Yeah - hope so. We could create an antipodean enclave of innovation without the dead weight of patents hanging over our heads.
The other response to your post notwithstanding, I wrote to Simon Power (the Minister in charge) and recieved a kind of encouraging response, so I hope that software patents will be no more in NZ.
The really funny thing is, having got some hope that NZ would stop software patents, I put on my devil's advocate hat and tried to come up with ways in which I could shaft those overseas patent holders and exploit their IP in NZ.
I drew a complete blank.
Not to belittle your environmental challenges, but we treat our own laptops as operating in a hostile environment. Statistically most of them will be stolen, lost of suffer catastrophic failure within 3 years. Mostly stolen.
While you do still want a rugged laptop, ultimately it is better to make sure you have a fantastic recovery plan for when shit happens.
One way is to go fully virtualised. Treat your host operating system as a basic shell, and instead install yoru real software on a VM. We use VMWare Workstation, Virtual box or others would work too.
Now fix your backup/recovery strategy. Backup your entire VM frequently - daily is ideal. A good way is to make use linux for the host, and keep the VM itself on an LVM volume - then you can read-consistent copies using LVM snaphots in the background with no impact on the guest - no pausing, no shutdown needed. You might also want to do a file-level back from within the VM of your very important files as a double safeguard.
Now you are sorted. Your machine will die, and when it does, you simply buy new one, re-install a host, then recover your VM onto the new one.
This also gives you an excuse to get a fairly grunty laptop - running VMs gives it a real good workout.
For safety what I do is back up the individual files within the encrypted volume rather than the entire truecrypt file itself. I use rsync, takes only a few minutes.
Truecrypt has worked well for me on my laptop for a long time - which runs Vista and crashes on a weekly or more basis, so far never causing data loss on the Trucrypt drive. For office applications at least there is no noticeable performance hit.
This is very complex and most likely the business owners haven't thought it all out.
Waiting until 5 years is up is not a good idea (and I assume they don't want to give it to you up front). Who knows what will happen. Ask for it one year at a time - or even better one month at a time - in advance.
Get tax advice. You are in dangerous territory.
Asking for 10% of the profits is interesting but theres an old saying in business that the 20% owner gets paid what the 80% owner wants them to. Its hard to stop the owner (say) takinga big salary and depleting the profits that way.
Consider a "roulette clause". With this, either party can offer to buy the other one out. The trick is that if they refuse, then you can demand they buy you out. This avoids stalemate, which is very destructive in this situation.
IMO database logging has good points and bad points:
On the good side, its easy to manipulate (query, purge, transform, summarise) the log entries. Also you can access the log entries remotely using the database tools you already know.
On the bad side, its undoubtedly slower and more resource-intensive.
Also, unless you have multiple DB connections (which itself raises complexity and overhead), then committing a log entry to the database will also commit your unit of work.
It seems to work well for "user logging", i.e. where the end user of your application (rather than just the dev team) would want to read the messages.
Ridiculous summary that does not seem to be based on the actual article. This sounds like an issue with Google, not with O2.
It seems that O2 posts the images with a pretty well randomized URL (16 hex digits is not too bad in most people's books). And the URLs are not linked to any publicly crawlable page on O2's web site. So how does Google reach them?
The reason (if anyone cares to FTA) that they can be googled is that according to "Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that one's Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing. "If you run Google Toolbar, it knows pages you visit," he said."
So if the article is correct, Google in its wisdom has decided to treat a URL sent to someone with the Google toolbar in a private email as a publicly reachable URL.
I find this whole story pretty non-sensicle though - presumable Google would not make "click here to reset your password" links publicly reachable?
If the article is correct then I'd be stripping off the Google toolbar as quick as I could.
Second this. I got one of these after getting sick of carting my full size laptop around in a backpack for emergency work. Its tiny, light, comes with a nice distro of Xandros which just works (tm), and I plug it straight into my 3G phone for internet anywhere. Great battery life. Goes up to 1024 x 768 so great for web-based demos through client projectors. Starts up in 20 seconds. Open Office for document work (though personally I use google docs).
Best of all its cheap, and I don't keep any data on it (ssh keys on a USB keychain) - for me the hassle of repeatedly getting laptops stolen means that I love having a disposable laptop.
Banks are businesses just like any other, though admittedly rather vital to the functioning of the economy.
Suddenly patent trolls (and according to the article, this guy doesn't really even fit the definition of a troll) have something as big as a Bank in their site, so the powers that be decide its time to hurl taxpayer money at this one patent problem.
Meanwhile thousands of people in small software companies held back by living under the shadow of these lame trolls get zip - worse than zip, their taxes are used to help out the Banks.
This is of course great news (that the war is over - nothing to do with who won), but having forked out for a Blu-Ray disc lately (running around $50 over here) I can honestly say that I wish I had not fallen for the blandishments of that sales guy who told me I should buy a smaller, but much higher definition, TV.
If I had my buying decision over I would say after the initial technogasm brought on by seeing every hair on the actor's heads, you very quickly forget about the quality and just wish your screen was bigger. (Apparently this is a common effect.)
Most people don't like free for many reasons. People need to know how you're making a buck before they want to deal with you. After all, "there's no such thing as a free lunch".
If you come around and offer to clean my windows for free, I naturally assume its some kind of scam. Perhaps my windows are coated with a rare gold dust which you intend to scrape off and re-sell? Who knows?
If you offer - nay, push on me - a free piece of computer system, I have to wonder why. Especially if you have the appearance and demeanour of some kind of zealot, with an almost religious fervor in trying to push me to use this software.
At least with MS I know they have a naked interest in gouging me for money via unnecessary upgrades and vendor lock-in. I can almost put a number on it - something in the mid-100s perhaps over the next few years. Something I guess I can grudgingly live with.
You may, but most users could care less what license their new shiny thing uses, as long as its free. They just use it.
GPL can totally be used against the causes of freedom.
I build a shiny widget, and release it under the GPL. Lots of people use my shiny widget - it becomes the gold standard for shiny widgets. Then some software house cuts a huge deal for software development with [insert name of immense multinational here]. The only trouble is, they need a shiny widget as part of the code. And damn, your one is the standard.
They come to you, and boy, you have them over a barrel. Because you were cunning enough to use the GPL, you can hold them to ransom, and charge them $1M for a limited license that lets them use your shiny widget in their new project. And whats more, you can sell it all over again the next time someone needs your shiny widget in a non-GPL setting.
If you had released your code under BSD this scenario can't happen.
The proponents of GPL sing a great song about freedom - but more than a few of them are fully aware of just how much control the GPL reserves for them, and they love it.
I'm no MS fanboy but hey, lets not get all emotional. If your company was putting out a similar offer for your own software your lawyers would be damn sure too to put "not limited to" after the list of data being collected. Its a standard legal phrase that you use unless you actually a) do have the complete, exhaustive list of what will be collected, and b) you are utterly confidnt that if someone changes what is collected that you will hear about it and get to change the terms of use.
Then some mofo lowlife stole my laptop so have just been forced to get a new one. The shop said they "can't" provide machines with XP, so I was forced to use Vista (with hindsight I should have shelled out for a copy of XP and downgraded the machine).
The weird thing is, you can sense the stirrings of some actual respect for decent security underneath the glittering, laquer-coated turd that is Vista. But sadly, the actual implementation is just as bad as I feared.
My first 2 hours were lost just trying to get an ssh shell working again.
- cygwin doesn't run (easily) - file permission problems. Need to become Administrator to fix them.
- turns out that under Vista, just because your account is an "Administrator account", does not mean you are an Administrator. No, there is an actual Administrator (root) user, which has been thoughfully disabled.
- you can google plenty of instructions for turning on the Administrator account - but because I have the artifically crippled "Home Premium" edition, those menu options are simply not there. I eventually work out that I need to go to the dos box and type "net use blah blah". Finally I can log in as Administrator and change file permissions.
- despite all this, I still find I need to disable UAC to do things from time to time - and of course, reboot whenever I change it. But at least finally cygwin works.
Despite all of these new annoyances, MS has thoughtfully retained some of the quite annoying features of XP (and probably of the devil's spawns that preceded it). eg if you leave a network drive connected, then go to another network, then doing "file open" in an app such as Word freezes for a few minutes.
I think MS has had little choice in releasing Vista. Their bad designed decisions in the past - always favouring absurd "one click and its running" ease of use over normal security procedures - have come home to roost, forcing them to paint themselves into the corner they're in now.
Well I read the article, and the points you mention do sound like they might be problems - but the general tone of TFA is somewhat hysterical, and I can sort of see the point of the manufacturer - anyone with enough knowledge who looks hard enough at a piece of complex software can find ways to discredit it and make it appear badly designed.
For example (from TFA):
Sections of the original code and modified code show evidence of using an experimental approach to coding, or use what is best described as the "trial and error" method. Several sections are marked as "temporary, for now".
If having comments saying "temporary, for now" equates to "an experimental approach to coding" then the we are in absurd land. It is perfectly reasonable to put, say, a non-optimal but fully functional sorting routine in, and then come back and replace it with something better later. As this was the first point, and it is obviously absurd, in mind the rest of the article is devalued and suspect.
If you don't want to personally profit - but you just want to make sure that no-one else can control it - then you could release it/publish it, using any or all of the suggestions given by well-meaning but legally ignorant slashdotters above (or better still ask a lawyer).
However seriously, if its a great idea, then there's a high chance someone else will want in - perhaps claiming you stole it from them for example. Yes there are people out there like this. Do you really want to stand in the way of a mega conglomerate's or a patent troll's legal team? Whether you are in the right or not will have little to do with it - you'll get spanked and have to move to a cardboard box.
Perversely, you're probably safer to patent it yourself - that way at least if you get attacked you'll have something to offer to a white knight who might help to defend you.
Your idea is probably one tenth of the cost, certainly one hundredth of the effort and most likely ten times as reliable as using Asterisk as some other posters have suggested....
Therefore your geek credentials are hereby revoked.
If I had something to hide, and hired an SEO company to bury my dirt, I wouldn't let the Wall Street Journal write an article about it, containing said dirt and my real name
You have missed the point - she complained about noise from bars, and got unfairly slurred as anti-gay - so its a great outcome for her that her story gets elevated to the top.
This is a sad situation where rich countries just dump their toxic wastes to the poor countries. It's a quick solution, and does not cause much (if any?) local political discussion. Out of sight, out of mind.
Unfortunately, this is a very irresponsible way to dispose off the toxic waste. Sure, the rich can claim that it is actually beneficial to the local economy in the poor countries. As the article mentioned, some dump site employs as many as 100,000 people. And sure, it's a global economy, meaning that anything can be "exported".
Did you actually look at the pictures?
Talk about glass half empty!
Check it out and you will see people hard at work separating the old computer pieces into their constituent metals, so they can be melted down and - RECYCLED!!!!!! Isn't that a good thing???
This looks to me like a very effective looking recycling program (albeit one that looks like a hellhole on earth to work at!)
Do you have a better suggestion as to what to do with all this old computer crap (given that it has already been created)??
Even as a person who has used Netflix for years now and absolutely love their service, I can say that if this is true they should be nailed to the wall over it. This is the sort of Patent System BS that must not be allowed to stand if we are to maintain our technology superiority as a country.
yeah, except that if NetFlix hadn't done what they did, they might have been taken down themselves by someone else doing exactly the same thing - to them.
The patent system is a nuclear standoff. Everyone would be better served if they didn't exist - but they do. Sticking your head in the sand and saying "I'm not going there, thats evil" just means you're not playing the game - the sure way to lose.
Netflix will end up paying out a small amount of money, the lawyers will keep most of it, and then the standoff will resume again for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - hope so. We could create an antipodean enclave of innovation without the dead weight of patents hanging over our heads. The other response to your post notwithstanding, I wrote to Simon Power (the Minister in charge) and recieved a kind of encouraging response, so I hope that software patents will be no more in NZ. The really funny thing is, having got some hope that NZ would stop software patents, I put on my devil's advocate hat and tried to come up with ways in which I could shaft those overseas patent holders and exploit their IP in NZ. I drew a complete blank.
While you do still want a rugged laptop, ultimately it is better to make sure you have a fantastic recovery plan for when shit happens.
One way is to go fully virtualised. Treat your host operating system as a basic shell, and instead install yoru real software on a VM. We use VMWare Workstation, Virtual box or others would work too.
Now fix your backup/recovery strategy. Backup your entire VM frequently - daily is ideal. A good way is to make use linux for the host, and keep the VM itself on an LVM volume - then you can read-consistent copies using LVM snaphots in the background with no impact on the guest - no pausing, no shutdown needed. You might also want to do a file-level back from within the VM of your very important files as a double safeguard.
Now you are sorted. Your machine will die, and when it does, you simply buy new one, re-install a host, then recover your VM onto the new one.
This also gives you an excuse to get a fairly grunty laptop - running VMs gives it a real good workout.
For safety what I do is back up the individual files within the encrypted volume rather than the entire truecrypt file itself. I use rsync, takes only a few minutes.
Truecrypt has worked well for me on my laptop for a long time - which runs Vista and crashes on a weekly or more basis, so far never causing data loss on the Trucrypt drive. For office applications at least there is no noticeable performance hit.
IMO database logging has good points and bad points: On the good side, its easy to manipulate (query, purge, transform, summarise) the log entries. Also you can access the log entries remotely using the database tools you already know. On the bad side, its undoubtedly slower and more resource-intensive. Also, unless you have multiple DB connections (which itself raises complexity and overhead), then committing a log entry to the database will also commit your unit of work. It seems to work well for "user logging", i.e. where the end user of your application (rather than just the dev team) would want to read the messages.
Ridiculous summary that does not seem to be based on the actual article. This sounds like an issue with Google, not with O2.
It seems that O2 posts the images with a pretty well randomized URL (16 hex digits is not too bad in most people's books). And the URLs are not linked to any publicly crawlable page on O2's web site. So how does Google reach them?
The reason (if anyone cares to FTA) that they can be googled is that according to "Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that one's Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing. "If you run Google Toolbar, it knows pages you visit," he said."
So if the article is correct, Google in its wisdom has decided to treat a URL sent to someone with the Google toolbar in a private email as a publicly reachable URL.
I find this whole story pretty non-sensicle though - presumable Google would not make "click here to reset your password" links publicly reachable?
If the article is correct then I'd be stripping off the Google toolbar as quick as I could.
The cycle is not perpetual. Start your own company and you will have many experiences, but being bored is not one of them.
Instead you will experience:
Second this. I got one of these after getting sick of carting my full size laptop around in a backpack for emergency work. Its tiny, light, comes with a nice distro of Xandros which just works (tm), and I plug it straight into my 3G phone for internet anywhere. Great battery life. Goes up to 1024 x 768 so great for web-based demos through client projectors. Starts up in 20 seconds. Open Office for document work (though personally I use google docs).
Best of all its cheap, and I don't keep any data on it (ssh keys on a USB keychain) - for me the hassle of repeatedly getting laptops stolen means that I love having a disposable laptop.
Totally true. This is utter madness.
Banks are businesses just like any other, though admittedly rather vital to the functioning of the economy.
Suddenly patent trolls (and according to the article, this guy doesn't really even fit the definition of a troll) have something as big as a Bank in their site, so the powers that be decide its time to hurl taxpayer money at this one patent problem.
Meanwhile thousands of people in small software companies held back by living under the shadow of these lame trolls get zip - worse than zip, their taxes are used to help out the Banks.
This is of course great news (that the war is over - nothing to do with who won), but having forked out for a Blu-Ray disc lately (running around $50 over here) I can honestly say that I wish I had not fallen for the blandishments of that sales guy who told me I should buy a smaller, but much higher definition, TV.
If I had my buying decision over I would say after the initial technogasm brought on by seeing every hair on the actor's heads, you very quickly forget about the quality and just wish your screen was bigger. (Apparently this is a common effect.)
Most people don't like free for many reasons. People need to know how you're making a buck before they want to deal with you. After all, "there's no such thing as a free lunch".
If you come around and offer to clean my windows for free, I naturally assume its some kind of scam. Perhaps my windows are coated with a rare gold dust which you intend to scrape off and re-sell? Who knows?
If you offer - nay, push on me - a free piece of computer system, I have to wonder why. Especially if you have the appearance and demeanour of some kind of zealot, with an almost religious fervor in trying to push me to use this software.
At least with MS I know they have a naked interest in gouging me for money via unnecessary upgrades and vendor lock-in. I can almost put a number on it - something in the mid-100s perhaps over the next few years. Something I guess I can grudgingly live with.
You may, but most users could care less what license their new shiny thing uses, as long as its free. They just use it.
GPL can totally be used against the causes of freedom.
I build a shiny widget, and release it under the GPL. Lots of people use my shiny widget - it becomes the gold standard for shiny widgets. Then some software house cuts a huge deal for software development with [insert name of immense multinational here]. The only trouble is, they need a shiny widget as part of the code. And damn, your one is the standard.
They come to you, and boy, you have them over a barrel. Because you were cunning enough to use the GPL, you can hold them to ransom, and charge them $1M for a limited license that lets them use your shiny widget in their new project. And whats more, you can sell it all over again the next time someone needs your shiny widget in a non-GPL setting.
If you had released your code under BSD this scenario can't happen.
The proponents of GPL sing a great song about freedom - but more than a few of them are fully aware of just how much control the GPL reserves for them, and they love it.
I'm no MS fanboy but hey, lets not get all emotional. If your company was putting out a similar offer for your own software your lawyers would be damn sure too to put "not limited to" after the list of data being collected. Its a standard legal phrase that you use unless you actually a) do have the complete, exhaustive list of what will be collected, and b) you are utterly confidnt that if someone changes what is collected that you will hear about it and get to change the terms of use.
And the horses have a tendency to trample people's rights.
What leads you to believe that this race is over?
My own little experience with Vista...
I was happy enough with XP.
Then some mofo lowlife stole my laptop so have just been forced to get a new one. The shop said they "can't" provide machines with XP, so I was forced to use Vista (with hindsight I should have shelled out for a copy of XP and downgraded the machine).
The weird thing is, you can sense the stirrings of some actual respect for decent security underneath the glittering, laquer-coated turd that is Vista. But sadly, the actual implementation is just as bad as I feared.
My first 2 hours were lost just trying to get an ssh shell working again.
- cygwin doesn't run (easily) - file permission problems. Need to become Administrator to fix them.
- turns out that under Vista, just because your account is an "Administrator account", does not mean you are an Administrator. No, there is an actual Administrator (root) user, which has been thoughfully disabled.
- you can google plenty of instructions for turning on the Administrator account - but because I have the artifically crippled "Home Premium" edition, those menu options are simply not there. I eventually work out that I need to go to the dos box and type "net use blah blah". Finally I can log in as Administrator and change file permissions.
- despite all this, I still find I need to disable UAC to do things from time to time - and of course, reboot whenever I change it. But at least finally cygwin works.
Despite all of these new annoyances, MS has thoughtfully retained some of the quite annoying features of XP (and probably of the devil's spawns that preceded it). eg if you leave a network drive connected, then go to another network, then doing "file open" in an app such as Word freezes for a few minutes.
I think MS has had little choice in releasing Vista. Their bad designed decisions in the past - always favouring absurd "one click and its running" ease of use over normal security procedures - have come home to roost, forcing them to paint themselves into the corner they're in now.
Well I read the article, and the points you mention do sound like they might be problems - but the general tone of TFA is somewhat hysterical, and I can sort of see the point of the manufacturer - anyone with enough knowledge who looks hard enough at a piece of complex software can find ways to discredit it and make it appear badly designed.
For example (from TFA):
Sections of the original code and modified code show evidence of using an experimental approach to coding, or use what is best described as the "trial and error" method. Several sections are marked as "temporary, for now".
If having comments saying "temporary, for now" equates to "an experimental approach to coding" then the we are in absurd land. It is perfectly reasonable to put, say, a non-optimal but fully functional sorting routine in, and then come back and replace it with something better later. As this was the first point, and it is obviously absurd, in mind the rest of the article is devalued and suspect.
I'm guessing that your "far to common" is a subtle easter egg?
IP sucks. Its never as simple as you think.
If you don't want to personally profit - but you just want to make sure that no-one else can control it - then you could release it/publish it, using any or all of the suggestions given by well-meaning but legally ignorant slashdotters above (or better still ask a lawyer).
However seriously, if its a great idea, then there's a high chance someone else will want in - perhaps claiming you stole it from them for example. Yes there are people out there like this. Do you really want to stand in the way of a mega conglomerate's or a patent troll's legal team? Whether you are in the right or not will have little to do with it - you'll get spanked and have to move to a cardboard box.
Perversely, you're probably safer to patent it yourself - that way at least if you get attacked you'll have something to offer to a white knight who might help to defend you.
Frankly I hope you don't get your misguided wish. To quote Albert Einstein:
I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.
Your idea is probably one tenth of the cost, certainly one hundredth of the effort and most likely ten times as reliable as using Asterisk as some other posters have suggested....
Therefore your geek credentials are hereby revoked.
You have missed the point - she complained about noise from bars, and got unfairly slurred as anti-gay - so its a great outcome for her that her story gets elevated to the top.
Did you actually look at the pictures?
Talk about glass half empty!
Check it out and you will see people hard at work separating the old computer pieces into their constituent metals, so they can be melted down and - RECYCLED!!!!!! Isn't that a good thing???
This looks to me like a very effective looking recycling program (albeit one that looks like a hellhole on earth to work at!)
Do you have a better suggestion as to what to do with all this old computer crap (given that it has already been created)??
yeah, except that if NetFlix hadn't done what they did, they might have been taken down themselves by someone else doing exactly the same thing - to them.
The patent system is a nuclear standoff. Everyone would be better served if they didn't exist - but they do. Sticking your head in the sand and saying "I'm not going there, thats evil" just means you're not playing the game - the sure way to lose.
Netflix will end up paying out a small amount of money, the lawyers will keep most of it, and then the standoff will resume again for a while.