Analogies are made with "like", equations are made with "same". Guess which he used?
Re:Where patent law is good
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 1
Patents are often bad, and in this case they certainly are. Maybe TiVo corp will be "saved" by patents, but there's no reason they deserve it.
and DVRs in general, aren't really that obvious
No, they are plenty obvious. Having seen (external view only) a TiVo in action, it's no real challenge for any average consumer electronics engineer to plan out a competing system. Or just use the "Self Explanatory Title" test. If a reasonably-skilled person can guess the body of a patent from the title, it's too obvious to patent.
What do we think about "Method and apparatus for displaying television program recommendations" "Multi-window pip television with the ability to watch two sources of video while scanning an electronic program guide" " Automatic signature-based spotting, learning and extracting of commercials and other video content"
(No, they might not guess exactly the same way TiVo did it... but that doesn't matter. They'll guess ways that work)
The most important rule guiding whether a patent should really be valid goes back to the US Constitution: "To promote the progress of science". If a patent doesn't promote science- doesn't encourage the publication of something that otherwise would be kept secret- then it doesn't fulfill the Constituitional reason to exist.
where's the companion article about Microsoft's dire financial situation? I mean, if they didn't have Windows and Office income subsidizing all their money-losing products
Not remotely similar. There's nothing magic about the iPod... no intellectual property, no great technical challenge to build them. Apple was the first company to produce a compact high capacity music player, but they won't be the last. If iPods are highly profitable, then other companies will get into the market, and margins will be pushed down towards commodity levels.
Microsoft's position with Office, however, is basically sustainable. There is some intellectual property in that product. And in terms of total complexity, Office is more difficult to design than an iPod. Most importantly, to compete with Office, you'd have to track a moving target.
If something like StarOffice ever becomes compatible enough that it's really taking away Office sales, Microsoft can just push an obligatory "security" patch to their customers to make it incompatible again. It may take finesse and trickery, but Microsoft has many tactics it can use to prevent effective competitors to Office.
Apple has no such paths open to it.
(For more detail, consider that MS Office is a "communication technology" and falls under Metcalfe's Law, while no network effect protects the iPod)
it was unfortunately premature and not very effective, but if the protesters were armed it would have been a major bloodbath
Isolated ancedotes can prove nothing one way or the other, but it's interesting to note that the Palestinian uprising owes most of its success to violence.
If not for the terrorism, the rest of the world would've ignored that area entirely, and the Zionists would've already pushed the indigs out into the desert. (cf "Why are Palestinians so violent?")
Only Groove puts all of those functional possibilities in one package. It's really THE P2P package.
And that's one of my problems with it. The Unix Philosophy had some really good rules, like #1, #2, and especially #6. Or "Make each program do one thing well".
Groove users I've seen only want to do one thing: automatically replicate a directory amoung distributed users. That's ALL they want. Oh, wait... they don't even want that. The majority just want to read a file that somebody else has told them is available through Groove.
As far as OS lock-in is concerned, this is the gov't you're talking about. They don't really get locked in.
None of what you just said re OS-lockin is relevant, unless Groove has Linux and Mac versions hidden away that they don't advertise. (If it uses ActiveX, then it probably doesn't!). Any agency which standarizes on Groove, then, is standardizing on Microsoft Windows, which is a national security risk.
The ultimate fix will involve both technological solutions and law enforcement, both of which are woefully deficient. It is the duty of government to fix these problems.
Ironically, the government is perpetuating these problems. Only curtailing their existing actions can they quickly cut down on virus/worm propagation.
Computer security is something that should be privatized. It sounds radical, but think it through: what would happen if the criminal penalty for hacking / virus-writing was 30 days instead of 3 years? The FBI would hardly bother to hunt the perpetrators, and consumers would no longer buy from Microsoft unless the products' security shot up radically.
Netscape was forced to enter the "Free" browser market and simply make money on server products.
Netscape was always free. Never a day went by when a person couldn't download a completely functional, unrestricted copy of Netscape for no charge.
At one point they switched to where "commercial" users were supposed to pay for it, but that's all. It's terribly difficult to convince people to pay for something if they've already been getting it free.
Of course, if there hadn't been free competition, then they'd have tried harder to charge... but Microsoft wasn't their only competitor! In fact, the Open Source community was also a threat to netscape!
Up until Netscape 3.0, the product had hardly any features a handful of skilled CS grad students couldn't have thrown together in a week. No Open Source browser sprung up, because there was no desire to make one: people wanting a free browser could always download Netscape.
But if ever Netscape had stopped the free downloads, a bunch of "Free Software" people would've got to work and quickly produced a program to take the whole cheapskate market-share (ie everyone)
Your worm ridden machine effects everybody! Same as an unsafe car.
So you equate crashing a workstation with the traumatic disintegration of a family of three in a high-speed collision?
An unmaintained car can kill other people. A PC without virus protection can... what?
However, beyond the terrifically different magnitude of potential damage, there is a more important reason computer-users shouldn't be licensed like drivers: jurisdiction.
Nobody can get into a car accident with your without first being in the same nation and district. Therefore she must first come under control of the same government authorities as you.
But networked computers don't respect national boundaries or even physical distance. An email worm can be spread about as effectively from Vienna or Bejing as Chicago. No law restricting who can use the internet can be effective unless it's globally enforced. And that won't happen.
A. Do you think the might US military having an easy time controlling Iraq? (Thats an easier job than controlling the US would be, for several reasons. Population for starters, terrain second, and language most of all)
B. The US miltiary is large, including about 1/300th of the whole US population. The people making up the military won't have totally alien attitudes. They won't enjoy bombing or shooting the poplace... so they won't.
The only point of the 2nd Amendment today is so that the poplace can put up enough resistance so the military would be forced to employ heavy weapons to defeat them. Once the soldiers are actually told to use tanks and planes against the people, they'll know it's wrong, and stop doing it.
To that end, the only needed weapons are hunting rifles.
What if their culture makes ours look sour and limited?
Been done. There were actually a lot more in 50s science fiction, such as one short about aliens who casually installed a satellite that prevented the instigation of violence...
Coincidentally I was watching the Justice League cartoon last Saturday
Coincidentally, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book concieved as an 1880s version of the Justice Leauge, and its heros have battled WotW martian tripods (but with a bioterrorism twist)
PS. If you think of attacking my numerical accuracy, please remember that "box office revenue" is different from total revenue. For Hollywood, theater receipts makes up less than half of the take for a film. Rental and TV are most of it. (And then there are other minor income sources like merchanidising, which for features like Star Wars is really huge)
Bollywood, however, gets relatively much less money from rental and TV. Partly because theaters are more available in India than good TV reception (and the electricity to run it, etc), partly because a lower respect for intellectual-property laws undermines the rental business.
Personally I hate English Dubbed Anime, but that could be because its usually so cheesily done.
The reason most english anime dubbing is horrible is because Hollywood is so successful.
The US is the world's largest movie exporter. Every other country imports Hollywood movies for their local theaters, so they have established companies and experienced actors ready to dub foreign works. The US lacks that foundation of dubbing ability.
And as another comment points out, other countries, like India, are quickly catching up.
Nothing was pointed out there. It said India had nearly $1 billion of filmmaking revenue last year. Do you happen to know the US's revenue for the same period? Without that number, you can't make any comparison.
As it happens, Hollywood had $63 billion of revenue. How to lie with statistics...
Oh no! At this rate, by next year they might hit 1/50th of Hollywood's revenue! And from a country with only 1/4th the US's GDP.
and has a massively higher output than Hollywood.
Erhm, General Hospital has more output than Hollywood, but it's not much of a threat either. Last year, Jen Ringley exceeded Hollywood's output. Quantity is irrelevant.
The only comparison that really matters is what percentage of revenue comes from international releases (localized by either sub or dub). For Hollywood, that's more than 40%. Does Bollywood get even 1% of sales from non-Indian audiences? Doubtful.
I recently tried running Evolution (a gtk app, but not part of new GNOME) over a high-speed but long distance link. For a while it was barely tolerable. Sure, it took 4 minutes to startup (instead of 15 sec) because of the animated splash screen that clogged the pipe, but I got by that.
Then I dragged an email message into another folder.
70 minutes later I killed the process, as it was still hung up drawing a little email icon proceeding pixel-by-pixel down an animated path.
Almost all of the core GNOME apps (Evolution, etc) are written for horizontal market use, and should be C/C++.
The strongest complaints against GNOME adoption is not that it is slow, but that features are lacking. Therefore if a different programming language would allow faster correct development, it would be overall beneficial, even if there is a performance hit.
The fact that most commercial software companies are allergic to the idea of giving their customers legible source code.
If interpreted programs ran as fast as bytecode (they're almost as fast), there would still be resistance because publishers don't want to send out software that can be read.
Your examples about the supposed "limitation of static analysis" are actually merely the "limitations of dumb linkers". Many C++ programs still use C linkers (for compatibility reasons), so these problems occur. But there is nothing inherent to static analysis which forces this. Using a smart C++ linker could catch all those cases.
Have you checked out MS' own SMS Server and Marimba's Castanet (which is written using Java btw)
But you're not even talking about Microsoft Windows. Those are two separate applications. You've really just proved my point that Windows provides no package management, by illustrating that Microsoft sells package management as an optional product.
Today, Microsoft offers some guidelines for writing installers, which it didn't back in the 90s, but there doesn't seem to have been much effect. Windows apps that I've personally watched being installed continue to use a mishmash of Installshield, Winzip, or homegrown routines. And the fact that Microsoft still talks about "installers" and not "packages" remains a clue to what they're really offering. (To abuse CS terminolgy, the MS way is imperative rather than declarative)
(Hey, the great part about Windows installation is there's no confusion about what "package" you want to install; because every one of them is named Setup.exe!)
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Analogies don't equate, they compare.
Analogies are made with "like", equations are made with "same". Guess which he used?
Patents are often bad, and in this case they certainly are. Maybe TiVo corp will be "saved" by patents, but there's no reason they deserve it.
and DVRs in general, aren't really that obvious
No, they are plenty obvious. Having seen (external view only) a TiVo in action, it's no real challenge for any average consumer electronics engineer to plan out a competing system. Or just use the "Self Explanatory Title" test. If a reasonably-skilled person can guess the body of a patent from the title, it's too obvious to patent.
What do we think about
"Method and apparatus for displaying television program recommendations"
"Multi-window pip television with the ability to watch two sources of video while scanning an electronic program guide"
" Automatic signature-based spotting, learning and extracting of commercials and other video content"
(No, they might not guess exactly the same way TiVo did it... but that doesn't matter. They'll guess ways that work)
The most important rule guiding whether a patent should really be valid goes back to the US Constitution: "To promote the progress of science". If a patent doesn't promote science- doesn't encourage the publication of something that otherwise would be kept secret- then it doesn't fulfill the Constituitional reason to exist.
where's the companion article about Microsoft's dire financial situation? I mean, if they didn't have Windows and Office income subsidizing all their money-losing products
Not remotely similar. There's nothing magic about the iPod... no intellectual property, no great technical challenge to build them. Apple was the first company to produce a compact high capacity music player, but they won't be the last. If iPods are highly profitable, then other companies will get into the market, and margins will be pushed down towards commodity levels.
Microsoft's position with Office, however, is basically sustainable. There is some intellectual property in that product. And in terms of total complexity, Office is more difficult to design than an iPod. Most importantly, to compete with Office, you'd have to track a moving target.
If something like StarOffice ever becomes compatible enough that it's really taking away Office sales, Microsoft can just push an obligatory "security" patch to their customers to make it incompatible again. It may take finesse and trickery, but Microsoft has many tactics it can use to prevent effective competitors to Office.
Apple has no such paths open to it.
(For more detail, consider that MS Office is a "communication technology" and falls under Metcalfe's Law, while no network effect protects the iPod)
it was unfortunately premature and not very effective, but if the protesters were armed it would have been a major bloodbath
Isolated ancedotes can prove nothing one way or the other, but it's interesting to note that the Palestinian uprising owes most of its success to violence.
If not for the terrorism, the rest of the world would've ignored that area entirely, and the Zionists would've already pushed the indigs out into the desert. (cf "Why are Palestinians so violent?")
Only Groove puts all of those functional possibilities in one package. It's really THE P2P package.
And that's one of my problems with it. The Unix Philosophy had some really good rules, like #1, #2, and especially #6. Or "Make each program do one thing well".
Groove users I've seen only want to do one thing: automatically replicate a directory amoung distributed users. That's ALL they want. Oh, wait... they don't even want that. The majority just want to read a file that somebody else has told them is available through Groove.
As far as OS lock-in is concerned, this is the gov't you're talking about. They don't really get locked in.
None of what you just said re OS-lockin is relevant, unless Groove has Linux and Mac versions hidden away that they don't advertise. (If it uses ActiveX, then it probably doesn't!). Any agency which standarizes on Groove, then, is standardizing on Microsoft Windows, which is a national security risk.
The ultimate fix will involve both technological solutions and law enforcement, both of which are woefully deficient. It is the duty of government to fix these problems.
Ironically, the government is perpetuating these problems. Only curtailing their existing actions can they quickly cut down on virus/worm propagation.
Computer security is something that should be privatized. It sounds radical, but think it through: what would happen if the criminal penalty for hacking / virus-writing was 30 days instead of 3 years? The FBI would hardly bother to hunt the perpetrators, and consumers would no longer buy from Microsoft unless the products' security shot up radically.
So by your logic, the newspaper has to print your manifesto?
No. But if you pay them enough to make them happy, then the government must allow it. (The same error present in the rest of your examples)
Netscape was forced to enter the "Free" browser market and simply make money on server products.
Netscape was always free. Never a day went by when a person couldn't download a completely functional, unrestricted copy of Netscape for no charge.
At one point they switched to where "commercial" users were supposed to pay for it, but that's all. It's terribly difficult to convince people to pay for something if they've already been getting it free.
Of course, if there hadn't been free competition, then they'd have tried harder to charge... but Microsoft wasn't their only competitor! In fact, the Open Source community was also a threat to netscape!
Up until Netscape 3.0, the product had hardly any features a handful of skilled CS grad students couldn't have thrown together in a week. No Open Source browser sprung up, because there was no desire to make one: people wanting a free browser could always download Netscape.
But if ever Netscape had stopped the free downloads, a bunch of "Free Software" people would've got to work and quickly produced a program to take the whole cheapskate market-share (ie everyone)
Your worm ridden machine effects everybody! Same as an unsafe car.
So you equate crashing a workstation with the traumatic disintegration of a family of three in a high-speed collision?
An unmaintained car can kill other people. A PC without virus protection can... what?
However, beyond the terrifically different magnitude of potential damage, there is a more important reason computer-users shouldn't be licensed like drivers: jurisdiction.
Nobody can get into a car accident with your without first being in the same nation and district. Therefore she must first come under control of the same government authorities as you.
But networked computers don't respect national boundaries or even physical distance. An email worm can be spread about as effectively from Vienna or Bejing as Chicago. No law restricting who can use the internet can be effective unless it's globally enforced. And that won't happen.
get past the US military?
A. Do you think the might US military having an easy time controlling Iraq? (Thats an easier job than controlling the US would be, for several reasons. Population for starters, terrain second, and language most of all)
B. The US miltiary is large, including about 1/300th of the whole US population. The people making up the military won't have totally alien attitudes. They won't enjoy bombing or shooting the poplace... so they won't.
The only point of the 2nd Amendment today is so that the poplace can put up enough resistance so the military would be forced to employ heavy weapons to defeat them. Once the soldiers are actually told to use tanks and planes against the people, they'll know it's wrong, and stop doing it.
To that end, the only needed weapons are hunting rifles.
What if their culture makes ours look sour and limited?
Been done. There were actually a lot more in 50s science fiction, such as one short about aliens who casually installed a satellite that prevented the instigation of violence...
advertisement for companies like Lexus, the Gap, Bulgari, etc?
How are you supposed to realistically portray a dark future of America without pervasive corporate advertising?
Inventing fake companies would've been... fake.
Those "other costs" are basically irrelevant for Microsoft. They don't need to conciously "sell" Windows to Europeans.
Distribution? Sales?? PC makers do that for them. Microsoft needs no "physical presense" outside Washington...
Coincidentally I was watching the Justice League cartoon last Saturday
Coincidentally, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book concieved as an 1880s version of the Justice Leauge, and its heros have battled WotW martian tripods (but with a bioterrorism twist)
european governments are built with the notion that the people can trust the government to act in their interest.
Yep, "America" is the only place to be founded on a revolution. France always trusted its government.
PS. If you think of attacking my numerical accuracy, please remember that "box office revenue" is different from total revenue. For Hollywood, theater receipts makes up less than half of the take for a film. Rental and TV are most of it. (And then there are other minor income sources like merchanidising, which for features like Star Wars is really huge)
Bollywood, however, gets relatively much less money from rental and TV. Partly because theaters are more available in India than good TV reception (and the electricity to run it, etc), partly because a lower respect for intellectual-property laws undermines the rental business.
Personally I hate English Dubbed Anime, but that could be because its usually so cheesily done.
The reason most english anime dubbing is horrible is because Hollywood is so successful.
The US is the world's largest movie exporter. Every other country imports Hollywood movies for their local theaters, so they have established companies and experienced actors ready to dub foreign works. The US lacks that foundation of dubbing ability.
And as another comment points out, other countries, like India, are quickly catching up.
Nothing was pointed out there. It said India had nearly $1 billion of filmmaking revenue last year. Do you happen to know the US's revenue for the same period? Without that number, you can't make any comparison.
As it happens, Hollywood had $63 billion of revenue. How to lie with statistics...
has annual revenues heading towards $1B
Oh no! At this rate, by next year they might hit 1/50th of Hollywood's revenue! And from a country with only 1/4th the US's GDP.
and has a massively higher output than Hollywood.
Erhm, General Hospital has more output than Hollywood, but it's not much of a threat either. Last year, Jen Ringley exceeded Hollywood's output. Quantity is irrelevant.
The only comparison that really matters is what percentage of revenue comes from international releases (localized by either sub or dub). For Hollywood, that's more than 40%. Does Bollywood get even 1% of sales from non-Indian audiences? Doubtful.
It makes WAN/dialup/dsl use of X even more
I recently tried running Evolution (a gtk app, but not part of new GNOME) over a high-speed but long distance link. For a while it was barely tolerable. Sure, it took 4 minutes to startup (instead of 15 sec) because of the animated splash screen that clogged the pipe, but I got by that.
Then I dragged an email message into another folder.
70 minutes later I killed the process, as it was still hung up drawing a little email icon proceeding pixel-by-pixel down an animated path.
Almost all of the core GNOME apps (Evolution, etc) are written for horizontal market use, and should be C/C++.
The strongest complaints against GNOME adoption is not that it is slow, but that features are lacking. Therefore if a different programming language would allow faster correct development, it would be overall beneficial, even if there is a performance hit.
What make bytecode language better?
The fact that most commercial software companies are allergic to the idea of giving their customers legible source code.
If interpreted programs ran as fast as bytecode (they're almost as fast), there would still be resistance because publishers don't want to send out software that can be read.
There are some things you cannot know statically.
Your examples about the supposed "limitation of static analysis" are actually merely the "limitations of dumb linkers". Many C++ programs still use C linkers (for compatibility reasons), so these problems occur. But there is nothing inherent to static analysis which forces this. Using a smart C++ linker could catch all those cases.
GCC compiles per file. It doesn't compile the project as a whole,
The GNU toolset includes an auxiliary program which enables GCC to compile a whole program as one unit. It is named "cat".
Have you checked out MS' own SMS Server and Marimba's Castanet (which is written using Java btw)
But you're not even talking about Microsoft Windows. Those are two separate applications. You've really just proved my point that Windows provides no package management, by illustrating that Microsoft sells package management as an optional product.
Today, Microsoft offers some guidelines for writing installers, which it didn't back in the 90s, but there doesn't seem to have been much effect. Windows apps that I've personally watched being installed continue to use a mishmash of Installshield, Winzip, or homegrown routines. And the fact that Microsoft still talks about "installers" and not "packages" remains a clue to what they're really offering. (To abuse CS terminolgy, the MS way is imperative rather than declarative)
(Hey, the great part about Windows installation is there's no confusion about what "package" you want to install; because every one of them is named Setup.exe!)