Future technology predictions

Life Technology
41

[quote=“robert_storey”][quote=“MaPoSquid”]

Then again, money isn’t everything:
tomshardware.com/hardnews/20 … 21119.html
[/quote]

Except that it costs maybe US$50,000 to fight a bogus patent and have it revoked. Since Microsoft holds about 3000 software patents, that means for a mere US$150 million we can we can castrate Bill Gates’ patent portfolio. I’ll pass the collection plate at the next Linux club meeting.

Meanwhile…

Don’t know if you read Robert Cringely’s weekly column, but these last two (which dealt with Microsoft’s planned use of patents on USB standards to cripple Linux) were gems:

pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040916.html

pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040923.html
[/quote]
Never heard of him. But so what? Device manufacturers need to make their gadgets compatible with everything, not just with Windows.

[quote=“robert_storey”]If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
– Bill Gates, 1991

This was quoted by Fred Warshofsky in “The Patent Wars” of 1994. The text is from an internal memo written by Bill Gates to his staff. Part of has appeared in another Gates memos.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. … The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."[/quote]
Yeah, so? Linux ought to be out there patenting the stuff ahead of time, so that the FSF and EFF and RedHat can bring Microsoft down to its knees.

The geek crowd is several hundred times more innovative than Microsoft has ever been. Show me just ONE real invention out of Microsoft – every single thing I’ve ever seen from them has been a poor copy of someone else’s work that Microsoft then bludgeons end-users into accepting. WinCE? IE? Excel? Oh, I know – Microsoft developed this really cool thing called a “windowing system” once upon a time!

So, patent the stuff. Blow Microsloth to hell and gone. When some dweeboid in Redmond screws up and includes the code in Windows, sue for infringement damages and demand royalties – that’ll pay for your $150,000,000 in patent litigation several times over.

42

[quote=“MaPoSquid”][quote=“robert_storey”]
Don’t know if you read Robert Cringely’s weekly column…
[/quote]
Never heard of him. But so what?..
[/quote]

Cringely’s usually worth reading, though sometimes (not often) he misses the mark. I think his analysis of Bill Gates’ personality was one of my favorites…

pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20001123.html

But maybe this is really getting off-topic.

regards,
Robert

As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
– Bill Gates, 1998

43

That’s not even close to true. It costs $50k for the simplest most slam-dunk patent case. That’ll get you enough legal representation to go through a few rounds of sending demand letters and then 1 day in court. Any more than this and the bill starts soaring. It is not uncommon for a patent dispute to cost a couple of million US dollars just in legal fees.

44

Thanks for the pbs.org Cringely links. Interesting stuff. The following article about wireless neighbourhood networks, and kitchen sink (Internet/phone/‘TiVo’) PDAs is a glimpse of the near-future.
pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040930.html

45

That’s not even close to true. It costs $50k for the simplest most slam-dunk patent case. That’ll get you enough legal representation to go through a few rounds of sending demand letters and then 1 day in court. Any more than this and the bill starts soaring. It is not uncommon for a patent dispute to cost a couple of million US dollars just in legal fees.[/quote]
Yeah, but look what Microsoft is trying to patent – “sudo”, linked lists, filesystems that were out 5 years before they decided to file. . . . These are the sorts of slam-dunk cases that will get discarded the moment anyone challenges them.

Look, I admit, most of what gets patented is crap. A lot of times, the inventor is looking for prestige or a bonus check from his employer. But there are genuine inventions, even in the software field – quicksort, B+ trees, FFT. The people who designed those algorithms published a paper and continued to collect their salaries, and little more. Meanwhile, some dweeboid who ran a Mexican fast-food chain for a couple of years sold it out to Wendy’s for US$300,000,000.

In my opinion, the USPTO and the other patent agencies around the world did a great disservice to the pioneers of the software field. It takes just as much creativity – and much more education – to design a faster sorting algorithm as it takes to design intermittent wiper blades on cars. Yet the software guys were prevented from becoming more than wage slaves. Last time I heard, the intermittent-wiper guy had won lawsuits against several car manufacturers, including one for US$20,000,000.

46

Granted, the FAT patent got denied, so we’re on good ground there. But Microsoft probably has a good enough legal department that going up against them even on slam-dunk cases is going to be rough. I certainly wouldn’t want to end up on the pointy end of the stick where Microsoft is concerned.

47

As if software patents weren’t enough of a shackle on future technology, take a look at this:

TRUSTED COMPUTING:
cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

Another vision of future-hell, brought to you by Microsoft and Intel.

48

Predictions about future technology is more of an art than a science.
This picture is a vision of what a home computer might look like in 1984.

49

Thank god Xerox PARC invented the mouse, or we’d all have huge ass steering wheels in front of our computers.

Edit: after passing this on to some friends, one of them spoiled my fun by pointing out that it is a fake: snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

The original picture:

50

[quote=“snopes”]The color picture above was taken in 2000 at the Smithsonian Institution exhibit “Fast Attacks and Boomers: Submarines in the Cold War” and depicts:
A full-scale mock-up of a typical nuclear-powered submarine’s maneuvering room in which the ship’s engineers control the power plant and electrical and steam systems
[/quote]

Duped again, dammit. I did wonder what the big steering wheel was for. :laughing: