Do they really think they are saving money by switching to open source linux? They're paying Sun like they would be paying Microsoft for their products. They want to implement this over a couple of years, by that time maybe something new comes up.
Waste of money. It's going to cost a lot of money to train indonesians to use linux. Support is going to cost a lot too.
You see, that's the point. They will have to spend money to train people to use any system, no matter whether it's linux, windows, os-x or something else.
In short term, they wouldn't save money no matter what they choose. I think they realize that, and are hoping that by going with a mostly open source system, they will save money in long term.
In addition to saving money, I also think there are other motivations, like not making the whole country completely dependend on a US corporation. They are buying from Sun, but since most of the system is open source, it makes them much less dependend on Sun then they would be on MS.
Nobody was rich in the old Soviet Union, except, maybe, for a few Communist Party bonzas and a few undercover millionaires.
False! It is true that Soviet Union didn't have a significant number of millionaires, but there were always those who, for example, at the time of a housing crisis had three large appartments and a "dacha" somewhere on a beach. It may not count as rich when compared to Bill Gates, but it was filthy rich compared to the general population.
Second, while SU didn't have patents, some other countries (e.g. Czechoslovakia) did, the system being somewhat similar to the american one. The patents even had some, if not large, monetary value. You could even make a living as an independent inventor, although most people who chose to do that had some additional source of income, like a night job or pension or something.
As for artists, you could become rich (relatively) by doing the right kind of "art" for the right people (why do I have an urge to put the word people in quotation marks, too?) Most artists chose to remain poor, and to even risk their freedom (also relative) for their art.
As for somebody making money off your creativity, I don't think that any of the people who counted as wealthy in those societies were rich because of their own achievements.
In short, I was not trying to make case against or for a patent system. I was just pointing out that even in a society in which creativity didn't bring monetary award, and was actually often risky, art and science could fluorish. I don't think the example was that bad.
AFAIK, most scientific journals publish discoveries that were classified by peers as "interesting" in some way. It could be commercially useful, useful for further research, or just plain interesting from an "intelectual curiosity" point of view.
In my field, it is often (usually?) impossible to tell whether a result is going to be useful or not.
Just look at art and science in totalitarian countries. In all former communist countries, you definitely couldn't get rich by doing science, not even in relative comparison to general population. Yet they had a lot of excellent scientists, and produced huge amount of research.
As far as art goes, not only you couldn't get rich, in many cases you could get yourself locked up. Still, all the Soviet block countries had very active unofficial art scenes.
like Linux-style mouse focusing...in windows powertoys is seriously broken, to the point of being unusable. Ditch it and get txmouse instead. It still have few glitches, but generally it works. I wouldn't use windows without it.
Microsoft's implementation of multiple desktops is a joke. If you want multiple desktops on a windows machine, get virtuawin. It's still nowhere near to what you can do with FVWM or E17, and there seems to be no decent pager, but it actually works, and it makes the time I spend working on windows much less painful.
Show us some of the secret information which cannot be found online. What book is so valueable that I cannot find any information like it on the net.
In my field, there is very little available online on real analysis. There are few online books (some of them very nice), one largely defunct mailing list, and that's pretty much it.
In complex analysis, the situation is not much better.
I can find anything online from programming, to websites on conspiracies. I see more diversity of information on the internet than in any library, and I can access websites from all around the world.
Information on the internet may be very diverse, but in most areas it has no depth.
Take for example fractals. There seems to be huge amount of information on fractals on the web. But most of the sites are basically repeating the same stuff over and over, and most of it is stuff that is generally well known by anybody who has ever touched the field. If you want to learn more about the math, you have to pick up a book.
Most of the web is like a giant encyclopedia. If you have a topic you know very little about, you can find a lot of interesting information, a you can learn a lot. But if somebody who already knows a lot about a topic wants to learn more, internet usually doesn't help. It depends on the specific topic, of course, I think there is probably more on both programming and conspiracies on the net than in any particular library. But even then, if you want a solid expert research backed analysis of a particular conspiracy by somebody with credentials, you need to visit a library or bookstore.
Are you nuts? I don't have any data to prove it, but my experience tells me that maybe 80 or 90% of information available in any good library cannot be found anywhere on the net.
a lot of the best information might not be at that specific library you are at, and I doubt you want to travel from library to library looking for that important book.
Ever heard about inter-library loans?
You don't know much about libraries, do you? Have you ever been in a big university library? Did you ever tried searching some big online library catalog?
You forgot to mention the "otherwise publicly known". Supposed you had "one click shopping" on your page before Amazon. The idea is so trivial that every expert can see how it is implemented. This would probably get counted as "otherwise publicly known". If your invention was somewhat more substantial and you tried to hide it, say by obfuscating the web page source, and somebody else patented it later, you got what you deserved, IMHO.
I think this is olso good case for open source, because I am sure that having the source available with your software would count as making it "otherwise publicly known".
This is completely correct. If Apple really disclosed the discovery before MS applied for the patent, they have prior art. I don't think they can patent it any more, but neither can MS.
If Apple decided to keep the discovery a trade secret and benefit from it in some other way, perhaps selling the product and prohibiting anybody from opening it and reverse engineering it, and somebody else invented the same thing and patented it, too bad for Apple, at least in the "first filed" system. And I think that's good.
So the work done by Inventor A would be by definition prior art, so how is prior art unchanged if Inventor B is granted a patent merely by filing first?
Only if A published the invention. The whole system is supposed to encourage publishing of inventions. If you invent something and you don't care about making money, simply publish the invention without patenting it. Nobody else can patent it after that since you have prior art. If you want to make money, patent it (by which act you also automatically publish it). If somebody invented the same thing years ago without publishing it or patenting it, just sitting on it and waiting, tough luck for them.
I thing this new system does what it is supposed to do much better than the old one. The problems I can see are:
1) what does it mean "publish"? If I describe my invention in some totally obscure journal that nobody who works in the field is ever likely to read, does it count?
2) Filing patent application is supposed to publish the invention, however nowdays there are so many application being filed that it is easy for an individual invention to get lost in the noise, especially if the invention is intentionally described in some obscure way.
Arrrgh! About 100 people have already explained that you don't have to license anything in order to use, support or even mention Linux. You just cannot use the word Linux in your own company or product name.
It's apparently not just Science that we're failing to instill the importance of in children.
That's part of the problem. In my experience, half of the students comming to low level math classes in US colleges are unable to read. Sure, they can get through some simple stories, newspaper articles etc, but their reading comprehension is so low that they cannot use the textbook. They cannot follow the textbook examples and explanations. When it comes to story problems, half of the students are unable to figure out what the problem says and what is the question.
I assume it is the same in science classes. How are the kids supposed to learn science, when they are unable to read the textbooks?
Since the whole system is computer controlled, I would expect that the computer would probably notoce that someone is rejecting car after car from the same location, and would trigger some action.
I would be more affraid that someone breaks into the central computer and start re-routing people all over the place...:)
"When upgrading, all your Extensions and Themes will be disabled. This is not an issue, but it may appear to be one..."
This may be a pretty serious issue. After I updated firefox, it wouldn't start. It turned out I was using the bookmarkshome extension, and I had my homepage set to the bookmarkshome page. Since the extension was disabled, the homepage couldn't be generated, which apparently prevented firefox from starting.
The only fix I could find was to manually edit my prefs.js file and change homepage to something else. This is not a hard fix, but I think lot of people will not be able to figure this out. They will just say "hmm, I updated firefox and it doesn't even start, what a piece of #$%^".
Slashdot Mirror
No, for writing a letter, the path is
NotePad -> Emacs -> Jed -> Vim
Do they really think they are saving money by switching to open source linux? They're paying Sun like they would be paying Microsoft for their products. They want to implement this over a couple of years, by that time maybe something new comes up.
Waste of money. It's going to cost a lot of money to train indonesians to use linux. Support is going to cost a lot too.
You see, that's the point. They will have to spend money to train people to use any system, no matter whether it's linux, windows, os-x or something else.
In short term, they wouldn't save money no matter what they choose. I think they realize that, and are hoping that by going with a mostly open source system, they will save money in long term.
In addition to saving money, I also think there are other motivations, like not making the whole country completely dependend on a US corporation. They are buying from Sun, but since most of the system is open source, it makes them much less dependend on Sun then they would be on MS.
Nobody was rich in the old Soviet Union, except, maybe, for a few Communist Party bonzas and a few undercover millionaires.
False! It is true that Soviet Union didn't have a significant number of millionaires, but there were always those who, for example, at the time of a housing crisis had three large appartments and a "dacha" somewhere on a beach. It may not count as rich when compared to Bill Gates, but it was filthy rich compared to the general population.
Second, while SU didn't have patents, some other countries (e.g. Czechoslovakia) did, the system being somewhat similar to the american one. The patents even had some, if not large, monetary value. You could even make a living as an independent inventor, although most people who chose to do that had some additional source of income, like a night job or pension or something.
As for artists, you could become rich (relatively) by doing the right kind of "art" for the right people (why do I have an urge to put the word people in quotation marks, too?) Most artists chose to remain poor, and to even risk their freedom (also relative) for their art.
As for somebody making money off your creativity, I don't think that any of the people who counted as wealthy in those societies were rich because of their own achievements.
In short, I was not trying to make case against or for a patent system. I was just pointing out that even in a society in which creativity didn't bring monetary award, and was actually often risky, art and science could fluorish. I don't think the example was that bad.
AFAIK, most scientific journals publish discoveries that were classified by peers as "interesting" in some way. It could be commercially useful, useful for further research, or just plain interesting from an "intelectual curiosity" point of view.
In my field, it is often (usually?) impossible to tell whether a result is going to be useful or not.
Just look at art and science in totalitarian countries. In all former communist countries, you definitely couldn't get rich by doing science, not even in relative comparison to general population. Yet they had a lot of excellent scientists, and produced huge amount of research.
As far as art goes, not only you couldn't get rich, in many cases you could get yourself locked up. Still, all the Soviet block countries had very active unofficial art scenes.
"You hit the succubus..."
what language is the parent written in?
I wish I had some mod points. Please, someone, mod this up!
I like a good top down solution with centralized control because it "just works"...
Yeah, that's right! Like for example the good old Stalins 5 year plans.
like Linux-style mouse focusing ...in windows powertoys is seriously broken, to the point of being unusable. Ditch it and get txmouse instead. It still have few glitches, but generally it works. I wouldn't use windows without it.
Microsoft's implementation of multiple desktops is a joke. If you want multiple desktops on a windows machine, get virtuawin. It's still nowhere near to what you can do with FVWM or E17, and there seems to be no decent pager, but it actually works, and it makes the time I spend working on windows much less painful.
Show us some of the secret information which cannot be found online. What book is so valueable that I cannot find any information like it on the net.
In my field, there is very little available online on real analysis. There are few online books (some of them very nice), one largely defunct mailing list, and that's pretty much it.
In complex analysis, the situation is not much better.
I can find anything online from programming, to websites on conspiracies. I see more diversity of information on the internet than in any library, and I can access websites from all around the world.
Information on the internet may be very diverse, but in most areas it has no depth.
Take for example fractals. There seems to be huge amount of information on fractals on the web. But most of the sites are basically repeating the same stuff over and over, and most of it is stuff that is generally well known by anybody who has ever touched the field. If you want to learn more about the math, you have to pick up a book.
Most of the web is like a giant encyclopedia. If you have a topic you know very little about, you can find a lot of interesting information, a you can learn a lot. But if somebody who already knows a lot about a topic wants to learn more, internet usually doesn't help. It depends on the specific topic, of course, I think there is probably more on both programming and conspiracies on the net than in any particular library. But even then, if you want a solid expert research backed analysis of a particular conspiracy by somebody with credentials, you need to visit a library or bookstore.
The internet has more diversity of information.
Are you nuts? I don't have any data to prove it, but my experience tells me that maybe 80 or 90% of information available in any good library cannot be found anywhere on the net.
a lot of the best information might not be at that specific library you are at, and I doubt you want to travel from library to library looking for that important book.
Ever heard about inter-library loans?
You don't know much about libraries, do you? Have you ever been in a big university library? Did you ever tried searching some big online library catalog?
Or are you just trolling?
Yeah, and on top of that, I think I smell the evil wumpus nearby.
Well, if we believe what the police in Utah31 say, that's what a rave is... Especially the munching pills part.
Hm, there is a prior art
Sure, if you didn't keep it secret enough.
You forgot to mention the "otherwise publicly known". Supposed you had "one click shopping" on your page before Amazon. The idea is so trivial that every expert can see how it is implemented. This would probably get counted as "otherwise publicly known". If your invention was somewhat more substantial and you tried to hide it, say by obfuscating the web page source, and somebody else patented it later, you got what you deserved, IMHO.
I think this is olso good case for open source, because I am sure that having the source available with your software would count as making it "otherwise publicly known".
This is completely correct. If Apple really disclosed the discovery before MS applied for the patent, they have prior art. I don't think they can patent it any more, but neither can MS.
If Apple decided to keep the discovery a trade secret and benefit from it in some other way, perhaps selling the product and prohibiting anybody from opening it and reverse engineering it, and somebody else invented the same thing and patented it, too bad for Apple, at least in the "first filed" system. And I think that's good.
So the work done by Inventor A would be by definition prior art, so how is prior art unchanged if Inventor B is granted a patent merely by filing first?
Only if A published the invention. The whole system is supposed to encourage publishing of inventions. If you invent something and you don't care about making money, simply publish the invention without patenting it. Nobody else can patent it after that since you have prior art. If you want to make money, patent it (by which act you also automatically publish it). If somebody invented the same thing years ago without publishing it or patenting it, just sitting on it and waiting, tough luck for them.
I thing this new system does what it is supposed to do much better than the old one. The problems I can see are:
1) what does it mean "publish"? If I describe my invention in some totally obscure journal that nobody who works in the field is ever likely to read, does it count?
2) Filing patent application is supposed to publish the invention, however nowdays there are so many application being filed that it is easy for an individual invention to get lost in the noise, especially if the invention is intentionally described in some obscure way.
Are these two things somehow addressed?
Arrrgh! About 100 people have already explained that you don't have to license anything in order to use, support or even mention Linux. You just cannot use the word Linux in your own company or product name.
also mention metapost, PyX, Asymptote, GRI, ...
Indeed! The other day I had to use Photoshop on Windows for the first time, and it was a huge PITA.
It's apparently not just Science that we're failing to instill the importance of in children.
That's part of the problem. In my experience, half of the students comming to low level math classes in US colleges are unable to read. Sure, they can get through some simple stories, newspaper articles etc, but their reading comprehension is so low that they cannot use the textbook. They cannot follow the textbook examples and explanations. When it comes to story problems, half of the students are unable to figure out what the problem says and what is the question.
I assume it is the same in science classes. How are the kids supposed to learn science, when they are unable to read the textbooks?
Since the whole system is computer controlled, I would expect that the computer would probably notoce that someone is rejecting car after car from the same location, and would trigger some action.
:)
I would be more affraid that someone breaks into the central computer and start re-routing people all over the place...
From the release notes:
"When upgrading, all your Extensions and Themes will be disabled. This is not an issue, but it may appear to be one..."
This may be a pretty serious issue. After I updated firefox, it wouldn't start. It turned out I was using the bookmarkshome extension, and I had my homepage set to the bookmarkshome page. Since the extension was disabled, the homepage couldn't be generated, which apparently prevented firefox from starting.
The only fix I could find was to manually edit my prefs.js file and change homepage to something else. This is not a hard fix, but I think lot of people will not be able to figure this out. They will just say "hmm, I updated firefox and it doesn't even start, what a piece of #$%^".