That's a bit impractical for a couple reasons. First off, patents cost money (on the order of $10k a piece) and take time to file. Attempting to patent everything would take a lot of money and a lot of time. If you're willing to do this, more power to you, but it's not something I would expect anybody (other than a large company with ulterior motives) to undertake.
Secondly, while holding a patent on something theoretically prevents somebody else from patenting the same thing, this doesn't hold true in practice (due to the general ineptness of the patent and trade office). If I remember correctly, there were two nearly identical patents issued for LZW compression, one to IBM and one to a company that would later be bought by Unisys. IBM was nice about it and allowed people to freely use LZW compression, but Unisys was not so nice and that's why we're in the mess we are today with GIF images.
It seems to me that a better strategy would be to create as much prior art as possible. If it doesn't save you the time and effort it takes to patent things it will at least save you the $10k per patent that would kill most people. It would also be a lot more impressive to build actual programs than to stoop to the level of companies like priceline.com and try to extort the patent system.
Gates claims that his business is "not like owning a newspaper". He adds: "Someone who owns a newspaper can pick up the phone to the editor and say 'run headlines I like'.
OK, and what is MSNBC again? I'm not saying he manipulates headlines, but to claim it's not like a newspaper... is like claiming Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly.
Reason 5 - Linux uses an antiquated command line interface where users have to type "commands" rather than having a GUI where users can point and click.
Reason 6 - Linux is too confusing to use because there are too many GUI's. Why would a user want to learn how to use both GNOME and KDE when they could just learn Windows?
This reminds me of the new Lifesavers commercial where they warn that their pineapple flavored Lifesaver is not Y2K compliant. They're running a promotion where they want people to vote on a Y2K compliant flavor to replace pineapple come January 1st.
> you can start worrying about them getting lost in the electronic shuffle.
...or rather _hope_ they got lost if they're part of your higher level education. My school made me sign a paper when I enrolled which (from what I remember) assigning all intellectual propery created by me in my coursework to the school. Maybe my school is weird that way, but it wouldn't surprise me if this were a common practice. If it is commonplace, hope they don't recognize your brilliant ideas so that they don't claim them for their own.
Yeah, but what about using it on an LCD monitor? I remember reading a few months ago about a new type of LCD monitor where the colors are layered on top of each other rather than being placed side by side. It seems like these types of monitors would work better with Frensel lenses in that they wouldn't unevenly magnify individual colors as you have described. Now which LCD monitors actually layer the colors like this is a different story. I can tell that my laptop puts the colors side by side, but I'm having a really hard time telling if my Apple StudioDisplay does or not (I think it does).
You might want to check out Fortify if you can't wait. I haven't used it myself, but I know several people who have. It turns a normal version of Netscape into the 128 bit version.
The company I'm currently contracting for and planning to work permanently for is extremely OSS friendly. All of our servers are Linux or OpenBSD and all but two of the desktops are Linux. When we are evaluating software to use, being open source gives it bonus points as the management grasps the fact that OSS provides long term viability and increased security. But wait, that's not the best part - the management encourages us to open-source software which is written in-house as long as it is general and doesn't give the company a competitve advantage. They let me open source my PHP to Java bridge that I wrote and they've given me the go ahead to open source some other stuff that I will when I get some free time.
Anyway, we have an opening for a full time developer. If you're in the Boston area and you have have experience with Java, SQL, and Unix/Linux and an interest in statistics email me with the URL to your resume.
I wish they wouldn't have made it sound like the class is on the same level as the computer science and math classes, but I suppose a little research is too much to ask of the press these days. They are certainly blowing the manners class at MIT way out of proportion and as such I'm not sure how much of the rest of the article to believe.
The manners class is taught during "Independent Activities Period" which is essentially the winter break at MIT. You can do whatever you want during this break and if you happen to be on campus there are a lot of classes you can take for fun. Some classes you can even take for credit during this period, but the manners class is not one of them. Anybody who is motivated to teach a class may do so and they often do with subjects that range from beer brewing to sushi making. Anyway, the manners class is in the same league as these other for-fun classes (although it is easily one of the more popular classes).
I wish they wouldn't have made it sound like the class is on the same level as the computer science and math classes, but I suppose a little research is too much to ask of the press these days. The manners class is taught during "Independent Activities Period" which is essentially the winter break at MIT. You can do whatever you want during this break and if you happen to be on campus there are a lot of classes you can take for fun. Some classes you can even take for credit during this period, but the manners class is not one of them. Anybody who is motivated to teach a class may do so and they often do with subjects that range from beer brewing to sushi making. Anyway, the manners class is in the same league as these other for-fun classes (although it is easily one of the more popular classes).
Did anybody notice this article over at news.com. Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying "We certainly will have Web-based office productivity services, no doubt about it." It's funny how every time one of their competitors makes a surprise announcement like Sun did Microsoft jumps up with the attitude of "oh, of course we had plans for this all along too, so you'll naturally want to wait for are version because everybody always ends up using our products anyway so don't risk your future compatability by using a product which actually exists now". I predict one of two things will happen here:
This will end up becoming classic Microsoft vaporware.
They will shove pieces of Office into ActiveX controls in Microsoft's usual, contorted manner and claim that it is a web based office system despite the fact that it's bloated to the point of being useless for internet use and that it only runs on Windows.
This reminds me of Bob Metcalfe's promise to eat his words if the internet didn't collapse by some given date. He ended up losing the bet, but he put his article in a blender with a bunch of liquid, chopped it up, and then just took a sip. I would probably be equally unimpressed if this guy ate chocolate ants or some other common food, although that would be admittedly less lame than taking a sip.
> We even support Java and we're the fastest performer with Java.
Well, according to the courts as well as the spec MS does not support Java. Like it or not, Sun owns the trademark on Java so if they say an implementation must adhere to a certain standard to be called Java then they are right. Taking away standard core functionality (e.g., RMI and JNI) and trying to claim that your product is still compatible is just bogus.
> There is unfortunately no way to get E to play nicely with the panel.
OK, I must have an older/newer version of something on my computer because E works fine with the pager. However, when I go into the office to work, it doesn't work right at all there (clicking on a task doesn't not bring the window to the foreground). I never set anything special to make it work on my machine so I guess it's the version of Gnome I installed. The version I use at work came with Red Hat 6 so I don't know if I just haven't updated Gnome in awhile to run into this problem or if I happen to have a newer version of Gnome than comes with Red Hat 6. What I would like to know is how can I configure E to play nice with the Gnome pager in Red Hat 6? It's not impossible since it works fine on my home machine, but I didn't set anything special to make it work here.
What about the FSF? I think the whole Gnu-Linux naming war is silly, but they've probably contributed far more software to RedHat's flagship product than Linus himself and it would be too bad if they weren't rewarded as well.
OK, this is somewhat related to the topic, but it's another question rather than an answer... Does anybody know of any good project management software that will allow you to break a project (a software project to be specific, but I suppose that doesn't need to be the case) into various tasks and then monitor those tasks? Ideally the software would allow people on the project to:
be assigned to particular tasks
give time estimates of how long particular tasks would take
provide a breakdown of the time they spent working in terms of which sub-tasks they were working on
prioritize inidividual tasks within the whole project
An open source package that does this would be nice so that I could add any features that are missing, but I could settle for something closed. It would also be nice if it were accessible from a web browser, but it would be OK if it were not web based as long as it runs on Linux.
Is it just me or is the law prohibiting the mere discussion of drug use downright frightening? Wouldn't this make sites that talk about the side effects of drugs illegal? Of course, as the article mentions this law would probably be selectively enforced so that the government would leave alone anti-drug sites which may list the side effects of hard core drugs, but prosecute other sites which point out that alcohol and nicotene are more harmful than certain illegal "soft" drugs.
The more important point, though, is that they are attempting to crimilaze a particular point of view. The way it sounds, I could get in trouble for saying that I support marijuana legalization even though I have no intention of ever using it myself. I find it inconceivable that they would consider throwing me in jail for merely stating what I think.
You may not care about this law now if you agree with the government's war on drugs, but you should care. If this law passes it will set a precedent for the government's ability to restrict free speech. Eventually, there may be some other issue that the government declares "war" on which you happen to disagree with. Would you want to go to jail from peacefuly disagreeing with the government in public? We're not even talking about taking any physical action here. All you have to do is publicly state your views and you go to jail.
I, for one, will not follow this law if it is passed. In fact, I don't have and never have had any links to drug related sites on my homepage, but if this law passes I will most certainly add some links. Hmmm... maybe I'll even do that now. Maybe a whole slew of us should do that now in protest. I'm off to check out the NORML homepage to see whether I want to link to it...
No, it's definitely not free if you consider the bandwidth that it takes. You may be able to piggy-back off of somebody who's already paid for it if you're at a University or if you're at a job where they let you use their network, but somebody has to pay for it.
Well, Linux does fit the bill of a server much better than a desktop environment for the masses. I personally use Linux full time on my own desktop and I love it, but I would hesitate to recommend it to all of my friends because it's not entirely intuitive to use yet. I know some people think that learning to use a command line interface is no harder than learning to use a GUI, but a GUI offers the advantage that you can often figure out how to do something from contextual clues and that's infinitely more difficult to do from a command line. GNOME and E look 10 times cooler than Windows (that's one of the big reasons why I permanently switched to Linux) and they offer far more functionality than Windows in terms of what I find useful, but every once in awhile I find myself having to drop into an xterm to do something that I can't do (or isn't obvious how to do) with the GUI. I imagine this would be much, much harder for somebody with minimal computer experience.
Then again, Windows isn't exactly intuitive either even with the contextual clues you get from the GUI. But the worst thing is, if you can't do something from the GUI you probably can't do it at all - you don't even have the option to drop into a CLI to do what you want (you can drop into DOS, but it most likely won't help).
So maybe Linux would make just as good of a desktop as Windows for Newbies. It's already blatantly more stable and less expensive than Windows - I guess it would feel more right recommending it as a desktop if it were obviously more intuitive to use than Windows.
PHP is nice for simple apps, and I use it myself for a lot of things. However, I wouldn't want to use it for a large project as I have tried it before and most of my time was spent being really frustrated with things not working right. The majority of the time the frustration was due to typographic errors on my part, which made me realize what an incredible amount of time strong type checking in languages like Java save me. PHP's slut-like view of casting also caused me infinite grief - when "" can be interpretted as "", 0, null, or false it makes database queries (among other things) a royal pain. I also found a lot of the functionality of the methods counter-intuitive, but I suppose that wouldn't be a problem if I were more experienced with it. The other thing, which I know has been mentioned already, is that PHP mixes code and HTML quite thoroughly which can be a real problem if you have a software team working on the functionality of the web page and a graphics design team working on the look and feel and they won't necessarily be working closely (this is common).
Anyway, I don't mean to be down on PHP because I still like it and use it. I just wanted to give you some ideas of why it's not right for every job.
Well, the company that I'm contracting for is going to be using Enhydra for 3 out of 4 of our major services so if it doesn't work we're screwed (put another way, if there are bugs that would keep it from working for us they will be fixed by us). However, from what I've seen so far Enhydra looks like a solid system and the design is very impressive. The people who developed it did so over the course of several years as part of their real-life contracting work so that alone would strongly encourage it to be highly stable with a pragmatic design. My experience with it is limitted to a few weeks so I'd be interested in what experiences others have had, but so far I've only been really impressed with it.
Not only is it well built, but their web page also looks very professional. That may be a really good selling for your boss as it's something you can't say about a lot of open source projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, while holding a patent on something theoretically prevents somebody else from patenting the same thing, this doesn't hold true in practice (due to the general ineptness of the patent and trade office). If I remember correctly, there were two nearly identical patents issued for LZW compression, one to IBM and one to a company that would later be bought by Unisys. IBM was nice about it and allowed people to freely use LZW compression, but Unisys was not so nice and that's why we're in the mess we are today with GIF images.
It seems to me that a better strategy would be to create as much prior art as possible. If it doesn't save you the time and effort it takes to patent things it will at least save you the $10k per patent that would kill most people. It would also be a lot more impressive to build actual programs than to stoop to the level of companies like priceline.com and try to extort the patent system.
OK, and what is MSNBC again? I'm not saying he manipulates headlines, but to claim it's not like a newspaper... is like claiming Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly.
...according to foxtrot... http://www.foxtrot.com/comics/pag es/ft990831.html
Reason 5 - Linux uses an antiquated command line interface where users have to type "commands" rather than having a GUI where users can point and click.
Reason 6 - Linux is too confusing to use because there are too many GUI's. Why would a user want to learn how to use both GNOME and KDE when they could just learn Windows?
This reminds me of the new Lifesavers commercial where they warn that their pineapple flavored Lifesaver is not Y2K compliant. They're running a promotion where they want people to vote on a Y2K compliant flavor to replace pineapple come January 1st.
> you can start worrying about them getting lost in the electronic shuffle.
...or rather _hope_ they got lost if they're part of your higher level education. My school made me sign a paper when I enrolled which (from what I remember) assigning all intellectual propery created by me in my coursework to the school. Maybe my school is weird that way, but it wouldn't surprise me if this were a common practice. If it is commonplace, hope they don't recognize your brilliant ideas so that they don't claim them for their own.
How is this doublespeak? The link you provided says nothing about banner ads.
Yeah, but what about using it on an LCD monitor? I remember reading a few months ago about a new type of LCD monitor where the colors are layered on top of each other rather than being placed side by side. It seems like these types of monitors would work better with Frensel lenses in that they wouldn't unevenly magnify individual colors as you have described. Now which LCD monitors actually layer the colors like this is a different story. I can tell that my laptop puts the colors side by side, but I'm having a really hard time telling if my Apple StudioDisplay does or not (I think it does).
You might want to check out Fortify if you can't wait. I haven't used it myself, but I know several people who have. It turns a normal version of Netscape into the 128 bit version.
Try http://www.techweb. com/printableArticle?doc_id=REU19990923S0001
Anyway, we have an opening for a full time developer. If you're in the Boston area and you have have experience with Java, SQL, and Unix/Linux and an interest in statistics email me with the URL to your resume.
I wish they wouldn't have made it sound like the class is on the same level as the computer science and math classes, but I suppose a little research is too much to ask of the press these days. They are certainly blowing the manners class at MIT way out of proportion and as such I'm not sure how much of the rest of the article to believe.
The manners class is taught during "Independent Activities Period" which is essentially the winter break at MIT. You can do whatever you want during this break and if you happen to be on campus there are a lot of classes you can take for fun. Some classes you can even take for credit during this period, but the manners class is not one of them. Anybody who is motivated to teach a class may do so and they often do with subjects that range from beer brewing to sushi making. Anyway, the manners class is in the same league as these other for-fun classes (although it is easily one of the more popular classes).
I wish they wouldn't have made it sound like the class is on the same level as the computer science and math classes, but I suppose a little research is too much to ask of the press these days. The manners class is taught during "Independent Activities Period" which is essentially the winter break at MIT. You can do whatever you want during this break and if you happen to be on campus there are a lot of classes you can take for fun. Some classes you can even take for credit during this period, but the manners class is not one of them. Anybody who is motivated to teach a class may do so and they often do with subjects that range from beer brewing to sushi making. Anyway, the manners class is in the same league as these other for-fun classes (although it is easily one of the more popular classes).
This reminds me of Bob Metcalfe's promise to eat his words if the internet didn't collapse by some given date. He ended up losing the bet, but he put his article in a blender with a bunch of liquid, chopped it up, and then just took a sip. I would probably be equally unimpressed if this guy ate chocolate ants or some other common food, although that would be admittedly less lame than taking a sip.
> We even support Java and we're the fastest performer with Java.
Well, according to the courts as well as the spec MS does not support Java. Like it or not, Sun owns the trademark on Java so if they say an implementation must adhere to a certain standard to be called Java then they are right. Taking away standard core functionality (e.g., RMI and JNI) and trying to claim that your product is still compatible is just bogus.
> There is unfortunately no way to get E to play nicely with the panel.
OK, I must have an older/newer version of something on my computer because E works fine with the pager. However, when I go into the office to work, it doesn't work right at all there (clicking on a task doesn't not bring the window to the foreground). I never set anything special to make it work on my machine so I guess it's the version of Gnome I installed. The version I use at work came with Red Hat 6 so I don't know if I just haven't updated Gnome in awhile to run into this problem or if I happen to have a newer version of Gnome than comes with Red Hat 6. What I would like to know is how can I configure E to play nice with the Gnome pager in Red Hat 6? It's not impossible since it works fine on my home machine, but I didn't set anything special to make it work here.
What about the FSF? I think the whole Gnu-Linux naming war is silly, but they've probably contributed far more software to RedHat's flagship product than Linus himself and it would be too bad if they weren't rewarded as well.
An open source package that does this would be nice so that I could add any features that are missing, but I could settle for something closed. It would also be nice if it were accessible from a web browser, but it would be OK if it were not web based as long as it runs on Linux.
Is it just me or is the law prohibiting the mere discussion of drug use downright frightening? Wouldn't this make sites that talk about the side effects of drugs illegal? Of course, as the article mentions this law would probably be selectively enforced so that the government would leave alone anti-drug sites which may list the side effects of hard core drugs, but prosecute other sites which point out that alcohol and nicotene are more harmful than certain illegal "soft" drugs.
The more important point, though, is that they are attempting to crimilaze a particular point of view. The way it sounds, I could get in trouble for saying that I support marijuana legalization even though I have no intention of ever using it myself. I find it inconceivable that they would consider throwing me in jail for merely stating what I think.
You may not care about this law now if you agree with the government's war on drugs, but you should care. If this law passes it will set a precedent for the government's ability to restrict free speech. Eventually, there may be some other issue that the government declares "war" on which you happen to disagree with. Would you want to go to jail from peacefuly disagreeing with the government in public? We're not even talking about taking any physical action here. All you have to do is publicly state your views and you go to jail.
I, for one, will not follow this law if it is passed. In fact, I don't have and never have had any links to drug related sites on my homepage, but if this law passes I will most certainly add some links. Hmmm... maybe I'll even do that now. Maybe a whole slew of us should do that now in protest. I'm off to check out the NORML homepage to see whether I want to link to it...
No, it's definitely not free if you consider the bandwidth that it takes. You may be able to piggy-back off of somebody who's already paid for it if you're at a University or if you're at a job where they let you use their network, but somebody has to pay for it.
Well, Linux does fit the bill of a server much better than a desktop environment for the masses. I personally use Linux full time on my own desktop and I love it, but I would hesitate to recommend it to all of my friends because it's not entirely intuitive to use yet. I know some people think that learning to use a command line interface is no harder than learning to use a GUI, but a GUI offers the advantage that you can often figure out how to do something from contextual clues and that's infinitely more difficult to do from a command line. GNOME and E look 10 times cooler than Windows (that's one of the big reasons why I permanently switched to Linux) and they offer far more functionality than Windows in terms of what I find useful, but every once in awhile I find myself having to drop into an xterm to do something that I can't do (or isn't obvious how to do) with the GUI. I imagine this would be much, much harder for somebody with minimal computer experience.
Then again, Windows isn't exactly intuitive either even with the contextual clues you get from the GUI. But the worst thing is, if you can't do something from the GUI you probably can't do it at all - you don't even have the option to drop into a CLI to do what you want (you can drop into DOS, but it most likely won't help).
So maybe Linux would make just as good of a desktop as Windows for Newbies. It's already blatantly more stable and less expensive than Windows - I guess it would feel more right recommending it as a desktop if it were obviously more intuitive to use than Windows.
PHP is nice for simple apps, and I use it myself for a lot of things. However, I wouldn't want to use it for a large project as I have tried it before and most of my time was spent being really frustrated with things not working right. The majority of the time the frustration was due to typographic errors on my part, which made me realize what an incredible amount of time strong type checking in languages like Java save me. PHP's slut-like view of casting also caused me infinite grief - when "" can be interpretted as "", 0, null, or false it makes database queries (among other things) a royal pain. I also found a lot of the functionality of the methods counter-intuitive, but I suppose that wouldn't be a problem if I were more experienced with it. The other thing, which I know has been mentioned already, is that PHP mixes code and HTML quite thoroughly which can be a real problem if you have a software team working on the functionality of the web page and a graphics design team working on the look and feel and they won't necessarily be working closely (this is common).
Anyway, I don't mean to be down on PHP because I still like it and use it. I just wanted to give you some ideas of why it's not right for every job.
Well, the company that I'm contracting for is going to be using Enhydra for 3 out of 4 of our major services so if it doesn't work we're screwed (put another way, if there are bugs that would keep it from working for us they will be fixed by us). However, from what I've seen so far Enhydra looks like a solid system and the design is very impressive. The people who developed it did so over the course of several years as part of their real-life contracting work so that alone would strongly encourage it to be highly stable with a pragmatic design. My experience with it is limitted to a few weeks so I'd be interested in what experiences others have had, but so far I've only been really impressed with it.
Not only is it well built, but their web page also looks very professional. That may be a really good selling for your boss as it's something you can't say about a lot of open source projects.
That url was a bit off (the pictures and links are broken). This one's better