throwawaykf03

Even now the majority of non-mobile traffic seems to be direct P2P. I know because I checked using packet sniffers. In fact, even supernode traffic is P2P. Checking my router logs, I can see a number of connections made to Skype even when I'm not using it, which I presume is my machine being used as a supernode.

Of course, since it's not your work that is being mis-appropriated, you're free to look at it another way :-)

"Are Universities Patent Trolls?", Mark Lemley, 2007

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776

From the abstract:

>Finally, I think we can learn something about the raging debate over who's a patent troll and what to do about trolls by looking at university patents. Universities are non-practicing entities. They share some characteristics with trolls, at least if the term is broadly defined, but they are not trolls. Asking what distinguishes universities from trolls can actually help us figure out what concerns us about trolls. What we ought to do is abandon the search for a group of individual companies to define as trolls. In my view, troll is as troll does. Universities will sometimes be bad actors. Nonmanufacturing patent owners will sometimes be bad actors. Manufacturing patent owners will sometimes be bad actors. Instead of singling out bad actors, we should focus on the bad acts and the laws that make them possible.

The means may be different, but the ends are the same: users are tracked all across the Internet.

And that's probably because Google is incredibly weak when it comes to patents. This is kind of well-known in IP licensing circles, but it's also evident in their desperation to acquire patents (Motorola, Novell, Nortel... and other patent holding companies that nobody's never heard of).

It may not be in their nature to attack, but even if they wanted to, they are much more vulnerable to a counter-attack.

This has some problems however:

1) As you can imagine discovery may not turn up any actual infringement, making it all a huge, expensive waste of time.

2) The unfortunate reality of patent lawsuits is that if you can't prove infringement just by looking at something, you might as well have already lost. Anything that requires expert witnesses to provide input on often comes down to which sides' witness the jury finds more likable, and that's pretty much a roll of the dice.

So even if Rap Genius is not bringing revenue to Google, Google certainly can derive value from Rap Genius that contributes to revenue. However, since the effects are indirect, it's not easy (though not impossible) to put a monetary value on this relationship.

I think the real criticism is that despite all this and all the potential opportunities ahead of them, pretty much all their revenue is from ads. Personally, I don't think of this as a cause for criticism, but I do view such a single point of failure as a significant weakness.

Anytime they start indexing or re-indexing a huge code base in a "background" thread, they end up locking the machine to varying extents. Linux is not as bad, as it only tends to lock up instances of the offending application... But that maybe because the Linux PC is a beefy workstation. OS X is on a much less powerful MacBook Pro, and freezes tend to lock up the whole system, or at least most of the other apps, especially Chrome.

I've also had problems with Chrome, and especially Flash, on OS X. Spinning beachballs on every page load. Click-to-flash was such a lifesaver, but I can now sorta see why Steve Jobs wanted Flash dead.

The spinning beachball has grown to be a frequent source of rage for me over the last 5 years. I'm surprised nobody else complains about it more. Maybe it only happens for heavy Java GUI-based apps?

Worked for me.

Edit: Different query from yours, my bad. I mixed both your links up.

Another topic that's huge all by itself is peer-to-peer networks, and all their associated aspects, such as structured (DHTs like Chord, Cassandra, etc.) vs unstructured (Gnutella, Kazaa, etc.), P2P search, handling churn, handling peers with heterogenous capabilities, peer selection, topology organization, decentralized routing, file-sharing (torrents) vs streaming (PPLive, Spotify), etc.

Other topics (with several overlapping aspects) include:

- Security, such as Sybil attacks, group key management, etc;

- Overlay networks;

- CDNs;

- Ad hoc and mesh networks;

- MMOs and multiplayer games;

- SCADA and industrial control systems;

- Pub/Sub systems and application layer multicast;

- Distributed file systems;

- Load balancing and bandwidth management;

And that's just off the top of my head... I'm sure I'm missing other important topics.

It was not very easy to get up and running, the documentation was lacking, requiring digging through many mailing lists, and it didn't support Objective-C 2.0... which was a big pain since the code was in Objective-C 2.0. Some of the libraries didn't even compile, for which I submitted a patch or two that never got accepted. When I finally got the app to compile, it was rather slow, so I abandoned further work.

Looking at the wiki, it apparently still does not properly support Objective C 2.0, and does not even mention plans for things like ARC. I don't think it'll see any adoption until they bring it closer to modern Objective-C style development.

The second patent is a design patent, which means you'd have to have a menu exactly like that to infringe.

Funnily enough, one of the icons in the figures in the first patent is for Internet Explorer. I think I also spied one for Word.

1) Ayn Rand's writings have had their fair share of criticism, with good reason. However, I'm not sure what the circular logic is in that snippet. Could you elaborate?

2) Randian logic aside, multiple people inventing (as opposed to "discovering") the same thing at the same time is so rare, that the USPTO changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file.

Agreed, but as long as anecdotes like mine abound (see also: other comments in this thread, or on any Linux thread anywhere in general), I think Linux on the PC will go nowhere. As others have mentioned, this is often the fault of vendors and drivers that Linux can do little about, but that's not going to excuse it for most users.

> Chromebooks are eating the desktop metaphor for lunch.

I think it's too early to call that right now, especially based on some really questionable statistics. There is some potential for Chromebooks, but in the long run tablets will probably prevail in that space.

Not in my experience, at least...I use Windows, Linux, OS X regularly these days, in increasing order of usage, with Linux and OS X being almost equal. On average, Linux has given me more trouble than the other two combined.

And there is a billion dollar marketing budget for Linux, and it does sell. Except it's only the kernel that's Linux, and the OS is called Android, and it sells because it has a completely different UX, one that was created with another billion dollars of investment from Google. This unfortunately has no bearing on the quality of the Linux UX on PCs.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.htm...

http://hallingblog.com/ayn-rand-on-intellectual-property/com...

Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what artists sell. Yet those essays were extremely popular simply because they confirmed people's biases (hence "pop philosophy"). However, if you check the so-called "blogosphere", you can find many others who have posted well-reasoned criticisms of those (and other) essays.

I've been using Linux regularly for the past half decade and daily for the past year as a PC (as opposed to as a development and deployment target for 12 years). No, it's not viable. Not when the competition is Windows and OS X. I'd explain why, but it'd devolve into a huge rant about poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, grub upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems, all of which get brought up ad nauseum in any Linux thread. Linux is very good as a server, but that in no way translates into being a good PC.

And no, Chromebooks are not a desktop, they're "browser appliances".

Stephenie Meyer spent years writing the Twilight books. Time spent on a work is in no way indicative on the quality of that work.