That's part of the problem. Another part is that the tech industry is based on a lot of small incremental changes. It's not like medicine where a new drug coated stent has a clear list of features. Medicine certainly still has its patent problems, but nothing on the scope of what IT has. IT also has a time scale problem. What is revolutionary today will be a commodity in 2 years. By comparison, a new choelestoral drug may be an industry standard for 30 years. By the time a tech patent is granted, what it covers is either obsolete or has become the new norm. To my mind, that should be invoking the obviousness clause of patents. That so many people are working on -- and solving -- the same problems simultaneously, it's a mistake to award a patent to someone because they filed their paperwork first. That's not what patents are supposed to protect.
Actually, I've learned a lot about nuclear physics from people explaining exactly why this is a scam. It's not newsworthy, but it has been educational.
I'll be impressed if someone can teach my wife that setting the thermostat lower doesn't do anything on a really hot day if the air conditioner can't keep up. I've explained this repeatedly, but she keeps trying to set the thermostat to 68 on a 100 degree July day. And this is a woman with 3 science degrees!
Nope. Cutting corners gets caught pretty quickly and usually backfires. Selling at a loss is an expensive and risky proposition. Theft of intellectual property can be handled by the courts. Currency manipulation if a ficticious boogeyman. It doesn't work for the same reason that perpetual motion machines don't work.
Ultimately, this is a case of China has cheap labor, lax environmental regulations, and produce an inferior, but "good enough" product that is cheaper.
Yeah, this is already sounding like a bad idea in my book. I've got enough problems pocket dialing my customers. What's this thing going to infer when I fart? Hopefully post it to my twitter account.
I'm a one man shop and I use version control, CI becomes a non-issue. I'm not convinced that unit testing is practical. However, there's one big red flag in the OP's question:
NEVER DEVELOP ON OLD TECHNOLOGY.
You will eventually find yourself out of work and unable to find work because you have a deprecated skillset. I've seen a lot of people in that situation. I know a very good Access programmer who really needs a job right now.
I find the results to be quite the opposite. I found Oblivion to be just plain tedious. It's not about being realistic and immersive, it's about the mechanics and tickling your brain in just the right way. The grid style crawler, I think, creates a lot of interesting opportunities for puzzles and the like.
Also, I prefer stylized graphics that cleanly represent the game world to attempts at realism. All the fancy lighting effects are great for FPS, but in most other games, I just get frustrated because I can't tell what I'm looking at. It takes the fun away. The immersion factor comes from the in game interactions. For example, Lands of Lore had a nice amount of story and NPCs to deal with, and the opening video did a fantastic job of setting the mood. The regions were well sized (not too big, not too small). In short, I love EotB and LoL.
Sadly (or not), I've never been called for jury duty, much less for a patent case. I'd certainly do my part to put an end to this garbage. On the other hand, if I ever wanted to get out of jury duty I could just reveal my various online handles.
You would generally think that, and mostly that's true. However, Apple, Microsoft, etc., all have style guides specific to their platforms. Having a consistent feel between apps is a big part of usability and the vendor specific platofrm guide is the next palce to go.
And that's great until Crashplan goes bankrupt or has some failure they didn't anticipate. 1 backup is never enough. Periodically archive things to DVD. Have a set of USB drvies, and add Crashplan on top of that.
Also, print out the pictures and get your wife to take up scrapbooking. My kid is 8 now, and 99% of the photos we've taken really aren't that important. Print out the important stuff, make some notes and save it in a physical form. If you have some home movies that are worth saving, burn them to DVD and give copies to your parents. Store things in multiple locations. If the house burns down, you won't lose everything.
I object to robo-calling to any number. I don't care if it's my home phone, cell phone, if it's for debt collectors or charities or political parties. From there, I want to expand the do not call registry. Right now, it only covers telemarketers. I want to also ban solicitations from charities, surveys, and political groups. I want a "leave me the fuck alone" registry. If you aren't one of my friends, customers, or suppliers, or someone I've given permission to call, then I don't want to talk to you.
Maybe I should just change to a personal 900 number. In fact, I think that's a great idea. Give everyone a toll number and a regular number. If you want to pester me, you can pay for the priveledge.
Or you could just get a bunch of batteries and an inverter and hook up a PLC to a smart meter and bam!, electricity arbitrage. Although, I would think that there are better storage mechanisms than batteries. I'm kind of left to wonder how this is patentable, as I could put something like this together quite easily and I'm not even that good.
I manage far fewer desktops, but I also get my parts from NewEgg. After all, it's cheaper to overnite a USB cable from NewEgg than to pick one up at BestBuy.
Where I think NewEgg is going to have problems is that, over the past decade, my upgrade cycle has gone from 3 years to about 7 years.
To be fair, though, unless stored properly in a dry environment, wood will decay and release the carbon. If you want to store it forever, you need to bake it down into charcoal. Then you can bury it in the ground. Where it can later be dug up to fuel a power plant.
In any event, I don't know who is supporting research for this retarded carbon dioxide sponge, but it needs to stop. There are so many more important things that could be done with that time and money. Feeding the poor, curing diseases, providing me with high end hookers and a pile of coke the size of Rhode Island. You get the idea.
Right, but what I think parent is claiming is that if you weren't also first to invent, that should be grounds to invalidate the patent. In fact, I rather think that there should be a 6 month window where the new patent application is sealed. Any competeing application (or any other publication, description, or offer to sell of like invention) filed in that time frame should also invalidate the patent. In short, just simplified versions of the prior art/obviousness doctrines. Frankly, if there are a dozen copmaines working on solving the same problem (ie., touchscreens - multitouch, swipe, etc.), patents are counter productive.
The lawyer still needs one actual plaintiff to start the process. That said, I'm still left to wonder what excactly the point of a shareholder lawsuit is. Who are they suing? Themselves? Any monetary damages woudl be self defeating, and if they wanted to oust the board of directors, there's already a process for that. Maybe someone can explain what I'm missing here.
Think of a low price. Now lower it. That's muthafarking ultra-low. That's so low you gotta be a world class limbo champion to slide your way under there. Ultra-low, biatches.
I know a medical coder and she thinks this is dumb. Most of her co-workers make enough mistakes trying to code to ICD-9. Trying to create a category for everything just means that coding will be slower with more mistakes. Never mind that the doctors and nurses frequently don't include all of the information that ICD-10 expects.
Retardation at its finest.... If you're buying directly from your audiologist, you're going to pay top dollar. And those absurd prices are list price. But you can buy all kinds of hearing aids on the internet these days, ranging in price from under $100 up to as much as you want to spend. You can buy them from Amazon. Really, is it too much to ask that someone googles the topic for 5 minutes before greenlighting this garbage?
The problem isn't capitalism in medicine, it's the lack of capitalism. Government over regulation keeps competition scarce and prices high.
For some, they might be able to do everything over the net or use a USB optical drive on rare occasions. I use mine quite a bit. For starters, I archive any music I buy on line. I also periodically archive any code I've written. The CD players in my workshop and my wife's car only support ordianry CDs (not even a line in jack!), so I burn things for those. I also pick up the occasional game on fixed media as well. And lastly, since storage has gotten cheaper, I'm re-ripping all of my CDs at a higher bit-rate. I don't need the archives very often, but when I do, boy am I glad they're there.
On a related note to the article, I rebuilt all of the PCs at my office late last fall. Windows is licensed separately, so that wasn't an issue, but I spent about $250 upgrading all of them to i3 processors (which for a non-gamming non-development/graphics desktop is positively luxurious) and related equipment. For a business desktop, they are flat out pimpin' and I really couldn't conceive spending more than that. Possibly upgrade the RAM from 2gb to 4gb, but there, we're only talking $17/unit and I don't really care about my users enough to justify that.:)
Don't forget that BestBuy and Amazon are still going to be looking for a margin of at least 15% on these things. Most likely, HP is just burning through the inventory of components they've already purchased/contracted for that they can't resell and burning through the manufacturing in progress. Still, it's pretty clear now, that they could have charged an extra $100 on each model and sold out just as quick. Maybe they're trying to buy some good karma or what not.
No, the tighter integration of fast memory with multicore CPU/GPU-like capacities will create the new killer apps we have not developed yet. IBM Watson in your pocket? Perhaps, but most likely the servies or device is not developed yet.
Quite the opposite. Computing resources are still energy intensive and storage takes up a lot of space. On the other hand, bandwidth keeps increasing. We're actually moving back towards thinner clients for a lot of tasks.
At the same time, virtualization is taking over the server space. If I have a physical server failure, I just restart the affected logical servers on a different piece of hardware, and for larger offices than mine, that process is fully automated. Even at that, though, it's going to take a few more decades before setting up and expanding your IT infrastructure becomes as simple as buying a box and plugging it in.
One space I'm still seeing plenty of activity is custom business apps. Programmers, at least, are in no danger of becomming irrelevant any time soon. On the other hand, we also live like wildebeests (pun intended!), moving from one project/watering hole to the next as soon as things dry up. Also, good security guys are in high demand, and I'm sure will be for at least the next 20 years.
No, cutting a jack in half is a really obvious solution, I just happen to think it's dumb. The reason no one has done this has nothing to do with innovation. It's about marketing and whether one thinks there would be demand and acceptance for it, or, for that matter, any need for it at all. But that problem is somewhat related to the function of patents, but I don't have a firm opinion on what, if any, protection should be afforded to someone pioneering a product in the marketplace.
Also, I have no doubt that if I had the time and the right vocabulary for the task, I could find an example, somewhere, where someone had taken a round connector and shaved down one side of it. Zero doubt. Hopefully the patent office is up to the task of rejecting this stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
That's part of the problem. Another part is that the tech industry is based on a lot of small incremental changes. It's not like medicine where a new drug coated stent has a clear list of features. Medicine certainly still has its patent problems, but nothing on the scope of what IT has. IT also has a time scale problem. What is revolutionary today will be a commodity in 2 years. By comparison, a new choelestoral drug may be an industry standard for 30 years. By the time a tech patent is granted, what it covers is either obsolete or has become the new norm. To my mind, that should be invoking the obviousness clause of patents. That so many people are working on -- and solving -- the same problems simultaneously, it's a mistake to award a patent to someone because they filed their paperwork first. That's not what patents are supposed to protect.
Actually, I've learned a lot about nuclear physics from people explaining exactly why this is a scam. It's not newsworthy, but it has been educational.
I'll be impressed if someone can teach my wife that setting the thermostat lower doesn't do anything on a really hot day if the air conditioner can't keep up. I've explained this repeatedly, but she keeps trying to set the thermostat to 68 on a 100 degree July day. And this is a woman with 3 science degrees!
Are you getting some form of a clue now?
Nope. Cutting corners gets caught pretty quickly and usually backfires. Selling at a loss is an expensive and risky proposition. Theft of intellectual property can be handled by the courts. Currency manipulation if a ficticious boogeyman. It doesn't work for the same reason that perpetual motion machines don't work.
Ultimately, this is a case of China has cheap labor, lax environmental regulations, and produce an inferior, but "good enough" product that is cheaper.
Yeah, this is already sounding like a bad idea in my book. I've got enough problems pocket dialing my customers. What's this thing going to infer when I fart? Hopefully post it to my twitter account.
Sorry, but you need to check the filing dates. Clearly the joydck mod was published after the filing date on the relevant patent.
I'm a one man shop and I use version control, CI becomes a non-issue. I'm not convinced that unit testing is practical. However, there's one big red flag in the OP's question:
NEVER DEVELOP ON OLD TECHNOLOGY.
You will eventually find yourself out of work and unable to find work because you have a deprecated skillset. I've seen a lot of people in that situation. I know a very good Access programmer who really needs a job right now.
I find the results to be quite the opposite. I found Oblivion to be just plain tedious. It's not about being realistic and immersive, it's about the mechanics and tickling your brain in just the right way. The grid style crawler, I think, creates a lot of interesting opportunities for puzzles and the like.
Also, I prefer stylized graphics that cleanly represent the game world to attempts at realism. All the fancy lighting effects are great for FPS, but in most other games, I just get frustrated because I can't tell what I'm looking at. It takes the fun away. The immersion factor comes from the in game interactions. For example, Lands of Lore had a nice amount of story and NPCs to deal with, and the opening video did a fantastic job of setting the mood. The regions were well sized (not too big, not too small). In short, I love EotB and LoL.
Sadly (or not), I've never been called for jury duty, much less for a patent case. I'd certainly do my part to put an end to this garbage. On the other hand, if I ever wanted to get out of jury duty I could just reveal my various online handles.
You would generally think that, and mostly that's true. However, Apple, Microsoft, etc., all have style guides specific to their platforms. Having a consistent feel between apps is a big part of usability and the vendor specific platofrm guide is the next palce to go.
And that's great until Crashplan goes bankrupt or has some failure they didn't anticipate. 1 backup is never enough. Periodically archive things to DVD. Have a set of USB drvies, and add Crashplan on top of that.
Also, print out the pictures and get your wife to take up scrapbooking. My kid is 8 now, and 99% of the photos we've taken really aren't that important. Print out the important stuff, make some notes and save it in a physical form. If you have some home movies that are worth saving, burn them to DVD and give copies to your parents. Store things in multiple locations. If the house burns down, you won't lose everything.
I object to robo-calling to any number. I don't care if it's my home phone, cell phone, if it's for debt collectors or charities or political parties. From there, I want to expand the do not call registry. Right now, it only covers telemarketers. I want to also ban solicitations from charities, surveys, and political groups. I want a "leave me the fuck alone" registry. If you aren't one of my friends, customers, or suppliers, or someone I've given permission to call, then I don't want to talk to you.
Maybe I should just change to a personal 900 number. In fact, I think that's a great idea. Give everyone a toll number and a regular number. If you want to pester me, you can pay for the priveledge.
Or you could just get a bunch of batteries and an inverter and hook up a PLC to a smart meter and bam!, electricity arbitrage. Although, I would think that there are better storage mechanisms than batteries. I'm kind of left to wonder how this is patentable, as I could put something like this together quite easily and I'm not even that good.
I manage far fewer desktops, but I also get my parts from NewEgg. After all, it's cheaper to overnite a USB cable from NewEgg than to pick one up at BestBuy.
Where I think NewEgg is going to have problems is that, over the past decade, my upgrade cycle has gone from 3 years to about 7 years.
To be fair, though, unless stored properly in a dry environment, wood will decay and release the carbon. If you want to store it forever, you need to bake it down into charcoal. Then you can bury it in the ground. Where it can later be dug up to fuel a power plant.
In any event, I don't know who is supporting research for this retarded carbon dioxide sponge, but it needs to stop. There are so many more important things that could be done with that time and money. Feeding the poor, curing diseases, providing me with high end hookers and a pile of coke the size of Rhode Island. You get the idea.
Right, but what I think parent is claiming is that if you weren't also first to invent, that should be grounds to invalidate the patent. In fact, I rather think that there should be a 6 month window where the new patent application is sealed. Any competeing application (or any other publication, description, or offer to sell of like invention) filed in that time frame should also invalidate the patent. In short, just simplified versions of the prior art/obviousness doctrines. Frankly, if there are a dozen copmaines working on solving the same problem (ie., touchscreens - multitouch, swipe, etc.), patents are counter productive.
The lawyer still needs one actual plaintiff to start the process. That said, I'm still left to wonder what excactly the point of a shareholder lawsuit is. Who are they suing? Themselves? Any monetary damages woudl be self defeating, and if they wanted to oust the board of directors, there's already a process for that. Maybe someone can explain what I'm missing here.
Think of a low price. Now lower it. That's muthafarking ultra-low. That's so low you gotta be a world class limbo champion to slide your way under there. Ultra-low, biatches.
I know a medical coder and she thinks this is dumb. Most of her co-workers make enough mistakes trying to code to ICD-9. Trying to create a category for everything just means that coding will be slower with more mistakes. Never mind that the doctors and nurses frequently don't include all of the information that ICD-10 expects.
Retardation at its finest.... If you're buying directly from your audiologist, you're going to pay top dollar. And those absurd prices are list price. But you can buy all kinds of hearing aids on the internet these days, ranging in price from under $100 up to as much as you want to spend. You can buy them from Amazon. Really, is it too much to ask that someone googles the topic for 5 minutes before greenlighting this garbage?
The problem isn't capitalism in medicine, it's the lack of capitalism. Government over regulation keeps competition scarce and prices high.
For some, they might be able to do everything over the net or use a USB optical drive on rare occasions. I use mine quite a bit. For starters, I archive any music I buy on line. I also periodically archive any code I've written. The CD players in my workshop and my wife's car only support ordianry CDs (not even a line in jack!), so I burn things for those. I also pick up the occasional game on fixed media as well. And lastly, since storage has gotten cheaper, I'm re-ripping all of my CDs at a higher bit-rate. I don't need the archives very often, but when I do, boy am I glad they're there.
On a related note to the article, I rebuilt all of the PCs at my office late last fall. Windows is licensed separately, so that wasn't an issue, but I spent about $250 upgrading all of them to i3 processors (which for a non-gamming non-development/graphics desktop is positively luxurious) and related equipment. For a business desktop, they are flat out pimpin' and I really couldn't conceive spending more than that. Possibly upgrade the RAM from 2gb to 4gb, but there, we're only talking $17/unit and I don't really care about my users enough to justify that. :)
Maybe. But without Taco, you gotta wonder who's gonna post a dupe of it on Tuesday.
Don't forget that BestBuy and Amazon are still going to be looking for a margin of at least 15% on these things. Most likely, HP is just burning through the inventory of components they've already purchased/contracted for that they can't resell and burning through the manufacturing in progress. Still, it's pretty clear now, that they could have charged an extra $100 on each model and sold out just as quick. Maybe they're trying to buy some good karma or what not.
No, the tighter integration of fast memory with multicore CPU/GPU-like capacities will create the new killer apps we have not developed yet. IBM Watson in your pocket? Perhaps, but most likely the servies or device is not developed yet.
Quite the opposite. Computing resources are still energy intensive and storage takes up a lot of space. On the other hand, bandwidth keeps increasing. We're actually moving back towards thinner clients for a lot of tasks.
At the same time, virtualization is taking over the server space. If I have a physical server failure, I just restart the affected logical servers on a different piece of hardware, and for larger offices than mine, that process is fully automated. Even at that, though, it's going to take a few more decades before setting up and expanding your IT infrastructure becomes as simple as buying a box and plugging it in.
One space I'm still seeing plenty of activity is custom business apps. Programmers, at least, are in no danger of becomming irrelevant any time soon. On the other hand, we also live like wildebeests (pun intended!), moving from one project/watering hole to the next as soon as things dry up. Also, good security guys are in high demand, and I'm sure will be for at least the next 20 years.
No, cutting a jack in half is a really obvious solution, I just happen to think it's dumb. The reason no one has done this has nothing to do with innovation. It's about marketing and whether one thinks there would be demand and acceptance for it, or, for that matter, any need for it at all. But that problem is somewhat related to the function of patents, but I don't have a firm opinion on what, if any, protection should be afforded to someone pioneering a product in the marketplace.
Also, I have no doubt that if I had the time and the right vocabulary for the task, I could find an example, somewhere, where someone had taken a round connector and shaved down one side of it. Zero doubt. Hopefully the patent office is up to the task of rejecting this stupidity.