Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Too subjective to be useful. (Score 1) 276

Lots and lots of people cycle to where they need to go in the winter, and -28 is a pretty common winter temperature

I would like to see a real breakdown by age, sex, martial status, income, injuries and deaths in traffic, and reports of medical emergencies like hypothermia, heart attacks and so on,

Comment Re:Infrastructure? (Score 1) 727

You pick any laptop with Windows pre-installed and buy another and let me install and configure Linux and put it in a box. You will then see how a Windows system when compared to a Linux system is inferior "out of the box."

How much say will I get in how you will configure the system?

You are a geek but I am not and we have a very different set of interests, values and expectations.

Comment Big Whoop. (Score 1) 727

My desktop computer at home is running Linux for more than a decade now.

"Winning the desktop" has never been about winning over the geek.

It's always about winning over the full time office worker, the temp and the senior volunteer. The billion or so clerical workers in this world who keep things running behind the scenes.

Comment By the numbers. (Score 1) 276

Finland has about 3 million passenger cars in use by a population of 5.46 million.

Finland, Vehicle stock grew in 2012

Helsinki has some 390 cars per 1000 inhabitants. This is less than in cities of similar density, such as Brussels' 483 per 1000, Stockholm's 401, and Oslo's 413.

Today, Helsinki is the only city in Finland to have trams and metro trains. There used to be two other cities in Finland with trams: Turku and Viipuri (Vyborg, now in Russia), but both have since abandoned trams. The Helsinki Metro, opened in 1982, is the only rapid transit system in Finland.

Helsinki

Comment Re:Patent Trolls arent just little companies (Score 1) 97

You don't automatically deserve for your business to succeed regardless of other commercial factors, and you certainly don't deserve money just for having an idea. Ideas are cheap, it's R&D that costs money.

I never said that I deserve automatic business success. "Reward" and "getting paid" are two different things. I do agree, however, that I expressed myself poorly. Of course the mere idea is not enough to get a patent: At the very least I should supply enough information to make my valve. Still, I shouldn't need to actually produce valves in order to deserve patent protection; after all there are dedicated research entities like CSIRO who do expend significant effort to develop technologies even though they don't develop physical products based on those technologies.

And that is how the patent system is broken, because it directly rewards ideas and not development effort. The positive outcome of the system is just a side-effect of how the system works. The whole system needs refactoring so that it directly achieves the goals above within an ethical framework that acknowledges the value of straightforward hard work over simple ideas. This would mean that a patent troll with nothing more than an idea can't walk all over a company that had the same idea and then spend $10m developing it into a commercial product.

If the non-company actually came up with a working prototype and wrote a patent that explains in detail how to copy it and demonstrably came up with the whole thing first then yes, the non-company deserves the patent. Of course this scenario is utterly unlikely. Still, patents shouldn't be about how much it cost to come up with something; they should be about whether this something advances the state of the art and is described in a precise manner that allows an average worker in the field to reproduce it. If your company spends $10m and mine spends $100k and we independently arrive at the same method of solving a particular problem then your company's claim isn't automatically more valid than mine.

If we could ensure that all granted patents are for things that advance the state of the art in a reproducible manner we'd be much closer to a reasonable system (although there'd still be work left to be done).

Comment Re:Patent Trolls arent just little companies (Score 2) 97

Patents are not inherently evil. If I get the idea for a new valve design that uses some obscure property of gasoline to make direct injection engines five percent more efficient then I deserve to be rewarded for that. But do I deserve a reward for taking something we already do and adding "via electronic transmission" without even detailing how exactly that transmission would work? Do I deserve a reward for taking the concepts of HTTP redirects and credit card processing and coming up with a redirect to a credit card processing software?

We have a few problems right now that need fundamental changes to how patents work in order to be resolved:

Firstly, there is a flood of patents far too great to allow patent examiners to examine each patent in detail. We can't solve this by adding more examiners; there's no money for that. We can't solve this by allowing an arbitrary backlog; sooner or later we'd get to a point where you'd spend longer for your application to be processed than the patent would last once approved, which would hurt legitimately useful applications. The current solution, just doing less work per patent, just means that more junk patents come through.

Additionally, we don't have enough experts. A patent on "storing a word processor document in a single XML file" (real patent) might not sound obvious to a patent examiner who doesn't have a deep understanding of IT but to an IT professional it's blindingly obvious; after all XML is a universal format and we store all sorts of other documents in XML form already. Still, a patent has been granted for this "innovation", most likely because the patent office can't afford enough IT experts to properly evaluate every IT patent. (Admittedly, the patent is specific enough that one can, with effort, create a non-infringing XML text document format. But it's still obvious.)

Of course it doesn't help that some granted patents are overly generic. Many patents just declare dominion over an idea, sometimes even without providing technical information on how to make the idea actually work. This can be hard to see for the examiner because of the relative dearth of domain experts.

Compounding that is the fact that willful infringement nets harsher punishment. However, if I actually do the research to make sure I don't violate certain patents it becomes reasonable to assume that I know about all relevant patents in the field. If I overlooked some and end up infringing them it becomes difficult to prove that I didn't know about them, costing me more money. Thus, the safest course of action is to never read any patents at all so I can at least claim ignorance. This keeps me open to surprise litigation, of course, and it also perverts the entire point of the patent system: Patents are not there so that someone can control an idea, they are there so that someone provides his idea and technical work to everyone else in exchange for some royalties.


Fixing this mess won't be easy. We need far more experts, more time per patent and fewer patent applications. The former two aren't going to happen because nobody's willing to pay that much money and the latter isn't going to happen as long as obtaining patents is as lucrative as it is today. While I don't think that killing off the entire patent system is the way to go it's easy to see how people come up with the idea.

Comment Re:A limit is a limit (Score 2) 475

When it comes to breaking the speed limit or being run over by a semi, I'll break the speed limit every time.

To what advantage if the semi is also being driven far above the speed limit?

Realistically, what are your chances of actually keeping pace with the thing or out-running it without losing control of your own vehicle?

Comment Re:All that money... (Score 1) 579

Yep. And then all that money that would be used to pay salaries that would be used on expenses locally, making the local economy work, will be redirected to Bill Gate's pockets.

The Munich economy is working just fine.

Munich is considered a global city and holds the headquarters of Siemens AG (electronics), BMW (car), MAN AG (truck manufacturer, engineering), Linde (gases), Allianz (insurance), Munich Re (re-insurance), and Rohde & Schwarz (electronics). Among German cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants purchasing power is highest in Munich (26,648 euro per inhabitant) as of 2007. In 2006, Munich blue-collar workers enjoyed an average hourly wage of 18.62 euro (ca. $23).

The breakdown by cities proper (not metropolitan areas) of Global 500 cities listed Munich in 8th position in 2009. Munich is a centre for biotechnology, software and other service industries. Munich is the home of the headquarters of many other large companies such as the aircraft engine manufacturer MTU Aero Engines, the injection molding machine manufacturer Krauss-Maffei, the camera and lighting manufacturer Arri, the semiconductor firm Infineon Technologies (headquartered in the suburban town of Neubiberg), lighting giant Osram, as well as the German or European headquarters of many foreign companies such as McDonald's and Microsoft.

Munich

as to that new corporate headquarters in Munich that makes the geek so suspicious:

Microsoft Deutschland decided to relocate its [30 year old] headquarters [from a suburb about 17km north of the city] and establish new, modern headquarters in Parkstadt Schwabing. Commencement of the construction works is planned for 2014. As of summer 2016, approximately 1,800 employees will find a new working environment in the new headquarters in Munich-Schwabing.

http://www.eversheds.com/globa..." a>Microsoft Deutschland GmbH relocates its headquarters[Nov 2013]

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 1) 65

Well, there are the schenanigans around the .iq domain. While accounts seem to differ it was a bit peculiar that .iq dropped off the root zone right around when the Iraq War happened. (I know that the guy administering the TLD was nasty but he wasn't convicted yet and I'm not sure it's reasonable to shut down a TLD because the Tech-C is being prosecuted.)

"Random people" includes any single government. Jon Postel might have been trustworthy but his government isn't. Not when international politics are involved. No single government or regional bloc truly is. (Neither are all governments combined but at least they'll have a harder time screwing everything up.)

Comment Re:LibreOffice/OpenOffice still kind of suck (Score 2) 579

The basic office-type products for Linux still kind of suck.

The geek still thinks in terms of the stand-alone office suite ca. 1995,

Its 2014 and LibreOffice doesn't include a plausible alternative to Outlook, OneNote and so on.

Microsoft sees MS Office as one component of an integrated Office system --- client, server, web and cloud --- that makes collaboration easy and scales well to an enterprise of any size.

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 3, Insightful) 65

Then again many people outside the USA aren't entirely comfortable with the USA having control over internet governance. Mind you, there are many other countries equally unsuited. The problem is that if one single country has control then one country might decide to use that control to further its own interests. And I don't think that it's a good trade to give all power to one country just to ensure that certain other countries get no power at all.

Of course this is about power shifting towards governments in general. This is to be expected - after all, we can't just have random people running the internet and governments happen to be the very things that represent their countries internationally. I expect ICANN to become something like the ITU: A UN agency that handles infrastructure governance. That does seem to be the safest and fairest option. Do Iran and North Korea get a voice? Yes, they do, just as they should. But that doesn't mean they run the show.

Comment Am I missing something here? (Score 1) 167

If you download Lantern in an uncensored region, you can connect with someone in a censored region, who can then access whatever content they want through you. What makes the system so unique is that it operates on the basis of trust. ...the amount of information any single Lantern user can learn about other users is limited to a small subset, making infiltration significantly more difficult.

Outside of the geek's virtual worlds and ways of thinking ---

The more you know about someone, the more you are willing to trust them. Particularly when the stakes are high.

Slashdot Top Deals

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

Working...