I do not think you understand where the parent post is coming from. The basic idea is it did not work in Red Hat 1 so therefore it does not work in Linux, at all, ever.
Good eamples of problems. I used to be an analyst at an investment manger who had restrictive policies. They blocked all images, so I could not get some emails from a retailer who wanted to show investors what their new format looked like. Of course joke emails
They did worse: Access to websites in certain categories was blocked, this included alcohol and tobacco - not very helpful when the analysts covering beverage and tobacco comapnies wanted to look at the company websites.
In fact, the location that development takes place has nothing to do with patent validity. Software developed in Denmark can be patented in the USA regardless of Danish or EU laws
Confusing governments over that is a major part of the pro strong patent and copyright crowds argument. Without it the whole "without the aptent laws people ahve no incentive" argument falls apart.
But patents also impose costs on consumers and during the lifetime of the patent they prevent further improvements to the patented idea. In other words they encourage one-off innovations but discourage evolutionary imporvements. Evolutionary improvemnt has a pretty good track-record at coming up with complex designs...
Business methods: as with software, inovations has not speeded up after they became patentable, therefore patents do not work
Pharmaceuticals: only a fractionabout 15%-20% of the extra cost paid by consumers goes back into R & D - i.e. it works but is a very inefficient incentive system.
Semiconductors: the main motive for R & D is to keep manufacturing capcblities up to advancing stadards - trade secrets would be enough protection. This was confired by a study by Besen and Maskin at MIT. In addition all the big boys cross license to each other anyway so the main effect is to keep new entrants out.
Th patent system works so well that huge government intervention and expenditure is needed to keep R & D spend going. The best examples are again with pharmaceuticals. In the US the FDA gives pharma companies extra incetives like those of orphan drugs, in the UK they get tax breaks. Globally a huge amount of R & D is carried out or funded by univerisites and by non-profit organisations such as the Wellcome Trust.
So why not restrict patents to purely mechancial investions: what they were meant to apply to originally?
It takes a little work, but you can use Windows as a non-administrator.
So why should I switch to Windows when Linux just works out of the box?
If we were talking about a feature windows had, and some posted a comment like "Linux will do it with a little work", there would be a hundered comments claiming that this was evidence that Linux is too difficult for Joe average
This is precisely why I prefer chose Linux for small business use. So far our experince of the advantages and disadvantages of desktop Linux are:
Advantages: easy to secure, cheap, huge range of apps also cheap and bundled with the OS (Mandrake 6 CD set).
Disdvantages: my assistant can not watch the windows media videos (sometimes embedded in Word files!) his girlfriend keeps emailing him
I am not that familiar with America evangalical christains of the type you talk about, however your post did spark of a thought in my mind. There seem to be some marked similarities to European imperial christianity of the 18th and 19th centuries:
supporting the wealthy and powerful
intolerance
aggressive evangalisation (not that that jsutifies the reaction of countries that persecute Christianity)
support for fairly militaristic policies
I suspect that combination is the result of trying to reconcile Jesus teachings with being an imperial power (as the US is de facto with no real rivals and a number of client states).
Of course, in Britan, eventually things changed and Chritians are now tend to be more liberal, politcal involvement tends to be with issues of justice (there were some other posts on the subject of the frequent criticism of the British government by the Church of England).
I hope this happens in the US, although from this distance I can see few signs yet.
Anyway thanks for you post - the fact I knew but it sparked off an intesting train of thought in my mind.
OSS is pro free markets (by minimising network effects, thus keeping barriers to entry lower) as opposed to state enforcement of monopolies (sound familiar?) and central planning (sound familiar?).
The New Testament as nearly as I can tell is just empty text they listen to and maybe even memorize without ever actually taking to heart and without actually practicing the other 6 days of the week.
Mostly thats becuase its hard to practice what Jesus asks. Intellectual assent is one thing, but when it comes to something like "give all you have to the poor", who wants to actually do it? And that is nothing compared to the risks in some coutries if you spread His word (want to me a martyr
Also, there is more to it than the New Testament, Chritinaity is about a personal relationship, and th effect of that should be profound and certainly can be.
Right approach, but unless you have a really buck passing organisational culture it should not be necessary to even get it in writing.
I have worked for two companies where at least some people had admin on their own machines. But these were places where people did not pass the buck to IT if they messed things up. On the other hand IT did help even if it was your fault - which did not actually happen too often.
The advantages of having admin were that you could fix problems yourself (if you knew how), and you could install software without bureaucracy. Worked well enought there - vertainly a lot better than things worked at places with very strict policies.
A stock nrokers proverb "where theres a tip theres a tap" - i.e. if some one tips a share they have a lot on tap to sell if it rises.
That said I assume msot people know by now that following stock tips based on forum positings is a very bad idea.
seem to be being fairly reasonable. Short extracts of of logs, apaprently realted to specific offences they are investigating. With a bit of luck they will catch a stupid script kiddie or two.
There are plenty of examples of law enforcement agencies abusing there powers, I can not see why anyone thinks this is one of them.
Thats not my point, what I am saying is that the deterioration is due to more passengers on the trains than the existing infrastucture can cope with.
The other thing is that total miles travelled has increased - i.e. more people are travelling (especially commuting to work) and longer distances.
Keep people informed, not jsut your management, but anyone on the project. When i had a job where I was basically a domiain expert, the biggest difference I noticed between the most experienced (and best) of the project managers I worked with and the least experienced was that the former kept me (and everyone else) in the loop. No surprises, especially no nasty surprises. Most importantly no problems with the client that I did not know about.
One thing I have noticed is that MS is on a major PR offensive here in Sri Lanka. I suspect that they can succeed here becuase the market is small, already locked into MS and the government has no understanding of technology. Add the fact that coporate IT people are notoriusly corrupt and tend to buy the most expensive solution (usually proprietary via an overpriced channel) and the environment is terrible for Linux.
In spite of all that Linux is gaining some traction and over the last year I have noticed increasing numbers of job ads and courses for Linux (almost always RH). No desktop use yet but some banks and others are using it on servers.
I am using it for business use myself, but that is one very small (four desktop) business. There is some potential for home use (especially when people get frightened of viruses) but only where a sufficently knowledgeable user is willing to help others as most PC retailers are barely capable of supporting Windows, let alone Linux.
China (and quite possibly India too) are inherently wary and more suspicious of a big firm owning every computer they work on. Conspiracy theories asid
Which is why MS's threats might very well push Asian givernments away from software patents.
They have given us a wonderful example of what ASia has to lose from software patents and I will be very surprised on if this does not have an effect on Asian, especially Chinese, thinking during the next round of WTO negotiations.
Incidentally software patents are not currently required by the WTO patent regime or Europe would have already had them.
What disaster? State run British rail was sooo good at the time right?
The privatised rail networks carries far more passengers, more safely than the nationalised one did. Oh, you thought it has a poor safety record did you? Maybe thats becuase unlike the "morons" you get your statistics from reliable tabloid headlines, rather than second rate sources like the ONS. Go on, have a look at the number of passenger kilometers now and pre-privatisation (up drastically) and the number of deaths per km (down).
The infrastucture is inadequate becuase people travel more, it is impossibly expensive to build more, and the economically sensible course (raise prices to deter people from travelling and put the money into new infrastucture) is politically impossible.
I do not disagree about undue business infulence on governments (and not just in the US and UK either) - and most governments are now mercantalist rather than free market in their policies. However state control is not the solution in this case unless the state is prepared to either raise fares or pour in a LOT of money to improve the infrastucture.
I assuming you are using Lynx or some kind of Unix,
so your wife now presumeably tells people how terrible this Linux is, and that it does not even have a "proper internet" - or something on those lines.
The community thanks your for your contribution to Linux advocacy.
You ignore the key arguments against the idea:
1) They are not necessary, software as not advanced faster since patents were itnroduced, so what purpose to they serve.
2) If you can find any gains from patents, they will not be worth the extra cost of litigation and patent fees.
3) The arguments in favour of woftware patents are based on supposition not backed up by evidence. If they worked there would avhe been an increase in softare development budgets as soon as aptents were possible - this did not happen. Where are your good software patents? Where are the small firms that benefitted from them? Can you give us some examples? Enough to out weigh the use of patents by incumbents to block new entrants?
Slashdot Mirror
I do not think you understand where the parent post is coming from. The basic idea is it did not work in Red Hat 1 so therefore it does not work in Linux, at all, ever.
They did worse: Access to websites in certain categories was blocked, this included alcohol and tobacco - not very helpful when the analysts covering beverage and tobacco comapnies wanted to look at the company websites.
Its an intarweb thingie a bit like Google Groups
Confusing governments over that is a major part of the pro strong patent and copyright crowds argument. Without it the whole "without the aptent laws people ahve no incentive" argument falls apart.
Well, if you can strech the analogy that for, I thought a little further would not hurt.
But patents also impose costs on consumers and during the lifetime of the patent they prevent further improvements to the patented idea. In other words they encourage one-off innovations but discourage evolutionary imporvements. Evolutionary improvemnt has a pretty good track-record at coming up with complex designs...
They do not work for:
- Software: I assume reading this knows that
- Business methods: as with software, inovations has not speeded up after they became patentable, therefore patents do not work
- Pharmaceuticals: only a fractionabout 15%-20% of the extra cost paid by consumers goes back into R & D - i.e. it works but is a very inefficient incentive system.
- Semiconductors: the main motive for R & D is to keep manufacturing capcblities up to advancing stadards - trade secrets would be enough protection. This was confired by a study by Besen and Maskin at MIT. In addition all the big boys cross license to each other anyway so the main effect is to keep new entrants out.
Th patent system works so well that huge government intervention and expenditure is needed to keep R & D spend going. The best examples are again with pharmaceuticals. In the US the FDA gives pharma companies extra incetives like those of orphan drugs, in the UK they get tax breaks. Globally a huge amount of R & D is carried out or funded by univerisites and by non-profit organisations such as the Wellcome Trust.So why not restrict patents to purely mechancial investions: what they were meant to apply to originally?
It takes a little work, but you can use Windows as a non-administrator.
So why should I switch to Windows when Linux just works out of the box?
If we were talking about a feature windows had, and some posted a comment like "Linux will do it with a little work", there would be a hundered comments claiming that this was evidence that Linux is too difficult for Joe average
This is precisely why I prefer chose Linux for small business use. So far our experince of the advantages and disadvantages of desktop Linux are:
use Lyx, very good quality output - as printout, PDF or HTML and easier to use than MS Word.
Logs seem to show two different spiders from google, one of which is supposed to be the adsense one, the other the search one.
I suspect that combination is the result of trying to reconcile Jesus teachings with being an imperial power (as the US is de facto with no real rivals and a number of client states).
Of course, in Britan, eventually things changed and Chritians are now tend to be more liberal, politcal involvement tends to be with issues of justice (there were some other posts on the subject of the frequent criticism of the British government by the Church of England).
I hope this happens in the US, although from this distance I can see few signs yet.
Anyway thanks for you post - the fact I knew but it sparked off an intesting train of thought in my mind.
OSS is pro free markets (by minimising network effects, thus keeping barriers to entry lower) as opposed to state enforcement of monopolies (sound familiar?) and central planning (sound familiar?).
Mostly thats becuase its hard to practice what Jesus asks. Intellectual assent is one thing, but when it comes to something like "give all you have to the poor", who wants to actually do it? And that is nothing compared to the risks in some coutries if you spread His word (want to me a martyr Also, there is more to it than the New Testament, Chritinaity is about a personal relationship, and th effect of that should be profound and certainly can be.
Right approach, but unless you have a really buck passing organisational culture it should not be necessary to even get it in writing.
I have worked for two companies where at least some people had admin on their own machines. But these were places where people did not pass the buck to IT if they messed things up. On the other hand IT did help even if it was your fault - which did not actually happen too often.
The advantages of having admin were that you could fix problems yourself (if you knew how), and you could install software without bureaucracy. Worked well enought there - vertainly a lot better than things worked at places with very strict policies.
A stock nrokers proverb "where theres a tip theres a tap" - i.e. if some one tips a share they have a lot on tap to sell if it rises. That said I assume msot people know by now that following stock tips based on forum positings is a very bad idea.
....be a breach of someone's IP rights - on investions wuch as a "wheel manufatured using fabricating process".
You will be able to use a fabricator only after taking legal advice, that is until they are banned as "devices designed to faciliate IP theft".
seem to be being fairly reasonable. Short extracts of of logs, apaprently realted to specific offences they are investigating. With a bit of luck they will catch a stupid script kiddie or two. There are plenty of examples of law enforcement agencies abusing there powers, I can not see why anyone thinks this is one of them.
Thats not my point, what I am saying is that the deterioration is due to more passengers on the trains than the existing infrastucture can cope with. The other thing is that total miles travelled has increased - i.e. more people are travelling (especially commuting to work) and longer distances.
Keep people informed, not jsut your management, but anyone on the project. When i had a job where I was basically a domiain expert, the biggest difference I noticed between the most experienced (and best) of the project managers I worked with and the least experienced was that the former kept me (and everyone else) in the loop. No surprises, especially no nasty surprises. Most importantly no problems with the client that I did not know about.
In spite of all that Linux is gaining some traction and over the last year I have noticed increasing numbers of job ads and courses for Linux (almost always RH). No desktop use yet but some banks and others are using it on servers.
I am using it for business use myself, but that is one very small (four desktop) business. There is some potential for home use (especially when people get frightened of viruses) but only where a sufficently knowledgeable user is willing to help others as most PC retailers are barely capable of supporting Windows, let alone Linux.
Which is why MS's threats might very well push Asian givernments away from software patents.
They have given us a wonderful example of what ASia has to lose from software patents and I will be very surprised on if this does not have an effect on Asian, especially Chinese, thinking during the next round of WTO negotiations.
Incidentally software patents are not currently required by the WTO patent regime or Europe would have already had them.
The privatised rail networks carries far more passengers, more safely than the nationalised one did. Oh, you thought it has a poor safety record did you? Maybe thats becuase unlike the "morons" you get your statistics from reliable tabloid headlines, rather than second rate sources like the ONS. Go on, have a look at the number of passenger kilometers now and pre-privatisation (up drastically) and the number of deaths per km (down).
The infrastucture is inadequate becuase people travel more, it is impossibly expensive to build more, and the economically sensible course (raise prices to deter people from travelling and put the money into new infrastucture) is politically impossible.
I do not disagree about undue business infulence on governments (and not just in the US and UK either) - and most governments are now mercantalist rather than free market in their policies. However state control is not the solution in this case unless the state is prepared to either raise fares or pour in a LOT of money to improve the infrastucture.
I assuming you are using Lynx or some kind of Unix,
so your wife now presumeably tells people how terrible this Linux is, and that it does not even have a "proper internet" - or something on those lines.
The community thanks your for your contribution to Linux advocacy.
Thanks for the great link. Funny how the legislators never seem to have looked at the evidence before spouting on about incentives for innovovation!
:-)
Now about that sig of yours. Spammers OK, but us MBAs are nice deep down, really
You ignore the key arguments against the idea: 1) They are not necessary, software as not advanced faster since patents were itnroduced, so what purpose to they serve. 2) If you can find any gains from patents, they will not be worth the extra cost of litigation and patent fees. 3) The arguments in favour of woftware patents are based on supposition not backed up by evidence. If they worked there would avhe been an increase in softare development budgets as soon as aptents were possible - this did not happen. Where are your good software patents? Where are the small firms that benefitted from them? Can you give us some examples? Enough to out weigh the use of patents by incumbents to block new entrants?