From your post it seems that you've hit the point where technology for technology sake has become boring. Good. Only now can you become a master software developer. This is not the end of your career... but the beginning of it. Mastery of technology comes with service. Certainly you will always be rewarded with a new technology insight; however, the bulk of your rewards will come from serving other people, as they serve you. Your reward will come when you put a smile on a person's face after saving them that horribly irritating 2 hour process they must do every Monday morning.
The programmer transfers tedious processes from humans to machines. We automate. We make hard or impossible processes feisable. Farmers sell food. Doctors sell health. Lawyers sell order. We sell a very precious gift... time.
So. My advice to you. Now that you are proficient software person, you must move on to a problem domain. You must pick a group of people you will serve. Learn business. Learn how social structures work. Learn about specific problem domains that interest you. Do a few internships. When you go into a job make sure that they know what you are there for -- to help them automate tedious processes. Once you grok your role and help other people to understand your role, you will find that software is indeed a most wonderful occupation.
This has got to be good ammunition which the DOJ and the state Attorney Generals can use. What a wonderful way to describe how Microsoft can single-handledly extend it's monopoly from office products into, stagger, something truley outstanding -- a monopoly on the definition of the English language. If Microsoft can do this with English, imagine what I can do to anything else it desires...
Is woody ready for production server?
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 1
I only need a few things: Open SSH, Apache, Python, PostgreSQL, Exim, Bind. Right now I can't use potato since I seem to be having a socket problem with Python 2.1 on Potato which goes away if I use a new version of RedHat... so I figure it's the kernel 2.2 or an older glibc... is this good logic?
Late 80's huh? How late is late for you? 1987? In which case we have the tail end of Windows 1 and the beginning of Windows 2.
I was doing installations of Windows 2.10 in '88 for customers that had custom DOS applications (DBASE II Application), but wanted the "Mac" interface. Support for DOS wasn't great. But it was there. You are right that Windows didn't really make it till the release of 3.0 in mid 1990. But I must say, it was the late 80's that was the turning point -- 2.11 worked and Microsoft had *promises* for 3.0 (and was showing demos of it to big clients). Microsoft marketing was huge in the late 80's. They bent over backwards to make programmers happy. And they played off the anti-IBM sentiment perfectly. They had promotions to encourage their resellers to label Apple as "cute" -- in business "cute" is the kiss of death. Funny how useable interfaces are "cute". Oh humm. I must say, I bought into their developer targeted marketing hook, line, and sinker. Microsoft was the "brilliant underdog".
What is often missing in these formulations is the investment in legacy software. This is why Microsoft won and Apple lost in the late 80's. Sure the Mac was better... but it didn't run all of the custom developed DOS software that Windows did. Then in the early 90's it was Windows NT vs OS/2. Although OS/2 had a compatibility layer, it wasn't "Windows". And thus, once again, all of those custom windows applications came to play.
Now we want companies like Ford to adopt linux? It isn't going to happen. They have, I am sure, billions of dollars invested in 16 bit and 32 bit windows software (Yes, there are still many VB 3.0 applications out there.). Until Linux provides proven, reliable, backwards compatibility here it's no dice. The lock-in cost is just too high.
Now. This may be possible in 10 years from now. As long as corporate developers use plain ole HTML plus well-supported Javascript and don't use ActiveX and, worse the new.NET stuff. But how likely is that? Not. And so we go round and round the treadmill. As corporate lock-in grows deeper and deeper -- tough luck Linux.
The wxWindows folks also have a Macintosh port that I believe also uses CARBON. From what I understand they are doing a great job. For python people, wxPython is just fantastic.
Bullies are Bad Business (a repeat of the 80s)
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Power is generational. It will be a while before we have a repeat the 80's. In '83 everyone my age disliked IBM, while those my fathers age were IBM heads. I disliked IBM beacuse they were bullies (or so my dad said). Thus, for me everything IBM was tainted. Microsoft, a small little company was on the other hand, very cool. They made DOS, had a Basic interpreter, etc. Another kickn' company was Borland, who made SideKick a very nifty personal organizer and a Pascal compiler.
Anyway, I don't have children, but people younger than me think that Microsofties are a bunch of bullies (or so I tell them). And rather than investing our attention in another company, I think we may have collectively learned our lesson. We are investing our time in open source software that is publically owned.
It took over two decades for Microsoft to catch up to IBM ('75-'95). I think it is fair to give open source a fair shake ('85-'2005). Sometime soon the pendilum will swing away from Microsoft and towards the next monopoly. Guided not by technology decisions, but by personal choice not to support the bullies. This time the monopoly holders will be the public, through licenses like the GPL.
I'll switch to Emacs when I can fold text with it.
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Please excuse my ignorance here. But I take a huge performance hit when I use emacs beacuse I don't know how to do line folding. Let me explain (and excuse the simplistic example). Suppose a file with the following content:
Line one
Line two
line three
line four
Line five
I'd like a command line where I type: "all/Line/" and the editor shows me...
Line one
Line two
Line five
And then I could do "less/two/" and the editor shows...
Line one
Line five
And then I do a change... "s/e/x/g" and the buffer now shows...
Linx onx
Linx fivx
And then I type "all" to show the entire file without regular expression folding.
Linx onx
Line two
line three
line four
Linx fivx
Wala! This is the kind of editing I like.
Would someone show me how to do this with Emacs so that I can retire THE.
If you are as proficient as you think that you are you should start your own company. Top of the class? In any other role you will be working for people stupider than yourself.
Exim allows MAPS and other DNS based black lists to be used to mark e-mails. Then procmail can be used to filter those e-mails. This I have found to be very useful.
Further, legslation should be in place that unsolicited e-mail gets an extra header "unsolicited: yes" or something like that so that I can filter better. Those that don't fill in this header should be liable for damages. Also, a flag for sexual content would be good as well.
If I sign up for a mailing list, I should NOT have a bunch of nannys insisting that companies waste my time with another verification step.
Thus, "double-opt-in" is really just "single-opt-in". They've spun the words to mean something that they don't.
These are the only steps which prevent spammers from mass-subscribing you to a mailing list that you don't want to be a part of. Think of it this way. I have a product. I pay a marketing firm $1.00 for every person whom the marketing firm gets on the mailing list. They can do this *legitamately* and actually convince people to sign themselves up... or... more likely, they can just add 1000's of known e-mails to the sign-up list.
You have to have 'clean hands' in order to use a law in your favor. The RIAA can resonably claim that anyone using the software does not have clean hands.
The hard sciences do this all the time, because that's how hard science is generally done--in a team setting.
The originality in the "Lab" occurs during the report. Where one explains what was done, why it was done, and what the results were. Perhaps this can be taken into computer science, where the group works on the "code"; but the reports are turned in individually -- each person explains in their own words how the requirements, the design, how the program is structured, how it operates, what it's limitations are, etc.
This is *exactly* the reason why I have a B.S. in Mathematics instead of computers. In my opinion, students should be allowed to chat and share ideas on their programming assignments -- even copying is good, as long as the student learns the subject matter. Here are some ideas...
1. Give frequent quizes, mid-terms, and final exams. Construct these tests so that it covers ideas which one would have to struggle with when solving the programming assignments.
2. Give an incomplete program (their own?) and have them complete one of the classes or functions. If they really wrote it (or understand the concepts), this won't take long at all.
3. Focus on "ideas" and "history". These are very testable, and probably a better yardstick. Use in-class essays; hire grad students to help grade them.
4. Have group projects to *encourage* knowledge sharing. Have each person write an essay about what they learned from the group project. Grade the essay, not the program that resulted.
5. Focus more on requirement gathering and other "fuzzy" stuff as well as the concrete programming. Give room for the those with good communication skills to shine and partner with those with good technical skills.
It irritates me when comments that are against the grain get moderated down. This the parent post's perspective is quite justified with history... many people think as he does. Moderating this, and similar comments down stifles discussion.
I personally feel that RAND is dead wrong; however, if it must come to pass, then perhaps
here is a compromise: Allow for royalty free use of the patent, but only if the software is licensed under the GPL. As much as Microsoft has bashed GPL in the past, this is probably the best option for the big boys. They could claim to "support open source" software but still keep their ability to charge royalties for proprietary implementations.
Note that allowing royalty free linking with any ole open source license will allow proprietary applications to "get around" the licensing restrictions. So, I can see why they would require GPL, but nothing less than GPL. One could also use the patent royalty free with any software that had a GPL compatible license, under the restriction that the aggregate license must also be GPL compatible. They may also have to add a clause that the source code for software must be available for download under the GPL when used as a server side process. As this would also give a "loop hole" allowing proprietary uses of the patented technology.
My aunt is furious about when her 6 year old child accidently does a typo and porn sites pop up everywhere. Perhaps if this stops, it will lessen the demand for filtering software. Filtering software, IMHO, is very bad; definately the worse of two evils. At least shutting down a web site could possibly have a court process attached to it...
As a university student majoring in Computer Science, I have been made to take classes such as Greek Mythology and American History... I'm paying them, if I want to learn about history, I'll tell them so. It shouldn't be the other way around.
Universities are *certifying* bodies that grant you a certificate once you have demonstrated a particular level of intellectual maturity. The whole point of a University is to expose you to ideas that you would not otherwise expose yourself to. Those ideas that you are exposed to is what your employer is paying for -- they are paying for critical thinking.
That being said, you should stop poo-pooing your American History papers and dig into the Federalist Papers. There is alot of ideas packed in there about how to run organizations and talk of the human condition. These topics are valueable. As well as the discusion techniques you learn in class and dealing with other classmates. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison are serious thinkers. You can learn alot from them.
I watched a friend (business major) take a programming course. They were teaching this person all kinds of low-level chores. What the individual took from the class: "Programming is tedious grunt work" Does he respect programmers? No. Does he have any more of a clue what goes into programming? No. Instead he thinks he knows about programming, aka "slinging code".
I think the problem is his class was too "applied" and ignored the basics. He wasn't taught anything about the history of computing, use the words "Babbage", "Turing", "Shockley", etc., and they draw a blank stare. For him, computers just emerged from thin air. He doesn't know how a transitor works. Thus, when it comes time to explain anything to him, changes in the industry, how it may impact his business, he just doesn't have the background. However, he does know how to print "Hello World" ten times. How practical.
In the other end of the spectrum, I was not encouraged to dig mightly into English and History. Both of which I've had to play "catch-up" due to years of neglect. In high school we completely ignore Contract Law, instead we focus Business class on investing and accounting. Admittedly, both of these can be useful, however my high-school business class ('87) completely left out contract law. What is business *but* contract law? I've signed many more contracts than I've had dollars to invest or accounting books to balance.
Also, they should renew the focus on civics. I recently found out that the same friend of mine didn't have a civics class. He has never read the constitution nor had a discussion of its importance beyond "US is great, we are a free country." Admittedly, I goofed off in my civics class but I do remember the day we talked about the constitution. And on Sept 11, I recalled a very long, detailed class discussion about our foreign policy. Helpful it was. History of Politics is very useful indeed.
I'm ignorant here... but could someone explain what happens when a patent is contested? Can one ask for a trial by Jury of Peers? I can imagine how a patent would fool most laywers or lay people... but a jury pool of practicing programmers; this may be a different story, no? Also, I was wondering what happens when you win? Can you get damages? Against who?
First, the parent post is not flame bait. It is a different opinion; which I happen to think is flawed, but this is besides the point.
Patent law exists to "promote the sciences and useful arts". It does not, nor should it exist to "allow businesses to recoup their research investments". This is natural-right thinking which is explicitly rejected by the founding fathers via the constitution.
The biggest problem with patent law is that it is now the providence of big business and lawyers; when it was originally there for "inventors". Patent mechansim is not very accessable by the general developer... else we would have far less patents since the PTO would be more up-to-speed with what is "obvious". The PTO also pays it's evaluators poorly. I can get over 6 figures in the marketplace, but the PTO could only offer me 40K beacuse I don't have a masters (and then it'd be 50K or so, 60K for a pHd). How can we expect the evaluators to know what is obvious if (a) they arn't practitioners and (b) they are underpaid.
I'd rather have a "patent duty" like "jury duty" be put out for average developers... where they are paid at the prevaling wadge for ONE YEAR of service, after which they return to the market. Now, this would help prevent those big companies from patenting stupid stuff...
The progress the W3C has made in the past *without* giving in to royalty-burdened patents has been absolutely fantastic.
It is not like there is a lack of innovation here.
Why fix something that's not broken? Money should not be the focus of the W3C... bringing the market to maturity and ensuring competition (and thus innovation) should be its goal.
Patents are wisely justified under the U.S. Constitution to "Promote the Sciences and Useful Arts" and are not justified under any sort of natural-rights or right to compensation logic. One must ask if the patent process is indeed satisfying its goal. If not, then institutions such as the W3C should not be rushing to support the implementation of restrictive mechanisms that are not needed.
The words "locked in" are a bit of a misnomer. No one is knocking down your IT department's door, demanding money and thrusting a CD in your hand.
The cost for most corporations to move away from a non-microsoft platform is terrifyingly huge (in the billions of dollars for most Fortune 500 companies) and stagnation is not an option. They have no choice. They must upgrade. They are locked-in. Unless all of their mission-critical in-house apps can be converted over to linux they cannot switch platforms; and migration means throwing out a decade of work, or more.
Pin the tail on the real donkey... copyright law which is just simply too strong. Microsoft is just a symptom, nothing more, nothing less. For another possible option (besides open source), read Distributed Copyright. But this doesn't help the Fortune 500 companys get their current "fix".
How about when you tell them that by simply donating money (which is tax-exempt)
Not much difference between donating money and spending it on a legitimate expense. They both are "tax free".
And, in addition, there is no reason why it has to be such and amount. Why not $2,000? Would the company miss it?
I was thinking a fortune 500 company. If each fortune 500 company donated $2,000, this would be at most one million dollars. Assuming that each company was generous. This just isn't enough money to be an effective option against Microsoft. Money makes the world go 'round. Even in the non-profit world.
You would have control over the direction of development.
Most companies don't want control over development. They want a choice of products that have been developed. Subtle but important difference. Most companies want to be told ("sold") what they need. They want to "adopt best practices".
What is needed... organizations to... contribute money to the FSF or similar foundation for the development of the "common good" applications.
Ok. This could work. Here is how. You could approach this via vertical markets. Suppose that a vertical market (say automotive) has vendors A (Ford), B (GM), C(Chystler), D (Toyota), and E (Honda). You could make a "industry dontation" agreement where X agrees to donate $1000K to the FSF if 8 out of 10 members of the industry also donate $1000K. In this way, each vendor has resonable confidence that they are not being taken advantage of. I bet it would be alot easier to do something like this than to try and get individual donations. If the FSF could do this to N vertical markets... now that could be some cash. But even so... this is probably a very hard sell.
I think it would be better to have them pay a premium for software *now* that gives them a competitive advantage *now* that will also become public domain in N years, reducing the chance/effect of business process "lock-in".
Slashdot Mirror
From your post it seems that you've hit the point where technology for technology sake has become boring. Good. Only now can you become a master software developer. This is not the end of your career... but the beginning of it. Mastery of technology comes with service. Certainly you will always be rewarded with a new technology insight; however, the bulk of your rewards will come from serving other people, as they serve you. Your reward will come when you put a smile on a person's face after saving them that horribly irritating 2 hour process they must do every Monday morning.
The programmer transfers tedious processes from humans to machines. We automate. We make hard or impossible processes feisable. Farmers sell food. Doctors sell health. Lawyers sell order. We sell a very precious gift... time.
So. My advice to you. Now that you are proficient software person, you must move on to a problem domain. You must pick a group of people you will serve. Learn business. Learn how social structures work. Learn about specific problem domains that interest you. Do a few internships. When you go into a job make sure that they know what you are there for -- to help them automate tedious processes. Once you grok your role and help other people to understand your role, you will find that software is indeed a most wonderful occupation.
This has got to be good ammunition which the DOJ and the state Attorney Generals can use. What a wonderful way to describe how Microsoft can single-handledly extend it's monopoly from office products into, stagger, something truley outstanding -- a monopoly on the definition of the English language. If Microsoft can do this with English, imagine what I can do to anything else it desires...
I only need a few things: Open SSH, Apache, Python, PostgreSQL, Exim, Bind. Right now I can't use potato since I seem to be having a socket problem with Python 2.1 on Potato which goes away if I use a new version of RedHat ... so I figure it's the kernel 2.2 or an older glibc... is this good logic?
Late 80's huh? How late is late for you? 1987? In which case we have the tail end of Windows 1 and the beginning of Windows 2.
I was doing installations of Windows 2.10 in '88 for customers that had custom DOS applications (DBASE II Application), but wanted the "Mac" interface. Support for DOS wasn't great. But it was there. You are right that Windows didn't really make it till the release of 3.0 in mid 1990. But I must say, it was the late 80's that was the turning point -- 2.11 worked and Microsoft had *promises* for 3.0 (and was showing demos of it to big clients). Microsoft marketing was huge in the late 80's. They bent over backwards to make programmers happy. And they played off the anti-IBM sentiment perfectly. They had promotions to encourage their resellers to label Apple as "cute" -- in business "cute" is the kiss of death. Funny how useable interfaces are "cute". Oh humm. I must say, I bought into their developer targeted marketing hook, line, and sinker. Microsoft was the "brilliant underdog".
What is often missing in these formulations is the investment in legacy software. This is why Microsoft won and Apple lost in the late 80's. Sure the Mac was better... but it didn't run all of the custom developed DOS software that Windows did. Then in the early 90's it was Windows NT vs OS/2. Although OS/2 had a compatibility layer, it wasn't "Windows". And thus, once again, all of those custom windows applications came to play.
.NET stuff. But how likely is that? Not. And so we go round and round the treadmill. As corporate lock-in grows deeper and deeper -- tough luck Linux.
Now we want companies like Ford to adopt linux? It isn't going to happen. They have, I am sure, billions of dollars invested in 16 bit and 32 bit windows software (Yes, there are still many VB 3.0 applications out there.). Until Linux provides proven, reliable, backwards compatibility here it's no dice. The lock-in cost is just too high.
Now. This may be possible in 10 years from now. As long as corporate developers use plain ole HTML plus well-supported Javascript and don't use ActiveX and, worse the new
The wxWindows folks also have a Macintosh port that I believe also uses CARBON. From what I understand they are doing a great job. For python people, wxPython is just fantastic.
Power is generational. It will be a while before we have a repeat the 80's. In '83 everyone my age disliked IBM, while those my fathers age were IBM heads. I disliked IBM beacuse they were bullies (or so my dad said). Thus, for me everything IBM was tainted. Microsoft, a small little company was on the other hand, very cool. They made DOS, had a Basic interpreter, etc. Another kickn' company was Borland, who made SideKick a very nifty personal organizer and a Pascal compiler.
Anyway, I don't have children, but people younger than me think that Microsofties are a bunch of bullies (or so I tell them). And rather than investing our attention in another company, I think we may have collectively learned our lesson. We are investing our time in open source software that is publically owned.
It took over two decades for Microsoft to catch up to IBM ('75-'95). I think it is fair to give open source a fair shake ('85-'2005). Sometime soon the pendilum will swing away from Microsoft and towards the next monopoly. Guided not by technology decisions, but by personal choice not to support the bullies. This time the monopoly holders will be the public, through licenses like the GPL.
Please excuse my ignorance here. But I take a huge performance hit when I use emacs beacuse I don't know how to do line folding. Let me explain (and excuse the simplistic example). Suppose a file with the following content:
/Line/" and the editor shows me...
/two/" and the editor shows...
Line one
Line two
line three
line four
Line five
I'd like a command line where I type: "all
Line one
Line two
Line five
And then I could do "less
Line one
Line five
And then I do a change... "s/e/x/g" and the buffer now shows...
Linx onx
Linx fivx
And then I type "all" to show the entire file without regular expression folding.
Linx onx
Line two
line three
line four
Linx fivx
Wala! This is the kind of editing I like.
Would someone show me how to do this with Emacs so that I can retire THE.
Clark
If you are as proficient as you think that you are you should start your own company. Top of the class? In any other role you will be working for people stupider than yourself.
Exim allows MAPS and other DNS based black lists to be used to mark e-mails. Then procmail can be used to filter those e-mails. This I have found to be very useful.
Further, legslation should be in place that unsolicited e-mail gets an extra header "unsolicited: yes" or something like that so that I can filter better. Those that don't fill in this header should be liable for damages. Also, a flag for sexual content would be good as well.
Clark
If I sign up for a mailing list, I should NOT have a bunch of nannys insisting that companies waste my time with another verification step.
... more likely, they can just add 1000's of known e-mails to the sign-up list.
Thus, "double-opt-in" is really just "single-opt-in". They've spun the words to mean something that they don't.
These are the only steps which prevent spammers from mass-subscribing you to a mailing list that you don't want to be a part of. Think of it this way. I have a product. I pay a marketing firm $1.00 for every person whom the marketing firm gets on the mailing list. They can do this *legitamately* and actually convince people to sign themselves up... or
You have to have 'clean hands' in order to use a law in your favor. The RIAA can resonably claim that anyone using the software does not have clean hands.
The hard sciences do this all the time, because that's how hard science is generally done--in a team setting.
The originality in the "Lab" occurs during the report. Where one explains what was done, why it was done, and what the results were. Perhaps this can be taken into computer science, where the group works on the "code"; but the reports are turned in individually -- each person explains in their own words how the requirements, the design, how the program is structured, how it operates, what it's limitations are, etc.
This is *exactly* the reason why I have a B.S. in Mathematics instead of computers. In my opinion, students should be allowed to chat and share ideas on their programming assignments -- even copying is good, as long as the student learns the subject matter. Here are some ideas...
1. Give frequent quizes, mid-terms, and final exams. Construct these tests so that it covers ideas which one would have to struggle with when solving the programming assignments.
2. Give an incomplete program (their own?) and have them complete one of the classes or functions. If they really wrote it (or understand the concepts), this won't take long at all.
3. Focus on "ideas" and "history". These are very testable, and probably a better yardstick. Use in-class essays; hire grad students to help grade them.
4. Have group projects to *encourage* knowledge sharing. Have each person write an essay about what they learned from the group project. Grade the essay, not the program that resulted.
5. Focus more on requirement gathering and other "fuzzy" stuff as well as the concrete programming. Give room for the those with good communication skills to shine and partner with those with good technical skills.
Just thoughts...
It irritates me when comments that are against the grain get moderated down. This the parent post's perspective is quite justified with history... many people think as he does. Moderating this, and similar comments down stifles discussion.
I personally feel that RAND is dead wrong; however, if it must come to pass, then perhaps
here is a compromise: Allow for royalty free use of the patent, but only if the software is licensed under the GPL. As much as Microsoft has bashed GPL in the past, this is probably the best option for the big boys. They could claim to "support open source" software but still keep their ability to charge royalties for proprietary implementations.
Note that allowing royalty free linking with any ole open source license will allow proprietary applications to "get around" the licensing restrictions. So, I can see why they would require GPL, but nothing less than GPL. One could also use the patent royalty free with any software that had a GPL compatible license, under the restriction that the aggregate license must also be GPL compatible. They may also have to add a clause that the source code for software must be available for download under the GPL when used as a server side process. As this would also give a "loop hole" allowing proprietary uses of the patented technology.
My aunt is furious about when her 6 year old child accidently does a typo and porn sites pop up everywhere. Perhaps if this stops, it will lessen the demand for filtering software. Filtering software, IMHO, is very bad; definately the worse of two evils. At least shutting down a web site could possibly have a court process attached to it...
As a university student majoring in Computer Science, I have been made to take classes such as Greek Mythology and American History... I'm paying them, if I want to learn about history, I'll tell them so. It shouldn't be the other way around.
Universities are *certifying* bodies that grant you a certificate once you have demonstrated a particular level of intellectual maturity. The whole point of a University is to expose you to ideas that you would not otherwise expose yourself to. Those ideas that you are exposed to is what your employer is paying for -- they are paying for critical thinking.
That being said, you should stop poo-pooing your American History papers and dig into the Federalist Papers. There is alot of ideas packed in there about how to run organizations and talk of the human condition. These topics are valueable. As well as the discusion techniques you learn in class and dealing with other classmates. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison are serious thinkers. You can learn alot from them.
I watched a friend (business major) take a programming course. They were teaching this person all kinds of low-level chores. What the individual took from the class: "Programming is tedious grunt work" Does he respect programmers? No. Does he have any more of a clue what goes into programming? No. Instead he thinks he knows about programming, aka "slinging code".
I think the problem is his class was too "applied" and ignored the basics. He wasn't taught anything about the history of computing, use the words "Babbage", "Turing", "Shockley", etc., and they draw a blank stare. For him, computers just emerged from thin air. He doesn't know how a transitor works. Thus, when it comes time to explain anything to him, changes in the industry, how it may impact his business, he just doesn't have the background. However, he does know how to print "Hello World" ten times. How practical.
In the other end of the spectrum, I was not encouraged to dig mightly into English and History. Both of which I've had to play "catch-up" due to years of neglect. In high school we completely ignore Contract Law, instead we focus Business class on investing and accounting. Admittedly, both of these can be useful, however my high-school business class ('87) completely left out contract law. What is business *but* contract law? I've signed many more contracts than I've had dollars to invest or accounting books to balance.
Also, they should renew the focus on civics. I recently found out that the same friend of mine didn't have a civics class. He has never read the constitution nor had a discussion of its importance beyond "US is great, we are a free country." Admittedly, I goofed off in my civics class but I do remember the day we talked about the constitution. And on Sept 11, I recalled a very long, detailed class discussion about our foreign policy. Helpful it was. History of Politics is very useful indeed.
I'm ignorant here... but could someone explain what happens when a patent is contested? Can one ask for a trial by Jury of Peers? I can imagine how a patent would fool most laywers or lay people... but a jury pool of practicing programmers; this may be a different story, no? Also, I was wondering what happens when you win? Can you get damages? Against who?
First, the parent post is not flame bait. It is a different opinion; which I happen to think is flawed, but this is besides the point.
Patent law exists to "promote the sciences and useful arts". It does not, nor should it exist to "allow businesses to recoup their research investments". This is natural-right thinking which is explicitly rejected by the founding fathers via the constitution.
The biggest problem with patent law is that it is now the providence of big business and lawyers; when it was originally there for "inventors". Patent mechansim is not very accessable by the general developer... else we would have far less patents since the PTO would be more up-to-speed with what is "obvious". The PTO also pays it's evaluators poorly. I can get over 6 figures in the marketplace, but the PTO could only offer me 40K beacuse I don't have a masters (and then it'd be 50K or so, 60K for a pHd). How can we expect the evaluators to know what is obvious if (a) they arn't practitioners and (b) they are underpaid.
I'd rather have a "patent duty" like "jury duty" be put out for average developers... where they are paid at the prevaling wadge for ONE YEAR of service, after which they return to the market. Now, this would help prevent those big companies from patenting stupid stuff...
The progress the W3C has made in the past *without* giving in to royalty-burdened patents has been absolutely fantastic.
It is not like there is a lack of innovation here.
Why fix something that's not broken? Money should not be the focus of the W3C... bringing the market to maturity and ensuring competition (and thus innovation) should be its goal.
Patents are wisely justified under the U.S. Constitution to "Promote the Sciences and Useful Arts" and are not justified under any sort of natural-rights or right to compensation logic. One must ask if the patent process is indeed satisfying its goal. If not, then institutions such as the W3C should not be rushing to support the implementation of restrictive mechanisms that are not needed.
The words "locked in" are a bit of a misnomer. No one is knocking down your IT department's door, demanding money and thrusting a CD in your hand.
The cost for most corporations to move away from a non-microsoft platform is terrifyingly huge (in the billions of dollars for most Fortune 500 companies) and stagnation is not an option. They have no choice. They must upgrade. They are locked-in. Unless all of their mission-critical in-house apps can be converted over to linux they cannot switch platforms; and migration means throwing out a decade of work, or more.
Pin the tail on the real donkey... copyright law which is just simply too strong. Microsoft is just a symptom, nothing more, nothing less. For another possible option (besides open source), read Distributed Copyright. But this doesn't help the Fortune 500 companys get their current "fix".
How about when you tell them that by simply donating money (which is tax-exempt)
Not much difference between donating money and spending it on a legitimate expense. They both are "tax free".
And, in addition, there is no reason why it has to be such and amount. Why not $2,000? Would the company miss it?
I was thinking a fortune 500 company. If each fortune 500 company donated $2,000, this would be at most one million dollars. Assuming that each company was generous. This just isn't enough money to be an effective option against Microsoft. Money makes the world go 'round. Even in the non-profit world.
You would have control over the direction of development.
Most companies don't want control over development. They want a choice of products that have been developed. Subtle but important difference. Most companies want to be told ("sold") what they need. They want to "adopt best practices".
What is needed ... organizations to ... contribute money to the FSF or similar foundation for the development of the "common good" applications.
Ok. This could work. Here is how. You could approach this via vertical markets. Suppose that a vertical market (say automotive) has vendors A (Ford), B (GM), C(Chystler), D (Toyota), and E (Honda). You could make a "industry dontation" agreement where X agrees to donate $1000K to the FSF if 8 out of 10 members of the industry also donate $1000K. In this way, each vendor has resonable confidence that they are not being taken advantage of. I bet it would be alot easier to do something like this than to try and get individual donations. If the FSF could do this to N vertical markets... now that could be some cash. But even so... this is probably a very hard sell.
I think it would be better to have them pay a premium for software *now* that gives them a competitive advantage *now* that will also become public domain in N years, reducing the chance/effect of business process "lock-in".