Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the market inertia that allows giants to sell bottled tap water at premium prices.
Mr. Myhrvold: All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their own actions. There are lots of major tech companies that grew from zero to gigantically successful in a very short period of time without investing in their own inventions. They got there by using other people’s inventions. [cite] No kidding.
Most of the new draft of the Concurrent Programs paper has to do with trying to specify problems and solutions in synchronization via an atomic “compare and swap” operation. Even these operations are surprisingly complicated once put under the microscope – or not so surprisingly complicated if you think about the details of using or [...]