The Web-based businesses that hit it off big never really spent a lot of time spewing the latest buzzwords.
Google doesn't run around with webpages where every other word is "AJAX" or "LAMP" or "Web 2.0" or "multi-tiered" or "grid computing". Look at this page. This thing *could* be stuffed full of the latest buzzwords. It's not. Hmm....
There are three groups of people a company needs to impress:
(a) Black-box customers. The people don't give a damn whether you're multi-tiered or have SynergisticWhizWham technology. They want to know whether your product is good and works and other than that, treat it as a black box. The only time they care about SynergisticWhizWham technology is if it's a checkbox on their purchasing requirements. And "Web 2.0" is not such a checkbox on *anyone's* purchasing requirements ("XML support", inanely enough, has made it onto a few).
(b) Engineers. You don't stuff "technology" onto the end of every word when talking to an engineer (a la "XML technology" or "Web technology") or try stuffing buzzwords in. This is because the engineer knows what you're talking about and is unimpressed with how well you can quote the latest terms that Forbes Technology editors are busy coining.
(c) Investors. Now these people *may* care about whether you're using what they percieve to be the most important emerging thingie, because some of them want to ride that technology wave, and you're trying to sell yourself as their surfboard. Not all of them, but some of them.
The problem is that if a company is clearly spending all of its time and resources appealing to (c), it probably doesn't have enough of a usable product to appeal to (a) or enough technical foundations to appeal to (b), which means that they're maybe going to get some VC funding and then promptly fall flat on their face.
Thus, buzzword-quoters are Bad News, and people to avoid.
The important thing is to use the current buzzwords. Web 2.0 is a marketing concept. The more you use important words like Web 2.0 that business rags are using, the more investor interest you can generate in Web 2.0-oriented businesses. As a matter of fact, if Web 2.0 fits into your intranet, you should have Web 2.0 there even more than you do on your Web 2.0 main servers to help in providing Web 2.0 based-services with unique Web 2.0-oriented features to assist in the task of serving customers demanding Web 2.0 features. The logical Web 2.0 extrapolation of this is that inserting "Web 2.0" in Web 2.0 as many times as Web 2.0 possible in your Web 2.0 marketing Web 2.0 literature Web 2.0 should Web 2.0 assist Web 2.0 you Web 2.0 in Web 2.0 getting Web 2.0 investment Web 2.0 capital Web 2.0 Web 2.0 Web 2.0.
Is this supposed to be a statement about corporations becoming evil over time? Because it sure as hell isn't literally true.
Google may wind up being nasty, but right now they've got more brains running around than MSFT did in its early days and they're producing consistently impressive stuff. I dunno about the rapid growth thing -- seems that if you grow really fast, you acquire a lot of assholes clinging to you on the way up -- but until they start to suck, I say enjoy.
- None of this would even be a question if the inventor hadn't patented it... the invention simply wouldn't exist!
That's a fun hypothetical situation...but there were digital radio networks a long time ago.
I keep running into that...okay, I can see this compelling situation in which some guy spends years of work to come up with something decades ahead of its time, significantly advancing the state of the art. He doesn't have the resources to develop it, so he wants to go to a big company...but without patent protection, that big company will just swipe his idea.
The *problem* is that in the real world, every time someone seems to claim that they fit into this picture, their idea is nothing special -- they just (rationally) want to take a spin on the Wheel of Fortune (since the patent system allows them to do so) and see if they can get ahold of lots of money.
There are very, very few ideas that are revolutionary. Most are evolutionary. No big jumps, just building a little bit on the stuff beforehand -- ordinary engineering work. The people doing *that* kind of work, the stuff that matters a lot more to society, are being hurt by the people who are exploiting a system designed around funding the production of revolutionary ideas.
The patents were good until RIM bought enough congressmen and lobbyists.
Frankly, I don't think that anyone should even need to drag out prior art. This sort of nonsense should not be patentable, and the fact that can even be considered as such wastes the time of engineers who could be doing more productive things and siphons resources off production of actual good stuff into having a bunch of people sit around in suits and make ridiculous legal arguments.
However, that being said, I would dearly love to hear how you think that RIM "bought the invalidity of the patents". I haven't read all the patents -- just part of the first one -- but even by the USPTO's overgenerous rules, that patent is probably not valid -- people built wireless networks that sent email before that.
By anyone with familiarity with the subject's judgement, this probably shouldn't be patentable (even if the USPTO had decided that they were). For example, look at this. Digital radio networks among hobbyists in *'76*! Before the Apple II! These ideas are not new!
*My* take is that no software patent should ever be granted. The costs of the system far outweigh the benefits.
They didn't patent such a broad idea. They did however patent stuff related to how RIM chose to deliver email (a push method instead of a poll) to its wireless device.
Go down to Claim 1. I don't see where this claim says that the information is specifically transmitted without receiving a request from the wireless device.
Besides...let's even assume that you're right.
This is basically the same thing that any system with a mail server on it with a wireless connection running to that server would do.
Fidonet, UCCP, etc were all push. It's a pretty safe bet that running it over a wireless connection was both not that groundbreaking of an idea and actually done by people (particularly UUCP).
That patent was granted August 1, 1995, and the application filed May 23, 1994.
Ricochet was already a commercial product in 1994. So, even ignoring the fact that I don't think that there's any benefit in granting patents on this stuff, the "infrastructure" certainly *was* in place. This was not an idea that nobody could or was coming up with.
He tried to bring it to market. He had a deal almost done with IBM, even demonstrated it at trade shows. His company was liquidated after the IBM deal fell threw, but was left with the patent portfolio.
"Almost done", huh?
He didn't sell it to them. IBM decided that they didn't want it. Unless you were involved in the negotiations *on IBM's side*, I don't see how you can have any idea how close they were. As it turns out, given how well Ricochet did, IBM probably was making a reasonable choice.
Several years later, RIM came on the scene and developed a workable system based on his technology.
And this is relevant to IBM how? How do you claim it is "based on his technology"? Are you claiming that RIM would not have had the 'revolutionary' idea of a wireless email device sans this guy, and that they proceeded to steal his idea?
What this guy did, if it had value (since I sure didn't see it) would have been in the device's design itself. The idea was neither groundbreaking nor unexpected.
He offered a license for $4 million.
Suppose you design, build, market, and make successful a cool gadget. Why should you hand $4M to every guy that walks up and demands money? Maybe he wanted to make a similar product in the same timeframe, okay, but he didn't.
Furthermore, at $100K a year (which, I think, is a darn good salary), and even ignoring inflation, what is being demanded is 40 years -- an entire working lifetime -- of salary. Even had RIM directly run out of one of his demos, said "Let's steal this idea" (and I don't have evidence that they didn't, but I doubt that you have evidence that they did), you're talking about nothing other than making a wireless computer access email. Does that take *forty years* of work to come up with this design?
RIM didn't even bother to respond, because they were too busy driving competitors out of the market using their own patents.
That may be true. I'm not familiar with RIM's IP background, and I'd be more than happy to see RIM not able to go after people with their patents either.
After RIM repeatedly blew him off, he got pissed and sued.
He demanded $4M, and RIM didn't bite. Okay.
RIM's lawyers were caught falsifying evidence. They still wouldn't pay the licensing. He started raising his price.
RIM's lawyers apparently put some sort of newer software on an '87 device. I have no further information on it. It may be that the outdated software was no longer available, and they just used the current version -- even though the original client could have performed the same tasks. It may have been that email couldn't be sent at *all* with that version. I don't have any knowledge about the specifics, and I doubt that you do either.
However, this is still breaking away from my point, which is that I don't think that there should be patents on this kind of thing at all. It is quite possible that RIM's lawyers conduct
Who do you think NTP is? Its the widow of a basement inventor who tinkered with radios and electronics for most of his life. The numbers got out of hand only after RIM refused to pay reasonable licensing fees of roughly $4 million.
See, here is the problem.
I haven't gone through all of the patents, but the first, for instance, is basically for a device that sends email wirelessly (possibly with the ability to dock -- not certain how to read that tidbit).
The justification for patents is that they will promote advancement in sciences and the arts.
The problem is that, as soon as a workable portable computer exists with wireless communication, it's pretty darn straightforward to, y'know, put email on a device. No engineer would have sat around for years saying "Darn, I've got this here portable computer that I'd like to send email from. Now how can I do this?"
Nor did anyone sit down and search through the USPTO database to *find* a way to solve the problem. The only time anyone searches the USPTO is if they (a) want to avoid patent mines or (b) want to lay some of their own.
So, basically, the patent-holder here is demanding a huge monopoly and millions of dollars for producing *no* advancement whatsoever. Did it take years of expensive research to come up with this idea? Certainly not (or if it did, they were very misallocated years). The patent holder doesn't really deserve any funding from society whatsoever.
The only organization that definitely had to expend money to provide something useful to society would have been the people that actually *designed* the Blackberry device. They easily made their money back, and in any event, their chips and software are protected by copyright.
Basically, software patents wind up funneling otherwise-to-be-used-for-engineering-new-systems money into the pockets of (a) lawyers and (b) patent holders. That doesn't sound like something that promotes advancement in technology at *all* to me.
Furthermore, the fact that you don't know when you might hit a patent mine means that the risk associated with engineering new tech increases, which only discourages funding for tech.
When people come in and start flaming people while saying things along the lines of "software patents are awesome, and you all suck" or "Microsoft kicks Linux butt", you just mark them Foe on Slashdot or killfile them on Usenet. Life is too short to get in flamewars when there are other people out there that post reasoned responses.
Generally, anyone calling you a "fucktard" in their posts is a pretty good candidate for ignoring.
Re:Why do people care about this guy? (serious inq
on
Woz On Apple's Success
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· Score: 5, Insightful
He's the talented engineer that singlehandledly designed and built the Apple I as well as a great deal of Apple's later technology.
He built neat stuff because he loved doing it, not because he wanted to become really wealthy or something else. He is a good example of the archetypal hacker.
He loves high-tech practical jokes.
He's credited with pushing hard for two major aspects of computers where his impact had a lasting effect on the industry -- gaming capabilities and openness. He liked playing video games, and wanted them to be affordable and available to all kinds of people. He also wanted them to be expandable and something that people could reconfigure and build new systems out of.
He's a nice, funny guy, which contrasts with Jobs:
He [Jobs] was given the task of creating a circuit board for the Atari game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 to each chip that was reduced in the machine. Unfortunately (and admittedly), Steve [Jobs] had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design. He made a deal with Stephen Wozniak: the bonus would be split evenly between them, if Woz could create a circuit board with a minimal number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50. Unfortunately he had made the design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $500 (rather than $5000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $250.
Today, Jobs is a power broker and the Woz teaches computer science to kids and encourages people to be hackers and engineers. The Woz is a geek and Jobs is a marketer -- and we all want a friendly hero to love.
He and Jobs started Apple partly with money made from selling blue boxes (devices that let people get free calls at the time) so he has a bit of appeal to the pirate folks out there as well.
Basically, The Woz is the kind of guy that we all wish we had a lot more of in society, and wish that more people would emulate. That's why people like to hang on his every word. I attended a talk he gave once, and while I didn't walk away with my life changed, you get the feeling that this is a guy who really has figured out life and how to enjoy doing what he loves.
As far as regular consumers go, this regulation is not a big deal in Japan. Many Japanese would prefer buying new hardwares/appliances to buying them used (the same goes to automotives).
I dunno. I can think of some things that people normally use for a long time that it's often worthwhile to buy used (at least in the US). Expensive food processors (KitchenAid/Cusinart). Refrigerators. Washers and dryers. I don't know whether there's a market for old power tools, but I'm sure that many people have tools that are more than five years old. I know that some people love vintage audio gear.
eBay is popular because it's so much more efficient, even with all the worrying about reputation and scams and so forth, than just throwing things out and buying new.
It's more efficient for a society to allow people to use used if they want. To force someone to buy new just forces consumers to pour some more of their money into the retail and manufacturing industry instead of on other things that they might like more.
No, the jury isn't "out on this one". That would imply there is evidence that WiFi causes any sort of health consequences- and further, that it is equal to evidence it does not.
You know, something like eighty percent of Americans believe that there is a God, despite the fact that there is no evidence in favor of his existence. A jury is made up of these ordinary people...
Admittedly, I'm taking the saying a bit literally.
"Lets hire Bob to be our president. He'll be free entertainment every day!"
More likely, he just doesn't want the university to have to spend the money to set up WAPs around campus, and needed an excuse. People do this kind of stuff all the time. He just made the headlines.
Having increased OpenGL support for Linux and gathering development support for advanced graphics toolkits will be a big win for Linux desktop.
Yes. Now all we need is a modern graphics card with good open-source drivers.
I currently own a Radeon 9250, which is about the fastest graphics card that you can get with workable 3d open-source drivers for Linux -- and even those are quirky. If a vendor would just produce one solid set of drivers for an up-to-date product, I'd buy it. Yes, I know about Nvidia's binary-only drivers, but I want open-source drivers. The Open Graphics Project is taking ages to get around to releasing their card.
The indexing servers are there to directly facilitate piracy and connect users to other users.
No.
Look.
P2P filesharing does one major thing that previous mechanisms *did not do*. It spreads the costs of distribution out over all the users. That means that the original content publisher need not spend lots of money to distribute his content.
Sure, Paramount doesn't like this, because Paramount has an *existing* business model that has been developed and can address the costs of distribution. It provides no benefit to Paramount.
A lot of our legal publication channels have evolved to deal with (and even rely on) a system where distribution is the primary cost. Book authors get money from publishers, who perform the task of publication and distribution.
If I run out and make a cool movie or a Linux distro or *anything*, *anything* at all that's large and that a lot of people would like, I have to offload distribution costs. There are a couple ways to do this.
(a) Get someone like sourceforge to pay distribution costs.
(b) Offload costs to all users.
(c) Other approaches that haven't seem to have caught on much.
(a) works okay for some content. However, (b) is not illegal or criminal or anything else along those lines.
The reason that there is so much copyright infringement on P2P filesharing systems is simply because there is a lot of demand for infringing content, and the main barrier was cost of distribution. I can't print up thirty thousand copies of Stephen King's latest novel and send them out to people who want infringing content for free. P2P filesharing cuts the cost of distribution down to so low a level that this barrier goes away.
Now, I happen to get a lot more good out of noninfringing content that is given away freely than infringing content. I use a huge amount of entirely free software every day, whereas my infringing content is the occasional ebook or movie, plus a couple CDs worth of audio that I listen to on loop. The fact that I can write a bunch of high-resolution textures for Quake II and distribute them over a P2P filesharing system at little cost to myself is phenomenal. Maybe this isn't true of everyone -- I don't know.
All I want to point out is that shutting down of P2P servers as "criminal" is absolutely absurd. If you are *not* content-neutral, if you are doing something like "download the latest and greatest movies here" on your main webpage, then there might be an issue. However, if you are doing nothing other than providing content-neutral services, then you are simply providing a service that changes (in a good way) the costs of distribution. The fact that this conflicts with the systems that we've built up to fund content creators, which are currently adapted to a different set of costs, is simply an unfortunate quirk.
I can understand maybe shutting down Napster, because it was definitely not content-neutral -- searching for the year of someone's album seems to be very likely to be intended for copyright infringement. But ed2k servers are content-neutral. Shutting one down simply *because* distributed distribution costs lend themselves well to infringement and because they are thus often used to infringe is simply unacceptable, in my view.
ed2k URLs provide a mechanism for content-based addressing. This is a hugely valuable feature for both content of any kind (regardless of its legality).
How is this that much different than a search engine that indexes websites? A search engine might reveal a website that has copyrighted material that can then be downloaded just as Razorback2's servers would.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you gay ?
Are you telling us that his opinion would be less valid if he was?
You ever notice something?
The Web-based businesses that hit it off big never really spent a lot of time spewing the latest buzzwords.
Google doesn't run around with webpages where every other word is "AJAX" or "LAMP" or "Web 2.0" or "multi-tiered" or "grid computing". Look at this page. This thing *could* be stuffed full of the latest buzzwords. It's not. Hmm....
There are three groups of people a company needs to impress:
(a) Black-box customers. The people don't give a damn whether you're multi-tiered or have SynergisticWhizWham technology. They want to know whether your product is good and works and other than that, treat it as a black box. The only time they care about SynergisticWhizWham technology is if it's a checkbox on their purchasing requirements. And "Web 2.0" is not such a checkbox on *anyone's* purchasing requirements ("XML support", inanely enough, has made it onto a few).
(b) Engineers. You don't stuff "technology" onto the end of every word when talking to an engineer (a la "XML technology" or "Web technology") or try stuffing buzzwords in. This is because the engineer knows what you're talking about and is unimpressed with how well you can quote the latest terms that Forbes Technology editors are busy coining.
(c) Investors. Now these people *may* care about whether you're using what they percieve to be the most important emerging thingie, because some of them want to ride that technology wave, and you're trying to sell yourself as their surfboard. Not all of them, but some of them.
The problem is that if a company is clearly spending all of its time and resources appealing to (c), it probably doesn't have enough of a usable product to appeal to (a) or enough technical foundations to appeal to (b), which means that they're maybe going to get some VC funding and then promptly fall flat on their face.
Thus, buzzword-quoters are Bad News, and people to avoid.
The important thing is to use the current buzzwords. Web 2.0 is a marketing concept. The more you use important words like Web 2.0 that business rags are using, the more investor interest you can generate in Web 2.0-oriented businesses. As a matter of fact, if Web 2.0 fits into your intranet, you should have Web 2.0 there even more than you do on your Web 2.0 main servers to help in providing Web 2.0 based-services with unique Web 2.0-oriented features to assist in the task of serving customers demanding Web 2.0 features. The logical Web 2.0 extrapolation of this is that inserting "Web 2.0" in Web 2.0 as many times as Web 2.0 possible in your Web 2.0 marketing Web 2.0 literature Web 2.0 should Web 2.0 assist Web 2.0 you Web 2.0 in Web 2.0 getting Web 2.0 investment Web 2.0 capital Web 2.0 Web 2.0 Web 2.0.
Is this supposed to be a statement about corporations becoming evil over time? Because it sure as hell isn't literally true.
Google may wind up being nasty, but right now they've got more brains running around than MSFT did in its early days and they're producing consistently impressive stuff. I dunno about the rapid growth thing -- seems that if you grow really fast, you acquire a lot of assholes clinging to you on the way up -- but until they start to suck, I say enjoy.
Pagers have been around for a long time. I don't even agree that what you're claiming is non-obvious.
However, the patents are also clearly much broader than what you are describing.
- None of this would even be a question if the inventor hadn't patented it ... the invention simply wouldn't exist!
That's a fun hypothetical situation...but there were digital radio networks a long time ago.
I keep running into that...okay, I can see this compelling situation in which some guy spends years of work to come up with something decades ahead of its time, significantly advancing the state of the art. He doesn't have the resources to develop it, so he wants to go to a big company...but without patent protection, that big company will just swipe his idea.
The *problem* is that in the real world, every time someone seems to claim that they fit into this picture, their idea is nothing special -- they just (rationally) want to take a spin on the Wheel of Fortune (since the patent system allows them to do so) and see if they can get ahold of lots of money.
There are very, very few ideas that are revolutionary. Most are evolutionary. No big jumps, just building a little bit on the stuff beforehand -- ordinary engineering work. The people doing *that* kind of work, the stuff that matters a lot more to society, are being hurt by the people who are exploiting a system designed around funding the production of revolutionary ideas.
Patent squatting should forfeit the rights to a patent after, say, 3 years if no progress has been made.
And software patents shouldn't exist at all.
The patents were good until RIM bought enough congressmen and lobbyists.
Frankly, I don't think that anyone should even need to drag out prior art. This sort of nonsense should not be patentable, and the fact that can even be considered as such wastes the time of engineers who could be doing more productive things and siphons resources off production of actual good stuff into having a bunch of people sit around in suits and make ridiculous legal arguments.
However, that being said, I would dearly love to hear how you think that RIM "bought the invalidity of the patents". I haven't read all the patents -- just part of the first one -- but even by the USPTO's overgenerous rules, that patent is probably not valid -- people built wireless networks that sent email before that.
By anyone with familiarity with the subject's judgement, this probably shouldn't be patentable (even if the USPTO had decided that they were). For example, look at this. Digital radio networks among hobbyists in *'76*! Before the Apple II! These ideas are not new!
*My* take is that no software patent should ever be granted. The costs of the system far outweigh the benefits.
They didn't patent such a broad idea. They did however patent stuff related to how RIM chose to deliver email (a push method instead of a poll) to its wireless device.
Patent 5,625,670.
Go down to Claim 1. I don't see where this claim says that the information is specifically transmitted without receiving a request from the wireless device.
Besides...let's even assume that you're right.
This is basically the same thing that any system with a mail server on it with a wireless connection running to that server would do.
Fidonet, UCCP, etc were all push. It's a pretty safe bet that running it over a wireless connection was both not that groundbreaking of an idea and actually done by people (particularly UUCP).
What the predecessor to NTP did was demonstrate a workable system in the late 80s/early 90s, before all that infrastructure was in place.
Let's take a look at this, because I think that I have a very different take on software patents than you do.
The earliest patent number I see here is 5,438,611.
That patent was granted August 1, 1995, and the application filed May 23, 1994.
Ricochet was already a commercial product in 1994. So, even ignoring the fact that I don't think that there's any benefit in granting patents on this stuff, the "infrastructure" certainly *was* in place. This was not an idea that nobody could or was coming up with.
He tried to bring it to market. He had a deal almost done with IBM, even demonstrated it at trade shows. His company was liquidated after the IBM deal fell threw, but was left with the patent portfolio.
"Almost done", huh?
He didn't sell it to them. IBM decided that they didn't want it. Unless you were involved in the negotiations *on IBM's side*, I don't see how you can have any idea how close they were. As it turns out, given how well Ricochet did, IBM probably was making a reasonable choice.
Several years later, RIM came on the scene and developed a workable system based on his technology.
And this is relevant to IBM how? How do you claim it is "based on his technology"? Are you claiming that RIM would not have had the 'revolutionary' idea of a wireless email device sans this guy, and that they proceeded to steal his idea?
What this guy did, if it had value (since I sure didn't see it) would have been in the device's design itself. The idea was neither groundbreaking nor unexpected.
He offered a license for $4 million.
Suppose you design, build, market, and make successful a cool gadget. Why should you hand $4M to every guy that walks up and demands money? Maybe he wanted to make a similar product in the same timeframe, okay, but he didn't.
Furthermore, at $100K a year (which, I think, is a darn good salary), and even ignoring inflation, what is being demanded is 40 years -- an entire working lifetime -- of salary. Even had RIM directly run out of one of his demos, said "Let's steal this idea" (and I don't have evidence that they didn't, but I doubt that you have evidence that they did), you're talking about nothing other than making a wireless computer access email. Does that take *forty years* of work to come up with this design?
RIM didn't even bother to respond, because they were too busy driving competitors out of the market using their own patents.
That may be true. I'm not familiar with RIM's IP background, and I'd be more than happy to see RIM not able to go after people with their patents either.
After RIM repeatedly blew him off, he got pissed and sued.
He demanded $4M, and RIM didn't bite. Okay.
RIM's lawyers were caught falsifying evidence. They still wouldn't pay the licensing. He started raising his price.
RIM's lawyers apparently put some sort of newer software on an '87 device. I have no further information on it. It may be that the outdated software was no longer available, and they just used the current version -- even though the original client could have performed the same tasks. It may have been that email couldn't be sent at *all* with that version. I don't have any knowledge about the specifics, and I doubt that you do either.
However, this is still breaking away from my point, which is that I don't think that there should be patents on this kind of thing at all. It is quite possible that RIM's lawyers conduct
Who do you think NTP is? Its the widow of a basement inventor who tinkered with radios and electronics for most of his life. The numbers got out of hand only after RIM refused to pay reasonable licensing fees of roughly $4 million.
See, here is the problem.
I haven't gone through all of the patents, but the first, for instance, is basically for a device that sends email wirelessly (possibly with the ability to dock -- not certain how to read that tidbit).
The justification for patents is that they will promote advancement in sciences and the arts.
The problem is that, as soon as a workable portable computer exists with wireless communication, it's pretty darn straightforward to, y'know, put email on a device. No engineer would have sat around for years saying "Darn, I've got this here portable computer that I'd like to send email from. Now how can I do this?"
Nor did anyone sit down and search through the USPTO database to *find* a way to solve the problem. The only time anyone searches the USPTO is if they (a) want to avoid patent mines or (b) want to lay some of their own.
So, basically, the patent-holder here is demanding a huge monopoly and millions of dollars for producing *no* advancement whatsoever. Did it take years of expensive research to come up with this idea? Certainly not (or if it did, they were very misallocated years). The patent holder doesn't really deserve any funding from society whatsoever.
The only organization that definitely had to expend money to provide something useful to society would have been the people that actually *designed* the Blackberry device. They easily made their money back, and in any event, their chips and software are protected by copyright.
Basically, software patents wind up funneling otherwise-to-be-used-for-engineering-new-systems money into the pockets of (a) lawyers and (b) patent holders. That doesn't sound like something that promotes advancement in technology at *all* to me.
Furthermore, the fact that you don't know when you might hit a patent mine means that the risk associated with engineering new tech increases, which only discourages funding for tech.
but I'm pretty much against the use of software patents with such a long shelf life
I'm pretty much against the use of software patents, period.
Isn't "Osama" a pretty common Arabic name?
I mean, Hitler killed a lot more people than bin Laden, but we don't ban "Adolf".
In our society, we can protest all we want, but in the end we're still civilized about it.
It really all depends on what you consider civilized, wouldn't you say?
When people come in and start flaming people while saying things along the lines of "software patents are awesome, and you all suck" or "Microsoft kicks Linux butt", you just mark them Foe on Slashdot or killfile them on Usenet. Life is too short to get in flamewars when there are other people out there that post reasoned responses.
Generally, anyone calling you a "fucktard" in their posts is a pretty good candidate for ignoring.
He's the talented engineer that singlehandledly designed and built the Apple I as well as a great deal of Apple's later technology.
He built neat stuff because he loved doing it, not because he wanted to become really wealthy or something else. He is a good example of the archetypal hacker.
He loves high-tech practical jokes.
He's credited with pushing hard for two major aspects of computers where his impact had a lasting effect on the industry -- gaming capabilities and openness. He liked playing video games, and wanted them to be affordable and available to all kinds of people. He also wanted them to be expandable and something that people could reconfigure and build new systems out of.
He's a nice, funny guy, which contrasts with Jobs:
He [Jobs] was given the task of creating a circuit board for the Atari game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 to each chip that was reduced in the machine. Unfortunately (and admittedly), Steve [Jobs] had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design. He made a deal with Stephen Wozniak: the bonus would be split evenly between them, if Woz could create a circuit board with a minimal number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50. Unfortunately he had made the design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $500 (rather than $5000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $250.
Today, Jobs is a power broker and the Woz teaches computer science to kids and encourages people to be hackers and engineers. The Woz is a geek and Jobs is a marketer -- and we all want a friendly hero to love.
He and Jobs started Apple partly with money made from selling blue boxes (devices that let people get free calls at the time) so he has a bit of appeal to the pirate folks out there as well.
Basically, The Woz is the kind of guy that we all wish we had a lot more of in society, and wish that more people would emulate. That's why people like to hang on his every word. I attended a talk he gave once, and while I didn't walk away with my life changed, you get the feeling that this is a guy who really has figured out life and how to enjoy doing what he loves.
Five years old is "fairly old"?
Okay, maybe with computers, but consumer electronics?
Do you buy a new stereo every five years?
As far as regular consumers go, this regulation is not a big deal in Japan. Many Japanese would prefer buying new hardwares/appliances to buying them used (the same goes to automotives).
I dunno. I can think of some things that people normally use for a long time that it's often worthwhile to buy used (at least in the US). Expensive food processors (KitchenAid/Cusinart). Refrigerators. Washers and dryers. I don't know whether there's a market for old power tools, but I'm sure that many people have tools that are more than five years old. I know that some people love vintage audio gear.
eBay is popular because it's so much more efficient, even with all the worrying about reputation and scams and so forth, than just throwing things out and buying new.
It's more efficient for a society to allow people to use used if they want. To force someone to buy new just forces consumers to pour some more of their money into the retail and manufacturing industry instead of on other things that they might like more.
It could be that he's just doing an extremely rational analysis based on limited information.
Personally, I think that he just doesn't want to spend university money on putting wireless Ethernet everywhere, and wants an excuse that sounds good.
No, the jury isn't "out on this one". That would imply there is evidence that WiFi causes any sort of health consequences- and further, that it is equal to evidence it does not.
You know, something like eighty percent of Americans believe that there is a God, despite the fact that there is no evidence in favor of his existence. A jury is made up of these ordinary people...
Admittedly, I'm taking the saying a bit literally.
"Lets hire Bob to be our president. He'll be free entertainment every day!"
More likely, he just doesn't want the university to have to spend the money to set up WAPs around campus, and needed an excuse. People do this kind of stuff all the time. He just made the headlines.
Having increased OpenGL support for Linux and gathering development support for advanced graphics toolkits will be a big win for Linux desktop.
Yes. Now all we need is a modern graphics card with good open-source drivers.
I currently own a Radeon 9250, which is about the fastest graphics card that you can get with workable 3d open-source drivers for Linux -- and even those are quirky. If a vendor would just produce one solid set of drivers for an up-to-date product, I'd buy it. Yes, I know about Nvidia's binary-only drivers, but I want open-source drivers. The Open Graphics Project is taking ages to get around to releasing their card.
The indexing servers are there to directly facilitate piracy and connect users to other users.
No.
Look.
P2P filesharing does one major thing that previous mechanisms *did not do*. It spreads the costs of distribution out over all the users. That means that the original content publisher need not spend lots of money to distribute his content.
Sure, Paramount doesn't like this, because Paramount has an *existing* business model that has been developed and can address the costs of distribution. It provides no benefit to Paramount.
A lot of our legal publication channels have evolved to deal with (and even rely on) a system where distribution is the primary cost. Book authors get money from publishers, who perform the task of publication and distribution.
If I run out and make a cool movie or a Linux distro or *anything*, *anything* at all that's large and that a lot of people would like, I have to offload distribution costs. There are a couple ways to do this.
(a) Get someone like sourceforge to pay distribution costs.
(b) Offload costs to all users.
(c) Other approaches that haven't seem to have caught on much.
(a) works okay for some content. However, (b) is not illegal or criminal or anything else along those lines.
The reason that there is so much copyright infringement on P2P filesharing systems is simply because there is a lot of demand for infringing content, and the main barrier was cost of distribution. I can't print up thirty thousand copies of Stephen King's latest novel and send them out to people who want infringing content for free. P2P filesharing cuts the cost of distribution down to so low a level that this barrier goes away.
Now, I happen to get a lot more good out of noninfringing content that is given away freely than infringing content. I use a huge amount of entirely free software every day, whereas my infringing content is the occasional ebook or movie, plus a couple CDs worth of audio that I listen to on loop. The fact that I can write a bunch of high-resolution textures for Quake II and distribute them over a P2P filesharing system at little cost to myself is phenomenal. Maybe this isn't true of everyone -- I don't know.
All I want to point out is that shutting down of P2P servers as "criminal" is absolutely absurd. If you are *not* content-neutral, if you are doing something like "download the latest and greatest movies here" on your main webpage, then there might be an issue. However, if you are doing nothing other than providing content-neutral services, then you are simply providing a service that changes (in a good way) the costs of distribution. The fact that this conflicts with the systems that we've built up to fund content creators, which are currently adapted to a different set of costs, is simply an unfortunate quirk.
I can understand maybe shutting down Napster, because it was definitely not content-neutral -- searching for the year of someone's album seems to be very likely to be intended for copyright infringement. But ed2k servers are content-neutral. Shutting one down simply *because* distributed distribution costs lend themselves well to infringement and because they are thus often used to infringe is simply unacceptable, in my view.
ed2k URLs provide a mechanism for content-based addressing. This is a hugely valuable feature for both content of any kind (regardless of its legality).
How is this that much different than a search engine that indexes websites? A search engine might reveal a website that has copyrighted material that can then be downloaded just as Razorback2's servers would.
Oh, that's being worked on as we speak.