You, and others like you fail to comprehend that presenting and successfully de-certifying a patent on "prior art" is:
1. Looong process that the USPTO is unwilling to process in most cases. Their "business model" is as a certification factory.
2. Expensive process. Who's going to take up this cause? You and I?
The scale at which junk patents are being issued is mind boggling. Remember, this is the new and improved government that measures productivity! In this case it's the number of patents, per reviewer, per year.
This story reinforces the urgent need of abolishing software patents. That's something few are willing to pay enough attention to see this critical mission through. Instead, off the cuff "prior art" posts fly.
I've used my nokia 9600 with no problems. It's a -great- phone for a sysadmin. I rarely rave about anything, but this phone has earned it. Crackberry and email clients, no strings attached audio player, memory card slot.
There was a follow-up sold to my trusty old 9300 in the U.S. but the E90 wasn't made available in the U.S. That's a pity because I would have been the first on my block with one.
It looks like the way to go in the U.S. may be a usb dongle and a PDA-like device instead of a phone.
privacy should not be conceived as absolute control over personal information, but rather as protection from harms accruing from the use or disclosure of information.
Very elegant phrase that simultaneously defines the elite groupthink for the last 20+ years. Noted principals underlying this type of thinking.
-Your personal information is not yours. -Others can (and do) do whatever they like with the evidence of your legal, financial, economic and social activities. -Of course we mean you no harm when collecting, storing and reselling the evidence of your activities. But that doesn't mean there's any liability assumed in our activities.
It should explain the ease and speed with which the NSA/telco domestic surveilance program was established. With that kind of groupthink, it stands to reason it is the tip of an iceberg. Probably meaningless to most because they don't see the environment this kind of permissive groupthink inspires in their government.
It's ironic and sad that 'HaHa' and 'stupid' form the basis of all the comments so far.
1. There's no interest in more transparency on the whole process of identity authentication and credit/finance scoring. None!
2. The groupthink on this hasn't changed one bit. In most cases, "It sucks to be you." In this case, I'd call it clever Marketing that's only making him richer.
They won't go after some low-profile wonk. The French bank with billions of losses from a couple of months ago is trying the same thing. It's not plausible.
This is very quickly how the scam works: The way bond agencies survive is by acquiring new business. Let's say a utility issues a bond for a new water project. They shop the issuance around. Highest rating gets the business. The higher rating means (roughly) less "insurance" they have to carry and the more they can use free cash to do other things.
The bond agencies are as "financialized" as a low-end broker sweat shop. No one seemed to care when the money was flowing. It's easy to take shots after the fact.
Few people follow the Fed's TAF's and its junk-filled balance sheet. It's worse than the credit agencies situation. Who knows if that will ever blow up like the credit markets.
Do you have any idea how much that would cost in legal fees? Antivirus Company XYZ gets a cease and desist from Microsoft with the bottom line being a $50,000/yr payout + units sold data to microsoft. Yes, sales data is part of the discovery to calculate damages. What better way to find out how big their business actually is?
From a business perspective, that $50,000/yr is a heck of a lot less than going to court. It is a shakedown. A totally legal protection racket. Which is why software patents should simply die.
Look at the Crackberry fiasco. RIM knew the patent litigation was a scam and couldn't get the patents invalidated fast enough before incurring HUGE legal expenses. At some point it became a super-priority most likely because politician's & policy wonks lives would be negatively affected by their Crackberry's being shut off.
Shuttleworth's idea is designed to further Ubuntu at the expense of the projects packaged therein. Specifically, he's trying to shift quite a bit of the release work onto the projects he packages.
Aaron's post is a must-read for anyone vaguely interested in the topic. In particular, It is not overly dramatic to say that if we make Free software development overly sterile via choice of process, there will be a commensurate diminishment in participation and momentum. I interpret that as Aaron recognizing the corrosive effect on the entire dev community by adopting Shuttleworth's scheme.
Better still, Aaron offers constructive alternatives. It's really nice to read and should be a template for most blogging.
Someone please explain why Shuttleworth's idea hasn't been swatted down the day he posted it.
Today's lesson: Learn to disagree without personal attacks and offer viable alternatives.
The mac market share isn't 4%. That's a dumb number that's used to make Windows appear much more dominant.
Compare Dell's unit sales to HP's unit sales to Apple's unit sales for a given segment and you'll find Apple in the top-5 for sure on any given month. In laptops, Apple is #1 per unit and dollar and has been for a really, really long time.
Still, I doubt there's the expertise on/. for a legitimate discussion about anti-trust.
1. If he and many others didn't try then I have a feeling Linux would be perceptually relegated to Hurd status or lower still.
2. Yeah, I'd like another window manager. I'd like four entirely new and different WM's.
3. I'd like iceweasel to run in console, so sure another version of iceweasel would be fabulous.
The more important question is what exactly is bad about so many choices? Do you understand the danger just a couple of operating system choices creates?
-The film was in development hell since the 1989 release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because Spielberg and Ford initially disagreed over Lucas's choice of the skull as the plot device.
You've got an actor with creative input into the movie plot. Very rarely does that ever work. Yes, the actors have input, it is most successful when it's improv within the filming of the movie.
-...rom a story co-written by executive producer George Lucas..... Screenwriters Jeb Stuart, Jeffrey Boam, M. Night Shyamalan, Frank Darabont and Jeff Nathanson wrote drafts, before David Koepp's script satisfied all three men.
Multiple treatments of the same premise, few of which actually materialize. This suggests the amount of vetting, oversized-personalities, and plain old stupidity was committee-style approval hell.
There's absolutely nothing reasonable about Shuttleworth's request.
1. It's a Trojan Horse to legitimize Shuttleworth's business prospects. Simultaneously he'll out-shout Debian and give him a platform with which to more easily compete with Novell. Given Novell's history of mismanagement, I'd say they are helping him already.
2. There will be _lots_ of ubuntu users ready to mod me down for comment #1. Let's entertain the notion that I am completely misguided and I fall in line with the Ubuntu groupthink. What exactly would be accomplished? Nothing. Ubuntu already forks from Debian early on and as far as I can tell, never the twain shall meet.
3. Debian still releases when ready. Ubuntu releases on a calendar, warts and all. Imagine if the Debian community fell under Shuttleworth's and changes to a firm "ready or not" release schedule. It would slowly turn the Debian project into Shuttleworth's fiefdom rotting it from the inside.
I see where you are going and in principal I agree. The problem is the consequences of rape and other unspeakably inappropriate sexual behavior generally play out over a lifetime and _generally_ speaking lead to more inappropriate sexual behavior at an early age to more children.
It very quickly turns into a "grand scale" social problem due to geometric growth of inappropriate behavior.
Again, I generally agree with the principal of what you are saying, but it's very important to point out the deeply corrosive effect inappropriate sexual anything has in a society.
because I don't work in this area, but I think a simpler explanation for the crazy hodge-podge of IP's on the map is dynamic IP's being given to a few infected PC's.
How can one say with confidence that the design is purposeful?
only the XP-based machine will be sold at mass-market retailers
There is no crime there! The retailer's job is to offer what the consumer wants with no regard about the wisdom of their choices. When Shuttleworth has enough money to advertise Linux everywhere like IBM did, then the retailer might go for it. Furthermore, the retailer specs the machines far more than the average consumer may comprehend.
While it's interesting to see that they are going cheap on storage to get the price point, it shows that Asus is still getting screwed by Microsoft. You can calculate the spread if you guestimate the OEM in quantity costs of the two drives.
1. Microsoft probably can and will figure out a way to eventually stack the board of in directors in their favor at Yahoo. Microsoft has time, Yahoo doesn't.
2. Google is keeping their enemies closer at this point. This is basically a white-knight move on Google's part to keep Microsoft out of their space at all costs. The question to Google is how long will it be until this kind of action starts affecting their bottom line numbers.
In a very heartless way, I'm all for the Microsoft->Yahoo acquisition. Most acquisitions fail to generate anything near the claims management makes. Microsoft would simply leave the door open for ex-Yahoo employees to startup things that would be a bigger thorn in Microsoft's side.
Death by thousands of thorns if you will pardon the pun.
I'm always happy to see stories like this. There are huge gaps in entertainment for low dev costs and this is how you make them fly.
-No, your games aren't going to be in WorstBuy anytime soon. -No, your games aren't going to get any attention whatsoever from the media. -No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour. -No, you won't attract VC to grow your business.
-Yes, you will have some loyal consumers. Make your games multilingual (i18?) and you'll have many. -Yes, you can build a very successful enterprise.
In all cases that's the way doing something original works. I wish more young Americans had this kind of attitude and perserverance.
I just hope they are smart enough to keep going on their own instead of using it as a resume builder.
CEO does not go about spending that kind of money without the approval of major stockholders.
Let's review the chain of command: CEO reports to the Board of Directors. Nowhere in there is your vanilla NASDAQ stock holder.
Now, in theory this should work, but in practice, the CEO normally votes people onto the board of directors. So, you have your buddies on the board "managing" the CEO where after the boring corporate procedures are over, everyone parties. So, it's quite reasonable to assume Ballmer comes up with a crackpot scheme to acquire yahoo and waste everyone's time on it and the BOD be quite satisfied with his managerial acumen.
It's also a complete fallacy that shares outstanding somehow means these share holders can exert some influence. That's a lesson for another day...
I can tell you why Indiana is *not* called opensolaris. It seems Sun wouldn't allow it. Which, I think is pretty emblematic of Sun's consistently inconsistent behavior regarding their "community" OS.
It looks like they want the free dev resources AND total control, right down to naming. Which, adds up to a project that doesn't seem viable to me. Maybe I'm wrong though.
These kinds of articles harm practically everyone. They eliminate variety and here's how.
1. Focusing on a couple of winners. In Ubuntu's case they've got PR hucksters doing the shouting for them 2. Eliminating new features. These shootouts leave no room for testing new features, programs, etc. It's yay or nay and the nay's always win when something is -really- new.
3. There are a number of "What about distro X, Y or Z?" comments and they are, for the most part legitimate questions. Most of those non-chosen distros simply haven't made a good enough impression in media circles. Those aforementioned "good impressions" usually cost some money.
4. Eliminating new distros. There are -lots- of other linux distros who's first purpose is _not_ a desktop. The problem I'm pointing out is multifaceted and troubling. To boil it down: "Everyone knows that Linux is that other computer system they buy for less and put their stolen XP OS on."
My 2 cents: Debian Testing -still- manages to be completely ignored when it's a good apples-to-apples comparison to whatever new version Ubuntu puts out.
Can you imagine if the US government was in full control of all telecommunications?
They learned long ago they don't need "full control" They learned where the choke points are and gather information there.
Legislators do nothing simply because it's not a high enough priority for the telcos. Right now the telcos are preparing to decimate cable/satellite and rid themselves of their public obligations (POTS) altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
You, and others like you fail to comprehend that presenting and successfully de-certifying a patent on "prior art" is:
1. Looong process that the USPTO is unwilling to process in most cases. Their "business model" is as a certification factory.
2. Expensive process. Who's going to take up this cause? You and I?
The scale at which junk patents are being issued is mind boggling. Remember, this is the new and improved government that measures productivity! In this case it's the number of patents, per reviewer, per year.
This story reinforces the urgent need of abolishing software patents. That's something few are willing to pay enough attention to see this critical mission through. Instead, off the cuff "prior art" posts fly.
end-rant
I've used my nokia 9600 with no problems. It's a -great- phone for a sysadmin. I rarely rave about anything, but this phone has earned it. Crackberry and email clients, no strings attached audio player, memory card slot.
There was a follow-up sold to my trusty old 9300 in the U.S. but the E90 wasn't made available in the U.S. That's a pity because I would have been the first on my block with one.
It looks like the way to go in the U.S. may be a usb dongle and a PDA-like device instead of a phone.
Technically? Depends on how much of the intellectual property is recognized by American courts. WIPO is supposed to be the global venue for patents.
Practically? No chance in hell. Even if they aren't laughed out of court, a little retroactive immunity legislation will fix that.
FYI, the American banking industry kneecaps patent holders that make it through the courts with retroactive immunity clauses with startling frequency. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021303731_pf.html
If only americans took an interest in their government. Most of it is too good/bad to be true.
privacy should not be conceived as absolute control over personal information, but rather as protection from harms accruing from the use or disclosure of information.
Very elegant phrase that simultaneously defines the elite groupthink for the last 20+ years. Noted principals underlying this type of thinking.
-Your personal information is not yours.
-Others can (and do) do whatever they like with the evidence of your legal, financial, economic and social activities.
-Of course we mean you no harm when collecting, storing and reselling the evidence of your activities. But that doesn't mean there's any liability assumed in our activities.
It should explain the ease and speed with which the NSA/telco domestic surveilance program was established. With that kind of groupthink, it stands to reason it is the tip of an iceberg. Probably meaningless to most because they don't see the environment this kind of permissive groupthink inspires in their government.
It's ironic and sad that 'HaHa' and 'stupid' form the basis of all the comments so far.
1. There's no interest in more transparency on the whole process of identity authentication and credit/finance scoring. None!
2. The groupthink on this hasn't changed one bit. In most cases, "It sucks to be you." In this case, I'd call it clever Marketing that's only making him richer.
The debt situation and the recession aren't related as much as you may want to believe.
No one is going to jail. Mere mortals are already paying for their mistakes through paying more for everything.
They won't go after some low-profile wonk. The French bank with billions of losses from a couple of months ago is trying the same thing. It's not plausible.
This is very quickly how the scam works:
The way bond agencies survive is by acquiring new business. Let's say a utility issues a bond for a new water project. They shop the issuance around. Highest rating gets the business. The higher rating means (roughly) less "insurance" they have to carry and the more they can use free cash to do other things.
The bond agencies are as "financialized" as a low-end broker sweat shop. No one seemed to care when the money was flowing. It's easy to take shots after the fact.
Few people follow the Fed's TAF's and its junk-filled balance sheet. It's worse than the credit agencies situation. Who knows if that will ever blow up like the credit markets.
How long does that "patent non-assertion" protection racket last? More to the point, WHAT patents have been violated?
What will the license be like? Let's ignore for a moment the argument about the enforceability of eula's.
Do you have any idea how much that would cost in legal fees? Antivirus Company XYZ gets a cease and desist from Microsoft with the bottom line being a $50,000/yr payout + units sold data to microsoft. Yes, sales data is part of the discovery to calculate damages. What better way to find out how big their business actually is?
From a business perspective, that $50,000/yr is a heck of a lot less than going to court. It is a shakedown. A totally legal protection racket. Which is why software patents should simply die.
Look at the Crackberry fiasco. RIM knew the patent litigation was a scam and couldn't get the patents invalidated fast enough before incurring HUGE legal expenses. At some point it became a super-priority most likely because politician's & policy wonks lives would be negatively affected by their Crackberry's being shut off.
Shuttleworth's idea is designed to further Ubuntu at the expense of the projects packaged therein. Specifically, he's trying to shift quite a bit of the release work onto the projects he packages.
Aaron's post is a must-read for anyone vaguely interested in the topic. In particular,
It is not overly dramatic to say that if we make Free software development overly sterile via choice of process, there will be a commensurate diminishment in participation and momentum. I interpret that as Aaron recognizing the corrosive effect on the entire dev community by adopting Shuttleworth's scheme.
Better still, Aaron offers constructive alternatives. It's really nice to read and should be a template for most blogging.
Someone please explain why Shuttleworth's idea hasn't been swatted down the day he posted it.
Today's lesson: Learn to disagree without personal attacks and offer viable alternatives.
The mac market share isn't 4%. That's a dumb number that's used to make Windows appear much more dominant.
/. for a legitimate discussion about anti-trust.
Compare Dell's unit sales to HP's unit sales to Apple's unit sales for a given segment and you'll find Apple in the top-5 for sure on any given month. In laptops, Apple is #1 per unit and dollar and has been for a really, really long time.
Still, I doubt there's the expertise on
your opinion for many reasons.
1. If he and many others didn't try then I have a feeling Linux would be perceptually relegated to Hurd status or lower still.
2. Yeah, I'd like another window manager. I'd like four entirely new and different WM's.
3. I'd like iceweasel to run in console, so sure another version of iceweasel would be fabulous.
The more important question is what exactly is bad about so many choices? Do you understand the danger just a couple of operating system choices creates?
Really, it is.
...rom a story co-written by executive producer George Lucas..... Screenwriters Jeb Stuart, Jeffrey Boam, M. Night Shyamalan, Frank Darabont and Jeff Nathanson wrote drafts, before David Koepp's script satisfied all three men.
The wikipedia reference spells it out.
-The film was in development hell since the 1989 release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because Spielberg and Ford initially disagreed over Lucas's choice of the skull as the plot device.
You've got an actor with creative input into the movie plot. Very rarely does that ever work. Yes, the actors have input, it is most successful when it's improv within the filming of the movie.
-
Multiple treatments of the same premise, few of which actually materialize. This suggests the amount of vetting, oversized-personalities, and plain old stupidity was committee-style approval hell.
There's absolutely nothing reasonable about Shuttleworth's request.
1. It's a Trojan Horse to legitimize Shuttleworth's business prospects. Simultaneously he'll out-shout Debian and give him a platform with which to more easily compete with Novell. Given Novell's history of mismanagement, I'd say they are helping him already.
2. There will be _lots_ of ubuntu users ready to mod me down for comment #1. Let's entertain the notion that I am completely misguided and I fall in line with the Ubuntu groupthink. What exactly would be accomplished? Nothing. Ubuntu already forks from Debian early on and as far as I can tell, never the twain shall meet.
3. Debian still releases when ready. Ubuntu releases on a calendar, warts and all. Imagine if the Debian community fell under Shuttleworth's and changes to a firm "ready or not" release schedule. It would slowly turn the Debian project into Shuttleworth's fiefdom rotting it from the inside.
Sprint Nextel, Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner and Clearwire.
I give the probability of fair pricing to the consumer coming out at 2%.
I give the probability of anything actually getting built beyond a pilot in the next 10 years at 5%.
I give the probability that these jokers can actually work together at 2%.
I see where you are going and in principal I agree. The problem is the consequences of rape and other unspeakably inappropriate sexual behavior generally play out over a lifetime and _generally_ speaking lead to more inappropriate sexual behavior at an early age to more children.
It very quickly turns into a "grand scale" social problem due to geometric growth of inappropriate behavior.
Again, I generally agree with the principal of what you are saying, but it's very important to point out the deeply corrosive effect inappropriate sexual anything has in a society.
Yes, there are mobile phone games, but how big an industry are we talking about?
Think waaay back before they launched the ipod. There were LOTS of mp3 player brands and Apple can control the entire value chain.
In the mobile phone space, they've got the service provider standing in the way ready to put the squeeze on Apple when they start doing well.
because I don't work in this area, but I think a simpler explanation for the crazy hodge-podge of IP's on the map is dynamic IP's being given to a few infected PC's.
How can one say with confidence that the design is purposeful?
only the XP-based machine will be sold at mass-market retailers
There is no crime there! The retailer's job is to offer what the consumer wants with no regard about the wisdom of their choices. When Shuttleworth has enough money to advertise Linux everywhere like IBM did, then the retailer might go for it. Furthermore, the retailer specs the machines far more than the average consumer may comprehend.
While it's interesting to see that they are going cheap on storage to get the price point, it shows that Asus is still getting screwed by Microsoft. You can calculate the spread if you guestimate the OEM in quantity costs of the two drives.
1. Microsoft probably can and will figure out a way to eventually stack the board of in directors in their favor at Yahoo. Microsoft has time, Yahoo doesn't.
2. Google is keeping their enemies closer at this point. This is basically a white-knight move on Google's part to keep Microsoft out of their space at all costs. The question to Google is how long will it be until this kind of action starts affecting their bottom line numbers.
In a very heartless way, I'm all for the Microsoft->Yahoo acquisition. Most acquisitions fail to generate anything near the claims management makes. Microsoft would simply leave the door open for ex-Yahoo employees to startup things that would be a bigger thorn in Microsoft's side.
Death by thousands of thorns if you will pardon the pun.
I'm always happy to see stories like this. There are huge gaps in entertainment for low dev costs and this is how you make them fly.
-No, your games aren't going to be in WorstBuy anytime soon.
-No, your games aren't going to get any attention whatsoever from the media.
-No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour.
-No, you won't attract VC to grow your business.
-Yes, you will have some loyal consumers. Make your games multilingual (i18?) and you'll have many.
-Yes, you can build a very successful enterprise.
In all cases that's the way doing something original works. I wish more young Americans had this kind of attitude and perserverance.
I just hope they are smart enough to keep going on their own instead of using it as a resume builder.
CEO does not go about spending that kind of money without the approval of major stockholders.
Let's review the chain of command: CEO reports to the Board of Directors. Nowhere in there is your vanilla NASDAQ stock holder.
Now, in theory this should work, but in practice, the CEO normally votes people onto the board of directors. So, you have your buddies on the board "managing" the CEO where after the boring corporate procedures are over, everyone parties. So, it's quite reasonable to assume Ballmer comes up with a crackpot scheme to acquire yahoo and waste everyone's time on it and the BOD be quite satisfied with his managerial acumen.
It's also a complete fallacy that shares outstanding somehow means these share holders can exert some influence. That's a lesson for another day...
I can tell you why Indiana is *not* called opensolaris. It seems Sun wouldn't allow it.
Which, I think is pretty emblematic of Sun's consistently inconsistent behavior regarding their "community" OS.
It looks like they want the free dev resources AND total control, right down to naming. Which, adds up to a project that doesn't seem viable to me. Maybe I'm wrong though.
These kinds of articles harm practically everyone. They eliminate variety and here's how.
1. Focusing on a couple of winners. In Ubuntu's case they've got PR hucksters doing the shouting for them
2. Eliminating new features. These shootouts leave no room for testing new features, programs, etc. It's yay or nay and the nay's always win when something is -really- new.
3. There are a number of "What about distro X, Y or Z?" comments and they are, for the most part legitimate questions. Most of those non-chosen distros simply haven't made a good enough impression in media circles. Those aforementioned "good impressions" usually cost some money.
4. Eliminating new distros. There are -lots- of other linux distros who's first purpose is _not_ a desktop. The problem I'm pointing out is multifaceted and troubling. To boil it down: "Everyone knows that Linux is that other computer system they buy for less and put their stolen XP OS on."
My 2 cents: Debian Testing -still- manages to be completely ignored when it's a good apples-to-apples comparison to whatever new version Ubuntu puts out.
Can you imagine if the US government was in full control of all telecommunications?
They learned long ago they don't need "full control" They learned where the choke points are and gather information there.
Legislators do nothing simply because it's not a high enough priority for the telcos. Right now the telcos are preparing to decimate cable/satellite and rid themselves of their public obligations (POTS) altogether.