Consider the implications. Should a pharma company be obligated to sell its products at the same prices in wealthy US and EU countries as in impoverished African countries?
Yes. Look at what happens with non-IP products such as cars, food or MP3 players. Different products are still sold in the first and third world but producers cannot differentiate as much or be as manipulative as IP producers are currently. In the long term everybody wins.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
This is especially true since the patent office has the power to make legally binding decisions - while they can be overturned in court, doing so is too expensive for the common man to have a real chance of doing so.
Absolutely true. See this for some examples. Another way to look at it is that every patent is a new law. Why aren't these new laws subject to more strict oversight? It is sometimes said that every new law is an opportunity for a lawyer to make more money. There needs to be strong mechanisms in place to stop lawyers trying to make more money at the expense of the rest of the community.
Are you saying that you cannot patent something without there being prior art ? Or that you can patent something even if there is prior art ?
I was saying was that even if there is no prior art that does not mean that an invention is innovative and entitled to a patent.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Charge them what they are willing to pay, not more.
And for a monopoly that means charging whatever it is worth to the customer, less 0.1%. In other words the net benefit to the customer is close to zero. The supplier gets income, hopefully in excess of their costs, and the customer gets almost nothing.
This is one reason why discriminatory pricing is such a bad thing. It is a sign that the supplier has managed to segment the market and it is not a true free market where customers can onsell between them to level prices. One thing that should be fixed in IP law is the ability to onsell i.e. no licensing allowed and everything is a sale of some service/product that can be onsold.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA copyright/patent abuse.
It doesn't matter how well staffed the patent office is. It is humanly impossible for a government office to realistically assess all of human knowledge for prior art. To say otherwise is dishonest.
More precisely the patent office examiners a liars if they can say with a straight face thay have checked all possible places for prior art on an invention they have never seen before. Only a scientist who has spent a lifetime working in a very narrow area can do this, and even then they make mistakes all the time. It is financially impossible for the patent office to employ a scientist in every narrow area. Just look at their understanding of even one area like software. Absolutely hopeless.
In any case prior art is a necessary but not sufficient evidence of inventiveness.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA patent/copyright abuse.
The vast majority of PC problems these days are rooted in the fact that most users are lazy.
Nonsense. The vast majority of PC problems are caused by programmers who do not design their programs for their target audience. If a user has to expend any amount of time at all to get the computer to operate correctly then that is a crap computer/program. Software is soft, it can be anything the programmer wants it to be.
Computer hardware and software are tools and if that tool steals my time it is a crap tool.
And don't get me started on the idiot developers who think it's okay to waste many users time if it will save them a little development time.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The sysadmin's job is not to provide service to the user, it is to maximize the availibility of his employer's resources.
No, it is to leverage the IT infrastructure to best achieve the business goals of the company. Part of that is to maximise each individual user's opportunity to get whatever they deem necessary to get their work done. You are being unjustifiably egotistical when you claim that you know better than every user what they do and do not need to do on their company computer. It's like the difference between a command economy and a laissez faire economy. Sure, a system administrator may often know what's best for the users and for the company but not always and it's those times the system administrator needs to show a little humility.
If the user is wasting his time installing software rather than doing whatever it is he is paid to do, that is a failing of the sysadmin.
Not if it is part of the user's job to assess whether particular software packages will solve their needs. They are the usually the ones who know best what is right for them.
We are talking a little at cross purposes here. I have no problem locking things down if the cost/benefit tradeoff is good. However, because of the flexibility of software (the "soft" in software) and the huge variety of users out there, there are usually much better options than the naive one-size-fits-all lock-down-everything approach that slack and poorly trained administrators often go for. I've lost count of the number of unjustifiably egotistical system administrators I've seen who are seriously harming the company by stopping users from getting serious, useful work done.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I agree with you in general but this isn't true for software. Unlike quality hardware, quality software can be copied many times at close to zero cost, ammortising the initially high cost over potentially millions of consumers. In mass market software it is possible to have quality and cheapness.
In the broken "free" software market we have the per-copy licensing model IP businesses are so fond of usually maximises profit for the producer and directly minimises the net benefit to the consumer but it's still possible to have reasonable quality and cheapness, as software like Linux and OpenOffice shows.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I have been both a developer and an administrator. I hate your type.;-) The whole point of your job is to provide service. When you lock down a machine you are withholding service.
There are many different sorts of users, many of whom have needs you have never heard of. A simple example are users who want to test drive applications for work that require admin to install.
There's always a tradeoff between experienced and naive users but one-size-fits-all is nonsense.
What you should be doing is providing services that allow a user to lockdown if they want (e.g. by running a privileged application to [un]lock the machine with the default locked down) and to recover if they don't (e.g. ghost images available over the intranet), without an administrator's time wasting intervention in either case.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I still cannot expect to plug in a popular digital camera and get a uniform response on the desktop.
Try KDE 3.2 in SuSE 9.1. If the camera or player has a USB file system (most do) you'll get an automounted Konquerer File Browser window popping up showing the contents of the device which you can then drag-and-drop to your home folder, made visible by clicking on the home icon on the desktop. That's cleaner than many cameras under mswindows which insist on popping up some proprietary piece of crap for each brand of camera.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You are mistaken. Which version of Linux are you using? My completely computer non-literate older neighbour is using Linux (SuSE 9.1) for wordprocessing (OO), spreadheets (OO), email (Evolution), CD burning (K3D), CD playing (gnome-cd), web and file system browsing (konqueror), printing (CUPS), games (cards) etc.
I installed Linux for her, upgrading from mswin98, a month ago and have given her two support calls since to set up some program options (e.g. fonts) and icons. By no stretch of the imagination is she computer savy - she has only a shaky idea of what a folder is and how to select program options. Yet she is comfortably using Linux for hours daily for her home based work, and play.
Anybody who says Linux is not ready for the desktop is out-of-date and wrong. It may not be ready for all desktops but is certainly ready for the vast majority.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And even under good circumstances an examiner won't have access to all the information possible.
It's worth stressing that. It's simply not humanly possible for a small government office to assess all human knowledge to discover prior art. To pretend otherwise is dishonest.
In any case lack of prior art is a necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for inventiveness.
Patents are frequently for inventions "whose time has come". Many people indenpendently invent the same thing in a short space of time. One person gets a potentially multi-million dollar advantage and everybody else loses. That's wrong.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
10) Stored procedure languages are usually kludgy and encourage bad programming practices.
11) Applications written in two or more languages are usually a significant maintenance headache. Not only do you require experts in all the languages but the interfaces themselves can be problematic. This is particularly true for applications that store significant state both in and out of the database. Synchronisation can be a major issue.
I use stored procedures when I have to, usually only because I need to reduce the size of a retrieved dataset before it hits the network and a simple SELECT won't do. Other than that I avoid stored procedures like the plague.
DBA's in the organisations I've worked in have generally had an unrealistic view of their importance and technical abilities. They get away with a lot more than they should mainly because they are gatekeeper to the organisation's "crown jewels", the data, and because database management is a mess that most developers try to avoid.
I've found from a practical standpoint it's best to keep the business logic out of the database and treat the database as a simple data store. Your mileage may vary.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
There is plenty of Linux GUI development happening as google and comments here show.
Fact is, the desktop experience on Gnome/KDE/Linux and M$Windows is pretty much the same at the moment. Configuration is more consistent on M$Windows but Linux is more flexible inside+outside the KDE+Gnome environments.
I look at such results. All the buzzword compliant bullshit in the world about "unified development API", "seamless desktop" and "desktop emulator" is meaningless if the result is the same. Like most companies trying for vendor lockin M$ claim their OS and development tools have mythical characteristics that will somehow save the world. This is nonsense as anybody has used even a few commercial and freeware software packages can attest.
M$Windows is not standing still. Neither is Linux. Let's stop comparing today's Linux with tomorrow's M$Windows.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
An important factor is that the market size is pretty much constant - x people each listening to y hours of music with z amount of attention each day.
Given the excess of supply if one performer wins then another performer must lose. With a smaller number of mass market performers more will lose. By having a larger number of more indie performers (less marketing in other words) there'll be more winners, though they may not win as big. That's a healthier, more vibrant market.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't trust such a panel. I've seen many vector supercomputer installations that had very dubious justification. The closest to a real justification I've seen is single-threaded legacy applications that would be too expensive to reengineer. And that's a pretty bogus reason given the cost of supercomputers.
I can't think of a single, large scale software problem that doesn't have a straightfoward parallel solution. Can anybody suggest one?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed. Those who haven't used VMS have no idea what they're missing. Amongst other things versioning in the file system allows:
Consistent, universal management of backup copies.
Automatic nth generation backup of files with no explicit coding in the application.
Power users can be configured with no previous versions and naive users can be configured with lots.
Automatic deletion of nth generation backups if required.
By default directory listings aren't cluttered with backups.
Easy diskspace recovery (purge filesystem of backups older than such-and-such a date).
The filesystem can be configured to keep up to n versions on a file and directory basis with reasonable defaults.
Downside is that the syntax can be grungy (e.g. "file.dat;5") and sometimes it's not clear what file[s] an operation should apply to. For example, when copying/deleting a file sometimes you want to copy/delete the previous versions and sometimes you don't - you have to explicitly specify it.
Now, MS doesn't use most of this good stuff, but it's all in there.
Which begs the question:
If they're not bothering to use most of the stuff in the current filesystem why are they creating a new one and accepting such significant conversion costs for them and their customers?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Unless the military contractor can guarantee that every sub- and sub-sub- contractor's code libraries is clean the same problem will apply to closed source also. With open source any interested party can check for themselves.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
wait for a mutex to be released or a socket to become readable
And there speaks a programmer who has been ill educated by the MSWindows environment. There are dozens of events that a program may need to wait on, everything from mutexes to sockets to GUI callbacks to USB events to power fails to signals to virtual memory events to whatever. To have a special call to wait on only two of them is stupid, precisely the sort of nonsense you expect to see in the MSWindows environment, rather than consistently solving the general problem with powerful, general purpose tools like threads and asynchronous IO. Related to the above, programmers who like the MSWindows kitchen sink API frequently have a poor idea of what a race condition is and how to avoid them, a large part of why MSWindows and MSWindows applications are so flaky. The Unix/Linux API isn't particularly clean either but it's a lot cleaner architecturally.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But it's OK to benefit the first person with enough balls to patent something that the rest of us think is stupid.
You are ignoring the fact that many (most?) patents are for ideas whose time has come. Many people/companies independently invent the same thing in a short space of time. One person/company gets a sometimes multi-million dollar advantage and everybody else loses. That's not right and is also why lack of prior art is no evidence of inventiveness.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Why is it that every successful Open Source project, that is also targeted to the End-User market (and not the server/developer market) is backed directly by a company with money to spare?
Simple. That's where the money is.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I've got not no objection to paying for hard work, intangible or otherwise. I have a big objection to paying an indefinitely large number of times for the one piece of work.
The problem has gotten so bad now that intellectual property oligopolies, ridiculously rich from repeatedly selling the one piece of work, are distorting the entire political system. The problem is compounded by the fact that the mass media oligopolies are themselves IP parasites and politicians are badly beholden to them.
Unfortunately, those that have the gold, even if illegally or unethically obtained, make/buy the rules.
WTF should M$ be able to make $35,000,000,000 per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago that, even if incredibly inefficiently developed, cost less than $100,000,000 to create? WTF should the RIAA members be able to make millions of dollars from songs that took a few hours to create? Arguments about the cost of distribution and marketing are nonsense, that's just evidence of hopelessly inefficient, uncompetitive and broken industries when it could be a web page and word of mouth.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
This is Slashdot, so Microsoft is bad and Linux is good.
You're either an idiot or an astroturfer.
If you're an idiot, get a life. Or go to microsoft.com where you'll get 100% bias, not the variety of opinions available on slashdot.
If you're an astroturfer, get a life. Ever thought of getting a real job? You know, one where you contribute to the community rather than being a parasite? The pay may or may not be less but you'll be better rewarded in the things that matter.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
All to often the submitters skewed view steers the conversation in only one way.
Company web sites skew viewpoints their way. Community web sites skew viewpoints their way. WTF should companies get a free lunch? I for one am glad that slashdot concentrates on community viewpoints in the face of the overwhelming commercial propaganda in the mass media.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the implications. Should a pharma company be obligated to sell its products at the same prices in wealthy US and EU countries as in impoverished African countries?
Yes. Look at what happens with non-IP products such as cars, food or MP3 players. Different products are still sold in the first and third world but producers cannot differentiate as much or be as manipulative as IP producers are currently. In the long term everybody wins.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
This is especially true since the patent office has the power to make legally binding decisions - while they can be overturned in court, doing so is too expensive for the common man to have a real chance of doing so.
Absolutely true. See this for some examples. Another way to look at it is that every patent is a new law. Why aren't these new laws subject to more strict oversight? It is sometimes said that every new law is an opportunity for a lawyer to make more money. There needs to be strong mechanisms in place to stop lawyers trying to make more money at the expense of the rest of the community.
Are you saying that you cannot patent something without there being prior art ? Or that you can patent something even if there is prior art ?
I was saying was that even if there is no prior art that does not mean that an invention is innovative and entitled to a patent.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Charge them what they are willing to pay, not more.
And for a monopoly that means charging whatever it is worth to the customer, less 0.1%. In other words the net benefit to the customer is close to zero. The supplier gets income, hopefully in excess of their costs, and the customer gets almost nothing.
This is one reason why discriminatory pricing is such a bad thing. It is a sign that the supplier has managed to segment the market and it is not a true free market where customers can onsell between them to level prices. One thing that should be fixed in IP law is the ability to onsell i.e. no licensing allowed and everything is a sale of some service/product that can be onsold.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA copyright/patent abuse.
USPTO itself is understaffed.
It doesn't matter how well staffed the patent office is. It is humanly impossible for a government office to realistically assess all of human knowledge for prior art. To say otherwise is dishonest.
More precisely the patent office examiners a liars if they can say with a straight face thay have checked all possible places for prior art on an invention they have never seen before. Only a scientist who has spent a lifetime working in a very narrow area can do this, and even then they make mistakes all the time. It is financially impossible for the patent office to employ a scientist in every narrow area. Just look at their understanding of even one area like software. Absolutely hopeless.
In any case prior art is a necessary but not sufficient evidence of inventiveness.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA patent/copyright abuse.
The vast majority of PC problems these days are rooted in the fact that most users are lazy.
Nonsense. The vast majority of PC problems are caused by programmers who do not design their programs for their target audience. If a user has to expend any amount of time at all to get the computer to operate correctly then that is a crap computer/program. Software is soft, it can be anything the programmer wants it to be.
Computer hardware and software are tools and if that tool steals my time it is a crap tool.
And don't get me started on the idiot developers who think it's okay to waste many users time if it will save them a little development time.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The sysadmin's job is not to provide service to the user, it is to maximize the availibility of his employer's resources.
No, it is to leverage the IT infrastructure to best achieve the business goals of the company. Part of that is to maximise each individual user's opportunity to get whatever they deem necessary to get their work done. You are being unjustifiably egotistical when you claim that you know better than every user what they do and do not need to do on their company computer. It's like the difference between a command economy and a laissez faire economy. Sure, a system administrator may often know what's best for the users and for the company but not always and it's those times the system administrator needs to show a little humility.
If the user is wasting his time installing software rather than doing whatever it is he is paid to do, that is a failing of the sysadmin.
Not if it is part of the user's job to assess whether particular software packages will solve their needs. They are the usually the ones who know best what is right for them.
We are talking a little at cross purposes here. I have no problem locking things down if the cost/benefit tradeoff is good. However, because of the flexibility of software (the "soft" in software) and the huge variety of users out there, there are usually much better options than the naive one-size-fits-all lock-down-everything approach that slack and poorly trained administrators often go for. I've lost count of the number of unjustifiably egotistical system administrators I've seen who are seriously harming the company by stopping users from getting serious, useful work done.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Quality costs money, always has, always will.
I agree with you in general but this isn't true for software. Unlike quality hardware, quality software can be copied many times at close to zero cost, ammortising the initially high cost over potentially millions of consumers. In mass market software it is possible to have quality and cheapness.
In the broken "free" software market we have the per-copy licensing model IP businesses are so fond of usually maximises profit for the producer and directly minimises the net benefit to the consumer but it's still possible to have reasonable quality and cheapness, as software like Linux and OpenOffice shows.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I have been both a developer and an administrator. I hate your type. ;-) The whole point of your job is to provide service. When you lock down a machine you are withholding service.
There are many different sorts of users, many of whom have needs you have never heard of. A simple example are users who want to test drive applications for work that require admin to install.
There's always a tradeoff between experienced and naive users but one-size-fits-all is nonsense.
What you should be doing is providing services that allow a user to lockdown if they want (e.g. by running a privileged application to [un]lock the machine with the default locked down) and to recover if they don't (e.g. ghost images available over the intranet), without an administrator's time wasting intervention in either case.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I still cannot expect to plug in a popular digital camera and get a uniform response on the desktop.
Try KDE 3.2 in SuSE 9.1. If the camera or player has a USB file system (most do) you'll get an automounted Konquerer File Browser window popping up showing the contents of the device which you can then drag-and-drop to your home folder, made visible by clicking on the home icon on the desktop. That's cleaner than many cameras under mswindows which insist on popping up some proprietary piece of crap for each brand of camera.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
but it is not ready for my mom's desktop
You are mistaken. Which version of Linux are you using? My completely computer non-literate older neighbour is using Linux (SuSE 9.1) for wordprocessing (OO), spreadheets (OO), email (Evolution), CD burning (K3D), CD playing (gnome-cd), web and file system browsing (konqueror), printing (CUPS), games (cards) etc.
I installed Linux for her, upgrading from mswin98, a month ago and have given her two support calls since to set up some program options (e.g. fonts) and icons. By no stretch of the imagination is she computer savy - she has only a shaky idea of what a folder is and how to select program options. Yet she is comfortably using Linux for hours daily for her home based work, and play.
Anybody who says Linux is not ready for the desktop is out-of-date and wrong. It may not be ready for all desktops but is certainly ready for the vast majority.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And even under good circumstances an examiner won't have access to all the information possible.
It's worth stressing that. It's simply not humanly possible for a small government office to assess all human knowledge to discover prior art. To pretend otherwise is dishonest.
In any case lack of prior art is a necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for inventiveness.
Patents are frequently for inventions "whose time has come". Many people indenpendently invent the same thing in a short space of time. One person gets a potentially multi-million dollar advantage and everybody else loses. That's wrong.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'd add:
10) Stored procedure languages are usually kludgy and encourage bad programming practices.
11) Applications written in two or more languages are usually a significant maintenance headache. Not only do you require experts in all the languages but the interfaces themselves can be problematic. This is particularly true for applications that store significant state both in and out of the database. Synchronisation can be a major issue.
I use stored procedures when I have to, usually only because I need to reduce the size of a retrieved dataset before it hits the network and a simple SELECT won't do. Other than that I avoid stored procedures like the plague.
DBA's in the organisations I've worked in have generally had an unrealistic view of their importance and technical abilities. They get away with a lot more than they should mainly because they are gatekeeper to the organisation's "crown jewels", the data, and because database management is a mess that most developers try to avoid.
I've found from a practical standpoint it's best to keep the business logic out of the database and treat the database as a simple data store. Your mileage may vary.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Someone's been drinking the M$ marketing koolaid.
There is plenty of Linux GUI development happening as google and comments here show.
Fact is, the desktop experience on Gnome/KDE/Linux and M$Windows is pretty much the same at the moment. Configuration is more consistent on M$Windows but Linux is more flexible inside+outside the KDE+Gnome environments.
I look at such results. All the buzzword compliant bullshit in the world about "unified development API", "seamless desktop" and "desktop emulator" is meaningless if the result is the same. Like most companies trying for vendor lockin M$ claim their OS and development tools have mythical characteristics that will somehow save the world. This is nonsense as anybody has used even a few commercial and freeware software packages can attest.
M$Windows is not standing still. Neither is Linux. Let's stop comparing today's Linux with tomorrow's M$Windows.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Some good points.
An important factor is that the market size is pretty much constant - x people each listening to y hours of music with z amount of attention each day.
Given the excess of supply if one performer wins then another performer must lose. With a smaller number of mass market performers more will lose. By having a larger number of more indie performers (less marketing in other words) there'll be more winners, though they may not win as big. That's a healthier, more vibrant market.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't trust such a panel. I've seen many vector supercomputer installations that had very dubious justification. The closest to a real justification I've seen is single-threaded legacy applications that would be too expensive to reengineer. And that's a pretty bogus reason given the cost of supercomputers.
I can't think of a single, large scale software problem that doesn't have a straightfoward parallel solution. Can anybody suggest one?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed. Those who haven't used VMS have no idea what they're missing. Amongst other things versioning in the file system allows:
The filesystem can be configured to keep up to n versions on a file and directory basis with reasonable defaults.
Downside is that the syntax can be grungy (e.g. "file.dat;5") and sometimes it's not clear what file[s] an operation should apply to. For example, when copying/deleting a file sometimes you want to copy/delete the previous versions and sometimes you don't - you have to explicitly specify it.
Now, MS doesn't use most of this good stuff, but it's all in there.
Which begs the question:
If they're not bothering to use most of the stuff in the current filesystem why are they creating a new one and accepting such significant conversion costs for them and their customers?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Unless the military contractor can guarantee that every sub- and sub-sub- contractor's code libraries is clean the same problem will apply to closed source also. With open source any interested party can check for themselves.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
(who knows what M$ + NSA put in the closed windows source that might hurt other nations)?
Cryptographic code for a start.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
wait for a mutex to be released or a socket to become readable
And there speaks a programmer who has been ill educated by the MSWindows environment. There are dozens of events that a program may need to wait on, everything from mutexes to sockets to GUI callbacks to USB events to power fails to signals to virtual memory events to whatever. To have a special call to wait on only two of them is stupid, precisely the sort of nonsense you expect to see in the MSWindows environment, rather than consistently solving the general problem with powerful, general purpose tools like threads and asynchronous IO. Related to the above, programmers who like the MSWindows kitchen sink API frequently have a poor idea of what a race condition is and how to avoid them, a large part of why MSWindows and MSWindows applications are so flaky. The Unix/Linux API isn't particularly clean either but it's a lot cleaner architecturally.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But it's OK to benefit the first person with enough balls to patent something that the rest of us think is stupid.
You are ignoring the fact that many (most?) patents are for ideas whose time has come. Many people/companies independently invent the same thing in a short space of time. One person/company gets a sometimes multi-million dollar advantage and everybody else loses. That's not right and is also why lack of prior art is no evidence of inventiveness.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Why is it that every successful Open Source project, that is also targeted to the End-User market (and not the server/developer market) is backed directly by a company with money to spare?
Simple. That's where the money is.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
See my signature.
I've got not no objection to paying for hard work, intangible or otherwise. I have a big objection to paying an indefinitely large number of times for the one piece of work.
The problem has gotten so bad now that intellectual property oligopolies, ridiculously rich from repeatedly selling the one piece of work, are distorting the entire political system. The problem is compounded by the fact that the mass media oligopolies are themselves IP parasites and politicians are badly beholden to them.
Unfortunately, those that have the gold, even if illegally or unethically obtained, make/buy the rules.
WTF should M$ be able to make $35,000,000,000 per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago that, even if incredibly inefficiently developed, cost less than $100,000,000 to create? WTF should the RIAA members be able to make millions of dollars from songs that took a few hours to create? Arguments about the cost of distribution and marketing are nonsense, that's just evidence of hopelessly inefficient, uncompetitive and broken industries when it could be a web page and word of mouth.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
This is Slashdot, so Microsoft is bad and Linux is good.
You're either an idiot or an astroturfer.
If you're an idiot, get a life. Or go to microsoft.com where you'll get 100% bias, not the variety of opinions available on slashdot.
If you're an astroturfer, get a life. Ever thought of getting a real job? You know, one where you contribute to the community rather than being a parasite? The pay may or may not be less but you'll be better rewarded in the things that matter.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
All to often the submitters skewed view steers the conversation in only one way.
Company web sites skew viewpoints their way. Community web sites skew viewpoints their way. WTF should companies get a free lunch? I for one am glad that slashdot concentrates on community viewpoints in the face of the overwhelming commercial propaganda in the mass media.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.