I think the existence of life elswhere in the universe is tightly coupled with the result of speculation over whether coffee is beneficial or detrimental to human health, since both seem to vary with equal frequency.
Follow the money trail when someone tells you that results of our ability to study a few hundred nearby solar systems is indicative of anything. The only way to PROVE that there is life elsewhere in the universe is to find it. Likewise the only way to disprove it is to study the entire universe, which isn't likely to happen. If in fact we DO manage to study the whole universe at some point, then enough time will have passed that we will almost certainly have CAUSED life to exist on other planets, either intentionally or not.
I'm all for space exploration etc, but having some publication once a day ask "what's the bottom line on all this?" is a total waste of time.
My guess is that this has something to do with their purchase of Visio. I got a briefing from Visio just before they were gobbled up and they were planning to introduce a package that would automatically make geographically correct drawings of your network using GPS data (which made the assumption that all your network equipment was GPS enabled).
It was a "cute" idea. But like so many things that are patented, not the sort of things that we would like to consider an advancement of civilization. Maybe, in fact, this focus on taking credit for trivialities is evidence that our civilization has reached it's high water mark. Middle of last century we were learning to split the atom, put people on the moon, cure formerly incurable diseases. This century the focus will be on reverse threaded lightbulbs for left handed people. That's pretty much how important I see all PC related inventions (including everything Microsoft has done) as almost all of it was done for mainframes back in the 70's. Between IBM's existing patent portfolio and what they can show as prior art probably the only thing MS can claim as new is their enormous inventory of mitigating factors used to explain why the latest security flaw isn't likely to require a reformat of your hard drive.
"Yeah, 'cause if you don't like it, Mr. AC, then it must be CRAP. I have wanted these to evolve into a reasonably priced product for a while now."
Yeah, but do you consider $1300+ reasonable?
I don't. Even full featured laptops are down below $1000 now. When I can go into a retail store and find one of these things that are on display for the public to play with and not BROKEN, I'll think about it. Otherwise, for a device that is likely to have to be thrown away every few years (what's your guess about how the warrantee horror stories will be like on these?) maybe a $349 price tag would be more appropriate.
This thing is just a gimmick to sell a new version of Windows, and I bet MS chips into the advertising budgets for any hardware maker willing to go out on a limb making them.
I'd rather see palmtops and desktop (or conventional laptop) systems work together to provide the flexibility (and then some) of these things.
I think this was more or less the first thought I had about RSS when I first looked into it and found out that it was a "pull" technology rather than a "push" as the early descriptions of it implied.
Yes, it's "cool" that I can set up a page (or now use a browser plug-in) to automatically get a lot of content from hundreds of web pages at a time when I really opened up the browser to check my e-mail.
What would have REALLY, been cool would be some sort of technology that would notify me when something CHANGED. No effort on my part, no *needless* effort on the servers part.
Oh wait... We HAD that didn't we, I think they were called Listservers, and they worked just fine. (Still do actually as I get a number of updates, including Slashdot, that way.) RSS advocates (and I won't mention any names) keep making pronouncements like "e-mail s dead!" simply because they have gotten themselves and their hosting companies on some black hole lists. Cry me a river now that your bandwidth costs are going through the roof and yet nobody is clicking though on your web page ads, because, guess what? Nobody is visiting your page. They have all they need to know about your updates via your RSS feeds.
I think they were the low-price-spread back when people still used a variety of word processors. There were a number of word processing alternatives to WordPerfect for a while and I don't think it was crystal clear that Word was the best of them. But as people gradually started getting computers that were capable of running the early versions of Windows, Microsoft used those secret API calls as well as low price as a way of making it a no-brainer to go with Office. Unfortunately some of those aging DP managers who made that no-brainer decision, as it turns out, actually don't have brains and are still finishing up their careers bragging about how they were able to install Prodigy on their home computers without help, you know, back in the good old days.
A new generation of management I hope will make a more objective decision about their computing needs. It seems like it takes forever for the old farts to die off though.
"In the future though I see a single communication line coming into your home. Off of abox installed in your house will come TV, Internet, and video Phone. Possibly using interchanged monitors."
Right!
And the game to watch is which of your existing services falls by the wayside. The DSL/Cable battle is just the first round. First company to put fiber in my house wins!
Next phase will be to eliminate current ridiculous bandwidth restrictions on servers because it will be more trouble to measure than the accounting costs are worth. Everyone can finally host their own unrestricted internet server. A lot of the smaller hosting companies will be put out of our misery by this and the only companies remaining will be those that need a room full of equipment to handle the demands of the large, popular domains, Google, MS, Yahoo and the like.
Net-centric computing will have finally arrived, and it will no longer be worth saving video, music, or even your own spreadsheet and text files on your local hard drive as they can be instantly downloaded from a server somewhere that is getting backed up regularly. In other words, current hosting companies will have the chance to transition from points of presence to storage, archiving, and application server facilities.
This will all demand an end to the nonsense of operating systems which can be easily hacked into. Microsoft will replace the Windows underpinnings transparently with something that is standards based (probably BSD variant), but Linux will continue to thrive for those who want to have complete control over what they do with their own hardware.
As the rest of the world tries to copy the connectivity nirvana achieved here in the US the world will enter a new era of peace and prosperity, except that all help-desk call centers the world over will still transfer to someplace in India...
"How odd that I noticed this earlier in the day. Slashdot is slower than my own curiosity these days. For Shame."
Except that it wasn't news this morning either. I've been playing with it for a week or so already. Unless you frequently check the google labs page, or subscribe to certain Orkut groups (where they appear to be leaking info) there is no reason that you'd know about it.
The system still looks rather primitive, buggy, and flawed (no munging of email addresses in posts to the outside world for example) so my guess is they were happy to not have a million people using it just yet.
"Basically, if a primary user's signal interferes with a secondary user, the secondary user is the one responsible for dealing with the problem (e.g., shielding their equipment, moving, etc). The primary users don't have to take any steps to avoid interfering with secondary users.
Secondary users, on the other hand, have to avoid interfering with primary users. If a secondary user interferes with a primary user, the secondary user has to stop, shield their equipment, move, etc."
Which is why the referenced article, as typical, GOT IT WRONG, since it leaves the distinct impression that AT&T or the military, or space aliens or just about anybody but the keyfob manufacturers are to blame for this. Maybe Jason Blair wasn't so bad. At least some of his made-up news had the ring of truth to it.
The Post article was moronic and I wrote to tell them so. I wish I could have added "AND CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION" but I haven't read the Post regularly for years (with good reason).
The review went something like this:
--- I have a FORD but I'm considering three alternatives:
(a) The Chevy is nice, but I don't like the available color schemes.
(b) The Honda drove well, but I would like something larger.
(c) Cadillacs are too expensive.
Well, since all the alternatives to FORD are ugly, too small and too expensive I think I'll just keep driving a FORD. ---
All such people should be told the same thing when they complain about security exposures decade release cycles and bloat: "Well why don't you get off your FAT ASS and do something about it? And don't call me at home with your stupid questions!"
He dinged Linux for not having an easy enough dynamic disk partitioner. I mean can't the Washington Post afford a fresh machine for him to install Linux on? Last time I checked, Windows didn't have a dynamic disk partitioner at all, and installing it blows away anything that is already there (boot wise).
Anyway, I know people at the Post, which I think is still a mainframe shop, at least to some extent. I haven't compared notes with them in a long time, but it seems to me the best thing they could do would be to adopt open standards, life-cycle methodology (to avoid the convert everything at once red-herring) and ultimately allow them to plug-and-play various kinds of clients into a logical infrastructure.
Based on this article, they don't seem to have a clue.
I don't think most people are against ALL patents, but recent examples suggest that there are a lot of patents being granted that should not be. The thinking along these lines should follow these rules:
(Rule 1) The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation.
(Rule 2) There is no Rule 2.
In other words, patents are not about maximizing or minimizing profits, helping inventors with their time management or life-style issues, solving social inequities, or any other subjective notion.
Yesterday we had a story about a bank that patented it's furniture arrangement (I'm oversimplifying, but the point is valid), and every day or two we here about another patent issued for things that we all take for granted.
At it's peek of usefullness the USPTO issued patents largely to manufacturing processes or for items that required a manufacturing process. It had nothing to do with inventors wanting or not wanting to be marketers. My experience is that most inventors LOVE being marketers. What they don't love is coming up with the funds to manufacture their inventions. They also don't like the risk of manufacturing 10,000 or something and then finding out that someone else can make the same thing for half the price. The patent process allows (or allowed, when it was being used properly) the inventor to separate the "cost" of coming up with the invention from the "cost" of producing, selling, marketing and a whole bunch of other risky activities. When most patents covered "things" this made a lot more sense. It makes much less sense when the "manufacturing" process consists of re-arranging furniture in a room, or typing 15 lines of code into an editor.
To me, things that require little or nothing in the way of manufacturing costs deserve very special scrutiny from the USPTO. That doesn't mean you can't patent software, or a cartoon mouse for that matter, but in such cases I think there needs to be a stricter burden of proof on the part of the applicant. They need to prove that the idea is "significant", and of course that the idea was not already "in the wild" before they had it.
One example that keeps showing up of course has to do with various techniques for selling things. A patent on clicking on an icon to buy something? Isn't that intuitively obvious once you accept the notion of clicking on things at all? Oh, but wait, you can't click on things without a mouse. Hmmm, there were pointing and clicking devices before the mouse however. The light pen depended on LEDs. So, should all e-bay sales generate a check for the inventor of the LED?
Anyway, I think the recent examples we have seen of USPTO activity should make us worry that they are doing more to DISCOURAGE innovation than to encourage it. If you sit down to figure out a better way to code a common activity, sell something on the internet, or wipe your ass, there is a good chance that the USPTO has already issues a patent to cover it. If the world of ideas can be likened to an airplane, the USPTO has overbooked the airplane 10 times over. It is no longer the cost of manufacturing, or even marketeering that should discourage the new inventor, but rather the legal process involved in enforcing your claim. Because so many ideas these days don't involve a manufacturing step at all, and in fact the invention process may have teaken all of 15 seconds, one has to ask at some point, why is this dog chasing it's own tail?
"To change the color or font for a sticky note, flip the note around -- all Widgets controls are on the back to keep them out of sight until you need them."
Sounds like Sun and Apple are finally taking computer users to the next level with 3D interfaces. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with.
Microsoft has this idea covered already. Each copy of Longhorn will come with a colorful selection of Post-It notes that can be affixed onto the back of your monitor. I think they already have the pattent application in the works too. Admit it... the people at Microsoft are just too smart for the rest of us.
No, I think he is absolutely right. While many of us would rather see the laws enforced without further delay, there is a good chance that the market will act first. Remember that in both the cases of the antitrust actions against IBM and AT&T market forces were already in effect before any action was taken by the courts. Had the PC "revolution" taken place only a few years earlier there would have been no point in busting up IBM (from the courts perspective). AT&T and the baby Bells since broken up generate a lot more revenue than they did as a single company. Many people think that total Microsoft revenue would increase (past tense perhaps) had they separated the OS, Office, and networking monopolies.
Microsoft may be "beating" the courts, but we may look back in a few years and realize that they invested so much of their corporate ego in remaining one big monopoly that they in fact are worse off for it. As an investor, I think IBM is much better prepared for the future than Microsoft. Microsoft COULD change however, by entering the consulting business in a big way (and in the process putting some of their business partners out of business), deemphasizing their software monopoly, and maybe even getting into the manufacturing (at least at the subcomponent level) they could once again find themselves face to face with IBM on the playing field.
Do I expect this to happen? No, not as long as Gates is around. It's that ego thing. Nothing to do with business. Certainly not the long-term good of the company at least.
I don't know, but mine is set to expire in October and I've already redirected subscription mail elswhere in preparation. I think they are counting too much on the loyalty factor. At some point you have to actually provide a competitive service too one would think.
"Of course, you may have to actually pay for the stuff this time . .."
Yeah, but for what you would pay to actually go to Comdex just think how much swag you could BUY.
The trick is to get your company to pay for Comdex like they always have. Just ask for a check and tell them you will make all the arrangements yourself. Buy your swag. Dig up some interesting technical news using Google. Turn in your trip report just like you always have. (Nobody ever reads those things anyway).
NEVER submit articles to Slashdot just to bump up your site statistics. Unless of course you have made financial arrangements with your hosting provider first.
Seems to me if we have the technology to terraform Mars then we should be able to call a halt to all ecological activism here on Earth. Too mch green house gases? Just set the terraformer on "high" for a few months and clean it all up right?
I bet if someone does the math they'll figure out that anything mankind could set up on Mars to generate an atmosphere would have to run for... oh, a hundred thousand years or so (one of the articles says 40 thousand) to have any noticable effect. Which gets us back to why man with all his evil ways hasn't been able to ruin Earth yet. (not that we should be TRYING to ruin Earth or anything).
"How does one get invited. I crave the invitation. I am almost tempted to start my own Google just so I could then invite myself to gmail. "
If you have been using Blogger for a while then you probably already have an invitation. Sign on to blogger (as if to update your blog) and look carefully over on the right.
"On the other hand, the filter model doesn't cut it for me. Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff. Maybe if I could "star" incoming messages based on criteria as well?"
You don't leave things in your inbox (unless you really want to). Check all the messages that you don't want in your inbox and then click ARCHIVE. If you have not labeled such a message then it will only be visible in the pseudo folder "ALL MAIL", or by doing a string search.
A friend of mine said he couldn't live without folders. I explained to him that the label system has exactly the same effect.
There is only ONE thing that folders can do that labels can't (that I can think of) and that is create multiple copies of the same message in several different folders. For that reason I think the label system is better. You delete a message and it's deleted, no matter how many labels you attached to it. If you have a complex and redundant folder set-up you could delete a message from a folder and not remember that you had 3 copies of it elsewhere. Multiple copies of a message would also confuse the threading scheme they have.
Really I think this is an example of a new thing being better, but people used to the old thing not having figured it out yet. Google needs to put a lengthy tutorial out there I think to explain things like this. Maybe they are counting on the invitation system to provide hand-holding for new users at first.
I thought I read AT LEAST two years ago that Sony had all the parts needed to make a Playstation 3 but was holding back due to the fact that there was no competition they needed to whomp at the time. Had XBox done better the PS3 would probably be out there now. I'd love to see the PS3 come out though, since as it was described it might not only be an XBox killer but a PC killer as well.
I hardly see how this move is a "risk" for Microsoft though. The bigger risk to Microsoft is that they just sit on their 50 Billion $ nest egg and wait for the Windows/Office monopoly to dry up. Having shot blanks with just about everything else they have tried, even Bill must be doubting his own genius by now.
If you had Sony to go up against in consumer electronics, IBM in IT consulting and hardware, Google, Yahoo and AOL in Internet space, and Open Software gradually picking up steam against your existing monopoly, wouldn't you be a bit worried? I bet the stock holders are.
Besides, who says the end of 2005 is a rush? In MS time that means 2007 at least.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the existence of life elswhere in the universe is tightly coupled with the result of speculation over whether coffee is beneficial or detrimental to human health, since both seem to vary with equal frequency.
Follow the money trail when someone tells you that results of our ability to study a few hundred nearby solar systems is indicative of anything. The only way to PROVE that there is life elsewhere in the universe is to find it. Likewise the only way to disprove it is to study the entire universe, which isn't likely to happen. If in fact we DO manage to study the whole universe at some point, then enough time will have passed that we will almost certainly have CAUSED life to exist on other planets, either intentionally or not.
I'm all for space exploration etc, but having some publication once a day ask "what's the bottom line on all this?" is a total waste of time.
But more interesting will be a betting pool on when SCO will cease to exist.
I've managed to screw my system up with Stable too, but I don't think you can infer anything from that.
Well, you can, but I ignore it.
My guess is that this has something to do with their purchase of Visio. I got a briefing from Visio just before they were gobbled up and they were planning to introduce a package that would automatically make geographically correct drawings of your network using GPS data (which made the assumption that all your network equipment was GPS enabled).
It was a "cute" idea. But like so many things that are patented, not the sort of things that we would like to consider an advancement of civilization. Maybe, in fact, this focus on taking credit for trivialities is evidence that our civilization has reached it's high water mark. Middle of last century we were learning to split the atom, put people on the moon, cure formerly incurable diseases. This century the focus will be on reverse threaded lightbulbs for left handed people. That's pretty much how important I see all PC related inventions (including everything Microsoft has done) as almost all of it was done for mainframes back in the 70's. Between IBM's existing patent portfolio and what they can show as prior art probably the only thing MS can claim as new is their enormous inventory of mitigating factors used to explain why the latest security flaw isn't likely to require a reformat of your hard drive.
"Yeah, 'cause if you don't like it, Mr. AC, then it must be CRAP. I have wanted these to evolve into a reasonably priced product for a while now."
Yeah, but do you consider $1300+ reasonable?
I don't. Even full featured laptops are down below $1000 now. When I can go into a retail store and find one of these things that are on display for the public to play with and not BROKEN, I'll think about it. Otherwise, for a device that is likely to have to be thrown away every few years (what's your guess about how the warrantee horror stories will be like on these?) maybe a $349 price tag would be more appropriate.
This thing is just a gimmick to sell a new version of Windows, and I bet MS chips into the advertising budgets for any hardware maker willing to go out on a limb making them.
I'd rather see palmtops and desktop (or conventional laptop) systems work together to provide the flexibility (and then some) of these things.
I think this was more or less the first thought I had about RSS when I first looked into it and found out that it was a "pull" technology rather than a "push" as the early descriptions of it implied.
Yes, it's "cool" that I can set up a page (or now use a browser plug-in) to automatically get a lot of content from hundreds of web pages at a time when I really opened up the browser to check my e-mail.
What would have REALLY, been cool would be some sort of technology that would notify me when something CHANGED. No effort on my part, no *needless* effort on the servers part.
Oh wait... We HAD that didn't we, I think they were called Listservers, and they worked just fine. (Still do actually as I get a number of updates, including Slashdot, that way.) RSS advocates (and I won't mention any names) keep making pronouncements like "e-mail s dead!" simply because they have gotten themselves and their hosting companies on some black hole lists. Cry me a river now that your bandwidth costs are going through the roof and yet nobody is clicking though on your web page ads, because, guess what? Nobody is visiting your page. They have all they need to know about your updates via your RSS feeds.
I think they were the low-price-spread back when people still used a variety of word processors. There were a number of word processing alternatives to WordPerfect for a while and I don't think it was crystal clear that Word was the best of them. But as people gradually started getting computers that were capable of running the early versions of Windows, Microsoft used those secret API calls as well as low price as a way of making it a no-brainer to go with Office. Unfortunately some of those aging DP managers who made that no-brainer decision, as it turns out, actually don't have brains and are still finishing up their careers bragging about how they were able to install Prodigy on their home computers without help, you know, back in the good old days.
A new generation of management I hope will make a more objective decision about their computing needs. It seems like it takes forever for the old farts to die off though.
Oh, wait a minute, I'm an old fart too!
"In the future though I see a single communication line coming into your home. Off of abox installed in your house will come TV, Internet, and video Phone. Possibly using interchanged monitors."
Right!
And the game to watch is which of your existing services falls by the wayside. The DSL/Cable battle is just the first round. First company to put fiber in my house wins!
Next phase will be to eliminate current ridiculous bandwidth restrictions on servers because it will be more trouble to measure than the accounting costs are worth. Everyone can finally host their own unrestricted internet server. A lot of the smaller hosting companies will be put out of our misery by this and the only companies remaining will be those that need a room full of equipment to handle the demands of the large, popular domains, Google, MS, Yahoo and the like.
Net-centric computing will have finally arrived, and it will no longer be worth saving video, music, or even your own spreadsheet and text files on your local hard drive as they can be instantly downloaded from a server somewhere that is getting backed up regularly. In other words, current hosting companies will have the chance to transition from points of presence to storage, archiving, and application server facilities.
This will all demand an end to the nonsense of operating systems which can be easily hacked into. Microsoft will replace the Windows underpinnings transparently with something that is standards based (probably BSD variant), but Linux will continue to thrive for those who want to have complete control over what they do with their own hardware.
As the rest of the world tries to copy the connectivity nirvana achieved here in the US the world will enter a new era of peace and prosperity, except that all help-desk call centers the world over will still transfer to someplace in India...
And then I woke up.
I didn't know what to do, so I tried going outside!
/. to come back.
It's DARK out there!
I'm just going to wait here and watch my screensaver while I wait for
Oh, wait, NM.
"Oh no. It's the Monty Python Argument sketch all over again.."
No it isn't!
"The internet is a platform delivered through text and porn."
True. But I read it just for the articles.
"How odd that I noticed this earlier in the day. Slashdot is slower than my own curiosity these days. For Shame."
Except that it wasn't news this morning either. I've been playing with it for a week or so already. Unless you frequently check the google labs page, or subscribe to certain Orkut groups (where they appear to be leaking info) there is no reason that you'd know about it.
The system still looks rather primitive, buggy, and flawed (no munging of email addresses in posts to the outside world for example) so my guess is they were happy to not have a million people using it just yet.
Oooops, too late.
"Basically, if a primary user's signal interferes with a secondary user, the secondary user is the one responsible for dealing with the problem (e.g., shielding their equipment, moving, etc). The primary users don't have to take any steps to avoid interfering with secondary users.
Secondary users, on the other hand, have to avoid interfering with primary users. If a secondary user interferes with a primary user, the secondary user has to stop, shield their equipment, move, etc."
Which is why the referenced article, as typical, GOT IT WRONG, since it leaves the distinct impression that AT&T or the military, or space aliens or just about anybody but the keyfob manufacturers are to blame for this. Maybe Jason Blair wasn't so bad. At least some of his made-up news had the ring of truth to it.
The Post article was moronic and I wrote to tell them so. I wish I could have added "AND CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION" but I haven't read the Post regularly for years (with good reason).
The review went something like this:
---
I have a FORD but I'm considering three alternatives:
(a) The Chevy is nice, but I don't like the available color schemes.
(b) The Honda drove well, but I would like something larger.
(c) Cadillacs are too expensive.
Well, since all the alternatives to FORD are ugly, too small and too expensive I think I'll just keep driving a FORD.
---
All such people should be told the same thing when they complain about security exposures decade release cycles and bloat: "Well why don't you get off your FAT ASS and do something about it? And don't call me at home with your stupid questions!"
He dinged Linux for not having an easy enough dynamic disk partitioner. I mean can't the Washington Post afford a fresh machine for him to install Linux on? Last time I checked, Windows didn't have a dynamic disk partitioner at all, and installing it blows away anything that is already there (boot wise).
Anyway, I know people at the Post, which I think is still a mainframe shop, at least to some extent. I haven't compared notes with them in a long time, but it seems to me the best thing they could do would be to adopt open standards, life-cycle methodology (to avoid the convert everything at once red-herring) and ultimately allow them to plug-and-play various kinds of clients into a logical infrastructure.
Based on this article, they don't seem to have a clue.
I'm hooked on the stuff. If I don't have a cup first thing in the morning the whole day is shot.
I think Java should be free. Down with Starbucks!
I don't think most people are against ALL patents, but recent examples suggest that there are a lot of patents being granted that should not be. The thinking along these lines should follow these rules:
(Rule 1) The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation.
(Rule 2) There is no Rule 2.
In other words, patents are not about maximizing or minimizing profits, helping inventors with their time management or life-style issues, solving social inequities, or any other subjective notion.
Yesterday we had a story about a bank that patented it's furniture arrangement (I'm oversimplifying, but the point is valid), and every day or two we here about another patent issued for things that we all take for granted.
At it's peek of usefullness the USPTO issued patents largely to manufacturing processes or for items that required a manufacturing process. It had nothing to do with inventors wanting or not wanting to be marketers. My experience is that most inventors LOVE being marketers. What they don't love is coming up with the funds to manufacture their inventions. They also don't like the risk of manufacturing 10,000 or something and then finding out that someone else can make the same thing for half the price. The patent process allows (or allowed, when it was being used properly) the inventor to separate the "cost" of coming up with the invention from the "cost" of producing, selling, marketing and a whole bunch of other risky activities. When most patents covered "things" this made a lot more sense. It makes much less sense when the "manufacturing" process consists of re-arranging furniture in a room, or typing 15 lines of code into an editor.
To me, things that require little or nothing in the way of manufacturing costs deserve very special scrutiny from the USPTO. That doesn't mean you can't patent software, or a cartoon mouse for that matter, but in such cases I think there needs to be a stricter burden of proof on the part of the applicant. They need to prove that the idea is "significant", and of course that the idea was not already "in the wild" before they had it.
One example that keeps showing up of course has to do with various techniques for selling things. A patent on clicking on an icon to buy something? Isn't that intuitively obvious once you accept the notion of clicking on things at all? Oh, but wait, you can't click on things without a mouse. Hmmm, there were pointing and clicking devices before the mouse however. The light pen depended on LEDs. So, should all e-bay sales generate a check for the inventor of the LED?
Anyway, I think the recent examples we have seen of USPTO activity should make us worry that they are doing more to DISCOURAGE innovation than to encourage it. If you sit down to figure out a better way to code a common activity, sell something on the internet, or wipe your ass, there is a good chance that the USPTO has already issues a patent to cover it. If the world of ideas can be likened to an airplane, the USPTO has overbooked the airplane 10 times over. It is no longer the cost of manufacturing, or even marketeering that should discourage the new inventor, but rather the legal process involved in enforcing your claim. Because so many ideas these days don't involve a manufacturing step at all, and in fact the invention process may have teaken all of 15 seconds, one has to ask at some point, why is this dog chasing it's own tail?
"To change the color or font for a sticky note, flip the note around -- all Widgets controls are on the back to keep them out of sight until you need them."
Sounds like Sun and Apple are finally taking computer users to the next level with 3D interfaces. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with.
Microsoft has this idea covered already. Each copy of Longhorn will come with a colorful selection of Post-It notes that can be affixed onto the back of your monitor. I think they already have the pattent application in the works too. Admit it... the people at Microsoft are just too smart for the rest of us.
No, I think he is absolutely right. While many of us would rather see the laws enforced without further delay, there is a good chance that the market will act first. Remember that in both the cases of the antitrust actions against IBM and AT&T market forces were already in effect before any action was taken by the courts. Had the PC "revolution" taken place only a few years earlier there would have been no point in busting up IBM (from the courts perspective). AT&T and the baby Bells since broken up generate a lot more revenue than they did as a single company. Many people think that total Microsoft revenue would increase (past tense perhaps) had they separated the OS, Office, and networking monopolies.
Microsoft may be "beating" the courts, but we may look back in a few years and realize that they invested so much of their corporate ego in remaining one big monopoly that they in fact are worse off for it. As an investor, I think IBM is much better prepared for the future than Microsoft. Microsoft COULD change however, by entering the consulting business in a big way (and in the process putting some of their business partners out of business), deemphasizing their software monopoly, and maybe even getting into the manufacturing (at least at the subcomponent level) they could once again find themselves face to face with IBM on the playing field.
Do I expect this to happen? No, not as long as Gates is around. It's that ego thing. Nothing to do with business. Certainly not the long-term good of the company at least.
I don't know, but mine is set to expire in October and I've already redirected subscription mail elswhere in preparation. I think they are counting too much on the loyalty factor. At some point you have to actually provide a competitive service too one would think.
"Of course, you may have to actually pay for the stuff this time . . ."
Yeah, but for what you would pay to actually go to Comdex just think how much swag you could BUY.
The trick is to get your company to pay for Comdex like they always have. Just ask for a check and tell them you will make all the arrangements yourself. Buy your swag. Dig up some interesting technical news using Google. Turn in your trip report just like you always have. (Nobody ever reads those things anyway).
Profit!
NEVER submit articles to Slashdot just to bump up your site statistics. Unless of course you have made financial arrangements with your hosting provider first.
Seems to me if we have the technology to terraform Mars then we should be able to call a halt to all ecological activism here on Earth. Too mch green house gases? Just set the terraformer on "high" for a few months and clean it all up right?
I bet if someone does the math they'll figure out that anything mankind could set up on Mars to generate an atmosphere would have to run for... oh, a hundred thousand years or so (one of the articles says 40 thousand) to have any noticable effect. Which gets us back to why man with all his evil ways hasn't been able to ruin Earth yet. (not that we should be TRYING to ruin Earth or anything).
"How does one get invited. I crave the invitation. I am almost tempted to start my own Google just so I could then invite myself to gmail.
"
If you have been using Blogger for a while then you probably already have an invitation. Sign on to blogger (as if to update your blog) and look carefully over on the right.
"On the other hand, the filter model doesn't cut it for me. Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff. Maybe if I could "star" incoming messages based on criteria as well?"
You don't leave things in your inbox (unless you really want to). Check all the messages that you don't want in your inbox and then click ARCHIVE. If you have not labeled such a message then it will only be visible in the pseudo folder "ALL MAIL", or by doing a string search.
A friend of mine said he couldn't live without folders. I explained to him that the label system has exactly the same effect.
There is only ONE thing that folders can do that labels can't (that I can think of) and that is create multiple copies of the same message in several different folders. For that reason I think the label system is better. You delete a message and it's deleted, no matter how many labels you attached to it. If you have a complex and redundant folder set-up you could delete a message from a folder and not remember that you had 3 copies of it elsewhere. Multiple copies of a message would also confuse the threading scheme they have.
Really I think this is an example of a new thing being better, but people used to the old thing not having figured it out yet. Google needs to put a lengthy tutorial out there I think to explain things like this. Maybe they are counting on the invitation system to provide hand-holding for new users at first.
I thought I read AT LEAST two years ago that Sony had all the parts needed to make a Playstation 3 but was holding back due to the fact that there was no competition they needed to whomp at the time. Had XBox done better the PS3 would probably be out there now. I'd love to see the PS3 come out though, since as it was described it might not only be an XBox killer but a PC killer as well.
I hardly see how this move is a "risk" for Microsoft though. The bigger risk to Microsoft is that they just sit on their 50 Billion $ nest egg and wait for the Windows/Office monopoly to dry up. Having shot blanks with just about everything else they have tried, even Bill must be doubting his own genius by now.
If you had Sony to go up against in consumer electronics, IBM in IT consulting and hardware, Google, Yahoo and AOL in Internet space, and Open Software gradually picking up steam against your existing monopoly, wouldn't you be a bit worried? I bet the stock holders are.
Besides, who says the end of 2005 is a rush? In MS time that means 2007 at least.