Re: your previous article on the "Ninja". I know what they are. I get it...

..and the Big Voice in Redmond said from on high, "All ye involved in the Windows Vista Capable debacle, ye shall be made to wear funny looking flannel jammies and wander aimlessly throughout the world carrying a Big Orange Thing. You will have no purpose and no meaning..."

My computer does have a 915 chipset, but it does not have the Vista capable sticker. It only has the "Designed for Windows XP" and the Intel Centrino mobile technology sticker. It has only 512 MB of memory so I would never want to try to run Vista on it. It is an HP tablet PC (tc4200). I got it new a bit over 2 and a half years ago.

Are patents doomed? Not on your life.

I know I may be a bit bombastic here, but, even before I read Joe's article, just the headline of Joe's article has my twitters in a beeb. I'll try to simmer down and try to redeem my barging in here like this with a witty reparte' when I redux this comment and have had a chance to figure out how to make the comment ontopic so one of the faithful hohums doesn't pinch me for being OffTopical.

But, I'm always creamy and I'll sink in if you let it sit without washing it off for a while.

At least, that's where I'm starting negotiations. The rest of you can cough up your sputum for all I care.

http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/02/28/ending-software-patents-has-the-time-come/?source=yahoo_quote
Mathematician Klemens contends that software patents amount to much the same thing as mathematics, thus unpatentable.

Not understanding the difference between physical work and a stream of words, the "I hate patents" faction thinks thought is the thing. Once "the thought" happens, what's the big deal?

They forget just how much thought is only a part of the thing and, without an investment by the life-support system to focus a learning mind, the rest of poor humanity is cursed to reinvent and miss the mark with every lurch toward innovation.

The hope of those who think they can abolish patents is that every "description of an idea" can be boiled down into a mathematical process and the academics finally get to pad the expense accounts and "learn" from examples for a chance. Just like Marx and Lenin with a distrust of capitalism, the free society of software learners gravitates toward a socialist view of software consummation so that he who can screw the most mothers gets the cheese.

Whereas, in a capitalist system, he who fathers so many dependent children is tasked with the burden of sustaining the children's needs. Or you can stranglethelittlebastardsintheirsleep and cut the cheese as often and in any shape you like. A socialist implementation of anything will necessarily degenerate into a less productive enclave although the goals and ideals of the proponents are very lofty and appear right from the emotional side,

When the cheese got scarce, there was a Joe Stalin calculus that took over and the generations slid downhill from there until they remake themselves after some admission and suffering of failure, sometime destructively, but, with help, constructively if not perfect. Thus, the idea, I would think of IBM's Open-Commerce Community and whatever branding Microsoft uses to talk of their own commoditizing of open-source into a commercial construct with high ideals on the front end and could calculus on the back end.

Just because you can express something in mathematics, doesn't mean the math is the real lesson.

I suppose we all want to run a 4 minute mile. But the first athlete to learn (yes it's a process because those who didn't run the 4 minute mile like the first guy... had to learn from his example and before long others could do it) deserves the accolades and license, on our cultures. It's that way with human effort to achieve anything. Why is the software inventor doing something anyone could do? If anyone could do it, it would have been done before. That's the "obviousness" of a thing. And the degree of complexity should bring awe instead of theft.

Granted there are foolish patents and the demagoguery is to characterize all patents like the ones we all laugh about. But the natural inclination of a demagogue is to paint with the broad brush so the whitewash doesn't wear off before people realize what happens when the little guy no longer has his day in court.

Each learning process is a refinement of past thought in an abstraction process into a more useful current thought... one in which we might find a resonance with which to extend that thought to look beyond the horizon. Some people think it happens all the time. It doesn't happen often when you're talking about learning the first one.

The distance covered from abstracted primitives available to the common mass (the stuff you learned in school... which is a couple years behind the developing curve and is completely clueless when it comes to disruption... unless the disruption occurs in that school) into a refinement of the "art" of constructing ideas into property is much more highly advanced in thought covered over new ground than the clown who thinks he can build a better one after reading a "Nuts and Volts" article on weedeater-robotics.

The mathematician claims he is the father of software. How odd. It's like making the 4 mile minute runner give honor to the shoes he ran in. In fact and in tragic human irony; that's precisely what happens when the common mass turns anything special into a commode. Give it a few years and only the "shoe company" will carve a living out of that once impossible event. And the one who ran the mile, works as a presentation tool of the corporation.

If I were some special one capable of inventing and seeing for the first time a result of my art that would be as full of import and issue resolution for the common man as the kerosene lantern in the jungles, I would think twice about saying a word about it. In fact, I would show it only to specific companies and cut an evaluative deal with each in secret that says they can't show it until I say they can and if they say anything to anybody they lose a chance use it.

Otherwise, if I couldn't cut a deal because I knew somebody big would re-engineer what they saw and make something inferior and claim to do the same thing except for this, that and the other for at least a few more months until I died from nobody believing I would live under that kind of smothering. I would say, "Meet you in court." And I sit and wait for the opportunity to stumble on them "discovering" the idea.

Oh, you mean I can't do that any more because the big companies are all having their panties up in the high C's because they actually have to consider certain things properties?

Well, then, screw you.

The next time I have a constructed revelation that can ease your burdens, light your way and feed your family, screw you, I'll leave it lie and see if one of the big boys has the sense to find it much less actually know enough of the vision to know how to use it without catching himself on fire.

What I'll do is I'll hide everything and make deals with people I could count on to be fair. And anybody I couldn't work with and consider fair and trustworthy, I wouldn't let out a peep until just the right time: Just before the campaign of marketing and introduction for a technology matured in the shadows

It's a lot like knowing just which weather is perfect for growing wheat, and knowing just when to buy the seed and when to throw it to its death... that it might bringforth a hundredfold or a thousand. Bring forth on opportunity. And on the knowledge to understand the opportunity and enforce a work practice upon it that results in a yield. And, like it or not, the nature of survival dictates the guy who makes the most yield is the guy that lives best.

Decanting cognac is an operation, the timing, the temperature, the handling... all of it is learned by specialized capability. The reason you benefit from the thing is the many years that knowledge took from the time it was first forms to the time you drink the highest form of the art.

And then the mathematician comes in and says he can describe mathematically the molecular compounding of the stuff. Or if we get too picky, he'll migrate to the next broader view and say his statistical math makes the American farming system the greatest success in the world.

Statistically speaking, but only to support the corporation. If the corporations were required to treat their own ideas as free for anyone who wants to reproduce the "mathematics", we would have a stagnation of concepts and the only people motivated to work on any one-man achievement will be those who believe the socialist life is superior in human self-governance.

Statistics say it's better for business to relocate the farm you planned on being buried in. Well, bad news. You're going to have to up your plans drastically. You'll die or you'll move... with the company, and their mathematicians. And it doesn't matter that you're the one that had the idea in the first place. The corporation owns the ideas.

Fine. Let the mathematicians make the shit. Let the corporations drink it.

The character sweating brains and heart out to come up with a way to do anything new deserves more of a kick in the ass than anybody on earth because he's simply working for a future nothing.

The capability of a full blown web-based (URL linked transactional nodes - if ReST were capable of transactioning, the web would be intrinsically interoperable and automated. That knowledge takes a great deal more thought.) deterministic arbitration system acting as super operating systems capable of recording the work of everyone who touched the system and allow for a focusing of application intelligence to apply business rules... as well as track the degree of dependence on various values of each fragment of code (should that be your bent), because a truly "seamless" grasp of a very large data mass requires transactioning. Telescope is dedicated to James Gray who was Microsoft's doctor transactioning. His specialty was the arcane world of carrying on a conversation everybody can trust.

But, all the transactional rules aren't the invention. The little applications and tools that allow you to build the physical deliverables, now THAT's where the money maker is and the idea is puddy or pudding depending on the onlookers' view.

Everybody talks about "taking it to the next level". Well, if the dark ages is any indication, the larger majority by far of you dolts are complete idiots when it comes to anything more than associative kluging to save your frikking lives.

Macines are about to fulfill the first fears of automation. When the computers of World War Two came to the corporate plantation and when the first automated controls got rid of operators who knew the characteristics of something as esoteric as one bank of valves in a refinery, the disruption wave swept away people with skills deemed essential and in some cases essential to the well being of the nation. The replacement by machine of a skillset propels the machine to a higher place and brings requirement for human skills up by notchs, discarding those not required at the back end.

For the refinery workers of old school, the computer could allow an engineer to sense, calculate and actuate mechanical tokens for the inputs the old timer put in with a red kerchief and a pipe wrench leveraging a kernel of learned "mathematics" over decades of sweating around a sugar boiler. That previous learning was the foundation for boiling oil for volatiles. The more the little guy is not needed by a corporation, the more needed is the little guy to the society. At least Trotsky knew that, but, then, they stuck an ax in his head.

A socialist patent revolt will stunt the knowledge and innovation base and breed nothing more than bad copies. I may mouth Microsoft pretty bad, but, dear God how much longer does anybody need to wait before they see a dominant community experience in the Linux crowd that can amalgamate some of this vast pool of "learning" and get out at least one "ah haaa" moment in open-source software? When will open-source manage to step out of the limitations imposed on them? Hey. Wait a minute. There's aren't any limitations imposed on open-source. They have every opportunity (in fact an even better opportunity) to find something truly innovative. Instead, what happens is some dweeb spews his guys at a forum, some sharp Bill Gates character who knows more about business than the science scoops it and "open-source" comes to mean "colonoscopic restitution".

So, here's to the guy who can sneak up on the jackasses and not break a law doing it. All the while they build catwalks onto the law so they can get access to a particular troubling part and apply some, uhhhh.... controls... on the process... of "learning".

So, OK. I was pissed. I'm kidding. Of course I'll let you have my created idea and all the work I poured into getting documented and productized while trying to battle a patent and getting smothered by giants claiming to "own a patent on XML", for instance, say if my software patent had to do with some esoteric subject such as, say, software development, and not just any software development but in developing foundation architectures for achieving a greatly needed common sense revolution in coding and a novel method of transporting and transacting the functions (any of those functions which are algorithmic software running through my infrastructural engine - I mean, you DO have to have a place and the facilities to do what your math says to do, right?) on a platform that could take any content from any resource, combine that with any format meaning any culture or style, comb in the functionality from any code and any platform, and, let's say, you have an ecology that can birth_to*death software frameworks that by their very arbitrary-ness in nature, create their own frameworks yet maintain the entire interactiveness of the framework with every player throughout the lifetime. Such an interconnected machine should be able to monitor any conceivable part of itself to any conceivable using community affiliations watching and policing (governing, if you will) by dashboard the death to life generation of any portion of software code whether it's... content, format and functionality.

I'll let you have you that as soon as you return the damn lawnmower.

And I'm sorry for the big run-on sentence. I don't do elevator speeches unless it's in a really tall building.

But, I realize the cognac keeper's secrets don't extend to things you can reverse engineer. So, for the current inventor within the current adversarial mindset, it's best to keep what you know very quiet and try to build out with the industry you know and have others vouch for, while knowing you're giving them the opportunity to bind up one of the less "fair" of the family of corporations.
The cagey player who can keep his mouth shut, knowing everybody out there is gunning for his treasure and is willing to say anything and, perhaps, "do" anything to get it. That cagey player who can outwait and outwit the larger player under stress will disrupt the industry and bring productivity. How original is that? How valuable is that?

So, we'll see what the public view of patents is over the next year or so.

Now, if only you guys had a machine with which to grind your mash.

PS
I've had a chance to reread what I've written and I agree with myself. So don't expect much of a redux.

OMG.

"Microsoft executive John Kalkman explains that Microsoft "lowered" the Vista Capable requirements to accommodate Intel: "We lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded." "

Helped them "make their quarterly earnings"? How convenient for such large companies to have such friends.

Oh, now this is just beautiful.

The collusion is obvious. But that's what monopolies do to protect their profits -- at the expense of the consumer. Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Chalk up yet another dastardly deed by Micro$oft. This rotten behavior doesn't surprise me at all. Ballmer is still in charge, right? And Bill hasn't really disappeared. it's business as usual for the crocodiles.

This is incredibly easy to fix. The FTC issues an order: Any consumer who has a Windows Capable logo on a computer with a Intel 915 chipset can return it to their retailer for a free replacement. Retailers will be required to provide a software tool to check for the 915 chipset.

It's a plain and simple product recall. And Microsoft will get to pay out more big bucks.

Gotta love the people who actually keep those $#&! stickers on their PCs and laptops like they're some kind of value enhancer. What a bunch of ubergeeks.

Collusion, deception, microsoft? Say it ain't so Joe!

LOL -- as usual, Redmond will pay a couple of billion to settle -- it's only shareholder money after all -- what the hay.

Sorry Jose,

I leave the stickers on as a visual reminder of when I bought the computer and what's inside. Folks who are smarter than me probably don't have to do that.

The problem with this is that MS chased short-term profits in exchange for its long-term reputation. I wonder if the involved MS execs got anything under the table from Intel? Of course it will be impossible to track, if they are smart.

There is no real problem here in the USA with the Intel 915 chipset, and the MS dirty dealing with another monopoly. After all, the DOJ is in the pocket of MS, at least during this administration, and probably as well for the 3 front runners for the next administrations, that I can see. The problem, for MS and Intel, the monopolies, will be settling a few class action lawsuites in the USA, and the possible real problem, in the EU.

At some point, the governing bodies around the world, will take notice of MS, and start to fine them. After all, MS does a lot they could be fined for, and they have the money. MS is a cash cow waiting to be milked no only by Patent trolls, but by the governments of the world, wherever MS sells software. And surely, MS deserves a whole lot more fines and regulation, than the governments of the world, has given it. Not to mention, Intel.

Jose and Roger,

I LOVE those stickers!!! I carefully peel them off and reuse them around the house. The thermostat has an "Intel Celeron 3 Inside." The wastebasket and paper shredder are "Designed for Windows." The coffee maker has an "Intel Pentium IV Inside." Wonder about the microwave? Best you have a need to know -- if you believe the stickers top and bottom on the door. :)

Stickers???

Man, I have an Intel Inside tattoo on my right shoulder and on my terrabyte "Solid State" hard drive on one side is "Plug 'n Play Ready", the other, "BFG Nvidia" and the girls love it especially when it goes HD widescreen on them as it frequently does.

^ LOL

Microsoft needs to pay up for the old bait and switch. Consumers bought Vista Capable PCs based on what they say on display at retail stores and didn't get what was advertised.

The ONLY people hurting Microsoft are Microsoft. All the court transcripts and emails from the years gone by should be proof enough of that.

Yes, it appears my Asus Eee has an Intel 915 in it. One of the lines of output from lspci reads:

    00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 04)

I bought it in November. Came with Xandros Linux, couldn't give a hoot about Vista, or any version of Dimdows, for that matter.

have you noticed, the more they "improve" windows, the worse they get? they should have stopped with 3.1.1 while they were ahead.

The Windows Vista CapAble Lawsuit! Whinners!
A few of you may have read the stories about several groups of whinny mormons attempting to initiate a class action lawsuit against us for deceptive advertising by allowing PC vendors to slap "Vista CapAble" stickers on crappy low-end PC's.
Let's just get the truth out here!

Vista was originally supposed to be released prior to the Christmas shopping season '06, but for reasons of our own we had to put off the release until '07 (for Vista this was the 17th and last time we changed the release date).
The PC vendors went wild, Mikey Dell fell to his knees before me and pleaded for help, "Half of our sales are during this quarter, people won't buy! They'll wait! Oh my God! Oh my God!"
I calmly got him up and said, "Really Mike! I'm not your God! But I do know what you mean, we have a plan! Buck up dude."
Still sniffling he whimpered, "Thank you God! What's you plan Bill?"
I Replied, "Stop calling me that!" I sat him down in MY chair and explained, "You guys can just slap a sticker on the low-end crap! Have it say 'Windows Vista CapAble', the half decent ones slap 'Premium Ready" on 'em!"
Sounding worried he stuttered, "those boat anchors won't run Vista".
I looked him straight in the eye, "I have the Nasal toned Nerds (NtN's) down in the basement stripping Vista down to Windows 95! We are gonna' call it Vista Home edition, we'll let them upgrade to that!", we both had a good little chuckle. I went over to him, grabbed a pen and paper and wrote - "CapAble"
I winked at him and said "get it?" He stared at it for a few seconds then smiled and slooowly said, "yeah, Cap Able! ... able but with a cap!" He stood and high fived me, he screamed, "Jesus! You are slick!"

... maybe I am, maybe I am!

You are welcome!
Here at MS we believe in truth in advertising! The boat anchor computers are CapAble of running Vista!
They are able just with a cap on performance and compatibility! It says so right on the sticker.