Mood:
don't askNow Playing: 'Slamming the Banana in the Spoon Drawer' Instructional video on making delicious splits.
Topic: Calamity
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote
"We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property,..." Steve Ballmer
"But!"
Well, some of us do, but Microsoft has demonstrated by their actions they do not.
Essentially the comment in the blog post before this one tells us Emily was working with Java several years ago while Microsoft was actively working to duplicate the same kind of effort with Sun and Java during that time. I would not doubt Microsoft shadowed Emily development every step of the way... but, there's a problem here. Microsoft hid that development away after VCSY won the patent. The verbiage of Microsoft market-speak studiously avoided particular discussions and demonstrations of how they were accomplishing some of the hottest developments they were to be including in Longhorn, Yukon and a host of other projects that have been since gutted.
Since gutted.
That's the first example of mens rea ( www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Mens_rea ) in that it may be shown Microsoft knew they were violating an intellectual property rule of some kind by shadowing the development of the dynamic very high level language Emily from at least 2001 through 2007.
They now come to a 'cease and desist' after believing all along VCSY would not survive as a business and they would have the advantage of head start on anything VCSY gave up during the expected bankruptcy.
Just one problem: VCSY didn't go bankrupt as planned.
Now Microsoft faces a patent judgment out of the blue ... unexpected, as it were ... one that will force them to pay according to their mental state as demonstrated in the past six years of .Net development and deployment.
They, in turn, must defend themselves by having the patent system declared non-valid.
Ordinarily, I would think VCSY would be quaking in their boots, even though the thought of Microsoft making good on their "promise" to sue seems ludicrous, the specter at being within the eye of such a storm can be daunting to anyone. VCSY is small. They have no protection beyond the courts. They have a history that far outshines Microsoft in the ability to deliver on a particular technological architecture they happen to have pioneered all through the dotcom era up to a point of maturation where they are ready to apply what they know to the world at large.
and an arrogant bumbling giant dances in with a tutu and a wand thinking they can make everyone think they've been doing the same thing for years.
If they have really been DOING it for years and they thought it really belonged to THEM THEY would be doing all that IBM and THEIR partners are.
Were that you Microsoft folks really did stand by the words you utter. Your representative, Mister Ballmer, says you all stand by the ethics of property and fair play. We shall see and we shall hear in the courts just what you've been doing all along. THEN I think the whole issue of intellectual property among deceitful hands will be demonstrated quite succinctly and glaringly.
The word is clear... if you are an inventor, Microsoft considers your software developments to belong to them because they are the biggest and they can hurt you and your friends and customers the most.
Microsoft's ability via money shield to say one thing and do another is what the courts a hundred years ago had to deal with in terms of non-competitive monopolies and "control by size" tactics of the oil industry. If Howard Hughes' dad had not been protected by patents for drill bits (HELL It's just tiny shovels on a stick! How can you patent something like that?) there would be no aviation pioneer who's companies furthered the cause of technological freedom. That is what a patent can do in the right hands. And there are so few "right hands".
VCSY technology is on the forefront of actuation virtualization: the ability to hook all these proprietary industrial automation systems to a virtualized supervisor. The industry may go ahead and steal it from VCSY but the number of educated longs will make it one stinky fight, that's for sure.
Microsoft may have all companies worried, but I would say to them, Fear not. Let not your hearts be troubled. You know they wouldn't be blowing a header valve like this if they weren't under enormous pressure. Let the beans boil on the pot and stop up the relief valve. Just stnad back when it blows/ Hot beans. Bad for the complexion.
Ballmer can always be counted on to act like an emotional twelve year old. This time he's going to defend himself from VCSY patent infringement by threatening to blow up the world. My advice is to throw a cold glass of water in his face, take the broomstick away from him and send him to bed without supper. That's how you deal with a tantrum and one can just see the popped veins in Mister Ballmer's neck as he strains to shake the foundations of the earth... in the face of a tiny tiny little threat.
Such a shame. Such a juvenile lunge at first base. And the umpire of history is shaking his head.
Let's all watch just how much power Microsoft has against the open source world now. By admitting he has a puckered puker at the prospect of the VCSY patent threats, now Mister Ballmer has invited the circling sharks to begin tearing chunks out of Microsoft's reputation and image. They couldn't imagine it could be true so the quiet path would have worked a bit longer, I think. But, maybe there is no “longer” for him and he realizes he's cut Microsoft out of the Virtualization derby.
We still have a hardware patent that secures VCSY's place in history in the single fiber optical image transmission patent by Cruz.
Look, there... just over the horizon. Charles Northrup's patents can easily be seen as a corollary to the fiber optical system for some fantastically advanced autonomous intelligence systems... even without the VCSY software patents. The VCSY software patents embody a work done by the original thinkers in this area.
If VCSY's work does not count for unique and expert and novel, there are no new developments in software worthy of protection.
If so, then, the no-patents world is right and nobody should make any money off the software they write. There's only one problem... the open-source world has been struggling and fitfully advancing through one dead end ringer after another... always doing what any designer and developer without a plan will do. That's acceptable when an individual inventor does so and comes up with something that works eventually. But, when 'the inventor' is a mass of wannabees and noblets trying to feel up an elephant for a cameo view, the delay is intolerable. The cost to business is in productivity via enhancements to virtualization and arbitration. Something that has been with-held (and I say with-held by design) from the world at large due to Microsoft's inability to swallow the pill and introduce the supremo maximo XML software "work" they had been doing. Up to now no dice. No show. No cigar. No merchandise. Yes we have no bananas. Sorry Merv. It's just a pattern of alphabetic characters that anybody could assemble so give it up. All them quarters in the jukebox. Give 'em up and you can keep the casinos.
Silly duplicitous bastards.
Why are we only now coming to the 'open-source' understanding and development in what SiteFlash and MLE have demonstrated? Have they been working in the dark? Did they not look at the patents? So they are only now "inventing it" in their shops? And what do we say to Mister McAuley and Mister Davison who were doing what you little titty-twisted-tadpoles are doing now back when you were peeing on your tricycle seat?
"Hey! I was doing that back in ought three!". Yeah? Did you bother to write it down and expend the energy to pursue a patent? Well, they did. And now you thieving little hyenas want to be able to do what the geniuses do with a 40 watt light bulb in an "Edison" socket.
You whining little mass of fleas looking for another dog to suck. Try being the first recorded with the US government administration tasked with recording intellectual property and then we will deign your words worthy of being considered by the true intellectuals in the world. The people who actually DO what all of the rest of your chicken lips peck at.
If an honest review of both VCSY patents are conducted, I would ask all participants to point out the machinery, computers, systems... whatever hardware that first demonstrated these "algorithms" at work and please award the prize for having achieved a novel invention to them.
And, while you're at it, would you please tell all the folks who write those other algorithms called "music" the thought police and the large corporations will be coming for them next. Why should THEY have to pay somebody who thought this stuff up? People have been whistling tunes like these for years!
Fools and blind.
Numbchucks and nuglets all piled in a coconut shell and powered by greed and fear and envy to lusting.
I think Microsoft's reaction in the above Ballmer Blowout demonstrates Microsoft's utter desperation at understanding what mens rea "is". That means they understand the law, their role in upholding the law, their perceived role in public as regards the things the VCSY intellectual property can produce (they were great guns for it up to 2004 then after that they feared saying), and when finally caught in a triangulation of their own makings (they DID make the first deal wit a Linux company by PAYING the Linux company Novell, did they not? Why? To save a failed interoperability project for Walmart by obfuscating and shifting the interoperations to a non-offending paradigm, namely Novell... The same Novell that knew much more about the pioneer work by Davison and McAuley because THEY WERE IN THE SAME FRICKING DISCIPLINES YOU NUMBSKULLS... as opposed to the Microsoft partners that knew about as much about network connectivity and distributed architectures as the Lone Ranger knew how to pack a wigwam. Just because you live close by and some of your friends do it, doesn't mean you know anything at all about the matter. Pack one in public and we'll talk..
That's the ace up the sleeve that would always prevent VCSY from being run into the ground by larger entities. That's why I believe Wade has it in his hot chubby habds.
It's a talisman to ward off the evil gnomes... so the gnome in chief, out of bitter frustration and as a "cry for help" to the world at large, turns to rend the townspeople for letting him get into this predicament. All our fault! All our fault!
One problem... VCSY have it and they have the patents and we will ALL have to trash the entire patent system to avoid poor Microsoft and their accomplices having to admit they wanted to steal the property of a very small company and their embattled shareholders.
My, my, my. Yes, yes, yes... the American legal system is a fine place to decide whether patents should be granted and stolen... or just gained by repression and duress.
