1. software doesn't have to be perfect 2. software doesn't have to be ultra-efficient 3. software doesn't have to be well-engineered 4. software doesn't have to have a good design 5. software doesn't have to compile clean
Something just has to be delivered. On time and under budget. It doesn't often even matter what that "something" is or if it even works.
Read the summary again. It's not a development nightmare--it's a QA nightmare. When you have two or three versions of the OS and two or three possible phones, you don't really need to test on that many combinations. When you have over ten versions of software and hundreds of possible phones, well, let's say your testers are going to be up for some long nights.
And how are you supposed to know if someone decides not to hire you because you're a catholic/wine taster/gay/republican/metalhead/model/democrat/atheist/country fan/jew/bagpiper/brewer/etc. I think you put far too much faith in the rationality of managers.
You could be denied employment for any of these reasons WITHOUT FACEBOOK and you wouldn't know, so nothing has changed. Sure, it's illegal to discriminate based on certain of those attributes, but there's no way to prove it happened.
1. Prosecutor needs illegally obtained evidence to gain a conviction. 2. Prosecutor makes a deal with the cops: Illegally obtain the evidence and I won't prosecute you. 3. Now there's effectively no such thing as "illegally obtained" evidence
Bank industry FUD. Lots of credit unions offer free ATM services to members of other credit unions. So during the time it takes to join a different credit union after you move, you can almost always find local ATMs that will accept transactions.
You're heartless. Won't someone think of the struggling rich? With this new tax, how can they afford to send their kids to private schools and buy their third vacation homes in Europe? They might even have to settle for two vacations in Tahiti this year instead of three! As someone who will never see a million dollars in his life, my heart aches for these unfortunate souls who make $500,000 (married who make $1,000,000) A YEAR and will have to do without. I wonder, if I pray that they defeat this tax, will they name their next yacht after me?
We vote for our lawmakers. In my view the biggest problem is the general public, election after election, voting out of propaganda-induced fear for people who see nothing wrong with using traffic law as a revenue stream.
It's not like these laws are etched in stone. Any day, any state can outlaw traffic cameras and speed traps, but they won't because voters (the same ones I commute who consistently drive at 10+ over the limit) associate traffic speed with danger and vote for the people who promise to end danger.
So you'd be willing to try to ruin some guy you don't even know over 'evidence' in a three-line Slashdot blurb? You want to at least wait and see if actual charges are filed, let alone a guilty verdict? Talk about jumping to conclusions...
If you see a young male with a hoodie running down the street with a handbag in his hand and a screaming grandmother further down the street, would you be more likely to call the police (or intervene yourself) or wait for the grandmother to prove the muggers guilt before calling the police (or intervening)?
The most sensible answer is, I'd not get involved at all. There are many possible explanations for the above scenario, and frankly the circumstances surrounding this transaction are none of my business.
It would not be constructive to speculate whether one or more of the parties might have done something wrong.
Here's an aspect of a no-patent world that you didn't mention: the large companies that you hate bullying smaller companies would, instead, reverse-engineer the inventions of smaller companies and subsequently use their economies of scale to eliminate their smaller competitors.
1. They do that today, in countries that do not honor US patents, yet innovation and invention continues unchecked.
2. I would be willing to bet that the scenario where a small company / individual uses a patent to stop a large company happens with only a tiny percentage of total patents. The vast, vast, vast majority of patents are issued to large firms and patent trolls and are primarily used to bully/leverage other large firms. The cost and time commitment required to take advantage of the patent process (including defense) pretty much excludes small organizations.
There are exceptions, of course, and if this thread is still alive, they'll no doubt be posted below, but by and large, the idea that the patent process benefits the little guy is a myth.
Self-interest is natural. It's totally understandable to want to protect one's profession. It makes total sense that by and large, the only vocal supporters of our patent system are attorneys and large firms that hold war chests of patents.
As a software professional, patents are detrimental to my livelihood. I oppose them pretty much across the board (including non-software patents). It's a self-interest-based position as much as it's a moral position. People should be allowed to innovate and invent without fear of walking through a mine field. You don't deserve exclusive right to make something just because you happened to file some paperwork first. These are opinions based on my morals and based on my desire to be able to go to work every day.
If patents disappeared tomorrow, people won't all of a sudden stop inventing things. The motivation is always there. There's so much profit in bringing to market novel inventions--with or without patents. As evidence look at the number of profitable companies that hold no patents. What WOULD stop overnight is companies using their war chests and lawyers (rather than their smarts) to bully other companies out of the market. And before you suggest it, I believe the societal "disclosure" benefit of the patent process is overblown in this day and age. Society no longer needs a government patent list to figure out what the latest advances in science and technology are and build upon them.
The point is, who wants to have a browser open in another window constantly doing Internet searches just to figure out what an article is talking about. I don't think it's lazy to expect an author to include a simple one-sentence description of the obscure subjects he's writing about.
You can't buy your life back after a low-paid "surgery-tech" with a little formal training and with poor judgment fucks up and you bleed to death.
If it's a choice between a $100/hr doctor and a $200/hr doctor, I'll choose the cheaper one. If it's a choice between a $100/hr doctor and a $25/hr tech, I'm going with the doctor who's been through years of medical school, residency, has done the rounds and chosen his specialty, thank you.
Only if they were stopped by someone like me, explaining to the person why they can't submit this patent. The PTO takes every application seriously which is both a wonderful and horrible thing, until it can be proven un-patentable or that it infringes on an earlier patent. This is done through a semi-long process of research that isn't always done correctly (because of the sheer magnitude of searching for similar patents or parts of similar patents).
My opinion: The burden of proof ought to be on the applicant and the PTO to prove the invention is patentable rather than to prove the invention is un-patentable.
I'm not going to criticize your knowledge of the patent system and process, because obviously, as a practitioner, you are obviously more knowledgeable than I.
What I will criticize is your bias as a legal professional.
What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents [of getting rid of software patents] are people within the software industry itself
What I find interesting is that the biggest proponents of the current patent system are not industry professionals, but patent attorneys. I consider that damning evidence of who truly benefits from the patent process.
I think you're missing the perspective of industry practitioners, but not the ones you tend to meet in your career--the relatively small group who were told by their company to apply for patents on anything and everything they can think of. The vast majority (I claim) of software developers are not interested in "protecting" their toolbox of clever little three-line inventions, and just want to get on with be inventive without worrying about walking through a mine field.
The flaw is with a lack of a rigorous model for determining what is and isn't obvious; the difficulty of truly understanding, without hindsight bias, what the level of ordinary skill in the art is.
I definitely agree with this assessment, however you left out "conducting an honest and thorough search for prior art". Perhaps you can educate me about how rigorously companies search for prior art that, if discovered, would ruin their chances of profiting from their patent submission. Or how rigorously attorneys conduct these searches, that if successful, would cut short the process (along with their hourly fees). Or how thoroughly and carefully the patent office conducts these searches, with 3-6 year backlogs and pressure to cut those backlogs drastically.
I submit that we have the mess we do because there is no force anywhere along the process that would motivate any of the involved parties to deny a patent.
Is it me, are/. articles more and more making wild assumptions about the knowledge level of us nerd news readers? Here's a story that mentions "Google TV" and "Boxee Box" with no context and not even a few-sentence description. I guess I'm a retard, but I have no idea what a Google TV is or what a Boxxee Box is. Absolutely none. You have to start navigating through the linked articles if you even want a hope of finding out what the/. article is even about. Indeed, only the second linked article comes close to describing a Google TV as: "Google TV is a combination of hardware and software designed in hopes of achieving the tech industry's long-held goal of breaking into the television industry, currently dominated by cable and satellite companies." No word on what it actually is (besides being a "combination of hardware and software") or does, but it's a start. No word at all about what a Boxee is. Guess I need to have Wikipedia open in another browser...
As someone peripherally interested in audio/video technology, I might be interested in this article (and the linked articles) but the way they are written makes them totally useless to all but a few people already knowledgeable about the products.
I'd like to see something like this on a job posting (C++ job example):
"Your first phone screen question will be, 'What is the difference between static_cast and dynamic_cast?" If you can't answer this or 10 other questions of similar difficulty, do not apply because you'd be wasting everyone's time."
Maybe a little blunt, but kind of refreshingly to-the-point. It would pique my curiosity and tells me right off the bat the company knows what it wants.
Re:Easy to make qualifications that nobody can mee
on
Tech Sector Slow To Hire
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Where are the qualified candidates!
They're already employed and fairly happy. If you want to get them to uproot and move to your company, your HR department is going to have to offer more than the standard "kinda above average" salary and "competitive" benefits.
What does the job posting look like? Is how it's worded attracting the wrong candidates?
When I was job hunting, I could always tell the "dog" jobs because they said nothing interesting about compensation besides (sometimes) "competitive pay and benefits".
I am willing to bet that if you take away everyones money and assets 90% of the people who were rich will be rich again. And 90% who were poor will still be poor.
That's probably a candidate for the stupidest thing I've heard in a decade.
If a magical force suddenly "took away everyone's assets" (I presume you also mean every natural resource on earth, as well) then everybody would have nothing--perpetually. What kind of ridiculous thought experiment is this?
I'll tell you what is true though: By and large, the people who started with a ton of money tend to be the ones who end up with the shit-ton of money, and the people who start with next to nothing end up with next to nothing. That's how capitalism works. That's the whole point to the system!
What's the best predictor of someone's income? Intelligence? Nope. Work ethic? Nope. Abilities? Try again. How about: Father's income
Slashdot Mirror
It's because in the world of commercial software,
1. software doesn't have to be perfect
2. software doesn't have to be ultra-efficient
3. software doesn't have to be well-engineered
4. software doesn't have to have a good design
5. software doesn't have to compile clean
Something just has to be delivered. On time and under budget. It doesn't often even matter what that "something" is or if it even works.
Read the summary again. It's not a development nightmare--it's a QA nightmare. When you have two or three versions of the OS and two or three possible phones, you don't really need to test on that many combinations. When you have over ten versions of software and hundreds of possible phones, well, let's say your testers are going to be up for some long nights.
This is as fine example as any about how patents help the small business and/or lone inventor.
And how are you supposed to know if someone decides not to hire you because you're a catholic/wine taster/gay/republican/metalhead/model/democrat/atheist/country fan/jew/bagpiper/brewer/etc. I think you put far too much faith in the rationality of managers.
You could be denied employment for any of these reasons WITHOUT FACEBOOK and you wouldn't know, so nothing has changed. Sure, it's illegal to discriminate based on certain of those attributes, but there's no way to prove it happened.
If they'd accept money to favor one site's traffic over a competitor, would they also accept money to outright block traffic to the competitor?
This could never work in the USA.
1. Prosecutor needs illegally obtained evidence to gain a conviction.
2. Prosecutor makes a deal with the cops: Illegally obtain the evidence and I won't prosecute you.
3. Now there's effectively no such thing as "illegally obtained" evidence
Bank industry FUD. Lots of credit unions offer free ATM services to members of other credit unions. So during the time it takes to join a different credit union after you move, you can almost always find local ATMs that will accept transactions.
You're heartless. Won't someone think of the struggling rich? With this new tax, how can they afford to send their kids to private schools and buy their third vacation homes in Europe? They might even have to settle for two vacations in Tahiti this year instead of three! As someone who will never see a million dollars in his life, my heart aches for these unfortunate souls who make $500,000 (married who make $1,000,000) A YEAR and will have to do without. I wonder, if I pray that they defeat this tax, will they name their next yacht after me?
I am absolutely certain that Sony's upper management is absolutely thrilled at yet another demonstration of their brainchild's incredible versatility.
Sony's product-level managers, maybe, but Sony's UPPER management? I'd be willing to bet many of them don't even know what a PS3 is.
So, promoting oneself is now "being a douche"? Do you have a resume?
We vote for our lawmakers. In my view the biggest problem is the general public, election after election, voting out of propaganda-induced fear for people who see nothing wrong with using traffic law as a revenue stream.
It's not like these laws are etched in stone. Any day, any state can outlaw traffic cameras and speed traps, but they won't because voters (the same ones I commute who consistently drive at 10+ over the limit) associate traffic speed with danger and vote for the people who promise to end danger.
So you'd be willing to try to ruin some guy you don't even know over 'evidence' in a three-line Slashdot blurb? You want to at least wait and see if actual charges are filed, let alone a guilty verdict? Talk about jumping to conclusions...
If you see a young male with a hoodie running down the street with a handbag in his hand and a screaming grandmother further down the street, would you be more likely to call the police (or intervene yourself) or wait for the grandmother to prove the muggers guilt before calling the police (or intervening)?
The most sensible answer is, I'd not get involved at all. There are many possible explanations for the above scenario, and frankly the circumstances surrounding this transaction are none of my business.
It would not be constructive to speculate whether one or more of the parties might have done something wrong.
Here's an aspect of a no-patent world that you didn't mention: the large companies that you hate bullying smaller companies would, instead, reverse-engineer the inventions of smaller companies and subsequently use their economies of scale to eliminate their smaller competitors.
1. They do that today, in countries that do not honor US patents, yet innovation and invention continues unchecked.
2. I would be willing to bet that the scenario where a small company / individual uses a patent to stop a large company happens with only a tiny percentage of total patents. The vast, vast, vast majority of patents are issued to large firms and patent trolls and are primarily used to bully/leverage other large firms. The cost and time commitment required to take advantage of the patent process (including defense) pretty much excludes small organizations.
There are exceptions, of course, and if this thread is still alive, they'll no doubt be posted below, but by and large, the idea that the patent process benefits the little guy is a myth.
Self-interest is natural. It's totally understandable to want to protect one's profession. It makes total sense that by and large, the only vocal supporters of our patent system are attorneys and large firms that hold war chests of patents.
As a software professional, patents are detrimental to my livelihood. I oppose them pretty much across the board (including non-software patents). It's a self-interest-based position as much as it's a moral position. People should be allowed to innovate and invent without fear of walking through a mine field. You don't deserve exclusive right to make something just because you happened to file some paperwork first. These are opinions based on my morals and based on my desire to be able to go to work every day.
If patents disappeared tomorrow, people won't all of a sudden stop inventing things. The motivation is always there. There's so much profit in bringing to market novel inventions--with or without patents. As evidence look at the number of profitable companies that hold no patents. What WOULD stop overnight is companies using their war chests and lawyers (rather than their smarts) to bully other companies out of the market. And before you suggest it, I believe the societal "disclosure" benefit of the patent process is overblown in this day and age. Society no longer needs a government patent list to figure out what the latest advances in science and technology are and build upon them.
You know what you call the guy who finished last in med school, right? Doctor.
Ha ha, but I'd still rather have the guy who finished last at med school than the guy who finished first at DeVry.
The point is, who wants to have a browser open in another window constantly doing Internet searches just to figure out what an article is talking about. I don't think it's lazy to expect an author to include a simple one-sentence description of the obscure subjects he's writing about.
You can't buy your life back after a low-paid "surgery-tech" with a little formal training and with poor judgment fucks up and you bleed to death.
If it's a choice between a $100/hr doctor and a $200/hr doctor, I'll choose the cheaper one. If it's a choice between a $100/hr doctor and a $25/hr tech, I'm going with the doctor who's been through years of medical school, residency, has done the rounds and chosen his specialty, thank you.
Only if they were stopped by someone like me, explaining to the person why they can't submit this patent. The PTO takes every application seriously which is both a wonderful and horrible thing, until it can be proven un-patentable or that it infringes on an earlier patent. This is done through a semi-long process of research that isn't always done correctly (because of the sheer magnitude of searching for similar patents or parts of similar patents).
My opinion: The burden of proof ought to be on the applicant and the PTO to prove the invention is patentable rather than to prove the invention is un-patentable.
To me it just doesn't make logical sense to have a $50/hour doctor doing appendectomies when a $25/hour tech could do the job just as well.
If it was your appendix, and you had a choice, which one would you choose?
I'm not going to criticize your knowledge of the patent system and process, because obviously, as a practitioner, you are obviously more knowledgeable than I.
What I will criticize is your bias as a legal professional.
What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents [of getting rid of software patents] are people within the software industry itself
What I find interesting is that the biggest proponents of the current patent system are not industry professionals, but patent attorneys. I consider that damning evidence of who truly benefits from the patent process.
I think you're missing the perspective of industry practitioners, but not the ones you tend to meet in your career--the relatively small group who were told by their company to apply for patents on anything and everything they can think of. The vast majority (I claim) of software developers are not interested in "protecting" their toolbox of clever little three-line inventions, and just want to get on with be inventive without worrying about walking through a mine field.
The flaw is with a lack of a rigorous model for determining what is and isn't obvious; the difficulty of truly understanding, without hindsight bias, what the level of ordinary skill in the art is.
I definitely agree with this assessment, however you left out "conducting an honest and thorough search for prior art". Perhaps you can educate me about how rigorously companies search for prior art that, if discovered, would ruin their chances of profiting from their patent submission. Or how rigorously attorneys conduct these searches, that if successful, would cut short the process (along with their hourly fees). Or how thoroughly and carefully the patent office conducts these searches, with 3-6 year backlogs and pressure to cut those backlogs drastically.
I submit that we have the mess we do because there is no force anywhere along the process that would motivate any of the involved parties to deny a patent.
Is it me, are /. articles more and more making wild assumptions about the knowledge level of us nerd news readers? Here's a story that mentions "Google TV" and "Boxee Box" with no context and not even a few-sentence description. I guess I'm a retard, but I have no idea what a Google TV is or what a Boxxee Box is. Absolutely none. You have to start navigating through the linked articles if you even want a hope of finding out what the /. article is even about. Indeed, only the second linked article comes close to describing a Google TV as: "Google TV is a combination of hardware and software designed in hopes of achieving the tech industry's long-held goal of breaking into the television industry, currently dominated by cable and satellite companies." No word on what it actually is (besides being a "combination of hardware and software") or does, but it's a start. No word at all about what a Boxee is. Guess I need to have Wikipedia open in another browser...
As someone peripherally interested in audio/video technology, I might be interested in this article (and the linked articles) but the way they are written makes them totally useless to all but a few people already knowledgeable about the products.
I'd like to see something like this on a job posting (C++ job example):
"Your first phone screen question will be, 'What is the difference between static_cast and dynamic_cast?" If you can't answer this or 10 other questions of similar difficulty, do not apply because you'd be wasting everyone's time."
Maybe a little blunt, but kind of refreshingly to-the-point. It would pique my curiosity and tells me right off the bat the company knows what it wants.
Where are the qualified candidates!
They're already employed and fairly happy. If you want to get them to uproot and move to your company, your HR department is going to have to offer more than the standard "kinda above average" salary and "competitive" benefits.
What does the job posting look like? Is how it's worded attracting the wrong candidates?
When I was job hunting, I could always tell the "dog" jobs because they said nothing interesting about compensation besides (sometimes) "competitive pay and benefits".
I am willing to bet that if you take away everyones money and assets 90% of the people who were rich will be rich again. And 90% who were poor will still be poor.
That's probably a candidate for the stupidest thing I've heard in a decade.
If a magical force suddenly "took away everyone's assets" (I presume you also mean every natural resource on earth, as well) then everybody would have nothing--perpetually. What kind of ridiculous thought experiment is this?
I'll tell you what is true though: By and large, the people who started with a ton of money tend to be the ones who end up with the shit-ton of money, and the people who start with next to nothing end up with next to nothing. That's how capitalism works. That's the whole point to the system!
What's the best predictor of someone's income? Intelligence? Nope. Work ethic? Nope. Abilities? Try again. How about: Father's income