Companies, being greedy bastards don't maintain patents that they have no interest in.
Maybe small companies where the CEO or CFO are signing off directly on such expenses. But in larger corporations where "legal" is nothing more than a faint blip on the accounting radar, these types of decisions have been lost in the process.
Who is going to go to all the trouble of tracking down which patents in the portfolio are actually not in use (and that would mean completely unused). In a large organization, tracking that down could be nearly impossible, especially when patents are coming from aquisitions, etc. The individual would have to have pretty good grasp of the technologies covered by the patent, the technologies used in all of the company's products (and those of its subsidiaries, etc...), have a good grasp of who in the organization "owns" the patent, the history behind its application, etc...
This would be a daunting and expensive task. It may simply be cheaper to pay the annual renewal fees rather than (a) do the legal and technical research to know that the patent is truly unused, and (b) understand the risk that someone else (e.g. a competitor) could not use the patent against the company giving up the patent.
(sorry...must actually look at the preview to make the "preview" function useful...)
"dormant patent" holders should have equivalent of "annual garage sale" for their patents.
Though a neat idea, the pragmatist/pessimist in me wonders what benefit there is to a corporation to participate in such a thing?
What is the benefit to the corporation to participating? The costs are:
resources needed to research its patent base and ensure that given patents are unused and irrelevant to the company (this would be both a legal and corporate-political issue; in a large corporation, the politics alone could be a nightmare to navigate)
resources needed to package up and sell the patents (and at "garage sale" prices no less??)
potential risk that a competitor picks up the patent (why give away a competitive advantage, even one that is unused?)
Think about it: would the typical manager/executive sign off on the budget to offload properties that don't cost anything to keep laying around? Would they absorb the potential risk of giving up an offensive or defensive legal shield?
"dormant patent" holders should have equivalent of "annual garage sale" for their patents.
Though a neat idea, the pragmatist/pessimist in me wonders what benefit there is to a corporation to participate in such a thing?
What is the benefit to the corporation to participating? The costs are:
resources needed to research its patent base and ensure that given patents are unused and irrelevant to the company (this would be both a legal and corporate-political issue; in a large corporation, the politics alone could be a nightmare to navigate)
resources needed to package up and sell the patents (and at "garage sale" prices no less??)
potential risk that a competitor picks up the patent (why give away a competitive advantage, even one that is unused?)
Think about it: would the typical manager/executive sign off on the budget to offload properties that don't cost anything to keep laying around? Would they absorb the potential risk of giving up an offensive or defensive legal shield?
Just because his paycheck is no longer coming from M$ he didn't become significantly more reliable.
You aren't paying attention. He's slamming Microsoft now; this makes him 100% reliable...almost saintly in fact (and if you still disagree...please take a moment to look at which site you are currently reading).
I mean every plan to do something drastic should at minumum[sic] look at the possible problems it could cause if something was miscalculated or was wrong.
The drastic part is already well underway: CO2 levels that are completely out of whack with anything this planet has ever seen. I do not believe that inviting people of the world (and the first world in particular) to think communally, to use resources wisely, to reduce gluttony is being "drastic".
What if the scientist were correct 30 or 40 years ago when they said we were entering an ice age. The Co2 could be a barrier to this and stopping ti from happening without our knowledge. If we are wrong in stopping our use of fossile fuels and cleaning the Co2 from the enviroment, then we could be moving us back into the ice age faster then we can adjust to it.
So you are postulating that humans are accidentally polluting ourselves to safety?
Seriously?
Where could that line of reasoning not take us? Mass murders == population control?
Dodge the issue? Which one is that, that Dell is out to make money?
His suggestion of starting a company is simply to highlight that there is A LOT of effort involved and that even a company like Dell likely can't see much business benefit in trying to go down this road. If Dell cannot do it with their cookie-cutter approach to most everything, then a completely different approach is needed and the author is suggesting that the collective figure that part out.
And by "cannot do it", I mean "cannot come up with a viable business plan". There is a very limited market for Linux on cheap PCs; what market there is would have extremely small profit margins; what market there is is further fragmented between the distros and desktops; and the training for a support organization would be next-to-killer to set up. How many Linux gurus do you know that want to either man phones or want to write up support scripts?
I'd love to see reasonably priced PCs come out with a stable, robust, well documented Linux distro. Unfortunately at this juncture, I don't know of one (yes, I run Ubuntu and Fedora...no they aren't well enough documented for a corporation to venture into supporting a disperate class of users).
The majority of people I know that run Linux exclusively are very picky about the boxes they run on. Most either built their own or completely spec'ed them out themselves. Dell simply would not be a place that these folks would buy from. Myself, I run Linux on just about any kind of box...but I'm not out to run bleeding edge apps on them, I simply want a shell, a text editor and some server software.
I would gladly buy a Dell with Linux, but there aren't enough of me to support a business model for Dell. I don't know what the overhead of them setting up a product line is, but I suspect that they'd have to yield many hundreds of millions of dollars to make it worth their while.
Ultimately, the Start Menu is just a collection of directories and shortcuts in the filesystem.
Yes and asking my grandmother to manipulate files and directories into an orderly fashion (especially a directory that is hidden from her by default) is not a user-friendly system.
Not much the OS can do to stop installers manipulating it.
Added to that, 99% of installers _already_ let the user decide where to put their icons.
You and I have extremely different software installation experiences. Heck, I don't think that MS-Office (at least v. 2003) let's you choose where to put its icons.
You can drag and drop program folders and icons. How much easier do you want it ?
You obviously don't understand that "user" in the phrase user friendly does not consist solely of you, me, and the rest of us slashbots.
"All Users" exists for a perfectly valid reason.
I didn't say get rid of "all users". I explicitly stated the "shortcut dupes issues". Surely you understand the problems that exist when a user has the same shortcuts as "all users" does, and then the user manipulates their start menu icon locations??? Or do you also consider this to be user friendly?
They're *right there on the Start Menu*. How much easier can it get ?
Again, "user friendly" does not mean "direct file system manipulation". Grandma don't get the whole "directory tree" concept, nor "root", "c-colon", "hidden files", "system directories", yada-yada-yada. The fact that the implementation of something is as straight forward as a directory structure and a bunch of wanna-be-symlinks does not detract from the fact that Grandma just don't get this stuff (nor the executive at my office, or her admin assistant, or the guy down the street who should have bought himself a Mac but went for a MS-Windows box because "everyone does",...)
Again, drag & drop stuff into (and out of) it. How much easier can it be ?
Once you use your machine for some time and have a good assortment of tools collected, finding things in the start menu even in XP (or 2003) does take a significant time
Wouldn't they have been better to improve the Start menus functionality in a couple of ways:
force installers to let the user choose where on the start menu items are to go
allow users to quickly and easily re-organize the Start menu
get rid of the "all users" vs "my" shortcut dupes issues (i.e. reorganize the "my" folder and now you have dupe links because the "all users" links are in the original location
improve the MRU and quick-pick lists so that users can easily discover and use them
improve the Quick Launch toolbar, again more discoverable and easier to organize/clean up
Adding a search is neat (and necessary to keep up with the Jones's/Apples/Googles), but it should be a fall-back to having things quickly and intuitively accessible. If we're to revert to the keyboard, then give me an improved shell and give me back the RAM wasted on GUI stuff I'm not using.
...the best course of action most of the time is just to keep your mouth shut and continue with life as usual.
Depends on your definition of "best", I believe. "Suck it up" and "lemming" do not describe what I view as "best" and certainly wouldn't describe what I want my "life as usual" to be.
I believe that one can be non-naieve (sic) and still Do The Right Thing. Yes, it could have negative immediate consequences, but the alternative could have significantly worse long term consequences...
A blogger has found a collection of XSS vulnerabilities including the websites of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John Cox, Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo
Ms. Former (First?) Lady gets my vote...to bad for her that I don't have one, eh?
If your job is something that you want to completely shut out as soon as you walk out the door, then can you really be doing the right thing with your time there?
Good point.
In addition, many people that I know who "carry blackberries" also have flexible schedules at work. I, for one, am able to leave when meetings are completed if I so desire. I get my 40+ hours done, just not always between 9 and 5. I usually am here before 9 and gone around 5, but I have the flexibility and freedom to alter that. I'm sure that if I was to abuse that freedom that I'd have 40+ hours of free time and no blackberry to worry about...with such freedom comes the responsibility to not abuse it (i.e. being responsive and completing work tasks).
he problem with Dell is that they have a reputation for the cheapest machines around [...] Most of their traffic is in the cheap end of the scale...
I disagree that the above is their problem. The vast majority of their profit comes from corporate sales:
most business machines do not need a hell of a lot of horse-power just to run MS-Outlook, IE and MS-Word
the business machines that do need power sell for a heftier price (look at Dell server lines)
They need to up the price on their lowest cost systems and improve the quality as well as reduce the number of options.
Actually, it is precisely the options that increase their profitability. They rope you into a system with a sweet price, then you decide you need an extra Gig of RAM, a bigger drive, hey for only $50 I get a faster CPU, and while I'm at it I'll pick up a USB memory stick. Oh, and look, I can get three years support for only $100 more.
Oh, and stop putting stupid blue LEDs in everything,
This is likely their biggest problem. Blue is sooooo 2003. Yep, the company is going down the drain...too bad they don't have enough resources to overcome the downturn in their revenue stream to overcome this horrendous technical glitch across their entire product line...
The OP says that he's 39. I suspect that if buddy has not yet established a (home) life for himself that having a (math) degree isn't going to help much at this point.
Vote with the dollar, it's the only way they'll listen.
This is where the morons problem creeps in...they make my vote irrelevant.
So the only real ways to "win" is to educate the morons...either that or "win" by "accepting the status quo" (i.e. "drinking the artificially-flavoured-coloured-sugar water (tm)".)
And it's my choice whether I wish to buy a knowingly crippled product ( the right to watch the movie on approved players ).
Yes, but there is this very slippery slope here.
They take some extremely popular movie X, slap DRM on it, sell millions of copies to a group of consumers (say teens) who don't necessarily value or "get" the subtleties of freedom and rights; they have a disc, view the movie, instant gratification relieved, get movie Y.
Unfortunately this business model is extremely effective for 5% of movies/music/games made. Excessively successful. So much so, that industry (who owns 99% of all content) decides that this model should be applied to 100% of content. So the other 95% doesn't sell...they write the problem off to poor quality or fickleness of the customer base. This is "the cost of doing business" thinking (put out 10 CDs with 10 formula-derived tracks hoping that at least one track goes super-hextillion-platinum).
See, the issues is that the vast majority of the public then is either forced to put up with reduced rights or to not get access to the media put out by this industry...which is just about everything. So either I lose my rights, or I lose the ability to see the (few) true quality pieces produced. And my attempting to argue that the latest "enviro-ware" movie (or whatever) should be released outside of their regular business model goes completely unanswered because there simply is not enough return-on-investment for them to consider anything less than super-hextillion-platinum.
Slashdot Mirror
And in the King's English, no less!!
J-SOX? Shouldn't that be SOX.NET ?
Maybe small companies where the CEO or CFO are signing off directly on such expenses. But in larger corporations where "legal" is nothing more than a faint blip on the accounting radar, these types of decisions have been lost in the process.
Who is going to go to all the trouble of tracking down which patents in the portfolio are actually not in use (and that would mean completely unused). In a large organization, tracking that down could be nearly impossible, especially when patents are coming from aquisitions, etc. The individual would have to have pretty good grasp of the technologies covered by the patent, the technologies used in all of the company's products (and those of its subsidiaries, etc...), have a good grasp of who in the organization "owns" the patent, the history behind its application, etc...
This would be a daunting and expensive task. It may simply be cheaper to pay the annual renewal fees rather than (a) do the legal and technical research to know that the patent is truly unused, and (b) understand the risk that someone else (e.g. a competitor) could not use the patent against the company giving up the patent.
What is the benefit to the corporation to participating? The costs are:
Think about it: would the typical manager/executive sign off on the budget to offload properties that don't cost anything to keep laying around? Would they absorb the potential risk of giving up an offensive or defensive legal shield?
What is the benefit to the corporation to participating? The costs are:
resources needed to research its patent base and ensure that given patents are unused and irrelevant to the company (this would be both a legal and corporate-political issue; in a large corporation, the politics alone could be a nightmare to navigate)
resources needed to package up and sell the patents (and at "garage sale" prices no less??)
potential risk that a competitor picks up the patent (why give away a competitive advantage, even one that is unused?)
Think about it: would the typical manager/executive sign off on the budget to offload properties that don't cost anything to keep laying around? Would they absorb the potential risk of giving up an offensive or defensive legal shield?
Seriously?
Where could that line of reasoning not take us? Mass murders == population control?
His suggestion of starting a company is simply to highlight that there is A LOT of effort involved and that even a company like Dell likely can't see much business benefit in trying to go down this road. If Dell cannot do it with their cookie-cutter approach to most everything, then a completely different approach is needed and the author is suggesting that the collective figure that part out.
And by "cannot do it", I mean "cannot come up with a viable business plan". There is a very limited market for Linux on cheap PCs; what market there is would have extremely small profit margins; what market there is is further fragmented between the distros and desktops; and the training for a support organization would be next-to-killer to set up. How many Linux gurus do you know that want to either man phones or want to write up support scripts?
I'd love to see reasonably priced PCs come out with a stable, robust, well documented Linux distro. Unfortunately at this juncture, I don't know of one (yes, I run Ubuntu and Fedora...no they aren't well enough documented for a corporation to venture into supporting a disperate class of users).
The majority of people I know that run Linux exclusively are very picky about the boxes they run on. Most either built their own or completely spec'ed them out themselves. Dell simply would not be a place that these folks would buy from. Myself, I run Linux on just about any kind of box...but I'm not out to run bleeding edge apps on them, I simply want a shell, a text editor and some server software.
I would gladly buy a Dell with Linux, but there aren't enough of me to support a business model for Dell. I don't know what the overhead of them setting up a product line is, but I suspect that they'd have to yield many hundreds of millions of dollars to make it worth their while.
- force installers to let the user choose where on the start menu items are to go
- allow users to quickly and easily re-organize the Start menu
- get rid of the "all users" vs "my" shortcut dupes issues (i.e. reorganize the "my" folder and now you have dupe links because the "all users" links are in the original location
- improve the MRU and quick-pick lists so that users can easily discover and use them
- improve the Quick Launch toolbar, again more discoverable and easier to organize/clean up
Adding a search is neat (and necessary to keep up with the Jones's/Apples/Googles), but it should be a fall-back to having things quickly and intuitively accessible. If we're to revert to the keyboard, then give me an improved shell and give me back the RAM wasted on GUI stuff I'm not using.I believe that one can be non-naieve (sic) and still Do The Right Thing. Yes, it could have negative immediate consequences, but the alternative could have significantly worse long term consequences...
Err...in the immortal words
In addition, many people that I know who "carry blackberries" also have flexible schedules at work. I, for one, am able to leave when meetings are completed if I so desire. I get my 40+ hours done, just not always between 9 and 5. I usually am here before 9 and gone around 5, but I have the flexibility and freedom to alter that. I'm sure that if I was to abuse that freedom that I'd have 40+ hours of free time and no blackberry to worry about...with such freedom comes the responsibility to not abuse it (i.e. being responsive and completing work tasks).
The digital watch is still a pretty neat idea.
The OP says that he's 39. I suspect that if buddy has not yet established a (home) life for himself that having a (math) degree isn't going to help much at this point.
Simply hilarious!
Get it??? Get it??!!
It does, however, tell me a lot about the company you find yourself in the midst of.
So the only real ways to "win" is to educate the morons...either that or "win" by "accepting the status quo" (i.e. "drinking the artificially-flavoured-coloured-sugar water (tm)".)
They take some extremely popular movie X, slap DRM on it, sell millions of copies to a group of consumers (say teens) who don't necessarily value or "get" the subtleties of freedom and rights; they have a disc, view the movie, instant gratification relieved, get movie Y.
Unfortunately this business model is extremely effective for 5% of movies/music/games made. Excessively successful. So much so, that industry (who owns 99% of all content) decides that this model should be applied to 100% of content. So the other 95% doesn't sell...they write the problem off to poor quality or fickleness of the customer base. This is "the cost of doing business" thinking (put out 10 CDs with 10 formula-derived tracks hoping that at least one track goes super-hextillion-platinum).
See, the issues is that the vast majority of the public then is either forced to put up with reduced rights or to not get access to the media put out by this industry...which is just about everything. So either I lose my rights, or I lose the ability to see the (few) true quality pieces produced. And my attempting to argue that the latest "enviro-ware" movie (or whatever) should be released outside of their regular business model goes completely unanswered because there simply is not enough return-on-investment for them to consider anything less than super-hextillion-platinum.