November 2006 Archives

Software Patents
Software is one industry dealing with imaginative/visual content, rather than physically designed content/equipment. Ideas here are imaginations of different people based on existing software or processes. And 8 out of 10 people come up with the same idea genuinely in isolated environments without copying.

Software ideas are more like seeing somebody writing with a pencil and inventing a pencil which has an eraser stuck to it at one end. Qualifying something like the "pencil with eraser" for a patent, is like giving authority to one person or company the rights to commercialize on a mass idea.

For years, patents have been issued on stupid things in software. Believe me someone holds an European patent for having shopping carts on webpages. Someone has a US patent on putting a small thumnail photograph of people who comment on a webpage.. and so on.

And that means if you have a website or I make a website that has this stuff, we are theoretically liable to be sued over patent infringement if we are allowing our websites to be seen/used by people in US and Europe.

The present Software innovations and advancements have grown out of innumerable re-inventions. Just like how improving on current life style improves/advances life style of the future, anybody would agree to the fact that improvements on existing technology is the one most major source of technological growth..

Microsoft's victories over patent infringement:
Microsoft Corporation a software giant was sued by Sun Microsystems (another software giant), for patent infringement because Microsoft's new technology .NET released in 2000 was very much a copy(at the concept level) of Sun's Java which released much earlier than 2000.

Microsoft won the suit at the end of an year of argument in the courts contending that "software evolves from previous technologies and like Java evolved from a programming language called C, .NET has also evolved from C and many other technologies".

Microsoft had similarly won a previous suit on its word processing software "Microsoft Word", against another company's product "Word Perfect".

Microsoft's victories suggest that software patents are invalid, and practically not implementable.

If you read through this page at ffii.org (here http://webshop.ffii.org/), you will find that creating any kind of a website is like walking over many patents and getting yourself into trouble. The page has references and links to contents of the patents issued on simple things like putting a shopping cart, putting image next to content, putting tabs, etc.,

NoSoftwarePatents.com Yes! a website which fights for "No software patents" in Europe.

DRM
The next stupid thing is DRM.

You bought a PC, it came with Microsoft Windows installation. You tried playing your Audio CD and it said 'DRM license not found. Cannot play'. Your technical guy talks all tells you the funda that you were trying to play with windows media player which these days has got a digital rights management software built-in, which verifies that you (technically your PC) has licences to play every bit of digital content on it.

You bought the machine, but the machine can't do what you want. You are already searching the web for hours, reading blogs like this to hear your music. May be you copied the music from a genuine CD.. but stop we can't trust you, you can only play from the genuine CD, if its corrupt buy another.

While the above scene is created by Microsoft by implementing DRM or digital rights management into its media player software(for which i believe microsoft is already sued by many times).

Microsoft claims this is to protect the rights of innumerable musicians and artists whose work is easily copied through digital media without purchasing licenses.

Music has always been copied by people and there are big examples of websites like napster.com shutting down, for allowing users to share music with fellow users for Free.

I am not sure whether artists are happy with Microsoft coming to help, but audio and video CD manufacturers and sellers are very happy about these things.. because it directly improves sales.

Microsoft unvieled DRM a couple of years back for probably two reasons.
1. Some CD sales executive who had huge loss in sales joined Microsoft at a higher level.
2. Microsoft wanted to endear media industry knowing well that media content sales is obviously growing at enormous rates every year, and Microsoft is now one among top technically adaptive companies in the digital media industry.

Because of DRM, there is immense pressure from the non-technical world, on the technical world, to implement such systems in software in the pretext of protecting rights of artists, and media content providers. And many popular software products have given way in implementing such systems or considering implementation, many software companies / web sites have sold off or shut down.. and what not.

One-CPU licenses
You bought a software, when you start it up it requests for registering the product through an internet connection.. Technically, this action registers the current PC as the sole PC licensed to use the software.

When you buy another PC and give away your old PC, you land up in some or other kind of a problem while using the software or while registering the software. You end up unable to use its full features, or you land up searching the web for counter-action, you contact the software manufacturers' customer helpdesk and all sorts of things. What the heck!! You bought the software and it should work on your current PC you think...but the software manufacturers' customer helpdesk start explaining you reasons for such protection.

You would have come across games which can be played only with the original game CD spinning in the CDROM drive.. copying it to another CD won't work.

All these implementations just kill the practicality of software usage itself, and many people very often struggle 4 hours to get a 2 minute work done because they get lost into solving such issues. This beats the very idea of using software to do stuff quickly.

End Note:

Ensuring that a software is used only by the buyer and only in the context of how many licenses where bought etc., is a major major implementation hurdle because of technology limitations, and that's first reason for software manufacturers to do all sorts of things to make sure they make atleast 50% sales of the actual number of users of their software.. because software is easy to pirate many people don't buy.

The problem with corporates is, companies like Microsoft know about all such issues for years, but they make hay as much as possible without implementing protection, and when they see competition in the industry they implement such systems to literally gain some kind of advantage over the competition under the cover of protecting rights of a community, and in the background avoiding or wiping all competitors from the business.

Are there solutions good for everybody:
This is where open-source community gains motivation from, and more of such protectionism attitude is creating a higher population in open-source technologists and free software users as well.

Like they say in medicine, that human body has a lot of counter-action mechanisms for defending its own health, the open-source industry looks like the automated counter-action system for all such above discussed 'nonsense systems' in software.

Does that mean every software company should become open-source or sell software for Free! Obviously not, but open-source is what is keeping the industry going, giving that much needed balance when commercial software is practically becoming more problematic to use.

And for the question whether the condition is going to improve for commercial software users / makers, its unfortunately... 'NO'.

"Live with it" is the answer many debates on such issues have always given.

Chatting with friends, I lumped on a topic of an old video I remember seeing.. which depicts how america became what it is today.

Searching the net with little sceptism whether the video was still available somewhere... i found it WAS! Great!...

Here it is.
If you haven't seen Bowling for columbine's 'A brief history of America' .. please do now.
http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/media/clips/index.php

It is a video that you can watch online.. If you have windows, click on windows media player links in the page, or if you have a mac with Quicktime video player then click the appropriate link.

You will remember this history of america for your life.

I cried laughing and feeling another film inside out.. Lage raho munnai bhai. Quite late, because it was released in october (if I am right).

To just make a tempting rating for the movie, "highly recommended" to anyone who can understand even a little bit of Hindi. In my opinion its by far the best presentation of gandhian values and ideals to an urban society of today.

It changed my views of Mr. Gandhi and his ideals. You could very easily tempt me to lose my temper in arguing against Mr.Gandhi and his values. Yes, against.. i don't believe that gandhian values helps solve any issue. That was till the film started.

Seeing the film I was convinced that I had a wrong understanding of values and philosophies that Mr.Gandhi preached.

> "Stay put and do a silent protest against people's wrong doings.. and things will change",
> "If someone slaps you on one cheek, show the other",
etc.,

I always thought all those statements meant that we should stand idle and silently protest with flags for whatever wrong people do. Or good people should cleanup every dirt others do.. and that cleaning to be done with a smiling face.. what nonsense i used to think.

Though I still hold the belief that non-voilence or protests are not solutions for everything, the movie broke my ignorance of these methods as valuable options. Especially very valuable methods to people who otherwise are suppressed against other methods, due to fear or force.

Also, some widespread issues like spitting/ smoking in public places, corruption in politics or corporates, etc., seem to have no other options to solve them. These issues have been of major concern for years in India. Current methods to eradicate such problems through rules, penalties, publicity, etc., don't seem to create much impact...and only address educated urban youth, a very few of them who misuse their freedom. So we are wasting time and money on other methods. And probably Gandhian methods are solutions.

The one
Why are they called Gandhian values? Is Mr.Gandhi to be credited for directing these new methods and values to us?

Mr.Gandhi had never called these methods as his own, he only preached them sincerely. Mr.Gandhi himself has said that he didn't introduce non-voilence or patience to people as they are methods as old as the largest mountains in the world.

He was one of very few leaders of the world who could get all scrambled people into a collective fold and inspire them across religion, belief and economic barries.

One who could preach complex subjects like non-voilence by being an example himself.

And for that thing he could make a nation-wide impact with his words even in the days when there was hardly two or three newspapers in India, and letters through postal mail was the only form of communication over distances.

Learning about Mr.Gandhi, Sir Albert Einstein once said "The future generation won't believe that such a man ever lived"..

"A good deed is a good deed... when its known as a good deed."

Note "when its known as" in the above line. That means one has to claim recognition for a good deed or action, to "complete" the good deed.

Again notice "complete", it means when you do a good thing to the society, or to your employees, or to anybody/any place/or a thing, you need to tell that you have done it to complete the action. Some people think of this as show-casing or making a hype, and not- claiming recognition for doing a good deed is considered being, modest, humble and the likes.

In my opinion people who try to be modest are 'stupid'. I am sorry to say that, but that's the fact.. because they leave their action incomplete and they dont understand how much it affects the reach of their good deed itself. Tell me, will you feel ok if you paid for your shopping and the shop staff didnt give you a bill?. Can you just hop out of the shop calling it as being modest. That's what happens when good people do good things and don't make a noise about it.

Call it showcasing, 'making hay when the sun shines', or whatever you like. But being against it, or being "modest" has very bad effects. And, what wrong is it to claim recognition for a good deed done well... when there are people who claim even bribes for doing nothing or just doing their duty. The more the number of modest people, there exist double that amount of unmodest, anti-development people.

I will take Indians for quoting the effects India is facing in growing into a better country because of modest people. Because there are too many modest people is one of the big reasons for India still trying hard to become a developed nation.

The politicians in India for example, just sign/approve a reform bill and claim they have done great things to make the nation grow.. and they drum it loud on newspapers, TV channels, radio... name a medium, they shout there for little deeds they do.

Point Number 1 here is, these politicians were elected only for doing these deeds, and shouting it loud is nuts... they are just doing their duty... and they are not giving away their money to reform anything or anybody. Are they?

There are some people on earth like Bill Gates (Chairman Microsoft corporation), who earns all his money out of hard-work, stressed-up planning, marketing, managing his large enterprise over many many years, and after all that Bill Gates donates billions of this hard-earned money to charity. Does Bill Gates drum it like these stupid politicians do.. and comparing Bill Gates with these politicians would only de-credit him, because he does it with his money, while politicians do it with people's money amassing some it to themself too.

In my opinion, every minute Bill Gates doesn't claim recognition for his work, his modesty costs an awful amount of time and money. Wondering how?

Kill your modesty:
You are a Dance choreographer, your creative work for a hindi music video gets you critical acclaim.. Go there, show off.. if you be modest, you are giving valuable Television air-time for a politician to make another claim for signing a small reform bill, you are giving scope for government employees to show-off as if they did a great thing when they have just did a part of their job and this is because you make general public think that great things are so uncommon and they believe every bit of a claim that unmodest people make.

This why I call unmodest people as anti-development guys.. and modest people are directly supporting them in allowing them to do their stuff with all the hype.

Looks like a simple thing to be modest..
Looks like a great thing to do a lot of good work and keep quiet,
But if you understand what all advantages people make for every bit of a space and opportunity they get, you will only need to make use of your good deed and claim notice for it... so that great things remain great things, and doing duty remains just a duty done well.

Kill your modesty... or it kills the meaning of "a good action".

Modesty and Indians:
Being an Indian, I have seen that "Modesty" is something that's grown with the fabric of Indian culture... quiet unfortunate.

So sad to see that many Indians who talk of trying to change the face of India, are also the people who are reluctantly trying to be modest with their deeds.

All the time when the question arises how they feel about doing the good work, they point their fingers above (towards god), or at someone else at a lower level (to encourage them help more)... which gives unreasonable effect to their work and makes it look like the person wasn't interested doing it, or it just happened by accident, or it wasn't hard work at all. They in turn insult the act of doing good, and nullify its importance (if it has any).

Whenever I see a politician or anybody making noise about a thing or two they did to correct a problem that was waiting to be solved, I remember one of my Project Managers.
Everytime a person on the project complained that the client has no proper systems or processes and its a big problem with doing things for the client, the manager used to clarify saying, "you are here only to make these improper systems and processes proper... thats why we hired you..and thats why the client hires us".
I wish politicians and government employees knew that.
Especially politicians in Tamilnadu India, who even have their own TV channels (owned by family or friends) to do the drumming part. Examples are: SUN TV which drums about every reform Mr.Karunanidhi (cheif, DMK party) make, and JAYA TV drum news about every reform Ms.J.Jayalalitha(cheif, AIADMK party) make.

Whenever I see a person being modest about his work.., I only used to wonder how much TV / media time he could have made use of to make his claims and explain how, why and what made him do it.. which could inspire probably a 100 more people to become like him. Such things are like lost opportunity to drive a million people into achievers...and these opportunities come only once in many years for these million people.

Where there is a billon [$], there is a way..
Where there are a million [employees], there are ways..

Globally more and more large businesses seem to be converting their targets of business growth based on factors like millions and billions. rather than net profit, net percentage growth, or returns per share, like it used to be.

Why, a few months back, the too giant search engines Yahoo, and Google, fought in public media claiming theirs as the most used search by people, ...becos they had a billion directory listings, or million searches per month.

Whatever... the scenes are changing.. probably triggered by IT industry we can say, because, only IT companies started the idea of reaching a billion $ turnover as a big milestone ahead of their competitors who were less than a billion $. Though the difference could be sometimes just a few millions, the latter probably feel themself smaller when compared to the competition which is already making 1 billion$.

Having worked for Cognizant technology solutions, chennai, india, i remember how many mails of motivation and inspiration we used to recieve from corporate heads across the globe in the excitement to reaching the 1 billion $ target, right from the day when we were only 600 million $]. Sometimes it used to look like unless the company made that money, it wasn't happy with what it had. And to make it more obvious, Cognizant gave all its staff an Apple iPod with 10gb disk space in celebration of achieving the target. No, I had left the company before the target and did get calls from friends saying they wished i still worked there so that i could have got one.. iPod.

Such celebration and boosters happen in many companies on many occassions, i dont mean it only happens in IT, or neither do I feel all this is unneccessary. .. but it happens "more" these days, is the point.

Indian railways always had a hell a lot of employees, which we indians always knew from childhood, but suddenly in 2004 people seemed to have drummed it around, and Indian railways was recognized for its 1,583,614 strong employee base by the ..who? Guiness book of world records.

I am not sure whether the railway employees got an iPod or not, but sure it made some news and celebration... and sent the message across to the world, right on time in 2004, that India is a labour intensive country.. and arguments at college as to whether being an Indian is a pride or not, started having statements like "we got guiness record for largest number of employees in an organization, has China got it?"

This slowly seems to have evolved into a tradition.. the numbers.. earlier we used to see importance of numbers only with the balance sheet of public companies. And I dont think increasing employee numbers to 1 million was considered a target which large companies were eager to achieve, 20 years back.

Recently there was some more news.. about another largely-employed organization in India, the Indian Army. I remember in my younger days I used to get bored watching the republic day parade on TV.. they used to keep walking and more soldiers keep coming.. all from morning 7AM or so, till close to Noon. And you had to wait hours to see a mouth-gaping view of the latest defence equipment India had, till 1000 or odd soldiers marched past... like some kind of a break between the sea of soldiers we had that equipment coming.

Ah! yea about the recent news... it seems like, Recently, indian IT companies are in the interest of taking HR lessons from Indian Army and Walmart on managing more than 10,000 strong employee base.

About walmart, it seems it has 1 million and odd employees. For a supermarket chain, that is a whopping number. If walmart employees itself bought their stuff from walmart, the company should find no difficulty making profits.

Bottomline:

Is having more employees, a strength or weakness of a company?
We could debate that. Imagine putting 50 people on a project which might as well do with 10. I think that would sink the project, its costs and its timeline in managing the extra 40 all the time.

Is a billion dollar company really "The" big/best company, shouldn't we factor that as to, "With what employee base, or customer base, they achieved that target?"

Anyways, we assume that corporate heads are in-the-know when it comes to numbers and how it affects (or effects) their show.

And after all this reading.. if you are not carried away thinking about your company size, or your neighbours family size, etc., you can read this interesting article on 'IT cos taking lessons from Indian Army and walmart'

In the meantime.. let me sharpen my conversion skills on how much is a million in lacs and billion in crores.. everytime i see those words millions and billions., i remember i need to work on this. Uh! ...one of the effects of learning the british system, while the british themself seem to have started talking in American system.

Scrybe is a new application on its launchpad. Yes, One of those many hundreds of (probably free) online applications for web users that are on launchpad. But the features of iScrybe are simple, new and impressively simplify day to day tasks.

If you are one of those people who would fancy internet applications (or computers at all) for organizing your tasks, appointments, etc.,, you should have a look at the demo of 'scrybe' here.

Source Website: iscrybe.com

From what I saw, I was inspired to think back how things have evolved from scribbling everywhere, to scribbling on paper, to scribbling on notepad, .... enter technology.. to Scrybe.