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Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did 291

Posted by chrisd from the love-the-automatic-hammer dept.
securitas writes: "If you think that dotcommers are the first people to live on Internet time, then take a trip to the 19th century (NYT Story, here's a Yahoo link). Thomas Edison had 10,000 researchers and scientists working at his Menlo Park labs, who slept on their desks, and had the same problems pleasing the investment community as today's tech companies. The result? Over 1000 patents and many inventions that we take for granted today."
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Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did More

Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did

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  • The result? Over 1000 patents and many inventions that we take for granted today.

    Bad slashbot. Patents are always evil. You are not correctly disseminating RMSthought or ESRspeak.

    Time for re-ned-ucation!

    --saint

    • Re:Bad slashbot. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by baronben ( 322394 ) <<ben.spigel> <at> <gmail.com>> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:49PM (#3288323) Homepage
      Its not the idea of a patent which is bad, registering with the government for the express purpose of protecting your idea for a limited amount of time is great, it helps foster innovation and otherwise makes life a little easer to live.


      However, you'll notice that Edison only patented his idea of passing electricity though a special filament in order to make light. He did not patent the idea of making light. He patented the idea for a phonograph which could reproduce sounds encoded on a wax cilender. He did not patent the idea of recording and playing back music.

      • Re:Bad slashbot. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by simm_s ( 11519 )
        Right on!
        In today's world, laws that were designed to protect people are twisted and gnarled to be used against people. I once read that as a small self-employed inventor you will need two or more patents to protect your invention. If you have only one, larger companies will be able to exploit your ideas. When you decide to sue the large company, good luck!

        Large companies, on the other hand, utilize patents to control markets and lock out competitors. The whole system needs to be reviewed.
    • Bad slashbot. Patents are always evil.

      Patents aren't bad. Software patents are bad.

      The government grants three primary forms of protection for IP: trade secrets, copyrights and patents. Until software arrived, very few products enjoyed protection under more than one of these concepts.

      Software is often subject to restrictions from all three protections simultaneously. Copyrights (of course), trade secrets (closed source), and now patents. Top it off with the need to enter into a "contract" to install the software that further restricts your rights.

      Each individual IP protection category was carefully developed over time to balance the rights of the producers and consumers. When software makers OR together all of their rights and AND together their customers' rights, this throws the whole system out of balance.

      To return software to a more reasonable situation, at least one of the protections for it should be disallowed. Since patents are the worst fit for software, software patents should be severely curtailed or eliminated.

      • The government grants three primary forms of protection for IP: trade secrets, copyrights and patents.
        Close, but not quite. Trade secrets are not granted by the government. The one you missed is the trademark.

        The copyright (at least before 1976), patent, and trademark require you to register with the government to be granted. Trade secrets are just that, secrets. About the only protection they offer is that in court proceedings, if you can convince the judge a piece of your evidence is a trade secret, it won't be entered into the court records.
        • OK, trade secrets aren't granted by the government, but they are recognized by it. You can make your employees sign contracts that forbid them from revealing trade secrets, and those contracts are enforceable.

          I left out trademarks because they are pretty much orthogonal to the software patent problem.

          • You can make your employees sign contracts that forbid them from revealing trade secrets, and those contracts are enforceable.
            You could forbid your employees from wearing pants by contract and it would be enforceable (as long as they sign it). The minute they wear pants you could sue for breach of contract.

            I left out trademarks because they are pretty much orthogonal to the software patent problem.
            Correct. The best tool I've found to understand the relationships between the different types of "intellectual property" is this IP map [tomwbell.com] by law professor Tom Bell [tomwbell.com].
            • The best tool I've found to understand the relationships between the different types of "intellectual property" is this IP map

              That is an interesting diagram. Using that as a reference, what I originally meant to say is that they want to simultaneously apply all of the protections from the bottom half of that diagram to a single product. Plus an EULA as a bonus.

      1. His patents are readadle, todays are designed not to reveal infromation.
      2. They were groundbreaking in thier day.
      3. Most of all they are EXPIRED.

      None of this makes him a good person, Edison was still an evil, helpless-animal murdering, bastard.

      But ideas are clean of their promulagators, inherently.

  • Sure he got a lot done. (Score:4, Funny)

    by beamdriver ( 554241 ) <beamdriver@gmail.com> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:36PM (#3288272) Homepage
    See how much work your techies can get do when they can't surf for pr0n all day.

    Imagine of they had the Internet back in Edison's day.

    "Hey, did you invent that light bulb yet"

    "Sorry boss, I spent all day downloading 'Naughty Knickers 6'"

  • "The result?" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:37PM (#3288275) Homepage Journal
    The Great Depression.

    - A.P.

    • Re:"The result?" (Score:3, Interesting)

      by EnderWiggnz ( 39214 )
      amen.

      kicked off the first truly big stock market bubble - electricity companies. bugs bunny numbers and valuations, just like the internet bubble.

      followed shortly by the automobile and radio bubble.

      the crash, boom, alakazam... Great Depression time....

      well... at least this time, we dont have a horribly pro-big business president. doh.

  • Its called business (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:37PM (#3288276)
    Sure this is a geek friendly story, but "internet time" which was called "hard work" at one point isn't limited to high tech. Have you ever tried to start your own company in any field? I have and yes, you do work for pennies and you do work twice or three times the hours your pals work all for a gamble that you can carve a niche out for yourself in your local economy.

  • Tesla (Score:2, Insightful)

    by phrontist ( 559617 )
    I still say tesla was covered up by edison and it still going on today. Oh well I'm just paranoid.
    Phrontist=Geek [phrontist.org]
    • Tesla was ok, I guess... I mean "Signs" was pretty cool, but they kinda disappeared after that, it seems...
    • It'd be nice to read an objective account of Telsa. My initial searches of Tesla revealed a lot of people are far more concerned with 'conspiracy theories' than actual facts of what happened.

      From what I can tell, Tesla did a TON of work involving electricity and fields etc, but Edison seems far more well rounded.

      Can anybody help me out? Where can I find more objective information?
      • Here's an excerpt of a supposedly true story about Tesla, now you know why I'm looking for objective data:

        "After his death in 1943, his TeslaScope interplanetary communication device was turned on at the home of a friend in Canada, and the assembled group heard the Commander of an Alien vessel, explain the true hidden facts behind Tesla's fantastic 87 year life. Tesla apparently didn't discover until fairly late in his life, that he himself was an Alien, who had been left on Earth as a baby to help the people of the Earth evolve through the use of his inventive genius. From early childhood it was clear that he was quite different and odd compared to more "normal" Earth humans. The Commander mentioned that they had attended Tesla's funeral, and they had simply blurred all the photographs so that there would be no record of their attendance."

        • Re:Here's an example... (Score:4, Informative)

          by nomadic ( 141991 ) <`nomadicworld' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:02AM (#3288744) Homepage
          Tesla was a brilliant inventor, who did come up with several interesting innovations, and didn't really get the recognition he deserved.

          He was also, however, quite mad, and near the end of his life started working on some really far-out death-ray kinds of things. Unfortunately, too many people online have latched onto his latter "inventions" as being something other than dementia.

          A good source about the life of Tesla is Clifford Pickover's book, Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen.

          What I'm really curious about is why this fringe cult has grown up around Tesla. I mean, there have been plenty of unappreciated inventors before (look at Philo Farnsworth), and crackpot scientists, but for some reason the fringe people have a thing about Tesla in particular.
          • Telsa attracts people because he's both unappreciated and became a crackpot. There's a huge amount of stuff he did right, and he was often mocked for ideas that came good; your common or garden crackpot usually can't point to a single success.

            So from that point of view, he's far more compelling. They may laugh at his death rays, but they laughed at using alternating current for long distance power transmission, too!

      • Re:Tesla (Score:2, Informative)

        by VWswing ( 74185 )
        Read the book "Man of lightning" It shows a lot
        of truths about tesla..

        For example, Tesla holds the patent for wirelss
        transmission, not marconi.

        Without tesla we'd have power statiosn every few
        miles because.. well. DC doesn't go too damned far..

    • oh you are not paranoid (Score:4, Informative)

      by Edmund Blackadder ( 559735 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @11:16PM (#3288606)
      Do you remember the slashdot story about an year ago about how the Smithsonian put edison's bust over tesla's inventions.

      The edison companies were big sponsors.

      So yeah it still goes on.

      What is more paranoid to think about are some of the Tesla files that are still in fbi custody.

      Are they keeping them secret because of incompetence, or is there something truly interesting in there?

    • goes something like this:

      Tesla apparently figured out how to turn the entire planet into a giant battery so that, in order to get power, you'd simply stick a copper pole in the ground. He went to J.P. Morgan and asked for some cash to implement his idea. Morgan listened and then asked Tesla how exactly he was supposed to charge people for it.

      :)

      It's a shame he was so nuts (he lived in a hotel room filled with pigeons, hated spherical objects and was terrified of body hair) some of his ideas would've been wonderful to try, even if they didn't work. I mean, the guy invented the radio (marconi got the credit but Tesla got the patent) :)
      • Tesla apparently figured out how to turn the entire planet into a giant battery so that, in order to get power, you'd simply stick a copper pole in the ground. He went to J.P. Morgan and asked for some cash to implement his idea. Morgan listened and then asked Tesla how exactly he was supposed to charge people for it.

        Branding, of course!

        Hell, if Coca-Cola can sell bottled tap water at obscene prices, Morgan would have had no trouble selling people free power :)

  • Trying to keep up with Edison, who survived on little sleep and recharged with catnaps on top of his desk,

    Reading this in one of the physics labs at uni. I decided this method might be the way to increase my grades and come up with that pesky solution, I mean, if it worked for such an obviously great inventor and man as Edison, surely it oculd do something for me!

    So of course, I curled up on one of the benches in the labs, for a quick nap. let me suggest: DONT DO THIS! they dont like having students sleeping on their equipment.


    .... of course, the very blurry hologram of my big toe is rather amusing

  • The next light bulb from some php slackers? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jbridges ( 70118 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:40PM (#3288291)
    Big difference between a research lab refining the lightbulb, and a zillion overfunding dot-bombs selling dog food at a $50 loss per customer.

    Staying up all night trying to fix yet another eCommerce site before the VC funding dries up is 100% perspiration and 0% inspiration.

  • list of patents (Score:5, Informative)

    by flynt ( 248848 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:41PM (#3288297)
    Here [tomedison.org] is the complete list of inventions and patents of thomas a. edison. truly a remarkable man.
    • truly a remarkable man.

      At first I thought this was the Alan Thicke troll...

    • Re:list of patents (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Does that list include the electrocution of stray animals as well?

      Think I'm joking?

      Edison did just that, in order to "prove" that Tesla/Westinghouse's newfangled Alternating Current was "dangerous". With this we can see that perhaps Edison's true invention was FUD, plain and simple.
    • I believe the proper phrase is:

      truly an american icon

  • overrated (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:44PM (#3288310)
    Edison is perhaps one of the most overrated figures in American History. Like Darwin, his political clout helped him to become the known inventor of things which had been developed elsewhere at the same time.
    • If he had half the political clout you claim he had we'd all have DC power outlets in our homes instead of the AC Westinghouse pushed.

      Today's useless fact: When the electric chair was first developed and used, Edison pushed (successfully) to have the chair run on AC. His motive: He wanted to have AC associated with something deadly so that consumers would ask for DC instead.
      • If he had half the political clout you claim he had we'd all have DC power outlets in our homes instead of the AC Westinghouse pushed.

        Not even Microsoft would have succeded in pushing DC instead of AC. There are limits to what marketing can do. MS might succeed in pushing Windows vs. Linux, but not MS-DOS vs. Linux.
  • "If you think that dotcommers are the first people to live on Internet time,"
    I don't know which is more irksome, the use of the phrase "Internet time", or the implication that I'm supposed to be amazed that in all of human history, I was not the first person to pull an all-nighter because I worked at a dot com.

    But I'll bet Thomas Edison's crew didn't have Nerf guns.

  • In 50 years.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by insta ( 267245 )
    We'll be regarding the "one click" patent as the greatest innovation of mandkind!
    Just you wait.

  • Where's the connection? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alewando ( 854 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:50PM (#3288329)
    Companies have had to please stakeholders since at least the seventeenth century. Where do you think the Jamestown Colony got its funding from?

    So he had a bunch of researchers amassed in a big thinktank operation. This is similar to the decentralized Internet exactly how?

    Unlike the Internet, Edison spawned entire useful industries. Unless you call revolutionizing the distribution of pornography a spectacular human achievement, there's nothing approaching what Edison accomplished here. Comparing the two is just silly.

    Just about the only similarity I can see is in the realm of disputed patents, namely Edison's quadruplex telegraph [rutgers.edu], which A&PTC and Western Union bitterly squabbled about. But then again, disputed patents are nothing new either.

  • Edison = Microsoft of his time? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:50PM (#3288330)
    Here's a task for you to try:
    Go check your encyclopedia to find the answers to the following questions: (answers are given in parentheses)

    1) Who invented the radio? (Marconi)

    2) Who discovered X-rays? (Roentgen)

    3) Who invented the vacuum tube amplifier? (de Forest)

    In fact, while you're at it, check to see who discovered the fluorescent bulb, neon lights, speedometer, the automobile ignition system, and the basics behind radar, electron microscope, and the microwave oven.

    Chances are that you will see little mention of a guy named Nikola Tesla, the most famous scientist in the world at the turn of the century.

    In fact, few people today have ever heard of the guy. Good old Tommy Edison made sure of that.

    (copied from a website)..
    So why is Edison so great? Because he used foul tactics to crush better inventors?
    • "In fact, few people today have ever heard of the guy. Good old Tommy Edison made sure of that."

      I've heard of Tesla plenty of times. I continually had to deal with his invention in C&C: Red Alert. :)

    • Tesla invented radio as well (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Edmund Blackadder ( 559735 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:55PM (#3288537)
      His patent predates Marconi's.

      He didnt make the commercial system before marconi because tesla was trying to use the investor's money to secretly develop another invention.

    • As humans we're really good at inventing/discovering stuff, ignoring it, inventing it again (and possibly yet again) and then eventually catching on. Why? Greed perhaps.

      Examples:
      All of the Edison examples that you just presented.
      Marconi-Tesla
      Columbus-Native Americans
      On that note, Columbus led a crew a couple thousand miles west. Chris thought that'd be enough to hit Asia. The Greeks had startlingly accurate figures for the circumference of the globe some 1600 years prior.

      We're all plagirists. Deal with it. The innovator is the guy who can *convince* everyone else that he was first.

    • 1) Who invented the radio? (Marconi) -> Hertz, Maxwell

      and the basics behind radar -> Christian Huelsmeyer(?), 1904 working prototype

      electron microscope -> ernst ruska, nobel price 1986.

      microwave oven -> The guys who invented the klystron ?

    • ...likening Edison to Gates is quite on-the-mark.

      As inventors / innovators, they have a great deal in common. They lack the sublime genius of their superior contemporaries (Tesla in Edison's day, Doug Engelbart in Bill Gates' day...). But what they lack in true vision they more than compensate for in cunning and ambition.

      100 years from now, our great grandchildren will probably be informed by the education system that Bill Gates invented personal computing singlehandledly, in addition to the GUI and a bunch of other crap. The gazillions of dollars in the Gates trust will constantly be invested in extending the historical footprint of William Gates III, even while parts are also appropriated to noble philanthropic causes.

      Some of you Linux-loving libertarian squints are telling yourselfs, "Ah! But you're wrong! Because the Internet will have a perfect record of today's history! The media in Tesla's day wasn't digital- it wasn't permanent. That's how he got so marginalized over time."

      And all I can say is that whatever the digital network ends up turning into - even if its the bloody Matrix itself - or its a global cashless society where you can't buy or sell without having a barcode tattoo- it is going to be owned and operated by Microsoft.

      Sucks. But history's gonna repeat itself. Until it ends.

  • That's what they will be saying about Gates (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mmusn ( 567069 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:50PM (#3288333)
    100 years from now, people will be looking back at Bill Gates and say the same thing: look, he ran a gigantic research and development lab, creating many of the inventions we take for granted today, and being responsible for the creation of thousands of patents. Never mind that almost all the technology Microsoft puts out was invented elsewhere.

    Of course, Gates is not Edison, but think about how today's events are going to look in the future. That may give you a bit of a better idea of what to think of the past.

    • Re:That's what they will be saying about Gates (Score:4, Interesting)

      by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:37PM (#3288492) Journal

      Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.

      Of course Daimler and Benz did just fine and became a premium brand--like Apple. There were certainly automobiles prior to Daimler-Benz. These would be analogous to the prototypes turned out by Xerox PARC or the DoD. They failed to reach the market either because the inventors were hogtied by short-sighted backers (Xerox) or because the projects were not suitable for the mass market (ENIAC).

      • Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.
        Ford's cars were more than just "good enough", this implies that he was somehow lucky to land that. What he did required great engineering and manufacturing abilities, not to mention vision and persistance, to bring to fruition. To say that his cars were merely good enough is to blindly dismiss his accomplishments. He may not have made the first car, or even the second, but his were the first cars that actually ran reliably and his cars were the first to be produced at an economical price. That is no small task.

        Gates, on the other hand, can make no such claims. While I agree with you to some extent that Xerox PARC was like the Daimler-Benz of its day, that is to say too much in the lab but lacking most of the engineering and development time to take it out, you are ignoring the likes of Apple and other groups that did and could have done just as well. Without getting into a holy war, I believe it is quite reasonable to assert that Gates' Windows and MS-DOS won the industry because of the nature of the PC industry (e.g., compatibility) and because of the backing of IBM and such. Gates could have easily have been replaced by IBM and we would be looking at an entirely different company. (That said, I will give Gates some credit for having the intelligence and tenacity to grab other markets,...but that's a seperate argument).

        • WTF? Go back and re-read what I wrote.

          Ford's cars were more than just "good enough", this implies that he was somehow lucky to land that

          No it doesn't. Otherwise, I wouldn't have described this as a tactic.

          To say that his cars were merely good enough is to blindly dismiss his accomplishments

          No it isn't. You are right to attribute genius to Ford's ability to bring economical cars to market, but the fact remains that other cars were much better--if you could afford them.

          Once again, go back and read what I wrote. I didn't ignore Apple at all. I likened Apple to Daimler-Benz, not Xerox to Daimler-Benz.

          I can agree with you that Gates is nowhere near the genius that Ford was. It's arguable that someone else could have done what Gates did. It is less arguable that someone could have done what Ford did; mass-produced cars would have come eventually, but perhaps not in so distinguished a fashion as Ford's.

          To end on a more pleasant note, here's a nice piece of Ford lore that was related to me by my father: The dimensions, material and construction of wooden crates used to ship engines were specified with precision by Ford. Why? Because when the engine was un-crated, the crate was disassembled and re-used as floor boards for the model-T.

  • One thing Edison DIDN'T invent... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dimator ( 71399 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:53PM (#3288351) Homepage Journal
    ...was the electric hammer [aol.com]!

  • What about...? (Score:2, Funny)

    by mudder ( 32780 )
    They didn't mention two of Edison's most famous inventions, the automatic hammer, and the 6-legged chair.

  • Not all things are the same. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fireboy1919 ( 257783 ) <rustypNO@SPAMfreeshell.org> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:54PM (#3288353) Homepage Journal
    Consider a story also about the corporate workplace, "Working with Einstiens."
    Heres a quote from a news segment I've seen:
    Reporter: "Mr. Edison, how do you feel about Einstiens theory of relativity?"
    Edison: "Well, I don't quite understand it."

    Edison inspired his staff by working EXTREMELY hard all of the time. Also, because of this, he was certianly qualified to be the boss: he was the one who made it happen, and he didn't play golf to do it. Can the same be said of the local IT industry? Is the management a group of people who got there because their career path in life was to work harder than their peers? Or did they choose a path that they thought would net them the most money with the least amount of work?

    My guess is on the latter for most management.

    I like Edison's management technique a lot better:
    "What a man's mind can create, a man's character can control."

    His character gave him the respect and admiration of his assistants, who helped him with the mundane task of trying out thousands of different materials to find just the right one for the light bulb, among other things. Do you think we find the same in the IT industry? Will I do something "stupid" for someone else because I have faith in them? I think not. I'd only do it for a high rate of pay.

    There is a place akin to this one: MIT media lab, as well as a lot of other Universities throughout the world, where the professors work like dogs for a lot less pay than they would get if they would sell some of their inventions on their own. But don't be so haughty as to compare this lab to IT.
    • Management is hard, middle management is easy. The fact that you report to a middle manager that is a 9-5er doesn't mean they all are. Once you find senior managers that are successful, they work like dogs. Most are out at a reasonable hour because they are in by 7. Want to reach the CEO of a major corporation without being intercepted by his secretary? Call before 8 AM, after 6 PM, or Saturday morning (before their golf game, most are at their desks).

      Outside of being born rich, there is no shortcut. Those that go into management as the easy route become middle managers where they stay for the rest of their lives. Even the cookie cutters work hard, they dog for 60-75 hour weeks for 3 years to get into a top MBA program. If they rock a top MBA program, they graduate and are 6-8 years away from financial success, but they bust ass to get there.

      Sure, these guys may appear like spoiled children, but ask their families how often they are at the office. The fact that slashdot says it doesn't make it true. I've worked at startups where management has their act together, we all bust ass for a common vision. When management doesn't put in the hours or effort, I was out early. Now that I have my own business, I try to lead by example and bust ass all the time. And if you think that lunch meetings or weekend meetings are taking a vacation, you're a fool. I think about my company from the time I wake up till I go to bed.

      The MIT media lab is a joke, great on spin, low on anything. No one puts in a full day of work, the PhD students sometimes work. The undergrads that work their suck down free money. It's an overfunded lab, they by toys to play with and make silly demos. They are mostly smoke-and-mirrors, with the job of spinning things for MIT's PR game.

      Alex

      • Yep (Score:2)

        by FallLine ( 12211 )
        Without saying "me too", in so many words...

        I absolutely agree with what you are saying, it's irks me to see slashdot's repeated dismissal of all things corporate and praise for all things academic. While I don't necessarily agree that upper management at publically held firms are always or generally right, slashdot is seriously deluding themselves if they think it's that easy.
      • Hmm...you could be right about the media lab. And you could be right about some middle management. But I know a lot of business majors, and I know that the reason they're doing it is because they want an easy job where they can make lots of money.

        I just gave the media lab as an example because that's what it was like at the lab I worked for while in school, and I know thats what its like at CMU.

        As far as being "a joke," that's just not true. They come up with stuff that obviously takes a long time to develop. If you don't believe me, you haven't been reading technical journals enough. It is precisely these technical journals that ensure that the lab continues to make a profit. Otherwise, they wouldn't be overfunded.
        • Take MAS.100, commonly called Pizza for Credit (if its still offered), which was a 6 unit (2 credit) course where you would eat Pizza and listen to people in the Media Lab explain what they do. One year it was dropped from a 3 hour class to a 2 hour class because the money for pizza wasn't there, yet the course was still a "3 hour classtime" class. You'd be floored at what gets funded there.

          Have a friend who works in the Media Lab take you on a tour (not the official one) and see what really goes on. Go in before 9 (I've been there on middle of the night reuse runs when I was an undergrad... don't ask, but I have some 15 year old Decstations to show for it), it's empty. Show up after 5, find a professor that is working.

          The Media Lab gets a lot of money from some corporations who can't cooperate on some of the research so they all chip in to the Media Lab. 20%-25% of the Media Lab produces stuff, the rest just plays with expensive toys to stroke their own ego... Don't worry, within a few years the new researchers will learn how to play with toys, then crank out another stupid demo right before the corporate donors come on a tour. It's a really sad organization.

          CMU is a very different school from The Institute.

          BTW: The fact that your friends are business majors and want a cushy job doesn't mean that they will graduate and get a cushy job. I mean, I wanted to graduate and get a cush job that pays a lot, I also want a million dollars, and a pony. You don't get things just for wanting them, you inherit them, marry into them, or earn them.

  • Gates is the Edison of Today (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:56PM (#3288364)
    Edison was a jerk.

    He hired tons of "the best and brightest" and then allowed the press to claim their hard work as his own genius.

    He tried his best to squash anyone who wanted to do it differently than him. See Nickolai Tesla, for example.

    He pushed inferior technologies because of their proprietariness and money making possiblities. If it were up to him, we'd all have DC from every outlet in our homes, with Edison power plants every two city blocks (because DC doesn't transfer over long distances). He staged demonstrations in large metropolitan areas where he would electrocute elephants and horses to show the dangers of AC.

    He was an IP-grubbing exploiter.

    He wanted to unitarilly squash anyone who dared compete with him. See Westinghouse

    Luckily, he eventually lost most of these battles. Let's hope Gates fares so well.

  • Bill Gates is doing nothing new (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AsOldAsFortran ( 565087 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:11PM (#3288405)
    Another lesson from the end of the 19th century is the story of the new media of photography for the common man. Handheld cameras, fast emusions, paper roll film and photographic labs were all new then.

    A collaborator of Edison, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, behaved like our own Bill Gates. Eastman tried to corner the patents on the new technology of mass production photographic equipment - lots of good stories about him stiff arming competitors and trying to become a monopolist.

    Gives you an opportunity to see what happens to technology monopolists after a hundred years. Got Fuji?

  • The transistor. Without it, we'd be stuck with vacuum tubes. The transistor revolutionized the world by creating the information age. We can credit Edison for the wasteful incandescent buld and a wax phonograph, but how many people use those now? Flourescent lights were invented not long after the incandescent bulb, and not by Edison.

    The radio. The radio finally allowed communication across long distances without a wire. It revolutionized warfare and entertainment.

    The Turing machine. While not a physical machine, it was Alan Turing's amazing machine that changed the world. The first definition of a computer, soon followed by crude mechanical and vacuum tube devices (which were built by Turing & his team)

    To summarize, Edison was not such a great inventor. There were dozens of others who have affected our lives in much more powerful ways. Marconi, Tesla, Turing. Edison actually silenced these inventors using his fame and political clout.

    Just my 2 cents.

    D/\ Gooberguy

  • Edison didn't even invent the lightbulb. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0xB ( 568582 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:31PM (#3288479)
    Joseph Swan, from the great city of Sunderland, did.

    The light bulb [uselessknowledge.com]

    Edison improved it.
    • THATS THE FUCKING BEAUTY OF IT! Muwhaha, the way it is, if you do the paperwork, you get the credit! It's a lovely system for those of us that can hire office administrators .... ;)

      It really is like this tho. Bill Gates was the opportunist, not the inventor. I mean, c'mon, Beethoven used to steal like 3 bars verbatim from other composers works. This story is the first /. story in a TON OF TIME to actually put some things in perspective, instead of holding the maginifying glass up to a social pattern most people don't even appreciate. The people rewarded are the ones who put the last piece in place. Hey, Newton said it best, I think? What was it, something about "standing on the shoulders of giants."

      Haha, good thing we're strengthening the laws to protect the 'inventors', 'authors' and and 'composers'. ;)

  • Internet Time is a Misnomer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NeuroManson ( 214835 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:39PM (#3288497) Homepage
    There is a differnce between what we used to call "Workaholism" and "Internet Time"... Workaholism is a refusal to stop working (or prompting to work) for a measured period of time to force either change or innovation through personal or redirected physical, mechanical and technological means...

    Internet time, however, is a different beast... For lack of a better word, it is a mental dependance on instantaneous gratification, eg: if it doesn't happen the nanosecond you think of or want it, bitch gripe and moan until someone does it for you (if you don't do it yourself)... Your music, videos, or websites must load now now now, and if your distributed computing doesn't come to par, it's not your fault, it's the guy running the (pick the OS you gripe about the most) OS of the week...

    Your attention spans are measured in seconds, not minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or even years... If the work isn't done by then, then an incredible offense has been performed, the likes of which are worthy of jihad du jour, flamewars, or what have you... Take this from someone who was diagnosed with ADHD over 20 years ago, most of those today make me look like an attentive, slow, and otherwise average representative member of society *gag*...

    For a best case example, compare this to Linux users who wait months for the newest kernel to fix their bugs, as opposed to those who wait weeks for Microsoft to come up with their patches/service packs... Microsoft is expected to rebuild a OS (from scratch) far faster than Linux, and is condemnned the moment it exceeds hours past another exploit being exposed, while Linux users wait patiently for months for the equivelent being released...
    • You're high right now - right?
    • There is a differnce between what we used to call "Workaholism" and "Internet Time"... Workaholism is a refusal to stop working (or prompting to work) for a measured period of time to force either change or innovation through personal or redirected physical, mechanical and technological means...

      Not according to the dictionary. Workaholism is a compulsive desire to work, regardless of outcomes. What you are describing is called dedication.

      For a best case example, compare this to Linux users who wait months for the newest kernel to fix their bugs, as opposed to those who wait weeks for Microsoft to come up with their patches/service packs... Microsoft is expected to rebuild a OS (from scratch) far faster than Linux, and is condemnned the moment it exceeds hours past another exploit being exposed, while Linux users wait patiently for months for the equivelent being released...

      Holy crap. This is the most amazingly absurd couple of lines I've stumbled across in a _long_ time. Well done!

      LEXX

    • Th rest of this post seems decently correct, as I have no quarrel with it. However, the last paragraph sounds like a troll in disguise... Let's have a look:

      "For a best case example, compare this to Linux users who wait months for the newest kernel to fix their bugs, as opposed to those who wait weeks for Microsoft to come up with their patches/service packs... Microsoft is expected to rebuild a OS (from scratch) far faster than Linux, and is condemnned the moment it exceeds hours past another exploit being exposed, while Linux users wait patiently for months for the equivelent being released..."

      First, Linux users wait months for kernel bugfixes? Yeah, right. Ever heard of diff patches? If there's a bug within free software (eg: not propeirty hardware or software), It's fixed within days. Depending on urgency, less than 24 hours. No other community can claim that due to the sheer volume of users/developers/debuggers.
      Having OPEN SOURCE helps quite a lot, too

      Next, is this statement. See if you can identify the troll like part in this:

      "Microsoft is expected to rebuild a OS (from scratch)."

      That's like "Regrowing New hair", right?

      Or how about this:

      "and is condemnned the moment it exceeds hours past another exploit being exposed, while Linux users wait patiently for months for the equivelent being released...
      "

      Well how about NEVER fixing identified bugs? All the NT series OS'es suffers from the CSRSS backspace bug. The big gripe here is is that NT 4.0 has been "laid to rest", essentially junked. Many corporations use NT 4.0 , as it is a good product, when installed and administered correctly. But since this bug will NEVER be fixed, NT 4.0 is forever broken. Here's the website explaining the bug: http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/c srss-backspace-bug.html

      Now about that Linux comment about lack of exploit patches: Like HELL. Whenever there's a root exploit or other comprimising problems, THERE IS A PATCH WITHIN DAYS. Usually, you just turn off the daemon till the patch comes through, or follow what a user found to stop the bug. It's exactly the opposite what this idiot said. Microsoft drags its heels in even admitting there is a bug. Then you hav eto wait for a service patch to fix it (hoping it doesn't break something else).

      It's sad that a/few moderator(s) actually didn't see through your junk argument. It's people who use thier brains who break this crap.

      Josh Crawley
  • I thought internet time referred to breaking time into an easy to understand system based on clicks or something.. A quick search on google will back up my assumption.. whats this have anything to do with Thomas Edison?
  • they invented stuff...

    The dotcommers only invented creative ways to do nothing with lots of money!

  • Unpaid overtime's for suckers unless self-employed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nabucco ( 24057 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:07AM (#3288768)
    The ITAA, the anti-engineer lobbying group which is bankrolled by Microsoft, IBM and others, did away a few years ago with FLSA laws for "computer operators" which require overtime pay.

    From government statistics, we know that Americans have surpassed even the Japanese in the hours worked per week and per year - Americans work more hours than people in any country in the world. This is very good for those who own the companies - the 1% of the US population that owns 42.2% of the stock. How about everyone else though?

    Well, as the average working week gets longer and longer over the past thirty years, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage has dropped. Anyone who has a pulse can see what's been happening in the IT field lately - layoffs (with those over-burdened people still around picking up the "slack"), frozen wages, falling wages, ever expanding workloads requiring ever more hours worked.

    If you work for yourself, and thus all work you do will profit you, then yes, hard work *does* pay off. If you're a wage slave working for someone else, all the unpaid overtime you work, all the hours on call you work are just making your boss look good, and the people who really own your company more wealthy. By really own I mean the people who really own your company, not the 1000 shares of underwater options you get that vest over 4-5 years and which are 0.000001% of the total shares, minus the strike price.

    Sorry, I hear enough of this stick-and-carrot stuff at work, I hear people say it here and I have to say, BS! I wish I had listened to the guys at the Programmer's Guild during the bubble when they were pointing out how rising H1-B caps and the destruction of FLSA laws. If one looks at the industry polls which show engineers getting farther and farther away from the 40 hour workweek, it becomes apparent how many suckers there are in this industry. When somebody *aside from yourself* is getting your labor time for free, than you are the sucker.

  • The Green Mile... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by percey ( 217659 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:10AM (#3288776)
    My opinion of Thomas Edison was forever altered when I read about one of his inventions, the electric chair [theelectricchair.com] It was an invention to show how dangerous AC current was by associating in the public's mind the horrible execution of people with Westinghouse's AC power, rather than the more benign DC that Edison was hawking. As for the spirit of invention in the old days, it was quite a marvel that he was able to do so many things, but thankfully in this internet revolution, with all its new inventions, there's no comparison to an electric chair. No modern death by spam, (although, slow death by cellphone may be an option) or the like. However, you must appreciate that he was one man that changed the world in a way that it would take the entire internet to do.
  • Oh my GOD I've never witnessed such geek hatred in my life! Well, except for the Bill Gates thing... but sheesh! The man's DEAD! (Wait, did someone create an everlasting-life machine that he put his name on?)

    Okay, I'll admit that I'm getting something of an education about Edison and all the things he didn't do successfully on his own, but sheesh... the hatred! The bitterness! The utter contempt!

    Some of you people should put yourselves in check... or in one of those funny couches, or maybe even one of those jackets without the holes for the hands to come out of...

    "Just because he was successful, you guys all hate him! You're just jealous and always trying to bring him down!"
    • You've got to understand (or not, if you'd rather not) that there are few things that bug many /.ers more than hype over truth.[1] If you were around and reading 16 months ago, you would have seen violent, cruel flame wars about the start of the new millennium. (not to mention the spelling flames)

      Then of course, you have the underdog factor. The comparison between Edison and Gates isn't too far off, actually. (After all, Bill has done some real work in his life too!) Both managed to get ahead by stealing the thunder of other, possibly better inventors.

      Finally, let's not forget the geographical factor. When an American gets credit for something that was done by a non-American, the ex-US subset of /. gets wildly up in arms! That's the price to be paid by being a modern empire. Ironically, in the days when Swan, Tesla, and Edison all lived, Edison would have been the underdog by virtue of geography.

      [1] Unless it involves Linux. Oops. Forget I said that. :-)
  • There is another side, no part of which takes anything away from Edison's accomplishments. He paid kids a quarter for puppies and kittens he could electrocute in his demonstarations of how dangerous AC power is, and even electrocuted an adult male elephant. He filmed the spectacle. He was little more than a gangster when it came to promoting his businesses, using every dirty trick in the book to intimidate the competition and gain a monopoly on movies and their distribution. No one knows how frequently he took credit for the work of others, but my guess is he was very good at it. He often slept curled up like a dog on old newspapers in a closet beneath the stairs--just another manifestation of a unique, driven personality. A fascinating man, but in my book, by no means totally admirable. A lot of his inventions, in fact all of them, I suspect, would have been made by others in time. We would not be reading by candlelight today if Edison had been run over by a beer wagon. If he was such a total genius, why did he seriously propose DC power? IMHO Bell Labs, not Edison, played a greater role in the development of technology, and Edison is sixty percent hype and forty percent solid contributions. Certainly old Thos. A. was nowhere near the intellectual equal of Maxwell, whose theoretical work was vastly more important and seminal. Still--credit where credit is due!

  • 10,000 researchers and scientists - no way. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @01:46AM (#3289035) Homepage
    Edison never had "10,000 researchers and scientists working at his Menlo Park labs". He started with about 15 employees there in 1876, and ramped up to a peak of about 80 employees at Menlo Park by 1881. There was a lamp factory at Menlo Park, with another 40 or so employees in 1880-1881, as the electric light moved into production, but the Menlo Park operation never got big. In 1881, Edison moved operations to 65 5th Avenue, New York City, and closed down Menlo Park.

    Edison's actual lab in Menlo Park was about 20 people in one big room. The whole place, with much of the original equipment, was rebuilt at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI, and can be seen there.

    General Electric, which was formed by the merger of the Edison businesses and Thomas-Houston of Cleveland, became a very big company, of course. But that wasn't Edison's lab, although he was on the board of directors of GE for a while. Nor did GE ever do R&D in Menlo Park. GE R&D was (and is) in Schenectady, New York.

    There's a substantial literature on Edison's life and lab. There are even movies; after all, he invented those, too.

  • Thomas Edison and the origins of Hollywood (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @03:01AM (#3289198)
    In the book Walt Disney, Hollywood's Dark Prince [amazon.com], the origins of Hollywood are discussed as Edison sought to drive out of business the Jewish filmmakers who were making peep shows with his film technology, using brutal mob tactics and violence to raid and threaten the penny arcades out of business. He wanted only his kind of films - dry, boring documentaries - to be made with his new film pipeline. The Jewish filmmaking community responded by physically removing themselves from his presence, and relocating to a sunny desert location in Southern California, where they planted the seeds for a vast empire of filmmaking, out of reach of Edison and his moral imperialism. See also an audio program [wfmu.org] by Dave Emory entitled Mickey Mauschwitz - The Reactionary Politics of Walt Disney, which excerpts the out of print book at length.

  • Nikola Tesla (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @03:12AM (#3289230)
    was a man way ahead of his time. As mentioned by other slashdotters, he seemed to have only lost a battle with Edison due to Edison's political clout and his desire to make a huge fortune at the expense of the entire human race.

    Tesla's experiments into wireless energy transmission would have spelled the end of the energy industry as we know it, as well as the end of conventional radio and television transmission as a limited resource doled out by the FCC, as we have seen all of this become. His Autobiography [lucidcafe.com] is very interesting albiet very quirky. It is also interesting to note that over half of his patents and papers remain classified by the U.S. government to this day. Try getting them through the FOIA act, I dare you. It would actually be an interesting experiment. You can read about alleged uses and abuses of Tesla's wireless technology in the book about Project HAARP [navy.mil], entitled Angels Don't Play This haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology [amazon.com] which puts forth evidence that Project HAARP's goals aren't as benign as they would like you to think, and that the weather modification aspect of the techology has been tried extensively for less than good purposes. Food for thought and grounds for further research. (http://www.haarp.net/ [haarp.net] HAARP book home page.)

    • +5 Interesting? (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheAwfulTruth ( 325623 )
      Large scale energy trasmission by HF RF is ABSOLUTLE BULLSHIT! People freak out over 0.2 watt uW transmission from their cell phones and yet bathing in gigawatt RF transmitting our daily power is in any way a workable idea? We'd need RF transmission towers radiating millions of times more energy that a typical 50,000 watt FM station! Tesla was a brilliant mad man. He invented someinteresting stuff, but his plans for putting it to use were absolutely insane.

      Thank god AC power won out over Edisons DC wishes however. Though maybe there's a lesson here for you conspiricy theorists out there. DC power transmission would also have been insane. And as usual saner and more practical heads prevailed. So now we have easily transmitted low loss AC power transmission and by WIRES not RF!

  • Joseph Swan invented it and Edison, realising that he had been beat, went into partnership with him, setting up the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company. Swan had the bulb; Edison had the money. Edison's main contribution to the technology was to realise that an oxygen-free atmosphere greatly extended the bulb's life, but the filament of carbon was Swan's.

    None of this is secret, so why do so many people still credit Edison with the invention and who do they think the "Swan" was in the Edision Swan Co?

    Davy (of the Davy safty lamp fame) had invented a bulb even earlier but it worked by producing an arc rather than an incandescent filament.

    TWW

  • However fascinating may Edison's Lab be, the truth is that no significant invention came out of it, in decades of work. All the major discoveries made by Thomas Edison were made before the existence of this lab (which was built, logically, after he had already made a fortune).

    The most significant discovery coming from Edison 's Lab is the lab in itself, that is, the concept of the modern research laboratory, which appeared for the first time in the US, not long after Louis Pasteur's labs in Paris.

  • Edison Vs. Tesla (Score:3, Informative)

    by Asmodean ( 21717 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:06AM (#3289523)
    Tesla was first an inventor and second a showman, he absolutely sucked at business. Edison on the other hand would RUN to the nearby patent office when he had a new invention.

    Telsa invented these, among other things:

    The whole AC system that we use today including:
    Rotating magnetic field and the motors/generators that use it. Polyphase. The Transformers to convert to high/low frequency for transmission.

    Flourescent lights
    Arc lights
    Radio (Supreme court said he had it first)
    Radar
    The first remote controlled vehicle (small boats he made for the army)
    X-ray (go read his bio's before arguing)
    The Tesla coil (you probably have one in your monitor/tv)
    First truly accurate oscillator
    The Tesla turbine
    Electricity collector from the difference in voltage from the sky/ground. (kinda like the recent 'tether' experiment on the shuttle. but from the ground)

    Toward his later years he was working on wireless transmission of electricity. also the 'death ray' he was working on was nothing more than a anti-airplane beam that would melt their engines through inductance.

    All his life it was his dream to harness the power of niagra falls, which he did. Westinghouse put him in charge of setting it up, but tesla only hung around for a short time. He wanted to get back to inventing stuff.

  • Two Words. Nikola Tesla.

    Shortly after WW2, several major electronics companies filed patents on "Digital Logic Gates".

    The patents were denied, the USPTO cited several of Tesla's patents for the same system implemented in his devices.

    The end result? Digital logic stayed public domain.

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