21–29 of 29 posts
This is how companies get patents on obvious things. They didn't discover this.
I've been wearing glasses for nearly 30 years and have known for most of that that you can press down behind your ears and the weight seems to all disappear. Your ears don't notice it much, but your nose does.
chopsticks??? I need to beef up my prototyping!
that is something I must learn. (/does a Mae-Pae beard curl) lol. Anyways on a serious note, I for some reason, feel that though google glass would be a hit product, the concept is still lacking something important. I don't know what, but for some reason, I don't see myself, sticking to it, beyond a certain period of time. The Attention aspect is being overlooked as well, no matter how good it can make our life, it w…
This will be a very interesting test of Collinridge's Dilemma.
GMail and Google Now were also prototyped in one day, as was Linux. The hard part is the years of refinement that come after that. I guess the lesson to take is that big working systems are built on small working systems . You don't get a big system by envisioning the final result, finding someone to fund you, and getting lots of people to build it for you. You take the smallest possible first step, see if it works,…
Because it was sth that we always wanted to use ourselves. It was a need that we felt. Okay, this should be like this and that like that. But working on it is tough! Because then comes the dirty little details. Making it happen usually too tough. Many give up, we might as well!
If you can prototype something in one day, that version is so brain dead as to not be any benefit as far as lessons leaned. That said, the "prototype" will still have promotional value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how could you possibly justify patents for such a thing, given how simple it is to come up with // Patents are awarded on novel inventions. An argument goes that if a particular invention were so simple then why hasn't anyone done it already? Motivation, ability, recompense? One response is the right-place, right-time, etc.. That's basically the answer that everything would be invented at some point. However the pa…
But we then look at the fact that, for something that can take a single day to come up with, do we really think a limited monopoly of five or ten years is worth granting? I think not. In fact, I think that the culture of hacking which has done so much good for this world pretty much demands immediate and unfettered access to the opportunity to play with these ideas.
Generally patent law allows unfettered access for personal or research purposes, including commercial research, but limits commercial exploitation.
So with [high quality] patents you get access to a vast database of knowledge which would otherwise be locked up in commercial secrets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Buchheit has more details in his Founders at Work interview, but basically the first version of GMail was a Perl script that grabbed his e-mail inbox and stuffed it into the Groups indexing engine, so that other people could search his e-mail. Version 2 was to let it search over their inbox instead of his, and Version 3 added the ability to send e-mail.
So it wasn't a "prototype of Gmail" so much as a hack that got people starting to think about storing mail on google technology stack. It's really funny, that this is the story of the the beginning of Gmail, when the part of Gmail that caught the whole world's attention was the AJAX web UI. I had always assumed Bucheit was a DHTML whiz. Storing and indexing mail already was rather old hat. Wait, is this a part of Gma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we then look at the fact that, for something that can take a single day to come up with, do we really think a limited monopoly of five or ten years is worth granting? I think not. In fact, I think that the culture of hacking which has done so much good for this world pretty much demands immediate and unfettered access to the opportunity to play with these ideas.
> unfettered access to the opportunity to play with these ideas. // Generally patent law allows unfettered access for personal or research purposes, including commercial research, but limits commercial exploitation. So with [high quality] patents you get access to a vast database of knowledge which would otherwise be locked up in commercial secrets.