Who says not giving competitors tech specs is bad?
on
Intel Antitrust Trial
·
· Score: 1
Why should Intel (or anyone else) *have* to give competitors an inside track on the technical specs of future products? Last time I checked, it's not illegal to keep your competitors in the dark.
Intel produces a lot more than CPU chips -- and it's known that incompatibility with motherboards' chipsets is a serious problems for competing processors. Not to mention "secret" and "patented" CPU connectors (slot 1, 2...)
Since splitting up MS would be unlikely and making them pay for "damages" would probably be useless, I think forcing them to lisence Windows is the only solution.
Why not? If damages will be more than what Mcirsosft can pay, Microsoft, Gates and all that stuff will be gone forever.
English borrows heavily from Latin. Does that mean that Latin isn't "out"
Ancient Romans, if they lived now, will be unable to understand English, leave along recognise it as Latin. Unix users however recognise Linux as their system.
Beyond that. BeOS is not Mach based, though it does have a POSIX interface, as does NT. Same goes for MacOS 10. This doesn't make any of them "UNIX" or even UN*X.
BeOS and NT have "POSIX" implementation that barely satisfies basic requirements to comply with POSIX.1. Quality of implementation in both is below the lowest standards, and both BeOS and Windows NT aren't really designed to be used with that.
BTW, "Unix" and "POSIX" aren't the same standards (at least what is commonly recognized as "Unix" -- what TOG says is different matter). Unified file descriptors, one of the cornerstones of Unix philosophy, for example, aren't present in BeOS and NT.
I mean, what? Microsfot will ship an IE-less Windows 98/Win2k? That doesn't hurt them, Netscape is already dead(err..bought by AOL..same thing). I just don't see what could really happen that would make Microsoft a "loser" in this trial.
If Microsoft loses, there will be no "punishment" -- Microsoft is not a person, so the action, government will take, is not predefined by any law, it can be anything that fixes the damage, and damage is enormous, it can be evaluated as more than Microsoft, Gates, or whatever else can pay in any form. The goal is the elimination of Microsoft's current position on the market because there is no reasonable way to fix situation while keeping Microsoft continuing this practice, and it will make no point for government to do anything less than that.
However if it will be done, Microsoft will be unable to compete at all -- it will either die (what will be well deserved), or become completely different, and definitely not as powerful kind of company (what will be enough to bring enough sanity back into the situation to let others fix things).
The only two things he is most likely guilty in are increasing number of MCSE by one (so M$ will brag about it more), and probably keeping NT working in situation where it deserves to burn and be thrown away. Pretty bad by my standards, but it's nothing compared to working for M$.
FWIW, I have a GNU/Linux with 96 megs of memory and I go into swap all the time.
It will use swap even if you'll have more RAM than your current swap plus current RAM size -- try to disable swap, and you'll see that things will still work, unless you run something huge.
I was told that they didn't hire unix programmers because "they have bad habits that they carry over". I believe that those bad habits included things like not assuming that sizeof(int)==2, writing portable code, and checking return codes.
See this list -- among stupid mistakes there are some valid Unix techniques that can't be used on Windows.
Seems like a lot of you really need to make up your minds. A great deal of the time you're saying, "Linux is so awesome, it's gonna destroy Microsoft, d00d!" Then by the time the next thread comes along, you're up in arms, screaming, "How dare Micro$uck say that they're not a monopoly! They have no competition!" Please make up your minds already. If Microsoft is really a monopoly, then you must believe that Linux will be relegated to irrelevancy unless the government wins this anti-trust suit. Given the odds that anything meaningful will happen to Microsoft as a result of this suit -- very small -- you guys really do have a lot to be worried about.
Microsoft does have a competition -- other companies that produce commercial operating systems and applications. And Microsoft uses illegal business practices to hurt that competition, and almost everything else in sight.
In addition to commercial operating systems there are noncommercial ones, that even if they had 99.9% of total installations, still have no relevance to the case because Microsoft will still have a monopoly in the commercial operating systems market. The facts that Microsoft doesn't like Linux, or that Linux, being developed noncommercially, can hurt Microsoft, are quite irrelevant, too, because Microsoft still doesn't do any noncommercial OS development, and noncommercial OS development is supported by large number of individuals, not companies that compete with Microsoft.
I assume, PCs with preinstalled Windows NT Workstation are counted as workstations, even though most of them are only upgrades for PCs that were running Windows 95. This gives nice statistics for Microsoft -- huge number of boxes that are used mostly as as typewriters moved from "PCs" with Windows 95 to "Workstations" class, however it doesn't change the fact that they still perform tasks of PC, not workstation.
Don't even DARE tell me that a multiple charset approach such as the ISO-2022 crap is better.
Why not make a better labeling system? The idea of one huge charset that includes everything else is still flawed, that fact that existing alternatives are bad doesn't change it.
As for those Asian and European stances about it, they are no better than an American saying "just use ASCII for everything". They have something that works for their narrow uses and couldn't care less about a solution that works for everyone in the world.
It does not work for "everyone in the world". Japanese don't like it, Chinese don't like it, Koreans don't like it, Russians (myself included) don't like it, etc. Who does? People who speak English (first 128 Unicode symbols are ASCII) or use Latin-1 (first 256 Unicode symbols are iso8859-1). No one else.
Unicode is an attempt to bring "happiness to the world" by forcing one narrow-minded vision on people who don't approve it, by telling them that "others" like it. There is no "others". No one uses it or likes it except people whose existing charsets happened to "coincide" with the beginning of Unicode table (so they remain using their charsets, possibly inserting more bytes into their strings).
I certainly prefer to use koi8-r for Cyrillic and have MIME headers in mail and web pages tell me what charset and language is used. With the lack of better solution I can use multipart MIME message to represent document with multiple languages. I will prefer to have better way of handling multiple charsets/languages (even though personally I never deal with documents that contain more than one language other than English, and ASCII is a common subset, representable in all charsets), but there is no better way now, and Unicode certainly is worse than that.
As for Microsoft, if it makes you feel better you should know that their implementation has the usual flaws and violations of the standard that Microsoft always has when they try to use an open standard.
It's poor implementation of poor standard.
Don't let them distract you from the best technical solution.
It definitely isn't the best of what can be made, and what is worse, it's a dead end -- no possibility for improvement because the whole concept of language is thrown out of the window.
Please don't confuse two things. "Unicode support" mentioned in the article is not what Linux, or Unix, or people need -- Unicode is a half-assed way to support displaying text in multiple languages without really supporting any of those languages. The problem of multiple language support is much bigger than the use of some overbloated alphabet, it still needs a good solution, developed with clear understanding, what exactly is necessary to make the use of text in multiple languages suitable for reading and processing. Unicode solves small part of the problem (how to represent and display a string with text in multiple languages) but makes impossible to solve anything else -- the basic question "what language is this word in?" can't be answered after the text is converted to Unicode.
I personally believe that there is no alternative to the development of text charset/language labeling system and format (that will use existing language and charset names -- no need to reinvant the wheel there). Maybe XML (without the requirement to use Unicode everywhere -- this requirement is to say the least, is odd in that standard) can provide such labeling, maybe inline MIME-ish labels will be useful, but plain extension the character size and requirement to use one "charset" for everything is just a way to sweep dust under the carpet. This is what we can expect from Microsoft (and they have done it, too -- but ask non-western-European Windows user if it helped) but what will be a huge step back for anything more advanced.
temptation for various e-commerce and other companies to *rely* on Processor ID. They know that IP addresses can change, MAC addresses may be nonexistent, and every piece of hardware that has ID, is changed so often, and may be not present in user's box, or move between boxes, so its ID is meaningless for user identification. Not so with CPU. One thing is, to say "Install Ethernet card, and our software will identify you by MAC address", another is "Since you already use Pentium III (or otherwise you couldn't make to this web site anyway), we will use your Processor ID to identify you, so please let our software to read it, or at least enter it by hand if you for some reason want to use a web browser". If there will be guaranteed that large number of people will choose not to have such ID, the idea will be useless because large number of people will be unable to provide ID even if in that particular case they had agreed if they had one, but otherwise company will be tempted to use it just like a lot of places [ab]use SSN.
Really. Why will I use software that reads this ID in the first place? If I'm law-abiding citizen, I will just use software that doesn't, and will make sure that it doesn't by compiling it myself. If I'm not, I will use some proprietary thing that reads it, run it under debugger (oh, debuggers vs. undebugable code wars again, but this time with complete hardware emulators available to general public) and fake ID, just like people fake credit card numbers. And since Intel chip becomes a "credit card" that costs >$100 to replace, things will be very interesting.
OK, you mention GIF so I'll talk about that (actually I beleive it is the LZW compression algorithm that GIF uses that is patented, but that's not really important). I think we can agree that GIF is a good format that filled a need that people had at the time. I argue that the format would not have been developed at all (or would have at least taken longer) if patents were not avaliable. Remove the incentive (all the money Unisys makes from patenting GIF) and there is no reason to inovate.
I have only mentioned the consequences of one, and very damaging, patent -- others things that I have given as examples, are gzip and PNG. You are completely wrong about the possibility that compressed image format will not be created if algorithms were not patentable. Some other compression algorithms and image formats were developed specifically to become non-patentable, and freely distributed, so if GIF and LZW never existed they could be replaced by anything else that would be developed at the time -- neither the idea of compression, nor the idea of image format was new at the moment. There is also a high probability that in this imaginable case moronic indexed 256 colors limit will never be introduced into image formats because most of people who develop image formats would know better than that, and if such thing appeared in the first release, someone will immediately point out that it's bad and should be extended.
Counter-examples are countless, and all of them deal with the same interoperability problem -- patent holder refuses to provide interoperability or allow implementation under reasonable license, and the whole world is either stuck because patented algorithm infected too many things around (GIF), or has to develop for free (just to compensate a damage, patent holder is creating) an alternative (gzip, JPEG, PNG).
In all other areas, with nonzero production costs, patent holder is more or less stimulated to constantly invest money into constantly making products containing patented idea. In software the "constantly" part doesn't work well -- patent holder makes something, and while there is a demand for the use of algorithm, the conditions (say, requirement of free license) aren't favorable for him if he will develop things complying to them while existing software produces profits without any further investment.
Forget "should." Be pragmatic, and think about "is." Neglecting a few minor exceptions, people work hard because they want a better house or car or computer or whatever. Basically they want money. That's life. That's economics.
Oh, Americans...:-( People want better life. What they do to achieve that, differs a lot. Some get more money (say, by writing software, getting a better job, robbing banks, etc.) then use those money to buy something. Some make things that they lacked (say, wooden chairs, photographs of flowers, unixlike kernels, HTTP servers, scientific articles with their ideas about prime numbers). Some learn to appreciate what they didn't appreciate before (say, the beauty of stars, art). Some do something to get higher position their person in their organizations/companies/... (improve their hunting, drink more beer, argue on company's meetings, pronounce long speeches before elections, make impressive contributions to software projects), etc. Most of people do things from every of those categories, and only brainwashed modern "cynics" that aren't even really cynical, just fascinated with money, explain everything in the terms of monetary value.
OK, let's say I spend a bunch of money on chemistry research and come up with a great new drug. Should I be able to patent that, so that I can make my money back?
Yes -- unless your patent happens to be a new use for existing chemical, and even if you have invented a drug there can be exceptions that disallow you to keep others from duplicating it.
OK, now let's say I spent a bunch of money to come up with a great encryption algorithm, should I be able to patent that, so that I can make my money back?
No because nothing prevents you to implement algorithm and sell software with it -- but if you will prevent others from using it, you will create a non-interoperable thing and disallow others to make anything compatible. You already have a benefit of being first, and giving you more will cause more damage than benefit. Patents aren't rights, they are given by the government (note -- patents are specific to countries where they are issued) to stimulate development of technology, and in cases where they do the opposite (hindering the development of communication programs) there is no justification for them.
What if I am a linguist? Should I take royalties from every use of alphabet?
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 16:05:29 -0800 (PST) From: Alex Belits To: webmaster@linux.com, webmaster@infomagic.nl Cc: webmaster@infomagic.com, ta@nl.net, torvalds@transmeta.com Subject: Comment about linux.com
Web site is poorly designed, does not display correctly in Netscape, contains no useful information, is written in poor style, and the comment about FrontPage demonstrates an incompetence of the author in the area of HTML development tools, available on Linux. Attempt ro submit comments returns FrontPage error.
The design of linux.com web site deeply insults me, and I believe that the name of Linux operating system (that is a tradematk of Linus Torvalds) should not be used in the association with this display of ignorance, incompetence and poor taste.
-- Alex
------------------------------------------------ ---------------------- Excellent.. now give users the option to cut your hair you hippie! -- Anonymous Coward
If the attack was done with browsers, and it can be shut off just by sending back large files, we are probably dealing with people who wrote software for Yorktown at one side, and warez kiddies on the other. However most likely people had a bit more clue, and attack was automated while response was just a ping flood. Not smart, but above the complete idiocy, described in the article.
One must protect his system by properly configuring it. I have seen a lot of people who got their boxes cracked because they configured them improperly, ignored advisories and updates, etc. -- this is the equivalent of having a house with no locks.
If someone launches the attack from vulnerable system he must expect that his vulnerability will be exploited, and it's pretty reasonable for attacked sysadmin to do that. However causing DoS for the whole ISP where the attacker's box is connected is stupid and irresponsible.
DoS by plain excessive use is a kind of attack, a lot of things are vulnerable to. In some cases it should be expected, and server should be just large enough to survive it unharmed. In some cases there is a need to respond to it by disabling requests from the source -- such attack often requires large resources and can't change the source easily. DoS of other kind may expose OS and applications insecurity, and then it may be necessary to replace both things -- but this is life.
god, i love sed. (but was it developed at AT&T by private funds, or at vast and ruinous expence at a federally funded university research program?!?!:)
Actually you most likely run a version that has no AT&T code -- either GNU or BSD sed. The original development of sed was AT&T, however don't forget that it's done in the area where AT&T's own business is heavily restricted.
...hanging on my belt (BTW, how one is supposed to carry that large and quite fragile thing? In a briefcase? under the arm? In the hand like a big clipboard? Even similar-looking things in Star Trek seem to be handled like big paper files are handled now, but those people have poor imagination anyway) and the most annoying problem is not a screen size or color (get rid of fluff, and everything fits nicely), not even a cable that connects PalmPilot with modem, or null modem/gender changer in it (fits nicely in the pocket), not even Metricom SE modem's antenna that sometimes refuses to stand upright, and not even a direction, where Metricom's LCD is pointed (away from me, not at the top where it can be read without turning it or disconnecting from the belt). It's a battery life time. Since the thing on the belt is not limited by weight as much as handheld PalmPilot or that WebPad, I have attached a pack of 4 "C" batteries to the same belt, so now the time, PalmPilot can spend constantly reconnecting to Ricochet is greater than the time, I spend outside of home, and things kinda work. However while people are accustomed to various stuff with antennas hanging off someone's belt, an open Radio Shack pack with batteries looks really strange to them.
With something that can be carried in the hand things are worse, you can't take a notebook without its carrying case and go around -- the weight of batteries that will last any reasonable time will be too much. Sure, Windows CE devices and PalmPilots normally work reasonable time, but most of people don't have wireless modems working as often as the purpose of this device suggests, and screens of PalmPilot and even some Windows CE boxes use less energy than magazine-sized color display of WebPad. If the problem with batteries will be solved, there is still some concern about those things being too large and fragile -- my PalmPilot fell from my hands/table/... multiple times, and once I had to re-solder its LCD cable (PITA with tools, designed for a bit larger components). Palm III case seems to be better, but what works for its size won't be of much help with large device unless something very radical will be done, like Palm III-style titanium case with screen cover.
I think, it will be a good idea to make a nice and inexpensive wearable with glasses-based display (with projection, reflected by the glasses, not "Borg-style" huge optical thing or "screen on the stick"). Glasses are easy to handle, easy to protect from damage, and they can be attached to the box (that can be heavy if necessary) with a cable, or even by RF link. Too bad, all displays of that kind, I have seen are either insanely expensive, or too low-quality to be of any use.
H-1 visa. But since it's hard to get a job while sitting outside US, you can get there by different type of visa, then ask for employment and visa change -- it's more or less a standard practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should Intel (or anyone else) *have* to give competitors an inside track on the technical specs of future products? Last time I checked, it's not illegal to keep your competitors in the dark.
Intel produces a lot more than CPU chips -- and it's known that incompatibility with motherboards' chipsets is a serious problems for competing processors. Not to mention "secret" and "patented" CPU connectors (slot 1, 2 ...)
Since splitting up MS would be unlikely and making them pay for "damages" would probably be useless, I think forcing them to lisence Windows is the only solution.
Why not? If damages will be more than what Mcirsosft can pay, Microsoft, Gates and all that stuff will be gone forever.
English borrows heavily from Latin. Does that mean that Latin isn't "out"
Ancient Romans, if they lived now, will be unable to understand English, leave along recognise it as Latin. Unix users however recognise Linux as their system.
Beyond that. BeOS is not Mach based, though it does have a POSIX interface, as does NT. Same goes for MacOS 10. This doesn't make any of them "UNIX" or even UN*X.
BeOS and NT have "POSIX" implementation that barely satisfies basic requirements to comply with POSIX.1. Quality of implementation in both is below the lowest standards, and both BeOS and Windows NT aren't really designed to be used with that.
BTW, "Unix" and "POSIX" aren't the same standards (at least what is commonly recognized as "Unix" -- what TOG says is different matter). Unified file descriptors, one of the cornerstones of Unix philosophy, for example, aren't present in BeOS and NT.
I mean, what? Microsfot will ship an IE-less Windows 98/Win2k? That doesn't hurt them, Netscape is already dead(err..bought by AOL..same thing). I just don't see what could really happen that would make Microsoft a "loser" in this trial.
If Microsoft loses, there will be no "punishment" -- Microsoft is not a person, so the action, government will take, is not predefined by any law, it can be anything that fixes the damage, and damage is enormous, it can be evaluated as more than Microsoft, Gates, or whatever else can pay in any form. The goal is the elimination of Microsoft's current position on the market because there is no reasonable way to fix situation while keeping Microsoft continuing this practice, and it will make no point for government to do anything less than that.
However if it will be done, Microsoft will be unable to compete at all -- it will either die (what will be well deserved), or become completely different, and definitely not as powerful kind of company (what will be enough to bring enough sanity back into the situation to let others fix things).
The only two things he is most likely guilty in are increasing number of MCSE by one (so M$ will brag about it more), and probably keeping NT working in situation where it deserves to burn and be thrown away. Pretty bad by my standards, but it's nothing compared to working for M$.
FWIW, I have a GNU/Linux with 96 megs of memory and I go into swap all the time.
It will use swap even if you'll have more RAM than your current swap plus current RAM size -- try to disable swap, and you'll see that things will still work, unless you run something huge.
I was told that they didn't hire unix programmers because "they have bad habits that they carry over". I believe that those bad habits included things like not assuming that sizeof(int)==2, writing portable code, and checking return codes.
See this list -- among stupid mistakes there are some valid Unix techniques that can't be used on Windows.
Seems like a lot of you really need to make up your minds. A great deal of the time you're saying, "Linux is so awesome, it's gonna destroy Microsoft, d00d!" Then by the time the next thread comes along, you're up in arms, screaming, "How dare Micro$uck say that they're not a monopoly! They have no competition!" Please make up your minds already. If Microsoft is really a monopoly, then you must believe that Linux will be relegated to irrelevancy unless the government wins this anti-trust suit. Given the odds that anything meaningful will happen to Microsoft as a result of this suit -- very small -- you guys really do have a lot to be worried about.
Microsoft does have a competition -- other companies that produce commercial operating systems and applications. And Microsoft uses illegal business practices to hurt that competition, and almost everything else in sight.
In addition to commercial operating systems there are noncommercial ones, that even if they had 99.9% of total installations, still have no relevance to the case because Microsoft will still have a monopoly in the commercial operating systems market. The facts that Microsoft doesn't like Linux, or that Linux, being developed noncommercially, can hurt Microsoft, are quite irrelevant, too, because Microsoft still doesn't do any noncommercial OS development, and noncommercial OS development is supported by large number of individuals, not companies that compete with Microsoft.
I assume, PCs with preinstalled Windows NT Workstation are counted as workstations, even though most of them are only upgrades for PCs that were running Windows 95. This gives nice statistics for Microsoft -- huge number of boxes that are used mostly as as typewriters moved from "PCs" with Windows 95 to "Workstations" class, however it doesn't change the fact that they still perform tasks of PC, not workstation.
Don't even DARE tell me that a multiple charset approach such as the ISO-2022 crap is better.
Why not make a better labeling system? The idea of one huge charset that includes everything else is still flawed, that fact that existing alternatives are bad doesn't change it.
As for those Asian and European stances about it, they are no better than an American saying "just use ASCII for everything". They have something that works for their narrow uses and couldn't care less about a solution that works for everyone in the world.
It does not work for "everyone in the world". Japanese don't like it, Chinese don't like it, Koreans don't like it, Russians (myself included) don't like it, etc. Who does? People who speak English (first 128 Unicode symbols are ASCII) or use Latin-1 (first 256 Unicode symbols are iso8859-1). No one else.
Unicode is an attempt to bring "happiness to the world" by forcing one narrow-minded vision on people who don't approve it, by telling them that "others" like it. There is no "others". No one uses it or likes it except people whose existing charsets happened to "coincide" with the beginning of Unicode table (so they remain using their charsets, possibly inserting more bytes into their strings).
I certainly prefer to use koi8-r for Cyrillic and have MIME headers in mail and web pages tell me what charset and language is used. With the lack of better solution I can use multipart MIME message to represent document with multiple languages. I will prefer to have better way of handling multiple charsets/languages (even though personally I never deal with documents that contain more than one language other than English, and ASCII is a common subset, representable in all charsets), but there is no better way now, and Unicode certainly is worse than that.
As for Microsoft, if it makes you feel better you should know that their implementation has the usual flaws and violations of the standard that Microsoft always has when they try to use an open standard.
It's poor implementation of poor standard.
Don't let them distract you from the best technical solution.
It definitely isn't the best of what can be made, and what is worse, it's a dead end -- no possibility for improvement because the whole concept of language is thrown out of the window.
Please don't confuse two things. "Unicode support" mentioned in the article is not what Linux, or Unix, or people need -- Unicode is a half-assed way to support displaying text in multiple languages without really supporting any of those languages. The problem of multiple language support is much bigger than the use of some overbloated alphabet, it still needs a good solution, developed with clear understanding, what exactly is necessary to make the use of text in multiple languages suitable for reading and processing. Unicode solves small part of the problem (how to represent and display a string with text in multiple languages) but makes impossible to solve anything else -- the basic question "what language is this word in?" can't be answered after the text is converted to Unicode.
I personally believe that there is no alternative to the development of text charset/language labeling system and format (that will use existing language and charset names -- no need to reinvant the wheel there). Maybe XML (without the requirement to use Unicode everywhere -- this requirement is to say the least, is odd in that standard) can provide such labeling, maybe inline MIME-ish labels will be useful, but plain extension the character size and requirement to use one "charset" for everything is just a way to sweep dust under the carpet. This is what we can expect from Microsoft (and they have done it, too -- but ask non-western-European Windows user if it helped) but what will be a huge step back for anything more advanced.
temptation for various e-commerce and other companies to *rely* on Processor ID. They know that IP addresses can change, MAC addresses may be nonexistent, and every piece of hardware that has ID, is changed so often, and may be not present in user's box, or move between boxes, so its ID is meaningless for user identification. Not so with CPU. One thing is, to say "Install Ethernet card, and our software will identify you by MAC address", another is "Since you already use Pentium III (or otherwise you couldn't make to this web site anyway), we will use your Processor ID to identify you, so please let our software to read it, or at least enter it by hand if you for some reason want to use a web browser". If there will be guaranteed that large number of people will choose not to have such ID, the idea will be useless because large number of people will be unable to provide ID even if in that particular case they had agreed if they had one, but otherwise company will be tempted to use it just like a lot of places [ab]use SSN.
Really. Why will I use software that reads this ID in the first place? If I'm law-abiding citizen, I will just use software that doesn't, and will make sure that it doesn't by compiling it myself. If I'm not, I will use some proprietary thing that reads it, run it under debugger (oh, debuggers vs. undebugable code wars again, but this time with complete hardware emulators available to general public) and fake ID, just like people fake credit card numbers. And since Intel chip becomes a "credit card" that costs >$100 to replace, things will be very interesting.
From Bill Gates and his countless PR people
OK, you mention GIF so I'll talk about that (actually I beleive it is the LZW compression algorithm that GIF uses that is patented, but that's not really important). I think we can agree that GIF is a good format that filled a need that people had at the time. I argue that the format would not have been developed at all (or would have at least taken longer) if patents were not avaliable. Remove the incentive (all the money Unisys makes from patenting GIF) and there is no reason to inovate.
I have only mentioned the consequences of one, and very damaging, patent -- others things that I have given as examples, are gzip and PNG. You are completely wrong about the possibility that compressed image format will not be created if algorithms were not patentable. Some other compression algorithms and image formats were developed specifically to become non-patentable, and freely distributed, so if GIF and LZW never existed they could be replaced by anything else that would be developed at the time -- neither the idea of compression, nor the idea of image format was new at the moment. There is also a high probability that in this imaginable case moronic indexed 256 colors limit will never be introduced into image formats because most of people who develop image formats would know better than that, and if such thing appeared in the first release, someone will immediately point out that it's bad and should be extended.
Name any software patent that improved anything.
Counter-examples are countless, and all of them deal with the same interoperability problem -- patent holder refuses to provide interoperability or allow implementation under reasonable license, and the whole world is either stuck because patented algorithm infected too many things around (GIF), or has to develop for free (just to compensate a damage, patent holder is creating) an alternative (gzip, JPEG, PNG).
In all other areas, with nonzero production costs, patent holder is more or less stimulated to constantly invest money into constantly making products containing patented idea. In software the "constantly" part doesn't work well -- patent holder makes something, and while there is a demand for the use of algorithm, the conditions (say, requirement of free license) aren't favorable for him if he will develop things complying to them while existing software produces profits without any further investment.
Forget "should." Be pragmatic, and think about "is." Neglecting a few minor exceptions, people work hard because they want a better house or car or computer or whatever. Basically they want money. That's life. That's economics.
Oh, Americans... :-( People want better life. What they do to achieve that, differs a lot. Some get more money (say, by writing software, getting a better job, robbing banks, etc.) then use those money to buy something. Some make things that they lacked (say, wooden chairs, photographs of flowers, unixlike kernels, HTTP servers, scientific articles with their ideas about prime numbers). Some learn to appreciate what they didn't appreciate before (say, the beauty of stars, art). Some do something to get higher position their person in their organizations/companies/... (improve their hunting, drink more beer, argue on company's meetings, pronounce long speeches before elections, make impressive contributions to software projects), etc. Most of people do things from every of those categories, and only brainwashed modern "cynics" that aren't even really cynical, just fascinated with money, explain everything in the terms of monetary value.
OK, let's say I spend a bunch of money on chemistry research and come up with a great new drug. Should I be able to patent that, so that I can make my money back?
Yes -- unless your patent happens to be a new use for existing chemical, and even if you have invented a drug there can be exceptions that disallow you to keep others from duplicating it.
OK, now let's say I spent a bunch of money to come up with a great encryption algorithm, should I be able to patent that, so that I can make my money back?
No because nothing prevents you to implement algorithm and sell software with it -- but if you will prevent others from using it, you will create a non-interoperable thing and disallow others to make anything compatible. You already have a benefit of being first, and giving you more will cause more damage than benefit. Patents aren't rights, they are given by the government (note -- patents are specific to countries where they are issued) to stimulate development of technology, and in cases where they do the opposite (hindering the development of communication programs) there is no justification for them.
What if I am a linguist? Should I take royalties from every use of alphabet?
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 16:05:29 -0800 (PST)
- ----------------------
From: Alex Belits
To: webmaster@linux.com,
webmaster@infomagic.nl
Cc: webmaster@infomagic.com,
ta@nl.net,
torvalds@transmeta.com
Subject: Comment about linux.com
Web site is poorly designed, does not display correctly in Netscape,
contains no useful information, is written in poor style, and the comment
about FrontPage demonstrates an incompetence of the author in the area of
HTML development tools, available on Linux. Attempt ro submit comments
returns FrontPage error.
The design of linux.com web site deeply insults me, and I believe that
the name of Linux operating system (that is a tradematk of Linus Torvalds)
should not be used in the association with this display of ignorance,
incompetence and poor taste.
--
Alex
-----------------------------------------------
Excellent.. now give users the option to cut your hair you hippie!
-- Anonymous Coward
...nuke every field with their plants every year?
Seems to be potentially less disasterous, as much expensive, and gives similar result.
god, i love sed. (but was it developed at AT&T by private funds, or at vast and ruinous expence at a federally funded university research program?!?! :)
Actually you most likely run a version that has no AT&T code -- either GNU or BSD sed. The original development of sed was AT&T, however don't forget that it's done in the area where AT&T's own business is heavily restricted.
...hanging on my belt (BTW, how one is supposed to carry that large and quite fragile thing? In a briefcase? under the arm? In the hand like a big clipboard? Even similar-looking things in Star Trek seem to be handled like big paper files are handled now, but those people have poor imagination anyway) and the most annoying problem is not a screen size or color (get rid of fluff, and everything fits nicely), not even a cable that connects PalmPilot with modem, or null modem/gender changer in it (fits nicely in the pocket), not even Metricom SE modem's antenna that sometimes refuses to stand upright, and not even a direction, where Metricom's LCD is pointed (away from me, not at the top where it can be read without turning it or disconnecting from the belt). It's a battery life time. Since the thing on the belt is not limited by weight as much as handheld PalmPilot or that WebPad, I have attached a pack of 4 "C" batteries to the same belt, so now the time, PalmPilot can spend constantly reconnecting to Ricochet is greater than the time, I spend outside of home, and things kinda work. However while people are accustomed to various stuff with antennas hanging off someone's belt, an open Radio Shack pack with batteries looks really strange to them.
With something that can be carried in the hand things are worse, you can't take a notebook without its carrying case and go around -- the weight of batteries that will last any reasonable time will be too much. Sure, Windows CE devices and PalmPilots normally work reasonable time, but most of people don't have wireless modems working as often as the purpose of this device suggests, and screens of PalmPilot and even some Windows CE boxes use less energy than magazine-sized color display of WebPad. If the problem with batteries will be solved, there is still some concern about those things being too large and fragile -- my PalmPilot fell from my hands/table/... multiple times, and once I had to re-solder its LCD cable (PITA with tools, designed for a bit larger components). Palm III case seems to be better, but what works for its size won't be of much help with large device unless something very radical will be done, like Palm III-style titanium case with screen cover.
I think, it will be a good idea to make a nice and inexpensive wearable with glasses-based display (with projection, reflected by the glasses, not "Borg-style" huge optical thing or "screen on the stick"). Glasses are easy to handle, easy to protect from damage, and they can be attached to the box (that can be heavy if necessary) with a cable, or even by RF link. Too bad, all displays of that kind, I have seen are either insanely expensive, or too low-quality to be of any use.
H-1 visa. But since it's hard to get a job while sitting outside US, you can get there by different type of visa, then ask for employment and visa change -- it's more or less a standard practice.