That's why compensation is tricky. You'd need to find a way to ensure that your competitor could copy the idea but only by sharing in the cost of the development and giving you a cut of the profits too.
I've suggested before on/. that perhaps allocating a percentage of the cost of manufacture of an item to all contributing contributors ("patent"/"copyright" holders) - a tax of sorts but not one that goes to the government. The tricky part would be administering this.
Free market + Copyrights + Patents + Trade Secrets are what we have now and they clearly aren't working.
I'm not advocating traditional price controls, socialism or communism at all. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't allow one company the option to restrict the use of intellectual property by another company. Intellectual property is not the same as physical property and it is only the fact that we didn't have the technology to copy things at will that made the existing systems, which do treat them in the same way, workable for so long.
We need to evolve past this way of thinking, before we REALLY see a mess develop. I'd say we're on the brink of seeing just that as technology continues to accelerate.
I can understand the argument for compensating the creator of an original work be it an invention or an artistic work, since otherwise there would be little incentive to innovate.
I do not understand why individuals and companies consider it a right to be able to control the use of their invention or demand extravagant or prohibitive compensation for its use. An idea or work of art, once formulated should be equally available to everyone to build upon. Determining what is or isn't prohibitive is trickier though I think we'd be able to do better than the current broken system.
I don't know what the solution to this one is but as it stands the current system of compensating inventors, innovators and artists is straining and about ready to burst. There needs to be widescale reform.
Looking at individual people and companies suing each other is like trying to tell the history of a world war by looking at a single hand to hand fight battle.
I think we need to scrap the system and start again but realistically I couldn't even tell you with what. This is the best I can come up with off the top of my head for patents and I'm sure there are plenty of holes in this idea:
a) A percentage (say 20% or 30%) of the profits made in selling a product is set aside to be payed to those who contributed ideas to its development.
b) This is then distributed among all inventors contributing to the product by a central body. Submissions from the manufacturer and the parties contributing technology could be addressed.
c) No inventor would have the right to disallow anyone from using their invention. The information would be free, and in order to be paid for it the inventor would still have to lodge a document similar to the patent with the central body.
This would mean that: 1) A company producing a product would no longer have to worry about whether it was using patented technology. They already know what percentage of profit they are paying and there will be no surprises or lawsuits. 2) No company could lock another company out of using a good idea.
Copyright could operate similarly. Middle men who haven't directly contributed technology or ideas should be cut out. They should be paid for distribution as a service and not "own" the art.
Immediate problems I can see with this scheme are: i) The massive costs of administration of a central body and deciding the spilt as given to the different inventors (likely to eclipse current court costs).
ii) Problems with shifting from the existing system.
I'm sure I'll have other problems pointed out. All I do know for sure is that the current system is BADLY broken, and is wasting human effort and stiffling innovation and creativity.
I think you've misunderstood their licensing and I doubt if what you describe would hold up legally. Furthermore Microsoft would be throwing away a lot of money if they refused to provide Software Assurance for a customer that decided they wanted it after the 30 days.
If you do not purchase Software Assurance within 30 days of purchasing your new Microsoft product, you will need to purchase an entirely new license when you upgrade. Thus, if you do not upgrade your Microsoft products very often, you may not need Software Assurance.
I apologise that this is a secondary reference, but I didn't have time to find this in the MS literature.
In other words "we'll charge you more", not "you can't get it". I'm not saying this is a nice or reasonable thing. However the CIO agreed to it and needs to understand what he's paying for. At best he's arguing the wrong thing. He did not enter into a contract that would give him what he thought he was getting and now he's blaming Microsoft.
The CIO of a company should know better than to get a maintenance contract just so he can upgrade based on a roadmap that may or may not materialize. If you want the maintenance only so you can upgrade, wait until the upgrade is out and THEN sign a maintenance contract.
The CIO needs to make it clear in summary to the CEO and CFO that these are the expected benefits, these are the assumptions I'm making and these are the risks. In my opinion he didn't do his job and now he's blaming Microsoft for failing to pedict the future, and he's making a fool of himself in the process.
If you're going to blame Microsoft, blame them for something they've done wrong. Don't try to penalize them for telling you what their plans are (a good practice in my opinion), or for your own stupidity. It makes you look like a whinning twit when you do have a legitimate complaint.
I disagree. If he's 25 and a virgin and you get him to pay for it you're only teaching him that you don't think he can get any on his own...that you've given up and that you've labelled him a loser that can't get laid.
Anyway then what? He'll be paying for it for the rest of his life if he does want any, and probably catching diseases to boot.
Persevere until you teach the boy some social skills. Things will all fall into place. He doesn't need to be suave and debonaire all the time to get a girlfriend, or very few guys would have girlfriends.
Ok so a lot of the comments here can be categorised one of the following solutions:
1) Get him sex. 2) Bribe him into behaving more socially (with something that he's interested in) and hope that it takes. 2a) Get him a job. Offer him tech toys for succeeding at it. 2b) Get him into sports (eg. martial arts) and offer him positive reenforcement for social behaviour.
Man am I glad I'm not the child. There are problems with all of these approaches.
1) Getting him sex. If he doesn't succeed you'll just make him feel worse about himself. If you pay for him to get it you're teaching him he's worthless. If he's not straight you'll also do damage pressuring him to conform with society. He may not be emmotionally mature enough to handle sex and all that comes with it. (You could get him suicidal over someone he builds a fantasy over if you're not careful for example). You're actually distracting him from his talent not helping him to fit it. Sexual behaviour has much more to it than learning to succeed at being a preditor. Let the poor kid develop at his own pace, introduce him to people his own age and get his social skills fixed and he'll not need you to be his pimp!
2a) This is only a good plan if he sees the job as worthwhile. He may not see menial labour as being worthwhile just as he probably doesn't see the need to conform. Once again you already know he doesn't have the social skills for normal interaction so why set him up to fail at something he's not ready for. If he doesn't succeed his precious toys you've bribed him with will be out of reach and he'll feel like a complete failure. Give him the social skills first.
2b) A little better IF you can get him interested AND you do something NON-COMPETITIVE. You want to build up his confidence, and you won't do that if he hasn't learnt how to fit in, and deal with succeess and failure first. Getting him interested MAY be very very difficult though, and if you force it he'll see you as the enemy as well.
Honestly what you want to do is find a hobby HE would be interested in that has a social aspect -something with a technical aspect would be ideal. Examples are boating, kite flying, photography. Try to stay away from PURELY technical hobbies like electronics, computing, sciences that tend to attract mostly males. He'll find his way into those himself. The ideal is something that both sexes participate in so he gets exposure to both men and women who do think differently (Note this is not to get him laid - this is to teach him to interact).
Now you need to sit him down and explain to him what the advantages are of interacting well. He won't be picked on, he'll make friends, aquaintances and collegues that will want to help him etc. If he's so inclined, tell him that you want him to play act the role of someone who'd fit in with people to see how people will behave - call it an experiment (but be sure he understands not to treat other people as lesser beings that aren't significant).
At the end of the day your best bet is going to be to get him to see that a small effort and getting into the habit of being more social will bring huge rewards in and of itself.
it isn't easy, but you always a) Need to make him understand you're on his side. He can't feel like you're the enemy. b) Emphasise the positive but do also point out the negative. c) Correct him gently explaining why things don't work and how he could do things differently to feel more at ease and make people around him feel more at ease. Remember he doesn't have your social skills so what's obvious to you may not be to him.
Ok point taken and I'll correct myself. Bloatware embedded at a lower level, just above the hardware. My point is we don't need bloat at a whole other level.
Another layer of complexity! And for what? So the operating system you do install overrides it and uses its own routines to access the hardware.
BIOS = BASIC input output system.
Its just not meant to do more. Blurring the edges like this is just plain silly - a duplication of effort at best. Another thing to go wrong and more complexity where its not needed. Now we have bloatware in the HARDWARE too!!!!
Who knows just how long before CRT technologies die. I bought my 80cm TV for AUD900 a couple of years ago. I didn't care about HD or flat screen - I just wanted something with a bit more size and that was the most money I could justify spending.
Technologies can get very cheap very quickly but then again they may not. The key factor will be price, particularly for larger units, as the main driver for when CRT technology dies. Predictions like this just don't make sense.
The issue here is not whether or not we should use standards but what kind of standards we should create, and by what process.
Few would argue that developing software to a good standard would be a good thing. You get all the benefits of using an approach that everyone else is using, and the resulting system will interoperate better with others. How different web browsers would have been used to view the posted article? How would those operate numerous standards - HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, ASCII etc.? Unless you want every piece of hardware and software sold to you by a single vendor standards are necessary.
Do standards stifle creativity? Sometimes. Do you always want to be creative? You shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel to build an online banking system. If you're working on something new or the standard is lousy, that's when you want to innovate.
Many of the standards that began in the heady days of the.com boom are bloated, and overengineered. Complex solutions should be employed to solve complex problems, not because there's an ill-fitting standard around that can be used. Does every application we build NEED to be scalable, n-tier, fault tolerant (with all the costs that entails?). I think not. This is what people need to realize, especially now that the unlimited.com funds have stopped flowing.
I'm currently writing an Astronomy library in C# for an Astronomy Masters (which I'm doing entirely online incidentally). My motivation was disgust with the overuse of archaic languages in computing. For example try finding a book on orbit determination with a computer that doesn't have basic or fortran code (or sometimes pascal).
I want to write a truely extensible, object oriented library. OO programming is ideally suited to flexible scientific modelling, where everything is based on a scientific model - mostly idealized or statistically based. I narrowed the menagerie of languages down to 3 possibilites - Java, which I ruled out as too slow, C++ which does require mastery if you don't want to be chasing technical and memory management bugs, and C#. I chose C# for a number of reasons, not the least of which that this was a good pet project to learn to use it. I've written some code for numerical methods, and a few simple astronomical problems so far. C# does appear to be a good language to work in for this kind of problem. My only complaints are:
1) It's a proprietary language. 2) It's currently limited to the windows environment, and some parts of it may always be despite efforts to get past this. 3) Lack of 3D graphics support at this stage.
Advantages include: 1) A modern complete and quite powerful language. 2) Interoperability with other languages.
My feeling is that scientific computing needs to move on from the procedural era, just as most business computing has. It's not good enough to say that you're not a computer person and thereby justify your avoidance of learning the best currently available tools for a programming task. That just doesn't make sense.
That said it also makes sense to be able to read, modify/maintain and perhaps even wrap existing fortran code. I would encourage anyone who's doing scientific programming to LEARN Fortran, but not to use it in a new scientific project, unless constraints won't allow the use of an object oriented paradigm.
There is a lack of availability of freely available numerical libraries in other languages. This is a good reason to go out and develop them! Not a good reason to stay buried in archaic code. There is nothing inherent about modern OO languages that prevent them for being used for numerical processing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why compensation is tricky. You'd need to find a way to ensure that your competitor could copy the idea but only by sharing in the cost of the development and giving you a cut of the profits too.
/. that perhaps allocating a percentage of the cost of manufacture of an item to all contributing contributors ("patent"/"copyright" holders) - a tax of sorts but not one that goes to the government. The tricky part would be administering this.
I've suggested before on
Free market + Copyrights + Patents + Trade Secrets are what we have now and they clearly aren't working.
I'm not advocating traditional price controls, socialism or communism at all. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't allow one company the option to restrict the use of intellectual property by another company. Intellectual property is not the same as physical property and it is only the fact that we didn't have the technology to copy things at will that made the existing systems, which do treat them in the same way, workable for so long.
We need to evolve past this way of thinking, before we REALLY see a mess develop. I'd say we're on the brink of seeing just that as technology continues to accelerate.
I can understand the argument for compensating the creator of an original work be it an invention or an artistic work, since otherwise there would be little incentive to innovate.
I do not understand why individuals and companies consider it a right to be able to control the use of their invention or demand extravagant or prohibitive compensation for its use. An idea or work of art, once formulated should be equally available to everyone to build upon. Determining what is or isn't prohibitive is trickier though I think we'd be able to do better than the current broken system.
Oh yeah? For how long?
I don't know what the solution to this one is but as it stands the current system of compensating inventors, innovators and artists is straining and about ready to burst. There needs to be widescale reform.
Looking at individual people and companies suing each other is like trying to tell the history of a world war by looking at a single hand to hand fight battle.
I think we need to scrap the system and start again but realistically I couldn't even tell you with what. This is the best I can come up with off the top of my head for patents and I'm sure there are plenty of holes in this idea:
a) A percentage (say 20% or 30%) of the profits made in selling a product is set aside to be payed to those who contributed ideas to its development.
b) This is then distributed among all inventors contributing to the product by a central body. Submissions from the manufacturer and the parties contributing technology could be addressed.
c) No inventor would have the right to disallow anyone from using their invention. The information would be free, and in order to be paid for it the inventor would still have to lodge a document similar to the patent with the central body.
This would mean that:
1) A company producing a product would no longer have to worry about whether it was using patented technology. They already know what percentage of profit they are paying and there will be no surprises or lawsuits.
2) No company could lock another company out of using a good idea.
Copyright could operate similarly. Middle men who haven't directly contributed technology or ideas should be cut out. They should be paid for distribution as a service and not "own" the art.
Immediate problems I can see with this scheme are:
i) The massive costs of administration of a central body and deciding the spilt as given to the different inventors (likely to eclipse current court costs).
ii) Problems with shifting from the existing system.
I'm sure I'll have other problems pointed out. All I do know for sure is that the current system is BADLY broken, and is wasting human effort and stiffling innovation and creativity.
A quote from this article:
If you do not purchase Software Assurance within 30 days of purchasing your new Microsoft product, you will need to purchase an entirely new license when you upgrade. Thus, if you do not upgrade your Microsoft products very often, you may not need Software Assurance.
I apologise that this is a secondary reference, but I didn't have time to find this in the MS literature.
In other words "we'll charge you more", not "you can't get it". I'm not saying this is a nice or reasonable thing. However the CIO agreed to it and needs to understand what he's paying for. At best he's arguing the wrong thing. He did not enter into a contract that would give him what he thought he was getting and now he's blaming Microsoft.
The CIO of a company should know better than to get a maintenance contract just so he can upgrade based on a roadmap that may or may not materialize. If you want the maintenance only so you can upgrade, wait until the upgrade is out and THEN sign a maintenance contract.
The CIO needs to make it clear in summary to the CEO and CFO that these are the expected benefits, these are the assumptions I'm making and these are the risks. In my opinion he didn't do his job and now he's blaming Microsoft for failing to pedict the future, and he's making a fool of himself in the process.
If you're going to blame Microsoft, blame them for something they've done wrong. Don't try to penalize them for telling you what their plans are (a good practice in my opinion), or for your own stupidity. It makes you look like a whinning twit when you do have a legitimate complaint.
I disagree. If he's 25 and a virgin and you get him to pay for it you're only teaching him that you don't think he can get any on his own...that you've given up and that you've labelled him a loser that can't get laid.
Anyway then what? He'll be paying for it for the rest of his life if he does want any, and probably catching diseases to boot.
Persevere until you teach the boy some social skills. Things will all fall into place. He doesn't need to be suave and debonaire all the time to get a girlfriend, or very few guys would have girlfriends.
Ok so a lot of the comments here can be categorised one of the following solutions:
1) Get him sex.
2) Bribe him into behaving more socially (with something that he's interested in) and hope that it takes.
2a) Get him a job. Offer him tech toys for succeeding at it.
2b) Get him into sports (eg. martial arts) and offer him positive reenforcement for social behaviour.
Man am I glad I'm not the child. There are problems with all of these approaches.
1) Getting him sex. If he doesn't succeed you'll just make him feel worse about himself. If you pay for him to get it you're teaching him he's worthless. If he's not straight you'll also do damage pressuring him to conform with society. He may not be emmotionally mature enough to handle sex and all that comes with it. (You could get him suicidal over someone he builds a fantasy over if you're not careful for example). You're actually distracting him from his talent not helping him to fit it. Sexual behaviour has much more to it than learning to succeed at being a preditor. Let the poor kid develop at his own pace, introduce him to people his own age and get his social skills fixed and he'll not need you to be his pimp!
2a) This is only a good plan if he sees the job as worthwhile. He may not see menial labour as being worthwhile just as he probably doesn't see the need to conform. Once again you already know he doesn't have the social skills for normal interaction so why set him up to fail at something he's not ready for. If he doesn't succeed his precious toys you've bribed him with will be out of reach and he'll feel like a complete failure. Give him the social skills first.
2b) A little better IF you can get him interested AND you do something NON-COMPETITIVE. You want to build up his confidence, and you won't do that if he hasn't learnt how to fit in, and deal with succeess and failure first. Getting him interested MAY be very very difficult though, and if you force it he'll see you as the enemy as well.
Honestly what you want to do is find a hobby HE would be interested in that has a social aspect -something with a technical aspect would be ideal. Examples are boating, kite flying, photography. Try to stay away from PURELY technical hobbies like electronics, computing, sciences that tend to attract mostly males. He'll find his way into those himself. The ideal is something that both sexes participate in so he gets exposure to both men and women who do think differently (Note this is not to get him laid - this is to teach him to interact).
Now you need to sit him down and explain to him what the advantages are of interacting well. He won't be picked on, he'll make friends, aquaintances and collegues that will want to help him etc. If he's so inclined, tell him that you want him to play act the role of someone who'd fit in with people to see how people will behave - call it an experiment (but be sure he understands not to treat other people as lesser beings that aren't significant).
At the end of the day your best bet is going to be to get him to see that a small effort and getting into the habit of being more social will bring huge rewards in and of itself.
it isn't easy, but you always
a) Need to make him understand you're on his side. He can't feel like you're the enemy.
b) Emphasise the positive but do also point out the negative.
c) Correct him gently explaining why things don't work and how he could do things differently to feel more at ease and make people around him feel more at ease. Remember he doesn't have your social skills so what's obvious to you may not be to him.
Good luck. Not an easy one.
Ok point taken and I'll correct myself. Bloatware embedded at a lower level, just above the hardware. My point is we don't need bloat at a whole other level.
Another layer of complexity! And for what? So the operating system you do install overrides it and uses its own routines to access the hardware.
BIOS = BASIC input output system.
Its just not meant to do more. Blurring the edges like this is just plain silly - a duplication of effort at best. Another thing to go wrong and more complexity where its not needed. Now we have bloatware in the HARDWARE too!!!!
Who knows just how long before CRT technologies die. I bought my 80cm TV for AUD900 a couple of years ago. I didn't care about HD or flat screen - I just wanted something with a bit more size and that was the most money I could justify spending.
Technologies can get very cheap very quickly but then again they may not. The key factor will be price, particularly for larger units, as the main driver for when CRT technology dies. Predictions like this just don't make sense.
The issue here is not whether or not we should use standards but what kind of standards we should create, and by what process.
.com boom are bloated, and overengineered. Complex solutions should be employed to solve complex problems, not because there's an ill-fitting standard around that can be used. Does every application we build NEED to be scalable, n-tier, fault tolerant (with all the costs that entails?). I think not. This is what people need to realize, especially now that the unlimited .com funds have stopped flowing.
Few would argue that developing software to a good standard would be a good thing. You get all the benefits of using an approach that everyone else is using, and the resulting system will interoperate better with others. How different web browsers would have been used to view the posted article? How would those operate numerous standards - HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, ASCII etc.? Unless you want every piece of hardware and software sold to you by a single vendor standards are necessary.
Do standards stifle creativity? Sometimes. Do you always want to be creative? You shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel to build an online banking system. If you're working on something new or the standard is lousy, that's when you want to innovate.
Many of the standards that began in the heady days of the
Sammy
I'm currently writing an Astronomy library in C# for an Astronomy Masters (which I'm doing entirely online incidentally). My motivation was disgust with the overuse of archaic languages in computing. For example try finding a book on orbit determination with a computer that doesn't have basic or fortran code (or sometimes pascal).
I want to write a truely extensible, object oriented library. OO programming is ideally suited to flexible scientific modelling, where everything is based on a scientific model - mostly idealized or statistically based. I narrowed the menagerie of languages down to 3 possibilites - Java, which I ruled out as too slow, C++ which does require mastery if you don't want to be chasing technical and memory management bugs, and C#. I chose C# for a number of reasons, not the least of which that this was a good pet project to learn to use it. I've written some code for numerical methods, and a few simple astronomical problems so far. C# does appear to be a good language to work in for this kind of problem. My only complaints are:
1) It's a proprietary language.
2) It's currently limited to the windows environment, and some parts of it may always be despite efforts to get past this.
3) Lack of 3D graphics support at this stage.
Advantages include:
1) A modern complete and quite powerful language.
2) Interoperability with other languages.
My feeling is that scientific computing needs to move on from the procedural era, just as most business computing has. It's not good enough to say that you're not a computer person and thereby justify your avoidance of learning the best currently available tools for a programming task. That just doesn't make sense.
That said it also makes sense to be able to read, modify/maintain and perhaps even wrap existing fortran code. I would encourage anyone who's doing scientific programming to LEARN Fortran, but not to use it in a new scientific project, unless constraints won't allow the use of an object oriented paradigm.
There is a lack of availability of freely available numerical libraries in other languages. This is a good reason to go out and develop them! Not a good reason to stay buried in archaic code. There is nothing inherent about modern OO languages that prevent them for being used for numerical processing.
Sammy