Also, if using powerful solvents to remove paint from your shirt, take your shirt off first, especially if you have to rub hard on it. Unless you like lobster-coloured skin, and that just-pickled tingle.
Software corporations spend BILLIONS of dollars and employ thousands and thousands of programmers to create patentable IP.
Yeah, right.
The vast majority of innovation in the computer business takes place in small companies. Small software companies out-invent and out-innovate big companies every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
In fact, most fields are like this; patents only really pay their way where significant up-front investment is required to bring an invention to market, such as in the pharmaceutical business, where the science is not understood well enough to be predictable, and the regulatory framework for new products is punishingly expensive. Some other heavily industrialised fields with big start-up costs can also benefit.
By contrast, software has a cost of invention dominated by staff salaries rather than plant or infrastructure, and has an incremental cost of manufacture of zero, which unprecented in economic history. These features, plus a historically lax regulatory framework for software, means it's pretty much the opposite of everything that makes the economic argument for patents justifiable.
Your big hero software companies see patents as a weapon to use in negotiations with the other corporate bruisers, and as a means to impede entry to markets they want to defend, not as a means to bring new things to consumers.
If you don't think that's true, please find evidence of a single significant software invention that would not have happened without patents to make it economically viable.
If you guys had your way, all of this money would be thrown away and the world of software would be thrown back into the stone ages.
Rubbish. Having to deal with patents for software is where you'd be throwing your money away, and I'd much rather spend it on development than on due diligence and legal insurance.
Pretty much the entire history of the software business is patent-free, and yet we got from the so-called "stone ages" to here pretty quickly, didn't we? This is the QED that patents are not required to promote progress in the software business, because massive progress happened without them, and no-one with any economic education can make a plausible case that we'd have got to where we are quicker, better or cheaper with them. Serious studies by actual economists (not accountants or executives) show that the pace of innovation has reduced, and costs to bring products to market have risen, since people have been able to get patents on software.
Face it, guys, the time for patenting software is NOW.
Only if you're a patent attorney, a narrow-minded corporate executive, or otherwise sadly misinformed. For everyone else, they're an obvious and unnecessary burden on progress, which is precisely the opposite of what they're supposed to be.
For the record, I've been inventing software related things for decades, make my living at it, and hold software-related patents. And I'd love to see them all torn up.
I fear that with billion in R&D and hundreds of millions of dollars for marketing, M$ will win this game unless they commit suicide.
Even if they wanted to play this game, which I don't believe they do, Microsoft have no chance:
Microsoft's approach to the market has always been to copy and co-opt, not to invent and to lead.
In ten years, almost nothing invented by their big, shiny research group has materially affected their commercial products, supporting the contentions that it's basically just for show, and to prevent some bright people from working for competitors.
Most smart people work elsewhere, and always will.
Good ideas from small groups that can be freely implemented are now regularly beating the best that their billion-dollar budgets pay for, and this will only ever get worse for them, as more groups get accustomed to working this way.
Outside the PC business, they have no market power to enforce standards: Web TV, Xbox, Phone/PDA software, MSN and tablet computers are all big money losers, and none have ever set standards in their markets.
Standard-setting for servers and enterprise markets is already irretrievably lost to free software and standards committees.
Internally, Microsoft have no teams that develop cross-market interface standards, and years of shared Windows branding hasn't substituted for this.
And ultimately, pervasive computing is a domain that Microsoft, as a business, hasn't a clue about.
I wonder who will win the interface definition standardization game? A bunch of really smart people at MIT or an even larger bunch of better funded smart people at Microsoft?
If I get stuck in traffic and show up 1 hour late, and my babysitter hands me a bill for $576.460.752.303.423.488 for an hour of her time, she'll need surgery to get my foot out of her ass.
You know, I've been thinking for a few years now that ATMs (in the UK at least)
seem to be getting slower and slower to use.
Indeed. In the 1980s, Clydesdale Bank (in Scotland) actually used to feature the speed of their cash dispensers (a.k.a. ATMs) in their advertising, claiming that you could get money out of theirs faster than their competitors' machines. I don't recall any bank making claims like that for a long time.
Also, it's not just cash dispensers that are slow: railway ticket machines and car park payment machines are just two of the types of kit that I bemoan the speed of every time I use them. You can tell that they've been programmed in a very serial fashion, with no attempt to optimise the speed of the transaction for the user. Most machines could be programmed to pre-load blanks into printers, or pre-print static header information on receipts, or otherwise get started on time-consuming tasks, but they never seem to. You can practially follow the progress of the transaction through the machine's guts as it plods away at it.
And the receipt printers on point-of-sale equipment always seem to have the slowest possible mechanisms, making shop assistants who care feel that they have to apologise for keeping the customer waiting. (I bet if the banks could have used the old ZX80 scorched-black-on-silver-paper printer mechanism and saved a buck, they would have.)
As someone who has been typing for about thirty years, and playing the piano (for some loose definition of 'playing') for about two years, I have to say that I think my typing habits interfere with my playing.
Specifically, I don't type in tempo, but I have to play in tempo, and I find this extremely hard -- I always want to play ahead on the easy passages, and slow down on the harder ones. Plus, I'd kill for a backspace on the piano.
Ultimately, my playing's only ever much use in short bursts, and I basically use the computer to play things back properly.
I prefer singing and playing violin anyway -- I think the completely different mode of physical interaction with the violin from a keyboard makes the violin much easier for me to handle, since there's no danger of habits from using one showing up in the use of the other. (And I think the violin and the voice are much more interesting musical instruments than the piano.)
I didn't have the following job, but an ex-colleague claimed he used to work with the people who did, and swore it was true.
Anyway, apparently at least some sewage from a major inland city in the UK (Manchester, I believe) was routinely dumped into a barge during the 1980s, and taken by canal to the Irish Sea, where it was dumped. The journey took several days. Sometimes the doors on the bottom of the barge jammed, and someone had to swim down through the ripened sewage in scuba gear with tools to get the doors open.
You will be able to count them in a glance if there are few objects but at some number (and for most people, that's around 7)
Please cite a reference for this claim. Counting at a glance is called subitizing, and the last research summaries I read on this show that the inflexion point for humans is about 3, not 7. That is, you can count 1 to 3 items at a glance, but 4 and above take noticeably more time, and increase roughly linearly from there.
In Unix, parents fork to create children, execute them, then kill them.
You can buy things that let multiple male connectors plug into a single female one at the same time.
And if you pay enough, it's possible to get uninterruptible power.
(But we'd better not let any politicians know abou that last one, eh?)
Re:Why extra inches *really* matter :-)
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
I can testify from direct experience of colleagues that giving them an extra LCD screen dedicated solely to their email has improved their productivity, and made them feel more on top of their work.
It's a relatively cheap addition for most modern computers, and doesn't take much desk space. Having it as an extra screen on their existing computer is vital, though; one keyboard and mouse, with the ability to copy between the email screen and their main screen, is what makes this work. Putting a second computer on their desk for this would have been a mistake.
One colleague even does this with his laptop, running e-mail and IRC on his laptop's screen, leaving the larger external screen for all other work-related stuff.
As I understand it, if I create a copyrightable work, I can impose any restrictions on the use of that work. [...] If you cannot comply, you cannot use it, pure and simple.
Your understanding is flawed.
Copyright provides you with certain exclusive rights to make copies of the work, and you can relinquish, sell or license those rights as you see fit. But it does not give you the ability to dictate how a work can be used.
Hence the wording in the GPL that it is manifestly not a licence to use, since copyright law, on which is it based, does not control that.
I didn't say the crossing time was irrelevant, nor did I say that no-one was using the service. I said that speed was the only thing in the hovercraft's favour.
Compared with Hoverspeed's erstwhile service, ferries offer smoother crossings, larger capacity, greater comfort, and greater reliability of service in the face of bad weather. Unless you're in a real hurry, that's a lot to trade off for speed, and it was clearly too much for the hovercraft service to remain viable once another fast service appeared.
Cross-channel hovercraft offered poor service compared with ferries, and their wanky pretence of being 'flights' across the channel did nothing to alleviate this; they were uncomfortable, and much more sensitive to weather conditions than the ferries, and only had speed in their favour. The channel tunnel took that advantage away, hence no more hovercraft across the channel.
Concorde was an engineering wet dream that the politicians latched onto to create a status symbol. It looks fantastic in flight, but it's expensive, cramped and stupidly noisy. I'll be delighted when it no longer flies over my house.
How is the Linux desktop market (aka common user) ever going to succeed if it cant match the future windows for security.
Because that market doesn't care what Windows could do, but what it does do.
The Linux I run on my computers today works a lot better than any combination of wishful thinking and promissory notes about future Microsoft products.
Windows' so-called potential for improvement is so large because it's so far behind. In any race, the smart money's on the consistent leaders, not on the lame duck with "great potenrial".
Can someone please explain why after these changes Linux is somehow intrisically better than Windows has the potential to becomein terms of security?
Sure, I'd be happy to explain after those changes actually happen. Until then, I'd be trying to compare actual working software with vapour. And that would be silly.
IAANAL, but AIUI, the GPL isn't a licence to use, it's a licence to distribute. So, you can reject the GPL and still use GPLed software, but you can't distribute it unless you accept the GPL (or whatever other licensing terms the software author offers as an alternative.)
In the specific case of Linux, the only licence to distribute is the GPL, so if SCO rejects the GPL, then they've breached copyright every time they've distributed a copy, which (in most relevant jurisdictions) is a criminal offence.
Also, declared invalid in court would only apply on a case-by-case basis, and only between parties who disagreed about the GPL. So, even if SCO prevailed in court over its validity, it wouldn't suddenly destroy the agreements it's the basis of everywhere else, unless the parties to those agreements then changed their minds.
I bought my current car new in 1992 here in Britain, and I had a choice then of taking one of the commonly-specified models the dealership had in stock, or specifying in almost ludicrous detail the car I wanted, and having it built in the factory in Germany. Delivery time would have been about six weeks, and the same delivery charge would either have had the car shipped to me, or would have paid for me to fly to the factory, stay in a hotel overnight, get a factory tour, and then drive home in the car, with a map showing both the tourist route home and the fast one.
It's perfectly possible to have relationships with co-workers without being unprofessional.
Professionalism is being able to stay focussed on business issues, while being able to put personal issues to one side for the duration of your work. It has nothing to do with who you see when you go home at the end of the day, when you should then put business issues to one side.
If you can't keep the two separate (and be seen to do so by your colleagues), then you're not being professional. But equally, if your colleagues don't understand that it's quite possible to keep the two separate, then they're the unprofessional (or, more likely, immature) ones.
It seems like the popular shows are based on doctors, lawyers, or police work.
The essence of drama is conflict, both within people and between them, and between people and adverse circumstances. Places like hospitals, battlefields and courtrooms are set up to deal with such conflicts in a way that is easy to understand, and that can be conveyed quickly to audiences. Additionally, these are places to which a great many different people bring their conflicts when they need to be resolved. These are the main reasons they occur over and over in the scenarios used in episodic drama.
So the challenge is to create a new scenario based around engineers that has built-in conflict, that can be conveyed in thirty seconds to the average TV audience, and that can be used to tell a great many stories.
Slashdot Mirror
ITYM:
Futurama - Christopher Tyng
Also, if using powerful solvents to remove paint from your shirt, take your shirt off first, especially if you have to rub hard on it. Unless you like lobster-coloured skin, and that just-pickled tingle.
That they help people to remember how to spell mnemonic:
Yeah, right.
The vast majority of innovation in the computer business takes place in small companies. Small software companies out-invent and out-innovate big companies every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
In fact, most fields are like this; patents only really pay their way where significant up-front investment is required to bring an invention to market, such as in the pharmaceutical business, where the science is not understood well enough to be predictable, and the regulatory framework for new products is punishingly expensive. Some other heavily industrialised fields with big start-up costs can also benefit.
By contrast, software has a cost of invention dominated by staff salaries rather than plant or infrastructure, and has an incremental cost of manufacture of zero, which unprecented in economic history. These features, plus a historically lax regulatory framework for software, means it's pretty much the opposite of everything that makes the economic argument for patents justifiable.
Your big hero software companies see patents as a weapon to use in negotiations with the other corporate bruisers, and as a means to impede entry to markets they want to defend, not as a means to bring new things to consumers.
If you don't think that's true, please find evidence of a single significant software invention that would not have happened without patents to make it economically viable.
Rubbish. Having to deal with patents for software is where you'd be throwing your money away, and I'd much rather spend it on development than on due diligence and legal insurance.
Pretty much the entire history of the software business is patent-free, and yet we got from the so-called "stone ages" to here pretty quickly, didn't we? This is the QED that patents are not required to promote progress in the software business, because massive progress happened without them, and no-one with any economic education can make a plausible case that we'd have got to where we are quicker, better or cheaper with them. Serious studies by actual economists (not accountants or executives) show that the pace of innovation has reduced, and costs to bring products to market have risen, since people have been able to get patents on software.
Only if you're a patent attorney, a narrow-minded corporate executive, or otherwise sadly misinformed. For everyone else, they're an obvious and unnecessary burden on progress, which is precisely the opposite of what they're supposed to be.
For the record, I've been inventing software related things for decades, make my living at it, and hold software-related patents. And I'd love to see them all torn up.
Even if they wanted to play this game, which I don't believe they do, Microsoft have no chance:
Fortunately, those aren't the only choices.
Yes, there is. Here in England, home of English, 2004 is pronounced: "two thousand and four".
You're fired.
Yeah, but on her pay, she can afford it.
Indeed. In the 1980s, Clydesdale Bank (in Scotland) actually used to feature the speed of their cash dispensers (a.k.a. ATMs) in their advertising, claiming that you could get money out of theirs faster than their competitors' machines. I don't recall any bank making claims like that for a long time.
Also, it's not just cash dispensers that are slow: railway ticket machines and car park payment machines are just two of the types of kit that I bemoan the speed of every time I use them. You can tell that they've been programmed in a very serial fashion, with no attempt to optimise the speed of the transaction for the user. Most machines could be programmed to pre-load blanks into printers, or pre-print static header information on receipts, or otherwise get started on time-consuming tasks, but they never seem to. You can practially follow the progress of the transaction through the machine's guts as it plods away at it.
And the receipt printers on point-of-sale equipment always seem to have the slowest possible mechanisms, making shop assistants who care feel that they have to apologise for keeping the customer waiting. (I bet if the banks could have used the old ZX80 scorched-black-on-silver-paper printer mechanism and saved a buck, they would have.)
As someone who has been typing for about thirty years, and playing the piano (for some loose definition of 'playing') for about two years, I have to say that I think my typing habits interfere with my playing.
Specifically, I don't type in tempo, but I have to play in tempo, and I find this extremely hard -- I always want to play ahead on the easy passages, and slow down on the harder ones. Plus, I'd kill for a backspace on the piano.
Ultimately, my playing's only ever much use in short bursts, and I basically use the computer to play things back properly.
I prefer singing and playing violin anyway -- I think the completely different mode of physical interaction with the violin from a keyboard makes the violin much easier for me to handle, since there's no danger of habits from using one showing up in the use of the other. (And I think the violin and the voice are much more interesting musical instruments than the piano.)
I didn't have the following job, but an ex-colleague claimed he used to work with the people who did, and swore it was true.
Anyway, apparently at least some sewage from a major inland city in the UK (Manchester, I believe) was routinely dumped into a barge during the 1980s, and taken by canal to the Irish Sea, where it was dumped. The journey took several days. Sometimes the doors on the bottom of the barge jammed, and someone had to swim down through the ripened sewage in scuba gear with tools to get the doors open.
Now, imagine interviewing for this position...
Please cite a reference for this claim. Counting at a glance is called subitizing, and the last research summaries I read on this show that the inflexion point for humans is about 3, not 7. That is, you can count 1 to 3 items at a glance, but 4 and above take noticeably more time, and increase roughly linearly from there.
I must inform you that your English licence has just been revoked.
In C++, a friend can access your private member.
In Unix, parents fork to create children, execute them, then kill them.
You can buy things that let multiple male connectors plug into a single female one at the same time.
And if you pay enough, it's possible to get uninterruptible power.
(But we'd better not let any politicians know abou that last one, eh?)
I can testify from direct experience of colleagues that giving them an extra LCD screen dedicated solely to their email has improved their productivity, and made them feel more on top of their work.
It's a relatively cheap addition for most modern computers, and doesn't take much desk space. Having it as an extra screen on their existing computer is vital, though; one keyboard and mouse, with the ability to copy between the email screen and their main screen, is what makes this work. Putting a second computer on their desk for this would have been a mistake.
One colleague even does this with his laptop, running e-mail and IRC on his laptop's screen, leaving the larger external screen for all other work-related stuff.
The London Bridge? We've got a dozen of the buggers; Which one were you thinking of?
Your understanding is flawed.
Copyright provides you with certain exclusive rights to make copies of the work, and you can relinquish, sell or license those rights as you see fit. But it does not give you the ability to dictate how a work can be used.
Hence the wording in the GPL that it is manifestly not a licence to use, since copyright law, on which is it based, does not control that.
I didn't say the crossing time was irrelevant, nor did I say that no-one was using the service. I said that speed was the only thing in the hovercraft's favour.
Compared with Hoverspeed's erstwhile service, ferries offer smoother crossings, larger capacity, greater comfort, and greater reliability of service in the face of bad weather. Unless you're in a real hurry, that's a lot to trade off for speed, and it was clearly too much for the hovercraft service to remain viable once another fast service appeared.
Cross-channel hovercraft offered poor service compared with ferries, and their wanky pretence of being 'flights' across the channel did nothing to alleviate this; they were uncomfortable, and much more sensitive to weather conditions than the ferries, and only had speed in their favour. The channel tunnel took that advantage away, hence no more hovercraft across the channel.
Concorde was an engineering wet dream that the politicians latched onto to create a status symbol. It looks fantastic in flight, but it's expensive, cramped and stupidly noisy. I'll be delighted when it no longer flies over my house.
The Linux I run on my computers today works a lot better than any combination of wishful thinking and promissory notes about future Microsoft products.
Windows' so-called potential for improvement is so large because it's so far behind. In any race, the smart money's on the consistent leaders, not on the lame duck with "great potenrial".
Sure, I'd be happy to explain after those changes actually happen. Until then, I'd be trying to compare actual working software with vapour. And that would be silly.
IAANAL, but AIUI, the GPL isn't a licence to use, it's a licence to distribute. So, you can reject the GPL and still use GPLed software, but you can't distribute it unless you accept the GPL (or whatever other licensing terms the software author offers as an alternative.)
In the specific case of Linux, the only licence to distribute is the GPL, so if SCO rejects the GPL, then they've breached copyright every time they've distributed a copy, which (in most relevant jurisdictions) is a criminal offence.
Also, declared invalid in court would only apply on a case-by-case basis, and only between parties who disagreed about the GPL. So, even if SCO prevailed in court over its validity, it wouldn't suddenly destroy the agreements it's the basis of everywhere else, unless the parties to those agreements then changed their minds.
Yes: they even wrote a book
What he said.
I bought my current car new in 1992 here in Britain, and I had a choice then of taking one of the commonly-specified models the dealership had in stock, or specifying in almost ludicrous detail the car I wanted, and having it built in the factory in Germany. Delivery time would have been about six weeks, and the same delivery charge would either have had the car shipped to me, or would have paid for me to fly to the factory, stay in a hotel overnight, get a factory tour, and then drive home in the car, with a map showing both the tourist route home and the fast one.
It's perfectly possible to have relationships with co-workers without being unprofessional.
Professionalism is being able to stay focussed on business issues, while being able to put personal issues to one side for the duration of your work. It has nothing to do with who you see when you go home at the end of the day, when you should then put business issues to one side.
If you can't keep the two separate (and be seen to do so by your colleagues), then you're not being professional. But equally, if your colleagues don't understand that it's quite possible to keep the two separate, then they're the unprofessional (or, more likely, immature) ones.
I think you'll find that, on average, you have about a fifteen per cent chance of being in that fifteen per cent. Definitely not most likely.
The essence of drama is conflict, both within people and between them, and between people and adverse circumstances. Places like hospitals, battlefields and courtrooms are set up to deal with such conflicts in a way that is easy to understand, and that can be conveyed quickly to audiences. Additionally, these are places to which a great many different people bring their conflicts when they need to be resolved. These are the main reasons they occur over and over in the scenarios used in episodic drama.
So the challenge is to create a new scenario based around engineers that has built-in conflict, that can be conveyed in thirty seconds to the average TV audience, and that can be used to tell a great many stories.