... atents can help anyone but patent lawyers. Since American patents are only binding in America, they put domestic companies at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world....
I'm not sure that's right. Consider this sequence:
1. America allows software patents.
2. America leans on European countries to allow them, and eventually succeeds.
3. SCOTUS invalidates software patents as non-Constitutional.
4. To be compatible with EU, which now has software patents, US signs a treaty allowing software patents, which, being a treaty, I believe, carries same weight as other parts of our Constitution. Now whole world has software patents, just because the U.S. temporarily did in the beginning.
What really bothers me is that our only viable path to do this right now is the courts. We've not been able to establish a legislative campaign.
I would normally be quite bothered by trying to get my way using the courts, when the legislature isn't in agreement. It seems like judicial activism of a sort.
But I'm coming to the conclusion that the House and Senate are basically ruled by external money on issues like this. That makes judicial "activism", especially in a case like this, a lot more palatable. I really hope the Supreme Court takes this case.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama hasn't been flat-out lying about his desire for a government that obeys the law, then does anyone know why he supports this kind of BS?
So far, I haven't seen any change I can believe in. And I voted for him.
I remember after HL2 first came out and I'd been playing it a lot. I was walking through my parking lot at work, a helicopter flew nearby. I found myself unconsciously looking for places to hide and estimating when I could get a good firing angle on it.
The appointment of Thompson to head the Department of Commerce would be an exceptionally interesting choice given that only days ago President Obama asked Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to lead his open source charge and conduct a study and report back regarding the feasibility of the US government forgoing proprietary software and moving toward open source software solutions
The Navy-Marine Corp. Intranet (NMCI) project has been seen as a huge, overpriced failure. It's also due for re-bidding in 2010, I believe, because EDS decided it wasn't a profitable contract.
I wonder if a general push towards OSS in the federal government will even lead to an eviction of the unholy Exchange servers that are part of the current NMCI.
So you're kicking out talented and resourceful people so that you can keep some fat lazy Americans in work?
There's so much wrong with your characterization of the issue that it's hard to figure out where to start...
H1B workers can be paid significantly less than native workers. If you're carrying $100k in student loans from having been educated in America, and the H1B program brings in someone who can afford to work for $30k/year, you're screwed. Being undercut by inexpensively educated foreign workers makes one neither fat nor lazy.
It may be awesome, but it's symptomatic of a poor development culture at MS, and ties back into the lack of protocol documentation.
I'm not sure we should knock their development culture that much. They've produced VisualStudio and SQL Server, which I have a lot of respect for. If they can pull that off, they're can't all be a bunch of keystone cops.
This may be apocryphal, but ISTR reading somewhere that when they needed documentation (for internal purposes) on SMB, they had to use the Samba guys' stuff.
And therein lies the problem. MS should have created a spec for their networking protocols BEFORE implementing them.
How can you justify that? They seem to have gotten by just fine, until recently, with their approach. If you consider that this legal remedy came out of nowhere, form the developers' perspectives, then it's hard to argue with their success, at least w.r.t. SMB. Granted, it came bundled with Windows, so there wasn't much customer choice, but it still worked well-enough.
I'm currently porting from fortran to C++ an app that's been developed over the past ~30 years. The standard for the program's correct behavior is: whatever the program does.
So the people who were supposed to document it before I started porting it had a Herculean task (or maybe a Sisyphean task). It's very hard to make intelligible and correct documentation, when the behavior of the program being documented is all over the place.
I suspect Microsoft faces a very similar thing with their networking protocols, or with SMB at the very least.
I'm trying to think of something witty to put here but I can't stop laughing long enough to breathe. Almost everything I come up with starts with In Soviet Russia.....
If you can be incapacitated by In Soviet Russia jokes, then I strongly suggest you frequent a different website.
Mortimer Adler is the author of numerous books such as, "How to Read a Book", and I believe he was once an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Alas, despite writing many good books, Adler was maddeningly patronizing towards his readers. For Britannica to let the great unwashed masses actually modify one of his sacred texts almost makes me giddy.
Slashdot Mirror
... atents can help anyone but patent lawyers. Since American patents are only binding in America, they put domestic companies at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world. ...
I'm not sure that's right. Consider this sequence:
1. America allows software patents.
2. America leans on European countries to allow them, and eventually succeeds.
3. SCOTUS invalidates software patents as non-Constitutional.
4. To be compatible with EU, which now has software patents, US signs a treaty allowing software patents, which, being a treaty, I believe, carries same weight as other parts of our Constitution. Now whole world has software patents, just because the U.S. temporarily did in the beginning.
5. ???
6. Profit!
I would normally be quite bothered by trying to get my way using the courts, when the legislature isn't in agreement. It seems like judicial activism of a sort.
But I'm coming to the conclusion that the House and Senate are basically ruled by external money on issues like this. That makes judicial "activism", especially in a case like this, a lot more palatable. I really hope the Supreme Court takes this case.
I guess data doesn't just want to be "free" :)
I assume that this will be in commercial products in "5-10 years"?
There could be only one thing to motivate all of SK to pull this off: StarCraft 2 must be a bandwidth hog!
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama hasn't been flat-out lying about his desire for a government that obeys the law, then does anyone know why he supports this kind of BS?
So far, I haven't seen any change I can believe in. And I voted for him.
I may have just found a new motto.
No, too-Terminator-like would be if it said, "You are not Sarah Connor. But I am a bit peckish...."
I remember after HL2 first came out and I'd been playing it a lot. I was walking through my parking lot at work, a helicopter flew nearby. I found myself unconsciously looking for places to hide and estimating when I could get a good firing angle on it.
The Navy-Marine Corp. Intranet (NMCI) project has been seen as a huge, overpriced failure. It's also due for re-bidding in 2010, I believe, because EDS decided it wasn't a profitable contract.
I wonder if a general push towards OSS in the federal government will even lead to an eviction of the unholy Exchange servers that are part of the current NMCI.
I can tell you from my time in high school that the brain damage in football players actually occurs far before their professional careers.
Ask not what You can learn from the Web,
but what the Web can learn from You.
There's so much wrong with your characterization of the issue that it's hard to figure out where to start...
H1B workers can be paid significantly less than native workers. If you're carrying $100k in student loans from having been educated in America, and the H1B program brings in someone who can afford to work for $30k/year, you're screwed. Being undercut by inexpensively educated foreign workers makes one neither fat nor lazy.
Surprised a Republican did this. These guys are more likable when not in power, I guess.
Does it violate the First Amendment for the government to tax one kind of content at a higher rate than another kind of content?
It may be awesome, but it's symptomatic of a poor development culture at MS, and ties back into the lack of protocol documentation.
I'm not sure we should knock their development culture that much. They've produced VisualStudio and SQL Server, which I have a lot of respect for. If they can pull that off, they're can't all be a bunch of keystone cops.
This may be apocryphal, but ISTR reading somewhere that when they needed documentation (for internal purposes) on SMB, they had to use the Samba guys' stuff.
That's awesome.
All of their submarine sonar systems will belt out the Soviet national anthem.
And therein lies the problem. MS should have created a spec for their networking protocols BEFORE implementing them.
How can you justify that? They seem to have gotten by just fine, until recently, with their approach. If you consider that this legal remedy came out of nowhere, form the developers' perspectives, then it's hard to argue with their success, at least w.r.t. SMB. Granted, it came bundled with Windows, so there wasn't much customer choice, but it still worked well-enough.
I'm currently porting from fortran to C++ an app that's been developed over the past ~30 years. The standard for the program's correct behavior is: whatever the program does.
So the people who were supposed to document it before I started porting it had a Herculean task (or maybe a Sisyphean task). It's very hard to make intelligible and correct documentation, when the behavior of the program being documented is all over the place.
I suspect Microsoft faces a very similar thing with their networking protocols, or with SMB at the very least.
I'm trying to think of something witty to put here but I can't stop laughing long enough to breathe. Almost everything I come up with starts with In Soviet Russia.....
If you can be incapacitated by In Soviet Russia jokes, then I strongly suggest you frequent a different website.
Of all the biases exhibited here at Slashdot---and there are many!---the bias favoring low-id users is probably the most idiotic.
Sorry, but we only consider critiques from users numbered below 636672.
Because culling the lowest 5-10% performing staff is good for the overall business ...
Yes, I think all companies should do that on an hourly basis!
Of course, before long all companies would have between 9 and 19 employees, but that's a small price to pay for employing only the creme de la creme!
Mortimer Adler is the author of numerous books such as, "How to Read a Book", and I believe he was once an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Alas, despite writing many good books, Adler was maddeningly patronizing towards his readers. For Britannica to let the great unwashed masses actually modify one of his sacred texts almost makes me giddy.
How on earth are we supposed to believe it's the real Agent Mularski now?