We need more lawyers on our side to be able to effectively communicate the right thing to the legal system. We live in a world dominated by the law and we can't change that without a civilian war. We need to play by the rules and that means getting lawyers who understand the issues and are willing to express them in legal terms.
Lawyers aren't the problem. It's the old entrenched companies who are paying for them. Lawyers are a tool we need to use.
Politicions just follow the money and votes. Educate more people about the issues and get them to vote for the ones with a clue. Spend more money on the right politicions through lobby groups. They'll get the message if enough people care.
I'm hoping that we get a reversal of the Mickey Mouse extension and reduction in the number of years of copyright to say 10. We are losing too much old software. Books aren't becoming public domain (the original intent) for another 17 (or is it 50) years.
I'd even be in favour of software copyright only being 5 years. That would put more presure on patents but that's a different battle.
The patent appears to be valid in that Dr Torng while working for Cornell invented the technique for reordering instructions for multiple processing units. He did this in 1989 and assigned the IP rights to the university.
The university has been pursuing HP about licencing since HP came out with a processor using the algorithms/techniques he described.
Intel awarded Dr Torng a prize for advances in CPU design and acknowledged his leadership in this particular area.
Have Intel paid a licencing fee to Cornell? Intels latest processors also use this technique. If they have then HP will lose.
The original question still stands: How many universities pursue licencing patents like this? How much of the universities revenues come from this type of IP? Will this become the new standard for achademic success?
You claim five years experience and yet you don't know how to handle this situation. There is more to a job than technical expertise. You have to develop experience with the internal politics.
I've been in exactly your situation: an immediate manager who claimed everything was ok but when it came to raises and promotions folded under pressure from other people every time and blamed his manager for it. I found another job and left before I became a problem and damaged my reputation.
I learnt to program when I was 10, was being paid for it by 14, I held down a full time job from 18 onward. I'm now 38 and still doing whatever I want to do. I've only got 20 years of "real" experience.
Don't appologize for your age, that's not the problem. Work out what it is about you that has alienated someone and learn from it. It will happen again. Forget lawyers etc, I would *never* hire someone who had in the past brought in lawyers.
One other point, System Admins are easy to replace, there are a lot of them out of work. Finding one with the right attitude to work with customers and other employees is the hard part.
Using the number of people connected to the internet as a measure of the population that each country is able to contribute to OSS projects is just plain nonsense.
The USA has a much higher proportion of 'programing illiterate' on the internet than any other country in the world.
Of course it would then appear that the USA isn't keeping up with the rest of Europe.
The underlying statistics he uses are meaningless and as we all know you can create any conclusion you want from false data.
You may eventually be proved right about the Constitution protecting the rights of everyone located in the USA. Current laws (particularly those signed in 1996) made it possible for the INS to hold or deport any non-citizen (legal resident or not) without review by any court. The INS doesn't have to provide reason or evidence. There are currently over 3000 people in the "indefinite custody" of the INS. They have no right to any legal recourse.
There is more information available at www.ucla.org and a fairly good summary
here.
Historically the Constitution has not protected slaves, females, japanese, or mexicans from laws designed to remove so-called basic human rights.
If they do this they had better pay me for placing an ad attached to my outgoing email.
It would also force me to digitally sign all email and insist that all people wanting me to read their email do the same.
Anything outside the signed block matching the sender would be stripped and tossed.
This is the same group of companies that have attempted to standardize the UNIX UI before.
There will be a cost to accepting money from this consortium. Probably in the form of agreeing to abide by the decisions of a committee of Co. employees who will form the standards body.
You'd be better off experimenting with what works instead of trying to standardize something that doesn't exist (unless MS is the definition).
Doomed... have a look at the track record with X11 and the various desktops and UIs. All
bad and with no real acceptance.
Functional languages have their place. I believe that everyone should learn lisp/scheme while doing a CS degree. The majority of programmers will never use them again, but it will change the way you think about programming for the better.
Having said that, I've worked on a number of commercial applications where an embedded scheme interpreter made prototyping of UI functionality an easy task. You expose the interfaces of the application to the FP language and off you go gluing bits and pieces together. Once you get it right, recode it in C/Java.
A good programmer should be able to work at five different levels of languages:
SQL - you must understand transaction based DBs to survive the client/server world.
Perl or Python - fast prototyping and CGI.
Scheme - prototyping and CAD/CAM, small and easy to embed.
C/Java - available everywhere and fast, but slow turn around.
Assembler - some times you just have to get dirty or the compiler has a bug.
Choose your favorite five and stick to them, it really doesn't matter which ones. (You should also be able to hand code HTML).
You should always aim to develop/prototype in the highest level language and then recode it when performance becomes an issue.
Forget provability - it's a nice academic goal but of little use in commercial software. Speed of development is how you'll get hired and rewarded.
I studied under John Lions and used his commentary of the level six UNIX. He included 9600 lines of code and every single one of them had a commentary to go along with it. It also had a functional cross reference for jumping around the code. This book went back the next day. It's not useful for the majority of people.
You were not watching news coverage, you were watching entertainment. If Bart Simpson had walked into the news studio and talked with the people covering times square you wouldn't have batted an eyelid. It would have been part of the entertainment.
The television is not a good source of news and has not been for years. The network companies treat the news as just another slot to fill with advertising. The stories are chosen to draw eyes, not for their importance to society.
If something happens, for example a bomb goes off in a public place, you can rely on the news to speculate wildly as to the perpetrators, the more outrageous the better. That way they get more people watching their advertising.
When was the last time you saw a promotion for the news or weather that actually contained information? If the news was really about news the information would be right there instead of telling you to wait until 6pm for the real news. Notice the order of news stories keeps the interesting one until the end of the half hour. It is all about keeping you watching the advertising.
CBS has just been caught doing exactly what they've been doing for years... selling advertising as news. Why are people shocked?
Why do slashdot people get surprised at the behavior of a large company like Sun?
McNealy/Joy understand that they work for the shareholders and need to keep the share price climbing. Which means controlling profit, it's not about being nice or playing fair.
The majority of Sun's profit comes from hardware sales, so anything that threatens that is the primary internal focus.
Sun software has always been seen as a tool to drive hardware sales. Their internal accounting virtually ignores the cost of developing or maintaining it. They hit it lucky with NSF and have been looking for another "standard" with which to win hardware sales - Java is their current golden child. They'll play with any standards body that acknowledges Sun as the authority, and hence will be the place to go for the best implementation (right or wrong).
Marketing/Legal own the product internally, the programmers are just there to keep the customers happy by lowering bug counts and providing technical support for any "standards" work. Programmers and technical staff have no say in the content or timing of press releases.
Working with the OSS teams may be "politically correct" for now but it's right at the bottom of Sun's primary goals and will be ditched as soon as they see that it does help the profit figures.
I worked for Sun as a programmer for four years until I could not take seeing good software products getting lost to marketing/legal and sales noise. There are many really great software people at Sun but the noise levels are too high to expect rational behavior from the company.
Sorry to break the bad news - Sun is driven by profit not by doing the right things.
This is the first time we've decided in so organized a way to alter the nature of life itself.
Melodramatic but not true at all. Medical science has always been mucking around with the genetic makeup of the species. We cured people who would have normally died, allowing them to pass on defective genes. Society spends quarter of a million dollars to keep babies that are born early, and with defects, alive. It all reduces the potential survivability of the race. Nothing new here.
HGP may give us the tools to improve the genetic stock and provide a balance to the negative influence we've had to date.
Could employers and insurance companies obtain an individual's genetic information?
It's just a matter of defining individual privacy. The issue is no different to if they can see your driving record. Until we decide that privacy is important then there's no reason why they shouldn't have access to the genetic info as well. Who knows the HGP may be the thing that cause society to wake up to it's real rights.
Will the rights of children really be protected
What rights? There is no right to life except in your head. Nature may not have caught up with you yet, but there is no right to life. Life and death are cheap, keeping you alive isn't. A society may choose to provide life, but there have been plenty of societies that practice infanticide. It's a choice we make not a right.
So the only real issue left is whether commercial companies should be able to gain exclusive rights to genome sequences that can be freely and easily discovered. We're already in the process of handing the right to govern us over to business anyway. What's one more thing?
Slashdot Mirror
We need more lawyers on our side to be able to effectively communicate the right thing to the legal system. We live in a world dominated by the law and we can't change that without a civilian war. We need to play by the rules and that means getting lawyers who understand the issues and are willing to express them in legal terms.
Lawyers aren't the problem.
It's the old entrenched companies who are paying for them. Lawyers are a tool we need to use.
Politicions just follow the money and votes. Educate more people about the issues and get them to vote for the ones with a clue. Spend more money on the right politicions through lobby groups. They'll get the message if enough people care.
I'm hoping that we get a reversal of the Mickey Mouse extension and reduction in the number of years of copyright to say 10. We are losing too much old software. Books aren't becoming public domain (the original intent) for another 17 (or is it 50) years. I'd even be in favour of software copyright only being 5 years. That would put more presure on patents but that's a different battle.
The patent appears to be valid in that Dr Torng while working for Cornell invented the technique for reordering instructions for multiple processing units. He did this in 1989 and assigned the IP rights to the university.
The university has been pursuing HP about licencing since HP came out with a processor using the algorithms/techniques he described.
Intel awarded Dr Torng a prize for advances in CPU design and acknowledged his leadership in this particular area.
Have Intel paid a licencing fee to Cornell? Intels latest processors also use this technique. If they have then HP will lose.
The original question still stands: How many universities pursue licencing patents like this? How much of the universities revenues come from this type of IP? Will this become the new standard for achademic success?
You claim five years experience and yet you don't know how to handle this situation. There is more to a job than technical expertise. You have to develop experience with the internal politics.
I've been in exactly your situation: an immediate manager who claimed everything was ok but when it came to raises and promotions folded under pressure from other people every time and blamed his manager for it. I found another job and left before I became a problem and damaged my reputation.
I learnt to program when I was 10, was being paid for it by 14, I held down a full time job from 18 onward. I'm now 38 and still doing whatever I want to do. I've only got 20 years of "real" experience.
Don't appologize for your age, that's not the problem. Work out what it is about you that has alienated someone and learn from it. It will happen again. Forget lawyers etc, I would *never* hire someone who had in the past brought in lawyers.
One other point, System Admins are easy to replace, there are a lot of them out of work. Finding one with the right attitude to work with customers and other employees is the hard part.
Fix the problem (you) or find another job.
Using the number of people connected to the internet as a measure of the population that each country is able to contribute to OSS projects is just plain nonsense.
The USA has a much higher proportion of 'programing illiterate' on the internet than any other country in the world.
Of course it would then appear that the USA isn't keeping up with the rest of Europe.
The underlying statistics he uses are meaningless and as we all know you can create any conclusion you want from false data.
You may eventually be proved right about the Constitution protecting the rights of everyone located in the USA. Current laws (particularly those signed in 1996) made it possible for the INS to hold or deport any non-citizen (legal resident or not) without review by any court. The INS doesn't have to provide reason or evidence. There are currently over 3000 people in the "indefinite custody" of the INS. They have no right to any legal recourse.
There is more information available at www.ucla.org and a fairly good summary here.
Historically the Constitution has not protected slaves, females, japanese, or mexicans from laws designed to remove so-called basic human rights.
It has nothing to do with the First Amendment. He's not a USA citizen and has no rights in this country. The constitution is irrelevant.
Any alien in the USA can be arrested and/or deported for no reason at all.
It would also force me to digitally sign all email and insist that all people wanting me to read their email do the same. Anything outside the signed block matching the sender would be stripped and tossed.
cheers, AndrewN
This is the same group of companies that have attempted to standardize the UNIX UI before.
There will be a cost to accepting money from this consortium. Probably in the form of agreeing to abide by the decisions of a committee of Co. employees who will form the standards body.
You'd be better off experimenting with what works instead of trying to standardize something that doesn't exist (unless MS is the definition).
Doomed ... have a look at the track record with X11 and the various desktops and UIs. All
bad and with no real acceptance.
Another site about hypercars that has useful information.
The good thing about a hypercar is that the economics of it will eventually force the switch away from conventinal cars.
The reformers can also be designed to produce a solid waste that can then be delivered to a chemical extraction faciity. No air pollution.
Functional languages have their place. I believe that everyone should learn lisp/scheme while doing a CS degree. The majority of programmers will never use them again, but it will change the way you think about programming for the better.
Having said that, I've worked on a number of commercial applications where an embedded scheme interpreter made prototyping of UI functionality an easy task. You expose the interfaces of the application to the FP language and off you go gluing bits and pieces together. Once you get it right, recode it in C/Java.
A good programmer should be able to work at five different levels of languages:
- SQL - you must understand transaction based DBs to survive the client/server world.
- Perl or Python - fast prototyping and CGI.
- Scheme - prototyping and CAD/CAM, small and easy to embed.
- C/Java - available everywhere and fast, but slow turn around.
- Assembler - some times you just have to get dirty or the compiler has a bug.
Choose your favorite five and stick to them, it really doesn't matter which ones. (You should also be able to hand code HTML).You should always aim to develop/prototype in the highest level language and then recode it when performance becomes an issue.
Forget provability - it's a nice academic goal but of little use in commercial software. Speed of development is how you'll get hired and rewarded.
--
Andrew Nicholson
The C# language doesn't do much, if anything, to enhance portability. Instead they assume that the .NET interfaces are available on every OS.
The MS way: Portabilty through world dominance.
C, Objective C, C++, C+-, Java, C# - same syntax different semantics, please make it stop.
- AndrewN
I studied under John Lions and used his commentary of the level six UNIX. He included 9600 lines of code and every single one of them had a commentary to go along with it. It also had a functional cross reference for jumping around the code. This book went back the next day. It's not useful for the majority of people.
You were not watching news coverage, you were watching entertainment. If Bart Simpson had walked into the news studio and talked with the people covering times square you wouldn't have batted an eyelid. It would have been part of the entertainment.
The television is not a good source of news and has not been for years. The network companies treat the news as just another slot to fill with advertising. The stories are chosen to draw eyes, not for their importance to society.
If something happens, for example a bomb goes off in a public place, you can rely on the news to speculate wildly as to the perpetrators, the more outrageous the better. That way they get more people watching their advertising.
When was the last time you saw a promotion for the news or weather that actually contained information? If the news was really about news the information would be right there instead of telling you to wait until 6pm for the real news. Notice the order of news stories keeps the interesting one until the end of the half hour. It is all about keeping you watching the advertising.
CBS has just been caught doing exactly what they've been doing for years ... selling advertising as news. Why are people shocked?
It not news
AndrewN
Why do slashdot people get surprised at the behavior of a large company like Sun?
McNealy/Joy understand that they work for the shareholders and need to keep the share price climbing. Which means controlling profit, it's not about being nice or playing fair.
The majority of Sun's profit comes from hardware sales, so anything that threatens that is the primary internal focus.
Sun software has always been seen as a tool to drive hardware sales. Their internal accounting virtually ignores the cost of developing or maintaining it. They hit it lucky with NSF and have been looking for another "standard" with which to win hardware sales - Java is their current golden child. They'll play with any standards body that acknowledges Sun as the authority, and hence will be the place to go for the best implementation (right or wrong).
Marketing/Legal own the product internally, the programmers are just there to keep the customers happy by lowering bug counts and providing technical support for any "standards" work. Programmers and technical staff have no say in the content or timing of press releases.
Working with the OSS teams may be "politically correct" for now but it's right at the bottom of Sun's primary goals and will be ditched as soon as they see that it does help the profit figures.
I worked for Sun as a programmer for four years until I could not take seeing good software products getting lost to marketing/legal and sales noise. There are many really great software people at Sun but the noise levels are too high to expect rational behavior from the company.
Sorry to break the bad news - Sun is driven by profit not by doing the right things.
AndrewN
This is the first time we've decided in so organized a way to alter the nature of life itself.
Melodramatic but not true at all. Medical science has always been mucking around with the genetic makeup of the species. We cured people who would have normally died, allowing them to pass on defective genes. Society spends quarter of a million dollars to keep babies that are born early, and with defects, alive. It all reduces the potential survivability of the race. Nothing new here.
HGP may give us the tools to improve the genetic stock and provide a balance to the negative influence we've had to date.
Could employers and insurance companies obtain an individual's genetic information?
It's just a matter of defining individual privacy. The issue is no different to if they can see your driving record. Until we decide that privacy is important then there's no reason why they shouldn't have access to the genetic info as well. Who knows the HGP may be the thing that cause society to wake up to it's real rights.
Will the rights of children really be protected
What rights? There is no right to life except in your head. Nature may not have caught up with you yet, but there is no right to life. Life and death are cheap, keeping you alive isn't. A society may choose to provide life, but there have been plenty of societies that practice infanticide. It's a choice we make not a right.
So the only real issue left is whether commercial companies should be able to gain exclusive rights to genome sequences that can be freely and easily discovered. We're already in the process of handing the right to govern us over to business anyway. What's one more thing?
AndrewN