Back in the early 1990s, the notion of software that's open to input by any developer who cares to monkey with it was pretty radical - So much so that it needed a license.
Nonsense!!!
Stallman created the GPL because the radical idea of making software proprietary was beginning to become the norm, replacing the original way of doing things openly. When AT&T started licensing UNIX, a things were starting to change. Before that, the UNIX and other project source code was shared openly, but there was no formal license. So AT&T simply changed the rules. RMS realized that there needed to be a formal way to ensure that software could be explicitly declared free and the GPL became the way to do that.
So, the idea was not radical, but rather an attempt to go back to the way everything used to be done, but in a formal declared way.
Sure, laptops are allowed again, but what about those new mobile devices that are field testing ethanol based fuel cells? When airport security asks what the pocket full of ampules in your laptop bag are for, I'm thinking they're not going to like the answer.
Then again, some of these new laptop batteries can explode when struck or heated and they're allowed, so maybe, if the cigarette lobby lawyers who got Homeland Security to allow cigarette lighters on planes go to work for a laptop lobby, then fuel cell laptops will get the go-ahead too.
"This sounds like a strength of the open source model. Many eyes can include security auditors too. The weaknesses get reported and fixed."
This seems to be the call of the open source zealout, but it is not reality. 99% of the people using Open Office are users. The other 1% contain people that might have the ability to look at it, but may not have the time or patience.
Right... as compared to closed source, where 0% have the capability of auditing the source code.
Of course, things aren't as black and white as either of our initial comments make things seem. The edge is a bit blurred these days as even Microsoft does have a 'shared source' initiative to allow some interested parties to have a look and those just happen to be some of the most likely ones to actually be motivated and qualified to find and implement fixes. However, openness as the default stance does seem to make a lot more sense because even one's critics can look at the code and make an assessment.
I have been involved with many open source projects over the past couple of years and it usually ends up like this:
1) someone emails a bug to the main programming team 2) someone on the programming team (when they have time..since it is a volunteer position) will look through the code and make the changes 3) rinse and repeat
That sounds a lot like the proprietary model except that the 'when they have time' gets replaced with 'if they get budget approval'. I've worked on proprietary software and know, first hand, that development costs are usually dwarfed by customer support costs. In many projects, bugs only get fixed if there's a good business case for the fix.
Either way, resources have to be available, but they can come from outside of the core organization in the case of open source projects. If some customer thinks something is important enough for them, they can always go out and fix themselves. With a commercial program if they aren't a big enough account to make a ripple at headquarters, then it'll never get fixed unless it happens to pop up on the radar of someone more important. Sure, companies that will do this are few and far between, but at least they do have the option. Heaven help them if they decide that they like the legacy version that they've been using for years and haven't ponied up for the forced upgrade to the latest and greatest or even worse, if the company has gone bankrupt and the software is no longer available. At least with source they have a fighting chance.
One of the biggest factors in all of this is the size of the projects. Small open source projects tend to be fairly poorly supported, not as a rule, but in general. Small proprietary programs often have very little support at all and tend to be discontinued. Large, sexy, open source projects get a lot of visibility and tend to benefit from lots of participation and feedback. Large, profitable, proprietary projects tend to have enough paying customers who complain about enough bugs that there's some pressure to get them fixed. Counter examples of all four cases abound, but in general... size matters.
So, perhaps arguments about open vs. closed are really about secondary effects rather than the primary effects.
"Chalk this up as a win for the open source model... at least for large high visibility projects like Open Office."
Not really. Many proprietary apps still have people that can and do find flaws (much in the same way they find them in open source apps. Sure, the source code helps, but I would imagine it's easy for many of the security experts to test it from the outside).
Sure, SOME proprietary software makes SOME of their code available to A FEW reviewers, but as I wrote above, open by default means that even unexpected sources capable of performing audits and code contribution.
This sounds like a strength of the open source model. Many eyes can include security auditors too. The weaknesses get reported and fixed.
The closed source model doesn't offer the same level of opportunity to find flaws. Even when people do find flaws in closed source products the publishers are as likely to bury the report, deny the flaw it exists or use DMCA to sue the people who disclose the problems.
Chalk this up as a win for the open source model... at least for large high visibility projects like Open Office.
Sounds a little too much like socialism with the whole "cost sharing" thing.
That's the least of the problems with this idea. Besides, Cabals, consortiums and other arangements have been around and functioning well for centuries, so the idea is older than and far more stable than socialism. They're actually so successful, that many countries have laws to limit the practice.
Besides, I don't think the idea is socialist at all. The licensees are still quality, service and price competitors and simply have to pay to get in the game, just as they do now. This idea, simply locks down the terms of the license so that the inventor doesn't have the power to stop innovation by requiring unrealistic licensing terms. Furthermore, it levels the playing field by making sure that ALL competitors get the same licensing terms... no more sweetheart back-room deals. The idea also provides the incentive for the original inventor to continue to innovate and compete on cost, service and quality.
The biggest problem I see with this idea is cost accounting fraud. In industries like pharmaceuticals, it would be easy to inflate the apparent cost of development when it becomes clear that a drug is going to be very successful, thus making your competitors/partners pay an unfairly high share to get into the game.
I'm for compulsory licensing of patents where the patent holder is not actively producing the patented product in commercial quantities. The fees should be small (pennies).
Sounds good, but needs more work;) Pennies per implementation on a high volume low margin product could be excessive. It would also, effectively, lock out open source implementations, which may not be reasonable if nobody else is producing a product that uses the idea.
I am just playing devil's advocate here. I don't really think the world will come to an end if the patent system as it currently exists were to suddenly go away. Also, my predictions, admittedly, tended toward the worst case results. However, there is some merit to the idea that something to balance the cost of invention (in some cases) against the advantages of waiting for someone else to invent something and I was just exploring that idea a little bit.
If you think office security is a pain now imagine what it'll be like when the stakes are raised.
Most 'office security' serves the same purpose as airport security, its making sure they can say 'but we tried to prevent it really' and to make people think about not taking risks. More of it won't do shit to stop industrial espionage.
Sure, that's because the stakes aren't all that high right now. However, if the costs of invention are high and there was no other protection against idea theft, then company security would likely become much more stringent. Even if it wasn't very effective, some companies would be sure to try harder anyways.
There are already problems with onerous non-competition clauses in high level employee contracts.
Those clauses should really be dealt with by law. It is absurd to ban someone from working in their field of choice because it is economically destriuctive. You effectively force a person to not contribute for a specific amount of time, resulting in lost production/inventiveness during that time.
Absurd or not, if the stakes are raised, some companies will try to push this harder and lobby government to improve its effectiveness and reduce safeguards for employees.
There's a reason that alchemy got nowhere for centuries... they all kept their research secret.
I beg to differ with your conclusion.
1. Where I live, patents existed already in the 1600s. Examples of patents preventing further invention, stalling development of an entire country even, are also dating back to the 1600s.
2. Alchemy had some interesting but usually pretty impossible objectives, and did not often employ scenmtific methods to study things. Those are the main reasons it never got anywhere, where they wanted to get didn't exist to begin with.
The second point actually supports my point. Basically, the scientific method is discouraged without patents. Of course your first point shows that patents can also slow down the scientific process. However, slow is better than stopped.
one valid point here, how to get companies to release information on their inventions to the public so that such information can be reused.
I don't know the answer, but I do know a system that allows you to document your inventiuon in ways to prevent reproducing it (read the typical software patent for examples of this) and where you can prevent your competition from using your invention (as opposed to can force your competition to compensate you for a bit for using your invention) is really seriously broken and is not accomplishing the desired result either, while it is expensive for everyone.
So in the end, yeah, a workign patent system might be even better, but abolishing the current system is very very likely a much better idea then keeping it.
I suspect that you're right. The current system is broken and abolishing it is probably the way to go. However, in the spirit of playing around with these ideas, I proposed another system in How about a cost of research sharing model? that has some potential to make the system work.
Here's a crazy idea: Instead of allowing patent holders to set their own licensing terms, congress could impose a 'cost of research sharing' model that, with some safeguards, requires anyone wishing to implement a patented idea to pay 51% of the research costs that have not already been paid by someone else to those who have already paid into the patent. This turns the monopoly into a cabal that shares costs. Naturally, there would have to be some fairly difficult to structure laws about the nature of what can be included in research costs, but I think this has the potential to really open things up.
One way of looking at patents is as a means of protecting the original inventor's investment in the idea so that first movers are not unduly penalized for having made the effort and taken the risk only to have it stolen by someone else who doesn't have to bear the costs of coming up with the invention.
If the original inventor wants to get rich off an idea, they should still have to have be competitive producers of the implementation of that idea and bear the risk that someone out there can do it more profitably than they can, but not have the handicap of competing with those who didn't have to bear the invention process costs.
First mover advantage and invention cost sharing aught to be enough for an inventor to succeed. there's no reason to give them a monopoly that provides no incentive to be efficient or innovate any further. History is rife with examples of patented innovations that stagnated for 17 years. Then, only after the patent expired, an explosion of new innovations moved the field forward.
To explain the idea further... imaging it costs $100 to invent some patentable idea. Then, if some other company wanted to produce a product or service that used the idea. They could do that, by paying $51 to the inventor for a license. If a third producer joined in they would pay, $25.50 to both the original inventor AND the second company. So each gets just a little more than half of what they had to invest in the first place. A fourth producer would pay $12.25 to each of the first three and so-on.
This system would not lock anybody out and would share the cost of the innovation with a tiny advantage to those who jump aboard first to encourage investment in research.
Great idea! Then everybody will jealously guard every innovation as a trade secret and industrial espionage will surge.
If you think office security is a pain now imagine what it'll be like when the stakes are raised.
There are already problems with onerous non-competition clauses in high level employee contracts. With no patent protection, you could expect EVERY knowledge worker to have to sign a contract saying that if they quit, that they can't work in any, even vaguely, similar career. So, if you're a software person and you quit, you better not be doing software anything for anybody else in your next job.
It'll be like all of the nasty parts of cyberpunk coming to fruition.
OK. I exaggerate. However much we all hate (software) patents, there probably does need to be some force that encourages invention disclosure for the greater good. The patent system may need massive overhaul, but abolishing it altogether ends up producing the problems that prompted its' creation in the first place. There's a reason that alchemy got nowhere for centuries... they all kept their research secret.
Coming from a company that cancels my email account if I don't use it for 30 days, I am less than enthused.
90% of the time, when I sign in to my Netscape email account, it has been deactivated. That's one of the reasons that my Yahoo and gmail accounts both get more use. I know they're trying to get me to sign in more often, but the fact that it is an effectively unreliable email address tends to produce the opposite effect.
What if I take a break and decide to stop using the portal for a month? Will they cancel my moderation capabilities when I try to use it again?
Besides, the Netscape home page always seems to be pushing celebrity photos and gossip. Who needs it!?
this article makes me believe that Google is buying into this "users don't need that much" mantra
Either that, or they're just following the "release early, release often" strategy, which gives them a chance to find out what users complain about the most so they can figure out which of those "98%" features are really needed and which can be left till later or for value-added or third party add-ons.
this nightmare scenario, where too many people downloading a hot wardrobe malfunction cause the rest of the internet to stop, that has NEVER HAPPENED.
Where were you on 2001-Sep-11? So many people were online reading the news that many sites were unreachable for hours and major News outlets had to resort to publishing simple plain text single page web sites to handle the load for a while. Sure you can argue that this was a success of routing around the damage, but the fact that much of the net ground to a near halt shows that it can be argued that it HAS HAPPENED or at least nearly happened depending on how you want to spin it.
Now mix in a few greedy monopolies that want to double charge for traffic and ask how stable that will make things. Have you already forgotten that there was a recent problem with some first tier networks having a spat over peering agreements that put significant chunks of the network out of reach for a day or so? Now with extra charges involved, network fail-over or just plain old heavy load routing could get extra complicated and brittle. Be afraid, very afraid.
Still going ahead with my Raven X60 purchase
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
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· Score: 1
I certainly am thinking twice about buying my Raven X60 notebook, which is just a Lenovo X60 Thinkpad renamed to 'Raven' and with Linux (ubuntu Dapper Drake in my case) pre-installed.
The ONLY reason I am not cancelling this order, is that I don't want to mess up the Emperor Linux folks who have already had to order the laptop on my behalf. They're good people and I don't want to jerk them around. However, if this had happened last week, I'd have saved myself a bundle and bought one of the cheaper 12.1" notebooks instead. When paying a premium for a luxury notebook, I don't want to be supporting a company (Lenovo) that has such a poor opinion of their customers choices. This will likely be my LAST Thinkpad purchase. Maybe I'll put a Tux sticker over the Thinkpad logo to hide my shame;)
This turn of events is really surprising to me because, I thought that, part of the reason that IBM, sold off this division was because there was a conflict of interest with their Linux software consulting and the pressure that they had from Microsoft. I thought that a major part of the issue was that Lenovo would be immune to this pressure and be working in a country where the local consumers were more likely to purchase linux boxen than elsewhere because of the strong Linux push in China. Of course, this could be looked at another way by realizing that, while IBM couldn't knuckle under to the pressure from Microsoft without losing face, Lenovo could.
So, where are the IBM linux consultants supposed to get their Linux laptops from now?
Since the/. crowd is highly networked and geeky, there's a distinct chance that this could actually be a Stand Alone Complex in the real world. That is, no original liar exists... just a pent-up emotional need sensed by the network of geeks that independently expressed itself by reverse hacking the cadre of un-sig'd geeks resulting in a viral meme that...
Um. OK. I've been watching too much adult swim. I'll admit it.
I haven't had a look at the code for the slashdotter, but I hope it's robust enough to deal with CSS changes like this contest suggests without breaking.
Unfortunately, robustness doesn't seem to be the general rule with Mozilla extensions, which seem to break with every upgrade or site change. Sometimes it seems as if half of the Greasemonkey scripts don't work any more because the pages they were designed to work with have changed.
The one the surprizes me the most is the Venkman JavaScript debugger. Usually developer tools are the first things that get ported to a new version of any platform because the developers are using it themselves, but for some reason, the Venkman debugger is frequently non functional on the latest version of Firefox.
Oh well. I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope this contest doesn't break slashdotter or that the extension gets updated quickly afterwards.
P.S. I hope you can't tell that SpellBound is broken on my installation of FireFox.
In firefox you can remove CSS by going to View > Page Style > No Style.
Sure, but that turns of ALL of the styling, which makes slashdot pages fairly nasty to look at. My suggestion allows you to turn off JUST the April Fools style so it looks just like it always does.
I love the Web Developer plugin for the Mozilla browsers like Firefox. When it's installed, it's trivially easy to select the CSS drop down menu, the select the Disable Styles - Individual Styles and uncheck slashdot_fool.css. The pink goes away just like that. I'm sure there are other ways to do that, but this was just so cool that I had to share. Though, I guess that using the Edit CSS sidebar is even more cool because you can see the colours change AS YOU TYPE in the CSS window.
if everyone who invented the same device could receive their own patents
Actually, I think that in cases like this, that NOBODY should be awarded a patent.
Although the current practice is to award a patent to whoever applies first, I think that the fact that subsequent, substantially similar, patents are applied for before the first one is made public or awarded should be considered a prima facie evidence that the invention is 'obvious'.
Seriously. I understand that obviousness is a slippery thing. Often, the best ideas are the simplest and may seem obvious in retrospect, so the patent office and courts are fairly careful about determining obviousness. However, if two or more inventers independently come up with the same idea at about the same time, then that should be considered proof that the idea was obvious. Since the patent office keeps filings secret until after a patent is awarded, the time between the original filing and the awarding of a patent for the idea is a time when no other inventor could know that a similar idea has been filed. So, another, similar, filing during this period aught to be considered proof that the idea is obvious and non patentable.
A large number of patents would get thrown out if this standard was adopted, but, since it's clear that there is a serious problem with the patent system, I don't think that this would be a bad thing and would actually provide us with a much better system.
they're *useless* for any serious amount of data input
That's the Palm legacy for you. Palm kicked Newton ass partly because they used a 'good enough' handwriting technology that resulted in a MUCH cheaper device because it didn't require the massive computing power that Rosetta did. While this was appropriate at the time it's now a legacy anchor holding back a major portion of the PDA marketplace.
Yes, there are better handwriting recognition engines on some PDA's, but those devices tend to be coupled with crippled user interfaces that make the improved HWR of only marginal benefit. The Newton wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it was designed from the ground up to work well with pen input and did a much better job than most modern PDA's.
have you ever tried writing a letter on one?
Yes. My Newton worked great for this. It was a fantastic, data input device that was entirely suitable for high volume data input and even had some decent graphical input capabilities. Once I attended a lecture where, instead of just writing down the key points, I wrote down virtually every word... in a 90 minute lecture! Admittedly, this won't work well in a physics class and the speaker, in this case, was a dramatic speaker who paused for emphasis frequently. However, sitting in a meeting and taking notes with a laptop is disruptive, but scribbling notes on a Newton isn't any more disruptive than writing on a pad of paper... unless your alarm goes off;)
Another key factor, that is common to all PDA's, is that mobility means you can easily take the device to the source of your data. Once I drew a picture of a sidewalk wedge that needed to be replaced and added the dimmensions to the picture as I measured them. Then it was an easy matter to fax a quick note, complete with a dimmensioned diagram to the contractor to do the work.
Maybe the 'Nanotube Paint Blocks Cell Phones on Demand' story has the answer. Either coat the entire inside of the passenger area with this stuff or coat all of the aircraft instrumentation racks and cable trays.
FogBugz is great. Sure, it's a commercial system that you have to pay for, but it is easy to install, simple to use, has a very clean user interface and even has a philosophy. Believe it or not, the last point is the most important. The folks behind FogBugz seem to work really hard to adhere to the KISS pricipal and produce a superior product.
If you compare them to workhorses like Bugzilla, Fogbugz seems very minimalistic, but it turns out to actually be more useful that way. The guy behind the folks behind Fogbugz, Joel Spolsky, has lots of interesting things to say about the design of Fogbugz that are just good reading for ANY CS/IT person to even if you don't buy his product.
Another product that I tried out was scarab, which was appealing since it was a Java J2EE application from the same folks who brough us subversion. From a CS point of view, scarab is an interesting example of how to use turbine. Unfortunately, scarab is hard to install and configure.
Although the version of scarab that I tested was still a beta product that might not be quite so hard to use out of the box any more, it is interesting to compare it to FogBugz. Scarab had the kitchen sink approach that is so configurable that it could be set up to be every bit as complicated as Bugzilla or as simple as FogBugz. However this flexibility made it a nightmare to configure and administer. While you could, conceivably set it up like FogBugz, it would be hard to make it work exactly the same way and wouldn't provide the same ease of use... just the same limitations with an added level of complexity.
To summarize less is more... in quality and price this time;)
If I understand it correctly, I think that Squirrel looks like a much more exciting application.
from the site:
SQUIRREL is a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer cooperative web cache, based on the idea of enabling web browsers on desktop machines to share their local caches.
If everybody used this, then there'd be no need for mirrordot and the slashdot effect would be a thing of the past and more people could afford to host pr0n on their personal websites;)
Hey... wait a second... I did a little more digging and it does look like there is at least a java version of the code base. The Linux version seems to run on pure java and the library contains the pastry.jar file. Even though there's a src/net tree, where much of the code seems to reside, I'm not seeing ANY C# code.
So, it seems I should've dug deeper before making my previous comment. Sorry about that folks:(
Slashdot Mirror
There's a signature out there that goes something like...
In the beginning, the internet was a bunch of smart people with dumb terminals. Now....
Stallman created the GPL because the radical idea of making software proprietary was beginning to become the norm, replacing the original way of doing things openly. When AT&T started licensing UNIX, a things were starting to change. Before that, the UNIX and other project source code was shared openly, but there was no formal license. So AT&T simply changed the rules. RMS realized that there needed to be a formal way to ensure that software could be explicitly declared free and the GPL became the way to do that.
So, the idea was not radical, but rather an attempt to go back to the way everything used to be done, but in a formal declared way.
Sure, laptops are allowed again, but what about those new mobile devices that are field testing ethanol based fuel cells? When airport security asks what the pocket full of ampules in your laptop bag are for, I'm thinking they're not going to like the answer.
Then again, some of these new laptop batteries can explode when struck or heated and they're allowed, so maybe, if the cigarette lobby lawyers who got Homeland Security to allow cigarette lighters on planes go to work for a laptop lobby, then fuel cell laptops will get the go-ahead too.
Here are the links to the SavaJe GSPDA Jasper S20 developer phone.
Right... as compared to closed source, where 0% have the capability of auditing the source code.
Of course, things aren't as black and white as either of our initial comments make things seem. The edge is a bit blurred these days as even Microsoft does have a 'shared source' initiative to allow some interested parties to have a look and those just happen to be some of the most likely ones to actually be motivated and qualified to find and implement fixes. However, openness as the default stance does seem to make a lot more sense because even one's critics can look at the code and make an assessment.
That sounds a lot like the proprietary model except that the 'when they have time' gets replaced with 'if they get budget approval'. I've worked on proprietary software and know, first hand, that development costs are usually dwarfed by customer support costs. In many projects, bugs only get fixed if there's a good business case for the fix.
Either way, resources have to be available, but they can come from outside of the core organization in the case of open source projects. If some customer thinks something is important enough for them, they can always go out and fix themselves. With a commercial program if they aren't a big enough account to make a ripple at headquarters, then it'll never get fixed unless it happens to pop up on the radar of someone more important. Sure, companies that will do this are few and far between, but at least they do have the option. Heaven help them if they decide that they like the legacy version that they've been using for years and haven't ponied up for the forced upgrade to the latest and greatest or even worse, if the company has gone bankrupt and the software is no longer available. At least with source they have a fighting chance.
One of the biggest factors in all of this is the size of the projects. Small open source projects tend to be fairly poorly supported, not as a rule, but in general. Small proprietary programs often have very little support at all and tend to be discontinued. Large, sexy, open source projects get a lot of visibility and tend to benefit from lots of participation and feedback. Large, profitable, proprietary projects tend to have enough paying customers who complain about enough bugs that there's some pressure to get them fixed. Counter examples of all four cases abound, but in general... size matters.
So, perhaps arguments about open vs. closed are really about secondary effects rather than the primary effects.
Sure, SOME proprietary software makes SOME of their code available to A FEW reviewers, but as I wrote above, open by default means that even unexpected sources capable of performing audits and code contribution.
This sounds like a strength of the open source model. Many eyes can include security auditors too. The weaknesses get reported and fixed.
The closed source model doesn't offer the same level of opportunity to find flaws. Even when people do find flaws in closed source products the publishers are as likely to bury the report, deny the flaw it exists or use DMCA to sue the people who disclose the problems.
Chalk this up as a win for the open source model... at least for large high visibility projects like Open Office.
Besides, I don't think the idea is socialist at all. The licensees are still quality, service and price competitors and simply have to pay to get in the game, just as they do now. This idea, simply locks down the terms of the license so that the inventor doesn't have the power to stop innovation by requiring unrealistic licensing terms. Furthermore, it levels the playing field by making sure that ALL competitors get the same licensing terms... no more sweetheart back-room deals. The idea also provides the incentive for the original inventor to continue to innovate and compete on cost, service and quality.
The biggest problem I see with this idea is cost accounting fraud. In industries like pharmaceuticals, it would be easy to inflate the apparent cost of development when it becomes clear that a drug is going to be very successful, thus making your competitors/partners pay an unfairly high share to get into the game.
Sounds good, but needs more work
Sure, that's because the stakes aren't all that high right now. However, if the costs of invention are high and there was no other protection against idea theft, then company security would likely become much more stringent. Even if it wasn't very effective, some companies would be sure to try harder anyways.
Absurd or not, if the stakes are raised, some companies will try to push this harder and lobby government to improve its effectiveness and reduce safeguards for employees.
The second point actually supports my point. Basically, the scientific method is discouraged without patents. Of course your first point shows that patents can also slow down the scientific process. However, slow is better than stopped.
I suspect that you're right. The current system is broken and abolishing it is probably the way to go. However, in the spirit of playing around with these ideas, I proposed another system in How about a cost of research sharing model? that has some potential to make the system work.
Here's a crazy idea: Instead of allowing patent holders to set their own licensing terms, congress could impose a 'cost of research sharing' model that, with some safeguards, requires anyone wishing to implement a patented idea to pay 51% of the research costs that have not already been paid by someone else to those who have already paid into the patent. This turns the monopoly into a cabal that shares costs. Naturally, there would have to be some fairly difficult to structure laws about the nature of what can be included in research costs, but I think this has the potential to really open things up.
One way of looking at patents is as a means of protecting the original inventor's investment in the idea so that first movers are not unduly penalized for having made the effort and taken the risk only to have it stolen by someone else who doesn't have to bear the costs of coming up with the invention.
If the original inventor wants to get rich off an idea, they should still have to have be competitive producers of the implementation of that idea and bear the risk that someone out there can do it more profitably than they can, but not have the handicap of competing with those who didn't have to bear the invention process costs.
First mover advantage and invention cost sharing aught to be enough for an inventor to succeed. there's no reason to give them a monopoly that provides no incentive to be efficient or innovate any further. History is rife with examples of patented innovations that stagnated for 17 years. Then, only after the patent expired, an explosion of new innovations moved the field forward.
To explain the idea further... imaging it costs $100 to invent some patentable idea. Then, if some other company wanted to produce a product or service that used the idea. They could do that, by paying $51 to the inventor for a license. If a third producer joined in they would pay, $25.50 to both the original inventor AND the second company. So each gets just a little more than half of what they had to invest in the first place. A fourth producer would pay $12.25 to each of the first three and so-on.
This system would not lock anybody out and would share the cost of the innovation with a tiny advantage to those who jump aboard first to encourage investment in research.
If you think office security is a pain now imagine what it'll be like when the stakes are raised.
There are already problems with onerous non-competition clauses in high level employee contracts. With no patent protection, you could expect EVERY knowledge worker to have to sign a contract saying that if they quit, that they can't work in any, even vaguely, similar career. So, if you're a software person and you quit, you better not be doing software anything for anybody else in your next job.
It'll be like all of the nasty parts of cyberpunk coming to fruition.
OK. I exaggerate. However much we all hate (software) patents, there probably does need to be some force that encourages invention disclosure for the greater good. The patent system may need massive overhaul, but abolishing it altogether ends up producing the problems that prompted its' creation in the first place. There's a reason that alchemy got nowhere for centuries... they all kept their research secret.
Coming from a company that cancels my email account if I don't use it for 30 days, I am less than enthused.
90% of the time, when I sign in to my Netscape email account, it has been deactivated. That's one of the reasons that my Yahoo and gmail accounts both get more use. I know they're trying to get me to sign in more often, but the fact that it is an effectively unreliable email address tends to produce the opposite effect.
What if I take a break and decide to stop using the portal for a month? Will they cancel my moderation capabilities when I try to use it again?
Besides, the Netscape home page always seems to be pushing celebrity photos and gossip. Who needs it!?
Where were you on 2001-Sep-11? So many people were online reading the news that many sites were unreachable for hours and major News outlets had to resort to publishing simple plain text single page web sites to handle the load for a while. Sure you can argue that this was a success of routing around the damage, but the fact that much of the net ground to a near halt shows that it can be argued that it HAS HAPPENED or at least nearly happened depending on how you want to spin it.
Now mix in a few greedy monopolies that want to double charge for traffic and ask how stable that will make things. Have you already forgotten that there was a recent problem with some first tier networks having a spat over peering agreements that put significant chunks of the network out of reach for a day or so? Now with extra charges involved, network fail-over or just plain old heavy load routing could get extra complicated and brittle. Be afraid, very afraid.
I certainly am thinking twice about buying my Raven X60 notebook, which is just a Lenovo X60 Thinkpad renamed to 'Raven' and with Linux (ubuntu Dapper Drake in my case) pre-installed.
;)
The ONLY reason I am not cancelling this order, is that I don't want to mess up the Emperor Linux folks who have already had to order the laptop on my behalf. They're good people and I don't want to jerk them around. However, if this had happened last week, I'd have saved myself a bundle and bought one of the cheaper 12.1" notebooks instead. When paying a premium for a luxury notebook, I don't want to be supporting a company (Lenovo) that has such a poor opinion of their customers choices. This will likely be my LAST Thinkpad purchase. Maybe I'll put a Tux sticker over the Thinkpad logo to hide my shame
This turn of events is really surprising to me because, I thought that, part of the reason that IBM, sold off this division was because there was a conflict of interest with their Linux software consulting and the pressure that they had from Microsoft. I thought that a major part of the issue was that Lenovo would be immune to this pressure and be working in a country where the local consumers were more likely to purchase linux boxen than elsewhere because of the strong Linux push in China. Of course, this could be looked at another way by realizing that, while IBM couldn't knuckle under to the pressure from Microsoft without losing face, Lenovo could.
So, where are the IBM linux consultants supposed to get their Linux laptops from now?
I don't know if anybody uses Lotus Smart Suite any more, but... shouldn't THAT be the place where they add ODF?
Since the
Um. OK. I've been watching too much adult swim. I'll admit it.
*Please* don't select a winner that breaks the slashdotter extension.
I haven't had a look at the code for the slashdotter, but I hope it's robust enough to deal with CSS changes like this contest suggests without breaking.
Unfortunately, robustness doesn't seem to be the general rule with Mozilla extensions, which seem to break with every upgrade or site change. Sometimes it seems as if half of the Greasemonkey scripts don't work any more because the pages they were designed to work with have changed.
The one the surprizes me the most is the Venkman JavaScript debugger. Usually developer tools are the first things that get ported to a new version of any platform because the developers are using it themselves, but for some reason, the Venkman debugger is frequently non functional on the latest version of Firefox.
Oh well. I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope this contest doesn't break slashdotter or that the extension gets updated quickly afterwards.
P.S. I hope you can't tell that SpellBound is broken on my installation of FireFox.
Sure, but that turns of ALL of the styling, which makes slashdot pages fairly nasty to look at. My suggestion allows you to turn off JUST the April Fools style so it looks just like it always does.
I love the Web Developer plugin for the Mozilla browsers like Firefox. When it's installed, it's trivially easy to select the CSS drop down menu, the select the Disable Styles - Individual Styles and uncheck slashdot_fool.css. The pink goes away just like that. I'm sure there are other ways to do that, but this was just so cool that I had to share. Though, I guess that using the Edit CSS sidebar is even more cool because you can see the colours change AS YOU TYPE in the CSS window.
Actually, I think that in cases like this, that NOBODY should be awarded a patent.
Although the current practice is to award a patent to whoever applies first, I think that the fact that subsequent, substantially similar, patents are applied for before the first one is made public or awarded should be considered a prima facie evidence that the invention is 'obvious'.
Seriously. I understand that obviousness is a slippery thing. Often, the best ideas are the simplest and may seem obvious in retrospect, so the patent office and courts are fairly careful about determining obviousness. However, if two or more inventers independently come up with the same idea at about the same time, then that should be considered proof that the idea was obvious. Since the patent office keeps filings secret until after a patent is awarded, the time between the original filing and the awarding of a patent for the idea is a time when no other inventor could know that a similar idea has been filed. So, another, similar, filing during this period aught to be considered proof that the idea is obvious and non patentable.
A large number of patents would get thrown out if this standard was adopted, but, since it's clear that there is a serious problem with the patent system, I don't think that this would be a bad thing and would actually provide us with a much better system.
That's the Palm legacy for you. Palm kicked Newton ass partly because they used a 'good enough' handwriting technology that resulted in a MUCH cheaper device because it didn't require the massive computing power that Rosetta did. While this was appropriate at the time it's now a legacy anchor holding back a major portion of the PDA marketplace.
Yes, there are better handwriting recognition engines on some PDA's, but those devices tend to be coupled with crippled user interfaces that make the improved HWR of only marginal benefit. The Newton wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it was designed from the ground up to work well with pen input and did a much better job than most modern PDA's.
Yes. My Newton worked great for this. It was a fantastic, data input device that was entirely suitable for high volume data input and even had some decent graphical input capabilities. Once I attended a lecture where, instead of just writing down the key points, I wrote down virtually every word... in a 90 minute lecture! Admittedly, this won't work well in a physics class and the speaker, in this case, was a dramatic speaker who paused for emphasis frequently. However, sitting in a meeting and taking notes with a laptop is disruptive, but scribbling notes on a Newton isn't any more disruptive than writing on a pad of paper... unless your alarm goes off
Another key factor, that is common to all PDA's, is that mobility means you can easily take the device to the source of your data. Once I drew a picture of a sidewalk wedge that needed to be replaced and added the dimmensions to the picture as I measured them. Then it was an easy matter to fax a quick note, complete with a dimmensioned diagram to the contractor to do the work.
Maybe the 'Nanotube Paint Blocks Cell Phones on Demand' story has the answer. Either coat the entire inside of the passenger area with this stuff or coat all of the aircraft instrumentation racks and cable trays.
FogBugz is great. Sure, it's a commercial system that you have to pay for, but it is easy to install, simple to use, has a very clean user interface and even has a philosophy. Believe it or not, the last point is the most important. The folks behind FogBugz seem to work really hard to adhere to the KISS pricipal and produce a superior product.
;)
If you compare them to workhorses like Bugzilla, Fogbugz seems very minimalistic, but it turns out to actually be more useful that way. The guy behind the folks behind Fogbugz, Joel Spolsky, has lots of interesting things to say about the design of Fogbugz that are just good reading for ANY CS/IT person to even if you don't buy his product.
Another product that I tried out was scarab, which was appealing since it was a Java J2EE application from the same folks who brough us subversion. From a CS point of view, scarab is an interesting example of how to use turbine. Unfortunately, scarab is hard to install and configure.
Although the version of scarab that I tested was still a beta product that might not be quite so hard to use out of the box any more, it is interesting to compare it to FogBugz. Scarab had the kitchen sink approach that is so configurable that it could be set up to be every bit as complicated as Bugzilla or as simple as FogBugz. However this flexibility made it a nightmare to configure and administer. While you could, conceivably set it up like FogBugz, it would be hard to make it work exactly the same way and wouldn't provide the same ease of use... just the same limitations with an added level of complexity.
To summarize less is more... in quality and price this time
from the site:
If everybody used this, then there'd be no need for mirrordot and the slashdot effect would be a thing of the past and more people could afford to host pr0n on their personal websites
Hey... wait a second... I did a little more digging and it does look like there is at least a java version of the code base. The Linux version seems to run on pure java and the library contains the pastry.jar file. Even though there's a src/net tree, where much of the code seems to reside, I'm not seeing ANY C# code.
:(
So, it seems I should've dug deeper before making my previous comment. Sorry about that folks