There's a better alternative than paying Yahoo $20/year. Get your own domain!
The big down side: $50-$100/year.
the up sides:
--email address that's easy to remember, not bobsmith1483@yahoo.com
--permanet email addresses for *all* your family and friends as well (get them to kick in on the $$!)
--you get to pick the domain name
--you can put a web site up there too
--POP or web access
--If the guys go under, you can move to another provider a day later(and are you so sure Yahoo isn't teetering on TU?)
I pay $35/year to register.com for my domain, and $60/year to ICDSoft for my hosting. There are even cheaper options, but for my $60 I get a third of a gig of storage, POP or web email, subdomains, mailing lists, MySQL database, great online tech support, $5 domain registration, no ads, and lots of other bennies. Highly recommended, BTW. And as long as I have $35/year, I'll have my domain.
I used to work at Microsoft, and spent three years in the drivers & kernel group for Win98 and then Win2k. It was a running joke that every year Intel would give us a presentation showing a graph of the price/performance of flash vs. hard drives. The curves would cross in something like four years from the date of the presentation. Of course, evey year, the axes changed, but the graph (and hence the time until convergence) never did...
Load it on to your laptop. Turn off the backlight. It's text, so it's still easy to read. It'll never page, so your HD goes to sleep. If you switch it into text only mode and you're using Windows XP and your drivers support it, your graphics accelerator will go to sleep (not sure about Linux). And be sure to pull out your PCMCIA cards, and get network drivers and an ACPI BIOS that play nice. You'll get battery life and entertainment value to last most of a transcontinental flight. Try that with the latest EA game-of-the-month!
File as quickly as possible. Do as much of it yourself as you feel comfortable, then turn it over to an attorney to submit. Once submitted, I believe you can claim "Patent Pending" status. This helps you in four important ways.
1) The VC types that you show it to can't easily steal your idea
2) They can expect that your new business will have some measure of patent protection, so it's worth more
3) Ideas you describe have less value than patents, since patents have legal standing as commercial property--this will help you negotiate your cut of the new business
4) If you get funded, you can draw on their resources to refine your application, respond to office actions, etc. Basically, you can save some of your expenses until after you've got more resources.
Here's the thing, though. For a small company or individual investor, it doesn't really matter if the patent is rock-solid (e.g. has professionally researched prior art) or not. If you're litigating the thing, you're already broke. The primary value of the patent is to deter people from violating it in the first place, or to get them to license it, not to win any lawsuits. The mere existence of the patent does most of the job.
Again, it's all about your goals--is your goal to sue someone for infringement, or is it just to discourage them from ripping off your idea?
Look at the number of times MS has sued annother company for patent infringement, and you'll get an idea of why they follow this policy. In their case they're reluctant to sue for PR reasons, not money reasons, but the results are the same.
I worked at MS for 5 years and applied for 3+ patents while I was there (I'll probably get modded down just for that!). Here are some observations and thoughts from my experience.
1) It's not worth doing a patent search. Most of the larger companies do not. If you've done a perfunctory search and it's not obviously covered by prior art, then go for it! Worst case, the patent office tells you about some prior art & you adjust your application to take it into account (this almost always happens anyway).
2) It's hard, but very possible, to do it yourself. Read a lot. Look at other patents. See how it's done. If you value your time highly, you won't save money (since it's so time consuming to do right), but it's interesting and fun--plus, if you're student/unemployed/etc, you might not value your time so highly & it could be worthwhile. Also FYI, the patent office *likes* indpendant filers (by all reports), and will go out of their way to help you.
3) Think hard about why you want a patent. Patents are useful if you're going to sell an idea, but most companies won't look at patented ideas (lest you claim later that they copied you). Patents are useful for protecting a new business, but that assumes that there's no other good way of accomplishing the thing your invention accomplishes. And patents are good resume fodder. If none of these apply, you might not want/need a patent and you can save yourself some effort.
4) Patent applications are almost always rejected the first time around. Don't sweat it, it's just part of the process.
5) Even if you do hire an attorney, doing your homework & writing it up well will save you money. Show him what you've got on your first visit to the office so you can get an professional opinion, and if it's in good shape, that's less hours you need to be billed. $200/hour attorneys are happy to transcribe your napkins for you, but it's usually more cost effective to do it yourself.
6) It always takes a long, long, long time. The first patent I filed for, 5 years ago, is just now about to be issued. 3 years is very typical.
7) DON'T pay for anything other than a licensed patent attorney to file your patent. "Invention Submission Bureaus" and their ilk are just there to take your fees.
8) If you can't monetize your patent yourself, it's almost worthless. The only other thing you could do is sit on it for years, then sue someone who accidently infringes on it (so-called "Submarining"), and that's just wrong (to my way of thinking). Use a patent to protect a business, but don't expect to build a business on a patent.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
--dan
If I go out and charge $20/h to do consulting, I can't get any business, but if I go and charge $200/h, I can get a fair bit of businesness!
This is CRAZY!
No, it's not crazy, it's a natural outgrowth of captialism. Capitalism predicts that most people will charge roughly their value. Those that don't will raise their prices (because they can get away with it) or go out of business (because they stink). So most cheap contractors will be inferior, with a few bargains mixed in. Most expensive contractors will be good, with a few duds floating around. If you have the money, and you want quality, you go with the person who charges more.
It may be more or less true for certain industries and certain people, but it's not crazy.
From an ex-MS guy: what this is about
on
More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 1
I worked as a program manager at MS for five years before I left two weeks ago to go to a startup that's designing cell phones that run Linux. Let me tell you what you're seeing here. Hint: it's not billg telling the legal department to be sure he gets root on everyone's MP3 server.
People writing EULAs at MS have the following priorities to consider:
1. Don't get sued.
As a consequence of this, they spend all their time worrying about what rights MS needs to get their software installed and functional, and none worrying about the rights they don't need but are inadvertently requesting anyway. What you're seeing is simply that; an overzealous rights grab from someone who doesn't want his too-timid EULA to land Bill in court again. Oh, and they probably didn't think hard about EU privacy (MS is a pretty domestic-thinking company); either that, or they have a diferent license in the EU.
Always remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" (or ignorance, or fear).
--dan
PS: the.NET server thing is sleazy and no doubt someone thinking they're clever; it can't be enforced in US courts anyway.
This is the second advanced research lab...
on
Modular Robots
·
· Score: 1
...to come up with the idea of building robots from interchangable modular parts.
Lego hasn't quite managed to stick a PowerPC in each block, but they're much more affordable. Seriously, it's nice to see things moving from the toy department to the research lab, instead of the other way around.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Programming preset problems gets pretty old after a while. It's a means, after all, not an end. What you've got to do is find yourself and end that gets your creative juices flowing. I'm not talking about a job--I'm talking about a great hobby. Build a cool hack that makes your life more fun.
What floats your boat? Model trains? Racing? Ancient Latin? Find something that you love to do, and apply your budding CS skills to it. You'll find yourself looking forward to quality time with your computer again, and discover newfound relevence in your class projects.
So go write a traintrack layout tool, reinvent babelfish, or design software to produce laser shows (that's what I did). It doesn't matter what it is. Just be sure you do some work for yourself, not your GPA. It'll rejuvinate your interest in coding, help you realize the extent of your own skills, and--extra bonus--be great resume fodder.
Slashdot Mirror
The big down side: $50-$100/year.
the up sides:
--email address that's easy to remember, not bobsmith1483@yahoo.com
--permanet email addresses for *all* your family and friends as well (get them to kick in on the $$!)
--you get to pick the domain name
--you can put a web site up there too
--POP or web access
--If the guys go under, you can move to another provider a day later(and are you so sure Yahoo isn't teetering on TU?)
I pay $35/year to register.com for my domain, and $60/year to ICDSoft for my hosting. There are even cheaper options, but for my $60 I get a third of a gig of storage, POP or web email, subdomains, mailing lists, MySQL database, great online tech support, $5 domain registration, no ads, and lots of other bennies. Highly recommended, BTW. And as long as I have $35/year, I'll have my domain.
I used to work at Microsoft, and spent three years in the drivers & kernel group for Win98 and then Win2k. It was a running joke that every year Intel would give us a presentation showing a graph of the price/performance of flash vs. hard drives. The curves would cross in something like four years from the date of the presentation. Of course, evey year, the axes changed, but the graph (and hence the time until convergence) never did...
Dan-V ascended to demigoddess-hood. 479 [496]
7th Place, 5878647 points
(1999 NH tournament)
File as quickly as possible. Do as much of it yourself as you feel comfortable, then turn it over to an attorney to submit. Once submitted, I believe you can claim "Patent Pending" status. This helps you in four important ways.
1) The VC types that you show it to can't easily steal your idea
2) They can expect that your new business will have some measure of patent protection, so it's worth more
3) Ideas you describe have less value than patents, since patents have legal standing as commercial property--this will help you negotiate your cut of the new business
4) If you get funded, you can draw on their resources to refine your application, respond to office actions, etc. Basically, you can save some of your expenses until after you've got more resources.
Good luck!
--dan
Again, it's all about your goals--is your goal to sue someone for infringement, or is it just to discourage them from ripping off your idea?
Look at the number of times MS has sued annother company for patent infringement, and you'll get an idea of why they follow this policy. In their case they're reluctant to sue for PR reasons, not money reasons, but the results are the same.
--dan
1) It's not worth doing a patent search. Most of the larger companies do not. If you've done a perfunctory search and it's not obviously covered by prior art, then go for it! Worst case, the patent office tells you about some prior art & you adjust your application to take it into account (this almost always happens anyway).
2) It's hard, but very possible, to do it yourself. Read a lot. Look at other patents. See how it's done. If you value your time highly, you won't save money (since it's so time consuming to do right), but it's interesting and fun--plus, if you're student/unemployed/etc, you might not value your time so highly & it could be worthwhile. Also FYI, the patent office *likes* indpendant filers (by all reports), and will go out of their way to help you.
3) Think hard about why you want a patent. Patents are useful if you're going to sell an idea, but most companies won't look at patented ideas (lest you claim later that they copied you). Patents are useful for protecting a new business, but that assumes that there's no other good way of accomplishing the thing your invention accomplishes. And patents are good resume fodder. If none of these apply, you might not want/need a patent and you can save yourself some effort.
4) Patent applications are almost always rejected the first time around. Don't sweat it, it's just part of the process.
5) Even if you do hire an attorney, doing your homework & writing it up well will save you money. Show him what you've got on your first visit to the office so you can get an professional opinion, and if it's in good shape, that's less hours you need to be billed. $200/hour attorneys are happy to transcribe your napkins for you, but it's usually more cost effective to do it yourself.
6) It always takes a long, long, long time. The first patent I filed for, 5 years ago, is just now about to be issued. 3 years is very typical. 7) DON'T pay for anything other than a licensed patent attorney to file your patent. "Invention Submission Bureaus" and their ilk are just there to take your fees.
8) If you can't monetize your patent yourself, it's almost worthless. The only other thing you could do is sit on it for years, then sue someone who accidently infringes on it (so-called "Submarining"), and that's just wrong (to my way of thinking). Use a patent to protect a business, but don't expect to build a business on a patent. Hope this helps. Good luck! --dan
It may be more or less true for certain industries and certain people, but it's not crazy.
People writing EULAs at MS have the following priorities to consider:
1. Don't get sued.
As a consequence of this, they spend all their time worrying about what rights MS needs to get their software installed and functional, and none worrying about the rights they don't need but are inadvertently requesting anyway. What you're seeing is simply that; an overzealous rights grab from someone who doesn't want his too-timid EULA to land Bill in court again. Oh, and they probably didn't think hard about EU privacy (MS is a pretty domestic-thinking company); either that, or they have a diferent license in the EU.
Always remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" (or ignorance, or fear).
--dan
PS: the .NET server thing is sleazy and no doubt someone thinking they're clever; it can't be enforced in US courts anyway.
...to come up with the idea of building robots from interchangable modular parts. Lego hasn't quite managed to stick a PowerPC in each block, but they're much more affordable.
Seriously, it's nice to see things moving from the toy department to the research lab, instead of the other way around.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
What floats your boat? Model trains? Racing? Ancient Latin? Find something that you love to do, and apply your budding CS skills to it. You'll find yourself looking forward to quality time with your computer again, and discover newfound relevence in your class projects.
So go write a traintrack layout tool, reinvent babelfish, or design software to produce laser shows (that's what I did). It doesn't matter what it is. Just be sure you do some work for yourself, not your GPA. It'll rejuvinate your interest in coding, help you realize the extent of your own skills, and--extra bonus--be great resume fodder.
Good luck!
--dan