So lets see, the drivers sucked.. maybe thats because, in order to get the WHQL/"Designed for Windows"/Windows Logo Program/whatever-the- marketing-team-decided-to-stick-into-the-name-today stamp of approval needed to be able to be able to supply a signed driver for 64 bit vista they had to run through a 6 month release gauntlet?
Any software release cycle that gets stuck delaying that long between finding a bug and issuing a fix is going to suck
Sure they are, but they can always claim they were operating in "good faith".
However, the "consequences" are unfortunately quite obvious:
By sending arguably baseless DMCA takedown notifications to thousands of Anti-Scientology videos on Youtube, they just have to wait for the DMCA counter- notices to be filed.
The counter-notices contain personal information for all those otherwise pesky anonymous internet users and get forwarded to them for free. Thats a lot cheaper than trying to hire people to track down your enemies on the internet.
And as an added bonus some fraction of the content - filed by folks whom are not aware of the counter-notice procedure, or whom are unwilling to divulge their personal information to the Church of Scientology - just goes away.
Finally, the counter-notice is a testimony that they can try to get the person to perjure themselves on that the content doesn't belong to the Church of Scientology, which gives them even more ammunition, given that a fair chunk of the content out there really does consist of Scientology documents.
It seems like a pretty effective end run around the system.
Grossly simplifying, you read off codons (via mRNA, etc.) generating peptides so that you can build up proteins, etc. Some of those codons turn on or off transcription to amino acids.
As noted in the article the fidelity of transcription of these is lower than conventional DNA. So perhaps they could make perfectly suitable markers for areas you want to provoke a mutation at a higher rate, perhaps dropping them into large introns to encourage mutation in those areas.
The 3FB self-pair also expands the vocabulary of base pairs, potentially opening more options for possible nucleases, yielding more ways to cut up the resulting sequences.
The 3FB-3FB pair is symmetric. I'm not sure of any applications of that at this point, but there are people who actually do this stuff for a living who I'm sure can come up with some sort of use for that feature.;)
Finally the code used need not remain fixed, (i.e. the various mitochondrial DNA codes) so the fact that they don't yield codons in any code we have now, doesn't mean that will always hold. Combined with the fact that transcription error rates are different for them leads to some interesting possibilities.
I have enough trouble getting these things to scan under ideal conditions at the grocery store let alone after being pulled used and bloodied from the body of a patient.
Almost all of the changes are backwards compatible.
Ecmascript 3 wisely reserved a lot of the keywords they could anticipate. However there are a handful that would impose a painfully high semantic burden on future users if tried to shoe-horn themselves into a pre-reserved java/c++ equivalent. They have to balance the unbounded semantic burden of understanding the language in the future with the bounded transitional burden of allowing existing programs to run in Ecmascript 4. Given the array of features (templates, a novel namespace structure, generators, etc) that they've been able to cram in in unused nooks of the existing grammar I am consistently amazed that they were able to get away with extending the keyword set so little.
'let', 'yield', 'is', 'cast', and 'as' are common keywords in other existing languages but don't exist in java/c++. (I may have missed one or two) Wherever possible they made their 'keywords' conditional so they could be used only in places they would have been illegal in the previous grammar. The problem with those 5 is that they have to occur in normal expressions to be useful.
It also doesn't appear like it'll go mainstream for another year or two.
That is an awful lot of time to s/cast/cast_/g
In ten years of heavy Javascript code-writing, the only one of those to have occurred in my code in a breaking position is 'yield' in a javascript-based threading library and I'd gladly trade in my use of the term for the generator functionality provided in Ecmascript 4.
Wii don't want their shovelware. Maybe if more development houses bought into the spirit of the platform rather than try to sell us the same old crap, they'd see some money from the this miraculous new demographic that is using the Wii. Most people didn't buy a wii because they want to play [Insert Old Product Here] while waving their hands in the air, when little thought has been given to the conversion and resulting mechanics and the whole package was banged out over the weekend by an intern. And I've yet to see a title that was ported to the Wii that was as playable as it was on the original platform, so I'll wait until we have more wii-centric original games to play.
My Wii is collecting dust, but mainly because it has been waiting for Super Mario Galaxy.
I for one am quite pleased, and I rather surprised that the matter was able to be resolved successfully in a manner that didn't completely screw over the BSD folks.
Heretofore I had held the opinion that one random unaccepted patch inappropriately removing a license notice wasn't worth the resulting furor. But by conflating that general non-issue with the root cause of the GPL borg consuming BSD code, the events here did reveal to a lot of folks whom hadn't previously paid much attention the cause of a lot of frustration on the behalf of the users of more open licenses.
I also had honestly not expected Moglen and company to be able to track down and get the GPL code contributors to relicense their code to appease the BSD crew, or even really suspected that they would do so. Bravo! I had largely taken the 'we're working on resolving the issue' statements as empty rhetoric.
In general I expected this to resolve with de Raadt and company stomping off, legally outmaneuvered by the GPL once again, without access to the improvements that had been made to their code by GPL contributors that they could see but not use. At least closed source corporate improvements are typically locked away behind closed doors and you don't have the code staring you in the face and you can rely on your larger development community to catch you up over time. With the GPL it seems so much more personal and tedious.
I had come to see that scenario as part of the genius (or bedeviling nature) of the GPL: its ability to co-opt the code of less opinionated. In essence doing the very thing it tries to prevent other legal entities from doing to it.
Neither the GPL nor the BSD licenses are perfect. The BSD license doesn't have a way to prevent GPL 'lockout', and the GPL doesn't play nice with others.
While I'm a little leery that this sets an awkward precedent that GPL developers on high profile projects will bend if people scream loud enough, overall, I think this was a remarkable feat of diplomacy on the part of the SFLC. Moreso given that it was done in the face of so much overt hostility.
... only because we were still at work at 4am trying to push out the current "Agile" development cycle, while management is off on vacation.
Re:I know why it's been 10 years
on
Programming Erlang
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Haskell equivalent of the same thing would be:
target = map (f . g) source_list
A minor shift in syntax, and dropping a lot of superfluous parentheses from the language and adding sugar (.) for function composition goes a long way to cleaning that up into something readable. =)
The main strengths of functional programming come when you start thinking about functions as first class values.
Here the function obtained by composing f and g became a new function that was usable just like the primitives you built it up from. To do the same in say c++, c#, c, java, etc. you'd have to fall back on building up a struct or class and overloading method invocation on that class to get a function-like thing representing the idea of "do this, then do that to the result".
Javascript gets the concept of closures right but the syntax for their functions is very verbose:
function compose2(f,g) { return function(x) { return f(g(x)); } }
Actually I believe it was because of the whole "Harry died for Hogwarts" thing, not because Harry was the master of the Elder Wand. He mentioned shortly thereafter to Voldemort about how none of his curses were sticking to the people around him because he'd done what his mother did.
Last I checked with friends of mine who used to do this sort of thing, copper you put in the ground in large parts of Africa was being pulled back out just as fast and sold as scrap.
Makes a bit of a barrier to getting a healthy internet economy, no?
Not quite sure what justifies a paper out of this.
If you check the linux kernel mailing list for Vassili Karpov, you should find test cases that demonstrate this behavior and tools for monitoring actual CPU usage for a variety of platforms, though I notice no mention of any of that in the paper.
My biggest gripe is when I open up something in an editor like vi and it starts 'helpfully' wrapping things at 132 columns despite the fact that my window may be much wider.
I do tend to write longer lines especially when commenting or when dealing with heavily functional code in languages like haskell where a chain of function compositions grows over time.
Actually, we'll be using something pretty close to 60s tech.
NASA runs pretty far behind the main technological curve and for good reason.
The processors up there have to deal with conditions we on the ground would find ludicrous.
It also doesn't help that most of the people who were alive then and knew how to get people to the moon are dead now.
My main concern with space travel is the background radiation and the effect on the human body of traveling through bow shock. Every time I see something about colonizing Io in a a few generations or something, I go look at the figures on the electromagnetic field of Jupiter. You'd need to knot up human DNA into a form like that of deinococcus radiodurans to survive and correct the number of transcription errors you'd have just from the brief exposure of arrival, let alone day-to-day living there. Thats quite a feat of biological engineering.
What I always liked about Mr. Wizard was that he didn't dumb things down.
He simplified things to enable the audience to participate, sure. Swapped in mayonnaise jars or alka-seltzer, things you'd have around the house, and as a result showed kids that science didn't have to be done in labcoats, but it wasn't the puerile nonsense you get in a most kid shows. I still remember the episodes about surface tension, and air pressure/suction to this day.
I was having a discussion with a friend about shows like Numb3rs today, and it came up that they get the character of the mathematician right, but they routinely dumb the math down, and he felt that they had to do that for the public audience.
Is it any wonder that when we dumb down everything as a matter of course, that America does so poorly in science?
Maybe what we need are characters that aren't billed as brilliant super-geniuses tackling problems that the audience barely comprehends and solving them with flashes of inspiration. Thats just off-putting. If you want to inspire kids to take up math and science, maybe what we really need is a sort of a mathematical MacGyver. Maybe the problem is that writers are not mathematicians, not scientists, so to them the process of discovery really is magic.
That said, odds are someone will stumble across a retrospective analysis of this sort. Wake me after they have correctly predicted the outcomes of the next few wars, then color me impressed.
Now what we need is a way to get those conductive inks to work with something like eInk dynamically changable images where icons detect touch via conducted electricity, low cost sound coming from your 1-page rollup newspaper. Probably tricky to get the current to flow across e-ink pixels that way though. Though, even if you couldn't get the e-ink parts to be touch sensitive, little conductive UI panels in the corners for forward/back touch spots wouldn't suck. Now all thats needed is flexible paper-thin power sources and circuitry.
One of the small ironies here being that the Apache Public License 2.0 which about half of those guys are using already provides those protections. So, putting them into GPL3 may ultimately make those licenses compatible and broaden the available set of libraries they can use.
Personally, I kind of like the side-effects and I don't really see the problem with this.
It means that the security of the site that I am using is positively correlated with its place in the rankings.
If a site is poorly designed and capable of being exploited with malware, it probably does deserve to be kicked into the 'get your s#!t together' pool down with the people who pay SEO 'professionals.'
The risk of such things happening will cause sites to care a lot more about security.
As for the 'low low price' case you lay out, its totally at odds with the way google does business, it quite simply requires too many boots on the ground and is too invasive. The sites they index are not their customers.
Even if apple grabs 2-3% of the market share, they will be drawing the revenue from both the hardware and software side of the sale. After all, Jobs' state GOAL was only 1% of the market in 2008. So Ballmer is really saying that he thinks Apple will do better than they will publicly admit to thinking.
Microsoft still doesn't get that Apple operates in a fundamentally different space than they do. Microsoft sells software; Apple sells hardware AND software.
Its like comparing Mac and PC sales. By controlling the hardware channel, Apple makes a hell of a lot more money per unit sale than Microsoft. Yet because they control both sides of the equation it is very difficult to compare them to pure software companies like Microsoft or to pure hardware companies like Dell. Apple's balance sheet shows net income in the ballpark of HP and Dell, based on revenues a half to a third the size. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9E F16A95-278E-40ED-9E00-FBEBD75207FB.html
So, yes, Microsoft would rather have software on 60% or 70% or 80% of the phones out there, just like they would like to have software on 60% or 70% or 80% or 90% of the desktops out there. Apple has a fundamentally different business model.
It really depends on the tier of management for which you are hiring the manager.
When hiring someone to manage a bunch of programmers, ask them questions about the Mythical Man Month, agile software development, iterations and traditional waterfalls, and try to figure out if he understands the ways programmers think. You're not looking for a coder, but you do want someone who understands the lingo. If the guy sounds off with how he'll never ask his people to do something he couldn't do, perhaps ask why he'd limit his team to the scope of his own abilities. Try to get a feel for his management style, if the team is small, and he is an ace-programmer, maybe he is more of a team lead candidate than a manager candidate. Skills with MS Project, Visio, Powerpoint, etc. are useful. Finding out how comfortable they are summarizing results and presenting material.
If you are hiring for senior management perhaps add questions about earned value management and try to get your head around how they have invested in improving their personnel in the past, and move away from the particulars of managing coders, because job duties will probably extend into other areas.
In either case, management style is a big factor. I am not a huge fan of the screaming-foreman style of management. IMNSHO, a good manager knows when to let his employees own their own deadlines, and how to keep s#!t from flowing downhill; they will go to bat for their team when they are right, and work with them to solve the problem when things go wrong. Asking questions about situations where someone underneath them has been thrown 'under the bus' and how they handled it and how they have handled situations where their estimates were wrong, is a good way to get a feel for their personalities in good and bad situations. A good manager inspires loyalty and doesn't make you dread coming to him with bad news.
I recently left management for academia, and ultimately made the round trip to coding and systems architecture when I received an offer from the best manager I had ever had the pleasure of working with. We had worked together during the dot-com days and moved on to separate fields in the meantime. I mention this to demonstrate that a solid manager can help you retain or acquire your best people and inspires loyalty.
Slashdot Mirror
So lets see, the drivers sucked.. maybe thats because, in order to get the WHQL/"Designed for Windows"/Windows Logo Program/whatever-the- marketing-team-decided-to-stick-into-the-name-today stamp of approval needed to be able to be able to supply a signed driver for 64 bit vista they had to run through a 6 month release gauntlet?
Any software release cycle that gets stuck delaying that long between finding a bug and issuing a fix is going to suck
Sure they are, but they can always claim they were operating in "good faith".
However, the "consequences" are unfortunately quite obvious:
By sending arguably baseless DMCA takedown notifications to thousands of Anti-Scientology videos on Youtube, they just have to wait for the DMCA counter- notices to be filed.
The counter-notices contain personal information for all those otherwise pesky anonymous internet users and get forwarded to them for free. Thats a lot cheaper than trying to hire people to track down your enemies on the internet.
And as an added bonus some fraction of the content - filed by folks whom are not aware of the counter-notice procedure, or whom are unwilling to divulge their personal information to the Church of Scientology - just goes away.
Finally, the counter-notice is a testimony that they can try to get the person to perjure themselves on that the content doesn't belong to the Church of Scientology, which gives them even more ammunition, given that a fair chunk of the content out there really does consist of Scientology documents.
It seems like a pretty effective end run around the system.
and played with infinite money
Grossly simplifying, you read off codons (via mRNA, etc.) generating peptides so that you can build up proteins, etc. Some of those codons turn on or off transcription to amino acids.
As noted in the article the fidelity of transcription of these is lower than conventional DNA. So perhaps they could make perfectly suitable markers for areas you want to provoke a mutation at a higher rate, perhaps dropping them into large introns to encourage mutation in those areas.
The 3FB self-pair also expands the vocabulary of base pairs, potentially opening more options for possible nucleases, yielding more ways to cut up the resulting sequences.
The 3FB-3FB pair is symmetric. I'm not sure of any applications of that at this point, but there are people who actually do this stuff for a living who I'm sure can come up with some sort of use for that feature. ;)
Finally the code used need not remain fixed, (i.e. the various mitochondrial DNA codes) so the fact that they don't yield codons in any code we have now, doesn't mean that will always hold. Combined with the fact that transcription error rates are different for them leads to some interesting possibilities.
I don't know the answer, but a quick google search turns up... oh wait...
Well, apparently Obama knows enough not to use a Bubble Sort:
;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8
Now, if he could just get some decent web developers.
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/31/2341201&from=rss
I have enough trouble getting these things to scan under ideal conditions at the grocery store let alone after being pulled used and bloodied from the body of a patient.
Almost all of the changes are backwards compatible.
Ecmascript 3 wisely reserved a lot of the keywords they could anticipate. However there are a handful that would impose a painfully high semantic burden on future users if tried to shoe-horn themselves into a pre-reserved java/c++ equivalent. They have to balance the unbounded semantic burden of understanding the language in the future with the bounded transitional burden of allowing existing programs to run in Ecmascript 4. Given the array of features (templates, a novel namespace structure, generators, etc) that they've been able to cram in in unused nooks of the existing grammar I am consistently amazed that they were able to get away with extending the keyword set so little.
'let', 'yield', 'is', 'cast', and 'as' are common keywords in other existing languages but don't exist in java/c++. (I may have missed one or two) Wherever possible they made their 'keywords' conditional so they could be used only in places they would have been illegal in the previous grammar. The problem with those 5 is that they have to occur in normal expressions to be useful.
It also doesn't appear like it'll go mainstream for another year or two.
That is an awful lot of time to s/cast/cast_/g
In ten years of heavy Javascript code-writing, the only one of those to have occurred in my code in a breaking position is 'yield' in a javascript-based threading library and I'd gladly trade in my use of the term for the generator functionality provided in Ecmascript 4.
Wii don't want their shovelware. Maybe if more development houses bought into the spirit of the platform rather than try to sell us the same old crap, they'd see some money from the this miraculous new demographic that is using the Wii. Most people didn't buy a wii because they want to play [Insert Old Product Here] while waving their hands in the air, when little thought has been given to the conversion and resulting mechanics and the whole package was banged out over the weekend by an intern. And I've yet to see a title that was ported to the Wii that was as playable as it was on the original platform, so I'll wait until we have more wii-centric original games to play.
My Wii is collecting dust, but mainly because it has been waiting for Super Mario Galaxy.
I for one am quite pleased, and I rather surprised that the matter was able to be resolved successfully in a manner that didn't completely screw over the BSD folks.
Heretofore I had held the opinion that one random unaccepted patch inappropriately removing a license notice wasn't worth the resulting furor. But by conflating that general non-issue with the root cause of the GPL borg consuming BSD code, the events here did reveal to a lot of folks whom hadn't previously paid much attention the cause of a lot of frustration on the behalf of the users of more open licenses.
I also had honestly not expected Moglen and company to be able to track down and get the GPL code contributors to relicense their code to appease the BSD crew, or even really suspected that they would do so. Bravo! I had largely taken the 'we're working on resolving the issue' statements as empty rhetoric.
In general I expected this to resolve with de Raadt and company stomping off, legally outmaneuvered by the GPL once again, without access to the improvements that had been made to their code by GPL contributors that they could see but not use. At least closed source corporate improvements are typically locked away behind closed doors and you don't have the code staring you in the face and you can rely on your larger development community to catch you up over time. With the GPL it seems so much more personal and tedious.
I had come to see that scenario as part of the genius (or bedeviling nature) of the GPL: its ability to co-opt the code of less opinionated. In essence doing the very thing it tries to prevent other legal entities from doing to it.
Neither the GPL nor the BSD licenses are perfect. The BSD license doesn't have a way to prevent GPL 'lockout', and the GPL doesn't play nice with others.
While I'm a little leery that this sets an awkward precedent that GPL developers on high profile projects will bend if people scream loud enough, overall, I think this was a remarkable feat of diplomacy on the part of the SFLC. Moreso given that it was done in the face of so much overt hostility.
Good job.
... only because we were still at work at 4am trying to push out the current "Agile" development cycle, while management is off on vacation.
The Haskell equivalent of the same thing would be:
target = map (f . g) source_list
A minor shift in syntax, and dropping a lot of superfluous parentheses from the language and adding sugar (.) for function composition goes a long way to cleaning that up into something readable. =)
The main strengths of functional programming come when you start thinking about functions as first class values.
Here the function obtained by composing f and g became a new function that was usable just like the primitives you built it up from. To do the same in say c++, c#, c, java, etc. you'd have to fall back on building up a struct or class and overloading method invocation on that class to get a function-like thing representing the idea of "do this, then do that to the result".
Javascript gets the concept of closures right but the syntax for their functions is very verbose:
function compose2(f,g) { return function(x) { return f(g(x)); } }
vs.
compose2 f g x = f (g x)
Actually I believe it was because of the whole "Harry died for Hogwarts" thing, not because Harry was the master of the Elder Wand. He mentioned shortly thereafter to Voldemort about how none of his curses were sticking to the people around him because he'd done what his mother did.
Last I checked with friends of mine who used to do this sort of thing, copper you put in the ground in large parts of Africa was being pulled back out just as fast and sold as scrap.
Makes a bit of a barrier to getting a healthy internet economy, no?
Not quite sure what justifies a paper out of this.
If you check the linux kernel mailing list for Vassili Karpov, you should find test cases that demonstrate this behavior and tools for monitoring actual CPU usage for a variety of platforms, though I notice no mention of any of that in the paper.
See http://www.boblycat.org/~malc/apc/ for the tool and 'invisible CPU hog' test case.
My biggest gripe is when I open up something in an editor like vi and it starts 'helpfully' wrapping things at 132 columns despite the fact that my window may be much wider.
I do tend to write longer lines especially when commenting or when dealing with heavily functional code in languages like haskell where a chain of function compositions grows over time.
Actually, we'll be using something pretty close to 60s tech.
NASA runs pretty far behind the main technological curve and for good reason.
The processors up there have to deal with conditions we on the ground would find ludicrous.
It also doesn't help that most of the people who were alive then and knew how to get people to the moon are dead now.
My main concern with space travel is the background radiation and the effect on the human body of traveling through bow shock. Every time I see something about colonizing Io in a a few generations or something, I go look at the figures on the electromagnetic field of Jupiter. You'd need to knot up human DNA into a form like that of deinococcus radiodurans to survive and correct the number of transcription errors you'd have just from the brief exposure of arrival, let alone day-to-day living there. Thats quite a feat of biological engineering.
What I always liked about Mr. Wizard was that he didn't dumb things down.
He simplified things to enable the audience to participate, sure. Swapped in mayonnaise jars or alka-seltzer, things you'd have around the house, and as a result showed kids that science didn't have to be done in labcoats, but it wasn't the puerile nonsense you get in a most kid shows. I still remember the episodes about surface tension, and air pressure/suction to this day.
I was having a discussion with a friend about shows like Numb3rs today, and it came up that they get the character of the mathematician right, but they routinely dumb the math down, and he felt that they had to do that for the public audience.
Is it any wonder that when we dumb down everything as a matter of course, that America does so poorly in science?
Maybe what we need are characters that aren't billed as brilliant super-geniuses tackling problems that the audience barely comprehends and solving them with flashes of inspiration. Thats just off-putting. If you want to inspire kids to take up math and science, maybe what we really need is a sort of a mathematical MacGyver. Maybe the problem is that writers are not mathematicians, not scientists, so to them the process of discovery really is magic.
Psychohistory anyone?
That said, odds are someone will stumble across a retrospective analysis of this sort. Wake me after they have correctly predicted the outcomes of the next few wars, then color me impressed.
Now what we need is a way to get those conductive inks to work with something like eInk dynamically changable images where icons detect touch via conducted electricity, low cost sound coming from your 1-page rollup newspaper. Probably tricky to get the current to flow across e-ink pixels that way though. Though, even if you couldn't get the e-ink parts to be touch sensitive, little conductive UI panels in the corners for forward/back touch spots wouldn't suck. Now all thats needed is flexible paper-thin power sources and circuitry.
One of the small ironies here being that the Apache Public License 2.0 which about half of those guys are using already provides those protections. So, putting them into GPL3 may ultimately make those licenses compatible and broaden the available set of libraries they can use.
So let me get this straight...
The guy is having trouble keeping up with the influx of mail and responds to everyone, so you slashdot his mailbox?
Harsh.
Personally, I kind of like the side-effects and I don't really see the problem with this.
It means that the security of the site that I am using is positively correlated with its place in the rankings.
If a site is poorly designed and capable of being exploited with malware, it probably does deserve to be kicked into the 'get your s#!t together' pool down with the people who pay SEO 'professionals.'
The risk of such things happening will cause sites to care a lot more about security.
As for the 'low low price' case you lay out, its totally at odds with the way google does business, it quite simply requires too many boots on the ground and is too invasive. The sites they index are not their customers.
Even if apple grabs 2-3% of the market share, they will be drawing the revenue from both the hardware and software side of the sale. After all, Jobs' state GOAL was only 1% of the market in 2008. So Ballmer is really saying that he thinks Apple will do better than they will publicly admit to thinking.
E F16A95-278E-40ED-9E00-FBEBD75207FB.html
Microsoft still doesn't get that Apple operates in a fundamentally different space than they do. Microsoft sells software; Apple sells hardware AND software.
Its like comparing Mac and PC sales. By controlling the hardware channel, Apple makes a hell of a lot more money per unit sale than Microsoft. Yet because they control both sides of the equation it is very difficult to compare them to pure software companies like Microsoft or to pure hardware companies like Dell. Apple's balance sheet shows net income in the ballpark of HP and Dell, based on revenues a half to a third the size. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9
So, yes, Microsoft would rather have software on 60% or 70% or 80% of the phones out there, just like they would like to have software on 60% or 70% or 80% or 90% of the desktops out there. Apple has a fundamentally different business model.
It really depends on the tier of management for which you are hiring the manager.
When hiring someone to manage a bunch of programmers, ask them questions about the Mythical Man Month, agile software development, iterations and traditional waterfalls, and try to figure out if he understands the ways programmers think. You're not looking for a coder, but you do want someone who understands the lingo. If the guy sounds off with how he'll never ask his people to do something he couldn't do, perhaps ask why he'd limit his team to the scope of his own abilities. Try to get a feel for his management style, if the team is small, and he is an ace-programmer, maybe he is more of a team lead candidate than a manager candidate. Skills with MS Project, Visio, Powerpoint, etc. are useful. Finding out how comfortable they are summarizing results and presenting material.
If you are hiring for senior management perhaps add questions about earned value management and try to get your head around how they have invested in improving their personnel in the past, and move away from the particulars of managing coders, because job duties will probably extend into other areas.
In either case, management style is a big factor. I am not a huge fan of the screaming-foreman style of management. IMNSHO, a good manager knows when to let his employees own their own deadlines, and how to keep s#!t from flowing downhill; they will go to bat for their team when they are right, and work with them to solve the problem when things go wrong. Asking questions about situations where someone underneath them has been thrown 'under the bus' and how they handled it and how they have handled situations where their estimates were wrong, is a good way to get a feel for their personalities in good and bad situations. A good manager inspires loyalty and doesn't make you dread coming to him with bad news.
I recently left management for academia, and ultimately made the round trip to coding and systems architecture when I received an offer from the best manager I had ever had the pleasure of working with. We had worked together during the dot-com days and moved on to separate fields in the meantime. I mention this to demonstrate that a solid manager can help you retain or acquire your best people and inspires loyalty.