Most of you are simply followers or have no business sense, or both. Patents are important, especially in technology.lhughey
Important to stifling competition and keeping yourself from being imploded by patent trolls perhaps (and it's not really effective in the later case). Patents over software represent a massive drag on the industry. How many people does it benefit exactly that the MPEG-LA has so many patents on video tech that it's sometimes thought no modern codec can be made which doesn't infringe on some of them?
That is just one example. Unlike in other industries any given producer (programmer) will routinely infringe upon patents in their day to day work because so many exist, because so many are so obvious and because they're so broad. The existence of these patents discourages work on innumerable projects or stifles others that have begun before they can hit their stride.
To add to this nobody makes any real money on patents except for trolls. Even those companies with the largest number of patents such as Microsoft and IBM need only one patent suit brought successfully against them every half decade or so in order for any possible profits they might have made on licensing deals to evaporate.
Nor do patents benefit customers/consumers. Each codec in the hardware we buy costs us extra, it certainly makes interoperability more difficult even for things which should be considered obvious (FAT32 long file names anyone?), and there is no real indication that the presence of these software patents encourages the production of good software, or software in general.
In fact a lot more innovation was taking place in software BEFORE patents on it were allowed than is taking place today. Explain that for me if you would.
That's pretty funny, because hating an OS is just not a worthwhile endeavor. They all have advantages, and some may prefer one over another, but seriously hating an OS is really just non-sensical, especially one that is so widely used and so easy to work with. More power to them and their many reasons for such contempt. Also, the thing about non-windows admins being paid more is not true in every case, but believe what you want. It sounds like all sorts of propaganda to me. tempest91
The thing about Windows supposed ease of use is that the more you know about computers the more clear it becomes just how difficult it actually is to work with. As an OS it is incredibly inflexible and inefficient in numerous ways. Mac OSX for all of its flaws and "my way or the highway" thinking has a BSD core to tinker with if you don't like the tools Apple provides. There is no equivalent on Windows.
Speaking for myself I hate Windows because it has held back the industry and has harmed people in the process and I'm pretty sure the two people I used as examples feel the same.
They've spent three decades caring dick all about security as just one example and only now are coming around because it has begun to hurt their business. Microsoft is like that with virtually everything when it comes to OSes. Much or most of the work they've done to advance their OS was done earlier and usually better elsewhere.
We've essentially been dragged along at a snails pace for three decades because Microsoft couldn't bother to support things as standard and well-understood as TCP/IP, Javascript, or ACLs. To this day Windows doesn't behave correctly with respect to TCP/IP.
Oh and virtually nothing is true in every single case. That doesn't disprove it in general though.
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