211–220 of 250 posts
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> The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.
> Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it. And in the patent case it doesn't .
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Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.
> The claims define what a patent covers. And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works. And you're confusing the value of the market wit…
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Windows is still the desktop OS for the majority because you can't walk into Best Buy or Frys and buy a Linux laptop or desktop. There was a small window with the early netbooks, but that's it. My kingdom for the ability to walk into Frys and buy Dells XPS 13 with Ububtu.
>> you can't walk into Best Buy or Frys and buy a Linux laptop or desktop. Nobody has a reason to. Not at least to buy one over a Windows 10 PC (or a Mac, or a Chromebook). The people who want/need to will just buy one, stick a USB stick with Ubuntu on it and go about there business 15 minutes later.
There is also a real benefit to users (the kind that don't care about ethics / privacy / control of the hardware and who think they can download more ram) that Linux desktops maintain their UX very consistently. Gnome 3 changed a lot, but MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and LXDE all cropped up to maintain the Gnome 2 metaphor. KDE gives you the option to do almost any metaphor, but has traditionally kept the defaults the same for some ~15 years. Windows changes their task bar, start menu, system settings, browser, and file manager every other release at least.
From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr: Free software won. Yay! However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services? Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized. Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty. Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again. --------------------------------------------------…
Sorry, but it didn't. Not the way we wanted it to, back in 1999.
It just won companies who use it on their servers or as a lower level component of their value added offerings (from Android phones and iOS -Mach, BSD etc-, to set top boxes).
And the main things those companies care for is that it's free (as in beer) and free (as in "lots of volunteers help improve their software they then wrap and sell as part of their commercial products for free").
But FOOS didn't won the consumers and end users -- those could not care less whether their Android device is based on FOSS Linux or not.
Besides, it's mostly closed/proprietary mobile apps they buy and use on it day in, day out. Plus closed (silo-ed) web services.
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Consumers are like water seeking the path of least resistance. It takes lots of engineers to reduce the resistance. Someone pays these engineers. That money comes from the users. Users don't like to actually pay for things if there is a free alternative, so users pay indirectly with their information. A Facebook clone wouldn't pull many users due to network effects. I think decentralization is opposed to network effe…
The open source social crowd does not get this at all. Federated social networks exist, and their user-facing sides suck. Here's the home page for joining Diaspora.[1] Here's the home page for joining Urbit.[2] Here's the home page for joining GNU Social.[3] Any questions? [1] https://joindiaspora.com/ [2] http://urbit.org/ [3] https://gnu.io/social/
Metcalfe's law is an impossible problem in theory, but not necessarily in practice.
For instance, one way for a new system to get around Metcalfe's law is to steal the network effect of the existing network. This is the same principle as in Tantek Celik's POSSE (publish on self, syndicate elsewhere) design, but a little more general.
Concretely, it's very hard to compete with Facebook, but relatively easy to let a user control their own Facebook account from their own general-purpose computer. Especially if you can get them to bring their own API key ("BYOK").
From controlling your own data in Facebook, you may move to mirroring it; from one-way mirroring, to two-way sync; from two-way sync, to discarding the silo. So it's not even necessary to replace Facebook in one impossible step; you can build a stepladder for users to migrate off gradually.
Of course, that this is possible doesn't make it easy!
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Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…
You sir, have some interesting stories to tell.
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Exactly. When I started doing the port of Oracle to Linux I had been reading the newsgroups - and they had been claiming POSIX compatibility. But system calls were missing many options, and entire sections of library code were missing. I'd run POSIX compatibility testing, so I knew that something didn't make sense. I kept posting to the news groups - mentioning that I was trying to port some software and hoping that…
I'm with you on the facts, but it was anything but a toy. Minix was a toy, linux allowed a whole raft of useful applications to be run on PCs that would have otherwise required a large investment in hardware. Linux would have succeeded with or without Oracle, and I find it sad that you would try to re-write history to the point where it would seem that without Oracle linux would have remained a toy.
Ehhh... I don't see where he claimed anything about that. I see "Linux was a toy. Oracle helped make it not a toy." But, nothing about what would have happened otherwise. Be careful not to get sad over things not said. Principle of Charity and all that...
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There's nothing wrong with selling hardware and software separately. This is the kind of laziness that gave Windows a desktop monopoly.
There's everything wrong with selling hardware that cannot work for its intended purpose without additional proprietary, for-profit software. Would you buy a car if you had to pay again to receive a steering wheel, a transmission, or a key ? No. Or to take an analogy closer to home, NVIDIA and ATI both sell graphics cards. They also both distribute proprietary device drivers as binary blobs. They do not charge money…
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You wrote: "Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations." I think this is dangerously wrong. It completely glosses over and overlooks the fact that economies of scale are real and larger organizations can solve larger problems. The guy with…
>Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric. It's a Catch-22 when the rules (laws written on paper) were what made the power distributions so greatly asymmetric in the first place. This is quite obvious when studying tribal cultures as compared to civilized cultures. It's also worth noting the inherent distributed organizational design of tribal cultures as compared to…
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I'm with you on the facts, but it was anything but a toy. Minix was a toy, linux allowed a whole raft of useful applications to be run on PCs that would have otherwise required a large investment in hardware. Linux would have succeeded with or without Oracle, and I find it sad that you would try to re-write history to the point where it would seem that without Oracle linux would have remained a toy.
> Linux would have succeeded with or without Oracle, and I find it sad that you would try to re-write history to the point where it would seem that without Oracle linux would have remained a toy. Ehhh... I don't see where he claimed anything about that. I see "Linux was a toy. Oracle helped make it not a toy." But, nothing about what would have happened otherwise. Be careful not to get sad over things not said. Princ…
Toy: for amusement or education of creator.
Non-toy: implements real requirement for some task.
For instance, 80 bytes of machine code which pop out a piece of bread when it toasts to a certain darkness level: non-toy.