Archive for July, 2005

I don’t know exactly what I did, but my left shoulder (the good one) is hurting, and has been for about a week. In addition, it’s getting worse. So, I scheduled an appt. with Dr. Speer, the orthopedist that did the reconstructive surgery on my right shoulder after my deer slaughtering event. I don’t know if everyone’s shoulders can do the same thing that mine can, but I’ve always been able to slide the shoulder socket slightly out of joint in order to position my arms in certain positions. If your holding your hand on the top of my shoulder, it feels like I’m able to simply move the ball out of the socket and down about 1″. Well, the left shoulder now appears to be falling down into that lower position when I don’t want it to, like when I’m lifting my arm to pick something up That hurts when it happens A) frequently and B) when you aren’t expecting it. Normally if I slid it down like that intentionally I would do so at a point in time where there was little or not stress on the ball and socket so that it could move easily down. When it happens all on its own, the stress isn’t necessarily zero and the resulting friction and pressure as it slides down is the cause of a lot of the pain. I’m not sure what started this, since I don’t recall any specific event where I hurt it in any way, but it started sometime after the 4th of July weekend when we went to the lake and did a lot of swimming and jumping off the boat into the water. About the only thing I could guess is that maybe one of those dives but some stress on the joint that I didn’t realize and popped it down in the socket, and in the process loosened up the ligaments making it easier for it to happen in the future. But, I would have expected that to hurt, so I’m at a bit of a loss. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

And no, I don’t mean Adam and Eve (or Adam and Steve, or Anna and Eve).
I mean Bob Young and Marc Ewing. Those are the two guys that originally
founded Red Hat. At least one of them, Bob, had in his mind from the
very beginning that one of the great things about open source software
is that it puts control of software into the hands of the users and
away from the corporate entities that keep their private source code
closely guarded and locked away like some sort of prized Renaissance
painting.

Being that I’m a software engineer, let me elucidate a few things for the rest of the world:

1. Software isn’t all that hard to write. Certainly not nearly as hard as
   companies like Microsoft or Sun would lead you to believe. Many times,
   they make their own jobs harder by the decisions they make. Simplicity
   is the key to maintainable software. Don’t throw in frills you don’t
   truly need and you don’t have near the maintenance headaches.
2. Software patents are evil. Pure, unadulterated, socially crippling, innovation stemming EVIL. 
   My first complaint with software patents is something that judges
   hearing software patent cases just don’t get.  Computers are
   nothing more than complex calculators.  The real trick in any
   computer program is not doing the math to accomplish the task, it’s in
   figuring out how to model items that we humans care about as nothing
   other than numbers.  Many patents granted have absolutely nothing
   to do with modeling things but are just about simple operations done in
   software.  My second complaint is that almost NONE
   of the patents meet the criteria that the founding fathers of this
   country had in mind when they allowed (against some opposition) any
   patent system to exist at all.  The patent system was originally
   intended to promote
   innovations, not stifle them.  The biggest key component to
   anything patentable was supposed to be that it was in some way a
   discovery, and the patent system was there to allow the discoverer the
   ability to recoup the expense of the trial and error and hard work that
   goes into any truly unknown discovery.  Today though, the patent
   system is being used to patent ideas instead of discoveries.  That
   was never intended.  If you have a good idea, then in order to
   protect it (at least as our forefathers set up), you must compete in
   the free market and be the best at implementing or delivering your
   idea.  If you are a piss poor business person with a great idea,
   then you have to align your self with a business guru in order to
   protect your idea.  But, the way the patent system is being abused
   today, people are patenting good ideas as though they are
   discoveries.  Sorry guys, that’s just lame.  Get off your
   lazy asses and MAKE something
   of your good idea, as the founding fathers intended, instead of
   expecting our legal system to put a silver spoon in your mouth. 
   The second reason for our patent system, as our forefathers defined it,
   is to get new information into the hands of the people.  Any time
   a company came across a discovery, they had one of two choices: keep it
   a trade secret or patent it.  If you made it a trade secret then
   you only were protected as long as people couldn’t figure it out, like
   Coke’s recipe.  If they ever did make the discovery themselves,
   then you had no protection against them using that discovery for their
   own benefit.  If you patented the idea, then you were required to
   disclose all the information needed for someone else to use your
   discovery, but you had limited protection against competition from them
   in the marketplace (mainly a time limit were you could recoup your
   losses on making the discovery before proceeding to compete with people
   who are using your discovery for their own purposes).  The option
   of exposing the discovery and having it protected was counter posed
   against the harm of keeping it secret.  In the software world
   though, they aren’t balancing “keep it secret and for ourselves” vs.
   “tell everyone and have some protection”.  Instead, they are
   taking all sorts of mundane things and patenting them with the intent
   of blocking other software engineers from coming up with the same thing
   themselves.  They are making a land grab out of software design
   similar to the Oklahoma land rush.  It has nothing to do with
   recouping losses and everything to do with stifling competition. 
   Our patent system and our courts have allowed this, to the detriment of
   the public and society at large.

Well, fortunately, Bob Young has applied that same type of “put control
in the hands of the people” philosophy to his next startup
business.  If you people haven’t visited it, go to
www.lulu.com.  Here, as a writer or singer or musician or artist
or any other type of original digital content producer you can now have
a hands off publishing company that will do all the work of building
publishing around your particular work.  There are no editors to
tell you to tone things down, no censors to tell you to be polite, and
no limitations on what you produce.  All they do is distribute
whatever works you come up with under whatever terms you dictate. 
They have a flat rate fee for things like actually printing books (they
do book printing on demand so it’s determined by the binding and the
number of pages) and a small commission on each sale that goes to fund
their operation.  For anyone who’s wanted to get published, this
is a definite way to do it.  For a small up front fee they will
even get your books listed in places like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble,
and Borders.  What else could you ask for?