Don't give up on that moonbase just yet, Hemos. Check out the info on the Artemis Project web site. They intend to establish a permanent moonbase within the next several years, and start commercial tourist flights soon thereafter.
And they are but one of several commercial efforts to go to the moon. I happen to like the Artemis Society's approach. (It all started when somebody noticed that the commercials sold during the televised coverage of the Apollo-11 mission would have paid for the entire Apollo program.)
HOWEVER a commercial space venture that talks about making large profits probably shouldn't have a.org domain. It scares away investors. However, if I had a spare billion dollars, I know what I would buy.
You know, right now any ISP can *restrict* access to the competitions sites if they felt like it... The poor users (i.e. the unsuspecting public) gets screwed again... Of course, things like slowing sites won't matter in 10 years when average homes have a 100Mbit connetion or higer...
Speaking as the owner of an ISP, restricting access doesn't work as either tactics OR strategy. What makes Internet access valuable is access to ALL sites on ALL networks. If you try to restrict access at your router (which has been suggested by some lawmakers in order to limit minors' access to pornography) you begin to lose customers.
Where the ability to throttle becomes useful, at least as far as the ISP is concerned, is where it gives you the ability to sell metered service to co-locations (and other downstreams.) If you don't throttle, you have to sell access to your LAN as if everyone was using all of your DS3. (Assuming you have a DS3.) Throttling allows you to sell cheaper access to lower-bandwidth sites. That lowers your up-front price and allows you to sell to a bigger market with less risk.
Oh, and don't hold your breath on that 100 Mb/s access. It remains to be seen how long it'll take the current backbone structures to adapt to the current crop of high-speed access schemes.
I'm worried now. I've got 3 years to change the world then I'm washed up?
Feel happy. I've got just about 5 months.
Actually, you've probably already learned about how it's stupid to work 80-hour weeks for months on end. That's a large part of why some companies won't hire older employees. (It's why I didn't get a job I applied for several years ago, anyway.)
One of the engineers that I've worked for and with for most of the last decade (and who graduated from high school the year I was born) tells me that successful companies make sure that their employees have lives outside of the company. It helps bring innovation and creativity to the business. People think better when they have other interests.
Now, I currently work for someone else and also own my own company. And, once again, I'm the youngest person working either place. We used to hire younger people at my business (it's an ISP) but we found that we got a lot more accomplished for a little more money from older (40-50 yo) folks.
Ideally, you have enough of a personnel budget to hire people with a range of ages and experience levels. Failing that, I think I'd rather pay for experience.
Re:No I'm not. It's right there on your head!
on
New Transmeta Patent
·
· Score: 1
Sorry about the title. I've been sitting on that response for the better part of a decade and I finally got a chance to use it. I digress
TheDullBlade Wrote:
However, the US patent office will accept anything if it's wrapped in enough technojargon to make it expensive to evaluate. They're overwhelmed with so many applications that their basic attitude is to pass through essentially everything and let the interested parties go to court, where it is expensive and the decision often goes to the company who can afford the best lawyers. The patent office barely has the manpower to read all the patent applications they receive.
You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the patent office works. They aren't supposed to be the final arbiter of what is obvious and what isn't. In order to be worthwhile, a patent must be defended in court.
Of course their attitude is to let the interested parties slug it out in court, that's the way the system is designed to work, and it works fairly well.
Does this take money? You bet it does. Piles of it. But think about it: if the patent situation is truly as out of hand as many appear to think, it should be possible to raise lots of money to get the most obvious patents voided. If a patent is truly obvious and is truly burdensome for a large number of people or companies, wouldn't they be willing to be named as parties in a suit? If I were being wronged that badly, I know I certainly would.
In any case, if it bothers you so much, perhaps you should, on your own initiative, set up a not-for-profit to take the holders of what you consider weak patents to court. Go ahead, try to solicit donations. I even think I might donate to it, for the potential for abuse certainly is there.
Look. I've been listening to the debate about software patents for longer than a patent lasts and longer than many of the participants here have been alive. In nearly 20 years of debate, it is sad to note that the anti-patent brigade hasn't been able to come up with single workable suggestion about what should replace the current US patent system or any concrete examples of the patent system run amok despite endless claims that this happens all the time. Perhaps it is time for you to show me how the USPTO has harmed me.
Not that the US patent system is perfect. Like the saying "There is no cause so just that you can't find a flaming asshole who supports it" there is no invention so perfect that you can't find someone harmed by it. However, in the absence of realistic alternatives, it's hard to know what to do.
From my point of view, ALL patents are an infringment of free speech and free thought, plain and simple.
How is making sure that everyone knows the details of an invention an "infringement of free speech and free thought"? The main alternative to patents are trade secrets. How do you think that making everything a trade secret and requiring NDA's from all the engineers involved in a project promotes free speech and thought?
I think you haven't carefully considered your opinion.
What exactly is the deal with patents? Seems to me I should patent "an object of complex design and orgin which allows for passengers to be moved via rapid motion from one point to another" That way I can collect royalties from everyone who uses a plane, train or automobile.
It helps if you know how the patent process works. I'm currently going through that process for my day job. A patent application has to describe a device or class of devices that has not been invented before and the description of the class of devices has to be described well enough so that someone who is "skilled in the art" can duplicate it without difficulty.
So, if something has ever been built before, it is not patentable. (This is true even if you were the one building it and you wait to long to file the patent.)
That puts a damper on your plans to rake in the big bucks from mass-transit manufacturers, doesn't it? People have been moved en masse for thousands of years, so there's lots of "prior art".
In order to be granted that patent, you have to explain what makes your device different from every other mass-transit device that's ever been built and why those differences are important enough to be afforded patent protection. So, it's not possible to patent, say, an airliner, but it may be possible to patent devices on the airliner. I'm sure that whoever invented retractable landing gear got a patent on the device even though most people today would consider that an "obvious" invention.
This whole software patent thing has been blown all out of proportion. Patents are there to help promote the free distribution of ideas, not to stifle invention. Some people focus solely on the fact that the patent gives the patent owner a monopoly on those devices, but they conveniently forget that, in order to get a patent on anything, you have to describe that thing in enough detail to duplicate it. Once the patent (assuming it's granted) expires, that information is freely available.
That works for software as well as for mechanical devices. I've heard the complaint that "software changes too fast so 17 years (or 25 or whatever the laws in your country say) is way too long." Unfortunately for that argument, it simply isn't true. The rapid rate of change in software technology was due to the relative youth of the technology. As software has matured, the rate of change in that technology has become much smaller. It's a lot harder to make fundamental changes in software technology now than it was 20 years ago. That alone means that you'll never see a situation where you can't write a program without violating some patent.
In fact, if you look, you'll see that patents in any technology follow a similar pattern: They come quickly and cover "obvious" (to posterity) inventions in the beginning and are granted less often and the patents that are granted get more esoteric as time goes on.
For the patent in question, well, I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a system where the cache contents were addressable as processor registers, which is what the patent covers. In fact, although I'm familiar with a number of processors and I am interested in processor design, I don't think it ever would have occured to me that this would be something useful or worthwhile. That means that I am satisfied, pending the arrival of some notification of "prior art", that the Transmeta guys have truly come up with something new.
You should come live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Sure, it's not the prettiest place in the world, and we have our share of problems, but we also don't have people who make "only" $35,000 a year living on public housing
Or Houston (where I live just fine in a 2100 SF 4BR ranch I lease for $695/month) or San Antonio or Austin. (I hear Austin is a nice town to live in if you can stand to be that close to the legislature. Fortunately, it only meets every other year, and they're done for a while.) For that matter, you could go to Oklahoma City, Des Moines, or Jackson, MS. As for Internet access, Houston has flat-rate ISDN and DSL (cable modems may or may not be coming soon, depending on who you ask,) at decent prices. (Can you say DS-1 speeds for well under $100/month? I thought you could.)
However, the decision of where to put a company is not made by the workers. Not that it should make any difference. I know that if I were to start a company, I wouldn't do it in Silicon Valley because the costs are too high. I would think that it's cheaper (and probably easier) to hire people in CA and move them to someplace cheaper than it is to pay them a living wage near SFO. The thing is, I suspect that few of the bosses read/. (It's something to think about when you want to start YOUR company, though. Your nest egg goes that much farther if you don't have to squander it all on luxuries like housing.)
To be sure, you can't "go water skiing in the morning and snow skiing in the afternoon" in Houston, TX like someone once told me they did in LA, but if you're supposed to be working 80 hours/week (or doing some other ridiculous things for the benefits of your boss and the detriment of yourself) there's no time or energy left to go skiing at all.
I certainly don't wish ill on my colleagues in the Bay area, but if you haven't put down roots, yet, and you're sick of paying vastly too much for your housing, food, and whatever, you might pick up some out-of-town newspapers and do some hunting, or just go to The Houston Job finder and look and see what's there, or, rather, what's here.
Brokersys (the company I started) isn't hiring, though, so please don't send any resumes.
Why should we give away the hundreds of thousands of lines of code which takes several person years to develop, but keep our art which, for a lot of videogames now can just be scanned really, under tight fisted control. SCREW THAT. Make the art free and make people pay for what took the real effort.
The reason why you give away the code and sell the art is because people are willing to pay money for the art, but aren't for the code. Very few people look at a game and say "cool rendering engine." Many, many people look at a game and say "nice gameplay."
Remember: the value of something is what someone else is willing to give you to get it, not how much it cost you to produce. In fact, reducing or eliminating the cost burden of developing new software is at the heart of why the code should be open source.
I contend that ease of use has nothing to do with command line or GUI. I have seen many GUI programs which are tough to use. Ever tried to use Veritas Volume Manager? Ease of use comes from conceptual simplicity. The simpler mental model one form of a software, the easier is it to use. GUI does help in some situations, but there is a danger in making GUI synonymous with ease of use.
20 years ago the Xerox PARC created the whole concept of Graphical User Interface. They did this, not as some would have you think, to make computers easier to use. NO! Their purpose was to make computers easier to learn. It's all about learning curve, not long-term usability.
Of course Linux/UNIX (and suchlike) are hard to learn. They aren't designed to be easy to learn. They are, however, designed to be easy to use. Small single-function programs that can be combined to produce effects both gross and subtle offer a system with tremendous expressive power and expressive power is what defines "ease of use".
From my perspective, there really is no way to get around the learning curve. Computers are complex devices and, while you can spend most of your life avoiding the places where they are most complex, sometimes it becomes necessary to make acquaintance with the beast. The only solution that I see is to move most people to the so-called "information appliances" which trade capability for simplicity.
That, and you need to stop mucking about with the interface. It's best to only climb the learning curve once.
Russ Nelson writes: As long as you call them idiots, they'll stick with Billg, who loves them.
ITYM "Billg, who they think loves them". He doesn't care about his users, he just wants their money so he can continue to be "The richest man in the world."(TM)
Your comment reminded me of this:
user, n.:
The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."
-- Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the Top"
(from the handy-dandy fortunes file.)
Of course, most of the people for whom Windows is the target market have no business on a computer. They don't use more than 10% of its capability and they don't know how to fix any of the myriad problems that crop up because computers are complicated things. The situation cries out for "information appliances."
"Anonymous Coward" (how true) writes: Windows 2000 Beta 3 is an absolutely amazing product. Whether or not you believe it's solid, I'm actually running both server and professional at home and have had very few problems with it.
Well, I run Debian 1.3 at work and I have had zero problems with it. Of course, I don't consider it "an absolutely amazing product". Being someone who rarely runs Microsoft software, I usually don't consider software that works to be amazing.
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And they are but one of several commercial efforts to go to the moon. I happen to like the Artemis Society's approach. (It all started when somebody noticed that the commercials sold during the televised coverage of the Apollo-11 mission would have paid for the entire Apollo program.)
HOWEVER a commercial space venture that talks about making large profits probably shouldn't have a .org domain. It scares away investors. However, if I had a spare billion dollars, I know what I would buy.
Speaking as the owner of an ISP, restricting access doesn't work as either tactics OR strategy. What makes Internet access valuable is access to ALL sites on ALL networks. If you try to restrict access at your router (which has been suggested by some lawmakers in order to limit minors' access to pornography) you begin to lose customers.
Where the ability to throttle becomes useful, at least as far as the ISP is concerned, is where it gives you the ability to sell metered service to co-locations (and other downstreams.) If you don't throttle, you have to sell access to your LAN as if everyone was using all of your DS3. (Assuming you have a DS3.) Throttling allows you to sell cheaper access to lower-bandwidth sites. That lowers your up-front price and allows you to sell to a bigger market with less risk.
Oh, and don't hold your breath on that 100 Mb/s access. It remains to be seen how long it'll take the current backbone structures to adapt to the current crop of high-speed access schemes.
Feel happy. I've got just about 5 months.
Actually, you've probably already learned about how it's stupid to work 80-hour weeks for months on end. That's a large part of why some companies won't hire older employees. (It's why I didn't get a job I applied for several years ago, anyway.)
One of the engineers that I've worked for and with for most of the last decade (and who graduated from high school the year I was born) tells me that successful companies make sure that their employees have lives outside of the company. It helps bring innovation and creativity to the business. People think better when they have other interests.
Now, I currently work for someone else and also own my own company. And, once again, I'm the youngest person working either place. We used to hire younger people at my business (it's an ISP) but we found that we got a lot more accomplished for a little more money from older (40-50 yo) folks.
Ideally, you have enough of a personnel budget to hire people with a range of ages and experience levels. Failing that, I think I'd rather pay for experience.
TheDullBlade Wrote:
You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the patent office works. They aren't supposed to be the final arbiter of what is obvious and what isn't. In order to be worthwhile, a patent must be defended in court.Of course their attitude is to let the interested parties slug it out in court, that's the way the system is designed to work, and it works fairly well.
Does this take money? You bet it does. Piles of it. But think about it: if the patent situation is truly as out of hand as many appear to think, it should be possible to raise lots of money to get the most obvious patents voided. If a patent is truly obvious and is truly burdensome for a large number of people or companies, wouldn't they be willing to be named as parties in a suit? If I were being wronged that badly, I know I certainly would.
In any case, if it bothers you so much, perhaps you should, on your own initiative, set up a not-for-profit to take the holders of what you consider weak patents to court. Go ahead, try to solicit donations. I even think I might donate to it, for the potential for abuse certainly is there.
Look. I've been listening to the debate about software patents for longer than a patent lasts and longer than many of the participants here have been alive. In nearly 20 years of debate, it is sad to note that the anti-patent brigade hasn't been able to come up with single workable suggestion about what should replace the current US patent system or any concrete examples of the patent system run amok despite endless claims that this happens all the time. Perhaps it is time for you to show me how the USPTO has harmed me.
Not that the US patent system is perfect. Like the saying "There is no cause so just that you can't find a flaming asshole who supports it" there is no invention so perfect that you can't find someone harmed by it. However, in the absence of realistic alternatives, it's hard to know what to do.
How is making sure that everyone knows the details of an invention an "infringement of free speech and free thought"? The main alternative to patents are trade secrets. How do you think that making everything a trade secret and requiring NDA's from all the engineers involved in a project promotes free speech and thought?
I think you haven't carefully considered your opinion.
It helps if you know how the patent process works. I'm currently going through that process for my day job. A patent application has to describe a device or class of devices that has not been invented before and the description of the class of devices has to be described well enough so that someone who is "skilled in the art" can duplicate it without difficulty.
So, if something has ever been built before, it is not patentable. (This is true even if you were the one building it and you wait to long to file the patent.)
That puts a damper on your plans to rake in the big bucks from mass-transit manufacturers, doesn't it? People have been moved en masse for thousands of years, so there's lots of "prior art".
In order to be granted that patent, you have to explain what makes your device different from every other mass-transit device that's ever been built and why those differences are important enough to be afforded patent protection. So, it's not possible to patent, say, an airliner, but it may be possible to patent devices on the airliner. I'm sure that whoever invented retractable landing gear got a patent on the device even though most people today would consider that an "obvious" invention.
This whole software patent thing has been blown all out of proportion. Patents are there to help promote the free distribution of ideas, not to stifle invention. Some people focus solely on the fact that the patent gives the patent owner a monopoly on those devices, but they conveniently forget that, in order to get a patent on anything, you have to describe that thing in enough detail to duplicate it. Once the patent (assuming it's granted) expires, that information is freely available.
That works for software as well as for mechanical devices. I've heard the complaint that "software changes too fast so 17 years (or 25 or whatever the laws in your country say) is way too long." Unfortunately for that argument, it simply isn't true. The rapid rate of change in software technology was due to the relative youth of the technology. As software has matured, the rate of change in that technology has become much smaller. It's a lot harder to make fundamental changes in software technology now than it was 20 years ago. That alone means that you'll never see a situation where you can't write a program without violating some patent.
In fact, if you look, you'll see that patents in any technology follow a similar pattern: They come quickly and cover "obvious" (to posterity) inventions in the beginning and are granted less often and the patents that are granted get more esoteric as time goes on.
For the patent in question, well, I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a system where the cache contents were addressable as processor registers, which is what the patent covers. In fact, although I'm familiar with a number of processors and I am interested in processor design, I don't think it ever would have occured to me that this would be something useful or worthwhile. That means that I am satisfied, pending the arrival of some notification of "prior art", that the Transmeta guys have truly come up with something new.
Or Houston (where I live just fine in a 2100 SF 4BR ranch I lease for $695/month) or San Antonio or Austin. (I hear Austin is a nice town to live in if you can stand to be that close to the legislature. Fortunately, it only meets every other year, and they're done for a while.) For that matter, you could go to Oklahoma City, Des Moines, or Jackson, MS. As for Internet access, Houston has flat-rate ISDN and DSL (cable modems may or may not be coming soon, depending on who you ask,) at decent prices. (Can you say DS-1 speeds for well under $100/month? I thought you could.)
However, the decision of where to put a company is not made by the workers. Not that it should make any difference. I know that if I were to start a company, I wouldn't do it in Silicon Valley because the costs are too high. I would think that it's cheaper (and probably easier) to hire people in CA and move them to someplace cheaper than it is to pay them a living wage near SFO. The thing is, I suspect that few of the bosses read /. (It's something to think about when you want to start YOUR company, though. Your nest egg goes that much farther if you don't have to squander it all on luxuries like housing.)
To be sure, you can't "go water skiing in the morning and snow skiing in the afternoon" in Houston, TX like someone once told me they did in LA, but if you're supposed to be working 80 hours/week (or doing some other ridiculous things for the benefits of your boss and the detriment of yourself) there's no time or energy left to go skiing at all.
I certainly don't wish ill on my colleagues in the Bay area, but if you haven't put down roots, yet, and you're sick of paying vastly too much for your housing, food, and whatever, you might pick up some out-of-town newspapers and do some hunting, or just go to The Houston Job finder and look and see what's there, or, rather, what's here.
Brokersys (the company I started) isn't hiring, though, so please don't send any resumes.
The reason why you give away the code and sell the art is because people are willing to pay money for the art, but aren't for the code. Very few people look at a game and say "cool rendering engine." Many, many people look at a game and say "nice gameplay."
Remember: the value of something is what someone else is willing to give you to get it, not how much it cost you to produce. In fact, reducing or eliminating the cost burden of developing new software is at the heart of why the code should be open source.
20 years ago the Xerox PARC created the whole concept of Graphical User Interface. They did this, not as some would have you think, to make computers easier to use. NO! Their purpose was to make computers easier to learn. It's all about learning curve, not long-term usability.
Of course Linux/UNIX (and suchlike) are hard to learn. They aren't designed to be easy to learn. They are, however, designed to be easy to use. Small single-function programs that can be combined to produce effects both gross and subtle offer a system with tremendous expressive power and expressive power is what defines "ease of use".
From my perspective, there really is no way to get around the learning curve. Computers are complex devices and, while you can spend most of your life avoiding the places where they are most complex, sometimes it becomes necessary to make acquaintance with the beast. The only solution that I see is to move most people to the so-called "information appliances" which trade capability for simplicity.
That, and you need to stop mucking about with the interface. It's best to only climb the learning curve once.
As long as you call them idiots, they'll stick with Billg, who loves them.
ITYM "Billg, who they think loves them". He doesn't care about his users, he just wants their money so he can continue to be "The richest man in the world."(TM)
Your comment reminded me of this:
(from the handy-dandy fortunes file.)
Of course, most of the people for whom Windows is the target market have no business on a computer. They don't use more than 10% of its capability and they don't know how to fix any of the myriad problems that crop up because computers are complicated things. The situation cries out for "information appliances."
Anybody got one?
Windows 2000 Beta 3 is an absolutely amazing product. Whether or not you believe it's solid, I'm actually running both server and professional at home and have had very few problems with it.
Well, I run Debian 1.3 at work and I have had zero problems with it. Of course, I don't consider it "an absolutely amazing product". Being someone who rarely runs Microsoft software, I usually don't consider software that works to be amazing.