There is nothing preventing Saudi Arabia from performing their own analysis independently and completely ignoring the Dutch.
How about total lack of competence combined with arrogance backing up the lack of information transfer from the Dutch? The original doctor mentioned that the Saudi labs checked for swine flu and then stopped working, which was the point at which he sent the sample abroad. The Saudis mention that there was then a multi-month delay before they were informed of the result from the Dutch lab. Whilst they shouldn't have been waiting, incompetence is impossible to avoid and so the Dutch get the blame for that part of the delay.
By the time the Saudis have had the delay and start looking for the virus, it seems the patients were dead or cured, so it's more difficult to find. When they finally do that, they find that most of the main international labs already have MTA agreements with the Dutch lab. Whilst I don't know if they make any legal difference in theory, I'm sure that any lab has to think carefully before accepting a separate sample and having MTA like obligations in two directions. The risk of a lawsuit is clearly there.
Overall neither side looks good, however it's very clear that patents and IP rights generally are behind the whole problem. If they aren't eliminated from the equation somehow there's a real risk that a future epidemic will take hold where it could have been easily stopped if there were less of a delay.
the virus material still belongs to the original provider (in this case Erasmus MC) and that the recipient cannot give it to other labs. It also asks for written consent from Erasmus for using the virus for commercial purposes.
After which I can't see how anyone can claim that this MTA doesn't slow down research. Think about the fact that producing and selling a vaccine is a "commercial purpose". Pharmaceutical companies do not operate as charities.
The Saudis don't want the material transferred from their country except by a special mechanism which guarantees them the Patent rights.
Er.. not really right, it's a dutch genetics lab that has a sample of the virus, and are making people who use the data or sample sign an MTA (Material Transfer Agreement), that basically says you can't do commercial things with it without paying them, non-comercial research stuff all fine.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), to which Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands are parties (as are practically all other UN members except the US), establishes obligations for access and benefit-sharing for biodiversity, including prior informed consent of the providing country and mutually agreed terms for utilisation of the material. These obligations are further detailed by the Convention's Nagoya Protocol, which is presently gathering ratifications for entry into force.
The situation of Erasmus having obtained the virus and placed intellectual property claim over it without the consent of the Saudi government and without an agreement for benefit-sharing appears to be at odds with the requirements of the Convention.
Basically the Saudis and the Dutch lab are both fighting over the IP rights.
The fishy bit seems to be that the Saudi's didn't seem to want the rest of the world to know they had a little disease outbreak, and it reads a bit like they were trying to supress anything to do with it, and now seem to be making excuses.
(And none of this stops you taking your own sample from a parient with the virus and doing your own genetic analysis...
I would be really really interested to the reason for this. Your suggestion is possible; Look at the quotes in my other comment though and you see that part of the delay is probably because they simply didn't realise they had a new disease. The most interesting bit though is that it seems that they only just agreed to a new transfer
“But now... we’ve got an approval to move these samples and they will be shipped for testing,” he said.
(from this Alarabiya article.)
and note this, from the original article (with my emphasis)
The PIP augments the International Health Regulations, creating a series of understandings that are flu-specific regarding sample sharing, patents, and profits from products derived from viral discovery. Chan's response to Memish's accusations no doubt stems from her concern that the Saudis could invoke provisions of the flu-specific PIP, demanding control over the MERS-CoV samples, patents, and products.
In other words; the Saudis now believe that they have a legal basis for control, even if they share. Before they were worried about this. And notice, the same article mentions that the Indonesians did exactly that so this is not something that's being thought about for the first time.
One suspects that you did not read the article... which is normal for slashdot, but given your username I would have expected different;)
I took my username specifically to remind me to read the article. In this case, the trollish bit is that I read not just the original article but a few more. The accusation is good though; keep it up and keep trolling all of us with it whenver you can.
The problem is with Saudi-Arabia, not with the Dutch lab.
Erasmus determined that it was a new coronavirus (SARS is another coronavirus), but delayed several months before making it available to others.
(same source)
Saudi Arabia's Memish complained at the WHO meeting that there was a lag of three months, between June and September 2012,
(article linked from summary above)
The article is borderline slander, but the summary is outright misleading.
That's a strong statement you are making there.
The problem isn't with a Dutch lab that asks for payment in return for results and a cut of the potential profit. The problem is with the Saudi government that fires people who actually try to alert the world.
Why does the problem have to be one or the other? Why can't it be both, but especially the involvement of patents in medicine and especially in patenting pre-existing natural gene sequences and their derived products?
For clarity I deleted a section of your post where I have no comment
It's not a patent It's a Material Transfer Agreement that means you agree to some restrictions including sharing / ceding patent rights. (That's OK, it's Timothy, we don't exactly expect accuracy here.)
I hate to be the first Slashdotter to defend our editors, but he didn't say "a patent". He said "obstacle to treatment: Patents". And in this case it's 100% right if you read carefully.
The Saudis don't want the material transferred from their country except by a special mechanism which guarantees them the Patent rights. That is slowing down the rate at which the virus gets to people. The lab which has a sample doesn't want to distribute it without special agreements about patents. Again, this slows down the transfer. If the lab was not motivated by patents then it could simply say "all patents based on this material must be shared freely and without patents", however they don't do that.
In all cases; if there were no potential future patents involved then the information could be shared easily and quickly. Patents and greed about them are the problem here.
Just ignore the trolls. Sometimes even me. Responding to them doesn't do any good unless you just occasionally enjoy a good flame war for the fun of it, in which case you need to be lots ruder than that.
BTW; what rubs me up the wrong way about Sarah's posting is really this
However, none of them address the factor that has the biggest impact on the quality of your codebase: Other People.
Ever since Knuth designed web and espoused Literate Programming there has been no possible way for a person properly educated in CS to not know that the main problem of software is communication with other human beings. I mentioned agile a bit glibly (it's a 1st post; it has to be fast and funny) but I really mean it as a strong comment to this overall. Agile software development process which was designed very much to talk about how people work together and the founders of it put this very explicitly in their manifesto.
Even those two movements are themselves just statements of ideas other people had done often before. Either Sarah is ignorant of this or she deliberately picked a bunch of methodologies which are trying to solve different problems and ignoring the ones which are related to her topic. Either thing would be a bad sign. If you are just getting into this subject then you should start reading up around the many interesting ideas related to this that have been around before. Recent (since the 90s at least) programming language design has been very much based around the idea of programming languages as human to human communication.
The number that I do believe is that paid app usage downloaded from Apple's store is much higher than the same thing from Google play. However that's a Google vs Apple financial comparison and isn't the one relevant to my arguments. For Apple devices the only software source is Apple's app store. For Android devices there are many sources; direct download; Amazon; 3rd party stores; Free software repositories like F-droid etc. This quite likely more than accounts for differences in the number of apps installed per device etc. which have been reported in the media. Remember especially that the Android users who have the most apps are also the ones who will be most likely to have a rooted device where at least some of the apps will be invisible to google. I think that these are completely missed in most reports on Android software usage but are things which will have a strong influence on the platforms' futures.
If you want to maximise revenue on your first version of a proprietary app, I guess that you might still be better to go with Apple App store. Even here I am not sure. If you are trying to reach the maximum number of people with your app, I would suspect that Android is already a clear winner.
Now, the final question is, which will give the better long term ROI. I would guess that we are already at the stage where revenue in Google play will overtake revenue in Apple's app store in the lifetime of any reasonable app. In which case, it seems to me that the that the people going for iOS are just making a mistake because they haven't yet realised that things already changed or are doing it because it's easier for them at this stage than converting over. That decision will change soon.
longer loiter time expected - weeks rather than hours
much cheaper / more of them - 5-100k dollars rather than 100 to 10000
belonging to "other" countries - especially unstable ones likely to lose control of them
more likely to be needed as armies are "demanned" and so remote systems will need to be able to defend themselves
This isn't a true quantitative change but the qualitative change is enough to make this worth reconsidering seriously. The Soviet Union's automated retaliatory systems which were designed to strike back of the Soviet leadership were all killed would probably also come into this category in many ways.
You point to a page which starts talking about smartphones as if they were melons, but in this case you are not talking about melons. Overall the article shows a serious lack of knowlege about the industry. These are smartphones and they work differently. In the case of smartphones, market share really is winning and you should remenber that that is exactly what kept Nokia dominant in the market from around 2000 to 2012 even as their technology lead was quite dubious. So far in the industry, market share dominance has only been lost not won; In Motorola's case by failing to transfer to digital. In Ericsson's case by failing to secure their logistics supplies against disaster. In Nokia's case basically by suicide. Apple doesn't count since they never actually achieved dominance; their situation is closer to that of HTC, Sony-Ericsson or Motorola recently which fought hard, came close, but could never defeat a bigger opponent.
The main point is simply the scale effect. There are a huge number of costs in the smartphone market which are fixed. These are, for example, development of hardware and underlying software. Some of these, such as making a new device driver for a camera, have to be done once per model of phone. Some of these, such as adding a bluetooth device driver, or improving the user interface, have to be done once for the entire OS type. Since these costs are spread across all Android users, that reduces the cost of the phone massively which means that the manufacturer can sell it cheaper whilst at the same time making more profit. Note that Samsung made a huge profit on Android phones.
Android manufacturers, like the PC market around 2000, are somewhat fragmented and use a number of different processor and technology vendors. At small scale that could be a problem since they have to go individually and negotiate prices. However, the Android market some time ago went beyond this to the stage that there are many different competing suppliers. This means that the producer of an Android phone could just sit there making small design changes and adding new technologies as they are delivered by the suppliers. Their phone would still improve as fast as the competitors using other systems.
The final most important point is that, Android just has become the standard software platform. If you are a big company and you want to reach 60% of your customers with a new App, in most countries you can simply produce an Android application and you will get there. All other platforms, even iOS, will just be a small incremental change that frankly isn't worth it until you know exactly how successful your app will be. Android just is, now, the standard platform to start on. New App development will be done there and so all other platforms will lag behind.
The biggest weakness of market dominance would be if, like Apple, the Android manufacturers became lazy and stopped improving now that they are dominant. Samsung might sit there doing nothing for a year or two, just producing an S5 slightly upgraded from the S4 and raking in the profits. However, that's the great thing about Android being multi-sources. Since HTC stopped concentrating on Windows phones and went back to Android seriously, there's a real alternative to Samsung. With Motorola actually looking like they might comeback, there's another alternative. All this means that, even with market dominance from Android, there will likely be more advances.
This is a bit sad in a way. Android is not the best mobile system ever (that goes to Nokia's old Maemo/Meego on the Nokia N9) I think that the system which challenges Android in future will have to be Android compatible.
Oh my god. You don't say. Here I thought it was run by intelligent giraffes from Alpha Centuri. All these years of deception. I'll just give up now. Your insights have suddenly made me realise none of us are worthy to inhabit the same world as you.
one sees an obvious bias.
It gets even stranger. Not just a site with "people" but those "people" have viewpoints. They write as if those views are true. Probably you are implying that the actually believe those views. Really? Amazing. What insight; what brilliance; a new level for mankind. You should apply to run Harvard. I'm sure they will take you as their leader on the basis of this comment alone.
Keep digging, Skippy, I am sure you are going to bury me in that hole you are currently have to look up to see out of.
Wow; such originality; such vision. I am sure that if we searched all the sites on the entire internet it would turn out that nobody had ever previously thought of such a comment. An answer to every question for which the commenter is too stupid to come up with a witty retort. A simple way to do down every point for which the poster can't think of a response. You are a genius; so full of yourself and yet so empty. Astounding.
No, you called him a shill because he called out Slashdot on it's hypocrisy.
Look; I am calling you out because you are stupid. I've already ripped you apart on this. Let me spell it out again. Web sites are not hypocritical. People are hypocritical. There are more than two people here. The fact that Alice posts "it's okay for me to steal" and Bob posts "it's not okay for you to steal" does not mean that Slashdot is hypocritical. It means that there is more than one view here.
Oh, and calling PHP new doesn't make it new. It also doesn't make it any good. That is a language which has been broken for years and I have no idea why you would want to boost it.
There is nothing wrong with that, business is business. But I find it extremely hypocritical to do all of the above while "doing no evil" and pretending to be a friend of open source and open standards at the same time.
How do you manage to keep the two bits picked out bold in your mind at the same time. Doesn't it hurt?
What serious disasters? Do you have any references that of any, especially ones that say it was because of.NET?
The big ones I know about are mostly in-house / intranet type things I wouldn't talk about. There are hints on the internet; look up things "intranet failed" and then correlate with previous big announcements from Microsoft or their partner's.NET marketing teams.
if for example your Java supplier has a bad security record, to migrate to a different one which is more responsive
Like who?
There are at least three major commercial strands of certifiable Java; Oracle; OpenJDK (Ubuntu / Red Hat) and IBM. This is before you start talking about specialist versions like the Java compilers used to make software for Android. You can find a comparison on Wikipedia. Also consider things like gcj
If you are thinking of migrating away from Java, gcj is great. You can port to it and then dispose of the JVM completely. Otherwise it's got major compatibility problems which limit it as a mainstream alternative.
Of the above, probably the most important is Red Hat's OpenJDK based systems. Although these are based on the same code base as Oracle, they put the JVMs inside SELinux sandboxes. You can then partition these as you wish for major security benefits.
He said something you don't like, specifically pointing out the hypocrisy of Slashdot, so he is a shill. You are proving the GP's point.
I called him a shill because he came in with a non sequitur post bringing in Red Hat when nobody is accusing Red Hat of being responsible for this and to do so (given the number of successful Red Hat based systems) would be stupid. When there were big public.NET failures, the very reasonable accusation was that, by choosing a new and immature system which had not been proven in big systems (and still really hasn't), the IT companies were being suckered by Microsoft. Probably mostly because senior management were doing favours for their friends.
Accusing a web site of hypocrisy would be so obviously stupid that not even he did that directly. There is not just you and some other guy. There are many people who have many different views. Obviously what one person says about one topic has very little chance of agreeing with what another person says about an unrelated topic, as in this case.
Until Microsoft publicly forswears the use of Astroturfing, something they have been repeatedly proven to be involved in, it is reasonable to accuse irrational supporters of theirs of being shills. Other people who want, for some reason, to promote views favourable to Microsoft and find themselves being caught up in this should demand that Microsoft stop using money to influence the public debate and should accept that, until Microsoft does that, Microsoft is limiting their right to be taken seriously.
Exactly. You cannot use Agile to build a 100-mile canal, as the whole thing would be useless even if you completed 99 miles.
If the system cannot be useful until a large set of functions are in place and working, then it is not suitable for Agile, period.
Thanks; that's a wonderful analogy for this case.
What is really instructive is to think what a "true agile" project would do in this case:
First they would start out trying to dig a Canal with spades or something similar. At the same time they would start wondering why they are doing this. Realising they can't dig a canal in a reasonable time, they would instead look for an alternative approach.
Pretty soon they would realise that a) the aim of the canal was to transport things and that b) they can't deliver a canal in a single small increment. Instead they would buy some horses and transport a small amount of stuff with those. Within a sprint or two the would be working on trying to improve the amount they could transport by smoothing out the path from place to place.
Slowly but surely they would work towards building a road instead of a canal. They would use trucks for transport. The end solution would be ready quicker than the canal, would work faster, but would have nowhere near the capacity and would be completely useless for shipping.
As "Agile" people they would see their project as a success: they delivered something of value to their customers. As "Waterfall" people others would see them as failures. They didn't achieve what they were "meant to" achieve.
I think you failed to notice the shill posting that I was responding to. I didn't bring up.NET to bash it, rather to respond to someone who was trying to compare it to RedHat which is a system that.NET clearly doesn't approach in any of maturity, flexibility or stability.
There are tens of thousands of.NET projects if not more that have succeeded.
That's hardly a recommendation. There are hundreds of thousands of projects that have been based on PHP. There are probably millions of such projects which are based on excels. The fact is that almost every problem system has lots of "success" stories. Many of those would have been much more successful if they chose a less problematic system but that doesn't mean that they aren't in their own terms successful.
Look at some key criteria for choosing a good system
Multiple competing suppliers each of which are approximately equivalent in ability.
Open active support market without specific vendor bias
Long record of successful projects
Full source code availablility
Open standards and standardization
Lack of proprietary interests able to close down development on a whim
interoperability and ability to migrate solutions both out and in of the chosen system
Supported by organisations with a reputation for honesty and reliability
When people choose.NET, they are choosing a system which is locked into one vendor. They are choosing a system which has a record of a number of serious disasters and lack of performance at higher system demand levels. Most of all, they are choosing a system from a vendor which is more willing to pay shills to turn up on forums astroturfing their success than they are willing to solve the underlying problems of their system. This doesn't guarantee failure any more than choosing a solid system guarantees success. However, it can be a single decision point which causes some given project to fail.
Compare the decision to choose.NET to the decision to choose SQL or C or even Java. Even though they have their problems, each of those systems has multiple suppliers and it will be possible, if for example your Java supplier has a bad security record, to migrate to a different one which is more responsive. That gives a more solid environment and a better chance of long term success.
An "agile" project cannot fail and cost Billions because it must always deliver runnable software with a maximum of a few weeks delay
Of course an agile project can fail. Anything can fail.
Failing to read the article is one thing. Failing to read the summary another. Failing to read the comment you are responding to is worse, but somewhat traditional. However, failing to read the quote you yourself choose from the comment you are responing to is... is... uh special.
I'm not saying that agile can't fail. I'm saying that repeated early regular failure is a key part of agile. You are supposed to deliver "working" software all the time. Early on in the project that software may have very limited features and value, however it is supposed to always add something of value to the users life. If you fail to do that for a period of several months then your project has already failed and should be cancelled for a cost which cannot be more than a few tens of kilo pounds.
In order to fail and cost Billions they must have been a very long way from doing agile development.
The trouble is, you can have software that runs and passes some tests, yet still does not meet all of the mandatory requirements for the project and therefore may have no value at all in the real world.
The agile word they say is "Working software". "Runs and passes some tests" does not match my meaning of working software.
It's just not true, and therefore neither is the claim that agile projects can't fail as a result.
I see this a bit differently. I take the "working software" bit as it is. I think this means that agile projects are mostly impossible for most things other than incremental software development of changes to pre-existing useful systems and that 90% of projects claiming to be "agile" actually aren't. However, more or less it seems to me we agree. The idea of delivering something that "runs and passes some tests" does not represent "inherent value" as you call it. I don't believe that software is working unless it delivers what you call "inherent value".
This is not an area where it is possible to give "a cite" since there are whole genres of literature covering this topic alone. If you haven't read."The Mythical Man Month" (please note; the book has a Wikipedia page; this is not an Amazon link) then that is where you should start. Not because it is complete, not because it is up to date, but because it will make you realise that the problems of today's IT were already fully described in the '70s and that our advances in the last decades have been incremental and mostly small.
Next time you drive over a bridge, be glad they used a waterfall-like development paradigm.
Bridges do not work the same as software development. Whilst each individual bridge has some differences in environment and location, in general you are just repeating a structure which has already been build long ago. In sofware the equivalent of building a new bridge is the "cp -ar" command. Agile is mostly designed to address development of new features on pre-existing software which is completely different.
Just because the failure of one project is caused by.NET does not mean that a project not based on.NET is going to succeed. In fact, traditionally 80% of software projects fail.
This project is clearly failing for the second from last reason. It is also failing because it is not an "agile project". An "agile" project cannot fail and cost Billions because it must always deliver runnable software with a maximum of a few weeks delay if you use some "semi agile" process like scrum or immediately any point if you use some true agile process.
Once you deviate from "Working software" for more than a couple of sprints (everybody can make a mistake) then you are no longer doing agile. I have seen so many "agile" projects which seem to define "Working" as meaning something like "a prototype which would never work at full scale" and so they have never addressed the major problems of their class of system.
If they are "billions" of pounds down whilst doing agile, then they should have already delivered plenty of working systems and have hundreds of happy users. In this case they are a "success" even if they were a bit slower and more expensive than some other projects. If, however, they really haven't delivered anything then what they were doing was an unplanned disaster using "agile" as an excuse for not having a proper plan.
Whilst I know that the "waterfall" method of development is famed for it's failures. Whilst I know that those failures are spectacular and huge. I really don't see how you deliver, for example, 5% of a working mobile phone network. You just have to have a big interlocked plan with a working phone, transmitter, backend, management and interconnection all planned together. I don't believe that such a thing can be done in a true "agile" way and pretending that you are doing it in an agile way is a dangerous fantasy. Only once you have a working network can you start to improve it in Agile increments.
Actually, as a person who has previously slammed you for your trolling, can I just say that this is about the most insightful criticism you have made of Linux and you are very largely right. Let me also give you the hint you need to pass your test.
The hardware is Red Hat certified (from five years ago)
The OS you use is the latest stable Red Hat from five years ago.
You are only allowed to change to a more recent major release if the hardware is also certified on the new release (though in real life this will almost always work too - Red Hat keep old hardware in their test suites)
This is a real practical problem for users. The correct solution is properly supported dedicated Linux hardware.
The 0,9 branch of vespucci has (limited) relation support.
Ah thanks; it seems limited means "no longer breaks OSM, so you can use it safely without breaking things". That's exactly the minimum needed. I guess I have to download and try it....
Lack of Android offline support is one of the biggest barriers I have to editing.
Slashdot Mirror
How about total lack of competence combined with arrogance backing up the lack of information transfer from the Dutch? The original doctor mentioned that the Saudi labs checked for swine flu and then stopped working, which was the point at which he sent the sample abroad. The Saudis mention that there was then a multi-month delay before they were informed of the result from the Dutch lab. Whilst they shouldn't have been waiting, incompetence is impossible to avoid and so the Dutch get the blame for that part of the delay.
By the time the Saudis have had the delay and start looking for the virus, it seems the patients were dead or cured, so it's more difficult to find. When they finally do that, they find that most of the main international labs already have MTA agreements with the Dutch lab. Whilst I don't know if they make any legal difference in theory, I'm sure that any lab has to think carefully before accepting a separate sample and having MTA like obligations in two directions. The risk of a lawsuit is clearly there.
Overall neither side looks good, however it's very clear that patents and IP rights generally are behind the whole problem. If they aren't eliminated from the equation somehow there's a real risk that a future epidemic will take hold where it could have been easily stopped if there were less of a delay.
After which I can't see how anyone can claim that this MTA doesn't slow down research. Think about the fact that producing and selling a vaccine is a "commercial purpose". Pharmaceutical companies do not operate as charities.
The Saudis don't want the material transferred from their country except by a special mechanism which guarantees them the Patent rights.
Er.. not really right, it's a dutch genetics lab that has a sample of the virus, and are making people who use the data or sample sign an MTA (Material Transfer Agreement), that basically says you can't do commercial things with it without paying them, non-comercial research stuff all fine.
From this article hare
Basically the Saudis and the Dutch lab are both fighting over the IP rights.
The fishy bit seems to be that the Saudi's didn't seem to want the rest of the world to know they had a little disease outbreak, and it reads a bit like they were trying to supress anything to do with it, and now seem to be making excuses.
(And none of this stops you taking your own sample from a parient with the virus and doing your own genetic analysis...
I would be really really interested to the reason for this. Your suggestion is possible; Look at the quotes in my other comment though and you see that part of the delay is probably because they simply didn't realise they had a new disease. The most interesting bit though is that it seems that they only just agreed to a new transfer
(from this Alarabiya article.) and note this, from the original article (with my emphasis)
In other words; the Saudis now believe that they have a legal basis for control, even if they share. Before they were worried about this. And notice, the same article mentions that the Indonesians did exactly that so this is not something that's being thought about for the first time.
One suspects that you did not read the article... which is normal for slashdot, but given your username I would have expected different ;)
I took my username specifically to remind me to read the article. In this case, the trollish bit is that I read not just the original article but a few more. The accusation is good though; keep it up and keep trolling all of us with it whenver you can.
RTFA. They didn't patent it, they're not blocking anyone.
(from this article)
The problem is with Saudi-Arabia, not with the Dutch lab.
(same source)
(article linked from summary above)
The article is borderline slander, but the summary is outright misleading.
That's a strong statement you are making there.
The problem isn't with a Dutch lab that asks for payment in return for results and a cut of the potential profit. The problem is with the Saudi government that fires people who actually try to alert the world.
Why does the problem have to be one or the other? Why can't it be both, but especially the involvement of patents in medicine and especially in patenting pre-existing natural gene sequences and their derived products? For clarity I deleted a section of your post where I have no comment
It's not a patent It's a Material Transfer Agreement that means you agree to some restrictions including sharing / ceding patent rights. (That's OK, it's Timothy, we don't exactly expect accuracy here.)
I hate to be the first Slashdotter to defend our editors, but he didn't say "a patent". He said "obstacle to treatment: Patents". And in this case it's 100% right if you read carefully.
The Saudis don't want the material transferred from their country except by a special mechanism which guarantees them the Patent rights. That is slowing down the rate at which the virus gets to people. The lab which has a sample doesn't want to distribute it without special agreements about patents. Again, this slows down the transfer. If the lab was not motivated by patents then it could simply say "all patents based on this material must be shared freely and without patents", however they don't do that.
In all cases; if there were no potential future patents involved then the information could be shared easily and quickly. Patents and greed about them are the problem here.
Just ignore the trolls. Sometimes even me. Responding to them doesn't do any good unless you just occasionally enjoy a good flame war for the fun of it, in which case you need to be lots ruder than that.
BTW; what rubs me up the wrong way about Sarah's posting is really this
Ever since Knuth designed web and espoused Literate Programming there has been no possible way for a person properly educated in CS to not know that the main problem of software is communication with other human beings. I mentioned agile a bit glibly (it's a 1st post; it has to be fast and funny) but I really mean it as a strong comment to this overall. Agile software development process which was designed very much to talk about how people work together and the founders of it put this very explicitly in their manifesto.
Even those two movements are themselves just statements of ideas other people had done often before. Either Sarah is ignorant of this or she deliberately picked a bunch of methodologies which are trying to solve different problems and ignoring the ones which are related to her topic. Either thing would be a bad sign. If you are just getting into this subject then you should start reading up around the many interesting ideas related to this that have been around before. Recent (since the 90s at least) programming language design has been very much based around the idea of programming languages as human to human communication.
people over processes; how deep.
The number that I do believe is that paid app usage downloaded from Apple's store is much higher than the same thing from Google play. However that's a Google vs Apple financial comparison and isn't the one relevant to my arguments. For Apple devices the only software source is Apple's app store. For Android devices there are many sources; direct download; Amazon; 3rd party stores; Free software repositories like F-droid etc. This quite likely more than accounts for differences in the number of apps installed per device etc. which have been reported in the media. Remember especially that the Android users who have the most apps are also the ones who will be most likely to have a rooted device where at least some of the apps will be invisible to google. I think that these are completely missed in most reports on Android software usage but are things which will have a strong influence on the platforms' futures.
If you want to maximise revenue on your first version of a proprietary app, I guess that you might still be better to go with Apple App store. Even here I am not sure. If you are trying to reach the maximum number of people with your app, I would suspect that Android is already a clear winner.
Now, the final question is, which will give the better long term ROI. I would guess that we are already at the stage where revenue in Google play will overtake revenue in Apple's app store in the lifetime of any reasonable app. In which case, it seems to me that the that the people going for iOS are just making a mistake because they haven't yet realised that things already changed or are doing it because it's easier for them at this stage than converting over. That decision will change soon.
So tell me again how killer robots are new?
This isn't a true quantitative change but the qualitative change is enough to make this worth reconsidering seriously. The Soviet Union's automated retaliatory systems which were designed to strike back of the Soviet leadership were all killed would probably also come into this category in many ways.
You point to a page which starts talking about smartphones as if they were melons, but in this case you are not talking about melons. Overall the article shows a serious lack of knowlege about the industry. These are smartphones and they work differently. In the case of smartphones, market share really is winning and you should remenber that that is exactly what kept Nokia dominant in the market from around 2000 to 2012 even as their technology lead was quite dubious. So far in the industry, market share dominance has only been lost not won; In Motorola's case by failing to transfer to digital. In Ericsson's case by failing to secure their logistics supplies against disaster. In Nokia's case basically by suicide. Apple doesn't count since they never actually achieved dominance; their situation is closer to that of HTC, Sony-Ericsson or Motorola recently which fought hard, came close, but could never defeat a bigger opponent.
The main point is simply the scale effect. There are a huge number of costs in the smartphone market which are fixed. These are, for example, development of hardware and underlying software. Some of these, such as making a new device driver for a camera, have to be done once per model of phone. Some of these, such as adding a bluetooth device driver, or improving the user interface, have to be done once for the entire OS type. Since these costs are spread across all Android users, that reduces the cost of the phone massively which means that the manufacturer can sell it cheaper whilst at the same time making more profit. Note that Samsung made a huge profit on Android phones.
Android manufacturers, like the PC market around 2000, are somewhat fragmented and use a number of different processor and technology vendors. At small scale that could be a problem since they have to go individually and negotiate prices. However, the Android market some time ago went beyond this to the stage that there are many different competing suppliers. This means that the producer of an Android phone could just sit there making small design changes and adding new technologies as they are delivered by the suppliers. Their phone would still improve as fast as the competitors using other systems.
The final most important point is that, Android just has become the standard software platform. If you are a big company and you want to reach 60% of your customers with a new App, in most countries you can simply produce an Android application and you will get there. All other platforms, even iOS, will just be a small incremental change that frankly isn't worth it until you know exactly how successful your app will be. Android just is, now, the standard platform to start on. New App development will be done there and so all other platforms will lag behind.
The biggest weakness of market dominance would be if, like Apple, the Android manufacturers became lazy and stopped improving now that they are dominant. Samsung might sit there doing nothing for a year or two, just producing an S5 slightly upgraded from the S4 and raking in the profits. However, that's the great thing about Android being multi-sources. Since HTC stopped concentrating on Windows phones and went back to Android seriously, there's a real alternative to Samsung. With Motorola actually looking like they might comeback, there's another alternative. All this means that, even with market dominance from Android, there will likely be more advances.
This is a bit sad in a way. Android is not the best mobile system ever (that goes to Nokia's old Maemo/Meego on the Nokia N9) I think that the system which challenges Android in future will have to be Android compatible.
It is run by people;
Oh my god. You don't say. Here I thought it was run by intelligent giraffes from Alpha Centuri. All these years of deception. I'll just give up now. Your insights have suddenly made me realise none of us are worthy to inhabit the same world as you.
one sees an obvious bias.
It gets even stranger. Not just a site with "people" but those "people" have viewpoints. They write as if those views are true. Probably you are implying that the actually believe those views. Really? Amazing. What insight; what brilliance; a new level for mankind. You should apply to run Harvard. I'm sure they will take you as their leader on the basis of this comment alone.
Keep digging, Skippy, I am sure you are going to bury me in that hole you are currently have to look up to see out of.
Wow; such originality; such vision. I am sure that if we searched all the sites on the entire internet it would turn out that nobody had ever previously thought of such a comment. An answer to every question for which the commenter is too stupid to come up with a witty retort. A simple way to do down every point for which the poster can't think of a response. You are a genius; so full of yourself and yet so empty. Astounding.
No, you called him a shill because he called out Slashdot on it's hypocrisy.
Look; I am calling you out because you are stupid. I've already ripped you apart on this. Let me spell it out again. Web sites are not hypocritical. People are hypocritical. There are more than two people here. The fact that Alice posts "it's okay for me to steal" and Bob posts "it's not okay for you to steal" does not mean that Slashdot is hypocritical. It means that there is more than one view here.
Oh, and calling PHP new doesn't make it new. It also doesn't make it any good. That is a language which has been broken for years and I have no idea why you would want to boost it.
There is nothing wrong with that, business is business. But I find it extremely hypocritical to do all of the above while "doing no evil" and pretending to be a friend of open source and open standards at the same time.
How do you manage to keep the two bits picked out bold in your mind at the same time. Doesn't it hurt?
What serious disasters? Do you have any references that of any, especially ones that say it was because of .NET?
The big ones I know about are mostly in-house / intranet type things I wouldn't talk about. There are hints on the internet; look up things "intranet failed" and then correlate with previous big announcements from Microsoft or their partner's .NET marketing teams.
if for example your Java supplier has a bad security record, to migrate to a different one which is more responsive
Like who?
There are at least three major commercial strands of certifiable Java; Oracle; OpenJDK (Ubuntu / Red Hat) and IBM. This is before you start talking about specialist versions like the Java compilers used to make software for Android. You can find a comparison on Wikipedia. Also consider things like gcj
If you are thinking of migrating away from Java, gcj is great. You can port to it and then dispose of the JVM completely. Otherwise it's got major compatibility problems which limit it as a mainstream alternative.
Of the above, probably the most important is Red Hat's OpenJDK based systems. Although these are based on the same code base as Oracle, they put the JVMs inside SELinux sandboxes. You can then partition these as you wish for major security benefits.
He said something you don't like, specifically pointing out the hypocrisy of Slashdot, so he is a shill. You are proving the GP's point.
I called him a shill because he came in with a non sequitur post bringing in Red Hat when nobody is accusing Red Hat of being responsible for this and to do so (given the number of successful Red Hat based systems) would be stupid. When there were big public .NET failures, the very reasonable accusation was that, by choosing a new and immature system which had not been proven in big systems (and still really hasn't), the IT companies were being suckered by Microsoft. Probably mostly because senior management were doing favours for their friends.
Accusing a web site of hypocrisy would be so obviously stupid that not even he did that directly. There is not just you and some other guy. There are many people who have many different views. Obviously what one person says about one topic has very little chance of agreeing with what another person says about an unrelated topic, as in this case.
Until Microsoft publicly forswears the use of Astroturfing, something they have been repeatedly proven to be involved in, it is reasonable to accuse irrational supporters of theirs of being shills. Other people who want, for some reason, to promote views favourable to Microsoft and find themselves being caught up in this should demand that Microsoft stop using money to influence the public debate and should accept that, until Microsoft does that, Microsoft is limiting their right to be taken seriously.
Exactly. You cannot use Agile to build a 100-mile canal, as the whole thing would be useless even if you completed 99 miles.
If the system cannot be useful until a large set of functions are in place and working, then it is not suitable for Agile, period.
Thanks; that's a wonderful analogy for this case.
What is really instructive is to think what a "true agile" project would do in this case:
First they would start out trying to dig a Canal with spades or something similar. At the same time they would start wondering why they are doing this. Realising they can't dig a canal in a reasonable time, they would instead look for an alternative approach.
Pretty soon they would realise that a) the aim of the canal was to transport things and that b) they can't deliver a canal in a single small increment. Instead they would buy some horses and transport a small amount of stuff with those. Within a sprint or two the would be working on trying to improve the amount they could transport by smoothing out the path from place to place.
Slowly but surely they would work towards building a road instead of a canal. They would use trucks for transport. The end solution would be ready quicker than the canal, would work faster, but would have nowhere near the capacity and would be completely useless for shipping.
As "Agile" people they would see their project as a success: they delivered something of value to their customers. As "Waterfall" people others would see them as failures. They didn't achieve what they were "meant to" achieve.
Tell me what's wrong or right.
Stop being dumb and bigoted.
I think you failed to notice the shill posting that I was responding to. I didn't bring up .NET to bash it, rather to respond to someone who was trying to compare it to RedHat which is a system that .NET clearly doesn't approach in any of maturity, flexibility or stability.
There are tens of thousands of .NET projects if not more that have succeeded.
That's hardly a recommendation. There are hundreds of thousands of projects that have been based on PHP. There are probably millions of such projects which are based on excels. The fact is that almost every problem system has lots of "success" stories. Many of those would have been much more successful if they chose a less problematic system but that doesn't mean that they aren't in their own terms successful.
Look at some key criteria for choosing a good system
When people choose .NET, they are choosing a system which is locked into one vendor. They are choosing a system which has a record of a number of serious disasters and lack of performance at higher system demand levels. Most of all, they are choosing a system from a vendor which is more willing to pay shills to turn up on forums astroturfing their success than they are willing to solve the underlying problems of their system. This doesn't guarantee failure any more than choosing a solid system guarantees success. However, it can be a single decision point which causes some given project to fail.
Compare the decision to choose .NET to the decision to choose SQL or C or even Java. Even though they have their problems, each of those systems has multiple suppliers and it will be possible, if for example your Java supplier has a bad security record, to migrate to a different one which is more responsive. That gives a more solid environment and a better chance of long term success.
An "agile" project cannot fail and cost Billions because it must always deliver runnable software with a maximum of a few weeks delay
Of course an agile project can fail. Anything can fail.
Failing to read the article is one thing. Failing to read the summary another. Failing to read the comment you are responding to is worse, but somewhat traditional. However, failing to read the quote you yourself choose from the comment you are responing to is... is ... uh special.
I'm not saying that agile can't fail. I'm saying that repeated early regular failure is a key part of agile. You are supposed to deliver "working" software all the time. Early on in the project that software may have very limited features and value, however it is supposed to always add something of value to the users life. If you fail to do that for a period of several months then your project has already failed and should be cancelled for a cost which cannot be more than a few tens of kilo pounds.
In order to fail and cost Billions they must have been a very long way from doing agile development.
The trouble is, you can have software that runs and passes some tests, yet still does not meet all of the mandatory requirements for the project and therefore may have no value at all in the real world.
The agile word they say is "Working software". "Runs and passes some tests" does not match my meaning of working software.
It's just not true, and therefore neither is the claim that agile projects can't fail as a result.
I see this a bit differently. I take the "working software" bit as it is. I think this means that agile projects are mostly impossible for most things other than incremental software development of changes to pre-existing useful systems and that 90% of projects claiming to be "agile" actually aren't. However, more or less it seems to me we agree. The idea of delivering something that "runs and passes some tests" does not represent "inherent value" as you call it. I don't believe that software is working unless it delivers what you call "inherent value".
I'd want to see a cite for that one.
This is not an area where it is possible to give "a cite" since there are whole genres of literature covering this topic alone. If you haven't read ."The Mythical Man Month" (please note; the book has a Wikipedia page; this is not an Amazon link) then that is where you should start. Not because it is complete, not because it is up to date, but because it will make you realise that the problems of today's IT were already fully described in the '70s and that our advances in the last decades have been incremental and mostly small.
Next time you drive over a bridge, be glad they used a waterfall-like development paradigm.
Bridges do not work the same as software development. Whilst each individual bridge has some differences in environment and location, in general you are just repeating a structure which has already been build long ago. In sofware the equivalent of building a new bridge is the "cp -ar" command. Agile is mostly designed to address development of new features on pre-existing software which is completely different.
Just because the failure of one project is caused by .NET does not mean that a project not based on .NET is going to succeed. In fact, traditionally 80% of software projects fail.
This project is clearly failing for the second from last reason. It is also failing because it is not an "agile project". An "agile" project cannot fail and cost Billions because it must always deliver runnable software with a maximum of a few weeks delay if you use some "semi agile" process like scrum or immediately any point if you use some true agile process.
Once you deviate from "Working software" for more than a couple of sprints (everybody can make a mistake) then you are no longer doing agile. I have seen so many "agile" projects which seem to define "Working" as meaning something like "a prototype which would never work at full scale" and so they have never addressed the major problems of their class of system.
If they are "billions" of pounds down whilst doing agile, then they should have already delivered plenty of working systems and have hundreds of happy users. In this case they are a "success" even if they were a bit slower and more expensive than some other projects. If, however, they really haven't delivered anything then what they were doing was an unplanned disaster using "agile" as an excuse for not having a proper plan.
Whilst I know that the "waterfall" method of development is famed for it's failures. Whilst I know that those failures are spectacular and huge. I really don't see how you deliver, for example, 5% of a working mobile phone network. You just have to have a big interlocked plan with a working phone, transmitter, backend, management and interconnection all planned together. I don't believe that such a thing can be done in a true "agile" way and pretending that you are doing it in an agile way is a dangerous fantasy. Only once you have a working network can you start to improve it in Agile increments.
It is, I've no idea why the British press do this. (Maybe they do it elsewhere as well, I dunno.)
Profit. This is the most profitable way to put the news.
Actually, as a person who has previously slammed you for your trolling, can I just say that this is about the most insightful criticism you have made of Linux and you are very largely right. Let me also give you the hint you need to pass your test.
This is a real practical problem for users. The correct solution is properly supported dedicated Linux hardware.
The 0,9 branch of vespucci has (limited) relation support.
Ah thanks; it seems limited means "no longer breaks OSM, so you can use it safely without breaking things". That's exactly the minimum needed. I guess I have to download and try it....
Lack of Android offline support is one of the biggest barriers I have to editing.
What is the biggest shame is that the most functional Android OSM editor seems to break relations so apparently isn't good to use. Does anyone know more about this? Any idea how to fix it?