David, how can you say "this is not accurate" when the article simply says that OpenDNS (which I use and am a big advocate of) *may* not return good results, demonstrates circumstances where this is clearly the case and publishes code where people can reproduce the results themselves? I only wish more articles would do such things and be as accurate.
It's generally true that these are "edge" conditions but the internet is one giant collection of edges once you get outside the USA and a few major countries. I reside in Bangkok presently, travel around SE Asia a good bit and have found circumstances where using OpenDNS make it impossible to get facebook or google mail working. The local DNS servers are often quite unreliable so a service like OpenDNS is a godsend when it works but, having an awareness of the potential problems as noted in the article has saved me hours of headaches when things get pathological on me.
I'm glad to hear you're getting POPs in Asia - where the majority of internet users reside and is one heckuva huge "edge". I think it also shows to need for improvements to the protocols which can take a lot of time. I continue to use OpenDNS but now as a backup rather than a primary in locations where latency is increased as a result. Believe me I'm grateful to have it.
I think you owe the author an apology though. He's trying to be fair and accurate as to the potential issues with services like OpenDNS, help people be aware that they are not a panacea, and explan why. I think that's a good thing that should be commended.
I process my own film and have always noticed, especially with TMAX B&W 120 rolls that - when I finish loading the film into the development spool - as I peel off the tape holding it onto the original film spool, I can see "stars" sparkle as it's peeled. Of course this is done in total darkness (no red light) and after my eyes have fully dilated in the pitch black. Also helps to not look directly at it but slightly to the side because highly sensitive rods in the eye are concentrated around the perimeter of the retina whereas colour-sensitive but not as light sensitive cones are concentrated in the middle. Haven't tried this with any other kind of tape.
-- Ben
BTW - Ilford makes the sticky tape you lick when you finish shooting a roll of 120 film spearmint flavoured which I think is a nice touch. Wonder if THAT's radioactive too?
excellent - there are so many good cameras to choose from and many models over many manufacturers that it is impossible to keep up with. panasonic has just made life easier cause I can now eliminate their entire life from my list of options i have to follow. thanx guys!
Sounds like the guy's in Canada so my comments weren't necessarily relevant anyway. However, could you summarize the impact and terms of the "academic exception", please? I'd be curious to know.
IANAL but I've certainly paid a lot of money to a few of them so I have some experience in this area. You don't say explicitly but I'm going to assume you are in the USA.
Unless you have an explicit contract that states who owns the rights to any code you produce than the whole issue comes down to a determination as to whether the effort falls under "Work for Hire". By default the author owns all copy rights to any work produced. The exception (when there is not an explicit contract for rights in place), in the USA, occurs when a) you are a W-2 employee (1099 and contractors don't count) and b) the work falls directly under the efforts that you are being paid as part of your employment.
The odds are, if you were being paid as an employee under a W-2 where the employer withholds taxes, that your efforts are considered a work for hire since it appears that the code in question was developed to support the research that is the purpose of your employment.
If you are not a W2 employee (doesn't matter if its the Uni or another agency paying you - its the W2 that counts as another agency owning the rights probably assigns them to the Uni as part of their contract) then you own the rights unless there is a contract with you that states otherwise.
Now - you may find yourself rapidly unemployed (as I have been) once you point this fact out to the Uni who will then make continuation of your relationship with them dependent on you signing away said rights. In my case it was actually explicitly excluded from my employment when I signed on because it was based on my prior work so I declined to sign away my rights. You may not be in a position to do so...
Sorry guys... I sooooo wanted an OLPC and was gung-ho on the mission but with with Negroponte selling out the original concept and Krstic having left the project - it's soul is gone.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not some GNU zealot (I'd like to shoot some GNUs some time...), but I think so much of the educational mission is lost once the child who owns the machine hits that brick wall that is the closed OS. The whole idea is that you're supposed to be able to explore EVERYTHING about how this wonderful device works and learn what makes it tick - then change it!
I don't care if the software's "free", I just want it to be completely 100% open. That's a mission I can get behind and something that I know would have impacted me as a child. Otherwise, you've just got a glorified game machine for my pirated copy of whatever is popular these days. That's pretty cool from a kid's perspective (given its free) but not a charity I'm gonna support.
That work you're doing doesn't belong to you - it's your employer's under work-for-hire. Any smart company will also have an IP/Non-disclosure agreement that also explicitly states that you are aware of this and agree to take reasonable actions to help them protect their IP even after you leave the company.
That said - YOU probably won't be asked to do anything "unethical" if your issue is simply you don't like software patents. You will be given a document that makes various "claims" about some concept/process/product. Your signature simply says that these claims are true and that you helped originate them. So long as that is true then you should sign the document. In fact, if you withhold your signature on a true document then you could have a financial liability yourself even if you resign/quit. If the IP is particularly critical and somehow the lack of your signature would prevent them from getting protection for it you could be deposed and compelled to testify as to whether those statements are true or not which would still give them what they need to file the patent.
Naturally any refusals on your part sans concerns about obviously untrue claims is gonna cause you to be viewed as a risk and management will look hard at cutting you loose and finding another colleague who can verify their claims.
Your job isn't to determine patentability - that's the lawyers and patent office (who sadly are clearly NOT doing their jobs these days).
Whatever your views are of IP, I find the presumption of your question that you are somehow owed a job but your employer is not entitled to the full legal value of what they paid for as hypocritical and pathetic. If you REALLY want to put an end to abuse of software patents and IP law - QUIT PROVIDING THE IP IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU TWIT!!!! IT IS *YOUR* FAULT THEY HAVE THE IP IN THE FIRST PLACE CAUSE YOU CREATED IT!!!!
Your mind and your ideas are the ONLY thing you truly own that cannot be taken away from you. When you sell it to others you can't take it back - that's fraud - but no one forced you to take the job in the first place. You are EXTREMELY fortunate to be in one of the only industries in human history where one's imagination can rapidly produce new and unique tangible value to mankind. So what are you going to do with it? Quit whining and take responsibility if you want to change something.
These (and yourself) must have been some dedicated guys & gals.:) Well - would be cool for you all to make a BSD licensed version of the same concepts and maybe use a language that better naturally enforces these ideas. Might get me all nostalgic again!
I find this difficult to imagine as IBM was definitely not interested in investing in re-engineering any of the source code. A friend of mine and I put together a proposal to re-write Presentation Manager in 32bit in a few short months and it was simply not considered. A re-work of SOM would have required a rework of WPS and I'm fairly certain I would have heard about that effort. Once they moved from Boca to Austin that was it for real OS/2 dev that I'm aware of.
I did two contracts with IBM in the early 90's, one on the OS/2 2.1 change team. In both I "got" to deal with SOM and its implementation source code. It's a giant nasty C macro & function pointer hack. OS/2's Workplace Shell was very cool but the underlying implementation was pretty nasty stuff. One of my fixes was dealing with how slow it was populating icons in folders. SOM is a good example of the "Prototry" anti-pattern where one does an initial implementation of a cool trick then ends up shipping & extending it rather than ever bothering to architect it right in the first place. I can understand why IBM doesn't want this source out in public. FWIW - I also had to deal with some of the Microsoft source code, especially device driver stuff. Was the worse C code I've ever seen in production...
If you like SOM & Workplace Shell features you'll find it far easier to implement on top of Qt/KDE or wxWidgets or a smart functional integration of some Boost library features & a GUI than you'd ever have hopes of getting that code to work with anything modern or useful today. I loved OS/2. Borland had a Beautiful C++ compiler for it and CSet/2 was one of the better standards compliant compilers at the time as well. They're all bit rot by now though. Appreciate the memories but let this one die.
They're replacing the O2 with Nitrogen? Wouldn't people in the room just start getting a buzz when it kicked in and not leave therefore suffocating? I think it would be far more entertaining to use Helium instead. That way everyone would know that something's up when their voice goes up 4 octaves in pitch!
I'm sorry but Python is a VERY easy language to learn plus inherently object oriented (although it impressively supports the functional paradigm as well). How is it that you can get all the way to chapter 13 in a book about python before talking about its OO features? I'm not seeing much value here...
Well the old version of Reuters Messaging (v3 I believe, v5 is present version) was a branded MSN client. The new one is a custom client and there is an enhanced chat service that is full featured and very popular in the financial world. The chat feature is a premium service so not every one with RM has chat.
Disclaimer: I have a professional interest in this product so consider me biased.
Actually Reuter's Messaging has a chat system that is in the same feature space as MindAlign. If you aren't in the financial industry you've probably never heard of it because its commonly sold as an adjunct to their other financial trading/information systems. Because of this financial focus they also have lots of legal compliance capabilities which most non-financial users don't normally ask for but, alas, that's probably soon to pass as well...
My flight was New York to Atlanta was delayed by nearly 3 hours and effectively wrecked my ability to get some important work done as a result of this "incident". Who do I go to for reimbursment? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars of incidental costs (jet fuel alone) that the airlines had to eat. Incredible.
Actually they do the "mystery shopper" thing too. Recently something like 21 airports were testing in this manner and 100% of them failed.
Honestly I'm not terribly concerned about safety. The ONLY reason the 911 terrorists succeeded was because of our policy of cooperating with hi-jackers which was based on the presumption that they wanted to survive the effort themselves. That policy is no more. Frankly I feel we'd be better off if everyone came on board armed with knives or sidearms (if properly trained). Regardless, any terrorist taking on a plane full of passengers these days knows he's going to be instantly attacked from all directions and shot down if necessary. We're putting way too much emphasis on things that have no measurable effect on our safety at serious detriment to our own freedoms, convenience, and financial situations.
I think your approach is a lose-lose proposition. Its bad enough, but not untypical, that management is making inherently technological decisions without understanding their business ramifications. Making the debate with management on your technology turf might let you "win" a battle but you've already lost the war. An approach with a far better liklyhood of long term success would be to push those technical decisions down to the IT level with clear business directives that would help drive those directions (preferably with some objective metrics of how well those directives are being met). This way the technical staff can communicate the impact of technology decisions in business terms that management can more readily understand. Thereafter, management can impact technology decisions by altering their business directives rather than making specific product choices they have no concept of. If you can accomplish that then when a manager reads an article out of a magazine and gets a brilliant idea the tech staff can say "thanx for the suggestion".
Windows... the ultimate honey pot. Well its good they recognized this "feature" and are trying to do some good from it. Maybe they'll take what they've learned to eliminate these holes??
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David, how can you say "this is not accurate" when the article simply says that OpenDNS (which I use and am a big advocate of) *may* not return good results, demonstrates circumstances where this is clearly the case and publishes code where people can reproduce the results themselves? I only wish more articles would do such things and be as accurate.
It's generally true that these are "edge" conditions but the internet is one giant collection of edges once you get outside the USA and a few major countries. I reside in Bangkok presently, travel around SE Asia a good bit and have found circumstances where using OpenDNS make it impossible to get facebook or google mail working. The local DNS servers are often quite unreliable so a service like OpenDNS is a godsend when it works but, having an awareness of the potential problems as noted in the article has saved me hours of headaches when things get pathological on me.
I'm glad to hear you're getting POPs in Asia - where the majority of internet users reside and is one heckuva huge "edge". I think it also shows to need for improvements to the protocols which can take a lot of time. I continue to use OpenDNS but now as a backup rather than a primary in locations where latency is increased as a result. Believe me I'm grateful to have it.
I think you owe the author an apology though. He's trying to be fair and accurate as to the potential issues with services like OpenDNS, help people be aware that they are not a panacea, and explan why. I think that's a good thing that should be commended.
-- Ben Scherrey
I process my own film and have always noticed, especially with TMAX B&W 120 rolls that - when I finish loading the film into the development spool - as I peel off the tape holding it onto the original film spool, I can see "stars" sparkle as it's peeled. Of course this is done in total darkness (no red light) and after my eyes have fully dilated in the pitch black. Also helps to not look directly at it but slightly to the side because highly sensitive rods in the eye are concentrated around the perimeter of the retina whereas colour-sensitive but not as light sensitive cones are concentrated in the middle. Haven't tried this with any other kind of tape.
-- Ben
BTW - Ilford makes the sticky tape you lick when you finish shooting a roll of 120 film spearmint flavoured which I think is a nice touch. Wonder if THAT's radioactive too?
excellent - there are so many good cameras to choose from and many models over many manufacturers that it is impossible to keep up with. panasonic has just made life easier cause I can now eliminate their entire life from my list of options i have to follow. thanx guys!
Sounds like the guy's in Canada so my comments weren't necessarily relevant anyway. However, could you summarize the impact and terms of the "academic exception", please? I'd be curious to know.
IANAL but I've certainly paid a lot of money to a few of them so I have some experience in this area. You don't say explicitly but I'm going to assume you are in the USA.
Unless you have an explicit contract that states who owns the rights to any code you produce than the whole issue comes down to a determination as to whether the effort falls under "Work for Hire". By default the author owns all copy rights to any work produced. The exception (when there is not an explicit contract for rights in place), in the USA, occurs when a) you are a W-2 employee (1099 and contractors don't count) and b) the work falls directly under the efforts that you are being paid as part of your employment.
The odds are, if you were being paid as an employee under a W-2 where the employer withholds taxes, that your efforts are considered a work for hire since it appears that the code in question was developed to support the research that is the purpose of your employment.
If you are not a W2 employee (doesn't matter if its the Uni or another agency paying you - its the W2 that counts as another agency owning the rights probably assigns them to the Uni as part of their contract) then you own the rights unless there is a contract with you that states otherwise.
Now - you may find yourself rapidly unemployed (as I have been) once you point this fact out to the Uni who will then make continuation of your relationship with them dependent on you signing away said rights. In my case it was actually explicitly excluded from my employment when I signed on because it was based on my prior work so I declined to sign away my rights. You may not be in a position to do so...
Good luck.
...but you lost me at Windows.
Sorry guys... I sooooo wanted an OLPC and was gung-ho on the mission but with with Negroponte selling out the original concept and Krstic having left the project - it's soul is gone.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not some GNU zealot (I'd like to shoot some GNUs some time...), but I think so much of the educational mission is lost once the child who owns the machine hits that brick wall that is the closed OS. The whole idea is that you're supposed to be able to explore EVERYTHING about how this wonderful device works and learn what makes it tick - then change it!
I don't care if the software's "free", I just want it to be completely 100% open. That's a mission I can get behind and something that I know would have impacted me as a child. Otherwise, you've just got a glorified game machine for my pirated copy of whatever is popular these days. That's pretty cool from a kid's perspective (given its free) but not a charity I'm gonna support.
Have you EVER used HPUX? Be afraid - be very afraid!
HP has never produced anything worth a damn except for an RPN calculator and a laser printer. Avoid anything else with their name on it at all costs.
They should just write some good OS device drivers and ship with Ubuntu or something.
That work you're doing doesn't belong to you - it's your employer's under work-for-hire. Any smart company will also have an IP/Non-disclosure agreement that also explicitly states that you are aware of this and agree to take reasonable actions to help them protect their IP even after you leave the company.
That said - YOU probably won't be asked to do anything "unethical" if your issue is simply you don't like software patents. You will be given a document that makes various "claims" about some concept/process/product. Your signature simply says that these claims are true and that you helped originate them. So long as that is true then you should sign the document. In fact, if you withhold your signature on a true document then you could have a financial liability yourself even if you resign/quit. If the IP is particularly critical and somehow the lack of your signature would prevent them from getting protection for it you could be deposed and compelled to testify as to whether those statements are true or not which would still give them what they need to file the patent.
Naturally any refusals on your part sans concerns about obviously untrue claims is gonna cause you to be viewed as a risk and management will look hard at cutting you loose and finding another colleague who can verify their claims.
Your job isn't to determine patentability - that's the lawyers and patent office (who sadly are clearly NOT doing their jobs these days).
Whatever your views are of IP, I find the presumption of your question that you are somehow owed a job but your employer is not entitled to the full legal value of what they paid for as hypocritical and pathetic. If you REALLY want to put an end to abuse of software patents and IP law - QUIT PROVIDING THE IP IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU TWIT!!!! IT IS *YOUR* FAULT THEY HAVE THE IP IN THE FIRST PLACE CAUSE YOU CREATED IT!!!!
Your mind and your ideas are the ONLY thing you truly own that cannot be taken away from you. When you sell it to others you can't take it back - that's fraud - but no one forced you to take the job in the first place. You are EXTREMELY fortunate to be in one of the only industries in human history where one's imagination can rapidly produce new and unique tangible value to mankind. So what are you going to do with it? Quit whining and take responsibility if you want to change something.
These (and yourself) must have been some dedicated guys & gals. :) Well - would be cool for you all to make a BSD licensed version of the same concepts and maybe use a language that better naturally enforces these ideas. Might get me all nostalgic again!
I find this difficult to imagine as IBM was definitely not interested in investing in re-engineering any of the source code. A friend of mine and I put together a proposal to re-write Presentation Manager in 32bit in a few short months and it was simply not considered. A re-work of SOM would have required a rework of WPS and I'm fairly certain I would have heard about that effort. Once they moved from Boca to Austin that was it for real OS/2 dev that I'm aware of.
I did two contracts with IBM in the early 90's, one on the OS/2 2.1 change team. In both I "got" to deal with SOM and its implementation source code. It's a giant nasty C macro & function pointer hack. OS/2's Workplace Shell was very cool but the underlying implementation was pretty nasty stuff. One of my fixes was dealing with how slow it was populating icons in folders. SOM is a good example of the "Prototry" anti-pattern where one does an initial implementation of a cool trick then ends up shipping & extending it rather than ever bothering to architect it right in the first place. I can understand why IBM doesn't want this source out in public. FWIW - I also had to deal with some of the Microsoft source code, especially device driver stuff. Was the worse C code I've ever seen in production...
If you like SOM & Workplace Shell features you'll find it far easier to implement on top of Qt/KDE or wxWidgets or a smart functional integration of some Boost library features & a GUI than you'd ever have hopes of getting that code to work with anything modern or useful today. I loved OS/2. Borland had a Beautiful C++ compiler for it and CSet/2 was one of the better standards compliant compilers at the time as well. They're all bit rot by now though. Appreciate the memories but let this one die.
They're replacing the O2 with Nitrogen? Wouldn't people in the room just start getting a buzz when it kicked in and not leave therefore suffocating? I think it would be far more entertaining to use Helium instead. That way everyone would know that something's up when their voice goes up 4 octaves in pitch!
I'm sorry but Python is a VERY easy language to learn plus inherently object oriented (although it impressively supports the functional paradigm as well). How is it that you can get all the way to chapter 13 in a book about python before talking about its OO features? I'm not seeing much value here...
Well the old version of Reuters Messaging (v3 I believe, v5 is present version) was a branded MSN client. The new one is a custom client and there is an enhanced chat service that is full featured and very popular in the financial world. The chat feature is a premium service so not every one with RM has chat.
Disclaimer: I have a professional interest in this product so consider me biased.
Actually Reuter's Messaging has a chat system that is in the same feature space as MindAlign. If you aren't in the financial industry you've probably never heard of it because its commonly sold as an adjunct to their other financial trading/information systems. Because of this financial focus they also have lots of legal compliance capabilities which most non-financial users don't normally ask for but, alas, that's probably soon to pass as well...
Myself? I miss the good ol' days of BIX.
"Well at least we got the vehicle back! Let's get some beer!"
My flight was New York to Atlanta was delayed by nearly 3 hours and effectively wrecked my ability to get some important work done as a result of this "incident". Who do I go to for reimbursment? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars of incidental costs (jet fuel alone) that the airlines had to eat. Incredible.
Actually they do the "mystery shopper" thing too. Recently something like 21 airports were testing in this manner and 100% of them failed.
Honestly I'm not terribly concerned about safety. The ONLY reason the 911 terrorists succeeded was because of our policy of cooperating with hi-jackers which was based on the presumption that they wanted to survive the effort themselves. That policy is no more. Frankly I feel we'd be better off if everyone came on board armed with knives or sidearms (if properly trained). Regardless, any terrorist taking on a plane full of passengers these days knows he's going to be instantly attacked from all directions and shot down if necessary. We're putting way too much emphasis on things that have no measurable effect on our safety at serious detriment to our own freedoms, convenience, and financial situations.
I think your approach is a lose-lose proposition. Its bad enough, but not untypical, that management is making inherently technological decisions without understanding their business ramifications. Making the debate with management on your technology turf might let you "win" a battle but you've already lost the war. An approach with a far better liklyhood of long term success would be to push those technical decisions down to the IT level with clear business directives that would help drive those directions (preferably with some objective metrics of how well those directives are being met). This way the technical staff can communicate the impact of technology decisions in business terms that management can more readily understand. Thereafter, management can impact technology decisions by altering their business directives rather than making specific product choices they have no concept of. If you can accomplish that then when a manager reads an article out of a magazine and gets a brilliant idea the tech staff can say "thanx for the suggestion".
Good luck!
Hey - no zombies ever went around screaming for computers to eat! Tell that to the next guy who thinks computers will ever be able to replace brains.
FYI - Intellectual property rights are a fundamental part of the free market system. Go read some Ayn Rand and come back... :)
Windows... the ultimate honey pot. Well its good they recognized this "feature" and are trying to do some good from it. Maybe they'll take what they've learned to eliminate these holes??
er.. no REAL science (i.e. Chemistry, Biology, Physics, et al) has the word science in it. That's how you can tell its a science. :)
Hacking is the artistic application of science. Elegance is the demonstration that art and science are simply two sides of the same coin.
You BASTARDS!