Sorry, I misunderstood your point, however, my "here we go..." wasn't actually targeted at you... I was just making a prediction of how the thread would evolve.
Actually I agree that the Windows VM system completely sucks, but given the number of pro-windoze types that inhabit/. these days, I didn't want to fan _those_ flames.
Well, here we go with another "I've got lots of RAM I don't need swap" thread:
Well then, it's a good thing I didn't say that. I said that the Windows swap system sucks. Especially when there's more than enough memory for it to operate efficiently. When I have only 40% of my memory wired, yet Windows is swapping like mad because it's too aggressive that's a bad implementation.
At least Windows XP and Vista don't auto-swap on minimize like NT4 used to do. It was always "fun" minimizing a J2EE server to let it run in the background, only to have to wait for 2-3 minutes when I decided to check the log. For bonus points, accidentally click the minimize button. It was totally awesome waiting for Windows to finish swapping it out, only to swap it right back in after immediately trying to restore.
In my experience, BSD, Linux, and Solaris all have far better paging systems. OS X's system is figgety, but it's not any worse than Windows'.
You are somewhat correct, however Solaris X86 has been around since 1992. And although still IBM hardware, you could at one time buy AIX for PS/2 systems. (for the young'uns in the audience that's not a playstation)
It's Unix-ish. Try compiling X11 (or any of hundreds of other POSIX compliant software packages) from source on a Mac. I'll wait.
That depends on how you define Unix. Linux is Unix-ish. I consider any OS that is certified to be UNIX 03 to be Unix. And why compile? Maybe I'm lazy, but I don't feel like doing any unnecessary steps. Just install it from the OS CD; It is not installed by default. Compiling it to me is like compiling a kernel. Sure, I could try to do that, but in the end, I did a lot of work that I may need to do. As for POSIX compliant software, there will be some that don't run on OS X just like there are some that don't run on Solaris, IRIX, etc. Now if you could provide an example, someone could probably help you fix it.
It's capable of running its own proprietary OS that is specifically designed to not run on any otherwise capable hardware...That would be like Halliburton putting sugar in all its petroleum products and designing a car that runs on sugar-gas, calling it a "feature".
Wait a minute, proprietary OS on specifically designed platform? Haven't you just described Unix? Only recently has Sun opened Solaris to non-Sun hardware. IBM has never released AIX for anything but their own servers. So is OS X Unix or not because you have just contradicted yourself.
I agree that Apple's vendor lock-in strategy is annoying, but if you're going to complain about it you should at least get your facts straight.
It is only since linux has become somewhat pervasive that it seems as though you should be able to pick up some "Unix" source code and compile it there, and compile it elsewhere with equal ease. Unix vendors have always played the vendor lock-in game; one of the causes of the original "Unix wars" (and the unfortunate outcome of Micro$oft squeezing through the middle) was that porting from one Unix variant to another _always_ took significant effort. Even today portability between Linux, *BSD, Solaris and say HP-UX is non-trivial (though not as bad as it once was).
EFI is only a very small part of what is different about a Mac vs a regular PC.
EFI is Intel's beast, developed a _long_ time before Apple changed away from PowerPC. It was originally developed in conjunction with HP for use as firmware for the Itanium platform, the only thing that's been holding back it's ability to completely replace that crufty pile of dog snot called the BIOS is Micro$ofts incompetence.
Indeed the ability of the OSX86 project to get OS X to boot on a regular PC is composed of three parts:
Booting OS X
Driver compatibility
DRM-style platform locking
the first is due to Apple's use of EFI but is easily circumvented, the second requires a bit of work but can hardly be described as vendor lock-in, it is the third that you are complaining about and it is done by encrypting system binaries with a key stored in the SMC, nothing to do with EFI (and nothing to do with TPM either!)
OS X running on Intel is 100% UNIX 03 certified, not Unix-ish.
Compatibility is still iffy. I dare you to try to compile X11 or mod_python from source. Doing either is a hard trek, if you can do it at all.
Regarding your sugar-gas analogy, the Mac can run on gas, sugar gas, or just sugar, whichever you prefer.
You misunderstand the point of the analogy: the car doesn't run on sugar; it runs on gas, and the sugar is an artificial limitation intentionally imposed by the manufacturer, just like Apple and their god-damned EFI chips.
That's why it's flexible. Get sick of OS X? Run Linux or Windows without a problem.
Why would I pay a premium for intentionallylimited hardware only to end up running an OS I could use on any other machine in the world?
I also feel I should point out, I am not a PC fan-boy. I use a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu PC at home and an iMac at work (which i'm using at the moment). My biggest problem with Apple is that they go out of their way to limit the capability of their products, to the detriment of the consumer (such as EFI). They've done the same intentional vendor lock-in for iPods and now for iPhones.
Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap.:-/
Well, here we go with another "I've got lots of RAM I don't need swap" thread:
What's going to happen when you have a runaway application that allocates all of your RAM at the expense of other apps, sure it well eventually be OOM'd but you loose swaps' ability to lessen the effect via LRU.
More-so is the fallacy that without swap there will be no disk activity when freemem falls near to zero. In actual fact the kernel will start purging part of the buffer-cache, which means that everytime you access a page of a binary or of a library it'll have to re-fetch from the filesystem.
Unless of course, your binaries and libraries are all stored on ramdisk too you'll hear the click of servo motors, and the whirr of platters.
likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
Unfortunately SMB is not the most desirable protocol from a security or performance standpoint.
AFP hasn't been updated to support any filesystem metadata except for resource forks, making it not particualarly useful, and...
Apple's NFS implementation is so buggy that it is completely unusable.
But if it was *genuine* makes you think that maybe us australians are pretty serious about keeping companies honest about their marketing.
Oh please! Cut the jingoistic crap! We are no better or worse than anyone else when it comes to keeping politicians/companies/marketing/sales droids honest.
Individuals will either stand up for whatever they feel they are entitled to, or they will be obedient little sheeple.
Actually the laws governing this are state determined by state government legistlation.
In NSW (where I live) it _used_ to be the case that retailers were obliged to sell at the advertised price, this was changed a decade or so ago.
Unfortunately, the consumer protection laws were comletely watered down; I can see the argument for a mistake in an advertisment, but the laws covering warranties are now effectively non-existent. If you have a problem during the warranty period the retailer can pass-the-buck onto the manufacturer or distributer and of course when they inevitably turn out to be in another state or country the only recourse you have is to file a civil suit.
I found this out the hard way, and was told by the NSW dept of consumer affairs (or whatever they call themselves these days) that they were unable to do anything other than contact the retailer on my behalf, the retailer told them to get stuffed, so they said the only way forward was to sue.
In Australia the retailer is obliged to honour any published price, even if the price is a mistake or a typo in the printing of a catalogue. Failure to do so will leave the retailer liable to legal action if enough people raise complaints to the ACCC.
that when I download the movie version of the comic version of the Themopylae inspired battle with Gerard Butler cast as NewYorkCountryLawyer and Jack Valenti as Xerxes that I'll get a John Doe leter?
Perhaps they were trying to save precious disk space by recording the number of cases in a byte-wide field and the database is now suffering from an overflow exception?
Dell tried that but strangely enough, not tying it to Dell hardware spelt its' doom.
Apple didn't write an OS and then tie it to their hardware... they designed a machine and then wrote an OS specifically for that machine.
They are under no legal obligation to make it available to other builders.
I wish Dell would make an Inspiron Operating System for their Inspirons, but they don't. I wish Lenovo would make a Thinkpad Operating system for their Thinkpads, but they don't.
As it stands, Apple is the only one brave enough to tell Microsoft "No thanks, we don't need to outsource our OS. We can write one ourselves."
No wonder Michael Dell isn't as powerful as Steve Jobs.
As long as you use standards-based file formats, physical media, connectors, and communications protocols the OS is irrelivant to the user. So why NOT custom-build one for each machine?
DVD Players, Microwaves, and dishwahers all have operating systems. No one complains that you can't take the one designed for the dishwasher and put it in the microwave.
Solaris only works on Apple Mac Supercomputeres. Plus it is not for Christians who believe in God and also Jesus Christ. Because if you use Microsotf you are not a Jew or a Mohammadean infedil. Please everyone remember to cast your votes for McKaner or OBOMA. They are Christians who love Jesus and Unixes of the Holy GHOST.
I've worked with well over 30 languages in the last 20 or so years, covering the entire gamut you describe and not once have I ever seen Prolog referred to as imperative.
Prolog is a declarative language (making it a cousin of functional languages) based on the resolution of horn clauses.
Imperative languages are based upon the idea of destructive update of state, echoing the Von Neumann architecture of the machine upon which they likely run.
In other words, on a diagram of programming language paradigms they are most likely polar opposites.
I'd consider the minimum for a really good programmer to include at least a project or two's worth of exposure to:
At least one assembly language or pseudo-asm.
At least one mid-level pointer-driven language (C/C++/etc)
At least one statically typed functional language (ML/Haskell/etc)
At least one dynamically typed functional language (Lisp/Scheme/etc)
At least one dynamically typed OO language (Smalltalk/Python/ruby/etc)
At least one higher-level statically typed OO language (Java/Ada/C#/etc)
That still leaves some holes that could be tricky to pick up, and ideally you'd know:
At least one stack-based language (Forth/Postscript/etc)
At least one imperative programming language (Prolog/etc)
At least one DBC-centered language (Eiffel/Sather/etc)
At least one concurrency-oriented language (erlang, etc)
But you can have a long and successful career as a top-shelf programmer without really needing that latter group.
And yes, those monikers are a bit arbitrary; you can do full OO in Lisp, functional programming in Python, etc. So you can get away with a lot fewer languages than there are on the list, as long as you learn the different programming models. It tends to be a little easier to learn a model with a language that's been used that way traditionally.
Actually, it's a common misconception that "cow emissions" are from cow's farting, it's actually the way a ruminant will burp during the processing of a cud that produces large volumes of methane (which is of course more troubling than CO2 emissions)
They won't be making a pile of cash out of trees.
Can't resist:
1) Identify a possible source of trouble
2) Invent a fix, no matter how convoluted it is
3) Patent it and market it
4) Profit
Just wonder how much do we have to wait for a fart capture device (cow farts are actually a major source of trouble)
This is incorrect, to my knowledge. Universities and other institutions engaged in what is essentially publicly funded research do not keep control of the patents that result from research: rather it's the individual researchers themselves who retain control of such patents.
Technically you are correct.
However, you will generally find that when enrolling for a research degree the application form will require you to sign over intellectual property rights arising from your research to the university (or more likely an institution within the university which just happens to also be a registered company wholly owned by the university).
If you don't sign they either don't enroll you, or expect you to pay the full value of the tuition fee (if you're in a country where government provided tuition scholarships are managed by the university).
What do you suppose they do with those patents? They start an outside company not affiliated with the university to capitalize on the patent(s) and reap personal profit from it. The university basically doesn't get - or isn't legally entitled to - a dime of that profit. This has been happening for decades.
Frankly, such patentable innovations discovered by virtue of public funding should be registered to The Public Domain (or Public Trust), rather than to individual researchers or even universities. If it's bragging rights they want, they can still proclaim their involvement. If public resources, taxes or the equivalent, made the research possible in the first place, though, then no individual person or institution should be able to claim any exclusive legal ownership of that little piece of knowledge.
(Frankly no one should be able to claim exclusive legal ownership of any bit of knowledge, IMO, but I'm throwing the dissenters a bone here.)
Re:You had me right up to "Agile."
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Abso-freakin-lutely!
Agile isn't such a bad idea in principle but you tend to find that people who rave-on about it seem to think it somehow relieves you of the burden of creating project plans, software specifications and the like.
For some reason, whenever I see that word in reference to programming, I want to run screaming in the opposite direction. Does that make me a bad person?
actually, I read an article about nano-punch cards that could store like 800 GB per square inch. They said making 0 impacts or 1 smooth areas would be simple even down to like 10 nm apart. I really hope we don't see that ever.
Why not? If it's cheaper then magnetic or capacitive techniques... bring it on.
One thing that always amazes me about the comments coming from the politically conservative Americans on slashdot is the useage of phrases like "leftist" or "socialist" when referring to the USA's Democratic party...
In most other western countries the Democrats would be considered at best a centrist party but more likely a right wing party (and of course by that basis the GOP are considered by most to positively looney)
Now I'm not trying to troll here (honest) but I really think perhaps this might give you some insight as to why many people in the rest of the world (especially in continental europe) will always say that americans are so different.
Now that's not to say that the US has it wrong, but maybe it aught to be food for thought?
Either you're a leftist troll, or somebody with a big heart who has simply been seriously deceived by the Establishment. You might want to check out this pie chart. We spend about 2/3 of our budget on "programs of [pretended] social uplift." These programs do not, for the most part, "uplift" people. But they do ensure that Democrats keep getting elected. Which is their real purpose.
There are programs designed to ensure Republicans get re-elected too. They're just as evil, but not nearly as expensive.
... I suspect that Damon (like many of us) have an aversion to giving the launch codes to someone who's beliefs include the idea that we are in the 'end times' and that somehow Jesus needs our help in bringing on armageddon.
If Palin were a moderate more traditional type of christian I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be this kind of fuss, after all there are plenty of examples of previous candidates (successful and otherwise).
OTOH, if say Biden was a _moderate_ Muslim I can see the GOP being all other him for the same reasons... then again a muslim vice-presidential candidate is about as likely as a black president or a female president... Oh Wait!:-P
It is both unfortunate and ironic that the United States' sociopolitical life is so dominated by something which its founding fathers were at great pains to explicitly single out as something that must be avoided at all costs. Of course the founding fathers were blinded by their enlightenment thinking into believing that religion could be reduced to the status of a personal system for moral guidance whereas the great majority of human history shows that, it is first and, in some parts of the world, foremost a political and legal system; Halakha or Sharia anoyone?
The doctrine of separation of church and state maybe etched in legal stone, but within the minds of the polity it is very blurred indeed.
At first I thought citing Matt Damon as a source was just another Team America reference about uppity actors, but then I read what he said.
Holy shit. How you believe we originated really matters on whether you should have control of nuclear codes?
Considering recent results from politicians with experience, I think I'll go for the hockey mom.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I misunderstood your point, however, my "here we go..." wasn't actually targeted at you... I was just making a prediction of how the thread would evolve.
Actually I agree that the Windows VM system completely sucks, but given the number of pro-windoze types that inhabit /. these days, I didn't want to fan _those_ flames.
Well then, it's a good thing I didn't say that. I said that the Windows swap system sucks. Especially when there's more than enough memory for it to operate efficiently. When I have only 40% of my memory wired, yet Windows is swapping like mad because it's too aggressive that's a bad implementation.
At least Windows XP and Vista don't auto-swap on minimize like NT4 used to do. It was always "fun" minimizing a J2EE server to let it run in the background, only to have to wait for 2-3 minutes when I decided to check the log. For bonus points, accidentally click the minimize button. It was totally awesome waiting for Windows to finish swapping it out, only to swap it right back in after immediately trying to restore.
In my experience, BSD, Linux, and Solaris all have far better paging systems. OS X's system is figgety, but it's not any worse than Windows'.
That depends on how you define Unix. Linux is Unix-ish. I consider any OS that is certified to be UNIX 03 to be Unix. And why compile? Maybe I'm lazy, but I don't feel like doing any unnecessary steps. Just install it from the OS CD; It is not installed by default. Compiling it to me is like compiling a kernel. Sure, I could try to do that, but in the end, I did a lot of work that I may need to do. As for POSIX compliant software, there will be some that don't run on OS X just like there are some that don't run on Solaris, IRIX, etc. Now if you could provide an example, someone could probably help you fix it.
Wait a minute, proprietary OS on specifically designed platform? Haven't you just described Unix? Only recently has Sun opened Solaris to non-Sun hardware. IBM has never released AIX for anything but their own servers. So is OS X Unix or not because you have just contradicted yourself.
I agree that Apple's vendor lock-in strategy is annoying, but if you're going to complain about it you should at least get your facts straight.
It is only since linux has become somewhat pervasive that it seems as though you should be able to pick up some "Unix" source code and compile it there, and compile it elsewhere with equal ease. Unix vendors have always played the vendor lock-in game; one of the causes of the original "Unix wars" (and the unfortunate outcome of Micro$oft squeezing through the middle) was that porting from one Unix variant to another _always_ took significant effort. Even today portability between Linux, *BSD, Solaris and say HP-UX is non-trivial (though not as bad as it once was).
EFI is only a very small part of what is different about a Mac vs a regular PC.
EFI is Intel's beast, developed a _long_ time before Apple changed away from PowerPC. It was originally developed in conjunction with HP for use as firmware for the Itanium platform, the only thing that's been holding back it's ability to completely replace that crufty pile of dog snot called the BIOS is Micro$ofts incompetence.
Indeed the ability of the OSX86 project to get OS X to boot on a regular PC is composed of three parts:
the first is due to Apple's use of EFI but is easily circumvented, the second requires a bit of work but can hardly be described as vendor lock-in, it is the third that you are complaining about and it is done by encrypting system binaries with a key stored in the SMC, nothing to do with EFI (and nothing to do with TPM either!)
OS X running on Intel is 100% UNIX 03 certified, not Unix-ish.
Compatibility is still iffy. I dare you to try to compile X11 or mod_python from source. Doing either is a hard trek, if you can do it at all.
Regarding your sugar-gas analogy, the Mac can run on gas, sugar gas, or just sugar, whichever you prefer.
You misunderstand the point of the analogy: the car doesn't run on sugar; it runs on gas, and the sugar is an artificial limitation intentionally imposed by the manufacturer, just like Apple and their god-damned EFI chips.
That's why it's flexible. Get sick of OS X? Run Linux or Windows without a problem.
Why would I pay a premium for intentionallylimited hardware only to end up running an OS I could use on any other machine in the world?
I also feel I should point out, I am not a PC fan-boy. I use a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu PC at home and an iMac at work (which i'm using at the moment). My biggest problem with Apple is that they go out of their way to limit the capability of their products, to the detriment of the consumer (such as EFI). They've done the same intentional vendor lock-in for iPods and now for iPhones.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
Well, here we go with another "I've got lots of RAM I don't need swap" thread:
What's going to happen when you have a runaway application that allocates all of your RAM at the expense of other apps, sure it well eventually be OOM'd but you loose swaps' ability to lessen the effect via LRU.
More-so is the fallacy that without swap there will be no disk activity when freemem falls near to zero. In actual fact the kernel will start purging part of the buffer-cache, which means that everytime you access a page of a binary or of a library it'll have to re-fetch from the filesystem.
Unless of course, your binaries and libraries are all stored on ramdisk too you'll hear the click of servo motors, and the whirr of platters.
(There's quite a long discussion of this here)
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
Unfortunately SMB is not the most desirable protocol from a security or performance standpoint.
AFP hasn't been updated to support any filesystem metadata except for resource forks, making it not particualarly useful, and...
Apple's NFS implementation is so buggy that it is completely unusable.
But if it was *genuine* makes you think that maybe us australians are pretty serious about keeping companies honest about their marketing.
Oh please! Cut the jingoistic crap! We are no better or worse than anyone else when it comes to keeping politicians/companies/marketing/sales droids honest.
Individuals will either stand up for whatever they feel they are entitled to, or they will be obedient little sheeple.
Actually the laws governing this are state determined by state government legistlation.
In NSW (where I live) it _used_ to be the case that retailers were obliged to sell at the advertised price, this was changed a decade or so ago.
Unfortunately, the consumer protection laws were comletely watered down; I can see the argument for a mistake in an advertisment, but the laws covering warranties are now effectively non-existent. If you have a problem during the warranty period the retailer can pass-the-buck onto the manufacturer or distributer and of course when they inevitably turn out to be in another state or country the only recourse you have is to file a civil suit.
I found this out the hard way, and was told by the NSW dept of consumer affairs (or whatever they call themselves these days) that they were unable to do anything other than contact the retailer on my behalf, the retailer told them to get stuffed, so they said the only way forward was to sue.
In Australia the retailer is obliged to honour any published price, even if the price is a mistake or a typo in the printing of a catalogue. Failure to do so will leave the retailer liable to legal action if enough people raise complaints to the ACCC.
that when I download the movie version of the comic version of the Themopylae inspired battle with Gerard Butler cast as NewYorkCountryLawyer and Jack Valenti as Xerxes that I'll get a John Doe leter?
Doesn't the DoJ know exactly how man?
Perhaps they were trying to save precious disk space by recording the number of cases in a byte-wide field and the database is now suffering from an overflow exception?
No one understands how the economy really works. Economists call that the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
They used anti-terror laws against Iceland, who are not at all terrorists.
When? Do you have a cite on this?
Apple didn't write an OS and then tie it to their hardware... they designed a machine and then wrote an OS specifically for that machine.
They are under no legal obligation to make it available to other builders.
I wish Dell would make an Inspiron Operating System for their Inspirons, but they don't. I wish Lenovo would make a Thinkpad Operating system for their Thinkpads, but they don't.
As it stands, Apple is the only one brave enough to tell Microsoft "No thanks, we don't need to outsource our OS. We can write one ourselves."
No wonder Michael Dell isn't as powerful as Steve Jobs.
As long as you use standards-based file formats, physical media, connectors, and communications protocols the OS is irrelivant to the user. So why NOT custom-build one for each machine?
DVD Players, Microwaves, and dishwahers all have operating systems. No one complains that you can't take the one designed for the dishwasher and put it in the microwave.
Someone is already working on bringing Microsoft Windows to the mainframe. Who could have imagined.
Solaris only works on Apple Mac Supercomputeres. Plus it is not for Christians who believe in God and also Jesus Christ. Because if you use Microsotf you are not a Jew or a Mohammadean infedil. Please everyone remember to cast your votes for McKaner or OBOMA. They are Christians who love Jesus and Unixes of the Holy GHOST.
I've worked with well over 30 languages in the last 20 or so years, covering the entire gamut you describe and not once have I ever seen Prolog referred to as imperative.
Prolog is a declarative language (making it a cousin of functional languages) based on the resolution of horn clauses.
Imperative languages are based upon the idea of destructive update of state, echoing the Von Neumann architecture of the machine upon which they likely run.
In other words, on a diagram of programming language paradigms they are most likely polar opposites.
I'd consider the minimum for a really good programmer to include at least a project or two's worth of exposure to:
At least one assembly language or pseudo-asm. At least one mid-level pointer-driven language (C/C++/etc) At least one statically typed functional language (ML/Haskell/etc) At least one dynamically typed functional language (Lisp/Scheme/etc) At least one dynamically typed OO language (Smalltalk/Python/ruby/etc) At least one higher-level statically typed OO language (Java/Ada/C#/etc)
That still leaves some holes that could be tricky to pick up, and ideally you'd know: At least one stack-based language (Forth/Postscript/etc) At least one imperative programming language (Prolog/etc) At least one DBC-centered language (Eiffel/Sather/etc) At least one concurrency-oriented language (erlang, etc)
But you can have a long and successful career as a top-shelf programmer without really needing that latter group.
And yes, those monikers are a bit arbitrary; you can do full OO in Lisp, functional programming in Python, etc. So you can get away with a lot fewer languages than there are on the list, as long as you learn the different programming models. It tends to be a little easier to learn a model with a language that's been used that way traditionally.
I'm sure I'm missing some areas, too.
They won't be making a pile of cash out of trees.
Can't resist:
1) Identify a possible source of trouble 2) Invent a fix, no matter how convoluted it is 3) Patent it and market it 4) Profit
Just wonder how much do we have to wait for a fart capture device (cow farts are actually a major source of trouble)
This is incorrect, to my knowledge. Universities and other institutions engaged in what is essentially publicly funded research do not keep control of the patents that result from research: rather it's the individual researchers themselves who retain control of such patents.
Technically you are correct.
However, you will generally find that when enrolling for a research degree the application form will require you to sign over intellectual property rights arising from your research to the university (or more likely an institution within the university which just happens to also be a registered company wholly owned by the university).
If you don't sign they either don't enroll you, or expect you to pay the full value of the tuition fee (if you're in a country where government provided tuition scholarships are managed by the university).
What do you suppose they do with those patents? They start an outside company not affiliated with the university to capitalize on the patent(s) and reap personal profit from it. The university basically doesn't get - or isn't legally entitled to - a dime of that profit. This has been happening for decades.
Frankly, such patentable innovations discovered by virtue of public funding should be registered to The Public Domain (or Public Trust), rather than to individual researchers or even universities. If it's bragging rights they want, they can still proclaim their involvement. If public resources, taxes or the equivalent, made the research possible in the first place, though, then no individual person or institution should be able to claim any exclusive legal ownership of that little piece of knowledge.
(Frankly no one should be able to claim exclusive legal ownership of any bit of knowledge, IMO, but I'm throwing the dissenters a bone here.)
For some reason, whenever I see that word in reference to programming, I want to run screaming in the opposite direction. Does that make me a bad person?
Would it have anything to do with the fact that the biggest software shops are Bangalore based?
There! Fixed that for you
Perhaps I should finally get around to putting my abacus and slide rule on eBay
...and that's only since I recently upgraded from a plugboard
Call me old fashioned, but I still use TOPS-20 with a teletype...
actually, I read an article about nano-punch cards that could store like 800 GB per square inch. They said making 0 impacts or 1 smooth areas would be simple even down to like 10 nm apart. I really hope we don't see that ever.
Why not? If it's cheaper then magnetic or capacitive techniques... bring it on.
Either you're a leftist troll, or somebody with a big heart who has simply been seriously deceived by the Establishment. You might want to check out this pie chart. We spend about 2/3 of our budget on "programs of [pretended] social uplift." These programs do not, for the most part, "uplift" people. But they do ensure that Democrats keep getting elected. Which is their real purpose.
There are programs designed to ensure Republicans get re-elected too. They're just as evil, but not nearly as expensive.
If Palin were a moderate more traditional type of christian I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be this kind of fuss, after all there are plenty of examples of previous candidates (successful and otherwise).
OTOH, if say Biden was a _moderate_ Muslim I can see the GOP being all other him for the same reasons... then again a muslim vice-presidential candidate is about as likely as a black president or a female president... Oh Wait! :-P
It is both unfortunate and ironic that the United States' sociopolitical life is so dominated by something which its founding fathers were at great pains to explicitly single out as something that must be avoided at all costs. Of course the founding fathers were blinded by their enlightenment thinking into believing that religion could be reduced to the status of a personal system for moral guidance whereas the great majority of human history shows that, it is first and, in some parts of the world, foremost a political and legal system; Halakha or Sharia anoyone?
The doctrine of separation of church and state maybe etched in legal stone, but within the minds of the polity it is very blurred indeed.
At first I thought citing Matt Damon as a source was just another Team America reference about uppity actors, but then I read what he said. Holy shit. How you believe we originated really matters on whether you should have control of nuclear codes? Considering recent results from politicians with experience, I think I'll go for the hockey mom.