I think we can separate the general issue of monopoly-breaking power of alternative technologies from the specific issue of how difficult it is to produce same in the bio world due to the current level of bio technology.
I think the cost of finding alternative treatments that don't violate patents is directly related to issue #1 that you raise.
I'm also not convinced that there is only one way to treat a problem (or only one effective way - obviously any treatment can be more or less effective; many drugs are not totally effective, but merely improve the patient to allow either other treatments or natural healing to occur.) I think nanotech will put that to rest in the near future in any event.
One might also quibble over whether the time and expense it takes to find a cure for something is because of misdirection of research resources. A lot of people have complained that the "disease du jour" gets the research money (AIDS is a classic case), while other research possibilities which might have more far-reaching benefits is considered riskier from a profit, patent and monopoly perspective.
In other words, I think people should be trying to solve world-class problems, first because the most financial profit comes from solving such, and second, because those are the problems that pay the most benefit in solving OTHER problems. I'm not sure the pharma company management is on that wavelength. If your motivation is on your quarterly bottom line, even if you have long-range research goals (which I assume most companies do or should), you tend not to take excessive risk.
This is where being a public stock company tends to restrict intellectual advancement in the general case. Privately owned biochem companies I think tend to take bigger risks (Craig Venter comes to mind as an example at least in concept - I don't know if his company was a publicly traded one at the time of the genome breakthroughs.)
"In a TRUE free market, monopolies exist and bleed their customers dry."
This is so stupid it isn't worth replying to, other than to refer the moron to the obvious fact that monopolies are NOT POSSIBLE except under state controlled economies (which thoroughly includes the US.)
As for pharma IP being distributed due to law, then what is the point of the patent wars referenced by the article? What's wrong with this picture?
As for the nonsense of "without patents", that has been dealt with repeatedly elsewhere. IP has absolutely no demonstrated effect on the production of inventions historically, exclusive of the general issue of state controlled markets. I am not aware of ANY study indicating such benefit. It's an excuse for greed, nothing more.
I don't do credentials. You're the one bragging about yours.
The reason management manages the stock price is to ensure their own holdings are up there. If you can't see that, you're clueless about ANYTHING having to do with business - or humans in general.
I hope the universities using your services get at least some money back from your negotiations, since you obviously know nothing about economics or making money.
"it works, even if they have distorted it in several ways for personal gain."
"I have executed approximately 2,000 IP-related licenses for an academic institution"
Okay, obviously we see your bias here!
"Which one makes them more money? If it's the latter, why aren't they doing it already? And if it's the former, wouldn't the latter violate the company's fiscal obligation to give stockholders a return on their investments?"
Clearly you know nothing. The latter - licensing - obviously makes them more money (although there could be cases where it doesn't.) Spreading an invention wide and participating in the profits of numerous companies will return more income, over time, to the inventor than being the sole source of it.
Why aren't they doing it? Greed and incompetent management usually explains most corporate actions adequately.
Violate fiscal responsibility? Gimme a break. That is the LAST thing ANY corporate management gives a shit about. The only thing corporate management cares about is the stock value of their shares and their personal power in the corporation. There is no such thing as "fiscal responsibility". Anybody who says there is is a manager who is lying his ass off.
As for the state of any large industry, kindly reread the article which compares the computer industry to the pharma industry. The computer industry widely cross-licenses. The cranking up of patent protection in that industry is merely another example of greedy incompetent management like Microsoft trying to defend against open source.
And I didn't say patents didn't work to make money for a corporation. Clearly they do in many cases. What I'm saying is first, that patent monopolies don't make as MUCH money for the company as licensing does, and second, patents have a negative effect on inventing, both for a company and for the industry of which it is a part as well as other industries that might use the technology, which means companies end up not inventing as much because they're milking their patents instead. This is another way patents put a damper on the company's income - less invention output equals less income.
That simple.
You're just another clueless management type that can't comprehend that risk equals reward.
"Well intentions" do not excuse either incompetence or malice.
If the Dutch are doing this for the reasons you stated - i.e., preventing the abuse of childen because of incompetence in their bureacracy - there are obviously many other ways to eliminate that incompetence rather than doing a cradle-to-grave surveillance of people.
The parents moved, so they can't find out they had trouble with kids before? Gimme a fucking break. If you can find out about it afterwards, you can find out about it beforehand. This is just the usual CYA bullshit the authorities always trot out to explain incompetence and justify more repression.
Then malice comes in. This is merely an excuse for the law enforcement establishment and the politicians - which is the SAME group of scumbags in EVERY country, regardless of political setup - to build up their surveillance of people, so they can clamp down on "undesireables" - i.e., anybody they don't like or who doesn't like them.
Period. That simple. Anybody who supports this sort of thing is a moron or a malicious asshole - probably both.
"If you spent $5 billion developing and testing a new drug, would you let your competitors buy the rights to sell their own versions?"
What part of LICENSING don't you understand?
You license so you can partake of the profits of everybody else selling your invention as well or better than you can yourself.
By not licensing, all you do is stimulate everyone else to come up with a better product - under a different patent - and put you out of business.
Read my lips. Patents don't last. No form of IP lasts. Monopolies that are not coercively protected by the state do not last. If you rely on a patent to make you money, you will shortly go out of business or spend most of your monopoly profits fighting legal battles in court.
Nanotech will alter that equation. Nanotech will allow biotech research to be sped up by orders of magnitude. And combined with advances in computer hardware via nanotech, the vast amounts of data produced by nanotech-enabled biotech research will be processable.
Some people have suggested that we won't make serious progress in understanding the human body and brain for the next 300 years. Wrong. Nanotech will in the next 20-50 years allow massively parallel embedded real-time investigation of body and brain function that will enormously speed up the process. I would expect we would have perfect maps of the entire human body and brain easily by the end of the century, if not sooner - I would guess easily by 2050 to 2075.
Nanotech will also allow bringing biotech products to market much faster as a result of the overall speedup of both research and development. Manipulation of biotech components will be easier with nanotech tools which will speed development of products.
"Do you think the same amount of research would go on if they couldn't recoup their investment costs?"
The problem with this notion is there is NO WAY they can be SURE in ANY case that they CAN recoup their investment costs.
Even if you produce a cure for cancer, how the hell do you know some geek in some other company hasn't produced a cure for cancer that can be produced cheaper and works better than yours? And isn't covered by YOUR patent? (Which is why they want patents that cover ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.)
Risk is risk.
The problem is that most money men don't know how to handle risk. Why? Because money men are primates and risk is scare one for primates. They're money men because they believe money makes them better than anyone else and more able to trash anyone else, and that's the only psychology that matters to them.
The idea of taking actual RISK in discovering something new is simply anathema to these morons.
So they bribe the state to attempt to secure their fortunes. Which is what patents and copyrights are. It has nothing to do with "stimulating creativity" - that's bullshit.
Unfortunately (pun intended) it doesn't always work. Which is why the article discusses all the patent wars that erupted as a result of Bayh-Dole and why researchers now have to clear everything with their legal departments before saying a word about their research. And THAT is stifling creativity.
As usual, you didn't read the article or get the point.
While Bayh-Dole was about commercialization of products developed with federal funding by universities (not particularly onerous a concept if you accept the basic concept of the state in the first place), the "unintended consequence" was patent legal wars - which are a direct result of there being patents.
And then you have the nerve to talk about pharma - which is exactly the point and example of the article.
RTFA next time.
And yes, you DO pay twice (or X or multiple times X) when the company is granted a monopoly on a drug invented by someone else. The issue - and the point of the problem the article has with Bayh-Dole - is that those with patent monopolies tend NOT to license or cross-license their products - which raises the cost of those products to monopoly rates and limits the spread of the IP - which is supposed to be the point of patents in the first place.
Just because patents are supposed to grant you a monopoly, that monopoly is supposed to be limited in time and subject to the provision that the IP gets licensed to all comers, so invention and distribution are both served.
Of course, it doesn't work that way. Monopoly is monopoly - I get it all, you get nothing. That's how humans work when they can use the coercive power of the state in their favor.
In a TRUE free market, you take your chances and the only thing keeping you from bankruptcy is smarts and speed.
And that's how it SHOULD be - raw evolution in action.
Seriously, who gives a shit what this asshole has to say? NOTHING he has said in the past has been relevent to anything but marketing spin and self-promotion.
Hey, Bill, stuff your mouth up your ass. We don't want to hear it.
He doesn't need "Linux from scratch" to set up one fucking server and some workstations. He's not a distro producer, he's an admin. He can do that crap later when he wants to deepen his knowledge of Linux. Telling him to do LFS is like telling an MCSE to write his own version of Windows. Bullshit.
My point on replicating his Windows system was not to make Linux look like Windows, but to enable the office to continue doing what they're currently doing on Windows but in the Linux manner. Stop knee-jerking and understand that.
Saying that RPM means Red Hat or SUSE or Mandrake are unusable is just fucking stupid. Get off your Debian or Gentoo or whatever fanaticism you're addicted to and get a clue. Most organizations use these three main Linux distros as servers for a reason.
And yes I have source installed on a number of occasions - in fact, on my old Red Hat 7.3 before my current Mandrake 10.1, and the Red Hat didn't HAVE all the new repository stuff. Never had a problem.
You're full of shit trying to be a Linux guru.
Give...it...up. You just sound like a fool or a fanatic. You're an example of why people coming from Windows can't stand Linux people. You give Linux users a bad name.
Okay, if you did the job right in training them and THEN they got some bozo manager who's scared of learning something new, well, nothing you can do about it.
Maybe you could go over the head of the new manager to her boss and suggest a support contract that would handle the trivial issues - or maybe some retraining to handle the issues that have arisen. If that didn't work, probably you might as well dump them, especially if they're going to dump you anyway and then badmouth you.
However, it might still be useful to try to part with them on good terms by steering them to somebody else they might want to work with if they're actually considering switching back to Windows. It would sort of be egg on your face, but at least you'd have some professional integrity you could point to by doing that if they badmouth you to others. Just a thought. Wouldn't do it until you're sure they're going to dump you, though.
Yeah, I can see how your boss is partly to blame for the situation, if he isn't taking care of the migration details sufficiently. Isn't that always the case? Gently point out to him how your company lost this client because of this (without making him the cause), and he might get a clue.
I agree he seemed a little casual about the prospect of a migration, but that might has just been his writing style.
Or he might be the sort of small business IT guy with a Microsoft background who really doesn't have a clue. For his company's sake, I hope not.
While he didn't get a lot of good advice, he did get some. It sounded to me like he just wanted some idea where to go learn. You'd think he'd think of Google, but that can be overwhelming to a lot of people, too, especially when you see umpteen zillion hits on the word "Linux".
As for the FUD, that was inevitable. Mention Linux and Windows in the same breath here, and the Windows shills come out of the sewer. Maybe this guy was just trolling for another flamefest, who knows?
Nowadays you boot a live CD and run any editor you want.
This hoary old "vi is the only editor you can count on" crap is obsolete, too.
Today there are a half dozen easier command line editors you can throw on a rescue floppy and a zillion you can put on a rescue CD.
If you're working on a system that has only got vi to work with in an emergency - get a job on a real system. Obviously the sys admin has no clue.
Besides, ninety nine percent of the time when you have to edit a config file, do you NEED a fancy editor? Pico is JUST as good for editing a simple config file and MUCH easier to use. But as I say, it's ridiculous to depend on either.
Can't disagree but my point is that he can learn to set it up in a lot less than two years of heavy study like other people have suggested.
He can learn what he needs to do this in less than six months - even three - if he applies himself to the right texts, and implements what he learns on a test machine (or two - necessary for learning networking on Linux.) Depending on how busy he is otherwise, of course.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, get the O'Reilly "Linux in a Nutshell" which is the best command line reference and also discusses some of KDE and GNOME. You'll use this a LOT.
Get texts on the following subjects:
1) Linux system administration. The classic UNIX text is "UNIX System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth/Snyder/Seebass/Hein from Prentice Hall, and there is one by the same authors in the same style called "Linux Administration Handbook", the second edition of which is due out in February 2006.
Don't get a book strictly on UNIX system administration because Linux does many things differently from "big iron" UNIX systems, using different tools, some of which vary from distro to distro. Coming from Windows, it won't help you to know the differences between UNIX versions.
You might want a book on the Webmin utility as well such as "The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX" by Joe Cooper or "Managing Linux Systems with Webmin: System Administration and Module Development" by Jamie Cameron from Prentice Hall. As a Windows guy, you're used to GUI system administration. Webmin is a general purpose GUI for system administration that uses plugins to control almost anything and everything on Linux and many other UNIX OSs. There are hundreds of plugins available. Check it out.
2) Linux security - "Building Secure Servers with Linux" from O'Reilly might be a good one. "Linux Administrators Security Guide" is available on the Net, it's old (1999) but covers the basics.
Just be aware that modern distros use the IPTABLES firewall, not IPCHAINS. There are also scripts available that help automate firewall creation such as Bastille Linux and Guarddog.
3) Introductory shell scripting - like "The Linux Rute User's Tutorial" by Paul Sheer which is available for download on the Net or purchase, or "UNIX Shells by Example" by Ellie Quiqley from Prentice Hall.
4) Samba if you have to support Windows desktops from the server before converting the desktops. There's an official guide out for Samba 3 written by the Samba people I believe.
5) Overviews on the various Linux servers for standard functions like email, so you can choose from between sendmail, postfix, etc. email servers and the like. Get these from the Net, pick one, then get a book on it.
6) In addition to Linux system administration, which will probably include some network administration, get a text specifically on Linux network administration - "Advanced Linux Networking" by Roderick Smith from Addison Wesley looks like a good one, despite being three years old. "Linux Network Administrator's Guide" by Tony Bautts, Terry Dawson, Gregor N. Purdy from O'Reilly is another good overview text.
7) A book specifically about moving from Windows to Linux might help, such as Marcel Gagne's "Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" from Addison Wesley, or "Linux in a Windows World" by Roderick Smith from O'Reilly, or "Windows to Linux Migration Toolkit" by David Allen, Christian Lahti, Herbert Lewis, John Streeton Stile, James Stanger, Andrew Taylor Scott, Timothy Tuck from Syngress or "Moving from Windows to Linux" by Chuck Easttom from Delmar Thomson Learning.
That list should keep you busy for six months at least.
I'd say he doesn't need any of that "Linux from scratch" stuff.
Yes, he needs to get his head around the structure and layout of Linux, the file system hierarchy, the UNIX way of doing things with small, scriptable, linkable utilities, etc. But delving into writing his own init scripts and the like isn't immediately necessary.
A good text on Linux administration such as the classic "UNIX System Administration Handbook" (or more properly the Linux edition) would go far to explaining things if he has real sys admin experience.
He needs "Linux in a Nutshell" as the classic command line reference book. He won't be terribly productive, but he can at least look up what he needs to know to do a specific task, backed up by Google-located tutorials where the reference book alone breaks down.
He probably should go through the Rute User book or the "By Example" book on shell scripting, so he can READ scripts if he has to, but he doesn't need much experience in WRITING them to install and setup a tiny network like this one - most of the tools these days are GUI anyway.
Over time, he can pick up the CLI ways of automating system maintenance and the like, or learn cfengine, or whatever. He only has one server and 15 workstations...
I also wouldn't bother with Knoppix. It would be easier to grab a cheap box and install a full-size distro on it. He could install Knoppix, but it would be better to start with something like Mandrake, or better yet one of the distros likely to end up being used as the server, like SUSE or Red Hat, either in their server versions or workstation versions. This way, he isn't confused by irrelevant issues caused by running from a live CD versus a real distro running from a hard drive and he can gain experience on the system he's going to use for the office. For home use and training, he could use a live CD if he doesn't want or doesn't have the space to dual boot.
He definitely needs to know package management, from RPM on up as well as source code installs, that's certainly true.
And he needs a good overview text on Linux system security.
There's tons of stuff on the Net he can download that will cover all this stuff. Subscribing to alt.binaries.ebooks.technical on Usenet will provide him with thousands of dollars worth of Linux textbooks over time.
The key is to learn what his users are actually DOING with their Windows systems and then systematically finding out how to replace ALL of it (including stuff like playing a CD while they work) with an equivalent Linux way of doing it that is maintainable and trainable, both on the server and on the desktop.
As he bangs along replicating the existing Windows system on Linux, he'll learn enough about Linux - and it will be knowledge he can apply directly to his work. Then he can build on it later to become an expert Linux sys admin.
The second most important thing he can do is make contact with someone who knows Linux well as a sys admin - a consultant or someone at another company - that he can call when he gets stuck, just to answer a question or point him in the right direction. He doesn't need to hire a Linux sys admin, not for a system this size, but just have a contact with someone he can ask a question of for $25/hour or over lunch or email or something.
And of course, lurk on the Linux Web sites and newsgroups and read everything relevant to whatever he's currently into. Use Google for specific questions.
It's not rocket science for an office this size if he has any sys admin clue at all.
Sounds to me like your "Linux solutions" weren't sufficiently solutions...
You didn't plan - or suggest to the company to plan - for new hires getting a Linux orientation? Did you think they were going to hire Linux experts - or even people with ANY Linux experience - to do clerical work?
This sounded suspiciously like a troll post masquerading as a Linux supporter, except I clicked on the Web site link and I see you're running Slackware 8.1 - so you're not a Windows shill.
What you should do is prepare a Linux orientation, contact the company and offer to train their new hires at some reasonable rate. Terminating the present contract just leaves the company high and dry and will seriously damage your credibility with anybody who hears about it.
Converting an established office would actually be easier in this regard since you can get acquainted with the employees and triage who's the power user, who's the scaredy-cat, etc. and plan the conversion appropriately.
You really dropped the ball by not arranging for employee training for this company. It's just common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this. I've used Checkinstall and the like in the past, but this seems very useful, too.
I think we can separate the general issue of monopoly-breaking power of alternative technologies from the specific issue of how difficult it is to produce same in the bio world due to the current level of bio technology.
I think the cost of finding alternative treatments that don't violate patents is directly related to issue #1 that you raise.
I'm also not convinced that there is only one way to treat a problem (or only one effective way - obviously any treatment can be more or less effective; many drugs are not totally effective, but merely improve the patient to allow either other treatments or natural healing to occur.) I think nanotech will put that to rest in the near future in any event.
One might also quibble over whether the time and expense it takes to find a cure for something is because of misdirection of research resources. A lot of people have complained that the "disease du jour" gets the research money (AIDS is a classic case), while other research possibilities which might have more far-reaching benefits is considered riskier from a profit, patent and monopoly perspective.
In other words, I think people should be trying to solve world-class problems, first because the most financial profit comes from solving such, and second, because those are the problems that pay the most benefit in solving OTHER problems. I'm not sure the pharma company management is on that wavelength. If your motivation is on your quarterly bottom line, even if you have long-range research goals (which I assume most companies do or should), you tend not to take excessive risk.
This is where being a public stock company tends to restrict intellectual advancement in the general case. Privately owned biochem companies I think tend to take bigger risks (Craig Venter comes to mind as an example at least in concept - I don't know if his company was a publicly traded one at the time of the genome breakthroughs.)
"I'm a patent attorney,"
If I'd known that, the ad hominem would have been much, much worse. Permit me to correct my mistake.
You're not just a clueless management type. I apologize for saying that.
You're complete slime.
Have a nice day.
Thank you for repeating exactly what I said.
Your post should be modded "Redundant".
"In a TRUE free market, monopolies exist and bleed their customers dry."
This is so stupid it isn't worth replying to, other than to refer the moron to the obvious fact that monopolies are NOT POSSIBLE except under state controlled economies (which thoroughly includes the US.)
As for pharma IP being distributed due to law, then what is the point of the patent wars referenced by the article? What's wrong with this picture?
As for the nonsense of "without patents", that has been dealt with repeatedly elsewhere. IP has absolutely no demonstrated effect on the production of inventions historically, exclusive of the general issue of state controlled markets. I am not aware of ANY study indicating such benefit. It's an excuse for greed, nothing more.
I don't do credentials. You're the one bragging about yours.
The reason management manages the stock price is to ensure their own holdings are up there. If you can't see that, you're clueless about ANYTHING having to do with business - or humans in general.
I hope the universities using your services get at least some money back from your negotiations, since you obviously know nothing about economics or making money.
"it works, even if they have distorted it in several ways for personal gain."
What's wrong with this picture?
Can I use those?
We Transhumans would like to know. Soylent Green never appealed to us.
There some reason for this?
HOW long has 2.6 been out?
Maybe they need to rename it LIMPware?
"I have executed approximately 2,000 IP-related licenses for an academic institution"
Okay, obviously we see your bias here!
"Which one makes them more money? If it's the latter, why aren't they doing it already? And if it's the former, wouldn't the latter violate the company's fiscal obligation to give stockholders a return on their investments?"
Clearly you know nothing. The latter - licensing - obviously makes them more money (although there could be cases where it doesn't.) Spreading an invention wide and participating in the profits of numerous companies will return more income, over time, to the inventor than being the sole source of it.
Why aren't they doing it? Greed and incompetent management usually explains most corporate actions adequately.
Violate fiscal responsibility? Gimme a break. That is the LAST thing ANY corporate management gives a shit about. The only thing corporate management cares about is the stock value of their shares and their personal power in the corporation. There is no such thing as "fiscal responsibility". Anybody who says there is is a manager who is lying his ass off.
As for the state of any large industry, kindly reread the article which compares the computer industry to the pharma industry. The computer industry widely cross-licenses. The cranking up of patent protection in that industry is merely another example of greedy incompetent management like Microsoft trying to defend against open source.
And I didn't say patents didn't work to make money for a corporation. Clearly they do in many cases. What I'm saying is first, that patent monopolies don't make as MUCH money for the company as licensing does, and second, patents have a negative effect on inventing, both for a company and for the industry of which it is a part as well as other industries that might use the technology, which means companies end up not inventing as much because they're milking their patents instead. This is another way patents put a damper on the company's income - less invention output equals less income.
That simple.
You're just another clueless management type that can't comprehend that risk equals reward.
"Well intentions" do not excuse either incompetence or malice.
If the Dutch are doing this for the reasons you stated - i.e., preventing the abuse of childen because of incompetence in their bureacracy - there are obviously many other ways to eliminate that incompetence rather than doing a cradle-to-grave surveillance of people.
The parents moved, so they can't find out they had trouble with kids before? Gimme a fucking break. If you can find out about it afterwards, you can find out about it beforehand. This is just the usual CYA bullshit the authorities always trot out to explain incompetence and justify more repression.
Then malice comes in. This is merely an excuse for the law enforcement establishment and the politicians - which is the SAME group of scumbags in EVERY country, regardless of political setup - to build up their surveillance of people, so they can clamp down on "undesireables" - i.e., anybody they don't like or who doesn't like them.
Period. That simple. Anybody who supports this sort of thing is a moron or a malicious asshole - probably both.
"If you spent $5 billion developing and testing a new drug, would you let your competitors buy the rights to sell their own versions?"
What part of LICENSING don't you understand?
You license so you can partake of the profits of everybody else selling your invention as well or better than you can yourself.
By not licensing, all you do is stimulate everyone else to come up with a better product - under a different patent - and put you out of business.
Read my lips. Patents don't last. No form of IP lasts. Monopolies that are not coercively protected by the state do not last. If you rely on a patent to make you money, you will shortly go out of business or spend most of your monopoly profits fighting legal battles in court.
Nanotech will alter that equation. Nanotech will allow biotech research to be sped up by orders of magnitude. And combined with advances in computer hardware via nanotech, the vast amounts of data produced by nanotech-enabled biotech research will be processable.
Some people have suggested that we won't make serious progress in understanding the human body and brain for the next 300 years. Wrong. Nanotech will in the next 20-50 years allow massively parallel embedded real-time investigation of body and brain function that will enormously speed up the process. I would expect we would have perfect maps of the entire human body and brain easily by the end of the century, if not sooner - I would guess easily by 2050 to 2075.
Nanotech will also allow bringing biotech products to market much faster as a result of the overall speedup of both research and development. Manipulation of biotech components will be easier with nanotech tools which will speed development of products.
"Do you think the same amount of research would go on if they couldn't recoup their investment costs?"
The problem with this notion is there is NO WAY they can be SURE in ANY case that they CAN recoup their investment costs.
Even if you produce a cure for cancer, how the hell do you know some geek in some other company hasn't produced a cure for cancer that can be produced cheaper and works better than yours? And isn't covered by YOUR patent? (Which is why they want patents that cover ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.)
Risk is risk.
The problem is that most money men don't know how to handle risk. Why? Because money men are primates and risk is scare one for primates. They're money men because they believe money makes them better than anyone else and more able to trash anyone else, and that's the only psychology that matters to them.
The idea of taking actual RISK in discovering something new is simply anathema to these morons.
So they bribe the state to attempt to secure their fortunes. Which is what patents and copyrights are. It has nothing to do with "stimulating creativity" - that's bullshit.
Unfortunately (pun intended) it doesn't always work. Which is why the article discusses all the patent wars that erupted as a result of Bayh-Dole and why researchers now have to clear everything with their legal departments before saying a word about their research. And THAT is stifling creativity.
As usual, you didn't read the article or get the point.
While Bayh-Dole was about commercialization of products developed with federal funding by universities (not particularly onerous a concept if you accept the basic concept of the state in the first place), the "unintended consequence" was patent legal wars - which are a direct result of there being patents.
And then you have the nerve to talk about pharma - which is exactly the point and example of the article.
RTFA next time.
And yes, you DO pay twice (or X or multiple times X) when the company is granted a monopoly on a drug invented by someone else. The issue - and the point of the problem the article has with Bayh-Dole - is that those with patent monopolies tend NOT to license or cross-license their products - which raises the cost of those products to monopoly rates and limits the spread of the IP - which is supposed to be the point of patents in the first place.
Just because patents are supposed to grant you a monopoly, that monopoly is supposed to be limited in time and subject to the provision that the IP gets licensed to all comers, so invention and distribution are both served.
Of course, it doesn't work that way. Monopoly is monopoly - I get it all, you get nothing. That's how humans work when they can use the coercive power of the state in their favor.
In a TRUE free market, you take your chances and the only thing keeping you from bankruptcy is smarts and speed.
And that's how it SHOULD be - raw evolution in action.
You monkeys just can't handle that, however.
Bwahahahahahah!!!!
Now THAT was funny!
Bill Gates Lies Out
OR
Bill Gates Lies Some More
OR just
Bill Gates Lies
Seriously, who gives a shit what this asshole has to say? NOTHING he has said in the past has been relevent to anything but marketing spin and self-promotion.
Hey, Bill, stuff your mouth up your ass. We don't want to hear it.
I call bullshit on all counts.
He doesn't need "Linux from scratch" to set up one fucking server and some workstations. He's not a distro producer, he's an admin. He can do that crap later when he wants to deepen his knowledge of Linux. Telling him to do LFS is like telling an MCSE to write his own version of Windows. Bullshit.
My point on replicating his Windows system was not to make Linux look like Windows, but to enable the office to continue doing what they're currently doing on Windows but in the Linux manner. Stop knee-jerking and understand that.
Saying that RPM means Red Hat or SUSE or Mandrake are unusable is just fucking stupid. Get off your Debian or Gentoo or whatever fanaticism you're addicted to and get a clue. Most organizations use these three main Linux distros as servers for a reason.
And yes I have source installed on a number of occasions - in fact, on my old Red Hat 7.3 before my current Mandrake 10.1, and the Red Hat didn't HAVE all the new repository stuff. Never had a problem.
You're full of shit trying to be a Linux guru.
Give...it...up. You just sound like a fool or a fanatic. You're an example of why people coming from Windows can't stand Linux people. You give Linux users a bad name.
'At Sun, we're the radical engineers that build "ass-whoopin" technology - we're not Miss Manners and we never want to be.'
Is that where your butt lets out a strange noise?
Last I read, the phrase should be "ass-whuppin'".
Well, I guess geeks aren't familiar with the concept...
Okay, if you did the job right in training them and THEN they got some bozo manager who's scared of learning something new, well, nothing you can do about it.
Maybe you could go over the head of the new manager to her boss and suggest a support contract that would handle the trivial issues - or maybe some retraining to handle the issues that have arisen. If that didn't work, probably you might as well dump them, especially if they're going to dump you anyway and then badmouth you.
However, it might still be useful to try to part with them on good terms by steering them to somebody else they might want to work with if they're actually considering switching back to Windows. It would sort of be egg on your face, but at least you'd have some professional integrity you could point to by doing that if they badmouth you to others. Just a thought. Wouldn't do it until you're sure they're going to dump you, though.
Yeah, I can see how your boss is partly to blame for the situation, if he isn't taking care of the migration details sufficiently. Isn't that always the case? Gently point out to him how your company lost this client because of this (without making him the cause), and he might get a clue.
I agree he seemed a little casual about the prospect of a migration, but that might has just been his writing style.
Or he might be the sort of small business IT guy with a Microsoft background who really doesn't have a clue. For his company's sake, I hope not.
While he didn't get a lot of good advice, he did get some. It sounded to me like he just wanted some idea where to go learn. You'd think he'd think of Google, but that can be overwhelming to a lot of people, too, especially when you see umpteen zillion hits on the word "Linux".
As for the FUD, that was inevitable. Mention Linux and Windows in the same breath here, and the Windows shills come out of the sewer. Maybe this guy was just trolling for another flamefest, who knows?
Nowadays you boot a live CD and run any editor you want.
This hoary old "vi is the only editor you can count on" crap is obsolete, too.
Today there are a half dozen easier command line editors you can throw on a rescue floppy and a zillion you can put on a rescue CD.
If you're working on a system that has only got vi to work with in an emergency - get a job on a real system. Obviously the sys admin has no clue.
Besides, ninety nine percent of the time when you have to edit a config file, do you NEED a fancy editor? Pico is JUST as good for editing a simple config file and MUCH easier to use. But as I say, it's ridiculous to depend on either.
Can't disagree but my point is that he can learn to set it up in a lot less than two years of heavy study like other people have suggested.
He can learn what he needs to do this in less than six months - even three - if he applies himself to the right texts, and implements what he learns on a test machine (or two - necessary for learning networking on Linux.) Depending on how busy he is otherwise, of course.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, get the O'Reilly "Linux in a Nutshell" which is the best command line reference and also discusses some of KDE and GNOME. You'll use this a LOT.
Get texts on the following subjects:
1) Linux system administration. The classic UNIX text is "UNIX System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth/Snyder/Seebass/Hein from Prentice Hall, and there is one by the same authors in the same style called "Linux Administration Handbook", the second edition of which is due out in February 2006.
Don't get a book strictly on UNIX system administration because Linux does many things differently from "big iron" UNIX systems, using different tools, some of which vary from distro to distro. Coming from Windows, it won't help you to know the differences between UNIX versions.
You might want a book on the Webmin utility as well such as "The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX" by Joe Cooper or "Managing Linux Systems with Webmin: System Administration and Module Development" by Jamie Cameron from Prentice Hall. As a Windows guy, you're used to GUI system administration. Webmin is a general purpose GUI for system administration that uses plugins to control almost anything and everything on Linux and many other UNIX OSs. There are hundreds of plugins available. Check it out.
2) Linux security - "Building Secure Servers with Linux" from O'Reilly might be a good one. "Linux Administrators Security Guide" is available on the Net, it's old (1999) but covers the basics.
Just be aware that modern distros use the IPTABLES firewall, not IPCHAINS. There are also scripts available that help automate firewall creation such as Bastille Linux and Guarddog.
3) Introductory shell scripting - like "The Linux Rute User's Tutorial" by Paul Sheer which is available for download on the Net or purchase, or "UNIX Shells by Example" by Ellie Quiqley from Prentice Hall.
4) Samba if you have to support Windows desktops from the server before converting the desktops. There's an official guide out for Samba
3 written by the Samba people I believe.
5) Overviews on the various Linux servers for standard functions like email, so you can choose from between sendmail, postfix, etc. email servers and the like. Get these from the Net, pick one, then get a book on it.
6) In addition to Linux system administration, which will probably include some network administration, get a text specifically on Linux network administration - "Advanced Linux Networking" by Roderick Smith from Addison Wesley looks like a good one, despite being three years old. "Linux Network Administrator's Guide"
by Tony Bautts, Terry Dawson, Gregor N. Purdy from O'Reilly is another good overview text.
7) A book specifically about moving from Windows to Linux might help, such as Marcel Gagne's "Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" from Addison Wesley, or "Linux in a Windows World" by Roderick Smith from O'Reilly, or
"Windows to Linux Migration Toolkit" by David Allen, Christian Lahti, Herbert Lewis, John Streeton Stile, James Stanger, Andrew Taylor Scott, Timothy Tuck from Syngress or "Moving from Windows to Linux" by Chuck Easttom from Delmar Thomson Learning.
That list should keep you busy for six months at least.
I'd say he doesn't need any of that "Linux from scratch" stuff.
Yes, he needs to get his head around the structure and layout of Linux, the file system hierarchy, the UNIX way of doing things with small, scriptable, linkable utilities, etc. But delving into writing his own init scripts and the like isn't immediately necessary.
A good text on Linux administration such as the classic "UNIX System Administration Handbook" (or more properly the Linux edition) would go far to explaining things if he has real sys admin experience.
He needs "Linux in a Nutshell" as the classic command line reference book. He won't be terribly productive, but he can at least look up what he needs to know to do a specific task, backed up by Google-located tutorials where the reference book alone breaks down.
He probably should go through the Rute User book or the "By Example" book on shell scripting, so he can READ scripts if he has to, but he doesn't need much experience in WRITING them to install and setup a tiny network like this one - most of the tools these days are GUI anyway.
Over time, he can pick up the CLI ways of automating system maintenance and the like, or learn cfengine, or whatever. He only has one server and 15 workstations...
I also wouldn't bother with Knoppix. It would be easier to grab a cheap box and install a full-size distro on it. He could install Knoppix, but it would be better to start with something like Mandrake, or better yet one of the distros likely to end up being used as the server, like SUSE or Red Hat, either in their server versions or workstation versions. This way, he isn't confused by irrelevant issues caused by running from a live CD versus a real distro running from a hard drive and he can gain experience on the system he's going to use for the office. For home use and training, he could use a live CD if he doesn't want or doesn't have the space to dual boot.
He definitely needs to know package management, from RPM on up as well as source code installs, that's certainly true.
And he needs a good overview text on Linux system security.
There's tons of stuff on the Net he can download that will cover all this stuff. Subscribing to alt.binaries.ebooks.technical on Usenet will provide him with thousands of dollars worth of Linux textbooks over time.
The key is to learn what his users are actually DOING with their Windows systems and then systematically finding out how to replace ALL of it (including stuff like playing a CD while they work) with an equivalent Linux way of doing it that is maintainable and trainable, both on the server and on the desktop.
As he bangs along replicating the existing Windows system on Linux, he'll learn enough about Linux - and it will be knowledge he can apply directly to his work. Then he can build on it later to become an expert Linux sys admin.
The second most important thing he can do is make contact with someone who knows Linux well as a sys admin - a consultant or someone at another company - that he can call when he gets stuck, just to answer a question or point him in the right direction. He doesn't need to hire a Linux sys admin, not for a system this size, but just have a contact with someone he can ask a question of for $25/hour or over lunch or email or something.
And of course, lurk on the Linux Web sites and newsgroups and read everything relevant to whatever he's currently into. Use Google for specific questions.
It's not rocket science for an office this size if he has any sys admin clue at all.
Sounds to me like your "Linux solutions" weren't sufficiently solutions...
You didn't plan - or suggest to the company to plan - for new hires getting a Linux orientation? Did you think they were going to hire Linux experts - or even people with ANY Linux experience - to do clerical work?
This sounded suspiciously like a troll post masquerading as a Linux supporter, except I clicked on the Web site link and I see you're running Slackware 8.1 - so you're not a Windows shill.
What you should do is prepare a Linux orientation, contact the company and offer to train their new hires at some reasonable rate. Terminating the present contract just leaves the company high and dry and will seriously damage your credibility with anybody who hears about it.
Converting an established office would actually be easier in this regard since you can get acquainted with the employees and triage who's the power user, who's the scaredy-cat, etc. and plan the conversion appropriately.
You really dropped the ball by not arranging for employee training for this company. It's just common sense.