Supported by IBM who supports Sen Hatch ...
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IT, Be Free!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I detect an inconsistency. Developer freedom is going to be under severe attack if every consumer application is going to have to be acceptable to the RIAA and their equivalent in other areas, yet IBM directly sponsors Sen Hatch who is pushing the INDUCE act forward.
We tend to consider IBM as the good guys because of their fight with SCO, but they cannot fail to see that a total clampdown on access to content effectively brings a sledgehammer down on much open source development.
The 2.6 linux kernel has been a roller coaster ride of development, and it was obvious from the switch from 2.5->2.6 that the kernel was far from ready for prime time.
OMG. If this is so, Linux is in for hard times, because regardless of what developers know to be the actual truth, the world considers 2.6 to be a stable kernel line. The even-stable / odd-development concept has a very long pedigree, and 2.6 was officially released as "stable" within that simple and clear scheme.
The lkml statement that 2.6 will no longer be regarded as a stable kernel, and that for stability people should seek assistance from distros, has horrible connotations. It comes close to suggesting that one should rely on commercial outlets instead of being able to rely on the power of the open community to create a stable product.
But your argument that outsourcing is OK rests on one very flawed assumption: that the people of the world are nothing more than labour.
But that wasn't my assumption, pretty much the opposite.
Different people have different talents and abilities, depending on their personal circumstances and their environment and culture. You can't expect an unfortunate barely literate 3rd-world ex-farmer who came in to the city to pack boxes for a US global megacorp to be designing the latest technological marvels or planning global marketting strategies, but he can certainly do a worthwhile job and earn a worthwhile wage by his own measure and for his own self-esteem. Nobody with any shred of decency supports slave labour, so by all means let's call for US and European global companies to provide good work conditions and higher than normal salaries when they set up abroad.
Globalisation, when described by a right-wing apologist, sounds like it might even work. But it has failed in every single host country it's been tried in, unless you ask the local corrupt governments, or the companies taking all the profits back to the US.
Those things exist, yes, but they're the corrupt old edge of globalization belonging to small-town days, which doesn't see the world as a whole at all. "Taking the profits home" makes no sense when home is the planet.
What protection does Oracle have from Chinese workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in China, or worse, in a Chinese company coming back to compete against Oracle in the States?
Hopefully, no protection whatsoever.
Oracle competes on excellence and through continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. The day that they call for protectionism is the day that they've started resting on their laurels and deserve to die.
Jeez folks, get out of this recent small-town myopia about outsourcing. You can do better than that. Dell's a good example of how excellent US industry can be if you shrug off yesterday's models and try to be genuinely different and quality-focussed, instead of regressive and protectionist.
If you complain about outsourcing you're merely buying into politician's agendas, effectively giving them an easy platform of "Vote for me and I will protect your jobs". Make great stuff and you don't need protectionism. And if you really value a free market, restrictions should be the last thing on your minds anyway.
The world is a tiny place now, you shouldn't be thinking about "keeping jobs at home" any more than you'd think about extracting all your raw materials from home too. That's not today's world. You can't compete on the basis of labour cost, that should be obvious; you need to be better.
Globalization of both the markets and the production has been immense in recent decades, and no megacorp can afford to chain itself down with yesterday's small-town views nor barriers against free flow of resources.
I may not realize or find out about it until well after you've started production and sales.
That will usually be the case. But if you're monitoring the market for potentially infringing products. you'll certainly learn about them within a year. The infrastructure for rapid discovery is all around us now, and it's vastly wider than just Google.:-)
After all, the manufacturer will be issuing press releases on launch and then advertising as well, otherwise he's not going to be shifting many units and so there won't be useful royalties from his business anyway. This is self-reinforcing: the only ones worth going after are those which you can detect easily in the marketplace.
A year is truly overkill for discovery, but it's a good round number, and I think most reasonable people would probably agree that making contact during the first year eliminates charges of patent submarining.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent.
I agree with the sentiment, but that doesn't actually help, as suing a company out of the blue 4 years and 11 months after they launched a product and worked hard to get it accepted in the market and made it profitable is still submarining.
Patent holders should be required to notify manufacturers about a believed infringement within the first year of an allegedly infringing product hitting the market, or else lose their patent. Suing is not the issue, but retaining claim to your invention definitely is (just like protecting a trademark), and unless you're closely monitoring the market for uptake of your idea then you really don't have any stake in it. A year is easily long enough to detect a product with "your" technology in the market.
A manufacturer needs to be told early in a product's life about potential infringement, so that terms can be agreed and royalties saved up on the books, or litigation prepared. It's the sudden claim for royalties late in the day which can wreck the manufacturer's business that is the big issue about submarining, namely hiding the claim until it is deemed convenient/profitable
Unfortunately, the conflict of interest created by their earning money from each patent ensures that they are not institutionally able to act ethically in this, and so they do indeed have it both ways.
The fault lies in their very foundations as a money-making organization. The fact that their actions are massively stifling innovation instead of promoting it would not be escaping their attention if this were not the case. As things stand though, they cannot possibly afford to listen to the worried whispers of their collective conscience.
Ouch, not "JAM" ! Non Java-centric "jam" exists
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Apache Maven 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
But there is a good middle ground between roll-your-own-ant and Maven, and it's called Javagen Ant Modules (JAM)...
That's very bad news, because the open-source build tool "jam" already exists and has been around for a very long time. And it's really good too.
People really ought to google a bit before picking names for their project tools. Sure, names can often be reused without conflict, but here both jam's are program build tools, and that's just plain short-sighted.
"Getting Microsoft technology for free" does not adequately express what's happening.
Fiat are obtaining poor technology with a doubtful future and with pretty nasty strings attached. They'd have done far better by bringing in either an open-source technology integrator (there are many) or joining the Symbian club of mobile device manufacturers. Instead, now they have all their eggs in the same iffy basket, and it's pretty easy to see that some of them have already broken and are starting to smell. Microsoft was never in the lead in integration nor in anything else except relative desktop prettiness, and now even that's in the past because others have caught up.
For what it's worth, I've had a Fiat, but I won't be buying any more if they're integrated with MS software. Even if it's not in life-critical systems, I'm not going to put up with poor technology. The crashed bank cash dispensers displaying their Windows logons may be funny, but the malaise actually runs very deep.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has just sworn off Fiat either.
Radio sets, chat shows, free concerts, charity
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 1
Concerts. It's how artists make their real money anyway...
Indeed, that's the traditional money earner for musicians who actually like to play live, and those still exist in reasonable numbers. It's not just tickets that help pay the rent, but direct CD sales and merchanising too. Not only does this bring a useful chunk of dough into wallets quickly, but it's great promotion too.
There are other ways of making money as a musician as well though. Above all else, you keep a website as a direct sales outlet, and you set up links with other bands who operate such sites. Musicians with similar backgrounds and tastes are nearly always going to be happy to help each other out.
Having done that, you start promoting yourself, bigtime! Do the rounds of the smaller radios with music shows -- many will be happy to host small live sets if they're into your kind of music. With the explosion in Internet radio, there is immense opportunity here. Outside of the RIAA brain-death zone, there's nothing a station likes more than broadcasting an exclusive set. (You need to be good, that goes without saying.)
That's a start, but there's a lot more that a musician or band can do to generate sales. You need to create buzz, and that means doing free concerts, assisting in charity events, going on chat shows, pumping the college gig circuits forever, helping out the local theatre groups, writing articles to the music papers, reviewing musical instruments, anything and everything...
It's continuous work, but we all work hard, and musicians aren't an exception to this. If you believe in yourself and are a real musician rather than a cut'n'paste artist, you can do it and the money will roll in, very slowly at first but more and more rapidly as you become better known. Fortunately the outgoings are remarkably low for a one-man startup in the music business, largely as a result of digital technology.
Persevere, and in the end you'll become not just a fully independent musician, but also an independent music business. And that's a pearl beyond price.
If it's as bad as portrayed, then those (alleged) poor underpaid PhDs have only themselves to blame for buying into the MBA's game. You shouldn't accept starting at the bottom of the employment ladder after getting a PhD.
Team together with other clever technical people (you don't even need to incorporate, though it helps), and make those MBAs that were allegedly getting your services on the cheap pay through the nose. It was hard getting a PhD, now it's time to profit from it.
I speak from experience, btw, as I went straight from academia to freelance contractor on pretty high rates (easy to do if you stick inside the field where you are a top expert). I made darn sure that those MBA wallets suffered.:-)
... do you also bitch that you had to buy a VCR to watch video tapes?
Again you're making no sense, because the physical counterpart to the VCR is the computer, and Linux users don't complain about having to buy their computers.
You can not make money on Linux software...
Sure you can. Create something new that isn't already provided free, and people who need that functionality will buy it. (If they don't buy it then they really didn't need it, or the price was much too high.)
The trouble with the moaners like you is that you don't produce anything novel enough to be worth buying.
Linux users aren't going to be happy unless it's free (speech) and free (beer).
You're making no sense. Linux users don't want everything free, they just don't want to pay twice over.
I bought my DVDs, with hard-earned cash, and they most definitely weren't free. I'll be blowed if I'm going to pay again, just to be "allowed" to play them on my own computer.
Your opinion that all people who want to license ideas are "patent squatters" is noted.
That's not what I said though. Those that actively seek out interested parties and try to license their ideas (regardless of the form of their participation) are not squatting.
The squatters are those who amass patents and just sit on them, letting time pass and opportunities slip away while reducing the world's pool of unencumbered ideas. They seem to think that the world owes them a continuous free lunch for doing not much at all, and in some cases, for doing absolutely nothing.
This practice allows companies that might not otherwise be able to have the latest manufacturing technique to benefit without having to dump millions into research.
That makes no sense: if those non-research companies would have had to dump millions into research to replicate the novel idea for themselves, then this implies that the research house that got the patent spent millions on the research too. If they spent millions (or a lot anyway), how come that now they're willing to let that investment go to waste by leaving the patent dormant and the concept unimplemented? It would make no sense.
Of course, it makes no sense because in most cases that's not what actually happened --- with very few exceptions, the research house didn't spend millions researching an idea, otherwise they wouldn't be willing to let all that money go to waste. And yet, despite not spending much money at all on it, they expect to be earning millions from it anyway on the backs of other people's efforts? That's severely wrong, and not what patents were designed for. They weren't created as a free lunch for speculators. They certainly weren't created for carving out a profitable market niche in some distant future, just because one happened to get the concept on paper long before the market would make it implementable.
Ideas are two a penny --- I should know since I've been in research for 30 years, both academic and commercial. I come up with new ideas every working day since that's my job, and if I were an unprincipled patent whore I could come up with a pile of potentially patentable concepts each year easy, of which I'd expect at least 10% to survive the prior art checks. Do I? Of course not, the patent situation is bad enough already without feeding it more fuel. Instead, the better ideas are woven into products or infrastructure, and the less good ones are fed back into the global sea of ideas just by talking to people. For the most part, that's what research is about --- exchanging ideas with the world, not grabbing them out of the pool and claiming exclusive rights.
If the research house doesn't want to get involved in any sort of manufacturing arrangement whatsoever after taking out a patent, not even by licensing or partnership or subcontracting (which is very common for REAL research labs that do spend real money on research), and instead they just sit on the patent, then they're patent squatters too, nearly as bad as the corporate squatters made up of purely parasitic lawyers. They sure as hell have no special attachment to their wonderful new idea if they make no moves to get it implemented commercially, which is MUCH harder than thinking it up. Under those circumstances, once a certain (quite short) period has elapsed, the idea should be freed from further restraint. Product cycles are becoming ever shorter, and 5 years is now an eternity.
Let me say it again, slightly differently. Impeding the takeup of ideas into products is not what patents are for, and that's exactly what you're doing if you sit on a patent for more than a typical product cycle. If it wasn't licensed from you in the first few years after your patent was published then the idea is not worth enough in the market to cover the royalty payments, in which case you are simply denying the world from having the corresponding products and nobody is gaining anything. That serves no purpose.
If these stupid patents aren't allowed to be created in the first place then groups like the EFF wouldn't have to fight to get them overturned later.
It's not just stupid patents that are bad though. Patent squatting (just sitting on patents) should be 100% illegal, as it just impedes the use of certain ideas by making them more costly than others.
Patents were intended as a means of helping inventors get novel products to market by creating a brief and artificial "honeymoon" period. Patent squatting is a complete corruption of that idea.
If you are not bringing product to market, you have no moral right to sit on an idea in the hope that someone else will do the hard work of developing a raw concept into a working reality. Companies with teams of lawyers that merely patent squat and actually create nothing are simply scum.
Patents should expire by default within 3 years unless you confirm in writing to the patent office that you are actively working on something that uses the patented idea as a central component or feature. And *all* patents should expire within 10 years, regardless, because skewing the market this way should only be a temporary condition.
Increasing the cost of ideas is not in the interest of humanity at all.
wouldnt it make more sense to package a label printing facility as part of Open Office as apposed to a standalone application ?
Absolutely NOT!!! The last thing we want to do is install a massive bloatware suite when all we need is one specific and well-defined function.
Open Office has its good points, for those with needs that mirror the many things that it offers. For everyone else, it's a throwback to the integrated packages of the past, and a major pain.
Why throw a ton of people into quickly improving an emerging new technology when we can split all those people up into smaller teams to try & develop the same thing from several different angles.
Although you're clearly trolling on behalf of megacorp cathedrals, the point which you intended as simple sarcasm is actually true: dividing that ton of people into smaller teams will quite often result in a better product. You seem to have entirely lost sight of that rather well proven concept of "competition". On top of that, when done properly, small teams can create very tight products that do a specific job extremely well, instead of the multi-purpose bloatware that comes out of the likes of Microsoft and Sun.
Furthermore, multiple smaller teams can churn out products that users need instead of the product that some manufacturer wants to release, and this also lets users choose between several alternatives. People are all different, one person's gems are another person's junk, and anyway, people just like to have choices.
So yes, you were right... not in your intented point, but in the words you wrote while meaning the exact opposite.
This whole business of "signal theft" is getting out of hand. The signal was theirs only as long as it was in their circuits, as it could be said that the electrons in their equipment are their personal property.
But the electromagnetic waves induced in space by their transmitters, how the hell can they be property? OK, maybe they induce the near-field boundary disturbance directly, but beyond that the wave is self-inducing and self-propagating.
If the EM signal that reaches my house is indeed their property, what the hell is it doing entering my property without my permission? If they have the right to sue for signal theft, then I have the right to sue for trespass.:-)
It just goes to show that the law is a real ass when it comes to technology. "Signal theft" and "music piracy" both rank among the top legal idiocies of the modern age.
Just a reminder to people that you can't believe a word that a politician says.
Sadly, a lot (the majority) of people still believe that the concepts typically taught in Politics 101 actually operate that way in the "democratic west". That's so naive that it's not even funny. The article linked a pretty good summary of the subversion of the democratic process that should dispell any childish misconceptions about that.
The only means we have of changing the course of history is through voting (I exclude suggestions relating to guns etc, they'll only accelerate the current bad path, afaics), but our voted directives are being entirely bypassed by those who wish a different outcome. This makes it pretty clear what the future holds.
Software freedom is being forced underground. In due course (dozens of years I expect, not one or two), writing a program openly outside of a rigorously patent-controlled corporate environment will be considered an act of economic terrorism or subversion.
The poster raises an interesting question (without actually stating it explicitly), since pillar width determines lateral stability.
The engineer in me would want to provide such a high bridge with a huge safety margin in lateral stability by adding pillar support stays perpendicular to the bridge span. It's not just for sheer massive bolstering either, but can be used as part of a frequency-tuned sway damping system.
I sure hope that they over-spec'ed the pillar widths to provide distributed lateral bolstering. Bridges have been known to collapse in adverse conditions.
Several people here have already addressed the issue of legality in their countries by pointing out that parallel imports are legal for them. Unfortunately, this would seem to leave everyone else doing something illegal under their local law, if that were the end of the story. But it is not.
What is "legal" is not necesssarily right or moral, and the actions of the RIAA and its cohorts definitely places them in the wrong. It is not the same world today as it was back in the days of vinyl, yet the cartels have steadfastly refused to reflect the virtual elimination of replication and distribution costs for digital music in their pricing. Instead of adapting to a new world, they corrupt the lawmakers to provide them with bully boys to enforce their claimed right to continued profits in perpetuity.
Well, sorry, the new generation isn't having any of that rubbish. The founding fathers left a land of repression for the freedom of a new world. Now their offspring are turning to Russia for their freedom. If somebody at home isn't getting the message, they should.
There's got to be rip-on-the-fly functionality in there too, as well as encode-on-the-fly, because in no way could any sane operation pre-rip every known CD.
Their hard disk storage is probably configured as an intermediate cache (well that's how I'd do it anyway), with cache-load requests coming up on the monitors of a bunch of unskilled temp employees who have the task of loading newly requested CDs into the racks of CDROM drives, ejecting the LRU CD as instructed.
And even this group of people probably forms a cache which feeds its misses as requests to the poor sods who have to run out into the Russian weather to chase down obscure CDs in the shops.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I detect an inconsistency. Developer freedom is going to be under severe attack if every consumer application is going to have to be acceptable to the RIAA and their equivalent in other areas, yet IBM directly sponsors Sen Hatch who is pushing the INDUCE act forward.
We tend to consider IBM as the good guys because of their fight with SCO, but they cannot fail to see that a total clampdown on access to content effectively brings a sledgehammer down on much open source development.
The 2.6 linux kernel has been a roller coaster ride of development, and it was obvious from the switch from 2.5->2.6 that the kernel was far from ready for prime time.
OMG. If this is so, Linux is in for hard times, because regardless of what developers know to be the actual truth, the world considers 2.6 to be a stable kernel line. The even-stable / odd-development concept has a very long pedigree, and 2.6 was officially released as "stable" within that simple and clear scheme.
The lkml statement that 2.6 will no longer be regarded as a stable kernel, and that for stability people should seek assistance from distros, has horrible connotations. It comes close to suggesting that one should rely on commercial outlets instead of being able to rely on the power of the open community to create a stable product.
I forsee a lot of bad press coming from this.
But your argument that outsourcing is OK rests on one very flawed assumption: that the people of the world are nothing more than labour.
But that wasn't my assumption, pretty much the opposite.
Different people have different talents and abilities, depending on their personal circumstances and their environment and culture. You can't expect an unfortunate barely literate 3rd-world ex-farmer who came in to the city to pack boxes for a US global megacorp to be designing the latest technological marvels or planning global marketting strategies, but he can certainly do a worthwhile job and earn a worthwhile wage by his own measure and for his own self-esteem. Nobody with any shred of decency supports slave labour, so by all means let's call for US and European global companies to provide good work conditions and higher than normal salaries when they set up abroad.
Globalisation, when described by a right-wing apologist, sounds like it might even work. But it has failed in every single host country it's been tried in, unless you ask the local corrupt governments, or the companies taking all the profits back to the US.
Those things exist, yes, but they're the corrupt old edge of globalization belonging to small-town days, which doesn't see the world as a whole at all. "Taking the profits home" makes no sense when home is the planet.
What protection does Oracle have from Chinese workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in China, or worse, in a Chinese company coming back to compete against Oracle in the States?
Hopefully, no protection whatsoever.
Oracle competes on excellence and through continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. The day that they call for protectionism is the day that they've started resting on their laurels and deserve to die.
Jeez folks, get out of this recent small-town myopia about outsourcing. You can do better than that. Dell's a good example of how excellent US industry can be if you shrug off yesterday's models and try to be genuinely different and quality-focussed, instead of regressive and protectionist.
If you complain about outsourcing you're merely buying into politician's agendas, effectively giving them an easy platform of "Vote for me and I will protect your jobs". Make great stuff and you don't need protectionism. And if you really value a free market, restrictions should be the last thing on your minds anyway.
The world is a tiny place now, you shouldn't be thinking about "keeping jobs at home" any more than you'd think about extracting all your raw materials from home too. That's not today's world. You can't compete on the basis of labour cost, that should be obvious; you need to be better.
Globalization of both the markets and the production has been immense in recent decades, and no megacorp can afford to chain itself down with yesterday's small-town views nor barriers against free flow of resources.
I may not realize or find out about it until well after you've started production and sales.
:-)
That will usually be the case. But if you're monitoring the market for potentially infringing products. you'll certainly learn about them within a year. The infrastructure for rapid discovery is all around us now, and it's vastly wider than just Google.
After all, the manufacturer will be issuing press releases on launch and then advertising as well, otherwise he's not going to be shifting many units and so there won't be useful royalties from his business anyway. This is self-reinforcing: the only ones worth going after are those which you can detect easily in the marketplace.
A year is truly overkill for discovery, but it's a good round number, and I think most reasonable people would probably agree that making contact during the first year eliminates charges of patent submarining.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent.
I agree with the sentiment, but that doesn't actually help, as suing a company out of the blue 4 years and 11 months after they launched a product and worked hard to get it accepted in the market and made it profitable is still submarining.
Patent holders should be required to notify manufacturers about a believed infringement within the first year of an allegedly infringing product hitting the market, or else lose their patent. Suing is not the issue, but retaining claim to your invention definitely is (just like protecting a trademark), and unless you're closely monitoring the market for uptake of your idea then you really don't have any stake in it. A year is easily long enough to detect a product with "your" technology in the market.
A manufacturer needs to be told early in a product's life about potential infringement, so that terms can be agreed and royalties saved up on the books, or litigation prepared. It's the sudden claim for royalties late in the day which can wreck the manufacturer's business that is the big issue about submarining, namely hiding the claim until it is deemed convenient/profitable
They can't have it both ways
That is a very good point.
Unfortunately, the conflict of interest created by their earning money from each patent ensures that they are not institutionally able to act ethically in this, and so they do indeed have it both ways.
The fault lies in their very foundations as a money-making organization. The fact that their actions are massively stifling innovation instead of promoting it would not be escaping their attention if this were not the case. As things stand though, they cannot possibly afford to listen to the worried whispers of their collective conscience.
But there is a good middle ground between roll-your-own-ant and Maven, and it's called Javagen Ant Modules (JAM) ...
That's very bad news, because the open-source build tool "jam" already exists and has been around for a very long time. And it's really good too.
People really ought to google a bit before picking names for their project tools. Sure, names can often be reused without conflict, but here both jam's are program build tools, and that's just plain short-sighted.
The PHBs were very impressed ...
I didn't follow whether this was intended as praise or criticism.
"Getting Microsoft technology for free" does not adequately express what's happening.
Fiat are obtaining poor technology with a doubtful future and with pretty nasty strings attached. They'd have done far better by bringing in either an open-source technology integrator (there are many) or joining the Symbian club of mobile device manufacturers. Instead, now they have all their eggs in the same iffy basket, and it's pretty easy to see that some of them have already broken and are starting to smell. Microsoft was never in the lead in integration nor in anything else except relative desktop prettiness, and now even that's in the past because others have caught up.
For what it's worth, I've had a Fiat, but I won't be buying any more if they're integrated with MS software. Even if it's not in life-critical systems, I'm not going to put up with poor technology. The crashed bank cash dispensers displaying their Windows logons may be funny, but the malaise actually runs very deep.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has just sworn off Fiat either.
Concerts. It's how artists make their real money anyway...
...
Indeed, that's the traditional money earner for musicians who actually like to play live, and those still exist in reasonable numbers. It's not just tickets that help pay the rent, but direct CD sales and merchanising too. Not only does this bring a useful chunk of dough into wallets quickly, but it's great promotion too.
There are other ways of making money as a musician as well though. Above all else, you keep a website as a direct sales outlet, and you set up links with other bands who operate such sites. Musicians with similar backgrounds and tastes are nearly always going to be happy to help each other out.
Having done that, you start promoting yourself, bigtime! Do the rounds of the smaller radios with music shows -- many will be happy to host small live sets if they're into your kind of music. With the explosion in Internet radio, there is immense opportunity here. Outside of the RIAA brain-death zone, there's nothing a station likes more than broadcasting an exclusive set. (You need to be good, that goes without saying.)
That's a start, but there's a lot more that a musician or band can do to generate sales. You need to create buzz, and that means doing free concerts, assisting in charity events, going on chat shows, pumping the college gig circuits forever, helping out the local theatre groups, writing articles to the music papers, reviewing musical instruments, anything and everything
It's continuous work, but we all work hard, and musicians aren't an exception to this. If you believe in yourself and are a real musician rather than a cut'n'paste artist, you can do it and the money will roll in, very slowly at first but more and more rapidly as you become better known. Fortunately the outgoings are remarkably low for a one-man startup in the music business, largely as a result of digital technology.
Persevere, and in the end you'll become not just a fully independent musician, but also an independent music business. And that's a pearl beyond price.
If it's as bad as portrayed, then those (alleged) poor underpaid PhDs have only themselves to blame for buying into the MBA's game. You shouldn't accept starting at the bottom of the employment ladder after getting a PhD.
:-)
Team together with other clever technical people (you don't even need to incorporate, though it helps), and make those MBAs that were allegedly getting your services on the cheap pay through the nose. It was hard getting a PhD, now it's time to profit from it.
I speak from experience, btw, as I went straight from academia to freelance contractor on pretty high rates (easy to do if you stick inside the field where you are a top expert). I made darn sure that those MBA wallets suffered.
... do you also bitch that you had to buy a VCR to watch video tapes?
...
Again you're making no sense, because the physical counterpart to the VCR is the computer, and Linux users don't complain about having to buy their computers.
You can not make money on Linux software
Sure you can. Create something new that isn't already provided free, and people who need that functionality will buy it. (If they don't buy it then they really didn't need it, or the price was much too high.)
The trouble with the moaners like you is that you don't produce anything novel enough to be worth buying.
Linux users aren't going to be happy unless it's free (speech) and free (beer).
You're making no sense. Linux users don't want everything free, they just don't want to pay twice over.
I bought my DVDs, with hard-earned cash, and they most definitely weren't free. I'll be blowed if I'm going to pay again, just to be "allowed" to play them on my own computer.
Your opinion that all people who want to license ideas are "patent squatters" is noted.
That's not what I said though. Those that actively seek out interested parties and try to license their ideas (regardless of the form of their participation) are not squatting.
The squatters are those who amass patents and just sit on them, letting time pass and opportunities slip away while reducing the world's pool of unencumbered ideas. They seem to think that the world owes them a continuous free lunch for doing not much at all, and in some cases, for doing absolutely nothing.
This practice allows companies that might not otherwise be able to have the latest manufacturing technique to benefit without having to dump millions into research.
That makes no sense: if those non-research companies would have had to dump millions into research to replicate the novel idea for themselves, then this implies that the research house that got the patent spent millions on the research too. If they spent millions (or a lot anyway), how come that now they're willing to let that investment go to waste by leaving the patent dormant and the concept unimplemented? It would make no sense.
Of course, it makes no sense because in most cases that's not what actually happened --- with very few exceptions, the research house didn't spend millions researching an idea, otherwise they wouldn't be willing to let all that money go to waste. And yet, despite not spending much money at all on it, they expect to be earning millions from it anyway on the backs of other people's efforts? That's severely wrong, and not what patents were designed for. They weren't created as a free lunch for speculators. They certainly weren't created for carving out a profitable market niche in some distant future, just because one happened to get the concept on paper long before the market would make it implementable.
Ideas are two a penny --- I should know since I've been in research for 30 years, both academic and commercial. I come up with new ideas every working day since that's my job, and if I were an unprincipled patent whore I could come up with a pile of potentially patentable concepts each year easy, of which I'd expect at least 10% to survive the prior art checks. Do I? Of course not, the patent situation is bad enough already without feeding it more fuel. Instead, the better ideas are woven into products or infrastructure, and the less good ones are fed back into the global sea of ideas just by talking to people. For the most part, that's what research is about --- exchanging ideas with the world, not grabbing them out of the pool and claiming exclusive rights.
If the research house doesn't want to get involved in any sort of manufacturing arrangement whatsoever after taking out a patent, not even by licensing or partnership or subcontracting (which is very common for REAL research labs that do spend real money on research), and instead they just sit on the patent, then they're patent squatters too, nearly as bad as the corporate squatters made up of purely parasitic lawyers. They sure as hell have no special attachment to their wonderful new idea if they make no moves to get it implemented commercially, which is MUCH harder than thinking it up. Under those circumstances, once a certain (quite short) period has elapsed, the idea should be freed from further restraint. Product cycles are becoming ever shorter, and 5 years is now an eternity.
Let me say it again, slightly differently. Impeding the takeup of ideas into products is not what patents are for, and that's exactly what you're doing if you sit on a patent for more than a typical product cycle. If it wasn't licensed from you in the first few years after your patent was published then the idea is not worth enough in the market to cover the royalty payments, in which case you are simply denying the world from having the corresponding products and nobody is gaining anything. That serves no purpose.
If these stupid patents aren't allowed to be created in the first place then groups like the EFF wouldn't have to fight to get them overturned later.
It's not just stupid patents that are bad though. Patent squatting (just sitting on patents) should be 100% illegal, as it just impedes the use of certain ideas by making them more costly than others.
Patents were intended as a means of helping inventors get novel products to market by creating a brief and artificial "honeymoon" period. Patent squatting is a complete corruption of that idea.
If you are not bringing product to market, you have no moral right to sit on an idea in the hope that someone else will do the hard work of developing a raw concept into a working reality. Companies with teams of lawyers that merely patent squat and actually create nothing are simply scum.
Patents should expire by default within 3 years unless you confirm in writing to the patent office that you are actively working on something that uses the patented idea as a central component or feature. And *all* patents should expire within 10 years, regardless, because skewing the market this way should only be a temporary condition.
Increasing the cost of ideas is not in the interest of humanity at all.
wouldnt it make more sense to package a label printing facility as part of Open Office as apposed to a standalone application ?
Absolutely NOT!!! The last thing we want to do is install a massive bloatware suite when all we need is one specific and well-defined function.
Open Office has its good points, for those with needs that mirror the many things that it offers. For everyone else, it's a throwback to the integrated packages of the past, and a major pain.
Why throw a ton of people into quickly improving an emerging new technology when we can split all those people up into smaller teams to try & develop the same thing from several different angles.
... not in your intented point, but in the words you wrote while meaning the exact opposite.
Although you're clearly trolling on behalf of megacorp cathedrals, the point which you intended as simple sarcasm is actually true: dividing that ton of people into smaller teams will quite often result in a better product. You seem to have entirely lost sight of that rather well proven concept of "competition". On top of that, when done properly, small teams can create very tight products that do a specific job extremely well, instead of the multi-purpose bloatware that comes out of the likes of Microsoft and Sun.
Furthermore, multiple smaller teams can churn out products that users need instead of the product that some manufacturer wants to release, and this also lets users choose between several alternatives. People are all different, one person's gems are another person's junk, and anyway, people just like to have choices.
So yes, you were right
... use their devices for signal theft ...
:-)
This whole business of "signal theft" is getting out of hand. The signal was theirs only as long as it was in their circuits, as it could be said that the electrons in their equipment are their personal property.
But the electromagnetic waves induced in space by their transmitters, how the hell can they be property? OK, maybe they induce the near-field boundary disturbance directly, but beyond that the wave is self-inducing and self-propagating.
If the EM signal that reaches my house is indeed their property, what the hell is it doing entering my property without my permission? If they have the right to sue for signal theft, then I have the right to sue for trespass.
It just goes to show that the law is a real ass when it comes to technology. "Signal theft" and "music piracy" both rank among the top legal idiocies of the modern age.
Just a reminder to people that you can't believe a word that a politician says.
Sadly, a lot (the majority) of people still believe that the concepts typically taught in Politics 101 actually operate that way in the "democratic west". That's so naive that it's not even funny. The article linked a pretty good summary of the subversion of the democratic process that should dispell any childish misconceptions about that.
The only means we have of changing the course of history is through voting (I exclude suggestions relating to guns etc, they'll only accelerate the current bad path, afaics), but our voted directives are being entirely bypassed by those who wish a different outcome. This makes it pretty clear what the future holds.
Software freedom is being forced underground. In due course (dozens of years I expect, not one or two), writing a program openly outside of a rigorously patent-controlled corporate environment will be considered an act of economic terrorism or subversion.
Kind of sad really.
The poster raises an interesting question (without actually stating it explicitly), since pillar width determines lateral stability.
The engineer in me would want to provide such a high bridge with a huge safety margin in lateral stability by adding pillar support stays perpendicular to the bridge span. It's not just for sheer massive bolstering either, but can be used as part of a frequency-tuned sway damping system.
I sure hope that they over-spec'ed the pillar widths to provide distributed lateral bolstering. Bridges have been known to collapse in adverse conditions.
Several people here have already addressed the issue of legality in their countries by pointing out that parallel imports are legal for them. Unfortunately, this would seem to leave everyone else doing something illegal under their local law, if that were the end of the story. But it is not.
What is "legal" is not necesssarily right or moral, and the actions of the RIAA and its cohorts definitely places them in the wrong. It is not the same world today as it was back in the days of vinyl, yet the cartels have steadfastly refused to reflect the virtual elimination of replication and distribution costs for digital music in their pricing. Instead of adapting to a new world, they corrupt the lawmakers to provide them with bully boys to enforce their claimed right to continued profits in perpetuity.
Well, sorry, the new generation isn't having any of that rubbish. The founding fathers left a land of repression for the freedom of a new world. Now their offspring are turning to Russia for their freedom. If somebody at home isn't getting the message, they should.
There's got to be rip-on-the-fly functionality in there too, as well as encode-on-the-fly, because in no way could any sane operation pre-rip every known CD.
:-)
Their hard disk storage is probably configured as an intermediate cache (well that's how I'd do it anyway), with cache-load requests coming up on the monitors of a bunch of unskilled temp employees who have the task of loading newly requested CDs into the racks of CDROM drives, ejecting the LRU CD as instructed.
And even this group of people probably forms a cache which feeds its misses as requests to the poor sods who have to run out into the Russian weather to chase down obscure CDs in the shops.