Gigs Shrugged

I found a pretty neat site tonight. Prior Art Database. It’s like “unpatents”. A company publishes on this site to prevent the technology from being patented in the future by someone else. It’s also a handy corpus of likely-not-patented technology articles. It’s got a staggering number of articles in it.

I’ve made it into a search widget for Firefox 2.0:
Install the priorartdatabase.com Google Search

I had to set the favicon to something, so I just set it to my logo. If I left it default you get Google’s favicon, which kinda sucks because then you don’t know if you are just searching Google or Prior Art.

Your moment of developer’s Zen for today:

Software is like a penis, the more flexible it is, it the less useful it is.

I’m still simmering two articles in my head. Keep your eyes peeled for “Technological Platform Capital”, and “The Invisible Hand of Open Source”, coming soon to a blog near you (this one).

In many ways, microeconomics treats a business as an anthropomorphic, amoral entity. The sole motivation is profit, with economic efficiency and social benefit as a pleasant side effect. For the most part, this works. Beyond this reductionist viewpoint, I think there are more subtle facets to the psychology behind a business. Businesses are run by people, with all the psychological complexity of the human brain. That lead me to wonder, “Does a business have (pseudo)psychological needs and motivations, beyond the superficial need for profit?” I believe it does.
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