Category: Computers

I recommend Will Frankenfood Save the Planet? from The Atlantic:

Over the next half century genetic engineering could feed humanity and solve a raft of environmental ills — if only environmentalists would let it

Very thoughtful and stuff.

Now this sounds like a good place to work: (Patent Factory: Camas lab churns out new ideas to keep Sharp on cutting edge)

In the super-competitive marketplace of the early 1990s, Japan’s Sharp Corp. sought to quicken the pace of product innovation by diversifying its brainpower. America, a fast-food nation fueled by instant coffee and sugar-coated breakfast cereal, a land of rock stars, risk-takers and entrepreneurs, was the place to turn.

Sharp Laboratories of America in Camas, established in 1995, has pretty much met the need.

Researchers working on the Sharp campus at 5750 N.W. Pacific Rim Blvd. have won 286 patents over the past eight years. Last year alone they filed 199 patent applications, keeping Sharp ahead of the curve on a number of competitive fronts — liquid crystal display technology, software design for multipurpose document imaging systems, semiconductor materials research, wireless phone technology and advanced television systems.

Sharp executives in Japan appear satisfied and are funding laboratory operations to the tune of $50 million a year. It’s an employment gold mine for Camas. Starting salaries for the lab’s research and development people range from $75,000 to $100,000 a year, depending on experience and education, with senior people in much higher salary categories. Total Camas employment: 183.

Gee whiz. Here’s the rest of the article:
Continue reading “Good place to work”

Law professor Jim Maule tries to convey a lesson on copyright to the zealots on Wellbert Declan McCullagh’s Politech e-mail list. Here’s one of his yeoman efforts:

Whatever Jefferson has said, the Constitution gives Congress the power to give copyright protection to the fixed forms of ideas. It is the fixed manifestation and the right to copy it that is protected, not the idea or the thought. Hopefully Declan will post this so that the discussion can re-focus on the point I think you made and that I think you made again (in your suggestion that the pirates aren’t the cause of revenue loss and in your point concerning the burden on the owners of information to invent new business models).

When the law grants a right, whether in title to real property or the right to copy, it is a violation of that law to act, without permission and without privilege, in a manner that denigrates those rights. In this regard, it makes no difference whether a right attaches to physical property or the manifestation in physical or digital form of an idea or the intangible “right” to own real property or to copy or fix an idea. The specifics of remedies, proof, and procedure may vary, but an intrusion on a right is an intrusion whatever the right.

I am not arguing for a perpetual copyright, as my careless articulation in my original posts seems to say. I corrected that in a followup.

Nor am I arguing that the term provided under existing law necessarily is the best, or ideal, or good for business or the economy. But I do argue that just because a person does not agree with a law is not in and of itself justication to ignore it.

The notion that the owners of copy rights need to rethink their business model because modern technology has made it easier for pirates to steal the profits flowing from the right to make copies (and that their failure to do so excuses the theft) is like saying that the creation of better lock picking tools means that those who don’t change their security system excuses the thieves. This is a natural consequence of the “blame the victim” mentality that permeates our culture. Sure, some copyright owners have exploited artists and consumers. That’s not enough to sanction P2P schemes that infringe on all sorts of artists, publishers and copyright owners (many of whom are not big Disneys).

How you can suggest that file swappers aren’t eating into CD sales boggles me. Who has to prove what is a different matter, and yes, the burden is on the RIAA. That the decline in sales matches the growth in the Internet and P2P and other file sharing schemes isn’t a coincidence. No one believes that in the absence of the technology the swappers would not have purchased CDs.

So I’d be happy to hear you say that you think the file swappers are violating the law and violating the copyrights. And then say you understand why they do that although you don’t think that makes it right. Then we’d be fairly close to having the same position. If that is what you are saying, then I apologize for mis-interpreting your earlier post and this one.

Declan’s people are mighty dense, so you have to admire the Professor’s patience. Music stealers know what they’re doing is wrong, which is why they try to justify it by claiming to be stealing only from the Big, Evil RIAA. But they’re also stealing from the little artist dudes, and they need to be reminded that that’s wrong.

The ersatz civil liberties champions at the EFF are true to form in the wake of the RIAA suits against music thieves: trolling for memberships. Here’s the pitch:

Join EFF and support our efforts to protect file-sharing.

But of course — pay the EFF and you get free music for life. What a deal.

Sorry guys, but we don’t need you screwing the recording artists, the record companies have already got that covered.

Two law professors, Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu, have filed a pleading with the FCC seeking to invalidate the architecture of cable Internet access networks. Click on this link for a discussion is its demerits.

Google has web site for their new toys, some of which are pretty neat. Try Google Viewer to have the results of a search played out for you. It’s like the “scan” button on a car radio.

Because the Internet buildout is proceeding apace, the next generation could trigger a business revolution as well. “Internet II”, about four years away, will combine broadband, wireless, and IPv6 switches, which will enable everything with electricity to have its own Web address that will make it intelligent. — Tom Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes, pg. 22; from a Feb. 23, 2001 column.

This is the kind of thing Friedman has pretty well stopped speculating on since Sept. 11, which is sad.

On one of my many trips to Fry’s this weekend, I ran into an old buddy from 3Com who now works for Wi-Fi champion Atheros, and we quickly ran down 802.11, 802.15, 802.16, UWB, Intel’s wireless strategy, and the limitations of IPv6. Little chance encounters like that are what’s best about Silicon Valley, but on reflection I didn’t learn much from it except that it’s nice that I don’t have to write code for a living any more.

I spent the weekend doing computer repair in Santa Clara. Mrs. Bennett’s computer got itself into a mode where it wouldn’t boot. When the power was turned on, the fans all spun on the CPU, the video card, and the case, but it woudn’t complete the POST, didn’t make a beep, and didn’t sync the monitor. So no feedback from the monitor, and no beep codes. After swapping out this thing and that, I got it to work quite nicely, but the bad part wasn’t what I thought, so let’s have a contest and try and guess what the problem was.

Unstrung spills the beans on another smart antenna startup:

Motia is working on 802.11 chipsets that will incorporate “smart antenna” technology, similar to that being offered by Airgo and Vivato Inc., Unstrung has learned. Systems using a smart antenna approach use multiple antennas to transmit signals in an effort to improve the consistency of the link.

This is a true story. The CEO of Motia called me one Saturday a few months ago trying to squeeze proprietary info out of me about Airgo, but being the stand-up guy that I am, I didn’t talk. My instinct when I get these calls is to give them some subtly misleading info, following my consultant daddy’s dictum that free advice is worth what you pay for it. My amendment is that advice should cost the recipient as much as it did the giver. I’m happy to give good advice if you’re willing to pay me well for it, and that’s the way the world works.