the difference what that patents had to be usable inventions... versus paper "maybes" we have now. Under the current terms Tesla would have ruled the patent scene because he had many scientifically sound ideas on paper but couldn't get them "quite" working.. or get funding. He could have sat back for years and still be collecting royalties.
back to the "house" guy. You live in your house every day... it's not a thing, it's shelter you benefit from every day. Why shouldn't THEY get something for providing you shelter and someplace to entertain your guests 20 years later? What about the engineers that designed large airplanes.. those are still transporting passengers for profit... why don't the engineers get a per-flyer fee from the airlines for the 30 years of flying? That's not how the "real" marketplace works. But some how a loop-hole in some piece of paper makes common sense go out the window.
If it's worth so much, they should pay property tax on it! Just like land, you can't own thousands of acres without some way to pay the tax man.. or he redistributes it to somebody who can pay. "IP" has no equivalent "weight" to it. You can will it to your heirs for no inheritance tax, a company can reuse it without paying capital gains or capital property tax. Imagine if Microsoft had to pay taxes on how much the Windows copyright was worth!
no but you have to remember NAFTA takes affect also. I read before that Canadian Copyright is still shorter than US. So works are falling into PD in Canada, then thru the free trade agreement cannot be stopped from import into the US. They only way to "fix" that is to force Canada to adopt our laws exactly.
Of course, it's not about adopting the SAME terms, they are pushing for even more egregious terms in Canada so they can come back to the US and "align" our terms to our neighbors.. it's only neighborly!!
not really, because they often don't put the specialized drivers for buttons, etc on their pages. Also, they ship the Windows Tweaked for their hardware with stuff that doesn't work turned off. Vanilla install of Windows won't figure that out for you.
they have time machine to backup your whole drive now! The only supported way to put music on your iPod is thru the iTunes.. which is backed up. I agree that they could make iPods more "hacker" friendly, but it simply won't happen.
It's not like our favorite chair throwing company president speaks for a multi-billion dollar company right? I'd say Linus is a much better example of a PERSON than say Steve throwing chairs when he loses employees to competition... how about Ellison's personal attacks on competitors?
The difference between Linus and other "famous" industry people is that he's not a rich billionaire trying to spin so his company stocks will double. He's just a guy with a project that goes to work like the rest of us. Sure he mouths off from time to time.. but it's HONEST mouthing off, not marketing spin. He'll admit sometimes he's probably wrong.. and he doesn't really care!!! The very status of his little "hobby project" is what makes the industry players so upset. The results per dollar input of Linux versus say Vista are huge.... and he just gives the work away...
I agree, the purpose of university is to train students to WORK at these companies, not to be cheap research. Public university should be for everybody, and those who do the work should get all the credit for it.. that's capitalism isn't it? I understand it's to "help" students, but why don't the companies just donate money to fund something? Why is it "paid for" under IP contracts?
My point is that the work the students do is worth 10x what the "donations" are worth. And the students are deprived of taking their work anywhere else after being presented the "ideas". Therefore the university has shirked it's duty to STUDENTS first to provide them tools to be productive and INDEPENDENT.
the problem is that in 1998 it wasn't possible to MAKE such a processor, by any means. This is the main flaw of the current system, that you can get such a patent on blueprints, and not for actually MAKING the product. When somebody else does the work to make a device and you can get a patent for "kind of like it". The issue is "does it work" as absolutely described? If there's not enough data, or they're relying on a future "breakthru" to "make it work" then it's not patentable. The same with software patents, if there's no source code, it shouldn't be valid if you can't touch it to see how it works.
Edison knew you needed vacuum, filament and electricity to make a light bulb.. under current standards he could have made a non-working mock-up and sued anybody that tried to actually MAKE one. In that day, you didn't get the patent till it WORKED. That meant 5,000 trials until the damn thing could be demonstrated. Same with Radio, Same with telephone... It was a race with the COMPLETED project to get the patent.
they need to engage in "affirmative" action for a European competitor... at one point that competitor was Suse... then the US company Novell bought them. I suppose Mandriva would be the new darling.
I know in the USA we have federal law that mandates all products and systems have multiple sources... i.e. no one vendor can dick over the govt and they pay good money to build duplicate systems in another OS... say on HP-UX and AS400 and SUN just to have "diversity". The rules apply to everybody EXCEPT Microsoft. They are the only one that doesn't have to write their products to "spec" like any other vendor.. You saw Massachusetts's attempt to force the issue go down in flames. The attempt Mass. made was EXACTLY the kind of LEGAL, and OPEN way to counter Microsoft, Microsoft was never barred from competing... on the STATE's terms, and they shot that down by personal FUD against the IT director.
consoles don't have serial numbers, or 30 minute installs of hundreds of megs of data either.... They assume possession of the disc is proof of "ownership".
Via likes their processors too much... it's their president's pet project. Intel has already squeezed ATI out of OEM contracts just like Via on motherboards. Via is a bad match for nVidia though, they're way of thinking is good enough and cheap. nVidia and SUN sound good, if SUN would let somebody else make UltraSparc processors for cheap. That is what nVidia needs to do... combine with a Linux platform they could pull it off, but Sun doesn't really want to open up Sparc either... nVidia is just stuck for now, even though they have top-of-the-line product all the chipmakers and OEMS have carefully worked out how NOT to need them.
they're rolling in money from PS3 sales... versus ATI that helped on Wii AND Xbox. I suppose the Apple iPod deal may help a little (Apple is stingy though)
You realize that was a special 3 year deal. Up until that point they paid zilch.. their flying stock was supposed to be "profit" enough for shareholders.
to see that they haven't been doing it very long... under 50 cents per year on a $60 investment isn't very good. My electric company pays better and they're far smaller and the stock cheaper.
Considering Microsoft makes upwards of 80 cents on the dollar PROFIT for some products (tune of tens of billions profit a year), they should be paying the owners a lot better than they do. Actually, looking around no companies pay good dividends... who cares about the price, I want interest for my money.. if I had some...
The issue is not the technology... it's telling them how to THINK... Silly as it may seem to us, a tribe may want to keep it's elders, it's traditions in spite of people brining technology. I grew up in Church around a lot of missionaries. Nobody ASKS the people what they want when they put them on TV as "starving" and push the Bible on them... they TELL the people where they will be made to fit in society, and it's usually the bottom of the heap as fresh bodies for the "machine".
What we're saying is that: Sorry, you eked out an existence for 20 generations in the wildest jungle on earth... but everything you did then, your way of life, is stupid and you should do things our way because it's so much better. After all, it's not like the "western" world's "tribes" are great examples of peace and prosperity (WW2 & atom bomb?)
but how will they get that info... they certainly aren't going to ASK for it and expect it to be "real". They'll partner with the current social sites and data mine... which is what I was describing. Remember, Yahoo and Gmail have all your mails, pictures, etc. it's pretty easy to figure out which people are "highly" influential (not necessarily family, exactly) and link your social networks up.
Handspring (PalmOS and Visor handhelds) was well on their way with modular cards and similar accessories by 2000, there's no way that should have been approved.
KDE is bad timing.. not Canonical trying to be mean. They didn't get the stuff out in time for the Kubuntu LTS release. They might have to sit out a round.
Either way, Kubuntu is still only a step-child.. it seems to lack the polish of the Ubuntu release... the main "value" in Ubuntu is the bit of polish to Gnome that they do to keep it user friendly. Yes, it means removing options, but it makes getting support really easy because there is only one place for each function setting rather than KDE's habit of putting half of the device settings in one control panel... and the related ones in a completely different place... I like Knoppic but it has like 6 places to something as simple as set the video drive, resolution and background.. that's poor planning. The KDE versions (other than SuSe) seem to stick to the base install which is a mess and not user friendly and organized like Gnome in Ubuntu is.
Yes, Yes I did. They had the "bus" at the local mall and gave out free pens and everything. Also the upgrade on release day was only $49 buck from Win98 so at the time it was a good idea.
Seriously, though, Vista is more than 1 year old. There's no excuse at all for ISVs not to be up-to-date. As much as there are warts, if you're not updating your stuff and moving forward at this point, you're just making more work to move stuff from XP to whatever's next. Like I said, I HAD to buy a new laptop because of performance need so it would be foolish not to get Vista and get my processes up to speed when we're paying the same even if we don't use it. There's a limited TIME that Vista will be useful.. continuing to wait reduces that timeframe (and the value of the upgrade money, you pay the same PRICE if you buy Vista now or buy it in another year) and puts you behind if there is some thing you might want to do and add value.
Intel has already killed that train.. they made GMA950 and X3100 to be "just enough" that Microsoft would certify them for "full" vista effects. Once that happened, gaming on any store-bought PC is pretty much dead under $1,000. Both Microsoft and Intel and the OEMs want to milk the market and charge twice the profit for "gaming" PCs even though the low end PC now is twice as fast as 3 years ago... except for the 5 year old graphics chip!
except Intel doesn't think they need Nvidia... that's why they've got nearly all the notebook vendors pumping out crappy built-in graphics that just barely run Windows Vista. ATI saw the writing on the wall and got themselves bought by AMD. Now AMD battles on CPUs, integrated graphics, and high end graphics... Intel can never buy Nvidia because they'd be instantly sued. Nvidia overpriced themselves, even with all the work they did for AMD, and the matching logos... stock holders were just too rich for AMD.
This makes Nvidia the "odd man out" because they don't make processors. Both Intel and AMD have integrated solutions and obviously want physics processing on the CPU so that they can sell 7 core 3.21GHz processors. NVidia has to break the mold if they want sales... they got shunned the last round of consoles for IBM and ATI, and Microsoft pretty much let ATI write the book for DX10 this round. NVidia + Ageia only makes sense if they'll make an open source console that runs either AMD or Intel CPUs. Games would need to run flawlessly, without "installing" just like a console. There's a hole for PC gaming right now... Apple's not filling it (they think it's stupid) Wintel is not helping (Microsoft only wants Vista gaming, and Intel wants to sell integrated graphics) so a well done Linux console could help... but there's too much IP in the way to make it happen.
Microsoft has not paid dividends... i.e. share of the profits to investors for most of their existance. Their stock rises, and investors pay taxes on that, but that's not money from PROFITS being taxed. The model of not taxing corporations worked when they were expected to pass on "all" of the profits, now that money sits in a war chest for years untouchable.
The problem is that "poverty" is relative. Would you consider Amish poor... without Cellphones, TV, Radio, etc, even though they own large amounts of land and animals, and bountiful crops? It's the DISPARITY that's the problem, not lack of possessions. We see natives as "kids" on a camping trip gone bad. They LIVED in a stable society of hunting/gathering/farming then somebody with a truck full of food (plus machines, money, clothes, radios, technology, guns, etc) enters the picture and trades the "wonders" for things they shouldn't be (like land, resources, or people). The imbalance of "technology" breaks their cultures by people from OUR culture making unfair demands for them to achieve the technology they may need.
The next, more important, question.. do the people WANT to be "saved"? This situation proves.. people want to be connected.. they understand technology, social change, etc is "over there" but they like their homes, their livelihoods in their area.. because it's HOME. The children will bring "civilization" back in small pieces... better clothes, improved housing, etc as they return to visit. The villagers will be free to accept as much "civilization" as they wish. It's organic, it's proper growth, not forced by govt edict or missionaries. That is what leads to political stability, adapting the old rules of elders and councils slowly to the more modern rules (just handing them money breaks all their political rules because they don't know how to handle it)... Right now they think THEIR way is the most fair... not some strange foreign way.
We almost need a "prime directive" from the UN to allow cultures to grow to meet us rather than be run over by massive, fatal changes.
Slashdot Mirror
we've gone too capitalistic.. think of how many of the Ferengi Rule of Acquisition libertarians and republicans repeat word for word as "good for us".
the difference what that patents had to be usable inventions... versus paper "maybes" we have now. Under the current terms Tesla would have ruled the patent scene because he had many scientifically sound ideas on paper but couldn't get them "quite" working.. or get funding. He could have sat back for years and still be collecting royalties.
back to the "house" guy. You live in your house every day... it's not a thing, it's shelter you benefit from every day. Why shouldn't THEY get something for providing you shelter and someplace to entertain your guests 20 years later? What about the engineers that designed large airplanes.. those are still transporting passengers for profit... why don't the engineers get a per-flyer fee from the airlines for the 30 years of flying? That's not how the "real" marketplace works. But some how a loop-hole in some piece of paper makes common sense go out the window.
If it's worth so much, they should pay property tax on it! Just like land, you can't own thousands of acres without some way to pay the tax man.. or he redistributes it to somebody who can pay. "IP" has no equivalent "weight" to it. You can will it to your heirs for no inheritance tax, a company can reuse it without paying capital gains or capital property tax. Imagine if Microsoft had to pay taxes on how much the Windows copyright was worth!
no but you have to remember NAFTA takes affect also. I read before that Canadian Copyright is still shorter than US. So works are falling into PD in Canada, then thru the free trade agreement cannot be stopped from import into the US. They only way to "fix" that is to force Canada to adopt our laws exactly.
Of course, it's not about adopting the SAME terms, they are pushing for even more egregious terms in Canada so they can come back to the US and "align" our terms to our neighbors.. it's only neighborly!!
not really, because they often don't put the specialized drivers for buttons, etc on their pages. Also, they ship the Windows Tweaked for their hardware with stuff that doesn't work turned off. Vanilla install of Windows won't figure that out for you.
they have time machine to backup your whole drive now! The only supported way to put music on your iPod is thru the iTunes.. which is backed up. I agree that they could make iPods more "hacker" friendly, but it simply won't happen.
It's not like our favorite chair throwing company president speaks for a multi-billion dollar company right? I'd say Linus is a much better example of a PERSON than say Steve throwing chairs when he loses employees to competition... how about Ellison's personal attacks on competitors?
The difference between Linus and other "famous" industry people is that he's not a rich billionaire trying to spin so his company stocks will double. He's just a guy with a project that goes to work like the rest of us. Sure he mouths off from time to time.. but it's HONEST mouthing off, not marketing spin. He'll admit sometimes he's probably wrong.. and he doesn't really care!!! The very status of his little "hobby project" is what makes the industry players so upset. The results per dollar input of Linux versus say Vista are huge.... and he just gives the work away...
I agree, the purpose of university is to train students to WORK at these companies, not to be cheap research. Public university should be for everybody, and those who do the work should get all the credit for it.. that's capitalism isn't it? I understand it's to "help" students, but why don't the companies just donate money to fund something? Why is it "paid for" under IP contracts?
My point is that the work the students do is worth 10x what the "donations" are worth. And the students are deprived of taking their work anywhere else after being presented the "ideas". Therefore the university has shirked it's duty to STUDENTS first to provide them tools to be productive and INDEPENDENT.
the problem is that in 1998 it wasn't possible to MAKE such a processor, by any means. This is the main flaw of the current system, that you can get such a patent on blueprints, and not for actually MAKING the product. When somebody else does the work to make a device and you can get a patent for "kind of like it". The issue is "does it work" as absolutely described? If there's not enough data, or they're relying on a future "breakthru" to "make it work" then it's not patentable. The same with software patents, if there's no source code, it shouldn't be valid if you can't touch it to see how it works.
Edison knew you needed vacuum, filament and electricity to make a light bulb.. under current standards he could have made a non-working mock-up and sued anybody that tried to actually MAKE one. In that day, you didn't get the patent till it WORKED. That meant 5,000 trials until the damn thing could be demonstrated. Same with Radio, Same with telephone... It was a race with the COMPLETED project to get the patent.
they need to engage in "affirmative" action for a European competitor... at one point that competitor was Suse... then the US company Novell bought them. I suppose Mandriva would be the new darling.
I know in the USA we have federal law that mandates all products and systems have multiple sources... i.e. no one vendor can dick over the govt and they pay good money to build duplicate systems in another OS... say on HP-UX and AS400 and SUN just to have "diversity". The rules apply to everybody EXCEPT Microsoft. They are the only one that doesn't have to write their products to "spec" like any other vendor.. You saw Massachusetts's attempt to force the issue go down in flames. The attempt Mass. made was EXACTLY the kind of LEGAL, and OPEN way to counter Microsoft, Microsoft was never barred from competing... on the STATE's terms, and they shot that down by personal FUD against the IT director.
consoles don't have serial numbers, or 30 minute installs of hundreds of megs of data either.... They assume possession of the disc is proof of "ownership".
Via likes their processors too much... it's their president's pet project. Intel has already squeezed ATI out of OEM contracts just like Via on motherboards. Via is a bad match for nVidia though, they're way of thinking is good enough and cheap. nVidia and SUN sound good, if SUN would let somebody else make UltraSparc processors for cheap. That is what nVidia needs to do... combine with a Linux platform they could pull it off, but Sun doesn't really want to open up Sparc either... nVidia is just stuck for now, even though they have top-of-the-line product all the chipmakers and OEMS have carefully worked out how NOT to need them.
they're rolling in money from PS3 sales... versus ATI that helped on Wii AND Xbox. I suppose the Apple iPod deal may help a little (Apple is stingy though)
both Xbox and Wii were designed/manufactured by ATI... you see how PS3 is selling? nVidia got the short straw this round.
You realize that was a special 3 year deal. Up until that point they paid zilch.. their flying stock was supposed to be "profit" enough for shareholders.
here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A232-2004Jul20.html
or look here: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/dividend.mspx
to see that they haven't been doing it very long... under 50 cents per year on a $60 investment isn't very good. My electric company pays better and they're far smaller and the stock cheaper.
Considering Microsoft makes upwards of 80 cents on the dollar PROFIT for some products (tune of tens of billions profit a year), they should be paying the owners a lot better than they do. Actually, looking around no companies pay good dividends... who cares about the price, I want interest for my money.. if I had some...
The issue is not the technology... it's telling them how to THINK... Silly as it may seem to us, a tribe may want to keep it's elders, it's traditions in spite of people brining technology. I grew up in Church around a lot of missionaries. Nobody ASKS the people what they want when they put them on TV as "starving" and push the Bible on them... they TELL the people where they will be made to fit in society, and it's usually the bottom of the heap as fresh bodies for the "machine".
What we're saying is that: Sorry, you eked out an existence for 20 generations in the wildest jungle on earth... but everything you did then, your way of life, is stupid and you should do things our way because it's so much better. After all, it's not like the "western" world's "tribes" are great examples of peace and prosperity (WW2 & atom bomb?)
but how will they get that info... they certainly aren't going to ASK for it and expect it to be "real". They'll partner with the current social sites and data mine... which is what I was describing. Remember, Yahoo and Gmail have all your mails, pictures, etc. it's pretty easy to figure out which people are "highly" influential (not necessarily family, exactly) and link your social networks up.
Handspring (PalmOS and Visor handhelds) was well on their way with modular cards and similar accessories by 2000, there's no way that should have been approved.
KDE is bad timing.. not Canonical trying to be mean. They didn't get the stuff out in time for the Kubuntu LTS release. They might have to sit out a round.
Either way, Kubuntu is still only a step-child.. it seems to lack the polish of the Ubuntu release... the main "value" in Ubuntu is the bit of polish to Gnome that they do to keep it user friendly. Yes, it means removing options, but it makes getting support really easy because there is only one place for each function setting rather than KDE's habit of putting half of the device settings in one control panel... and the related ones in a completely different place... I like Knoppic but it has like 6 places to something as simple as set the video drive, resolution and background.. that's poor planning. The KDE versions (other than SuSe) seem to stick to the base install which is a mess and not user friendly and organized like Gnome in Ubuntu is.
Yes, Yes I did. They had the "bus" at the local mall and gave out free pens and everything. Also the upgrade on release day was only $49 buck from Win98 so at the time it was a good idea.
Seriously, though, Vista is more than 1 year old. There's no excuse at all for ISVs not to be up-to-date. As much as there are warts, if you're not updating your stuff and moving forward at this point, you're just making more work to move stuff from XP to whatever's next. Like I said, I HAD to buy a new laptop because of performance need so it would be foolish not to get Vista and get my processes up to speed when we're paying the same even if we don't use it. There's a limited TIME that Vista will be useful.. continuing to wait reduces that timeframe (and the value of the upgrade money, you pay the same PRICE if you buy Vista now or buy it in another year) and puts you behind if there is some thing you might want to do and add value.
Intel has already killed that train.. they made GMA950 and X3100 to be "just enough" that Microsoft would certify them for "full" vista effects. Once that happened, gaming on any store-bought PC is pretty much dead under $1,000. Both Microsoft and Intel and the OEMs want to milk the market and charge twice the profit for "gaming" PCs even though the low end PC now is twice as fast as 3 years ago... except for the 5 year old graphics chip!
except Intel doesn't think they need Nvidia... that's why they've got nearly all the notebook vendors pumping out crappy built-in graphics that just barely run Windows Vista. ATI saw the writing on the wall and got themselves bought by AMD. Now AMD battles on CPUs, integrated graphics, and high end graphics... Intel can never buy Nvidia because they'd be instantly sued. Nvidia overpriced themselves, even with all the work they did for AMD, and the matching logos... stock holders were just too rich for AMD.
This makes Nvidia the "odd man out" because they don't make processors. Both Intel and AMD have integrated solutions and obviously want physics processing on the CPU so that they can sell 7 core 3.21GHz processors. NVidia has to break the mold if they want sales... they got shunned the last round of consoles for IBM and ATI, and Microsoft pretty much let ATI write the book for DX10 this round. NVidia + Ageia only makes sense if they'll make an open source console that runs either AMD or Intel CPUs. Games would need to run flawlessly, without "installing" just like a console. There's a hole for PC gaming right now... Apple's not filling it (they think it's stupid) Wintel is not helping (Microsoft only wants Vista gaming, and Intel wants to sell integrated graphics) so a well done Linux console could help... but there's too much IP in the way to make it happen.
Microsoft has not paid dividends... i.e. share of the profits to investors for most of their existance. Their stock rises, and investors pay taxes on that, but that's not money from PROFITS being taxed. The model of not taxing corporations worked when they were expected to pass on "all" of the profits, now that money sits in a war chest for years untouchable.
The problem is that "poverty" is relative. Would you consider Amish poor... without Cellphones, TV, Radio, etc, even though they own large amounts of land and animals, and bountiful crops? It's the DISPARITY that's the problem, not lack of possessions. We see natives as "kids" on a camping trip gone bad. They LIVED in a stable society of hunting/gathering/farming then somebody with a truck full of food (plus machines, money, clothes, radios, technology, guns, etc) enters the picture and trades the "wonders" for things they shouldn't be (like land, resources, or people). The imbalance of "technology" breaks their cultures by people from OUR culture making unfair demands for them to achieve the technology they may need.
The next, more important, question.. do the people WANT to be "saved"? This situation proves.. people want to be connected.. they understand technology, social change, etc is "over there" but they like their homes, their livelihoods in their area.. because it's HOME. The children will bring "civilization" back in small pieces... better clothes, improved housing, etc as they return to visit. The villagers will be free to accept as much "civilization" as they wish. It's organic, it's proper growth, not forced by govt edict or missionaries. That is what leads to political stability, adapting the old rules of elders and councils slowly to the more modern rules (just handing them money breaks all their political rules because they don't know how to handle it)... Right now they think THEIR way is the most fair... not some strange foreign way.
We almost need a "prime directive" from the UN to allow cultures to grow to meet us rather than be run over by massive, fatal changes.