There's an idea I've been thinking about in the vein of the "create this" and api competition ideas (and the repo itself I suppose). I've found that on Stack Overflow questions of the form "Is there software that does x, y and x?" will often get locked. However, I think a site like SO for finding software could be really useful. And when you don't find it you've just identified a niche that hasn't been filled that someone could come along and make software for. It would be possible for developers to gauge demand by the number of up-votes/bounties a post gets. It could use many of the same mechanisms from SO like voting/comments/reputation/merging related posts, but perhaps adding some structured ways to describe ideas would facilitate better searching.
Ideas for Computing
91–100 of 101 posts
Re: Ideas for Computing
#92A lot of these are already done, like command autocomplete. Many show a lack of vision, why are we thinking about putting buttons and windows all over the place, adding complex nonstandard headers willy-nilly to our emails when we could be thinking about important things like indexing the vast power of existing UNIX tools in a voice-controlled environment?
Why voice controlled? I can type all day but speaking for an hour leaves me hoarse.
And why Unix tools?
Re: Ideas for Computing
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is most modern computing is driven by the single question: "How can I monetize this idea?" It's only hobbyists and academics that really try to improve the state of computing, rather than having a primary focus on revenue. It's unfortunate that groundbreaking ideas are usually not the moneymakers, else we'd see innovation at a quicker rate. Software patents are another hindrance to innovation too. Often t…
Can someone confirm the patent part? From what I heard an idea is unpatentable as soon as it has been described in public even, from what I heard, if it was in a comic.
You're right, my implication that online posts are not prior art was wrong. I have a negative bias against the patent office from past experience, however it's also not a simple as 'an idea being unpatentable as soon as it is described'.
Firstly, a patent doesn't cover only an abstract idea, but an abstract implementation of an idea. It's a description with a list of claims about how the idea is acheived, which can cite prior art, but the requirement is that a "non-obvious" invention occurs in the claims, which can unfortunately include "combination" of two or more existing ideas.
Given that the author had only described brief ideas, they might serve as prior art, but as they don't really establish claims on what is invented, someone could later come along and take the idea and develop it, coming up with "inventions" in their implementation. Such inventions are probably obvious to someone who takes the time to develop an idea, and would be rediscovered by anyone who starts from the same piece of prior art. A problem is that patent applications always start by using the broadest sense of the "invention" that it covers, and the claims are narrowed down if the application is rejected by the patent office, but applications can be revised and resubmitted many times.
The obviousness of ideas really depends on how much consideration is given to each one, so perhaps it would be in the interest of authors to establish claims on how each of their ideas might be achieved, as patents do (although they shouldn't need to be written in legalese.) Maybe a separate hyperlinked article where more detail is given on each, particularly the ones he cares most about, would surely improve the protection against the ideas being taken.
One of my concerns is the invention of new terms in patent applications which cover already existing ideas. I've seen patents which cover something very obvious, but choose some unknown term to describe it like it's something new.
The other major issue with these ideas is whether they are discoverable by a patent examiner, and proving that they were published prior to a patent application.
I had a discussion with a patent examiner a few years ago, and he pretty much expressed that existing patents, journals and scientific publications are preferred as prior art, because they are easier to verify. Other non-patent literature is googled, and archive.org is sometimes used to confirm publication date, but is unreliable.
However, I've just been reading the manual on patent examination[1] and it turns out that the scope of online publications is quite broad, and that providing a date on the publication is sufficient for an examiner to consider it prior art. They also need to archive a search strategy for each application.
I guess what we can take from that, is to ensure that we always include a publication date, and make an effort to reasonably disseminate the ideas so that they can be easily found by examiners and used as evidence that it was accessible to any patent applicant. Guess that means I should drop a self-hosted wiki and publish on github like the author too.
Re: Ideas for Computing
#94I've thought of some of these independently. (It's good to see somebody else did too.) We could probably make more progress if we all kept a list like this publicly. Or even privately, with snippets shared where appropriate. I know if I went through some old journals I could scrounge up a decent list myself. One I had: Bash scripting in the style of hypercard. Hypercard was described to me as a system that had a set…
Check out NeWS, circa 1990. Or Arthur Van Hoffs HyperNeWs around the same time.
Edit: or Apples MPW shell back in the late 80s had a posixy set of command line tools that came with a shell called "commando". When invoked, it presented a dialog of all the tools options and constructed the command line from your choices. Kind if like training wheels, and it was smart enough to disable conflicting options, or to prompt for paths as appropriate. It showed the command syntax being built up. Eventually, I think it made its way to a/ux in 1992 or so.
Re: Ideas for Computing
#95One thing I've wanted for years is a small, pocket-sized and battery operated blob of storage with a well-defined API, where all of my data lives. Not the cloud, because no, thank you; and not an external drive. I want something that my phone, my laptop, my TV, my workstation can use as a canonical data storage location for everything in my life.
Ideally this would have a fast radio, so I could just leave it in my bag while I'm walking around listening to music on my phone; and a high-speed physical connection so I can plug it in if necessary.
Re: Ideas for Computing
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is most modern computing is driven by the single question: "How can I monetize this idea?" It's only hobbyists and academics that really try to improve the state of computing, rather than having a primary focus on revenue. It's unfortunate that groundbreaking ideas are usually not the moneymakers, else we'd see innovation at a quicker rate. Software patents are another hindrance to innovation too. Often t…
I actually quite strongly disagree here. A LOT of startups start of as: "how can we make something people want" and not "how can we sell people something." Look at history of all the big companies who didnt start with a business model: Google and Facebook for example. Only later when they grew did they start looking for ways to monetize. Dont get me wrong, I am not saying that there arent companies which do do this,…
This is just part of the acqui-hire culture in silicon valley: throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. The idea that you don't need a business model as long as you can grab a large enough userbase, then come up with a business model later, or get aquired, only works when you have lots of venture capital, because relatively few of these startups produce sustainable businesses. This model isn't practiced so much in Europe, where if you want to build a business, you better be considering how to monetize it from the beginning, because there aren't many sources of capital for ideas that don't have a detailed business plan.
Re: Ideas for Computing
#97I'm waiting for the sparrowOS guy to comment on this thread. Despite his hell-banned status, I've been impressed with what he as an individual has come up with. He seems likely to have implemented many of these features for his edification.
Re: Ideas for Computing
#98I've thought of some of these independently. (It's good to see somebody else did too.) We could probably make more progress if we all kept a list like this publicly. Or even privately, with snippets shared where appropriate. I know if I went through some old journals I could scrounge up a decent list myself. One I had: Bash scripting in the style of hypercard. Hypercard was described to me as a system that had a set…
A utility that allows you to create a GUI window from the command line See PowerShell with ShowUI, on Windows. http://huddledmasses.org/showui-tutorial-walkthrough/
PowerShell takes a lot of what I dislike about cmd.exe and makes things worse. Many cmdlets assume some form of hidden state that isn't documented. Despite needing to use it, I often do so holding my nose. I really wish Windows would adapt the unix paradigm for command line...
Re: Ideas for Computing
#99I've thought of some of these independently. (It's good to see somebody else did too.) We could probably make more progress if we all kept a list like this publicly. Or even privately, with snippets shared where appropriate. I know if I went through some old journals I could scrounge up a decent list myself. One I had: Bash scripting in the style of hypercard. Hypercard was described to me as a system that had a set…
Check out NeWS, circa 1990. Or Arthur Van Hoffs HyperNeWs around the same time. Edit: or Apples MPW shell back in the late 80s had a posixy set of command line tools that came with a shell called "commando". When invoked, it presented a dialog of all the tools options and constructed the command line from your choices. Kind if like training wheels, and it was smart enough to disable conflicting options, or to prompt…
I guess the interesting question is, why aren't similar things popular today? I'm guessing the apps you mentioned didn't really become popular in their day either.
Re: Ideas for Computing
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually quite strongly disagree here. A LOT of startups start of as: "how can we make something people want" and not "how can we sell people something." Look at history of all the big companies who didnt start with a business model: Google and Facebook for example. Only later when they grew did they start looking for ways to monetize. Dont get me wrong, I am not saying that there arent companies which do do this,…
This is just part of the acqui-hire culture in silicon valley: throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. The idea that you don't need a business model as long as you can grab a large enough userbase, then come up with a business model later, or get aquired, only works when you have lots of venture capital, because relatively few of these startups produce sustainable businesses. This model isn't practiced so…
I think that a lot of startups would benefit not from disregarding thinking about how they're going to make money, but not making it their primary focus.
We had an idea a few months back for a product we wanted to exist, talked to some other people that also wanted it, built it (total cost ~$120 and lots of free time), got some people to use it, and one of the first thing several of them said is "I wish I could pay a few dollars to do X". We hadn't thought of that.
The point is, we could have said, no there's no point in doing this, the only clear monetization path for us is worth less than the cost in hosting, and killed the idea in January. However, we decided that lots of people would probably use it if it were free, so we built it, and it turns out that we would be able to make it profitable by testing it.