a year? Granted, for some applications it will not be terribly useful, but is that a bad thing?
Here's the yard-stick that you apply to patents: if we do it this way, does it maximize the benefit to the public? You want to encourage companies to seek patent grants, but remember that the goal is to promote the sciences and useful arts by incenting companies to contribute to the ever-expanding pool of general knowledge.
Software patents currently last 17 years, though I understand it depends somewhat on who's treaty you're looking at. Worse, that time starts ticking when the patent is granted, which can be as much as a decade after the patent application. When you're able to stifle the general public's ability to use a new software technique for as long as the entire history of the personal computer, there's a problem.
Then again, two years might be too much. Open Source may have proven that the promotion of the sciences and useful arts in the software domain is self-managing. Microsoft innovates no more than Linux/BSD/GNU/X/etc. Companies fund research like X (DEC/HP), Linux SMP (many), etc. not because they hope to reap the benefits of the patents, but because the market moves so fast that they can use the edge of simply having been there first.
Reading the patent, both the abstract and the claims say many things to indicate that this patent covers network devices "such as a switch". Much of the patent is faily specific to forwarding between ports on such a device. I really don't think it can be said to generically cover generic layer-3+ packet filtering (in fact, I think it's pretty specifically layer-2ish).
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I am a network engineer who deals with packet filtering all the time, and any "expert witness" worth his salt would bring these points up in a patent-suit. Someone should step up to be first on this one (Checkpoint or Cisco would be good choices, but there are many others who would be hurt by having to license this stuff).
On a more general point, I'm sure there are patents out there on just about everything that a modern Linux, BSD, etc system does. Some are already expired, but many are not. We really need to get a game plan here. My personal take is that patents are still a good thing, even on software, but it's the duration and disclosure that kill us. How can we reasonably get patent duration for software down to 2 years and require early disclosure of a pending patent? If those two things happened, patents would actually be a good thing for Open Source!
Sounds like they've QoSed you into the ground. Good tactic, actually. You get to use the network, but real traffic wins.
Re:Details on Palladium from EFF's Seth Schoen...
on
The Power of Palladium
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That's the spin, right? But that statement in no way binds Microsoft to the idea of not suing the pants off of Linus, Red Hat and SuSe the moment Linux uses MS-patented DRM techniques (e.g. makes use of the DRM hardware in a Pd motherboard).
Worse: Microsoft's SMB subsystem could stop accepting data from non-DRM-friendly servers or clients at any time. When that happens, since Samba cannot do the DRM without violating the patent, everyone running Samba loses.
It's not so much that Pd v1.0 will hose Open Source. I give MS credit for being much smarter than that. I think it will be an early service pack that addresses "security concerns" that starts to cause small problems for "non-trusted" systems and software. Then, a new "high security" IIS release will start to bounce non-IE browsers (or at least that's MS' counter-threat to AOL who is currently threatening to take a huge chunk of the browser market away by releasing a Netscape-based AOL).
This will be the tool that the marketing types use in the next round of platform wars. They would be stupid not to use it. It is incumbent on us to find a way to stop that before it becomes an option.
How can that have any effect?! Certainly a few tens of thousands of years from now, we'll see changes, but the geologic record that exists today is totally unchanged. Until the topsoil, plants, sea beds, etc of today become the rocks of tomorrow, uranium dating will still give us a pretty good idea of the age of a mineral sample won't it?
On a slightly off-topif vein, this reminds me of one of my favorite travesties of logic: a christian group once tried to "disprove" the usefulness of carbon dating. They had a technitian (against his protests) carbon date a live plant). Of course, the result was completely wacky, but you could interpret it as meaning that the plant was several thousand years old.
From this, the conclusion was drawn that carbon dating doesn't work. Heh.
Kind of like pointing a gun at your foot, turning off the safety, pulling the trigger and then claiming that guns can never be safe.... The sad part is that even today many anti-science types still recite the mantra that carbon dating is "known not to work".
Re:Future Dating?
on
The Chronoliths
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· Score: 5, Informative
Carbon dating only tells you how long it's been since an organic life form died. Thus it does not work on a) things that have never lived or b) things that are currently alive. If it worked in reverse, you would be able to tell me when I was going to die (sort of the topic of a R.A.H. short story, "Timeline").
To be even more general, carbon dating assumes many things about the state of the atmosphere, sun, and organic life. It would work on another world, but the parameters are different.
This is why after a certain horizon (measured in tens of thousands of years, AFAIK), you have to switch to something like Uranium-decay. Even still after you start going past a significant percentage of the Earth's history (say 500M-1B years) it starts getting hard to back up any specifics.
$ # Note, you can't create port-80 client-side unless you're root $ # I'll use port 8000 for the example $ ssh -CNnfx -L 8000:serverhost:80 you@target.host.com $ mozilla localhost:8000
Slashdot Mirror
Mass chronic layoffs are rarely, if ever, used to
keep a company afloat.
You weren't discussing just any company. This is a company that has more debt than it can handle and *will go out of business* unless they do something. What they will do (roughly) is this:
1. Secure financing for restructuring costs
2. Go chapter 11 to protect company assets from ceditors
3. Pay off and/or work out long-term plans on as much debt as possible to avoid liquidation of essential assets
4. Sell some non-core assets and/or business units
5. Restructure
Restructuring is the hard part. The goal there is to re-shape your business so that you can afford what debt you come out of chapter 11 with (mostly your new debt that consolidated some of your old). Debt payments are expensive, and you have to do something to assure the courts that your credit will be good, or you won't get out of chapter 11.
So, you cut costs where you can, sell off anything that you don't actually need (Worldcom made some acquisitions that didn't make a whole lot of sense anyway) and close the ones you can't sell. This is where the bulk of the layoffs will usually come from. You don't lay off people who are required for your core business unless you have to, since that's where your revenue will have to come from post-chapter-11.
It's not about trying to screw over your employees or make your earnings look good (the accounting mess that got them where they are was about earnings). It's about getting the money together to pay off debt.
AOL makes $48M a month in subscription revenue. They laid off 2000 people at one point last year. Why? Their combined monthly salaries are pocket change to a company with 23 million subscribers?
Ok let's do the math. Let's assume those 2000 people only cost AOL an average of $50,000/yr each (that's basically a smidge over minimum wage plus benefits plus social security plus unemployment insurance plus accounting and hr and other overhead). If these were more senior people that number is usually between $100,000 to $200,000 per employee.
Take that $50,000 and divide by 12. You get a little over $4,000 per month per person, so for 2,000 people that's $8million per month. However, you actually have to shrink that number a bit because some of the layoffs will come from overhead areas like accounting and HR (less people, less overhead).
Let's call it (and this is really just ballpark) $5,000,000 per month. So you say that they have $48,000,000 per month in revenue. So, you're talking about reducing your costs by about 10% of your total revenue by laying off those 2,000 people.
This is all arm-waving without being able to see AOL's books, but you can see how laying off staff can quickly put a company's earnings back in line to the point that they not only make investors happy, but they're able to pay their debts. Event a profitable company is constantly incurring debt, and if it ever gets out of control, you end up in Enron/Worldcom land. Very bad. Do not do.
Lay offs are not the only and often not the best solution, but any comprehensive restructuring cannot afford to ignore layoffs (even in those few private companies that view layoffs as harmful to their long-term health such as Fidelity Investments).
I'm not an accountant, but I've had enough exposure to the theory and the practice of corporate accounting that I don't have the innocent "if only people weren't evil it would all work" view. Running a business is insanely hard, and there comes a time where you have to make the choice to keep the business running or lay people off. It's always painful because you know these people rely on you, but you have to think of the health of the whole company and help those you can. Even Japan had to learn this lesson (which was totally foreign to their way of doing business until the 90s).
MH was always a pain to use. pine and elm were more limited than mutt. Mozilla was nice, but too limited.
The things I like about Evolution:
- Virtual mailboxes -- insanely useful feature. I have a virtual mailbox for example that shows me any mail from a known list of friends across all of my IMAP and local mailboxes.
- Wonderfully smooth and responsive IMAP and POP handling
- Very good handling of attachments and all sorts of strange document types
- Drag and drop between accounts
- Well protected against malicious HTML mail (doesn't do javascript or load images by default, etc).
- Excellent searching capabilities
Had you had some problems with it that made you unhappy?That's a rather silly outlook. Critisizing how they got where they are is one thing, but at this point keeping people on to the detriment of the company would not help those people (they might have a few weeks or months more employment at most). Laying people off and/or selling non-profitable business units is the best thing that can be done for the company and the employees that are left at the end.
Destroying careers is bad business, but then so is mis-managing revenue. Worldcom made a major, MAJOR Internet bid at just the wrong time. They're paying for that and how they handled the down-turn. They'll recover.
There's a problem with your theory. They may have to lay off many of the technitians that are required to keep their networks running. They may continue to nominally provide pipe, but will routing loops take longer to resolve? Will QoS get hosed? Will fiber cuts cause more downtime than they should?
I'm confident in WCOME's long-term outlook (so much so I bought 8500 shares of their stock at the fire sale), but the short-term may not be pretty.
What's even scarier is being on an XP box, starting up a shell, typing "startx", get an xterm, run "ssh -XCfc blowfish me@linuxbox evolution" and getting a usable mail client on windows! :-)
Contempt and animosity? How so? Any more so than the boomers showed for the establishment in the 60s?! Please, this is a joke. Anyone who doesn't care about the strength of research and engineering for future generations is probably not in the target audience for such public debate.
The difference in most computer products (software atleast) is that they can be duplicated with little cost or effort on the part of the duplicator
I'm too young to remeber it, but if you look back, you will find that when photocopiers were introduced the same arguments were made about books. Oddly, what has destroyed the value of books is not the the increased publishing power of the consumer, but of the publisher. Publishers have flooded the market with cheap, bad books that make the wave of pulps in the middle of last century look like a local reading circle, and now they only stay in business by flagrant market manipulation and ripping off authors as often as possible.
Here is the fallacy: we start this discussion with the idea that the software market has to be as safe for the publishers as any other market. Why do we think this way? Why is it unreasonable to say that software is a risky business where it's hard to control end-users? Why do we have to guarantee a stable and safe market in an inherently unstable and unsafe medium? How does a software publisher earn that right?
Certainly, we should punish those who break the law, and copyright law infringement is no exception (though note that until the DMCA it was a civil matter, not a criminal one). But, I don't see that that gives anyone the right to tell me how I can interact with my legally purchaced CDs or operating system software. Fair use should not be trampled on just because you would prefer to have a well-ordered market that makes you money whenever you release a new version or add-on.
When someone mentions they gave up Linux for Windows everyone on slashdot supported MS, and ran against Linux.
Not I, but that's sort of beside the point.
But, a few stories later, we find ourselves reaming MS. Now MS tries to address subjects YOU WANT THEM TO ADDRESS, and the linux community is in an uproar.
Adressing the subjuct really doesn't do anything. We're concerned about the prospect of OS/hardware DRM and the many possible abuses thereof, not the arm-waving of a convicted market-manipulating monopoly. The simple fact is that MS cannot be trusted, just as Enron cannot be trusted, but that too is beside the point. If Red Hat and Intel were colluding on DRM I would be worried too. This is the sort of thing that could lead us down the road to hardware that does not allow us to write our own drivers or run our own operating systems. It gives large companies (like MS) the hooks to start abusing competitors (especially open source).
Personally, I just don't see this article as being anti-MS so much as anti-corporate. When has Slashdot ever flinched from that possition? What shocked you about that? Did you come to slashdot expecting Forbes?
You know, I think we need to start thinking of the hackers of years gone by. This sort of clear, concrete idea of what's at stake will really help get through to the baby-boomer engineering crowd and explain, "You know that radio you took apart when you were a kid? For the next generation, it will come with an EULA and be protected from tampering by at least 4 fedral laws that carry fines and prison terms."
There is a generation out there, most of whom have no idea what this generation think, but who will feel compelled to action if they think future engineers and tinkerers will be disuaded from early experimentation.
How can we get that message out? Where do we tell that story? Certainly there are media outlets like Popular Science, Scientific American, etc.
Anyone out there a well credited sociologist and want to take on the comparison of 1950s/60s egineering boomers with the early 2000s hackers and the threats to their future that boomers never had to worry about?
This is all true, but taking the long view, I'll be happy with the current state of affairs if we're able to get some patent reforms in the next 10 years. Open source will still be around in 20, 30 or 100 years. Will this little two-bit company? Probably not.
You don't need to use something to replace JPEG... probably. Realistically, the people they're going to go after for JPEG use are the manufacturers of products that use it (digital cameras, image editors, etc) and make a lot of money doing so. This is why Sony was an early target.
If all you do is take an image out of your camera and put it up on your site, you're not infringing their patent anyway (IANAL, so go ask yours), the camera maker is.
I suggest that everyone take a deep breath and then those few of you involved in deciding what image formats are used by open source software should get together and start working on a long-term solution. JPEG is very nice, and if it's still the best technology in town in 17 years (or the only one that's unencumbered), we'll go back to using it.
And you can. Your definition of use involves prodouction deployment, does it? Authors of software-related books are well used to using pre-alpha versions of software for research material. I'm sure he would not have as hard a time as you think.
If you could write and use a Perl 6 program right now, maybe he'd include a chapter on it in his book.
heh.
As mentioned in a previous post, can we add this to the list of "handy quotes that were never said", right up there with Al Gore "inventing the internet"?
Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. He DID however, claim responsibility for it, which is partially true. He was one of the senators who lobbied for the funding that DARPA needed for many projects which included the creation of a research network (ARPANet) which would eventually evolve into the Internet.
What upset me about the statement was the fact that he was tacitly taking credit for the foresight to fund the creation of the Internet, when he almost certainly had no clue what rammifications ARPANet would have.
In email from Bill Gates he denies the quote, but instead of offering up context for its origin or any explanation of why the quote originated, he waxes on about memory limitations. He even claims credit ("I and many others have said") for "Moore's Law", though he uses a mildly modified form of the assertion (1 extra bit every 2 years).
As rebuttals go, it's pretty weak. I'd love to hear from the original citer on when/where it was quoted from.
I'm a big fan of The West Wing too, but I have to say if it starts having popup-ads, I'm outa there. Same goes for Buffy, Jeremiah, South Park and Witchblade. TV just isn't worth it any more. I'll pack it up and sell my TiVo to someone who doesn't mind the ads.
I'm confused by that attitude. How can 2 years be too short when the average software product cycle is 6 months to a year? Granted, for some applications it will not be terribly useful, but is that a bad thing?
Here's the yard-stick that you apply to patents: if we do it this way, does it maximize the benefit to the public? You want to encourage companies to seek patent grants, but remember that the goal is to promote the sciences and useful arts by incenting companies to contribute to the ever-expanding pool of general knowledge.
Software patents currently last 17 years, though I understand it depends somewhat on who's treaty you're looking at. Worse, that time starts ticking when the patent is granted, which can be as much as a decade after the patent application. When you're able to stifle the general public's ability to use a new software technique for as long as the entire history of the personal computer, there's a problem.
Then again, two years might be too much. Open Source may have proven that the promotion of the sciences and useful arts in the software domain is self-managing. Microsoft innovates no more than Linux/BSD/GNU/X/etc. Companies fund research like X (DEC/HP), Linux SMP (many), etc. not because they hope to reap the benefits of the patents, but because the market moves so fast that they can use the edge of simply having been there first.
Reading the patent, both the abstract and the claims say many things to indicate that this patent covers network devices "such as a switch". Much of the patent is faily specific to forwarding between ports on such a device. I really don't think it can be said to generically cover generic layer-3+ packet filtering (in fact, I think it's pretty specifically layer-2ish).
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I am a network engineer who deals with packet filtering all the time, and any "expert witness" worth his salt would bring these points up in a patent-suit. Someone should step up to be first on this one (Checkpoint or Cisco would be good choices, but there are many others who would be hurt by having to license this stuff).
On a more general point, I'm sure there are patents out there on just about everything that a modern Linux, BSD, etc system does. Some are already expired, but many are not. We really need to get a game plan here. My personal take is that patents are still a good thing, even on software, but it's the duration and disclosure that kill us. How can we reasonably get patent duration for software down to 2 years and require early disclosure of a pending patent? If those two things happened, patents would actually be a good thing for Open Source!
Sounds like they've QoSed you into the ground. Good tactic, actually. You get to use the network, but real traffic wins.
That's the spin, right? But that statement in no way binds Microsoft to the idea of not suing the pants off of Linus, Red Hat and SuSe the moment Linux uses MS-patented DRM techniques (e.g. makes use of the DRM hardware in a Pd motherboard).
Worse: Microsoft's SMB subsystem could stop accepting data from non-DRM-friendly servers or clients at any time. When that happens, since Samba cannot do the DRM without violating the patent, everyone running Samba loses.
It's not so much that Pd v1.0 will hose Open Source. I give MS credit for being much smarter than that. I think it will be an early service pack that addresses "security concerns" that starts to cause small problems for "non-trusted" systems and software. Then, a new "high security" IIS release will start to bounce non-IE browsers (or at least that's MS' counter-threat to AOL who is currently threatening to take a huge chunk of the browser market away by releasing a Netscape-based AOL).
This will be the tool that the marketing types use in the next round of platform wars. They would be stupid not to use it. It is incumbent on us to find a way to stop that before it becomes an option.
How can that have any effect?! Certainly a few tens of thousands of years from now, we'll see changes, but the geologic record that exists today is totally unchanged. Until the topsoil, plants, sea beds, etc of today become the rocks of tomorrow, uranium dating will still give us a pretty good idea of the age of a mineral sample won't it?
On a slightly off-topif vein, this reminds me of one of my favorite travesties of logic: a christian group once tried to "disprove" the usefulness of carbon dating. They had a technitian (against his protests) carbon date a live plant). Of course, the result was completely wacky, but you could interpret it as meaning that the plant was several thousand years old.
From this, the conclusion was drawn that carbon dating doesn't work. Heh.
Kind of like pointing a gun at your foot, turning off the safety, pulling the trigger and then claiming that guns can never be safe.... The sad part is that even today many anti-science types still recite the mantra that carbon dating is "known not to work".
Carbon dating only tells you how long it's been since an organic life form died. Thus it does not work on a) things that have never lived or b) things that are currently alive. If it worked in reverse, you would be able to tell me when I was going to die (sort of the topic of a R.A.H. short story, "Timeline").
To be even more general, carbon dating assumes many things about the state of the atmosphere, sun, and organic life. It would work on another world, but the parameters are different.
This is why after a certain horizon (measured in tens of thousands of years, AFAIK), you have to switch to something like Uranium-decay. Even still after you start going past a significant percentage of the Earth's history (say 500M-1B years) it starts getting hard to back up any specifics.
Any geologitsts want to chime in here?
$ # Note, you can't create port-80 client-side unless you're root
$ # I'll use port 8000 for the example
$ ssh -CNnfx -L 8000:serverhost:80 you@target.host.com
$ mozilla localhost:8000