Can't say I'm a health nut. In the 60's I was too interested in astronomy and lepidoptera to pay too much attention to LSD. My head was in the clouds already. Besides, why waste that kind of money and brain capacity when a good Henry Clay was both cheap and legal? (It was a different age) Can't say I find Nicotiana Tabacum as particularly bad. So sue me. (No. . . wait!)
I was particularly fascinated by the way some lepidoptera had specialized in eating toxic plants in order to make themselves toxic or evil tasting to larger predators. Tomato and Tobacco Hornworms are seriously cool. Being able to collect them is one of the fringe benefits of keeping a small plot of tomatos and tobacco.
I'm afraid I'm one of those youthful ubergeeks who skipped high school entirely in favor of "adult education" and college, so I didn't have biology class there, but I found myself, in the early 70's, studying under Hans Selye and Linus Pauling for a spell.
I tried to pay attention, but their specialty was in the "higher" orders.
the tomato and tobacco are both variaties of nightshade, as is the potato.
All of these plants already contain nicotine, so of course he found them, and various other alkaloids. The only question is the concentration and where that concentration is.
You'll also find nicotine in things you might not expect, like bananas, beef, cow's milk and cottage cheese.
Eat a tomato leaf, potato leaf, or even the wrong parts of a potato and you can end up, very, very dead.
Ah, but if they had their own facilities for this wouldn't they have been using them in the first place?
This is a public event sponsored by the military. Not a military event. You can't simply have all these civs just wandering around White Sands chasing their four ton toy cars across the missle range.
That's only fun until someone loses their structural integrity.
Just the number of local jurisdictions that this race will pass through makes the logical approach undoable because of the logistical requirements.
I'm involved a bit in ultramarathon cycling and they go through the same problems all the time. State Police, County Sheriff, City Police, everyone with a badge and permit application form gets in on the act and you have to coordinate them all.
One numnut in the middle of the course who'll only let you do it on Tuesday, but only if the moon is full, fucks the whole deal if everyone else will only allow it on Wednsday, but only if the moon is new.
And to be even more anal about the legal matters, O.J. wasn't found "guilty" by the civil court. He was found liable.
Courts find people liable for things they proved they didn't do all the time (see the Chaplin paternity case). It really shouldn't be that way, but because it is sometimes that can work to your advantage.
"Ok, you proved you didn't do it, but we think you're scum anyway. Pay up."
And who doesn't think telemarketers are scum? Hell, I've known some telemarketers who knew they were scum, but didn't care because it kept them in coke money.
Microsoft hadn't arranged their car so that if the radio breaks all the tires blow out.
To gain performance MS has taken what was originally a very elegant modular system with a graphical shell on top of a solid kernel and coded user apps directly into kernel space. See "browser integration," which means that a bug in the browser is a bug in kernel space. See the recent RPC exploit.
It wasn't meant to be this way, but marketing has made it so, whatever the elegance of the original architecture. It is the reality that must be dealt with.
In this sense, yes, KDE as a shell on top of the Linux kernel is more secure than the Explorer shell, Internet Explorer, Outlook and Office "wired into" the NT kernel. ( And such a configuration is closer to what the term KDE really means in practice).
KDE has its own problems of course, so to that extent original poster is perhaps naive. If the radio stops working the windshield wipers stop too, but the tires don't blow out.
Which means you're also less likely to find yourself carjacked.
I used to own an R/C indoor carpet track. I charged people $3 a day for track time during the week when there were no races. Come in in the morning and stay all bloody day for all cared.
My brother could never understand this. "You can't make any money that way. You have to charge them by the hour."
But I didn't make money from this and didn't even intend to. That $3 a day added up to cover the fixed costs I had just to remain open whether someone gave me a few bucks or not. Rent, insurance, etc. all coverd by that nominal fee. That meant every penny I took in for racing, cars, parts, snacks, etc. was pure profit, profit that otherwise would have been eaten up by rent, insurance. ..
I loved the fact that my customers payed me money to allow me to sell them tires and Coke.
But more importantly it generated traffic. There were always people hanging about and playing with their cars. That made my place the place to go hang out and play with your cars. When new people showed up there were people there, hanging out, playing with cars. Cool!
That made my place the place to race. Which is where I made my money!
I think Red Hat would be standing there with my brother saying, "But how do you make any money only charging them $3 a day?"
Arrrrrgh!
KFG
Re:Nothing new - Better languages than Java for th
on
Jess in Action
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· Score: 2
When I saw your original post I thought, "Uh oh, he's going to get slammed," and I see I haven't been disapointed. Bloody shame that.
You were formally trained in an age when computer science was still part of the science department and not the business trade school department. Your concepts of programming are thus founded in the logic and mathmatics behind the languages and "apps."
Modern programers who are in "Enterprise" computing aren't even going to understand a single word you say, nor are they likely to care to.
The whole structure is ad hoc (just look at Java itself. Yech) thrown together and driven by the commercial interests of the vendors, not the customers, and thus not even the logic inherent in the problems to be solved.
If Turing, Von Neumann and Codd showed up here to try to explain things they'd get modded down as flamebait.
Normally I'd say forgive them, they know not what they do, but we're talking about a culture in which I find it hard to forgive what amounts to wilfull ignorance.
To the extent that they're really tradespeople and a product of trade training I suppose they can be forgiven, but I'd hope they'd pick up a book once in a while that explains what they're doing rather than just books about the practicum of trade.
The "lab" work is supposed to be built on top of deeper understanding.
Well, I shall soon be joining you in "flamebait hell." Save me a barstool, will you? We'll talk.
Yes, I'm afraid that "science" is in a pitiful state right now, even physics ( my own field of training, as it happens). Most of rules applied to ferreting out snake oil marketing must now apply to most of science as well.
Academia in general is in even worse shape.
Most of what goes on in the software "sciences" are obfuscated because there really is no foundation and/or the promologators themselves have absolutly no understanding.
I even know physicists who don't know the difference between theory at the logical level and real world phenomenon.
It's been coming on for quite awhile. Check out Stephen Leacock's "Too Much College" if you can track down a copy.
And I deny it. However crude or offensive my thoughts may be they are my thoughts honestly expressed.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool . ..
I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere-for I have had a little experience in that business-that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. ..
So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.
So, that leaves at least the meaningful core of my answer, at least to the extent that I'm meaningful.:)
OSS is the historical norm. Binary only distribution the recent anomoly. OSS is becoming resurgent again through one primary influence. The publicly accessable internet.
"Back in the day" open source meant something a bit different than it does now. Only us academics and the military had access to the internet, where we freely exchanged source. The general public didn't have home computers and when they aquired them they weren't capable of running the sort of software we did, or access the internet with them, so the internet still had little effect on them (even so most home computer programs were distributed with or as source).
The so called "Bazaar Model" of software development is the new phenomenon, with anyone who wishes to develop the skills able to participate equally in real time across the world.
It isn't really a software revolution at all, simply a communications revolution that has touched software development.
The GPL which is often hailed as the revolution, and it's certainly what makes the whole thing possible in the "binary only age", is actually just Stallman's shot at maintaining and guarunteeing what had been the norm.
When software was a purely scientific/hobbiest undertaking we simply observed proper scientific standards of openness and selling software as an "industry" wouldn't even have been considered an ethical thing to do on the professional level.
Stallman isn't really quite so much of a "radical" as people often hold him out to be. Much the opposite, in some respects he is archaic.
If you simply stand still long enough eventually you stand apart from the crowd. Stand still a little longer and you might find yourself the leader of a "revolution."
Businesses use technology as a competitive advantage.
Indeed, but it must actually be a competitive advantage to confer competitive advantage. Businesses are notoriously poor at understanding this point or selecting the right technolgies.
Although this often creates jobs to support their mistakes (such as investing heavily in Object Oriented database products or Microsoft platforms when superiour free ones are available. My knowledge of vi and mathmatics confers a tremendous competitive advantage to me over my competitors who must support MS Office) such jobs do not last. May I point to your own unemployment status?
Skyscrapers proped up on cinder blocks do not stand long, no matter how impressive they look when new.
Which also brings up the issue of whether we are going to consider building such skyscrapers as desirable jobs, and then rebuilding them when they fall. Is this the creation of wealth? Less stitches more riches?
However, I can say that new capabilities will mean a business would upgrade hardware, install new software, hire workers, etc.
Well, as has already been pointed out it usually works the other way around. People want apps that their hardware won't run so they have to invest in new hardware. We are speaking in the context of companies that are investing in new hardware, but as yet no apps. This strongly suggests this is simply a maintainence issue, not a true upgrade issue, except, perhaps, to increase the speed of their current apps.
However, that is not always the case. Technology also creates new capabilities, which creates jobs.
Yes, but usually fewer jobs overall. They are also typically transfer jobs. In the context of this discussion we're talking about IT jobs, not the delivery jobs you posit.
In the past year have you even applied for a job with UPS, or are you waiting for another good IT job to open up?
If a new technology created more shipping jobs ( not likely actually. A 20% increase in shipping from one company often simply means another transfer of jobs from a competitor, not an increase in overall jobs, and requires a 20% increase in items to be shipped. Without that increase the added efficiency is used to reduce jobs, which is what happens when everyone aquires the "advantage") and as a result you could never get a job in IT again but could work in the warehouse as a "hand" would you consder that a good thing?
There's a lot more to the question of jobs than just the question of jobs.
"Social Skills" is a broad set of behaviours. It is not simply "being nice." Indeed, always being nice would actually be evidence of poor social skills, although a better class of poor social skills than always being nasty. They'll both see you prematurely dead (as our social skills effect our survival), but the latter somewhat sooner than the former in most cases.
If I misconstrued your original post and came off as snotty without cause, and review suggests I certainly may well have, I apologize.
Even people with good social skills make mistakes.
Yes, the trades have historically been based on "trade secrets," although this has not always been the case and as you note this has changed.
For some reason the tradition of blacksmithing is one of the fields where this has happened the slowest. Perhaps because its own history and traditions that are unique from that of other crafts. No one ever considered basketweaving as magic.
The last great craft trade secrets were the formulas for laquer and porcelin. Being able to read books about and take lessons in any craft from a master of such has been nearly ubiquitous for a couple of centuries.
In the sciences, of which computing is a branch, complete openess has been the norm nearly since the time of Pythagoras (magic again).
This is, at least in part, because to have one's science recognized one must, of necessity, publish.
Only the invention of mediums that allow publication without human readability has allowed the promologation of "hidden" mathmatics.
I learned my social skills from the likes of Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, both well know as racontuers, but who did not suffer fools gladly, and if you were my AC I'd drink it.
Massive amounts of data storage capacity for the buck. Storage capacity growth has been increasing at greater than Moore's Law rates, and at the same time we have been accumulating 800 MB of data per every man woman and child on the face of the Earth every year. The need to manage all of this with software is a staggering business need, and will lead to lots of new software development.
The vast majority of that data is untouched, and will remain untouched, by business. No business has any interest in storing a duplicate copy of every book on your shelf or a duplicate copy of every CD you own (on a one to one basis).
Only a few megs per person is a business concern.That's still a lot of data.
The technology to handle this amount of data (indeed any amount of data) is already known, although poorly implimented.That's a market issue, not a computing one. A proper implimentation would requiring the hiring of more well educated people, but fewer people overall than is now required. Business resents a dependence on education ("training" is not education. A dog may be trained. A dog can't perform analytical logic), but will resort to it, however reluctantly, when it shows significant financial advantage.
You can always pray for more XML "technology." Yeah, that'll create a lot of jobs for awhile. Pointless and annoying jobs, but jobs nonetheless. (Type "Hello World" in Kword and save as raw XML. Count how many pages of text and files it takes. Virtually all of that text is redundant, but must be stored and "managed").
Eventually, although maybe not this business cycle bandwidth growth will trigger ANOTHER software revolution where people will truly become walking network nodes. When that happens most offices will totally disappear.
And in what way will this increase IT jobs? Remember the context of this discussion is IT jobs.
It will also require a social revolution. Social revolutions happen slowly. Much of our social structure today is medieval and completely out of step with our technology, and even how we want to live, and yet it persists.
As an example, phone tech support can now be outsourced to anywhere in the world, and yet most people doing such support must travel to an office to perform their tasks even though the technology could just as easily support their jobs from their homes.
Most jobs aren't really about performing tasks. They are about hierarchical control. The people who wield the control like it that way. For some reason that escapes me so do the controled.
The boss also likes his fancy office in the fancy building with the fancy receptionist. Wall Street isn't about to turn into a gathering of little cottages with English gardens within our lifetimes.
In nearly the entire history of mathmatics and computing. OSS is the historical norm. Propriatary software, as we know it, is a fairly recent phenomenon and possibly something of a passing fad.
Once upon a time even propriatary software was distributed either with or as source. Electronic devices, even those covered by patents, came with complete schematics.
If you're 20 something (or younger) you can be excused from not having seen this before, but it smacks of a lack of inquisitiveness for you to not know this.
I've come not to expect such in the general populace, but lack of inquisitiveness isn't a really good geek trait.
You might wish to look into pool cleaning technologies. They seem to stay fairly stable and are based on buying and applying commercial products, rather than thinking.
. . . people purchase boxes with new capabilities or more processing power, and they usually want new applications to take advantage of those features.
Why?
People buying new boxes to run their old applications faster does occur sometimes, but isn't the historical norm.
Why?
I have not proposed anything. It is not unreasonable, however, to question both historical norms and historical behaviours and assuming historical norms might well get one into trouble.
So, since we're having a bit of trouble over low level questions let me aim one slightly higher above the horizon.
What feature of the new systems (other than speed) do you see as opening support for new apps that answer some need of business?
One can also ask ( and bear in mind that this is a different question) what app do you see business perceiving some need for that the new machines allow that the old ones didn't?
One thing that seems apparent to me is that one of the possible attributes of a new app over an old from the business point of view is that it takes fewer people to implement and maintain than the old one. In the context of jobs newer more powerful machines with better apps may well mean fewer jobs for people.
This has also been the historical norm for sufficiently large quantities of "history."
I'm afraid you have just shown that this "Cat Exercise Device" is inventive: you put known things together, but the combination has a surprising effect ("peculiar quality").
whereas I say it's enough to either show an anticipation of the technique, or some proof that the effect was known
Which is easy enough to do. We have the submiters own word that he was aware that the effect was widely known before filling.
Ah, but my primary claim wasn't actually based on the obviousness of the "invention." In fact, I'm willing to stipulate inventiveness (despite the fact that I could also make the arguement that some cats "go crazy" over flashlights and that the fact that the more cohesive the beam the more of them go crazy makes the conlusion that a fully cohesive beam would deliver mazimum craze).
My primary claim is that of "prior art." The preexistence of the invention. Indeed, that's the context of the whole schmagegee.
My main 'objection' to your post was the sentence "You must demonstrate that the implementation existed at the time"
No, no. I did not say that it was necessary to do this under law. I'd already refuted that directly, which was the raison d'etre of my whole post, so why would I? This was said in the context of issuing a challange to a person claiming that such was necessary. It is a thought experiment, a puzzle, within certain constraints, one of which was supplied by the original poster as a necessary constraint.
Actually, at least in the European system, if you can show that hand-held lasers existed, then a claim to this Cat Exercise Device would be already invalid: the device is just not new. A method for exercising a cat comprising making the cat go crazy using a laser might still be allowable with respect to novelty, but then it doesn't really seem to present a contribution in a technical field (at least not to me).
Precisely the point of the patent submiter, who blatently and publicly submited the patent claim to show how broken the current American system was.See above.
He recieved a patent on playing "red dot" with a cat.
That's just plain daft. Even dafter that the time and money of a court and the time and money of someone playing with his cat should be potentially wasted deciding the merits a patent that was prima facie unpatentable.
But then under our system we're now awarding patents to perpetual motion devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't say I'm a health nut. In the 60's I was too interested in astronomy and lepidoptera to pay too much attention to LSD. My head was in the clouds already. Besides, why waste that kind of money and brain capacity when a good Henry Clay was both cheap and legal? (It was a different age) Can't say I find Nicotiana Tabacum as particularly bad. So sue me. (No. . . wait!)
I was particularly fascinated by the way some lepidoptera had specialized in eating toxic plants in order to make themselves toxic or evil tasting to larger predators. Tomato and Tobacco Hornworms are seriously cool. Being able to collect them is one of the fringe benefits of keeping a small plot of tomatos and tobacco.
I'm afraid I'm one of those youthful ubergeeks who skipped high school entirely in favor of "adult education" and college, so I didn't have biology class there, but I found myself, in the early 70's, studying under Hans Selye and Linus Pauling for a spell.
I tried to pay attention, but their specialty was in the "higher" orders.
KFG
...then it's not only hilarious, it's a mission kill!
That's the part mama never understood when she gave us that "loses an eye" lecture.
KFG
the tomato and tobacco are both variaties of nightshade, as is the potato.
All of these plants already contain nicotine, so of course he found them, and various other alkaloids. The only question is the concentration and where that concentration is.
You'll also find nicotine in things you might not expect, like bananas, beef, cow's milk and cottage cheese.
Eat a tomato leaf, potato leaf, or even the wrong parts of a potato and you can end up, very, very dead.
Enjoy your fries and ketchup.
KFG
"Considering Intel developed the first microprocessor, you could swing the statement around toward them as well."
.
Never trust a computer you can't lift. - Stan Mazor - Intel
And out of that simple philosophy. .
KFG
Ah, but if they had their own facilities for this wouldn't they have been using them in the first place?
This is a public event sponsored by the military. Not a military event. You can't simply have all these civs just wandering around White Sands chasing their four ton toy cars across the missle range.
That's only fun until someone loses their structural integrity.
KFG
Why is this such a big deal?
The course.
Just the number of local jurisdictions that this race will pass through makes the logical approach undoable because of the logistical requirements.
I'm involved a bit in ultramarathon cycling and they go through the same problems all the time. State Police, County Sheriff, City Police, everyone with a badge and permit application form gets in on the act and you have to coordinate them all.
One numnut in the middle of the course who'll only let you do it on Tuesday, but only if the moon is full, fucks the whole deal if everyone else will only allow it on Wednsday, but only if the moon is new.
KFG
And to be even more anal about the legal matters, O.J. wasn't found "guilty" by the civil court. He was found liable.
Courts find people liable for things they proved they didn't do all the time (see the Chaplin paternity case). It really shouldn't be that way, but because it is sometimes that can work to your advantage.
"Ok, you proved you didn't do it, but we think you're scum anyway. Pay up."
And who doesn't think telemarketers are scum? Hell, I've known some telemarketers who knew they were scum, but didn't care because it kept them in coke money.
Pay up buddy.
KFG
Microsoft hadn't arranged their car so that if the radio breaks all the tires blow out.
To gain performance MS has taken what was originally a very elegant modular system with a graphical shell on top of a solid kernel and coded user apps directly into kernel space. See "browser integration," which means that a bug in the browser is a bug in kernel space. See the recent RPC exploit.
It wasn't meant to be this way, but marketing has made it so, whatever the elegance of the original architecture. It is the reality that must be dealt with.
In this sense, yes, KDE as a shell on top of the Linux kernel is more secure than the Explorer shell, Internet Explorer, Outlook and Office "wired into" the NT kernel. ( And such a configuration is closer to what the term KDE really means in practice).
KDE has its own problems of course, so to that extent original poster is perhaps naive. If the radio stops working the windshield wipers stop too, but the tires don't blow out.
Which means you're also less likely to find yourself carjacked.
KFG
I used to own an R/C indoor carpet track. I charged people $3 a day for track time during the week when there were no races. Come in in the morning and stay all bloody day for all cared.
.
My brother could never understand this. "You can't make any money that way. You have to charge them by the hour."
But I didn't make money from this and didn't even intend to. That $3 a day added up to cover the fixed costs I had just to remain open whether someone gave me a few bucks or not. Rent, insurance, etc. all coverd by that nominal fee. That meant every penny I took in for racing, cars, parts, snacks, etc. was pure profit, profit that otherwise would have been eaten up by rent, insurance. .
I loved the fact that my customers payed me money to allow me to sell them tires and Coke.
But more importantly it generated traffic. There were always people hanging about and playing with their cars. That made my place the place to go hang out and play with your cars. When new people showed up there were people there, hanging out, playing with cars. Cool!
That made my place the place to race. Which is where I made my money!
I think Red Hat would be standing there with my brother saying, "But how do you make any money only charging them $3 a day?"
Arrrrrgh!
KFG
When I saw your original post I thought, "Uh oh, he's going to get slammed," and I see I haven't been disapointed. Bloody shame that.
You were formally trained in an age when computer science was still part of the science department and not the business trade school department. Your concepts of programming are thus founded in the logic and mathmatics behind the languages and "apps."
Modern programers who are in "Enterprise" computing aren't even going to understand a single word you say, nor are they likely to care to.
The whole structure is ad hoc (just look at Java itself. Yech) thrown together and driven by the commercial interests of the vendors, not the customers, and thus not even the logic inherent in the problems to be solved.
If Turing, Von Neumann and Codd showed up here to try to explain things they'd get modded down as flamebait.
Normally I'd say forgive them, they know not what they do, but we're talking about a culture in which I find it hard to forgive what amounts to wilfull ignorance.
To the extent that they're really tradespeople and a product of trade training I suppose they can be forgiven, but I'd hope they'd pick up a book once in a while that explains what they're doing rather than just books about the practicum of trade.
The "lab" work is supposed to be built on top of deeper understanding.
Well, I shall soon be joining you in "flamebait hell." Save me a barstool, will you? We'll talk.
KFG
Seriously, I've been getting less spam lately thanks to filters.
Getting less spam lately or seeing less spam?
The distinction is critical.
KFG
Yes, I'm afraid that "science" is in a pitiful state right now, even physics ( my own field of training, as it happens). Most of rules applied to ferreting out snake oil marketing must now apply to most of science as well.
Academia in general is in even worse shape.
Most of what goes on in the software "sciences" are obfuscated because there really is no foundation and/or the promologators themselves have absolutly no understanding.
I even know physicists who don't know the difference between theory at the logical level and real world phenomenon.
It's been coming on for quite awhile. Check out Stephen Leacock's "Too Much College" if you can track down a copy.
KFG
And I deny it. However crude or offensive my thoughts may be they are my thoughts honestly expressed.
.
.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool . .
I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere-for I have had a little experience in that business-that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. .
So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.
- Thoreau - Life Without Principle
KFG
So, that leaves at least the meaningful core of my answer, at least to the extent that I'm meaningful. :)
OSS is the historical norm. Binary only distribution the recent anomoly. OSS is becoming resurgent again through one primary influence. The publicly accessable internet.
"Back in the day" open source meant something a bit different than it does now. Only us academics and the military had access to the internet, where we freely exchanged source. The general public didn't have home computers and when they aquired them they weren't capable of running the sort of software we did, or access the internet with them, so the internet still had little effect on them (even so most home computer programs were distributed with or as source).
The so called "Bazaar Model" of software development is the new phenomenon, with anyone who wishes to develop the skills able to participate equally in real time across the world.
It isn't really a software revolution at all, simply a communications revolution that has touched software development.
The GPL which is often hailed as the revolution, and it's certainly what makes the whole thing possible in the "binary only age", is actually just Stallman's shot at maintaining and guarunteeing what had been the norm.
When software was a purely scientific/hobbiest undertaking we simply observed proper scientific standards of openness and selling software as an "industry" wouldn't even have been considered an ethical thing to do on the professional level.
Stallman isn't really quite so much of a "radical" as people often hold him out to be. Much the opposite, in some respects he is archaic.
If you simply stand still long enough eventually you stand apart from the crowd. Stand still a little longer and you might find yourself the leader of a "revolution."
KFG
Businesses use technology as a competitive advantage.
Indeed, but it must actually be a competitive advantage to confer competitive advantage. Businesses are notoriously poor at understanding this point or selecting the right technolgies.
Although this often creates jobs to support their mistakes (such as investing heavily in Object Oriented database products or Microsoft platforms when superiour free ones are available. My knowledge of vi and mathmatics confers a tremendous competitive advantage to me over my competitors who must support MS Office) such jobs do not last. May I point to your own unemployment status?
Skyscrapers proped up on cinder blocks do not stand long, no matter how impressive they look when new.
Which also brings up the issue of whether we are going to consider building such skyscrapers as desirable jobs, and then rebuilding them when they fall. Is this the creation of wealth? Less stitches more riches?
However, I can say that new capabilities will mean a business would upgrade hardware, install new software, hire workers, etc.
Well, as has already been pointed out it usually works the other way around. People want apps that their hardware won't run so they have to invest in new hardware. We are speaking in the context of companies that are investing in new hardware, but as yet no apps. This strongly suggests this is simply a maintainence issue, not a true upgrade issue, except, perhaps, to increase the speed of their current apps.
However, that is not always the case. Technology also creates new capabilities, which creates jobs.
Yes, but usually fewer jobs overall. They are also typically transfer jobs. In the context of this discussion we're talking about IT jobs, not the delivery jobs you posit.
In the past year have you even applied for a job with UPS, or are you waiting for another good IT job to open up?
If a new technology created more shipping jobs ( not likely actually. A 20% increase in shipping from one company often simply means another transfer of jobs from a competitor, not an increase in overall jobs, and requires a 20% increase in items to be shipped. Without that increase the added efficiency is used to reduce jobs, which is what happens when everyone aquires the "advantage") and as a result you could never get a job in IT again but could work in the warehouse as a "hand" would you consder that a good thing?
There's a lot more to the question of jobs than just the question of jobs.
Indeed, there's even the question of jobs.
Now that's a long thread.
KFG
The above was posted as example, not literal.
"Social Skills" is a broad set of behaviours. It is not simply "being nice." Indeed, always being nice would actually be evidence of poor social skills, although a better class of poor social skills than always being nasty. They'll both see you prematurely dead (as our social skills effect our survival), but the latter somewhat sooner than the former in most cases.
If I misconstrued your original post and came off as snotty without cause, and review suggests I certainly may well have, I apologize.
Even people with good social skills make mistakes.
KFG
Yes, the trades have historically been based on "trade secrets," although this has not always been the case and as you note this has changed.
For some reason the tradition of blacksmithing is one of the fields where this has happened the slowest. Perhaps because its own history and traditions that are unique from that of other crafts. No one ever considered basketweaving as magic.
The last great craft trade secrets were the formulas for laquer and porcelin. Being able to read books about and take lessons in any craft from a master of such has been nearly ubiquitous for a couple of centuries.
In the sciences, of which computing is a branch, complete openess has been the norm nearly since the time of Pythagoras (magic again).
This is, at least in part, because to have one's science recognized one must, of necessity, publish.
Only the invention of mediums that allow publication without human readability has allowed the promologation of "hidden" mathmatics.
KFG
I learned my social skills from the likes of Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, both well know as racontuers, but who did not suffer fools gladly, and if you were my AC I'd drink it.
KFG
Massive amounts of data storage capacity for the buck. Storage capacity growth has been increasing at greater than Moore's Law rates, and at the same time we have been accumulating 800 MB of data per every man woman and child on the face of the Earth every year. The need to manage all of this with software is a staggering business need, and will lead to lots of new software development.
The vast majority of that data is untouched, and will remain untouched, by business. No business has any interest in storing a duplicate copy of every book on your shelf or a duplicate copy of every CD you own (on a one to one basis).
Only a few megs per person is a business concern.That's still a lot of data.
The technology to handle this amount of data (indeed any amount of data) is already known, although poorly implimented.That's a market issue, not a computing one. A proper implimentation would requiring the hiring of more well educated people, but fewer people overall than is now required. Business resents a dependence on education ("training" is not education. A dog may be trained. A dog can't perform analytical logic), but will resort to it, however reluctantly, when it shows significant financial advantage.
You can always pray for more XML "technology." Yeah, that'll create a lot of jobs for awhile. Pointless and annoying jobs, but jobs nonetheless. (Type "Hello World" in Kword and save as raw XML. Count how many pages of text and files it takes. Virtually all of that text is redundant, but must be stored and "managed").
Eventually, although maybe not this business cycle bandwidth growth will trigger ANOTHER software revolution where people will truly become walking network nodes. When that happens most offices will totally disappear.
And in what way will this increase IT jobs? Remember the context of this discussion is IT jobs.
It will also require a social revolution. Social revolutions happen slowly. Much of our social structure today is medieval and completely out of step with our technology, and even how we want to live, and yet it persists.
As an example, phone tech support can now be outsourced to anywhere in the world, and yet most people doing such support must travel to an office to perform their tasks even though the technology could just as easily support their jobs from their homes.
Most jobs aren't really about performing tasks. They are about hierarchical control. The people who wield the control like it that way. For some reason that escapes me so do the controled.
The boss also likes his fancy office in the fancy building with the fancy receptionist. Wall Street isn't about to turn into a gathering of little cottages with English gardens within our lifetimes.
KFG
"Were's the "historical norm" for OSS?"
In nearly the entire history of mathmatics and computing. OSS is the historical norm. Propriatary software, as we know it, is a fairly recent phenomenon and possibly something of a passing fad.
Once upon a time even propriatary software was distributed either with or as source. Electronic devices, even those covered by patents, came with complete schematics.
If you're 20 something (or younger) you can be excused from not having seen this before, but it smacks of a lack of inquisitiveness for you to not know this.
I've come not to expect such in the general populace, but lack of inquisitiveness isn't a really good geek trait.
You might wish to look into pool cleaning technologies. They seem to stay fairly stable and are based on buying and applying commercial products, rather than thinking.
KFG
. . . people purchase boxes with new capabilities or more processing power, and they usually want new applications to take advantage of those features.
Why?
People buying new boxes to run their old applications faster does occur sometimes, but isn't the historical norm.
Why?
I have not proposed anything. It is not unreasonable, however, to question both historical norms and historical behaviours and assuming historical norms might well get one into trouble.
So, since we're having a bit of trouble over low level questions let me aim one slightly higher above the horizon.
What feature of the new systems (other than speed) do you see as opening support for new apps that answer some need of business?
One can also ask ( and bear in mind that this is a different question) what app do you see business perceiving some need for that the new machines allow that the old ones didn't?
One thing that seems apparent to me is that one of the possible attributes of a new app over an old from the business point of view is that it takes fewer people to implement and maintain than the old one. In the context of jobs newer more powerful machines with better apps may well mean fewer jobs for people.
This has also been the historical norm for sufficiently large quantities of "history."
Do you propose a new historical norm?
KFG
But it is certain that once people start upgrading their old boxes, sooner or later they will need new applications to run on them.
Why?
KFG
I'm afraid you have just shown that this "Cat Exercise Device" is inventive: you put known things together, but the combination has a surprising effect ("peculiar quality").
whereas I say it's enough to either show an anticipation of the technique, or some proof that the effect was known
Which is easy enough to do. We have the submiters own word that he was aware that the effect was widely known before filling.
Ah, but my primary claim wasn't actually based on the obviousness of the "invention." In fact, I'm willing to stipulate inventiveness (despite the fact that I could also make the arguement that some cats "go crazy" over flashlights and that the fact that the more cohesive the beam the more of them go crazy makes the conlusion that a fully cohesive beam would deliver mazimum craze).
My primary claim is that of "prior art." The preexistence of the invention. Indeed, that's the context of the whole schmagegee.
My main 'objection' to your post was the sentence "You must demonstrate that the implementation existed at the time"
No, no. I did not say that it was necessary to do this under law. I'd already refuted that directly, which was the raison d'etre of my whole post, so why would I? This was said in the context of issuing a challange to a person claiming that such was necessary. It is a thought experiment, a puzzle, within certain constraints, one of which was supplied by the original poster as a necessary constraint.
Actually, at least in the European system, if you can show that hand-held lasers existed, then a claim to this Cat Exercise Device would be already invalid: the device is just not new. A method for exercising a cat comprising making the cat go crazy using a laser might still be allowable with respect to novelty, but then it doesn't really seem to present a contribution in a technical field (at least not to me).
Precisely the point of the patent submiter, who blatently and publicly submited the patent claim to show how broken the current American system was.See above.
He recieved a patent on playing "red dot" with a cat.
That's just plain daft. Even dafter that the time and money of a court and the time and money of someone playing with his cat should be potentially wasted deciding the merits a patent that was prima facie unpatentable.
But then under our system we're now awarding patents to perpetual motion devices.
KFG
at least they didn't patent backing up system files to removable media, so at least we still have that area open to us.
Oh, wait. Call my patent attorney, we've got a live one!
KFG
Did Jefferson get a patent on slavery too?
No, there was thousands of years of prior art. It is also a business plan and was thus unpatentable on those grounds as well.
What about raping slave girls.
No, on the same grounds that you couldn't patent a perpetual motion machine. It is impossible.
It is also a behaviour, not an invention, and thus not patentable on those grounds as well.
Did he get that right "out of the box"?
As per above, yes.
Got any more strawmen?
KFG