I seem to recall something about Alexander Graham Bell getting to the Patent Office just hours before someone else. If someone's that close, then it should be non-patent worthy, on the basis of being obvious.
The other thing is that someone, somewhere can invent something having never seen the original patent, and be unable to use it.
The main area that patents should be allowed is in truly revolutionary technology, not evolutionary.
It could definitely end up as a disincentive. If you can write one hit record or novel that goes huge, and pays you enough each year to give you a decent living, what's the incentive to write another one?
Except of course, that you enjoy doing it, in which case, you don't need a copyright system.
Plenty of great music and novels were written when copyright had a far shorter life.
We've got a bunch of old performers in the UK complaining that their 50 year performance copyright on some records is about to run out - but none of them have made any quality work in decades, and that 50 year copyright didn't stop them making it 40-odd years ago. Therefore, no disincentive existed.
I'm going to start asking these people if they really believe it's going to happen or not, and quit just sticking a question mark at the end. Really, either say what you think will happen, or don't. You're meant to be the experts who make predictions, not me, so quit asking me the questions.
The problem is that it's turning into whack-a-mole. Eventually, you just can't keep up with the speed that the moles are appearing.
Even though they have a stack of cash, the change is happening quite quickly, and sending people out to talk to governments, businesses etc around the world costs time and money. For small businesses, it's only worth it so that they don't become poster boys for others. But all efforts so far are not stopping the interest in it.
I know some non-geeky business guys using OOo. One is an IT project consultant, one is a Financial Advisor, and the other is a writer. These are certainly not "compile a distro" guys.
It seemed to me that mentioning people committing suicide was exactly trying to make a similar risk comparison.
With regards to the unfortunate people who lost their pensions, there is definitely more transparency and separation required with pension plans. A pension plan should be just that, and not something that corporations can touch. We have had problems here in the UK in the past with this.
In the end, it's about free association. If you think the CEO is a crook, don't work for him.
I think that history will record that the web killed off Microsoft (although that may be a lot to do with Open Source - Firefox, companies running FOSS).
FYI IBM are still important. AFAIK they are still the largest computer company in the world by market cap. But, they changed themselves.
The danger for Microsoft is in just how much they are backing desktop software and software that binds into the desktop, when it's going to be so much less important in the future.
I respect Joel for his writing on computing, but I've never heard anything that backs this up, that price reduction is used as a power move.
I often find myself waiting for certain old albums to be in the "sale" before I buy them, so for me, record companies reducing the price would get a sale that they simply won't get otherwise (like I'll pay £7 but not £17).
Has Wikipedia been a reliable research tool for the last 365 days, just as Britannica has been?
That depends. When the DJ John Peel died, it was on Wikipedia as soon as I'd heard. Naomi Campbell's recent arrest is listed in her Wikipedia Bio.
For me, it's also about the sheer volume of Wikipedia. Does Britannica have entries on bands like The Secret Machines, or the Dogme 95 cinema movement, the Cloudy Bay vineyard or the village of Pewsey?
I wish there was a better editing mechanism, particularly to keep vandals out.
If I was in a workplace and needed to research something, chances are that I wouldn't use EB, because I'd want more specific detail than an encyclopedia could give me.
Wikipedia quite often gives me enough to then go searching more of Google.
If a CEO screws a company, it's none of my business. I can choose to work for them, or I can choose to invest in them.
Plenty of people don't commit suicide when they lose their jobs. No-one I know has. Some people respond to suicide when their partner leaves them. Should we therefore screen people's partners?
My question is often this: Why does Bill Gates carry on doing what he's doing? Especially as he continually states that he's going to give it all away before he dies.
Maybe it's just me, but I partly do the work I do because I enjoy it, but also because it pays the bills. If the bills disappeared, I would make different choices in my work.
I don't even think that Microsoft have the "purpose" of companies like Google. At least when those companies release something, you can sense the excitement, that the Google guys are into making what they make as good as possible.
I don't know why Bill bothers doing what he does any more. There's little exciting coming out of Microsoft, just lots of "me too" products. I personally wouldn't bother doing it if I had Bill's fortune. I'd be either just enjoying myself, or trying to make a difference.
How is any of this stopping artists selling music. I know what people say "they wanted to close down the P2P networks to stop artists from sharing music", but there's nothing to support that at all.
There are people out there freely offering MP3s of their music on web sites on a "go ahead, use as you like" and the RIAA aren't doing anything about it.
The other thing is that people shifting their media means their CDs and DVDs remain intact. If you rip your CD to your PC and then to your iPod, you can put your CD on a shelf, and probably never need to touch it again.
That means no losing it, no scratching it or anything else that could generate a repeat sale.
This is what they may think that it may do, but it's far from certain that it will. The community may be completely resistant to efforts to push Fox content down their throats, especially if it messes up the myspace.com experience (which seems to revolve about music, fandom and ugly beeping personal webspace). Others have tried to "leverage" their freshly bought online properties (you know, back in 2000, where the number of registered users were as good as a hard currency) and failed (Bertelsmann's brief adventures with AOL Europe spring to mind). But hey, at least the ideas you described will serve to keep the stock holders happy;-)
Post of the day. This is always what people think... "hey, we can take this site with it's huge number of users and make it work for us". Completely forgetting that the reason people are using it is that they want the experience given.
The Mainstream Media companies still don't get it. Part of the internet experience is about getting away from force-fed and controlled content. People want it their way. They want to know about tens of thousands of bands playing everything from techno-polka to death-metal. They don't want what you want to give them. And manufactured cool won't work any more. The blogging community will spread the story so fast, they'll kill any attempts at it.
As soon as they try and control it, it will get killed, and someone will create a new equivalent. Creating a social networking site isn't too difficult.
If you see a document on a site that's a.doc, write to the site owner, telling them that making it available as a pdf would be more useable and font-friendly. Tell them that they can either get a free printer driver to create this from their software, or if they want to, use OpenOffice.org, an office suite that can easily make PDFs, which incidentally is free. And that if they want, you'll send them a CV in the post.
Sitting back and complaining about Microsoft's domination isn't going to change anything. Piece by piece, deconstruction of the customer base and word-of-mouth will work.
The problem is that a lot of people do care about this stuff.
Personally, I really don't care. I've managed programmers who have a wardrobe that contains one shirt and one suit and I'd hire them again in an instant. My only rule is that if a client's visiting, you put on some chinos, a shirt and a pair of shoes (and that's a rare circumstance).
People who care about appearances of their staff are people who don't know what you are actually doing. They are managers who somehow got to be running an IT team, but don't really know what they are dealing with. So, the one thing they can deal with is the simple stuff - are the timesheets produced on time, do you turn up for the requisite number of hours, how do you look.
When you do contract work, you see all sorts. Sometimes, it's just about working out what will keep the client happy.
Indeed. Until someone offers something like the iPod, where DVDs can be stored in a PC storage in a similar way to iTunes, this won't take off.
The people who already stream from PC have a solution - they are geeks and they've got a hacked xbox or are running a Shuttle in their front room.
Everyone else needs something simple. Something where they can load in their DVDs, and then hide them in a cupboard, and when they want to play it, they just choose it from a menu showing the DVDs as text or cover art. And this won't get them there.
You've just reminded me to get that dual-boot Ubuntu set up more quickly.
Stuff like this stinks, and I don't want to support it any longer.
Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 1
I agree with what you are saying about dealing with the problems we can deal with.
I'm suggesting more that if you're going to go into space, research into the physics of FTL are probably a better expenditure. If you want to deal with creating sustainable economies in space, the first place to work with it is on the ground. It's possible to create more isolated environments (like biosphere 2) in order to learn lessons than to go into space with things like the ISS.
Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We need a quantum leap in technology. I've been in meetings where people won't bite the bullet and replace things with something much better, and instead, try and continue to tweak what's there. That's the situation we've got with Mars and beyond.
Right now, Mars is a folly. Other than "because it's there" there's little reason to go, and the current technology means huge times and costs (carrying a years food, dealing with issues like someone getting seriously ill a month into the mission, taking 2 years out of your life). If we look at the great human journeys, the drivers were far more than "because it's there". Columbus sailed the atlantic seeking a short trade route, the space race was about cold war propaganda.
FTL and the like are the next thing, what we should be putting research money into. It's the only way we will find a planet with a genuine possibility of colonization or other life.
If we track the first 50 years of manned air travel, mostly outside of governments, we went from people experimenting, to having scheduled air trips. The massive advances that took place were because of individual experimentation and profit motives. Space has gone nowhere. The state-of-the-art is the shuttle and the Soyuz, both 20+ year old technologies that put very few extra people into space than they did 20 years ago (and maybe less). We need the Bransons of this world to get competitive space travel going, something that will create innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of my reason for moving to open languages is because I want more freedom, not to be following what someone decides is the way forward.
but remember, you must think in Russian.
The other thing is that someone, somewhere can invent something having never seen the original patent, and be unable to use it.
The main area that patents should be allowed is in truly revolutionary technology, not evolutionary.
Except of course, that you enjoy doing it, in which case, you don't need a copyright system.
Plenty of great music and novels were written when copyright had a far shorter life.
We've got a bunch of old performers in the UK complaining that their 50 year performance copyright on some records is about to run out - but none of them have made any quality work in decades, and that 50 year copyright didn't stop them making it 40-odd years ago. Therefore, no disincentive existed.
I'm going to start asking these people if they really believe it's going to happen or not, and quit just sticking a question mark at the end. Really, either say what you think will happen, or don't. You're meant to be the experts who make predictions, not me, so quit asking me the questions.
I've seen people do it, and often they collect the data, which gets pasted to the word doc, printed and saved.
Which means that the data can't be analysed or transformed easily, and it's all over the place.
What you really need is a simple application, which has the functionality to produce a print.
That said, Macros can be done in OpenOffice.org too. But need some manual conversion.
MS Office is horrible to do the same thing.
Even though they have a stack of cash, the change is happening quite quickly, and sending people out to talk to governments, businesses etc around the world costs time and money. For small businesses, it's only worth it so that they don't become poster boys for others. But all efforts so far are not stopping the interest in it.
I know some non-geeky business guys using OOo. One is an IT project consultant, one is a Financial Advisor, and the other is a writer. These are certainly not "compile a distro" guys.
With regards to the unfortunate people who lost their pensions, there is definitely more transparency and separation required with pension plans. A pension plan should be just that, and not something that corporations can touch. We have had problems here in the UK in the past with this.
In the end, it's about free association. If you think the CEO is a crook, don't work for him.
FYI IBM are still important. AFAIK they are still the largest computer company in the world by market cap. But, they changed themselves.
The danger for Microsoft is in just how much they are backing desktop software and software that binds into the desktop, when it's going to be so much less important in the future.
I often find myself waiting for certain old albums to be in the "sale" before I buy them, so for me, record companies reducing the price would get a sale that they simply won't get otherwise (like I'll pay £7 but not £17).
That depends. When the DJ John Peel died, it was on Wikipedia as soon as I'd heard. Naomi Campbell's recent arrest is listed in her Wikipedia Bio.
For me, it's also about the sheer volume of Wikipedia. Does Britannica have entries on bands like The Secret Machines, or the Dogme 95 cinema movement, the Cloudy Bay vineyard or the village of Pewsey?
I wish there was a better editing mechanism, particularly to keep vandals out.
If I was in a workplace and needed to research something, chances are that I wouldn't use EB, because I'd want more specific detail than an encyclopedia could give me.
Wikipedia quite often gives me enough to then go searching more of Google.
If a CEO screws a company, it's none of my business. I can choose to work for them, or I can choose to invest in them.
Plenty of people don't commit suicide when they lose their jobs. No-one I know has. Some people respond to suicide when their partner leaves them. Should we therefore screen people's partners?
Maybe it's just me, but I partly do the work I do because I enjoy it, but also because it pays the bills. If the bills disappeared, I would make different choices in my work.
I don't even think that Microsoft have the "purpose" of companies like Google. At least when those companies release something, you can sense the excitement, that the Google guys are into making what they make as good as possible.
I don't know why Bill bothers doing what he does any more. There's little exciting coming out of Microsoft, just lots of "me too" products. I personally wouldn't bother doing it if I had Bill's fortune. I'd be either just enjoying myself, or trying to make a difference.
How is any of this stopping artists selling music. I know what people say "they wanted to close down the P2P networks to stop artists from sharing music", but there's nothing to support that at all.
There are people out there freely offering MP3s of their music on web sites on a "go ahead, use as you like" and the RIAA aren't doing anything about it.
That means no losing it, no scratching it or anything else that could generate a repeat sale.
Post of the day. This is always what people think... "hey, we can take this site with it's huge number of users and make it work for us". Completely forgetting that the reason people are using it is that they want the experience given.
The Mainstream Media companies still don't get it. Part of the internet experience is about getting away from force-fed and controlled content. People want it their way. They want to know about tens of thousands of bands playing everything from techno-polka to death-metal. They don't want what you want to give them. And manufactured cool won't work any more. The blogging community will spread the story so fast, they'll kill any attempts at it.
As soon as they try and control it, it will get killed, and someone will create a new equivalent. Creating a social networking site isn't too difficult.
If you see a document on a site that's a .doc, write to the site owner, telling them that making it available as a pdf would be more useable and font-friendly. Tell them that they can either get a free printer driver to create this from their software, or if they want to, use OpenOffice.org, an office suite that can easily make PDFs, which incidentally is free. And that if they want, you'll send them a CV in the post.
Sitting back and complaining about Microsoft's domination isn't going to change anything. Piece by piece, deconstruction of the customer base and word-of-mouth will work.
Personally, I really don't care. I've managed programmers who have a wardrobe that contains one shirt and one suit and I'd hire them again in an instant. My only rule is that if a client's visiting, you put on some chinos, a shirt and a pair of shoes (and that's a rare circumstance).
People who care about appearances of their staff are people who don't know what you are actually doing. They are managers who somehow got to be running an IT team, but don't really know what they are dealing with. So, the one thing they can deal with is the simple stuff - are the timesheets produced on time, do you turn up for the requisite number of hours, how do you look.
When you do contract work, you see all sorts. Sometimes, it's just about working out what will keep the client happy.
The people who already stream from PC have a solution - they are geeks and they've got a hacked xbox or are running a Shuttle in their front room.
Everyone else needs something simple. Something where they can load in their DVDs, and then hide them in a cupboard, and when they want to play it, they just choose it from a menu showing the DVDs as text or cover art. And this won't get them there.
Stuff like this stinks, and I don't want to support it any longer.
I'm suggesting more that if you're going to go into space, research into the physics of FTL are probably a better expenditure. If you want to deal with creating sustainable economies in space, the first place to work with it is on the ground. It's possible to create more isolated environments (like biosphere 2) in order to learn lessons than to go into space with things like the ISS.
Right now, Mars is a folly. Other than "because it's there" there's little reason to go, and the current technology means huge times and costs (carrying a years food, dealing with issues like someone getting seriously ill a month into the mission, taking 2 years out of your life). If we look at the great human journeys, the drivers were far more than "because it's there". Columbus sailed the atlantic seeking a short trade route, the space race was about cold war propaganda.
FTL and the like are the next thing, what we should be putting research money into. It's the only way we will find a planet with a genuine possibility of colonization or other life.
If we track the first 50 years of manned air travel, mostly outside of governments, we went from people experimenting, to having scheduled air trips. The massive advances that took place were because of individual experimentation and profit motives. Space has gone nowhere. The state-of-the-art is the shuttle and the Soyuz, both 20+ year old technologies that put very few extra people into space than they did 20 years ago (and maybe less). We need the Bransons of this world to get competitive space travel going, something that will create innovation.
"I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass. "
Yeah, because people really want a bunch of extra memory-hungry features.
Plenty of companies are still running Office 2000. One of those I know is investigating replacing that with OpenOffice.org for most desktops.