What blows my mind us that they'd apologize. What's to get offended about? Why do you have to keep bending over and taking it hard from the oversensitive crybabies of the world?
I say fuck anyone that gets obnoxiously upset over song lyrics.
I wasn't going to say it quite so offensively, but I agree
Fossil fuels only win because they cheat. If they had to eat all their downsides themselves instead of burdening everyone else they would be much less attractive.
than what?
Nuclear is the only other energy supply tech that we have that is capable of supplying our current demands without completely trashing our environment (yes, I'd consider >10% of the environment covered in solar panels or wind farms to be trashing it).
VBA in Excel - the cause of more programmer misery than anything else, ever.
A very close second: the inclusion of MS Access in Office Professional...
(A) A disturbingly large amount of the world's wealth resides entirely on the common Excel spreadsheet. Carl Sagan-like numbers. Found that out working at the managed funds division of a major bank. Spreadsheets, with a rather enormous amount of VBA. Scared yet?
Yeah, I know, it's very very scary. I've worked in the finance industry and had the 'this is Fred, he's a casual worker we've had here this summer and he's put together a spreadsheet in his lunchtimes that is now business-critical for the entire Claims department. We need you to support it because Fred's going back to school now' conversation. Surprisingly I managed to control my apoplectic rage during the discussions with Fred.
(B) There is a path for MS Access home-schooling. (1) Build business on Access; (2) Upsize Access DB with SQL Server back-end; (3) Systematically replace Access front-end with IronSpeed; (3) Become popular since their DB apps aren't crashing daily; (4) Become glum when the breathing room and feeling of success you've given your employer allows them to outsource your department to a hosted SAP house.
Step 1 is great, everyone's happy. Step 2 is always the problem in my experience (e.g. managers who copy the entire database onto a thumb drive to work from home on it). Step 4 is usually a blessed relief to be out of there;)
Now.NET as a language isn't that bad, I actually like it..
.NET as a language isn't that bad because it's not a language. It's a frikkin framework.
I think you're making a somewhat artificial distinction. I'd call it a part of the language, with VB-proper being the other part.
Yeah, while technically it's not a language, most of learning.NET coding is learning the various libraries in the framework. Whether you choose to manipulate those libraries in C# or VB (or any other language) is almost irrelevant.
No, you're quite right. Most coders, even most of the extremely good and very productive ones, work the working week then go on to have some sort of a life outside work.
I'd go further and say *all* of the extremely good and productive coders work a standard working week and do something else outside their 40 hours.
There will be exceptions, as with any rule, but in almost all cases productivity goes down after 8 hours of solid coding. The marginal returns of coding past about 10 hours are negligible, and past about 12 hours the code quality drops to the point where it's actually counter-productive.
This is based on personal experience running a development team for years. Professional coders who take pride in their craftsmanship turn up to work, put in 8 solid hours of coding (well, OK, 6 hours of coding, an hour of meetings and an hour of admin/watercooler) and then go home. They meet their deadlines because they correctly estimate the effort required, and report deviations from the estimates early.
Working insane hours is acceptable for short bursts at crunch time. If it's consistently expected or needed then it's a management failure.
Absolutely agree. It's also totally counter-productive as it produces very low-quality code that takes longer to fix. I once did a 36-hour shift to meet a deadline, and I spent most of that blearily trying to fix the mistakes I'd made an hour ago. I'd have done much better to go home after 12 hours and come back refreshed, but I guess that's a learning experience.
However, trying to explain this to a senior manager that doesn't look at (or understand) the results, and just sees your team doing 8 hours a day while every other team in the company does 12 hours a day can be difficult.
Yeah, but if you think you have a man figured out and then find you haven't, he's not mad at you for that. Most men will take it as a welcome opportunity to explain how rational we are (and talk about ourselves for a bit).
If you're in a serious relationship with a woman and she realises that you don't understand something about her, then that's apparently cause for a fight/crying. Somehow she can be as irrational as she likes and if you don't understand her that's because you don't love her enough. Asking her to explain either the original behaviour or why she thinks this is also cause for a fight/tears.
I'm not criticising women, I'm just illustrating why this is tricky for men sometimes.
It's ridiculous for lawmakers to even engage in this whack-a-mole game.
Instead of banning substances, we should be banning behaviour.
If you want to get high in the privacy of your own home and eat a half-ton of Oreo's while watching the whole of Lord of The Rings extended expanded Director's Cut, you go right ahead, sir, have a nice day.
If you choose to attempt to drive while stoned/drunk/wasted/incompetent/texting then you're guilty of a new offence called 'Driving Like A Dick' and can be prosecuted for that.
If you choose to walk through a public space shouting your arse off about aliens, then you're guilty of a new offence called 'Acting Like A Dick' and can be prosecuted for that.
Equip all police officers with video cameras. Have them show the video in the trial and the magistrate decides whether the cop was right to make the arrest.
interesting, but it doesn't solve the problem that if Jesus died for your sins, including original sin, then before Jesus there was no way to be absolved of original sin
I haven't tried it, but I don't see any immediate technical hurdles to writing a web service to do torrent-like file transfer over HTTP
No, if they wanted to control this, then they'd need to lock down the client properly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing would be the way to do it, ensure that only 'proper' commercial organisations could write software that could be installed on the average PC.
Yeah the "debate" has been raging for over 200 years now, I don't expect to live to see the end of it.
It also gives us a glimpse at the likely future of the AGW "debate" which we've been witnessing pretty much from the beginning: Arguments with any possible scientific merit dry up within a few decades, and for centuries later the "skepticism" consists of mighty stonewalls of outright denial and/or batshit insanity, although at slowly decreasing prevalence.
nah...we just wait and see what the thermometer does. At some point either Team Hockey Stick has got to concede that it's still not getting any warmer and the seas aren't rising, or the temperature is going to rise in accordance with the models and there'll be a large amount of heat-eating in the blogosphere.
Why would a "God" need to perform an experiment, when He already knows the outcome?
Now this question is simple enough to answer. He does not know the answer. The nature of the experiment is to find out whether the human race is able to freely AND wisely choose between go(o)d and (d)evil. Because the devil has been given a fair game, not even god can know the end result. The interesting thing is that choosing go(o)d requires explicit choice and effort from us, while choosing (d)evil pretty much just happens like a default setting. In the end there will of course be an epic final boss battle between god and devil, and the people on their freely chosen sides will tip the scales and decide the end result.
There's a couple of problems with this viewpoint: 1. For the vast majority of human history there was no choice available. Even if you're a Young Earth Creationist, for just over half the lifetime of the earth there was no way to get past original sin to get to heaven. 2. For the vast majority of human history, massively more people have died before they reached five years old than have lived to the point where they could make any kind of rational choice between any morality at all. If your creator is really conducting an experiment like this, then his methods are a little inefficient to say the least.
There are an infinity of things that are unproveable. The thing is that they're completely irrelevant as well.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the poster child for this logic. By the same logic that says you can't prove/disprove a christian/muslim/jewish god, you can't prove/disprove the FSM. That doesn't make the FSM something that suddenly has any credibility or needs any attention from anyone.
Take any adjective/noun set ("omnipotent creator" for example, or "benign angel") and you have a concept that can neither be proved or disproved in an infinite universe/multiverse. But that doesn't mean you have to worship it.
I've heard this story a lot. The current patent law system doesn't protect the inventor, it protects the business with the most money for lawyers.
There are ways of defending this kind of case, but they involve basically giving your patent to a patent troll, who will then attempt to enforce your patent. You don't get anything from it, but you don't have to pay the legal costs. Unfortunately the patent trolls are always after settlements and will usually settle/license for an amount that allows your competitor to continue using your invention profitably. In this case it wouldn't have helped you as they'd have carried on undercutting you.
There are a very few technical ideas that can work like this, and usually they're pretty simple improvements on existing processes or mechanisms.
Almost all new ideas are completely worthless because the value is all in the execution.
To take your example: you have an idea for a new vacuum cleaner. Let's be generous and say there are 10 creative thoughts in that idea. The process for creating a factory, hiring workers, ironing out the bugs of the manufacturing process, designing and carrying out the appropriate marketing plan, raising the necessary funding, dealing with all the regulations involved, negotiating distribution deals with retailers, and all the hard work that goes into actually turning your idea into a workable product is going to involve thousands of creative thoughts.
If your value is coming up with ideas and then walking away from them, you don't really have any value.
Which makes it even more important that their rights are completely respected to the letter.
If they carry out an attack that is so outrageous that society demands that the rights they're fighting to eradicate are eradicated, then they've succeeded.
As most software incorporates many functions, any of which may or may not be patented, patents are a net liability for any startup. Even if they may have one or two, chances are high that their idea cannot be usefully brought to market without infringing on tens to hundreds of other patents.
Remember that a patent just enables you to have a courtcase. It doesn't enforce itself. You can infringe on as many patents as you like while you're poor, you only ever have to worry about them when you've got enough money to be sued.
Which is why the original idea in TFA is a bit crap, as most FOSS projects don't have the kind of money or organisation that can be sued for large lumps of cash, so they can effectively infringe whatever they like.
And it's also why patents are useless for protecting small companies. Let's say you invent something, patent it, start to make it work and then a larger company rips off your idea. At this point you can continue with your original business plan and live with the fact that you have a large competitor, or you can start what is effectively a new business enforcing your patent (since you won't have enough time to do both, and you're going to sink most if not all of your business's resources into paying patent lawyers). This is what Ric Richardson has done, good for him.
Note that a patent doesn't 'protect the income stream of the original business' at all. You won't be able to get an injunction stopping the infringer from doing business until you've proven that they've infinged, and at that point the hard work is done and you're talking about damages.
The problem, as usual, is not with the technicals, but with the business.
Software Patents solve a business need; that of investors to feel reassured that the thing they're investing in is worth the investment they're making.
An investor usually has no technical chops, so cannot determine if a software startup is doing something clever, innovative or hard-to-replicate. They're buying a stake in some Intellectual Property, and need to know that the property they're buying is 'real'. The first question asked of a software startup is 'what's your protection strategy for your IP?', because if there's no protection there's nothing 'real' that they can invest in. Patents are currently a good answer to this question.
This view is changing, slowly. Lean Startup http://theleanstartup.com/ (amongst others) is beginning to get people used to the concept that execution is more important than ideas, that IP is not a static thing that remains constant and can be owned like a piece of land. A business's IP should be changing the whole time, old ideas and executions discarded behind it as they become irrelevant in a changing market, new executions being constantly tested against the current market. With this worldview, investors invest in people, not ideas, and the whole patent system becomes irrelevant.
Of course, as long as there's a valid business model for patent trolling then there'll be a set of businesses using that model to make money. But it becomes more and more visibly broken and hopefully we can get the politicians to see that.
Any large company that thinks giving 10% of their workforce to their competition is going to make them a better competitor in their market has got to be dreaming.
But, obviously, clearly, cutting 10% of your overhead must immediately increase your profitability by 10%. This is truth.
For truly it is said: 'any idiot can cut costs, only a true leader can grow sales'
It'd be interesting to see whether there's a common cause here... those of us who put on way too much weight, usually in our late 20's, and have since shed it. It seems to be a common experience that we have to go way under the dietician's recommended calorie intake to avoid putting on the weight again.
Slashdot Mirror
damn I never have a mod point when I need one
or vagina
That's unlikely.
What blows my mind us that they'd apologize. What's to get offended about? Why do you have to keep bending over and taking it hard from the oversensitive crybabies of the world?
I say fuck anyone that gets obnoxiously upset over song lyrics.
I wasn't going to say it quite so offensively, but I agree
Fossil fuels only win because they cheat. If they had to eat all their downsides themselves instead of burdening everyone else they would be much less attractive.
than what?
Nuclear is the only other energy supply tech that we have that is capable of supplying our current demands without completely trashing our environment (yes, I'd consider >10% of the environment covered in solar panels or wind farms to be trashing it).
I think you have your cause and effect the wrong way around.
These days we generally see rich people as being unethical, so logically any work that pays well must therefore be unethical.
It's probably not true.
VBA in Excel - the cause of more programmer misery than anything else, ever.
A very close second: the inclusion of MS Access in Office Professional...
(A) A disturbingly large amount of the world's wealth resides entirely on the common Excel spreadsheet. Carl Sagan-like numbers. Found that out working at the managed funds division of a major bank. Spreadsheets, with a rather enormous amount of VBA. Scared yet?
Yeah, I know, it's very very scary. I've worked in the finance industry and had the 'this is Fred, he's a casual worker we've had here this summer and he's put together a spreadsheet in his lunchtimes that is now business-critical for the entire Claims department. We need you to support it because Fred's going back to school now' conversation.
Surprisingly I managed to control my apoplectic rage during the discussions with Fred.
(B) There is a path for MS Access home-schooling. (1) Build business on Access; (2) Upsize Access DB with SQL Server back-end; (3) Systematically replace Access front-end with IronSpeed; (3) Become popular since their DB apps aren't crashing daily; (4) Become glum when the breathing room and feeling of success you've given your employer allows them to outsource your department to a hosted SAP house.
Step 1 is great, everyone's happy. Step 2 is always the problem in my experience (e.g. managers who copy the entire database onto a thumb drive to work from home on it). Step 4 is usually a blessed relief to be out of there ;)
VBA in Excel - the cause of more programmer misery than anything else, ever.
A very close second: the inclusion of MS Access in Office Professional.
Why did you do this to us, Bill? What did we ever do to you?
Now .NET as a language isn't that bad, I actually like it..
.NET as a language isn't that bad because it's not a language. It's a frikkin framework.
I think you're making a somewhat artificial distinction. I'd call it a part of the language, with VB-proper being the other part.
Yeah, while technically it's not a language, most of learning .NET coding is learning the various libraries in the framework. Whether you choose to manipulate those libraries in C# or VB (or any other language) is almost irrelevant.
No, you're quite right. Most coders, even most of the extremely good and very productive ones, work the working week then go on to have some sort of a life outside work.
I'd go further and say *all* of the extremely good and productive coders work a standard working week and do something else outside their 40 hours.
There will be exceptions, as with any rule, but in almost all cases productivity goes down after 8 hours of solid coding. The marginal returns of coding past about 10 hours are negligible, and past about 12 hours the code quality drops to the point where it's actually counter-productive.
This is based on personal experience running a development team for years. Professional coders who take pride in their craftsmanship turn up to work, put in 8 solid hours of coding (well, OK, 6 hours of coding, an hour of meetings and an hour of admin/watercooler) and then go home. They meet their deadlines because they correctly estimate the effort required, and report deviations from the estimates early.
Working insane hours is acceptable for short bursts at crunch time. If it's consistently expected or needed then it's a management failure.
Absolutely agree. It's also totally counter-productive as it produces very low-quality code that takes longer to fix.
I once did a 36-hour shift to meet a deadline, and I spent most of that blearily trying to fix the mistakes I'd made an hour ago. I'd have done much better to go home after 12 hours and come back refreshed, but I guess that's a learning experience.
However, trying to explain this to a senior manager that doesn't look at (or understand) the results, and just sees your team doing 8 hours a day while every other team in the company does 12 hours a day can be difficult.
No, you're right, weight is not a factor.
Mass, however, is.
Yeah, but if you think you have a man figured out and then find you haven't, he's not mad at you for that. Most men will take it as a welcome opportunity to explain how rational we are (and talk about ourselves for a bit).
If you're in a serious relationship with a woman and she realises that you don't understand something about her, then that's apparently cause for a fight/crying.
Somehow she can be as irrational as she likes and if you don't understand her that's because you don't love her enough.
Asking her to explain either the original behaviour or why she thinks this is also cause for a fight/tears.
I'm not criticising women, I'm just illustrating why this is tricky for men sometimes.
It's ridiculous for lawmakers to even engage in this whack-a-mole game.
Instead of banning substances, we should be banning behaviour.
If you want to get high in the privacy of your own home and eat a half-ton of Oreo's while watching the whole of Lord of The Rings extended expanded Director's Cut, you go right ahead, sir, have a nice day.
If you choose to attempt to drive while stoned/drunk/wasted/incompetent/texting then you're guilty of a new offence called 'Driving Like A Dick' and can be prosecuted for that.
If you choose to walk through a public space shouting your arse off about aliens, then you're guilty of a new offence called 'Acting Like A Dick' and can be prosecuted for that.
Equip all police officers with video cameras. Have them show the video in the trial and the magistrate decides whether the cop was right to make the arrest.
interesting, but it doesn't solve the problem that if Jesus died for your sins, including original sin, then before Jesus there was no way to be absolved of original sin
I haven't tried it, but I don't see any immediate technical hurdles to writing a web service to do torrent-like file transfer over HTTP
No, if they wanted to control this, then they'd need to lock down the client properly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing would be the way to do it, ensure that only 'proper' commercial organisations could write software that could be installed on the average PC.
Yeah the "debate" has been raging for over 200 years now, I don't expect to live to see the end of it.
It also gives us a glimpse at the likely future of the AGW "debate" which we've been witnessing pretty much from the beginning: Arguments with any possible scientific merit dry up within a few decades, and for centuries later the "skepticism" consists of mighty stonewalls of outright denial and/or batshit insanity, although at slowly decreasing prevalence.
nah...we just wait and see what the thermometer does.
At some point either Team Hockey Stick has got to concede that it's still not getting any warmer and the seas aren't rising, or the temperature is going to rise in accordance with the models and there'll be a large amount of heat-eating in the blogosphere.
This universe is God's experiment in free will.
Why would a "God" need to perform an experiment, when He already knows the outcome?
Now this question is simple enough to answer. He does not know the answer. The nature of the experiment is to find out whether the human race is able to freely AND wisely choose between go(o)d and (d)evil. Because the devil has been given a fair game, not even god can know the end result. The interesting thing is that choosing go(o)d requires explicit choice and effort from us, while choosing (d)evil pretty much just happens like a default setting. In the end there will of course be an epic final boss battle between god and devil, and the people on their freely chosen sides will tip the scales and decide the end result.
There's a couple of problems with this viewpoint:
1. For the vast majority of human history there was no choice available. Even if you're a Young Earth Creationist, for just over half the lifetime of the earth there was no way to get past original sin to get to heaven.
2. For the vast majority of human history, massively more people have died before they reached five years old than have lived to the point where they could make any kind of rational choice between any morality at all. If your creator is really conducting an experiment like this, then his methods are a little inefficient to say the least.
There are an infinity of things that are unproveable. The thing is that they're completely irrelevant as well.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the poster child for this logic. By the same logic that says you can't prove/disprove a christian/muslim/jewish god, you can't prove/disprove the FSM. That doesn't make the FSM something that suddenly has any credibility or needs any attention from anyone.
Take any adjective/noun set ("omnipotent creator" for example, or "benign angel") and you have a concept that can neither be proved or disproved in an infinite universe/multiverse. But that doesn't mean you have to worship it.
I've heard this story a lot. The current patent law system doesn't protect the inventor, it protects the business with the most money for lawyers.
There are ways of defending this kind of case, but they involve basically giving your patent to a patent troll, who will then attempt to enforce your patent. You don't get anything from it, but you don't have to pay the legal costs. Unfortunately the patent trolls are always after settlements and will usually settle/license for an amount that allows your competitor to continue using your invention profitably. In this case it wouldn't have helped you as they'd have carried on undercutting you.
There are a very few technical ideas that can work like this, and usually they're pretty simple improvements on existing processes or mechanisms.
Almost all new ideas are completely worthless because the value is all in the execution.
To take your example: you have an idea for a new vacuum cleaner. Let's be generous and say there are 10 creative thoughts in that idea. The process for creating a factory, hiring workers, ironing out the bugs of the manufacturing process, designing and carrying out the appropriate marketing plan, raising the necessary funding, dealing with all the regulations involved, negotiating distribution deals with retailers, and all the hard work that goes into actually turning your idea into a workable product is going to involve thousands of creative thoughts.
If your value is coming up with ideas and then walking away from them, you don't really have any value.
Which makes it even more important that their rights are completely respected to the letter.
If they carry out an attack that is so outrageous that society demands that the rights they're fighting to eradicate are eradicated, then they've succeeded.
But Australia is closer to China (where everything gets made) ... so why are Australians paying more than Americans?
And the boats that ship all our minerals to China can just fill up on stuff on the way back, so shipping should basically be free...
Going by the very same logic, pirating their software is OK.
If they can discriminate on their pricing I can discriminate on my sourcing.
As most software incorporates many functions, any of which may or may not be patented, patents are a net liability for any startup. Even if they may have one or two, chances are high that their idea cannot be usefully brought to market without infringing on tens to hundreds of other patents.
Remember that a patent just enables you to have a courtcase. It doesn't enforce itself. You can infringe on as many patents as you like while you're poor, you only ever have to worry about them when you've got enough money to be sued.
Which is why the original idea in TFA is a bit crap, as most FOSS projects don't have the kind of money or organisation that can be sued for large lumps of cash, so they can effectively infringe whatever they like.
And it's also why patents are useless for protecting small companies. Let's say you invent something, patent it, start to make it work and then a larger company rips off your idea. At this point you can continue with your original business plan and live with the fact that you have a large competitor, or you can start what is effectively a new business enforcing your patent (since you won't have enough time to do both, and you're going to sink most if not all of your business's resources into paying patent lawyers). This is what Ric Richardson has done, good for him.
Note that a patent doesn't 'protect the income stream of the original business' at all. You won't be able to get an injunction stopping the infringer from doing business until you've proven that they've infinged, and at that point the hard work is done and you're talking about damages.
The problem, as usual, is not with the technicals, but with the business.
Software Patents solve a business need; that of investors to feel reassured that the thing they're investing in is worth the investment they're making.
An investor usually has no technical chops, so cannot determine if a software startup is doing something clever, innovative or hard-to-replicate. They're buying a stake in some Intellectual Property, and need to know that the property they're buying is 'real'. The first question asked of a software startup is 'what's your protection strategy for your IP?', because if there's no protection there's nothing 'real' that they can invest in. Patents are currently a good answer to this question.
This view is changing, slowly. Lean Startup http://theleanstartup.com/ (amongst others) is beginning to get people used to the concept that execution is more important than ideas, that IP is not a static thing that remains constant and can be owned like a piece of land. A business's IP should be changing the whole time, old ideas and executions discarded behind it as they become irrelevant in a changing market, new executions being constantly tested against the current market.
With this worldview, investors invest in people, not ideas, and the whole patent system becomes irrelevant.
Of course, as long as there's a valid business model for patent trolling then there'll be a set of businesses using that model to make money. But it becomes more and more visibly broken and hopefully we can get the politicians to see that.
Any large company that thinks giving 10% of their workforce to their competition is going to make them a better competitor in their market has got to be dreaming.
But, obviously, clearly, cutting 10% of your overhead must immediately increase your profitability by 10%. This is truth.
For truly it is said: 'any idiot can cut costs, only a true leader can grow sales'
Congrats on your success also.
It'd be interesting to see whether there's a common cause here... those of us who put on way too much weight, usually in our late 20's, and have since shed it. It seems to be a common experience that we have to go way under the dietician's recommended calorie intake to avoid putting on the weight again.