Re:cost of acquisition is everything, huh?
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
My brain has gotten me through several career changes and graduate school, to publication in leading journals, and propelled me to the higher ranks of engineering in a very well respected shop. But it is obviously much too puny to grok the mighty thoughts of this group of intellectual giants.
I had possibly best find a less lofty crowd to hang with.
cost of acquisition is everything, huh?
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
No disrespect intended, but that's really naive. There are other costs, even for home users. Frustration with overly technical administrative requirements is a cost. Having to ask other people how to do stuff all the time is a cost. Listening to overbearing geeks tell you how easy things you can't figure out are, is a cost. Having to find and download "free" software to do stuff MS users get with their machines, and then finding out it isn't quite the same, is a cost. Not being able to easily exchange docs and pictures with your nieces and nephews is a cost. Do I need to go on?
Tend to agree about Microsoft's hostility to standards processes (I'm involved in some of them). But why isn't ISO taking any licks here? It takes like 3 years to move a standard through ISO; what development organization has that kind of time?
And remember, there's only one vote per country in JTC 1 committees, which makes it easy for US-based companies to feel like the process is a bit imbalanced when it comes to software standards.
I disagree; the amounts are almost beneath notice. These big companies know that while legal actions are important, you make all your real money by SELLING PRODUCTS. The factor is going on 1000 to 1--a trillion dollar industry will have around a billion dollars available for attack by lawyers.
"So, after decades of careful deliberation, never rushing to judgment, the ACM has decided that the PC and the LAN were significant ideas worthy of recognition. Does this put Tim Berners-Lee in the mix for the award circa 2030?"
The code I wrote 10 years out of grad school is a heck of a lot better than the code I wrote in grad school. Observation of others supports the point, which is that you may not be fully mature as a programmer until you're 35.
Contrary to myth, there _are_ good managers out there. They know what code you've touched, and they know how many bugs in that code have come back to bite them.
I knew a guy that would fix 10 to 15 bugs a day. Phenomenal. Except most of them were in code he'd submitted as other bug fixes. The bad managers loved him. The good ones didn't trust him.
There's no simple answer to this problem. I wouldn't repeat this, on the grounds that it's obvious, but most commenters here seem to forget.
Every time IT has gone down the tubes at a company I've worked for, it's been just after a ticketing system was installed. This has the immediate effect of turning productive IT people--meaning folks that help _me_ be more productive--into ticket managers.
I can understand how they could use these materials (theoretically anyway) to make Julian Beever-style illusions (see http://www.moillusions.com/2007/12/julian-beevers-new-3d-sidewalk.htm). But a real invisibility cloak has to detect the direction of every photon striking it and deliver that proton in the same direction out the exact opposite side of the cloak, doesn't it? Otherwise the effect is likely to be like a Beever painting, viewable from only one precise viewpoint.
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Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road
Seems to me that Google and others are correct in following local law. This is not the same, however, as following the dictates of local advocates of political correctness. Doing that is simply a recipe for increasing the level of local corruption.
The FAA has a pretty good record of making travel via commercial aircraft truly safe. But their adversaries are aircraft and flight control systems, and all the various ways those can malfunction.
The TSA has an equivalent job, but terrorists, as stupid as some of them are, are a good bit brighter than airplanes, and they're self-destructive to boot. So perfect security is unlikely to happen until terrorists go away.
We need to learn *as a country* what cost/benefit analysis means, and how to use it on the terrorism problem.
C and Scheme are the "closest to the metal", meaning that they're the purest expressions of procedural and functional programming. He'll be most likely to learn good programming habits using those. But he pretty much needs to be interested in programming for its own sake to succeed with them.
If he wants to do games, just bite the conceptual bullet, get an account for developing iPhone apps and let him use it. Or try out Android. Give him as much help as you can, but don't sweat getting him the answer for every question. Teach from your expertise, which is knowledge of general principles. He'll be teaching you the gory details in six months.
-------
Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road
There may be a theoretical equivalence between algorithms and mathematical formulas, but how useful is it?
I once saw Edsgar Dijkstra give a talk on proving program correctness via mathematical proof. It took him an hour--he was a great speaker so at least it was fun--to prove the correctness of a routine to compute factorials, and no one had ever heard of the theorem he finally used to nail the thing down.
During the Q&A session, Niklaus Wirth asked, "So, where did you get the rabbit you just pulled out of your hat?" Dijkstra huffed and puffed that it was no rabbit, it was a *theorem*, but Wirth serenely replied, "It looked like a rabbit to me."
Wirth's point was that requiring exhaustive knowledge in one area to perform simple tasks in another area is simply not useful. And mine is that calling everything math does nothing to tease apart and clarify the multiple issues related to software patents, and therefore is a poor way of reasoning about them.
---
Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road.
> I am yet to see a single software patent that I feel is really a new invention that requires protection....
The one example I am aware of is the write-anywhere feature of WAFL -- the NetApp filesystem. This unique and brilliantly conceived feature enabled cheap snapshots, which in turn enabled the development of a suite of data protection products that made building a billion-dollar company from scratch possible.
I'm not sure whether patent protection had anything to do with NetApp's success though. There are clones of this technology out there now--and lawsuits to go with them--well before the patents are set to expire (ca. 2015?). But the cloning didn't happen until NetApp's revenue got big enough to generate envy. That kind of analysis would seem to indicate that the original motivation for patents--to protect small inventors--is essentially not operative anymore.
> Patents by themselves weren't a problem back in 1968...
(1) Large companies have been bludgeoning each other with their patent portfolios for 100 years, and putting the occasional small company out of business too. But there was a revenue threshold, say $250M in today's dollars, that you had to hit before anyone paid any attention to you. Either the threshold has come down, or a lot more people have started hitting it, is all.
(2) Given that a patent is nothing more than a license to sue, what else was going to happen besides lawsuits?
I have an iphone (3Gs) and hate it. Terrible phone. Nice toy though. Even though I hate the keyboard, I have to say that the large screen was the innovation that sold me: I can actually read a slashdot story on this device. But so many things are broken, it's just too much. Some of it is ATT, yes.
I'm going to Verizon Real Soon Now, for real phone service, and getting a real GPS, so my locator service will actually work when I need it, not just 1/3 of the time. Those are the two things I really wanted out of a phone, and I'm not getting either of them now.
> has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible for once and for all
Wrong. Depending who you talk to, innovation is either a great idea or a process. If it's a great idea, putting it out as open source says nothing about open source at all. If it's a process, then it hasn't happened yet, because the idea only just now got introduced as open source and there's been no time for any process at all.
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It's too bad all the people that really know how to run the country are busy writing blogs and running talk shows.
First, follow the previous advice to report on things are working well, improvements that you are targeting or hope to target, and a discussion of risks and challenges. Then summarize it all with the math as shown here.
Be careful though, your executives may see you thinking like a business person and promote you into management.
When I was in school (20 years ago), I took notes with pencil and paper. They allow me to draw and diagram things, arrange things in blocks and illustrate relationships in a way that text just can't. If I had to replicate the effects on a computer, it would require a cross between Visio, Matlab, LaTeX or variant, a vector drawing application and a word processor. And it wouldn't be worth it--the point of it all is processing the material in a way so as to learn it. This doesn't require typesetting.
Back then the PalmOS showed some promise, but all I really wanted was editable ink. It's a pain to rearrange things on paper, yet would be a piece of cake with cut-and-paste for ink. The Palm folks were all over character recognition and other stuff that I didn't really need and never thought about just doing the simple stuff.
Nothing's changed--I'd still like a kindle-like device I could take handwritten notes on, and do a modest amount of ink-level editing on. Post processing the handwritten text to enable searching would be a nice v2 feature.
Slashdot Mirror
My brain has gotten me through several career changes and graduate school, to publication in leading journals, and propelled me to the higher ranks of engineering in a very well respected shop. But it is obviously much too puny to grok the mighty thoughts of this group of intellectual giants.
I had possibly best find a less lofty crowd to hang with.
No disrespect intended, but that's really naive. There are other costs, even for home users. Frustration with overly technical administrative requirements is a cost. Having to ask other people how to do stuff all the time is a cost. Listening to overbearing geeks tell you how easy things you can't figure out are, is a cost. Having to find and download "free" software to do stuff MS users get with their machines, and then finding out it isn't quite the same, is a cost. Not being able to easily exchange docs and pictures with your nieces and nephews is a cost. Do I need to go on?
Mod parent up. The original poster is either clue deprived or not describing the situation accurately.
Tend to agree about Microsoft's hostility to standards processes (I'm involved in some of them). But why isn't ISO taking any licks here? It takes like 3 years to move a standard through ISO; what development organization has that kind of time?
And remember, there's only one vote per country in JTC 1 committees, which makes it easy for US-based companies to feel like the process is a bit imbalanced when it comes to software standards.
I disagree; the amounts are almost beneath notice. These big companies know that while legal actions are important, you make all your real money by SELLING PRODUCTS. The factor is going on 1000 to 1--a trillion dollar industry will have around a billion dollars available for attack by lawyers.
"So, after decades of careful deliberation, never rushing to judgment, the ACM has decided that the PC and the LAN were significant ideas worthy of recognition. Does this put Tim Berners-Lee in the mix for the award circa 2030?"
-- a [anonymous] colleague
The code I wrote 10 years out of grad school is a heck of a lot better than the code I wrote in grad school. Observation of others supports the point, which is that you may not be fully mature as a programmer until you're 35.
Contrary to myth, there _are_ good managers out there. They know what code you've touched, and they know how many bugs in that code have come back to bite them.
I knew a guy that would fix 10 to 15 bugs a day. Phenomenal. Except most of them were in code he'd submitted as other bug fixes. The bad managers loved him. The good ones didn't trust him.
There's no simple answer to this problem. I wouldn't repeat this, on the grounds that it's obvious, but most commenters here seem to forget.
Every time IT has gone down the tubes at a company I've worked for, it's been just after a ticketing system was installed. This has the immediate effect of turning productive IT people--meaning folks that help _me_ be more productive--into ticket managers.
I can understand how they could use these materials (theoretically anyway) to make Julian Beever-style illusions (see http://www.moillusions.com/2007/12/julian-beevers-new-3d-sidewalk.htm). But a real invisibility cloak has to detect the direction of every photon striking it and deliver that proton in the same direction out the exact opposite side of the cloak, doesn't it? Otherwise the effect is likely to be like a Beever painting, viewable from only one precise viewpoint.
-------
Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road
Seems to me that Google and others are correct in following local law. This is not the same, however, as following the dictates of local advocates of political correctness. Doing that is simply a recipe for increasing the level of local corruption.
Perfect setup for an attack by the evil Sex Ray machine smuggled into the luggage compartment.
> No carry on at all and dressed only in disposable paper overalls
The FAA has a pretty good record of making travel via commercial aircraft truly safe. But their adversaries are aircraft and flight control systems, and all the various ways those can malfunction.
The TSA has an equivalent job, but terrorists, as stupid as some of them are, are a good bit brighter than airplanes, and they're self-destructive to boot. So perfect security is unlikely to happen until terrorists go away.
We need to learn *as a country* what cost/benefit analysis means, and how to use it on the terrorism problem.
C and Scheme are the "closest to the metal", meaning that they're the purest expressions of procedural and functional programming. He'll be most likely to learn good programming habits using those. But he pretty much needs to be interested in programming for its own sake to succeed with them.
If he wants to do games, just bite the conceptual bullet, get an account for developing iPhone apps and let him use it. Or try out Android. Give him as much help as you can, but don't sweat getting him the answer for every question. Teach from your expertise, which is knowledge of general principles. He'll be teaching you the gory details in six months.
-------
Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road
Lots of folks say voice recognition software sucks, but maybe it's not so bad after all. Imagine having to spell out every word.
-----
Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road.
There may be a theoretical equivalence between algorithms and mathematical formulas, but how useful is it?
I once saw Edsgar Dijkstra give a talk on proving program correctness via mathematical proof. It took him an hour--he was a great speaker so at least it was fun--to prove the correctness of a routine to compute factorials, and no one had ever heard of the theorem he finally used to nail the thing down.
During the Q&A session, Niklaus Wirth asked, "So, where did you get the rabbit you just pulled out of your hat?" Dijkstra huffed and puffed that it was no rabbit, it was a *theorem*, but Wirth serenely replied, "It looked like a rabbit to me."
Wirth's point was that requiring exhaustive knowledge in one area to perform simple tasks in another area is simply not useful. And mine is that calling everything math does nothing to tease apart and clarify the multiple issues related to software patents, and therefore is a poor way of reasoning about them.
---
Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road.
Also prohibited: groups of all groups that don't contain themselves.
> Prohibited:
> 1. Users named other than "Thomas".
> 2. Users named "Thomas".
> I am yet to see a single software patent that I feel is really a new invention that requires protection....
The one example I am aware of is the write-anywhere feature of WAFL -- the NetApp filesystem. This unique and brilliantly conceived feature enabled cheap snapshots, which in turn enabled the development of a suite of data protection products that made building a billion-dollar company from scratch possible.
I'm not sure whether patent protection had anything to do with NetApp's success though. There are clones of this technology out there now--and lawsuits to go with them--well before the patents are set to expire (ca. 2015?). But the cloning didn't happen until NetApp's revenue got big enough to generate envy. That kind of analysis would seem to indicate that the original motivation for patents--to protect small inventors--is essentially not operative anymore.
> Patents by themselves weren't a problem back in 1968...
(1) Large companies have been bludgeoning each other with their patent portfolios for 100 years, and putting the occasional small company out of business too. But there was a revenue threshold, say $250M in today's dollars, that you had to hit before anyone paid any attention to you. Either the threshold has come down, or a lot more people have started hitting it, is all.
(2) Given that a patent is nothing more than a license to sue, what else was going to happen besides lawsuits?
Engineer: Hmmm, looks like system 8323 is hot, maybe we should cool it down somehow.
Patent Attorney: Great idea! How many different ways can we cool it? When can I have a New Invention Report?
I can only hope that this straw contributes to breaking the camel's back.
I have an iphone (3Gs) and hate it. Terrible phone. Nice toy though. Even though I hate the keyboard, I have to say that the large screen was the innovation that sold me: I can actually read a slashdot story on this device. But so many things are broken, it's just too much. Some of it is ATT, yes.
I'm going to Verizon Real Soon Now, for real phone service, and getting a real GPS, so my locator service will actually work when I need it, not just 1/3 of the time. Those are the two things I really wanted out of a phone, and I'm not getting either of them now.
You don't train a misbehaving dog to be well-mannered by whacking it one every time it wags its tail.
> has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible for once and for all
Wrong. Depending who you talk to, innovation is either a great idea or a process. If it's a great idea, putting it out as open source says nothing about open source at all. If it's a process, then it hasn't happened yet, because the idea only just now got introduced as open source and there's been no time for any process at all.
------
It's too bad all the people that really know how to run the country are busy writing blogs and running talk shows.
First, follow the previous advice to report on things are working well, improvements that you are targeting or hope to target, and a discussion of risks and challenges. Then summarize it all with the math as shown here.
Be careful though, your executives may see you thinking like a business person and promote you into management.
Meanwhile, if bridges broke even 1/1000th as often as even the most stable OSes, we wouldn't have any.
Methinks software engineers live in the most microsopically thin of glass houses.
When I was in school (20 years ago), I took notes with pencil and paper. They allow me to draw and diagram things, arrange things in blocks and illustrate relationships in a way that text just can't. If I had to replicate the effects on a computer, it would require a cross between Visio, Matlab, LaTeX or variant, a vector drawing application and a word processor. And it wouldn't be worth it--the point of it all is processing the material in a way so as to learn it. This doesn't require typesetting.
Back then the PalmOS showed some promise, but all I really wanted was editable ink. It's a pain to rearrange things on paper, yet would be a piece of cake with cut-and-paste for ink. The Palm folks were all over character recognition and other stuff that I didn't really need and never thought about just doing the simple stuff.
Nothing's changed--I'd still like a kindle-like device I could take handwritten notes on, and do a modest amount of ink-level editing on. Post processing the handwritten text to enable searching would be a nice v2 feature.