When patents were conceived, they served an important purpose. They made it possible and even profitable for companies to invest time, money, and effort into developing new and innovative products and techniques. Essentialy, they served as a way for a company to effectively protect a complex product derived from original novel ideas. However, the patent system was designed well before the age of "intellectual property" where remarkable monetary value is held in nothing more than simple ideas applied in interesting ways. And this has led to abuse of the patent system by any number of entities. Recently, Microsoft effectively patented the "double click" when used on handheld devices. Now, Cingular has come up with an idea that I'm sure none of us have ever seen before: emoticons! Whats even more interesting, they are trying to patent it.

This article takes the oft-discussed topic of switching between Windows and Linux and looks at it from the precisely opposite standpoint of most. It looks at how an experienced Linux user may view their first few experiences with windows as opposed to how a windows user would view their first few experiences with linux. The article gives the impression that all of the problems occured during the same deployment, but admits at the end that the problems may have occured at different times on different machines. Regardless, this article stands as an excellent example of how Linux users see those still trapped in Microsoft's evil trap. Check out the article here.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I've been running debian Linux as my primary operating system for a long time now and absolutely despise working in Microsoft Windows.

CNN Money, despite being part of the evil CNN, has actually delivered an interesting and rather fun to read list of mistakes businesses made in 2005. I know every company, including my own, makes some poor decisions in the course of a year. However, the majority of these are really inexcusable and a few of them are downright hilarious. You can check out the list here.

So, here it is, the first post on this drupal powered blog. So far, I am pleasantly surprised by the configurability of the CMS while maintaining a "bloggish" feel that makes updating easy. Its important that updating be fast and easy or I probably won't bother to do it. I've added my del.icio.us feed on the right side and it will contain links to some of the many interesting articles I come across on a daily basis.