ah, the good old days. before Stalin rose to power, destroyed communism, sold its soul to capitalism, power, and ambition, hunted down all the Trotskyites, demonized their ideas, and his and that fool Mao's pseudo-Communism stalled progress for half the world for a few decades, with some of it still going.
go watch the movie referenced above. they've basically already tried that.
the movie's also really funny in its own right. i'm particularly a fan of the guy who, when swerving wildly on the road to run over the toads in his bus, much prefers to hit them head-on since - and i can't make this stuff up - it makes a more satisfying popping sound.
this is modded funny, and from the tone i think that's what your intent was... but really, i think it should be modded insightful. this is exactly what i want. all i really want from my mobile provider is a fat data pipe - say, EVDO for starters, which i can get in much of the US today (an i've already got it, in fact) - and a decent programmable device (they're getting there quickly). forget minutes, forget 10/SMS. give me a fat pipe, and get out of my way.
in a way, using Verizon's EVDO service and a PCMCIA card in my Mac, i already have this. iChat A/V, Safari, iTunes... all things the operators would love to charge me by the minute or megabyte for. but instead, they get my $60/month, and that's it. no cut of transactions, no increased ARPU.
and let me tell you: this scares the crap out of the operators.
i think i'm one of those users you're talking about:
about a week ago, a friend of mine were wandering around and needed to kill half an hour before we could go home. we wandered into a blockbuster, spent half an hour roaming around the store making fun of the crap they stock (a whole shelf worth of Aliens knock-offs and a row of B-or-worse vampire movies) and bemoaning the lack of real selection, especially in Sci-Fi, anime, and television series. by the time we'd left, we'd made use of their heat on a rainy evening for half an hour, bought or rented nothing, and convinced two other patrons to go join Netflix. i consider that a productive evening.
While I am all for innovation, there is also a question of blowing the wad too soon.
this presumes that innovation is a limited commodity; this is a false assumption. in fact, for the right people, i think it's actually quite the opposite - innovation feeds on innovation.
and customers aren't getting "burned". when a new product comes out, your existing one doesn't drop features, doesn't stop working, doesn't become any less useful or enjoyable than it was before the new launch. it's arguably not as "cool", because it's not the latest and greatest thing, but that's more an artifact of being a fashonista who buys technology for bragging rights or to compensate for certain anatomical traits than the actual technology in question.
I worked at Apple in the early 90s and, given the amount of really dim or useless people we had there, we had really GREAT products.
that was before NeXT bought them for -$400M. all the really smart people are back in place, and now they've got simply killer products.
i worked at Bell Labs from the mid-90s through about the turn of the millennium. there might not have been a denser concentration of brilliant people on the planet; certainly not a larger grouping. but they consistently managed to botch one astounding project after another. next-gen telephone switches, operating systems, real consumer-grade computers the size of Apple's AirPort Express... and those are just a few that were actually in product phase. much of the stuff that was still in research would still be groundbreaking if it hit market today. they just had a string of mis-management. i'm hopeful that Jeong can turn things around.
initially, fundamentally, they didn't learn enough from the past, or at least not all of it. they learned from Mac OS, and some from Win32, but seemed to learn almost nothing from Unix or its descendants, which had a much richer history to learn from. i think the most important failure in the design was that they didn't do anything new or interesting with networking; actually, it was very Win32-like. they didn't take multi-user or security issues seriously in the initial design, and tried to add them in later. and as they went on, they were seriously hindered by a shifting vision of who they were ("it's a media OS! no, it's a desktop OS! no, it's an embedded OS!).
there were some very strong positive points - thread model in the kernel and a really good file system, for example - but as a system, i think it was a loss.
well, i guess i'll just say that my experience differed significantly. it was certainly better than the contemporary mainstream competitors, but not by an order of magnitude, and there were other research systems that could match it on responsiveness (although, to be fair, none that i'm aware of also had such strong multimedia capabilities).
i should see about reproducing that multiple-videos-on-a-spinning-cube demo. that was slick.
possibly. it's not clear how far down the line these "offers" got. we know the right people (that is, sufficiently important people) were involved in the conversations, but not whether the price-setting was a final barrier or an up-front discussion. these deals work both ways. personally, having used NeXT once or twice and BeOS quite extensively, i'm very glad it went the way it did. BeOS was nice, had lots of great ideas and a few of them actually implemented, but they got so many things wrong it's astounding. they also just never got to the level of maturity that would make them generally useful. Apple would have had to put in a ton more work, and without the brains they acquired from NeXT, i don't see that ever having happened (they did, after all, botch several of their earlier attempts at "next-gen" OSs).
It is very similar to business calls. You can pay extra so that your calls never drop on a network as a business.
ah, but they already have that too! business users pay extra to get a SLA and higher level of service; just compare prices for home and office SDSL lines for an accessible example. just like paying AT&T for business service doesn't carry that guarantee through to Verizon customers, there's no reason to expect my SDSL service to do so. what would make sense is if the networks were talking about passing QoS information between networks and honoring other people's QoS information, for a fee, and passing that fee, with mark-up, to the customer. that would be a real benefit. but they don't do that, and that's not what they're talking about. they want Google to pay them for what they're already doing right now, or they'll degrade the service.
aside from the fact that Palm doesn't own PalmOS or BeOS any more, what the heck would Apple want with BeOS? Apple specifically went with NeXT instead because it was a more mature, developed technology. BeOS was pretty slick when compared with the Mac OS and Win32 systems of the time, but it's been stagnant for most of this century. i used BeOS for a long time, on three platforms, and there's nothing i miss from it now.
Essentially, in POTS terms, they want both the caller and the callee to pay for the same conversation.
no, it's worse than that. what you've described is what they want you to think. in reality, they're (collectively) already getting that; i pay for bandwidth, Google pays for bandwidth. done, right? no - the old telcos want a cut of any value derived from the conversation. so, to correct your analogy, in POTS terms, they want both the caller and the callee to pay and they want a commission on any value either side derives from that call.
Brown, of course, wouldn't have been caught by the type of check the parent was suggesting, because he never lied about his credentials - Bush just gave him the job anyway. i believe that's the more general case with Bush's cronyism. this won't fix that.
no, it's not. you don't understand science. heliocentrism is testable, measurable, and observable. we've shot probes out from earth which have confirmed this. we've sent humans onto other orbiting masses or out into space who can see it first-hand. the big bang, by contrast, has lots of evidence and measurements that point to it, but the bang itself is long past.
eh. why? this is one guy; that does not establish any sort of trend. besides, if some NASA data processor who's been sitting at a desk doing his job quite well for the past 20 years lied about some degree or certification two decades ago, is it really that big a deal? sure, it's certainly wrong, and if found out he should be punished, but we don't really need a witch hunt here. i think it's a better use of everyone's resources to just examine the problem cases.
you're correct on both counts: it's a real legal risk, but it's also trivial to get around. he could easily craft a zero-cost licensing agreement with usage restrictions. then he could go after people who don't sign up for trademark infringement, and breach of contract for any who misrepresent their activities.
... the idea that a major breakthrouh should provide enough income for some large fraction of the inventors lifetime seems to me to be something that should not be lost.
ah, but that's never been the idea! at least in the US (in many other jurisdictions, too, but i can't provide exact references and wording), patents exist explicitly to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as per the Constitution of the United States, Article I Section 8. granting monopolies on inventions for a limited time is a useful way to hit that goal, but should only be employed to the extent that it remains useful to that goal. patents (like copyright, but that's a separate discussion with other issues involved) shouldn't be judged relative to the inventor's lifetime, but rather to when an equivalent "invention" would have come around. as the rate of innovation increases, this length of time decreases; thus, patent terms should decrease correspondingly.
this is not a definition i'm making up, it's the one from the Constitution. it's been restated in US laws and explicitly upheld by the Supreme Court repeatedly (although not uniformly).
that's a defeatist attitude. which wouldn't be a problem in itself, i guess, but i think it also happens to not be true. there's a very large number of very large companies (think Microsoft) that are calling for patent reform. they're not all saying the same thing at the moment, but it's at least obvious that not everyone the government listens to thinks the situation's fine and dandy.
the single biggest problem with patents in my mind is that the term has not been adjusted to keep up with the changing rate of innovation. that is, 17 years on a patent (adjusted about a decade ago to 20 years) was fine 200 years ago when we were talking about new ways to make steam trains climb mountains, but is grossly inappropriate today. patent lifetime should be, at absolute greatest, 5 years from issuance of patent; i'd say 2-3. along with that is the problem that it's not really appropriate any more to enforce one length for all patents. even just in "computers", for example, 5 years sounds about right for new technologies in chip manufacture, but is an eternity in software design. separate from this but related on several points is the fact that the current patent process is not transparent. that is, i can submit a patent that you have no way of knowing about - and thus knowing you're infringing - for up to a few years. that's plenty of time to build an entire business today. ideally, patents should be visible from date of filing. i'd also agree with the common complaint on patents on mathematics, on the principle that they are naturally occurring phenomenon, not true inventions. this eliminates a good number of software patents but still leaves room for truly novel activities. having to choose all or none, i'd back the "no software patents" position, because doing real evaluations of that class of patents is hard and costly, and it's worse for innovation - at least today, if not always - to grant too many than too few.
the most important thing people need to remember, and most of the involved government seems to have forgotten, is what the point of patents are. the constitution is often silent on intent; this is one of the few cases where it actually tells us why it's doing what it's doing. patents exist explicitly to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". honestly, i think we need somebody with lots of free time and discretionary income to make a big fuss about this. i believe the current PTO policies are unconstitutional and violate existing Supreme Court findings (see, for example, Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, which excluded patents on "laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas").
for point of reference, one of my current responsibilities is working on our company's IP portfolio. i'm quite familiar with the current rules. they're stupid, but in order to remain competitive companies are often forced (by the market, not legally) to play by them. it's unrealistic to expect companies (or individual filers) to simply "do the right thing" with regard to what they're filing, or even to have any idea how to evaluate that.
We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God.
Torvalds might not be; Stallman clearly is.
i'm not Torvald's biggest fan. i don't think he's a particularly good architect or designer, he's abusive and abrasive in conversations, is impressively adverse to accepting the idea that somebody - anybody - might know better than him about something, blah blah blah. but the fact remains that where Stallman is an ideologue and fanatic, Torvalds is a pragmatist. Stallman talks a better game, but Torvalds actually gets stuff done. my comments on the quality of the output should not be read as a knock on his ability to drive an impressively-sized project.
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ah, the good old days. before Stalin rose to power, destroyed communism, sold its soul to capitalism, power, and ambition, hunted down all the Trotskyites, demonized their ideas, and his and that fool Mao's pseudo-Communism stalled progress for half the world for a few decades, with some of it still going.
go watch the movie referenced above. they've basically already tried that.
the movie's also really funny in its own right. i'm particularly a fan of the guy who, when swerving wildly on the road to run over the toads in his bus, much prefers to hit them head-on since - and i can't make this stuff up - it makes a more satisfying popping sound.
this is modded funny, and from the tone i think that's what your intent was... but really, i think it should be modded insightful. this is exactly what i want. all i really want from my mobile provider is a fat data pipe - say, EVDO for starters, which i can get in much of the US today (an i've already got it, in fact) - and a decent programmable device (they're getting there quickly). forget minutes, forget 10/SMS. give me a fat pipe, and get out of my way.
in a way, using Verizon's EVDO service and a PCMCIA card in my Mac, i already have this. iChat A/V, Safari, iTunes... all things the operators would love to charge me by the minute or megabyte for. but instead, they get my $60/month, and that's it. no cut of transactions, no increased ARPU.
and let me tell you: this scares the crap out of the operators.
i think i'm one of those users you're talking about:
about a week ago, a friend of mine were wandering around and needed to kill half an hour before we could go home. we wandered into a blockbuster, spent half an hour roaming around the store making fun of the crap they stock (a whole shelf worth of Aliens knock-offs and a row of B-or-worse vampire movies) and bemoaning the lack of real selection, especially in Sci-Fi, anime, and television series. by the time we'd left, we'd made use of their heat on a rainy evening for half an hour, bought or rented nothing, and convinced two other patrons to go join Netflix. i consider that a productive evening.
and customers aren't getting "burned". when a new product comes out, your existing one doesn't drop features, doesn't stop working, doesn't become any less useful or enjoyable than it was before the new launch. it's arguably not as "cool", because it's not the latest and greatest thing, but that's more an artifact of being a fashonista who buys technology for bragging rights or to compensate for certain anatomical traits than the actual technology in question.
stop buying technology as fashion.
i worked at Bell Labs from the mid-90s through about the turn of the millennium. there might not have been a denser concentration of brilliant people on the planet; certainly not a larger grouping. but they consistently managed to botch one astounding project after another. next-gen telephone switches, operating systems, real consumer-grade computers the size of Apple's AirPort Express... and those are just a few that were actually in product phase. much of the stuff that was still in research would still be groundbreaking if it hit market today. they just had a string of mis-management. i'm hopeful that Jeong can turn things around.
i stand corrected; thanks.
initially, fundamentally, they didn't learn enough from the past, or at least not all of it. they learned from Mac OS, and some from Win32, but seemed to learn almost nothing from Unix or its descendants, which had a much richer history to learn from. i think the most important failure in the design was that they didn't do anything new or interesting with networking; actually, it was very Win32-like. they didn't take multi-user or security issues seriously in the initial design, and tried to add them in later. and as they went on, they were seriously hindered by a shifting vision of who they were ("it's a media OS! no, it's a desktop OS! no, it's an embedded OS!).
there were some very strong positive points - thread model in the kernel and a really good file system, for example - but as a system, i think it was a loss.
well, i guess i'll just say that my experience differed significantly. it was certainly better than the contemporary mainstream competitors, but not by an order of magnitude, and there were other research systems that could match it on responsiveness (although, to be fair, none that i'm aware of also had such strong multimedia capabilities).
i should see about reproducing that multiple-videos-on-a-spinning-cube demo. that was slick.
possibly. it's not clear how far down the line these "offers" got. we know the right people (that is, sufficiently important people) were involved in the conversations, but not whether the price-setting was a final barrier or an up-front discussion. these deals work both ways. personally, having used NeXT once or twice and BeOS quite extensively, i'm very glad it went the way it did. BeOS was nice, had lots of great ideas and a few of them actually implemented, but they got so many things wrong it's astounding. they also just never got to the level of maturity that would make them generally useful. Apple would have had to put in a ton more work, and without the brains they acquired from NeXT, i don't see that ever having happened (they did, after all, botch several of their earlier attempts at "next-gen" OSs).
bah. i don't lie about my credentials: i don't have any.
still, if i had mod points, i'd mod you funny.
aside from the fact that Palm doesn't own PalmOS or BeOS any more, what the heck would Apple want with BeOS? Apple specifically went with NeXT instead because it was a more mature, developed technology. BeOS was pretty slick when compared with the Mac OS and Win32 systems of the time, but it's been stagnant for most of this century. i used BeOS for a long time, on three platforms, and there's nothing i miss from it now.
Brown, of course, wouldn't have been caught by the type of check the parent was suggesting, because he never lied about his credentials - Bush just gave him the job anyway. i believe that's the more general case with Bush's cronyism. this won't fix that.
no, it's not.
you don't understand science. heliocentrism is testable, measurable, and observable. we've shot probes out from earth which have confirmed this. we've sent humans onto other orbiting masses or out into space who can see it first-hand. the big bang, by contrast, has lots of evidence and measurements that point to it, but the bang itself is long past.
eh. why? this is one guy; that does not establish any sort of trend. besides, if some NASA data processor who's been sitting at a desk doing his job quite well for the past 20 years lied about some degree or certification two decades ago, is it really that big a deal? sure, it's certainly wrong, and if found out he should be punished, but we don't really need a witch hunt here. i think it's a better use of everyone's resources to just examine the problem cases.
i hereby mod you "-1: Don't Give Them Any Ideas".
you're correct on both counts: it's a real legal risk, but it's also trivial to get around. he could easily craft a zero-cost licensing agreement with usage restrictions. then he could go after people who don't sign up for trademark infringement, and breach of contract for any who misrepresent their activities.
this is not a definition i'm making up, it's the one from the Constitution. it's been restated in US laws and explicitly upheld by the Supreme Court repeatedly (although not uniformly).
that's a defeatist attitude. which wouldn't be a problem in itself, i guess, but i think it also happens to not be true. there's a very large number of very large companies (think Microsoft) that are calling for patent reform. they're not all saying the same thing at the moment, but it's at least obvious that not everyone the government listens to thinks the situation's fine and dandy.
the single biggest problem with patents in my mind is that the term has not been adjusted to keep up with the changing rate of innovation. that is, 17 years on a patent (adjusted about a decade ago to 20 years) was fine 200 years ago when we were talking about new ways to make steam trains climb mountains, but is grossly inappropriate today. patent lifetime should be, at absolute greatest, 5 years from issuance of patent; i'd say 2-3.
along with that is the problem that it's not really appropriate any more to enforce one length for all patents. even just in "computers", for example, 5 years sounds about right for new technologies in chip manufacture, but is an eternity in software design.
separate from this but related on several points is the fact that the current patent process is not transparent. that is, i can submit a patent that you have no way of knowing about - and thus knowing you're infringing - for up to a few years. that's plenty of time to build an entire business today. ideally, patents should be visible from date of filing.
i'd also agree with the common complaint on patents on mathematics, on the principle that they are naturally occurring phenomenon, not true inventions. this eliminates a good number of software patents but still leaves room for truly novel activities. having to choose all or none, i'd back the "no software patents" position, because doing real evaluations of that class of patents is hard and costly, and it's worse for innovation - at least today, if not always - to grant too many than too few.
the most important thing people need to remember, and most of the involved government seems to have forgotten, is what the point of patents are. the constitution is often silent on intent; this is one of the few cases where it actually tells us why it's doing what it's doing. patents exist explicitly to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".
honestly, i think we need somebody with lots of free time and discretionary income to make a big fuss about this. i believe the current PTO policies are unconstitutional and violate existing Supreme Court findings (see, for example, Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, which excluded patents on "laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas").
for point of reference, one of my current responsibilities is working on our company's IP portfolio. i'm quite familiar with the current rules. they're stupid, but in order to remain competitive companies are often forced (by the market, not legally) to play by them. it's unrealistic to expect companies (or individual filers) to simply "do the right thing" with regard to what they're filing, or even to have any idea how to evaluate that.
when can i move?
is immigration invitation-only? c'mon... i'll trade a free iPod offer reference for a gNation invite!
i'm not Torvald's biggest fan. i don't think he's a particularly good architect or designer, he's abusive and abrasive in conversations, is impressively adverse to accepting the idea that somebody - anybody - might know better than him about something, blah blah blah. but the fact remains that where Stallman is an ideologue and fanatic, Torvalds is a pragmatist. Stallman talks a better game, but Torvalds actually gets stuff done. my comments on the quality of the output should not be read as a knock on his ability to drive an impressively-sized project.