There's definitely a huge demand for this, and not just on the home PC level, either.
I do the same sort of thing, but for small businesses. I recently installed a wireless LAN and ADSL router for a company that had everyone using separate dial-up accounts for each laptop. Reduced their bills, sped everything up and they're vastly more secure than they were before. For that, they pay me GBP several-hundred per hour. And it's worth every penny to them.
No, the BCS is the professional body for the sort of people who run mucking great corporate systems, programmed in Cobol. Or academics who discuss the best way to parallelize optimal algorithms for fun and profit. All worthwhile pursuits and topics, but rather more like the ACM in the USA. Not really much to do with fixing PCs. At all.
Actually, it's not only possible but fairly easy to do. We (the bunch I work for) are developing a couple of P800/900/Series 60 apps that play audio during calls (for a variety of reasons) and it's not at all difficult.
Problem is that there's no money in this sort of thing. The number of sales you'll get of a download app from Handango and the like isn't really enough to cover the R&D and other costs. Not yet, anyway.
I personally wouldn't mind paying.01 cents per email (that'd be Euro cents for me). Or maybe even 1p/email. But let's suppose my ISP, in a fit of enlightenment, decides to put email charging in place. What's going to happen?
Well, for starters, the amount of spam that I get is unlikely to change at all. Because it's nearly all coming from other ISPs. Only if they start charging will my spam load be reduced. And,of course, any ISP that doesn't charge has a sales advantage over all those that do; lower costs to the end user.
This is an good solution, but it needs to be implemented by every ISP (or at least a very significant fraction of all of them), worldwide. Thus it can't be addressed by US law, or EU law or even Chinese law. It needs an co-operative effort of will by a large number of commercial entities... who are all competing for the same customers. Hmm.
A "national" database on "everyone alive"?
I'll give you a moment...
Now consider how many people are alive outside the boundaries of the United States. Ever heard of a lil' place called China?
Jeez...
And those of us who have a Sony-Ericsson P800 can get TrafficMaster data shown on a nice lil' zoomable scrollable map of the UK (with all motorways and major routes shown). The app is available from Traffic-i. As someone who often has to drive long distances during peak times this has frequently saved me hours spent sitting in traffic.
Well, I freely admit that patenting things we have no idea of building is the business model of the company I work for. It's what we do. And I'll further contend there's nothing wrong with it.
Look; ideas are ten (or more) a penny. Good ideas are about 1% of all ideas (at best). Good ideas that can make money in the real world are about 1% of all good ideas. That's a low production rate. In order to generate these ideas, we have to do all sorts of research, be aware of wide areas of technology, employ experts in consumer interaction, etc etc.
So, if we develop a good, marketable idea, what do we do with it? How does one sell ideas? That's our niche; we understand how to protect and sell ideas. We understand patents, design rights (registered and unregistered), copyright, NDAs... the whole shooting match. That's where our expertise is, not in manufacture or distribution or marketing or sales. We deal in ideas.
As a consequence, we never make anything (except prototypes and some demos). And we never will. We sell the ideas (license the patents or designs) to people who can and will make money from them. And there's nothing wrong in that.
Note, though, that I'm not arguing the patent system isn't flawed. It's just that if anyone wants to protect a good, novel, inventive idea then there is no real workable alternative.
Actually, MS (allegedly) transferred the IP to HTC, who manufacture the SPV smartphone. Sendo have slapped an injunction against Orange to stop distribution of the SPV in the UK. There is a difference, you see.
Since the patent is filed in several juristictions, Sendo may well enter into "aggressive negotiations" with HTC shortly. However, they don't really need to, since they can achieve their ends by preventing sale of infringing phones in any region where they have a patent. If nobody can sell the phones HTC makes, then HTC won't bother making them... and MS won't get any more market share.
Anna
These days patents are pretty much a rubber stamp...
Ah, indeed. That'll be why I spend much of my time arguing novelty and inventiveness in detailed logical statements with the examiners from various patent offices around the world. Rubber stamp... I only wish!
If I decide that I want to patent some sort algorithm they taught in CS101 and manage to get it rubber stampped by the PTO, I can then use it to extort money from companies that don't want to take the risk of litigation...
"Extort" is a dangerous word. Be careful how you use it. Trying to get money out of people who infringe patents (which is how I spend a lot of the rest of my time) is very, very difficult. No sizeable company will take and serious notice of an infringement notification letter. It costs so much to do a decent job of work on an infringer that only sizeable companies are worth addressing. It costs around a minimum of GBP 1.5 million to set up a court action and unless you set up a court action, ain't nobody going to take any notice of you. It would be wonderful (for some) if your view of the patent system were based on reality but believe me, it isn't. At all.
The fact that it takes money to bring an infringment prosecution is one form of correction to the problem of bad patents. Do you think anybody really wants to put GBP 1 million into court to litigate a bad patent? The odds are ridiculous, even in the EU where patent cases are heard by judges not juries. Stupid patents don't come to court.
Now, one final point on patents; the existence of a number of examples of bad patents is not proof that the system as a whole is fatally flawed or discredited any more than the existence of a few bugs in your code shows you to be completely inept as a programmer.
I once walked from St Pauls a mile and back to find a cab with no success. At 11pm. In winter. And in heels. I'd have paid a lot to have had this then... just to avoid the blisters.
Nothing to do with being a "jessie" (I'm a Northerner too), it's to do with not getting your best togs rained on or splashed with muck from the street.
Anyone who's been in London a while knows that there are times and/or places when it gets especially difficult to find a cab. You can stand at the side of the most used street in London and see seas of black cabs passing with not a single "for hire" light on. The point about Zingo is that it connects you with an available cab.
Anyway, enough about cabs - the really interesting thing about this is that it demonstrates the UK mobile networks have worked out a way to license location-based information about callers to third parties. This, until recently, has been the barrier to any location-based service not operated by the networks themselves. That is the real news behind this article.
Wait no longer. It is here. Or more specifically, here in an article in The Register.
Of course, GSM standards means that most of the rest of the world gets it before the USA:)
Anna
Perhaps it's the sheer intelligence and expertise that TG folk have:)
Well, on a less self-congratulatory level, one could argue that those TGs in the IT trades are more likely to be in touch with other TGs online. Being CD/TV or TS can be lonely, and it's not like you can easily spot others in the street, so online is where many friendships form.
Anna
Why not pit woman vs. machine? Because girls have more sense than to spend their time competing:) Instead we'd just sit down and get the machine to talk about the problems it's having with its relationships...
In the UK, we can freely switch mobile phone operators and preserve our numbers. My boss has been with all 3 of the main operators in the UK and has had the same number all that time (around six years). Makes life easier since the operators all know customers can switch with minimal hassle, so it's easy to phone up every 12 months to "talk about leaving" and be offered a new phone at a substantial discount.
I'm surprised keeping your phone number isn't a constitutional right in the USA - aren't you guys supposed to live in the Land of the Free?
the added advantage that a female Terminator could have certain psychological advantages in manipulating humans over a male terminator.
Hang on, you mean you define the terms humans as "heterosexual males attracted to buxom blondes"? If so, you seriously need to do some study of the range and depth of human cultures. Or perhaps in the future humanity is controlled by spotty American geek teenagers. Yeah, that'll be it.
Bluetooth works fine, but it's being mostly used in Europe. The reasons for its non-appearance in the USA are political and commercial and sound to me like the same reasons that US mobile telephony is so far behind the rest of the world.
Take a look at this article in The Register to see why Americans have this misunderstanding that it's failing when in fact it's a very clever and successful technology.
Oddly enough, a company like this can encourage innovation. Not convinced? Allow me to explain...
Full disclosure: I work for a company that generates patents. We don't build anything. We don't write any software, we don't hammer and hardware. We deal in IP; intellectual property.
Given that we have a patent filing on a good idea, we then go and find the best placed company to exploit that idea. They license the patent from us and in return they get to build the best possible implementation they can and they benefit from the protection that the patent gives.
Without the protection that patents give, ideas companies such as ours are extremely vulnerable. Try going to one of the big companies with an idea and no protection; they'll shake your hand, give you a coffee and then when you leave they'll rip you off without a second thought. Without patents, there is little effective protection for small guys, like us, who come up with innovative ideas.
Filing and carrying through a patent application costs. We also have to run the company and pay for people to sit around generating ideas. 90% of all ideas are crap. 90% of the non-crap ideas either have no commercial validity or have been done. The remaining ideas can be turned into patents.
Note that this is dramatically different from an IP company who patent an idea and then wait for someone to infringe. That's parasitic.
Public transport in London can be great. However, try looking for bus services in the rural areas of the UK... or decent train connections from one major metropolitan area to another, assuming neither is London.
It's a very skewed picture and it's easy for foreign visitors to the UK who only see London to get the wrong impression.
In A World Out Of Time (published in the 70s, as I recall), Larry Niven described a system like this. In fact, the hero travels in just such an evacuated tube transit system but it's leaky, so the pressure in the car drops during the journey... I'll let you go find a copy of the book to see whether he survived.
To be exact, I don't recall the book mentioning anything about the propulsion system, but the principle of the evacuated tube was clear and Niven being who he is, I'm sure that he was referring to a system that was being discussed in public when he wrote the book.
Think of this from the other way around. That is, not from the point of view of a net consumer of computer resource, but as a net producer. I control around 15 different PCs in all sorts of roles. All of them spend the majority of their time idle (including the desktop ones - remember, the time someone's in the office is only 8 hours out of every 24). I'd love to be able to sell that spare capacity in some form of online exchange.
The obligatory "SF thought of this first" reference: Greg Egan talks about this sort of thing in a number of his books - check out Permutation City and Distress. Great hard-SF geek reading too!
UDP is the protocol responsible for maintaining a communication session between hosts
Erm, just to be pedantic, UDP doesn't maintain any session. It's a datagram protocol which delivers single messages. TCP is a transport protocol which does maintain a session between hosts. Both of them run over IP, and it's at the IP layer that ports are significant.
I suspect that the discussions of the sexism (or lack of it) in the Tomb Raider series is going off at a tangent. The motivation for many males playing games is the same as the motivation for many businesspeople - status.
Men are very competitive creatures, always tending to look to see where they stand in a hierarchy. Watch two guys meeting for the first time - they'll "tomcat" around each other, trying to sort out who knows more than the other in what area. That's why guys love to give advice; it sets the giver of it above the receiver.
Women tend to be less competitive, so they lack the same drivers for competitive games. Look at the world of non-competitive adventure/puzzle/interactive fiction games to see more women players.
An "enabling disclosure" has to be a description that would enable someone of "average skill" (in the appropriate field) to build your invention. So you'd have to explain how the flux capacitor worked, unless it's obvious to any time-machine engineer.
The key word is enabling. When you write a patent you must describe the best possible way of implementing your invention (it's generally referred to as the "preferred embodiment"). Ideally, an enabling disclosure should be the best way you can think of to build the thing.
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There's definitely a huge demand for this, and not just on the home PC level, either.
I do the same sort of thing, but for small businesses. I recently installed a wireless LAN and ADSL router for a company that had everyone using separate dial-up accounts for each laptop. Reduced their bills, sped everything up and they're vastly more secure than they were before. For that, they pay me GBP several-hundred per hour. And it's worth every penny to them.
No, the BCS is the professional body for the sort of people who run mucking great corporate systems, programmed in Cobol. Or academics who discuss the best way to parallelize optimal algorithms for fun and profit. All worthwhile pursuits and topics, but rather more like the ACM in the USA. Not really much to do with fixing PCs. At all.
Actually, it's not only possible but fairly easy to do. We (the bunch I work for) are developing a couple of P800/900/Series 60 apps that play audio during calls (for a variety of reasons) and it's not at all difficult.
Problem is that there's no money in this sort of thing. The number of sales you'll get of a download app from Handango and the like isn't really enough to cover the R&D and other costs. Not yet, anyway.
I personally wouldn't mind paying .01 cents per email (that'd be Euro cents for me). Or maybe even 1p/email. But let's suppose my ISP, in a fit of enlightenment, decides to put email charging in place. What's going to happen?
Well, for starters, the amount of spam that I get is unlikely to change at all. Because it's nearly all coming from other ISPs. Only if they start charging will my spam load be reduced. And,of course, any ISP that doesn't charge has a sales advantage over all those that do; lower costs to the end user.
This is an good solution, but it needs to be implemented by every ISP (or at least a very significant fraction of all of them), worldwide. Thus it can't be addressed by US law, or EU law or even Chinese law. It needs an co-operative effort of will by a large number of commercial entities... who are all competing for the same customers. Hmm.
A "national" database on "everyone alive"? I'll give you a moment... Now consider how many people are alive outside the boundaries of the United States. Ever heard of a lil' place called China? Jeez...
And those of us who have a Sony-Ericsson P800 can get TrafficMaster data shown on a nice lil' zoomable scrollable map of the UK (with all motorways and major routes shown). The app is available from Traffic-i. As someone who often has to drive long distances during peak times this has frequently saved me hours spent sitting in traffic.
Look; ideas are ten (or more) a penny. Good ideas are about 1% of all ideas (at best). Good ideas that can make money in the real world are about 1% of all good ideas. That's a low production rate. In order to generate these ideas, we have to do all sorts of research, be aware of wide areas of technology, employ experts in consumer interaction, etc etc.
So, if we develop a good, marketable idea, what do we do with it? How does one sell ideas? That's our niche; we understand how to protect and sell ideas. We understand patents, design rights (registered and unregistered), copyright, NDAs... the whole shooting match. That's where our expertise is, not in manufacture or distribution or marketing or sales. We deal in ideas.
As a consequence, we never make anything (except prototypes and some demos). And we never will. We sell the ideas (license the patents or designs) to people who can and will make money from them. And there's nothing wrong in that.
Note, though, that I'm not arguing the patent system isn't flawed. It's just that if anyone wants to protect a good, novel, inventive idea then there is no real workable alternative.
Anna
Actually, MS (allegedly) transferred the IP to HTC, who manufacture the SPV smartphone. Sendo have slapped an injunction against Orange to stop distribution of the SPV in the UK. There is a difference, you see. Since the patent is filed in several juristictions, Sendo may well enter into "aggressive negotiations" with HTC shortly. However, they don't really need to, since they can achieve their ends by preventing sale of infringing phones in any region where they have a patent. If nobody can sell the phones HTC makes, then HTC won't bother making them... and MS won't get any more market share. Anna
Ah, indeed. That'll be why I spend much of my time arguing novelty and inventiveness in detailed logical statements with the examiners from various patent offices around the world. Rubber stamp... I only wish!
If I decide that I want to patent some sort algorithm they taught in CS101 and manage to get it rubber stampped by the PTO, I can then use it to extort money from companies that don't want to take the risk of litigation..."Extort" is a dangerous word. Be careful how you use it. Trying to get money out of people who infringe patents (which is how I spend a lot of the rest of my time) is very, very difficult. No sizeable company will take and serious notice of an infringement notification letter. It costs so much to do a decent job of work on an infringer that only sizeable companies are worth addressing. It costs around a minimum of GBP 1.5 million to set up a court action and unless you set up a court action, ain't nobody going to take any notice of you. It would be wonderful (for some) if your view of the patent system were based on reality but believe me, it isn't. At all.
The fact that it takes money to bring an infringment prosecution is one form of correction to the problem of bad patents. Do you think anybody really wants to put GBP 1 million into court to litigate a bad patent? The odds are ridiculous, even in the EU where patent cases are heard by judges not juries. Stupid patents don't come to court.
Now, one final point on patents; the existence of a number of examples of bad patents is not proof that the system as a whole is fatally flawed or discredited any more than the existence of a few bugs in your code shows you to be completely inept as a programmer.
I once walked from St Pauls a mile and back to find a cab with no success. At 11pm. In winter. And in heels. I'd have paid a lot to have had this then... just to avoid the blisters. Nothing to do with being a "jessie" (I'm a Northerner too), it's to do with not getting your best togs rained on or splashed with muck from the street. Anyone who's been in London a while knows that there are times and/or places when it gets especially difficult to find a cab. You can stand at the side of the most used street in London and see seas of black cabs passing with not a single "for hire" light on. The point about Zingo is that it connects you with an available cab. Anyway, enough about cabs - the really interesting thing about this is that it demonstrates the UK mobile networks have worked out a way to license location-based information about callers to third parties. This, until recently, has been the barrier to any location-based service not operated by the networks themselves. That is the real news behind this article.
Wait no longer. It is here. Or more specifically, here in an article in The Register. Of course, GSM standards means that most of the rest of the world gets it before the USA :)
Anna
Nice to see that her appearance is the factor by which you judge her. There are other reasons for transition you know! Anna
Perhaps it's the sheer intelligence and expertise that TG folk have :)
Well, on a less self-congratulatory level, one could argue that those TGs in the IT trades are more likely to be in touch with other TGs online. Being CD/TV or TS can be lonely, and it's not like you can easily spot others in the street, so online is where many friendships form.
Anna
Why not pit woman vs. machine? Because girls have more sense than to spend their time competing :) Instead we'd just sit down and get the machine to talk about the problems it's having with its relationships...
In the UK, we can freely switch mobile phone operators and preserve our numbers. My boss has been with all 3 of the main operators in the UK and has had the same number all that time (around six years). Makes life easier since the operators all know customers can switch with minimal hassle, so it's easy to phone up every 12 months to "talk about leaving" and be offered a new phone at a substantial discount.
I'm surprised keeping your phone number isn't a constitutional right in the USA - aren't you guys supposed to live in the Land of the Free?
the added advantage that a female Terminator could have certain psychological advantages in manipulating humans over a male terminator.
Hang on, you mean you define the terms humans as "heterosexual males attracted to buxom blondes"? If so, you seriously need to do some study of the range and depth of human cultures. Or perhaps in the future humanity is controlled by spotty American geek teenagers. Yeah, that'll be it.
Take a look at this article in The Register to see why Americans have this misunderstanding that it's failing when in fact it's a very clever and successful technology.
Anna
Oddly enough, a company like this can encourage innovation. Not convinced? Allow me to explain...
Full disclosure: I work for a company that generates patents. We don't build anything. We don't write any software, we don't hammer and hardware. We deal in IP; intellectual property.
Given that we have a patent filing on a good idea, we then go and find the best placed company to exploit that idea. They license the patent from us and in return they get to build the best possible implementation they can and they benefit from the protection that the patent gives.
Without the protection that patents give, ideas companies such as ours are extremely vulnerable. Try going to one of the big companies with an idea and no protection; they'll shake your hand, give you a coffee and then when you leave they'll rip you off without a second thought. Without patents, there is little effective protection for small guys, like us, who come up with innovative ideas.
Filing and carrying through a patent application costs. We also have to run the company and pay for people to sit around generating ideas. 90% of all ideas are crap. 90% of the non-crap ideas either have no commercial validity or have been done. The remaining ideas can be turned into patents.
Note that this is dramatically different from an IP company who patent an idea and then wait for someone to infringe. That's parasitic.
Anna B
Public transport in London can be great. However, try looking for bus services in the rural areas of the UK... or decent train connections from one major metropolitan area to another, assuming neither is London.
It's a very skewed picture and it's easy for foreign visitors to the UK who only see London to get the wrong impression.
Anna (a Brit)
In A World Out Of Time (published in the 70s, as I recall), Larry Niven described a system like this. In fact, the hero travels in just such an evacuated tube transit system but it's leaky, so the pressure in the car drops during the journey... I'll let you go find a copy of the book to see whether he survived.
To be exact, I don't recall the book mentioning anything about the propulsion system, but the principle of the evacuated tube was clear and Niven being who he is, I'm sure that he was referring to a system that was being discussed in public when he wrote the book.
Anna B
Think of this from the other way around. That is, not from the point of view of a net consumer of computer resource, but as a net producer. I control around 15 different PCs in all sorts of roles. All of them spend the majority of their time idle (including the desktop ones - remember, the time someone's in the office is only 8 hours out of every 24). I'd love to be able to sell that spare capacity in some form of online exchange. The obligatory "SF thought of this first" reference: Greg Egan talks about this sort of thing in a number of his books - check out Permutation City and Distress. Great hard-SF geek reading too!
Anyone with any sense obfuscates their URLs. And tell me, why do you like to stay anonymous when insulting people? Ashamed of something? Anna
Erm, just to be pedantic, UDP doesn't maintain any session. It's a datagram protocol which delivers single messages. TCP is a transport protocol which does maintain a session between hosts. Both of them run over IP, and it's at the IP layer that ports are significant.
It's a minor point, but worth clarifying.
Anna, who understands TCP/IP pretty well.
Men are very competitive creatures, always tending to look to see where they stand in a hierarchy. Watch two guys meeting for the first time - they'll "tomcat" around each other, trying to sort out who knows more than the other in what area. That's why guys love to give advice; it sets the giver of it above the receiver.
Women tend to be less competitive, so they lack the same drivers for competitive games. Look at the world of non-competitive adventure/puzzle/interactive fiction games to see more women players.
An "enabling disclosure" has to be a description that would enable someone of "average skill" (in the appropriate field) to build your invention. So you'd have to explain how the flux capacitor worked, unless it's obvious to any time-machine engineer.
The key word is enabling. When you write a patent you must describe the best possible way of implementing your invention (it's generally referred to as the "preferred embodiment"). Ideally, an enabling disclosure should be the best way you can think of to build the thing.
Anna B