In MY opinion, no case between multi-billion-dollar corporate giants with diametrically-opposed agendas is ever "straightforward". This will either be settled out of court, or it will become an ugly complicated mess that only a Darl McBride could ever fully appreciate.
They should be forced to pay for Americans if they want to avail themselves of the services provided by this country, and the term "pay for Americans" has a lot of different aspects to it, not all of which have to do with direct employment by such organizations.
Halliburton has a lot inc common with many other major U.S. corporations, who also see nothing wrong with pissing all over their domestic workforce. All that, while simultaneously demanding more and more for less and less from said workforce, demanding to pay less and less in corporate taxes, buying more and more from overseas (e.g. China), manufacturing less and less here, and generally selling out their own people. Don't expect much sympathy for the likes of Halliburton around here.
And so far as you're concerned, it's nice that you have multiple advanced degrees and all, but explain to me how that has anything to do with the kind of employment being lost to the United States today: manufacturing jobs, mostly, because of all the production that's been sent to China.
The world is slowly changing, but I think it's as the truly ignorant people die off.
Logically, then, the solution to improving the rate of progress has less to do with R&D investment than it does with placing more truly ignorant people at the bottom of the nearest large body of water.
I didn't say they took no legal action. I said they weren't interested in stopping the clones, which is a different matter entirely and which they could have done... instead, they protected their copyrights and not a lot more. IBM had the resources to cause clone makers a lot more grief than it actually did (and which Apple did, and is still doing.) If a comparatively small company like Apple can do it, you can't tell me that IBM couldn't have had they pulled out all the stops. Copyright infringement was only one avenue that IBM could have taken: with their patent portfolio they could have found something with which to go after Compaq and the rest, if they'd wanted to that badly. Like I said, IBM wasn't that interested in stopping the clones, because if they had been... there wouldn't be any. Oh, we'd still have personal computers, but they wouldn't be IBM PC compatible.
You're partly wrong about Franklin. Their initial machines (I saw one... it was in a cardboard enclosure, for chrissakes) was indeed a knockoff as you say. The model I saw even said "Apple ][" on the top of the display during bootup. But Franklin redesigned the mainboard and the enclosure and wrote their own BIOS (actually, "Monitor ROM"), improving on the design with a substantially better keyboard (something Apple refused to do until the//e came out, and I'm not counting the Apple///.)
The problem with ripping off the Apple's Monitor ROM was that direct function calls to specific ROM addresses were required: there was no indirection. Consequently, while Franklin's rewrite was a masterful effort there was a neverending stream of compatibility issues and ROM updates.
IBM, on the other hand, did a much better job with the original PC BIOS by using software interrupts: it didn't matter where a particular handler was located in memory because there was a pointer to it in the vector table. Writing a clone BIOS was a piece of cake in comparison, hell, you could even run an entire BIOS in RAM (I've done that) or replace specific ROM code with a RAM equivalent. As long as you didn't rip off any of IBM's original code, and could show that the developers weren't tainted, you were gold. The development task itself was straightforward (I still have the annotated BIOS listings for both Apple ][,//e and the original PC... they aren't all that complicated.) Cloning the BIOS wasn't the trick... making it legal was. And IBM's firmware design made that much easier.
In any event, I still maintain that had IBM really been interested in stopping the clones they could have done it. Apple certainly has managed to keep clones at bay, and I can't believe that IBM's legal team couldn't have done just as good a job against the likes of Compaq if they'd really wanted to do so.
It also wouldn't make much business sense; who would want to develop for a platform where the goalposts are constantly moving?
You just described everyone who's been developing on the Microsoft bandwagon for the past twenty-five years or so, me included. The goalposts not only move, but they have JATO units attached to them that fire at random intervals. Now... does that make much business sense? No, not really: but that's how things work in the world of Microsoft operating systems.
On the other hand, at that point in time IBM wasn't really all that interested in stopping the development of clone PCs, for a variety of reasons. Had they really chosen to throw their weight around, they most certainly could have, in which case someone else would have taken over (which might have been a good thing for world of personal computing, when you get right down to it.)
Apple, in fact, spent far more time in court suing the likes of Franklin Computer (who, in many ways, had a better product.) Granted, that may have been simply because IBM didn't perceive the personal computer as being a big part of their future, at that point in time, since big iron was still their bread-and-butter. However, if you want to get into the history of anticompetitive behavior at IBM, check out out how they dealt with anyone making plug-compatible components for their mainframe systems in the 60's and 70's. That was a very different story. There's a guy named Amdahl that would be happy to enlighten you.
Besides, the legal climate for reverse-engineering is decidedly less friendly to cloners than it was in, say, 1981.
I'm sure they have, given the ability of this company and its officers to dissemble on virtually any subject. But most people (those with an IQ above room temperature) don't go after the IRS... they do whatever they're going to do and pray they don't get noticed. SCO, on the other hand, went on the offensive. I can't imagine a more difficult target than IBM in an intellectual property case, and that's particularly true when you don't have any intellectual property. I mean, Burst won their case against Microsoft (a similarly hard target) but that's because they had valid patents.
Reminds me of the scene in the first Naked Gun movie, where O.J. Simpson snuck on board a freighter, and burst into a cabin full of well-armed gansters. Not too swift.
I dunno, SCO vs. IBM hasn't had much to do with actual patents and copyrights because SCO appears to have very little of either... the issue is more a complete lack of business ethic, and a willingness to abuse the legal system for fun and profit. You can find that in any field, high-tech or not (take the recording industry) although I agree you're more likely to find such behavior in organizations that regularly deal with IP. IBM is also taking its sweet time because I think they want to establish some valuable precedent, the kind that involves burying one's opponents.
Yes, and being as cold and distant as it is, I'm sure that a massive influx of hot air (such as would happen if we sent our Congress and our various Legislatures there) would significantly improve livability.
Do a little research on "Amdahl". You'll learn very quickly how IBM used to treat competitors, back in the age of big iron, long before Microsoft was even a gleam in Bill Gates' eye. Sure, they've "re-invented" themselves in the past couple decades but we're still talking about Big Blue. SCO would have been better off tangling with the IRS.
Arguably Cameron's finest work. Frankly, when I heard that he was not involved in Terminator 3 I was inclined not to bother with it... and as it turned out I wished I had listened to myself. How anyone could take the incredible foundation laid down by the first two films and turn out such dreck is beyond me. Might as well have been a George Lucas production (Episodes I-III... now there's some "B" material for you.)
A few years before he passed away, my father gave me the hardcover edition of the Terminator 2 script, annotated by Cameron himself. It was absolutely fascinating, and gave some real insight into the decision-making the resulting in such a wonderful film.
For example, in the asylum scene where Dr. Silberman sees the T1000 for the first time as it walks through the bars (and realizes in that instant that everything Sarah Connor ever told him was true) Cameron's notes said "that faint popping sound you heard was the doctor's mind snapping." Poetic justice at its best.
Alessandro Volta himself, who managed to make a pair of frog's legs jerk when applying a current from one of his primitive batteries is presently sitting up in his crypt saying, "WTF? I could've just clapped my hands?"
The problem is not so much that veil of anonymity can be pierced, but that the government has, in the midst of its own quest to make our private lives a thing of the past, provided would-be piercers with way too much ammunition.
it seems to me that even if these egregious clowns were, in fact, devoid of criminal intent (I don't know if I believe that, anyway) they should hardly be excused of criminal misconduct. Regardless of whether it was just bad recordkeeping, sloppy policework in general (I have a problem with that, in general) or whatever... they were required to follow the law and they didn't.
No, because obviously a simple finite probability generator wasn't sufficient to beat Mr. Larson. They would have needed to spend some extra bucks on an infinite improbability generator.
The GP doesn't understand that protectionism is not, in and of itself, evil. In fact, much of the current ills facing our society are due to a lack of it, as you say. This idea that everyone should be free to sell anything they want, anywhere in the world, for any price is simply wrong. When you operate that way, the net result is invariably an entropic transfer of wealth, from areas of highest concentration (the United States) to areas of lesser concentration (Japan, India, China, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) That's been the history of the United States since we stopped bothering to collect tariffs on imported goods. Ironically, it was the advent of the personal income tax and eventually withholding, that lessened the Federal Government's dependence upon that tariff structure and allowed the present state of affairs to come about.
Look, what China and India are doing to the United States are nothing more than what Japan (an erstwhile ally) pioneered decades ago. It's called dumping, it's supposedly illegal and anticompetitive, yet it's happening on a scale that tiny Japan could never have managed. China is dumping goods with the express intent of destroying domestic manufacturing while transferring massive quantities of U.S. dollars into its coffers, and India is doing the same thing with intellectual capital. Both nations are attempting to decimate our ability to create wealth, by going after the businesses that manufacture goods, and the very people capable of designing those goods.
One of my fellow engineers came to work the other day with an expensive-looking set of screw and nutdrivers, in a nice solid case. Made in China of course. He paid two dollars for it. $2.00. No way in hell did that Chinese manufacturer make a profit on that, even if he did pay his workers in rice. But it's sure hard for any domestic producer to compete with that, is it not? If we had a brain in our heads we'd be pushing for our Government to start tariffing the hell out of Chinese imports, to give our own people a chance. I'd have been willing to pay the thirty or forty bucks that screwdriver set was really worth.
Any MBA foolish enough to believe that we'll be able to keep feeding Indian workers peanuts forever is, well, a fool. They're competing with American workers for jobs, and because they'll work for a fraction of a typical American's salary and are frequently highly-qualified they're getting those jobs. That's great, I guess... but when there are no more U.S. citizens capable of doing that work, the price will go up, there will be nobody left to compete with them, and we'll be that much less an independent nation.
The Founders would be proud, I'm sure. No, not really... in reality, they're turning over in their graves.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the Viacom case is very straight forward.
In MY opinion, no case between multi-billion-dollar corporate giants with diametrically-opposed agendas is ever "straightforward". This will either be settled out of court, or it will become an ugly complicated mess that only a Darl McBride could ever fully appreciate.
They should be forced to pay for Americans if they want to avail themselves of the services provided by this country, and the term "pay for Americans" has a lot of different aspects to it, not all of which have to do with direct employment by such organizations.
Halliburton has a lot inc common with many other major U.S. corporations, who also see nothing wrong with pissing all over their domestic workforce. All that, while simultaneously demanding more and more for less and less from said workforce, demanding to pay less and less in corporate taxes, buying more and more from overseas (e.g. China), manufacturing less and less here, and generally selling out their own people. Don't expect much sympathy for the likes of Halliburton around here.
And so far as you're concerned, it's nice that you have multiple advanced degrees and all, but explain to me how that has anything to do with the kind of employment being lost to the United States today: manufacturing jobs, mostly, because of all the production that's been sent to China.
The world is slowly changing, but I think it's as the truly ignorant people die off.
Logically, then, the solution to improving the rate of progress has less to do with R&D investment than it does with placing more truly ignorant people at the bottom of the nearest large body of water.
I have some recommendations.
If it's going on right now, we may know in a year or so.
One can only hope.
I didn't say they took no legal action. I said they weren't interested in stopping the clones, which is a different matter entirely and which they could have done ... instead, they protected their copyrights and not a lot more. IBM had the resources to cause clone makers a lot more grief than it actually did (and which Apple did, and is still doing.) If a comparatively small company like Apple can do it, you can't tell me that IBM couldn't have had they pulled out all the stops. Copyright infringement was only one avenue that IBM could have taken: with their patent portfolio they could have found something with which to go after Compaq and the rest, if they'd wanted to that badly. Like I said, IBM wasn't that interested in stopping the clones, because if they had been ... there wouldn't be any. Oh, we'd still have personal computers, but they wouldn't be IBM PC compatible.
You're partly wrong about Franklin. Their initial machines (I saw one ... it was in a cardboard enclosure, for chrissakes) was indeed a knockoff as you say. The model I saw even said "Apple ][" on the top of the display during bootup. But Franklin redesigned the mainboard and the enclosure and wrote their own BIOS (actually, "Monitor ROM"), improving on the design with a substantially better keyboard (something Apple refused to do until the //e came out, and I'm not counting the Apple ///.)
//e and the original PC ... they aren't all that complicated.) Cloning the BIOS wasn't the trick ... making it legal was. And IBM's firmware design made that much easier.
The problem with ripping off the Apple's Monitor ROM was that direct function calls to specific ROM addresses were required: there was no indirection. Consequently, while Franklin's rewrite was a masterful effort there was a neverending stream of compatibility issues and ROM updates.
IBM, on the other hand, did a much better job with the original PC BIOS by using software interrupts: it didn't matter where a particular handler was located in memory because there was a pointer to it in the vector table. Writing a clone BIOS was a piece of cake in comparison, hell, you could even run an entire BIOS in RAM (I've done that) or replace specific ROM code with a RAM equivalent. As long as you didn't rip off any of IBM's original code, and could show that the developers weren't tainted, you were gold. The development task itself was straightforward (I still have the annotated BIOS listings for both Apple ][,
In any event, I still maintain that had IBM really been interested in stopping the clones they could have done it. Apple certainly has managed to keep clones at bay, and I can't believe that IBM's legal team couldn't have done just as good a job against the likes of Compaq if they'd really wanted to do so.
It also wouldn't make much business sense; who would want to develop for a platform where the goalposts are constantly moving?
... does that make much business sense? No, not really: but that's how things work in the world of Microsoft operating systems.
You just described everyone who's been developing on the Microsoft bandwagon for the past twenty-five years or so, me included. The goalposts not only move, but they have JATO units attached to them that fire at random intervals. Now
On the other hand, at that point in time IBM wasn't really all that interested in stopping the development of clone PCs, for a variety of reasons. Had they really chosen to throw their weight around, they most certainly could have, in which case someone else would have taken over (which might have been a good thing for world of personal computing, when you get right down to it.)
Apple, in fact, spent far more time in court suing the likes of Franklin Computer (who, in many ways, had a better product.) Granted, that may have been simply because IBM didn't perceive the personal computer as being a big part of their future, at that point in time, since big iron was still their bread-and-butter. However, if you want to get into the history of anticompetitive behavior at IBM, check out out how they dealt with anyone making plug-compatible components for their mainframe systems in the 60's and 70's. That was a very different story. There's a guy named Amdahl that would be happy to enlighten you.
Besides, the legal climate for reverse-engineering is decidedly less friendly to cloners than it was in, say, 1981.
I'm sure they have, given the ability of this company and its officers to dissemble on virtually any subject. But most people (those with an IQ above room temperature) don't go after the IRS ... they do whatever they're going to do and pray they don't get noticed. SCO, on the other hand, went on the offensive. I can't imagine a more difficult target than IBM in an intellectual property case, and that's particularly true when you don't have any intellectual property. I mean, Burst won their case against Microsoft (a similarly hard target) but that's because they had valid patents.
Reminds me of the scene in the first Naked Gun movie, where O.J. Simpson snuck on board a freighter, and burst into a cabin full of well-armed gansters. Not too swift.
I dunno, SCO vs. IBM hasn't had much to do with actual patents and copyrights because SCO appears to have very little of either ... the issue is more a complete lack of business ethic, and a willingness to abuse the legal system for fun and profit. You can find that in any field, high-tech or not (take the recording industry) although I agree you're more likely to find such behavior in organizations that regularly deal with IP. IBM is also taking its sweet time because I think they want to establish some valuable precedent, the kind that involves burying one's opponents.
SCO Says IBM Hurt Profits
Good.
Or repeal the Law of Gravity. Just imagine the savings on elevator maintenance.
Yes, and being as cold and distant as it is, I'm sure that a massive influx of hot air (such as would happen if we sent our Congress and our various Legislatures there) would significantly improve livability.
It did, but they fixed it the moment you noticed.
So, in other words they had a functioning Linux solution and they (apparently on purpose) migrated to Microsoft.
Huh.
Do a little research on "Amdahl". You'll learn very quickly how IBM used to treat competitors, back in the age of big iron, long before Microsoft was even a gleam in Bill Gates' eye. Sure, they've "re-invented" themselves in the past couple decades but we're still talking about Big Blue. SCO would have been better off tangling with the IRS.
"It's the smell, don't you agree?"
Agent Smith
I agree, but I think that if you ask a hundred users what their "key" features would be, you'd probably get 101 different answers.
Arguably Cameron's finest work. Frankly, when I heard that he was not involved in Terminator 3 I was inclined not to bother with it ... and as it turned out I wished I had listened to myself. How anyone could take the incredible foundation laid down by the first two films and turn out such dreck is beyond me. Might as well have been a George Lucas production (Episodes I-III ... now there's some "B" material for you.)
A few years before he passed away, my father gave me the hardcover edition of the Terminator 2 script, annotated by Cameron himself. It was absolutely fascinating, and gave some real insight into the decision-making the resulting in such a wonderful film.
For example, in the asylum scene where Dr. Silberman sees the T1000 for the first time as it walks through the bars (and realizes in that instant that everything Sarah Connor ever told him was true) Cameron's notes said "that faint popping sound you heard was the doctor's mind snapping." Poetic justice at its best.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Indeed. I think we should assemble a league of extraordinary gentlemen to look into it for us.
Alessandro Volta himself, who managed to make a pair of frog's legs jerk when applying a current from one of his primitive batteries is presently sitting up in his crypt saying, "WTF? I could've just clapped my hands?"
Only if you piss off the wrong people.
The problem is not so much that veil of anonymity can be pierced, but that the government has, in the midst of its own quest to make our private lives a thing of the past, provided would-be piercers with way too much ammunition.
it seems to me that even if these egregious clowns were, in fact, devoid of criminal intent (I don't know if I believe that, anyway) they should hardly be excused of criminal misconduct. Regardless of whether it was just bad recordkeeping, sloppy policework in general (I have a problem with that, in general) or whatever ... they were required to follow the law and they didn't.
No, because obviously a simple finite probability generator wasn't sufficient to beat Mr. Larson. They would have needed to spend some extra bucks on an infinite improbability generator.
The GP doesn't understand that protectionism is not, in and of itself, evil. In fact, much of the current ills facing our society are due to a lack of it, as you say. This idea that everyone should be free to sell anything they want, anywhere in the world, for any price is simply wrong. When you operate that way, the net result is invariably an entropic transfer of wealth, from areas of highest concentration (the United States) to areas of lesser concentration (Japan, India, China, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) That's been the history of the United States since we stopped bothering to collect tariffs on imported goods. Ironically, it was the advent of the personal income tax and eventually withholding, that lessened the Federal Government's dependence upon that tariff structure and allowed the present state of affairs to come about.
... but when there are no more U.S. citizens capable of doing that work, the price will go up, there will be nobody left to compete with them, and we'll be that much less an independent nation.
... in reality, they're turning over in their graves.
Look, what China and India are doing to the United States are nothing more than what Japan (an erstwhile ally) pioneered decades ago. It's called dumping, it's supposedly illegal and anticompetitive, yet it's happening on a scale that tiny Japan could never have managed. China is dumping goods with the express intent of destroying domestic manufacturing while transferring massive quantities of U.S. dollars into its coffers, and India is doing the same thing with intellectual capital. Both nations are attempting to decimate our ability to create wealth, by going after the businesses that manufacture goods, and the very people capable of designing those goods.
One of my fellow engineers came to work the other day with an expensive-looking set of screw and nutdrivers, in a nice solid case. Made in China of course. He paid two dollars for it. $2.00. No way in hell did that Chinese manufacturer make a profit on that, even if he did pay his workers in rice. But it's sure hard for any domestic producer to compete with that, is it not? If we had a brain in our heads we'd be pushing for our Government to start tariffing the hell out of Chinese imports, to give our own people a chance. I'd have been willing to pay the thirty or forty bucks that screwdriver set was really worth.
Any MBA foolish enough to believe that we'll be able to keep feeding Indian workers peanuts forever is, well, a fool. They're competing with American workers for jobs, and because they'll work for a fraction of a typical American's salary and are frequently highly-qualified they're getting those jobs. That's great, I guess
The Founders would be proud, I'm sure. No, not really