Submission + - USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks 1
theodp writes: Chargebacks on computing resources are certainly nothing new, hailing back to the '60s. But five decades later, the USPTO has deemed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' invention — Dynamic Pricing of Web Services Utilization — worthy of a new patent. From the patent: 'Utilization of a storage resource may be measured in terms of a quantity of data stored (e.g., bytes, megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), etc.) per unit of time (e.g., second, day, month, etc.). Similarly, communication bandwidth utilization may be measured in terms of a quantity of data transmitted per unit of time (e.g., megabits per second). Processing resource utilization may be measured as an aggregate number of units of processing effort (e.g., central processing unit (CPU) cycles, transactions, etc.) utilized, or as a rate of processing effort utilization per unit of time (e.g., CPU cycles or transactions per second).' Sound familiar, Greyglers? Another example of why it's not wise to grant software patents when people don't know much about computer history.
But there are improvements over mainframe pricing (Score:2)
In 60's and 70's timesharing services is was perfectly well understood that costs for CPU, storage, communications, etc., were all "funny money". In either commercial or academic environments the costs were completely related to either the cost of the computing center to supply, and especially never related to demand. Supply never met the elasticity of demand (academics: think about summer vacation vs final project time, or in business think about payroll vs non-payroll periods), precisely because the cost