Great! Here is a company whose reason for existence is to trade in patents. They don’t implement any of it, they just keep filing or buying ’em and selling ’em. They say that the firm was founded to invest in innovation and invention.
In 1991, according to The Patent Wars
by
Fred Warshofsky, Bill Gates said this about software patents:
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 patent
exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up
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.
IT used to do this, decades ago, but no more. Today, IT is based mostly on selling general ideas. The requirements
gathering process is superficial. The project proposal is mostly a “shell of an idea.” IT projects have lots of
meetings, lots of issues to be resolved, lots of management to coordinate things. The workers rarely spend more than
35 percent of their time actually accomplishing something FOR the project. In an engineering project the workers are
generally over 80 percent productive.
Is our heritage of culture and knowledge all based on original ideas? There have been countless plays written around scenes from Ramayana, Mahabharata, Kalidasa, Premchand, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhya and innumerable others. These people or works of art have themselves been inspired by the litreature and culture in their times.
Isn’t that what heritage is all about? You build upon your history and create the present and the foundations of the future? Or does every creative author, script writer sit down and think about ways to make whatever they write totally original? Of course, it brings to mind questions as to what is original?
I am starting off a new category of blogs called Pop Cuisine. I call it that ‘coz I am no elite food critic, but I enjoy food good enough to talk and gush about it. My comments on food, or my views on how food should be, is solely based on taste - my taste. So if I find something good (or good enough), and you don’t … too bad. This is my blog. ;) Go rant somewhere else.
Over the past few years, with the explosion of coffee bars in Delhi, I have risen above the depths of the pathetic Nescafe home-made and vending machines. In a case of acquired taste, now I screw up my nose if somebody shoves such a cup under it. Being a non-smoking teetotaller, coffee is the only vice I could take refuge in. And that explains why me and my brother drive ten kilometers (one way) every other day to get our shot of “good” coffee.
After my cellphone was stolen from my car dashboard a few months back, I was left really mad, and I tried to convince my mobile operator Hutch to blacklist the phone IMEI. The operator told me that it was not worth the trouble because the IMEI of stolen mobile phones could be changed, and anyway there was too much paperwork involved in blocking the phone by IMEI.
There is currently an interesting thread at India-GII about this. This post by Nandkumar Saravade was interesting. He quoted an interesting page which talked about the Mobile Telephones (Re-Programming) Act in UK which had the following text:
Aargh! Just discovered from my logs that my college photo gallery is the first result given by a Google
search for “REC Jalandhar” (Check here). Even
before the college website itself!
Since I have forbidden robot access to the Photo gallery (to keep it a
little more private, if such a thing is possible), I expect this “anomaly” to get corrected in a month or two.
Wordpress has a queer default RSS excerpt limit of 50 words while creating rss feed content.
And regardless of the “use full text” setting in the syndication section of the reading options, the description field
of RSS, which is used by some news readers, is limited to this length.
While syndicating content at http://blogs.lug-delhi.org - the ILUGD
members blog aggregating site, I found out that all Wordpress sites were belching out tiny excerpts, while Drupal sites
exported more content.
Going through the daily drudgery of earning to survive, one always keep wondering - “where are we going with all this?”
or “which way should I turn now?” or if you are a business, then “which way should we take today so that we are where
others would try to flock to tomorrow?”. You are always crying out for a larger view of things. And from time to time,
you find the words of someone else with a theory that can shed some light on that possible path.
I have been watching the happenings in the US election with some interest. And at the same time I keep wondering why there is not so much interest in India about this election.
What most people dont realize is that the US election is sometimes more important to every Indian than, say, the way assembly elections in Maharashtra is important to us in Delhi. And look at the difference in media coverage!
The actions of the US determines how many innocent men, women and children die in Iraq, Afganistan, Palestine, Kashmir, etc. You might call this a stretch of imagination, but think about it this way - the fate of all the children in Iraq who died last week in the continuing fight there, was decided by the decision of a large section of Americans to vote for George Bush. (And everybody knows by now, the fight in Iraq was for anything but USA’s national security interest, leave aside the morality of preemptive attacks). Ofcourse, I dont think most of these Americans would have thought things would turn this bad in the hands of their elected representative. But this blog of mine is not about what Bush did wrong, but rather it is more about how the leadership issue of a country in this world, affects so many people outside that country, in such a significant way.