I agree. There are 376 claims to this patent, which is quite spectactular - most patents have a few dozen. However, claim 1 must stand on its own, and it really does not seem terribly inventive.
This is a disease which afflicts the patent system. People are not patenting brilliant, innovative, inobvious ideas, but just "staking out territory".
Also, this patent was filed in 2000. If this work dates from the 1980's, as is stated in the post, then an enabling disclosure or marketing of the technology may have occurred before 1999, and the patent will be questionable.
It may be that Applie and Microsoft think they can attack this patent, which is why they didn't cut a deal.
There is a huge distinction between GPL and PHP licenses. You can incorporate PHP software into your proprietary software, and it remains proprietary. You only have to acknowledge the presence of the software. If you incorporate GPL software into yours, you must make available the entire linked source to anyone you distribute the binary to. And they can distribute the source to anyone else.
The result is that it's impossible to incorporate GPL software into a commercial product if you wish the software to remain proprietary. With PHP software, no problem.
And by the way, I don't consider myself one of the "little people". Stallman, at 5' 5", maybe.
Private broadcasters can put on what they want, and I can watch or not. Fox and CNN don't use my tax dollars to propogandize a political view point I disagree with.
I work in an internatinoal company. We have made a conscious decision to keep our software development in Canada because it's cheaper. Salaries are about the same in Canada, but in Canadian, not U.S., dollars. And health care costs are much less for Canadian companies because most of it is paid for by the government.
The down side, of course, is more tax. And the CBC.
He was once sane enough to write one of the best instructional books on chess ever written (Bobby Fischer teaches Chess).
It's a pity he didn't follow it up with books on other aspects of the game than just play along the back rows.
Software's great defining attribute is it's shareability. Good software costs a lot to write, but almost nothing to reproduce and distribute. This is the attribute that the open source movement so efficiently exploits.
And by doing so, people do not have to keep reinventing the wheel, which means software systems can be built more efficiently. And this means we need less people to generate the same applications.
But this is a good thing. Remember the purpose of the software industry is not to employ programmers, but to provide functionality for computer users. If this can be done cheaper, faster, and better, society on the whole is richer for it.
But what about the all of those poor unemployed programmers? Well, two things might happen - one is that they go on to some other industry where their wealth-generating capability is put to better use. And that's a good thing.
Perversly, however, by increasing the (true) productivity of programmers, the demand for programmers may actually increase. Currently there is no shortage of challenging software applications - at least, not where I work. Open source will allow us to develop fancier and more difficult applications than we would otherwise take on.
Billy's arguments seem to assume that the applications we develop will be the same with or without open source. He should have a long talk with an economist.
I don't get it. SCO spent over 2 million on R&D last quarter. Why? Their "conventional" business is dead in the water. Consider that (1) they've pissed off huge numbers of IT managers with their IP claims against Linux, (2) they are in a highly volatile situation and may not be around long, and (3) they have developed a delightful habit of harassing and suing their own customers. One would have to be an idiot to initiate business with SCO.
It's rumoured that BlueStar made the same point to SCO. I think they were right. SCO's conventional business should be in "harvest" mode right now.
Does anyone know of a reason that SCO should be investing money in R&D?
What the journal provides is credibility, archiving, distribution, and an audience. Putting your paper out "on the web" independent of an official journal provides little or none of these things.
When you write a paper, you have a list of references at the end. Do you want references to papers in journals, or to papers posted in peoples' personnal web site?
Musicians make money selling their music. Scientsts DON'T make money selling their papers,
but rather use their published papers to establish their reputation as researchers. Generally speaking, the better publication list you have, the more institutions are willing to pay for your services. Thus it makes sense that scientists pay to have their papers published.
So SCO wants a trial in September 2005? I'm surprized by that, since it's not clear they will last that long.
I've been trying to figure out how fast SCO is going through cash. Their latest quarterly report is not much help, with their financial waters so muddied, and their reporting so obscure. The next quarterly report is due any day now. Maybe it will be more informative, but I doubt it.
When their financial backers backed out recently, it meant paper profit for SCO, but it also meant that SCO has less cash. And they will need it.
Perhaps they think they have a poor case, and a postponement will increase the chances of a
settlement or buy out.
Film and television invariably cast the skeptic as close minded and cynical. It's the "open minded" ones (in truth, the gullible ones) who are the heroes. In the X Files, Agent Mouldy was the enlightened hero, Agent Skuzzy the stick in the mud.
This has made it terribly unfashionable to have both feet on the ground. Anybody refusing to believe astonishing claims based on the flimsiest of evidence is looked down upon with pity.
The trouble with writing an article like this is there's always some gumbah (sp?) who wants to nitpick. Like me.
Besides those, you will learn about limits and indeterminate forms, which will allow math to be done that involves infinitely large or small values.
The idea of Cauchy's definition of the limit is to avoid talking about infinitely small values. Only with this definition's discovery (invention?), and the abandoning of the idea of "infinitesimals", did a sound theoretical basis for calculus begin to form.
First, high school calculus teachers tend to be the teachers in the math department the longest. The problem with this is that while these teachers are more experienced, they have been away from calculus longer than the other math teachers in most cases. Besides that, these teachers are often near retirement and may not be as motivated as younger teachers.
I think the author just had a bad experience with an older math teacher. The statement about being away from calculus for a long time is a little strange. Any calculus you're taught in university is going to at least 150 years old.
I work for a processing firm that has about 100 Sun workstations, and I've often had questions for Sun concerning their operating system, compilers, and so on. I've come to view their customer support on these issues not so much like a sun, but more like a massive black hole, into which questions fall in never to reappear as answers.
Their customer support sucks. I say let Sun evaporite in a wave of Hawking radiation.
100 Nobel Laureates means very little. How many climatologists are in this number? My guess is few or none. Mostly they will be biologists, physicists, chemists, possibily even economists.
Now someone with a Nobel prize in physics is going to be a very smart person, but he or she will be no more able to assess claims in climatology than myself.
How about centuries of reality in the form of futile attempts to get around the first law of thermodynamics (conservations of energy). It's not "knee-jerk skepticism" when you've seen the same old scam for the 1000'th time - it's common sense.
It's often tricky figuring out where open mindeness leaves off, and naivete and gullibility begin. This particular motor, however, is an easy call.
There's a Canadian-based insurance company called Clarica whose entire marketing compaign is based on bringing clarity and simplicity to the consumer. Whether their products are any damn good I couldn't say, but it's very smart marketing.
Clarica understand that all the choices modern society presents to consumer often leaves them dazed and confused. This means a marketing opportunity. Put bluntly, people will pay to simplify their lives. Look for many more companies, in many industries, to exploit this.
I've seen good software developers with a sound foundation in the analysis of algorithms, and good software developers without. Those with are better.
A knowledge of algorithms is constantly useful because you are aware of solutions less informed people wouldn't even think of. For example, I've cast a couple of problems as "the stagecoach problem", a kind of shortest path problem for which a very fast and elegant solution exists. It's behaviour almost looks like artificial intelligence.
I've also made use of Voronoi diagrams (a solution to the nearest neighbour problem), which has numerous applications, one of which is fast 2-dimensional searching.
Knowledge of least-L1-norm algorithms has helped me develop robust software where the "obvious" solution would fail miserably.
I didn't use knowledge of algorithms to create new algorithms (as you say, most of that work has been done), but to find solutions for applications that wouldn't even occur to someone without such a background.
What stupendously uninformed garbage.
on
AT&T Labs' Brain Drain
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Congratulations! This must break some kind of record for misinformed bullshit in slash-dot.
First, most industrial conference fees are not in the thousands of dollars. About five hundred is more typical. These conferences do, after all, want good attendance. Second, it is rather unusual for employees to pay their own way to conferences, especially out of town ones (which most are). Third, research is by no means all or nothing. Most of it is incremental improvememnt on existing science, and gives a corresponding return on investment. Sometimes a radicial advancement is made, and this can make headlines, but that is the exception, not the rule. Fourth, you accuse companies of "stealing" ideas at conferences. Well that's the whole idea, ding dong. When one presents a paper at a conference, it's to disseminate ideas. People are supposed to "steal" them, and I take great pride when people steal mine.
I am a software developer and researcher in geophysics. In that community at least, the top researchers are about evenly divided between industry and academic, and no, the industrial researchers are NOT mostly ex-professors.
I have never detected any disdain for industry researchers from university researchers - indeed there are many consortiums between them. I suspect most academics are jealous of industrial researchers because they often have better financial backing and are involved in more "real world" problems. I also think industrial researchers are jealous of academics because they have more time and freedom to tackle basic, pure research. Together they make a powerful combination.
So far as your assessment of the quality of conference papers from industry is concerned, it's just complete garbage. Free enterprize is a highly stimulating environment that attracts talented people, and the papers reflect that. The weakest papers, I'm afraid, tend to be from graduate students, although I have seen many excellent ones. Sometimes, too, overtly commercial papers get presented, although conferences fight to minimize this.
Your rant is misinformed pretty well from top to bottom. I can't imagine why you would make such nonsense up, but it has no relation to reality.
Warren Buffett once wrote that people seem to either understand the concept of value investing right away once it's explained to them, or they never seem to get it no matter how long they are taught.
From many years of debating with our friends in the tin foil hats, I think skepticism is similar.
Admittedly all of us believe in silly ideas from time to time, but there are some people who appear absolutely driven to believe every fruitcake conjecture that comes down the turnpike, and no amount of facts or reasoning will change their minds.
Given this, the purpose of debating with such people is not to influence them, but to influence the audience listening in.
"But the creators need to maintain the freedom to distribute their ideas any way they want. They shouldn't be bogged down by 20-year copyrights and other old restrictions that bottle up good ideas"
A few points...
Why should businesses pay software developers the big fat salaries they do if the developers retain control over many of the software rights?
I know that the full transcript was not presented here, but incentive to invest is critically important. It didn't go away just because we entered the 21st century.
Copyright does not bottle up good ideas. Patents maybe, but not copyright. People are perfectly free to steal ideas from other peoples software - they just have to write their own damn code. If they are too lazy or incompetent to do that, I have little sympathy.
Lessig continually differentiates between "creators" and "commercial interests", yet it is often the business side of the equation which is the most inspired - identifying an untapped market, bringing together the "talent", getting them to produce a good product, marketing, distribution, and so on. Stanford law professors may have a little trouble seeing that.
First, I'm not an American, and have never lived in America. Nice try. Sell you insults somewhere else.
Second, you are not describing a true socialist society. According to Karl Marx, a socialist state is one where both land and the means of production are in the hands of the state. The Soviet Union and China were, more or less, socialist states. New Zealand never has been. Left wing, maybe - that's all.
Third, only the most radical right winger would deny the need to support the needy, redistribute income, and provide public services. The extent to which that is done is, of course, a source of endless debate. It has little to do with the right to carry out private enterprise for personnal profit. It's bizarre that you think that the latter denies the former.
You don't understand the meaning of the words you use. A good liberal arts education might do you good.
The state of economic knowledge of your typical/.'er is truly appalling. You state that there's no such thing as the public good in capitalism? Read Adam Smith's "The Wealth Of Nations". It may be more than two centuries old (first published in 1776, rather appropriately) but it's as relevant today as it ever was. Adam Smith explains in great detail how a person behaving in his or her own self interest adds to the public good.
And capitalism is not in the least elitist. The paper boy, the owner/operator of the corner grocery, the local landscpape expert, the software consultant - these are every bit the capitalists that Bill Gates is. Indeed, the ability to produce value efficiently is a wonderful equalizer, constantly raising up the capable and bringing down the arrogant. So many of todays billionaires started with essentially nothing, and so many of tomorrow's billionairies have essentially nothing today.
And so far as socialism being egalitarian, communal, and sharing in the public good? Well, perhaps you could point out a good working example. All I can think of is Stalin and the twenty million Russian corpses he left behind.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a disease which afflicts the patent system. People are not patenting brilliant, innovative, inobvious ideas, but just "staking out territory".
Also, this patent was filed in 2000. If this work dates from the 1980's, as is stated in the post, then an enabling disclosure or marketing of the technology may have occurred before 1999, and the patent will be questionable.
It may be that Applie and Microsoft think they can attack this patent, which is why they didn't cut a deal.
The result is that it's impossible to incorporate GPL software into a commercial product if you wish the software to remain proprietary. With PHP software, no problem.
And by the way, I don't consider myself one of the "little people". Stallman, at 5' 5", maybe.
4.5 Teraflops for $100 million? Surely not. That much compute power can be had for 1/20'th the price. What am I missing?
Next, I suppose, you're going to talk about "ice hockey".
Private broadcasters can put on what they want, and I can watch or not. Fox and CNN don't use my tax dollars to propogandize a political view point I disagree with.
The down side, of course, is more tax. And the CBC.
He was once sane enough to write one of the best instructional books on chess ever written (Bobby Fischer teaches Chess). It's a pity he didn't follow it up with books on other aspects of the game than just play along the back rows.
Software's great defining attribute is it's shareability. Good software costs a lot to write, but almost nothing to reproduce and distribute. This is the attribute that the open source movement so efficiently exploits.
And by doing so, people do not have to keep reinventing the wheel, which means software systems can be built more efficiently. And this means we need less people to generate the same applications.
But this is a good thing. Remember the purpose of the software industry is not to employ programmers, but to provide functionality for computer users. If this can be done cheaper, faster, and better, society on the whole is richer for it.
But what about the all of those poor unemployed programmers? Well, two things might happen - one is that they go on to some other industry where their wealth-generating capability is put to better use. And that's a good thing.
Perversly, however, by increasing the (true) productivity of programmers, the demand for programmers may actually increase. Currently there is no shortage of challenging software applications - at least, not where I work. Open source will allow us to develop fancier and more difficult applications than we would otherwise take on.
Billy's arguments seem to assume that the applications we develop will be the same with or without open source. He should have a long talk with an economist.
It's rumoured that BlueStar made the same point to SCO. I think they were right. SCO's conventional business should be in "harvest" mode right now.
Does anyone know of a reason that SCO should be investing money in R&D?
When you write a paper, you have a list of references at the end. Do you want references to papers in journals, or to papers posted in peoples' personnal web site?
Musicians make money selling their music. Scientsts DON'T make money selling their papers, but rather use their published papers to establish their reputation as researchers. Generally speaking, the better publication list you have, the more institutions are willing to pay for your services. Thus it makes sense that scientists pay to have their papers published.
I've been trying to figure out how fast SCO is going through cash. Their latest quarterly report is not much help, with their financial waters so muddied, and their reporting so obscure. The next quarterly report is due any day now. Maybe it will be more informative, but I doubt it.
When their financial backers backed out recently, it meant paper profit for SCO, but it also meant that SCO has less cash. And they will need it.
Perhaps they think they have a poor case, and a postponement will increase the chances of a settlement or buy out.
I stand corrected. Scooby Doo cartoons, final bastion of rationality in a sea of naivete.
This has made it terribly unfashionable to have both feet on the ground. Anybody refusing to believe astonishing claims based on the flimsiest of evidence is looked down upon with pity.
Besides those, you will learn about limits and indeterminate forms, which will allow math to be done that involves infinitely large or small values.
The idea of Cauchy's definition of the limit is to avoid talking about infinitely small values. Only with this definition's discovery (invention?), and the abandoning of the idea of "infinitesimals", did a sound theoretical basis for calculus begin to form.
First, high school calculus teachers tend to be the teachers in the math department the longest. The problem with this is that while these teachers are more experienced, they have been away from calculus longer than the other math teachers in most cases. Besides that, these teachers are often near retirement and may not be as motivated as younger teachers.
I think the author just had a bad experience with an older math teacher. The statement about being away from calculus for a long time is a little strange. Any calculus you're taught in university is going to at least 150 years old.
We'll be waking up at night with a sudden urge to chew through the electrical wiring.
Their customer support sucks. I say let Sun evaporite in a wave of Hawking radiation.
Now someone with a Nobel prize in physics is going to be a very smart person, but he or she will be no more able to assess claims in climatology than myself.
It's often tricky figuring out where open mindeness leaves off, and naivete and gullibility begin. This particular motor, however, is an easy call.
Clarica understand that all the choices modern society presents to consumer often leaves them dazed and confused. This means a marketing opportunity. Put bluntly, people will pay to simplify their lives. Look for many more companies, in many industries, to exploit this.
A knowledge of algorithms is constantly useful because you are aware of solutions less informed people wouldn't even think of. For example, I've cast a couple of problems as "the stagecoach problem", a kind of shortest path problem for which a very fast and elegant solution exists. It's behaviour almost looks like artificial intelligence.
I've also made use of Voronoi diagrams (a solution to the nearest neighbour problem), which has numerous applications, one of which is fast 2-dimensional searching.
Knowledge of least-L1-norm algorithms has helped me develop robust software where the "obvious" solution would fail miserably.
I didn't use knowledge of algorithms to create new algorithms (as you say, most of that work has been done), but to find solutions for applications that wouldn't even occur to someone without such a background.
First, most industrial conference fees are not in the thousands of dollars. About five hundred is more typical. These conferences do, after all, want good attendance. Second, it is rather unusual for employees to pay their own way to conferences, especially out of town ones (which most are). Third, research is by no means all or nothing. Most of it is incremental improvememnt on existing science, and gives a corresponding return on investment. Sometimes a radicial advancement is made, and this can make headlines, but that is the exception, not the rule. Fourth, you accuse companies of "stealing" ideas at conferences. Well that's the whole idea, ding dong. When one presents a paper at a conference, it's to disseminate ideas. People are supposed to "steal" them, and I take great pride when people steal mine.
I am a software developer and researcher in geophysics. In that community at least, the top researchers are about evenly divided between industry and academic, and no, the industrial researchers are NOT mostly ex-professors.
I have never detected any disdain for industry researchers from university researchers - indeed there are many consortiums between them. I suspect most academics are jealous of industrial researchers because they often have better financial backing and are involved in more "real world" problems. I also think industrial researchers are jealous of academics because they have more time and freedom to tackle basic, pure research. Together they make a powerful combination.
So far as your assessment of the quality of conference papers from industry is concerned, it's just complete garbage. Free enterprize is a highly stimulating environment that attracts talented people, and the papers reflect that. The weakest papers, I'm afraid, tend to be from graduate students, although I have seen many excellent ones. Sometimes, too, overtly commercial papers get presented, although conferences fight to minimize this.
Your rant is misinformed pretty well from top to bottom. I can't imagine why you would make such nonsense up, but it has no relation to reality.
From many years of debating with our friends in the tin foil hats, I think skepticism is similar. Admittedly all of us believe in silly ideas from time to time, but there are some people who appear absolutely driven to believe every fruitcake conjecture that comes down the turnpike, and no amount of facts or reasoning will change their minds.
Given this, the purpose of debating with such people is not to influence them, but to influence the audience listening in.
"But the creators need to maintain the freedom to distribute their ideas any way they want. They shouldn't be bogged down by 20-year copyrights and other old restrictions that bottle up good ideas"
A few points...
Why should businesses pay software developers the big fat salaries they do if the developers retain control over many of the software rights? I know that the full transcript was not presented here, but incentive to invest is critically important. It didn't go away just because we entered the 21st century.
Copyright does not bottle up good ideas. Patents maybe, but not copyright. People are perfectly free to steal ideas from other peoples software - they just have to write their own damn code. If they are too lazy or incompetent to do that, I have little sympathy.
Lessig continually differentiates between "creators" and "commercial interests", yet it is often the business side of the equation which is the most inspired - identifying an untapped market, bringing together the "talent", getting them to produce a good product, marketing, distribution, and so on. Stanford law professors may have a little trouble seeing that.
Second, you are not describing a true socialist society. According to Karl Marx, a socialist state is one where both land and the means of production are in the hands of the state. The Soviet Union and China were, more or less, socialist states. New Zealand never has been. Left wing, maybe - that's all.
Third, only the most radical right winger would deny the need to support the needy, redistribute income, and provide public services. The extent to which that is done is, of course, a source of endless debate. It has little to do with the right to carry out private enterprise for personnal profit. It's bizarre that you think that the latter denies the former.
You don't understand the meaning of the words you use. A good liberal arts education might do you good.
And capitalism is not in the least elitist. The paper boy, the owner/operator of the corner grocery, the local landscpape expert, the software consultant - these are every bit the capitalists that Bill Gates is. Indeed, the ability to produce value efficiently is a wonderful equalizer, constantly raising up the capable and bringing down the arrogant. So many of todays billionaires started with essentially nothing, and so many of tomorrow's billionairies have essentially nothing today.
And so far as socialism being egalitarian, communal, and sharing in the public good? Well, perhaps you could point out a good working example. All I can think of is Stalin and the twenty million Russian corpses he left behind.