This story is really about the invidious patenting of ideas rather than actual inventions. Such patenting of software processes is not about protecting intellectual property or a partuclar working design of some new gizmo.
The entire point of software patents like this is to stifle innovation by preventing anybody, including Microsoft, from reverse engineering the process by any means. That's not patenting because you have a product on the market that you're trying to protect, it's a form of intellectual highway robbery by digging a big hole in the road and then charging people to cross the hole using the one bridge and the police preventing people from going around the hole.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, I feel no sympathy. Microsoft has aggressively tried to corner and stifle competition by collecting as many of these software or business process patents as it can. Now it gets bitten by somebody else doing the same thing. "He who lives by the software patent also get shafted by the software patent"
Microsoft should be like Earl: call it "karma" and seek to redress people for what it has done. But first, Bill Gates needs to get caught in a hit-and-run accident while holding a winning scratch card.
Unless there is urgent action to void these "business process through software" patents, then it will be the rest of the world, China, India and especially Europe which will benefit from innovation and not the US. In America, software patents are causing the pace of innovation to slow while costing eveybody more money, and jamming up the Patent system with these mendatious patent claims.
...but that just makes them an acquisition target. I'm still not sure that Novell's shareholders won't get together and fire the board (Jack Messman and all) before an acquiring vehicle (and it could be a VC-led consortium) does it anyway.
It takes real genius to fail to meet the market in the way Novell has, but Novell has so many failed strategies, failed relaunches, failed products that never quite delivered, that it amounts to a sort of genius.
It has too many consultants, but more importantly far too many managerial layers to ever be nimble. Novell corporately is sclerotic, and its upper management is utterly remote from the cutting edge.
SuSE wasn't making money before the acquisition, and SuSE Linux needs more corporate sponsors.
Perhaps Google should buy SuSE Linux - I'm sure Eric Schmidt would like the irony.
Did I miss something here? Is Novell's contract under attack because they didn't specify Slackware? Gentoo? Minix? Are we too far gone to realise that there are no feasible alternatives to ZenWorks and that eDirectory is rock solid and reliable?
It's good news for Novell that they won this contract. Jeebus knows that they need the money.
It has great products, but a lousy, overbureaucratized management structure with lots and lots of layers of people whose sole functions are to shaft the people below them and survive the next purge by the people above. This makes for a fanatically strong political system, with lots and lots of people looking over their shoulders instead of looking forward.
It is also centrally managed, Soviet-style, complete with multi-year plans and targets and Novell employees are regularly gathered together to compliment their leader for the overperformance on this meaningless metric, and the achievement of "difficult" targets in the teeth of a bitter competitive wind. As is usual in command enterprises, everywhere else other than Provo is treated as a satellite state. Only from Provo do all the ideas come, so if you're bright and have a great idea and don't work in Provo, don't bother telling anyone about it because they don't want to know. And if you persist they'll park you in a shitty job until you get the message and leave. Lots did.
There should be a sign on all offices "Abandon initiative all ye who enter here". They have lots of meetings whose purpose is to crush all ideas from below and praise the crappy ones from above. Rebranding, corporate restructuring, departmental changes, layering, delayering, change management etc are regular 3-6 month occurences. During my five years there, I moved desks 16 times. Eventually you don't bother emptying boxes into your drawers because you know that another org change is just around the corner. The people adminsitering these changes never moved. It was uncanny.
Initiatives come thick and fast from above and your only choices are to keep your mouth shut or be drowned in the slurry. At one time, everyone in Novell went through the Kepner-Trego rational decision making course, complete with little cards and posters on the wall and papers for people to do rational decisions on. The only problem with that, is in order for rational decision making, there must be rational decision makers, which in Novell is a joke. One month after the course nobody mentioned, let alone used, Kepner-Trego again.
Then Novell merged with Cambridge Consulting (or was it Cambridge Consulting reversed into Novell?) Cambridge weren't doing very well. Novell weren't doing very well - the result would be a world-beater? Like to guess?
Cambridge added a lot more consultants that Novell didn't need. In order to employ those extra consultants, Novell did the most obvious thing: it screwed its partners. So the partners who had done such sterling work promoting the Novell brand found that Novell itself was competing for those same customers to order to employ those extra consultants that Novell didn't need.
With all of this could Novell make a profit through its Consulting arm? No. It charged twice as much and still managed to lose money because most of the time, it pitched for delivery times that were too short and had to use up all of the profit and then some to pay its consultants past the end date in order to deliver at all. Thus Novell managed to screw its partners and fail to make a profit. The perfect result for its competitors. One customer I consulted for that after their experience, they would never use Novell Consulting again (this was one of the largest privately-held companies on the planet).
Novell joined the Linux field too late and bought the wrong company (should have been Red Hat). It bought SilverStream for too much money. It's been behind the curve for lots of new products too often.
It's testing and quality of software are terrible. More often than not, products would be shipped with key pieces of functionality missing pending the first or second service pack. The software would work, but you had to wait to be able to deploy it meaningfully.
Novell should be bought by somebody who knows how to run an enterprise for profit. Instead its run by people who know only how to cover their own asses and rule by fear. I guarantee you, any turnaround specialist would perform a decapitation of Novell's byzantine management structure to stand any chance.
Netware 4.0, 4.01 and 4.02 were POS horrible things with terrible stability and NDS was as steady as Jell-o
Netware 4 was one of the main reasons people didn't upgrade from the rock-solid Netware 3.11, giving MS plenty of time to create a nice upgrade path to NT 3.51 complete with license-busting MS Netware gateways.
Only when Netware 4.1 came along did it start to get good. By then, fewer people cared, having been scarred by the experiences with the previous versions.
I've been a CNE for 12 years. But not for very much longer.
Because "Great" Britain won't do anything by itself any more. The entire policy of the government is based on appeasement of foreign powers and containment of its own people "for their own protection against terrorism". It alternately fears and fawns up to any large political power and its people hate the government because of it - but there's no point changing the ruling party, because the alternatives would behave the same way.
Up until a few months ago, Britain had its own rocket technology. But it chose not to bother with it lest it inadvertently offended anyone by having its own space program.
Go figure.
Why is it good? Because if Microsoft starts producing better code and better product, it raises the bar for Open Source as well, leading to better code from everybody and the consumer wins.
If Microsoft learns how to build security into Windows as Linux does and Linux learns how to install/uninstall applications as easily as Windows, then everybody gets happy.
I have SuSE Linux 9.3 with the latest patches and latest (beta) version of Open Office. It fell over in a big heap every time I tried to save a document that contained graphics. Then it lost eight hours of my work that I was trying to finish before going on vacation. At that point I reeeeaaaalllly missed having MS Word. Maybe CrossoverOffice would be a good next purchase.
I submitted this same story on June 28th and it was rejected. Why did we have to wait for the Washington Times to notice it?
Now nearly a full month later, Slashdot gets to hear about it.
For those interested, the meat of the story can be found on Steve McIntyre's weblog where you can find Steve is patiently going through the code and finding that Mann Bradley and Hughes have not told the truth about their paper.
Cmdr Taco - I recommend a new slogan:
"Slashdot - Old news for nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter anymore"
It sounds like yet another way that, with dual-core processors being released and memory being supplied in gigabytes, Microsoft produces yet another operating system that slows the whole shebang down to a crawl with all the extra features that people desperately "need".
Oh and putting virtualization into a monopoly OS at no cost clearly precludes competition and is clearly an antitrust case in the making. No doubt about it, this would be Netscape/IE all over again.
Nobody has said the magic word "vaporware" yet. None of this is real and yet it affects the software market in a big way.
He lied in an affidavit about something that was not, and is not, a crime. Nor did it lead to a crime, nor cause crimes to be committed. Remember that impeachment is for "high crimes and misdemeanors", not white lies about extramarital sex.
You sir, are a doofus.
My daughter is nearly two. The idea that she might hit puberty in six or seven years is frightening. Nobody knows why they're getting to puberty so early but its frightening. The sexualization of children on TV and the media is not helping.
There are plenty of creeps trying the troll of "what's the difference between 15 yrs 364 days and 16 years" but the answer is usually "statutory rape". Lines have to be drawn somewhere and vulnerable children protected. Children are vulnerable - they may have sexual feelings (and thinking back, mine were INTENSE in my teens) but they have no clue about consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
This story is really about the invidious patenting of ideas rather than actual inventions. Such patenting of software processes is not about protecting intellectual property or a partuclar working design of some new gizmo.
The entire point of software patents like this is to stifle innovation by preventing anybody, including Microsoft, from reverse engineering the process by any means. That's not patenting because you have a product on the market that you're trying to protect, it's a form of intellectual highway robbery by digging a big hole in the road and then charging people to cross the hole using the one bridge and the police preventing people from going around the hole.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, I feel no sympathy. Microsoft has aggressively tried to corner and stifle competition by collecting as many of these software or business process patents as it can. Now it gets bitten by somebody else doing the same thing. "He who lives by the software patent also get shafted by the software patent"
Microsoft should be like Earl: call it "karma" and seek to redress people for what it has done. But first, Bill Gates needs to get caught in a hit-and-run accident while holding a winning scratch card.
Unless there is urgent action to void these "business process through software" patents, then it will be the rest of the world, China, India and especially Europe which will benefit from innovation and not the US. In America, software patents are causing the pace of innovation to slow while costing eveybody more money, and jamming up the Patent system with these mendatious patent claims.
...but that just makes them an acquisition target. I'm still not sure that Novell's shareholders won't get together and fire the board (Jack Messman and all) before an acquiring vehicle (and it could be a VC-led consortium) does it anyway.
It takes real genius to fail to meet the market in the way Novell has, but Novell has so many failed strategies, failed relaunches, failed products that never quite delivered, that it amounts to a sort of genius.
It has too many consultants, but more importantly far too many managerial layers to ever be nimble. Novell corporately is sclerotic, and its upper management is utterly remote from the cutting edge.
SuSE wasn't making money before the acquisition, and SuSE Linux needs more corporate sponsors.
Perhaps Google should buy SuSE Linux - I'm sure Eric Schmidt would like the irony.
Did I miss something here? Is Novell's contract under attack because they didn't specify Slackware? Gentoo? Minix? Are we too far gone to realise that there are no feasible alternatives to ZenWorks and that eDirectory is rock solid and reliable?
It's good news for Novell that they won this contract. Jeebus knows that they need the money.
It has great products, but a lousy, overbureaucratized management structure with lots and lots of layers of people whose sole functions are to shaft the people below them and survive the next purge by the people above. This makes for a fanatically strong political system, with lots and lots of people looking over their shoulders instead of looking forward.
/.
It is also centrally managed, Soviet-style, complete with multi-year plans and targets and Novell employees are regularly gathered together to compliment their leader for the overperformance on this meaningless metric, and the achievement of "difficult" targets in the teeth of a bitter competitive wind. As is usual in command enterprises, everywhere else other than Provo is treated as a satellite state. Only from Provo do all the ideas come, so if you're bright and have a great idea and don't work in Provo, don't bother telling anyone about it because they don't want to know. And if you persist they'll park you in a shitty job until you get the message and leave. Lots did.
There should be a sign on all offices "Abandon initiative all ye who enter here". They have lots of meetings whose purpose is to crush all ideas from below and praise the crappy ones from above. Rebranding, corporate restructuring, departmental changes, layering, delayering, change management etc are regular 3-6 month occurences. During my five years there, I moved desks 16 times. Eventually you don't bother emptying boxes into your drawers because you know that another org change is just around the corner. The people adminsitering these changes never moved. It was uncanny.
Initiatives come thick and fast from above and your only choices are to keep your mouth shut or be drowned in the slurry. At one time, everyone in Novell went through the Kepner-Trego rational decision making course, complete with little cards and posters on the wall and papers for people to do rational decisions on. The only problem with that, is in order for rational decision making, there must be rational decision makers, which in Novell is a joke. One month after the course nobody mentioned, let alone used, Kepner-Trego again.
Then Novell merged with Cambridge Consulting (or was it Cambridge Consulting reversed into Novell?) Cambridge weren't doing very well. Novell weren't doing very well - the result would be a world-beater? Like to guess?
Cambridge added a lot more consultants that Novell didn't need. In order to employ those extra consultants, Novell did the most obvious thing: it screwed its partners. So the partners who had done such sterling work promoting the Novell brand found that Novell itself was competing for those same customers to order to employ those extra consultants that Novell didn't need.
With all of this could Novell make a profit through its Consulting arm? No. It charged twice as much and still managed to lose money because most of the time, it pitched for delivery times that were too short and had to use up all of the profit and then some to pay its consultants past the end date in order to deliver at all. Thus Novell managed to screw its partners and fail to make a profit. The perfect result for its competitors. One customer I consulted for that after their experience, they would never use Novell Consulting again (this was one of the largest privately-held companies on the planet).
Novell joined the Linux field too late and bought the wrong company (should have been Red Hat). It bought SilverStream for too much money. It's been behind the curve for lots of new products too often.
It's testing and quality of software are terrible. More often than not, products would be shipped with key pieces of functionality missing pending the first or second service pack. The software would work, but you had to wait to be able to deploy it meaningfully.
Novell should be bought by somebody who knows how to run an enterprise for profit. Instead its run by people who know only how to cover their own asses and rule by fear. I guarantee you, any turnaround specialist would perform a decapitation of Novell's byzantine management structure to stand any chance.
You read it here first on
WTF are you talking about?
Netware 4.0, 4.01 and 4.02 were POS horrible things with terrible stability and NDS was as steady as Jell-o
Netware 4 was one of the main reasons people didn't upgrade from the rock-solid Netware 3.11, giving MS plenty of time to create a nice upgrade path to NT 3.51 complete with license-busting MS Netware gateways.
Only when Netware 4.1 came along did it start to get good. By then, fewer people cared, having been scarred by the experiences with the previous versions.
I've been a CNE for 12 years. But not for very much longer.
Because "Great" Britain won't do anything by itself any more. The entire policy of the government is based on appeasement of foreign powers and containment of its own people "for their own protection against terrorism". It alternately fears and fawns up to any large political power and its people hate the government because of it - but there's no point changing the ruling party, because the alternatives would behave the same way. Up until a few months ago, Britain had its own rocket technology. But it chose not to bother with it lest it inadvertently offended anyone by having its own space program. Go figure.
Of the Cherry Sage shrub family, the new plant absorbs nitrogen oxide and other substances from the air better than the original Cherry Sage.
Nitrogen oxide? Just say NO!
I would suggest "WideOpenSuSE"
Why is it good? Because if Microsoft starts producing better code and better product, it raises the bar for Open Source as well, leading to better code from everybody and the consumer wins.
If Microsoft learns how to build security into Windows as Linux does and Linux learns how to install/uninstall applications as easily as Windows, then everybody gets happy.
I have SuSE Linux 9.3 with the latest patches and latest (beta) version of Open Office. It fell over in a big heap every time I tried to save a document that contained graphics. Then it lost eight hours of my work that I was trying to finish before going on vacation. At that point I reeeeaaaalllly missed having MS Word. Maybe CrossoverOffice would be a good next purchase.
This is all mostly for a Society of navel and marine engineers contest every year.
They have engineers for navels now? Man, that's specialised!
Coming soon on National Geographic! Navel engineers investigate "The Secret of the Blue Lint"
I submitted this same story on June 28th and it was rejected. Why did we have to wait for the Washington Times to notice it?
Now nearly a full month later, Slashdot gets to hear about it.
For those interested, the meat of the story can be found on Steve McIntyre's weblog where you can find Steve is patiently going through the code and finding that Mann Bradley and Hughes have not told the truth about their paper.
Cmdr Taco - I recommend a new slogan:
"Slashdot - Old news for nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter anymore"
It's Mrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, not "Windsor", "Mountbatten", "Battenburg" to you, peasant.
Get it right and welcome to the 15th Century!
I blame global warming.
Bullshit. Check a dictionary and get back to reality.
Somebody mod this up for insightful.
Where do I buy some put options? This is a bubble waiting to burst *takes out Tub of Glee and rubs hands in it*
It sounds like yet another way that, with dual-core processors being released and memory being supplied in gigabytes, Microsoft produces yet another operating system that slows the whole shebang down to a crawl with all the extra features that people desperately "need". Oh and putting virtualization into a monopoly OS at no cost clearly precludes competition and is clearly an antitrust case in the making. No doubt about it, this would be Netscape/IE all over again. Nobody has said the magic word "vaporware" yet. None of this is real and yet it affects the software market in a big way.
He lied in an affidavit about something that was not, and is not, a crime. Nor did it lead to a crime, nor cause crimes to be committed. Remember that impeachment is for "high crimes and misdemeanors", not white lies about extramarital sex. You sir, are a doofus.
...someone who has a passion for Windows.
He's a window cleaner.
...when I say: SCREW SUB-ORBITAL FLIGHT.
If I want a quick rush I'll get on a damn roller-coaster.
Put me in orbit for a week, and bring me back safely.
Good. The climate science program is overstuffed as it is.
Ten million climate model runs doesn't equal a single empirical data point.
My daughter is nearly two. The idea that she might hit puberty in six or seven years is frightening. Nobody knows why they're getting to puberty so early but its frightening. The sexualization of children on TV and the media is not helping.
There are plenty of creeps trying the troll of "what's the difference between 15 yrs 364 days and 16 years" but the answer is usually "statutory rape". Lines have to be drawn somewhere and vulnerable children protected. Children are vulnerable - they may have sexual feelings (and thinking back, mine were INTENSE in my teens) but they have no clue about consequences.
Rock on.
...Sealand. Which is an independent monarchy just off the East Coast of the UK.
It runs as its (only) business, Havenco which is a totally anonymous secure web data center.
That would be 2001 digits (even more pedantically)
..because this one's going to be an all night soaparama.