Ironic that this article is on jstor
Hope it was one that Aaron Swartz was able to download before MIT arrested him.
It's on both LibGen and Sci-Hub.
Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't post like this. If you see a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ) or email hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix the problem
OK, but how could I vouch for users? I occasionally see comments from users like this one, with all but occasional comments dead. If I look back far enough, sometimes I can find a comment that was transgressive. But often enough, nothing. So should I be emailing hn@ycombinator.com about those?
Yes.
"[dead]" means that an account has been administratively banned. "flagged" only shows up per-comment, showing that users have flagged that comment.
Tracking back through history to find the banning offence can take a while. But you can vouch for either individual posts or a user as a whole, by email, as described above. I do this myself on occasion.
Flagged / banned account activity isn't visible unless you've set "showdead" to on, in your HN profile settings.
Re: Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
#13The 1947 anti-trust lawsuit was settled by the 1956 consent decree which forced AT&T to exit all businesses not related to providing a national telecommunications network and which also required royalty-free licensing of all patents. For example, the Westrex sound recording business for movie production was sold to Litton. This undoubtedly reduced any appetite for deploying any customer premises recording devices whi…
One of the more famous consequences of that 1956 consent decree was Unix, and from it, Linux, the BSDs, and MacOS.
A case in which competition and capital actively interfered with creativity and innovation.
Re: Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
#14Resistance to technological innovation, often by commercial concerns, is all too common.
Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these:
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
As Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
That looks at cases of such opposition in several areas:
- Transportation
- Communication
- Power
- Metals
- Textile Machinery
- Agricultural Machinery
- Building
Re: Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, but how could I vouch for users? I occasionally see comments from users like this one, with all but occasional comments dead. If I look back far enough, sometimes I can find a comment that was transgressive. But often enough, nothing. So should I be emailing hn@ycombinator.com about those?
Yes. "[dead]" means that an account has been administratively banned. "flagged" only shows up per-comment, showing that users have flagged that comment. Tracking back through history to find the banning offence can take a while. But you can vouch for either individual posts or a user as a whole, by email, as described above. I do this myself on occasion. Flagged / banned account activity isn't visible unless you've s…
OK, thanks. I'll try it and see how it goes.
It's so sad to see banned accounts consistently making interesting and constructive comments, which are mostly all dead, except for the occasional vouched one. And sometimes for years. That's quite the cruel punishment.
Being paranoid by nature, I routinely check my account from other IPs whenever my comments aren't getting replies. And I wonder if others do that. I mean, could someone go for a year without realizing that their account had been banned?
Re: Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
#16IBM's Watson Lab had the same role in preventing innovations from escaping and upsetting stable markets. Hiring up promising PhDs to prevent them working for somebody else, and keeping them busy not developing for anybody else, was its main purpose, so almost everything they did went straight to the shelf. In the '90s, IBM started taking things off the shelf.