Suppose that we said each year, each person named as an inventor or each company or person named as an assignee on a patent qualified for a rolling fee. Say $200 for the first patent, $1000 for the next, $5000
Building what customers want
Visting LinuxWorld in San Francisco reminded me that one of the advantages Apple has in the cell-phone market is that it can set design goals to be “what people who buy cell phones want”. While you might think this would
Net neutrality and real-time
British Telecom breaks with the party line. This is the intersection of a business/political dispute about what business telecos should be in and a technical issue of QOS. Traffic shaping is a blunt instrument for QOS and part of the
Transaction costs are good: software patent debate continues
Don Marti is asking the wrong question when he writes: The question is where you draw the line of what is or isn’t patent infringement. If Victor invents something, and I describe it in prose, I’m not infringing. If he
Enterprise operating systems
Can anyone name a single feature of “enterprise†operating systems available today that was not already working in VMS or Solaris or SGI’s system 10 or more years ago? Multi-processor support – practically prehistoric. Here’s a wise observation: â€Since the
Software patents are so different from circuit patents (really!)
Updated (and again, and even again – below) It should also be recognized that circuit arrangements are typically designed and fabricated at least in part using one or more computer data files, referred to herein as hardware definition programs, that
Operating system interfaces are what you bump into…
Operating system interfaces are what you bump into when you are trying to do your work. There is no need for workaday users to see an operating system interface at all; the current OS interface is bureaucratic bloat, an unnecessary
Adding value to Windows
Andy Bechtolscheim says: It’s really hard to add value to Windows. Whatever you add, Microsoft is going to take away from you. Linux has opportunities. There are many ways to add value. There are lots of things Sun customers expect
Plagiarism watch
Thanks to google code watch I see that an open source real-time Linux project has reached new heights of originality – changing the magic number that they copied from RTLinux 10 years ago to a new number. The constant definition
The Embedded Enterprise, Pruit-Igoe, Ayn-Rand, the telecommunications stack and why software does not suck
Programmers will readily tell you that “Windows sucks” or “Linux sucks” or “POSIX sucks” why this or that software is badly designed, bloated, slow, buggy, un-needed, ugly, and generally disgusting. But, Windows is actually an immensely useful and sophisticated program