Monday, September 28, 2015

Google and NASA Have A New Quantum Computer

Google and NASA Have A New Quantum Computer:

Quantum Computing. Changes the way you look at doing computing. Running HOT but keeping it cool. If you wanted to compare this joint venture computing effort by NASA, Google, and USRA (Universities Space Research Association) to traditional computing, you might not be overly impressed. But you probably should be. Maybe.

It will be interesting to see if this is the way forward in computing vs other possible methods.

Hitting the brick wall on Moore's Law of computing. Double ever 18 months and half the price has been running hard into the physical limits of silicon chips: approximately 12 manometers. Intel has a lot going on at 14nm in 3D computing.

In 2015, Intel fell short on its historic Tick-Tock trend: one year for the hardware upgrade, the next year for the software. Repeat. But now Intel is taking much longer for their cycle. The cadence seems to be permanently slowing. The clock is running slower, even if the computing is running really fast. Exponential growth is not possible to maintain, at least indefinitely. See 2015 connundrum on the chip/computer rollout discussions here.

Interesting times we have going on in the computing world.:-)

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Saturday, September 19, 2015

Uber disruptive innovation

Uber Meets Its Match in France http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-meets-its-match-in-france-1442592333
It seeing how the company has been able to introduce disruptive innovation, into existing and monopolistic type markets. They jump start into the market so that they have a large presence of drivers and customers before the regulators can catch up with them. Of course the services are much better than the existing taxis. Very interesting how disruptive innovation good the interview so quickly into large markets. Doubly interesting is how there's very little barrier to entry and the company über can do so well and be so big.
This is über competition and innovation at its best!

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Studio must consider fair use before taking down video, court rules - Fortune

Studio must consider fair use before taking down video, court rules - Fortune:

This is a big win for those people who would like to use copyrighted materials in any way they want.

Simply wind up your baby to copyrighted muzak and press <record>.


Of course it probably does no great publicity to Prince to have law suits against babies at play with his music.


The unanimous vote to allow the mom to use the prince music centers around fair use.

Here's the key quote from this article:
Fair use, as the court made clear, is an independent right that permits people to use copyrighted material in certain situations such as parody or news reporting. Under the law, there is a four-part test for fair use but, for practical purposes, the deciding factors are usually whether the new work is transformative and if it will impact the market for the original work.
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Friday, September 4, 2015

States Act Forcibly to Halt or Limit Patent Trolls

The patent troll condition -as identified- is a relatively new phenomenon/hot spot in the IP world, perhaps one or two decades old.  To be sure, there were isolated cases of troll-like behavior as far back as the 1970s, but nothing like the scope, intensity and frequency of the past several years.  Today's trolls not only find dormant patents also but buy up unused portfolios from companies not concerned with their IP or in need of cash and assert them against other companies.  It has been profitable because many companies would rather pay than play (hardball) because they don't want the publicity or the potential arbitration/litigation costs.

Large companies with massive patent portfolios have complained and campaigned for years to Congress asking for legislation to curb patent trolls.  There has been considerable activity but no results on Capital Hill.  By default, then, this has become a state issue and many have enacted various means to de-claw would be trolls as this article in the Wall Street Journal describes,  http://www.wsj.com/articles/states-move-to-do-it-yourself-patent-reform-1441321066.  As more and more states are encouraged to follow the leaders, it will be interesting to see how Capital Hill reacts, if at all.  From a corporate patent house perspective, either one or both will be an improvement over the present condition.