chrisd notes that his company is making SCO employees unhireable.
I'd complain about how immature the policy is except that if you read the page, you see that they are not hiring, so SCO employees are ineligible for all zero of the openings they have available.
At the same time, you can't always dream because resources are finite. If we dreamt like Rip Van Winkle, we'd be spending billions of dollars and a few fine minds researching parapsychology, astrology, and endeavouring to produce a perpetual motion machine.
You mean like Princeton University's impressively rigorous parapsychology research? I'm inclined to be skeptical, but I can't see why carefully controlled scientific research like this is inappropriate.
...I'm sure he's getting paid and doesn't have to do a damn thing except let his name be associated with the suit. SCO gets PR pump from his name, Boies gets a little cash (and the appreciation of Canopy, MS and SUN) for doing nothing. Win-win.
Not so. According to ZDNet, Boies is being paid on a contingency basis, so he needs to get a judgment or a settlement to get paid.
That article plays some number games, sadly. There is no such thing as "Netscape staff." Netscape is a brand. I repeat: NETSCAPE IS A BRAND. When the statement "less than 10% of Netscape staff" is made, that should translate to "less than 10% of AOL's Mountain View campus." The bottom line is, 100% of former Mozilla developers in the employ of AOL are no longer working on Mozilla. I don't know of any exceptions.
Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history's hall of fame.
If they had said the logically equivalent "over three-quarters of married scientists made further significant contributions...", it would sound like marriage helped research. Personally, it looks like pretty flimsy reasoning to me.
This is a quirk in US patent law. Prior art needs to exist a year before for the filing date to invalidate a patent provided the patentholder can provide evidence that they developed the technology before then.
By contrast, non-US patents can be invalidated by any art prior to the filing date.
My favorite reassuring quote from SCO. I'm glad to see that all my concern has been misplaced.
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell says his company's lawsuit will not put an end to Linux.
"Linux could still be used; it just wouldn't be free," Stowell said. "These people are upset because they've been enjoying a free ride for some time. They're upset their free ride will potentially be gone."
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Most of this thread seems like crap. I have no idea how "sharpness" curves with age, but it is pretty fucking irrelevant. If you don't ask people their IQs during a job interview, why should you ask their age? Any given 50 year old may be sharper than any given 20 year old. It doesn't matter if he is as sharp as he was when he was 20. He's competing with the other candidates, not a younger version of himself.
I was an author of a commercial C compiler when I was 22. I think I'm a hell of a lot better coder now at 41 than I was then. I don't feel any dumber, but even if I am, it's certainly only a second order effect compared to my gained experience. I still do as many all-night hacking runs as when I was teenager (I'll do one tonight). I spend a lot of time reeducating myself on current technologies (with the benefit of seeing them through the lens of experience).
My age is one of the weakest possible indicators of how well I can code, either positive or negative. If I need to look for a job sometime in the future, I suppose I'd write a program, bring it with me to the job interview, and say "If you want to see how good of a coder I am right now, just read my code." Certainly the quality of the code I produce would be a much more reliable indicator (positive, I hope!) of how well I can code than my age. I would hope that any reasonable interviewer would see it the same way.
Only if they want every failing company in the world to sue them on a trumped up charge in hopes of a buyout. I don't see how IBM can agree to buy SCO without opening the floodgates.
If IBM bought SCO to avoid the suit, every failing software company would sue IBM (probably at their boards insistence) in hope of getting bought. IBM can't afford to set such a precedent.
It would be suicide for IBM to buy them. If they did, every failing tech company would see how SCO made millions out of nothing, and their boards would insist on suing IBM for patent infringement in hope of getting bought out. IBM has to show that companies will regret bringing patent lawsuits against them.
There are a lot more reasons to use 64-bits than just letting programs use more than 4GB of memory:
1. 64-bit machines essentially turn conservative garbage collectors into precise garbage collectors because the chance of pointer misidentification becomes almost vanishingly small with address space so much larger than live memory. The ability to automatically garbage collect all your legacy C/C++ programs is a huge benefit.
2. Programs are now often constrained more by memory bandwidth into the ALU than by processing speed. Using 64-bit operands can help this dramatically.
In the US, you have one year to file for a patent, so prior art needs to beat the filing date by a year. This is not true for patents in the rest of the world, which have an "absolute novelty" requirement.
If the only prior art that can be found is from early '96, we will have to relocate all our websites to Europe, which will really show how US IP laws protect American business:)
Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen. Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.
Sigh. I suspect that's exactly it. And that's what pisses me off.
The problem is that new fab lines cost billions of dollars and laying out a new iteration of a microprocessor is not cheap either, so the chip manufacturers need to be pretty brutal about producing money-makers on their fab lines.
Maybe the FSF could get funds by having everyone who uses one of their products give them a dollar.
Oh, wait...
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.
It is possible to play chess either by raw computation or intelligence. People use their intelligence to play chess. Deep Blue did not.
Here's an analogy that works for me. A computer can be easily programmed to determine that 1000000003 is not a sum of two square by exhaustive computation. No one (I hope) would contend that is an intelligent computer program. On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence. Deep Blue took the exhaustive computation approach to chess.
The article says that Eolas wants to be acquired, perhaps by an IBM or AOL. Microsoft has an immense patent portfolio that they would not be shy about using to retaliate in kind. If a company with other software products (such as IBM or AOL) tried to enforce a patent against Microsoft, then Microsoft would immediately try to enforce hundreds of their patents against that company. At that point, the company would have to license the patent to Microsoft or stop selling software.
Speaking from experience, it can take way more fiddling than the average computer user is capable of to get the Windows fonts (or acceptable substitutes) commonly used by Office installed and displaying well under Linux. If Suse has preconfigured this, it could make the difference between only geeks being able to use Crossover Office and anyone being able to use it.
Peter Jackson had to cut out scenes he wanted to keep to make the film short enough to show in theatres (and also to keep a PG-13 rating I believe). Commercial theatrical releases are generally limited to about three hours. If a film is longer, the theatre cannot have enough showings per night to make a good return, no matter how full the theatre is. None of these considerations apply to the DVD. Hence, the recut.
Embedding an invisible image has a variety of problems.
1. Relying on obscure side-effects leads to bad code. For example, one could imagine a highly-optimized browser-rendering engine may choose not to read the bits of the image because they won't be visible. It's much better to have an XHTML tag that explicitly expresses the desired semantics and leave it to the presentation tool to properly figure out how to present.
2. Languages, standards, and practices evolve. For example, if my webages are XML interpreted by XSL stylesheets, do I really want to start embedding browser hints in my XML pages (or have my XSL stylesheet assume a browser is the client)?
3. How does the browser know not to start prefetching the image before it has loaded the main page? The prefetching FAQ says that prefetching uses an idle test to avoid doing harm. Embedded images can't readily be optimized by an idle test.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd complain about how immature the policy is except that if you read the page, you see that they are not hiring, so SCO employees are ineligible for all zero of the openings they have available.
You mean like Princeton University's impressively rigorous parapsychology research? I'm inclined to be skeptical, but I can't see why carefully controlled scientific research like this is inappropriate.
Not so. According to ZDNet, Boies is being paid on a contingency basis, so he needs to get a judgment or a settlement to get paid.
According to the article, will I get more creative for no longer being unmarried or less creative because I am now "too old"?
If they had said the logically equivalent "over three-quarters of married scientists made further significant contributions...", it would sound like marriage helped research. Personally, it looks like pretty flimsy reasoning to me.
This is a quirk in US patent law. Prior art needs to exist a year before for the filing date to invalidate a patent provided the patentholder can provide evidence that they developed the technology before then.
By contrast, non-US patents can be invalidated by any art prior to the filing date.
My favorite reassuring quote from SCO. I'm glad to see that all my concern has been misplaced.
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell says his company's lawsuit will not put an end to Linux.
"Linux could still be used; it just wouldn't be free," Stowell said. "These people are upset because they've been enjoying a free ride for some time. They're upset their free ride will potentially be gone."
Most of this thread seems like crap. I have no idea how "sharpness" curves with age, but it is pretty fucking irrelevant. If you don't ask people their IQs during a job interview, why should you ask their age? Any given 50 year old may be sharper than any given 20 year old. It doesn't matter if he is as sharp as he was when he was 20. He's competing with the other candidates, not a younger version of himself.
I was an author of a commercial C compiler when I was 22. I think I'm a hell of a lot better coder now at 41 than I was then. I don't feel any dumber, but even if I am, it's certainly only a second order effect compared to my gained experience. I still do as many all-night hacking runs as when I was teenager (I'll do one tonight). I spend a lot of time reeducating myself on current technologies (with the benefit of seeing them through the lens of experience).
My age is one of the weakest possible indicators of how well I can code, either positive or negative. If I need to look for a job sometime in the future, I suppose I'd write a program, bring it with me to the job interview, and say "If you want to see how good of a coder I am right now, just read my code." Certainly the quality of the code I produce would be a much more reliable indicator (positive, I hope!) of how well I can code than my age. I would hope that any reasonable interviewer would see it the same way.
And they won't be able to use slide rules either!
Only if they want every failing company in the world to sue them on a trumped up charge in hopes of a buyout. I don't see how IBM can agree to buy SCO without opening the floodgates.
Mike
i.e. get bought by IBM.
If IBM bought SCO to avoid the suit, every failing software company would sue IBM (probably at their boards insistence) in hope of getting bought. IBM can't afford to set such a precedent.
It would be suicide for IBM to buy them. If they did, every failing tech company would see how SCO made millions out of nothing, and their boards would insist on suing IBM for patent infringement in hope of getting bought out. IBM has to show that companies will regret bringing patent lawsuits against them.
There are a lot more reasons to use 64-bits than just letting programs use more than 4GB of memory:
1. 64-bit machines essentially turn conservative garbage collectors into precise garbage collectors because the chance of pointer misidentification becomes almost vanishingly small with address space so much larger than live memory. The ability to automatically garbage collect all your legacy C/C++ programs is a huge benefit.
2. Programs are now often constrained more by memory bandwidth into the ALU than by processing speed. Using 64-bit operands can help this dramatically.
Well if previous Apple server sales (pre xserve) are any indication, nobody is ;)
According to an InfoWorld Article, enough people have been buying the xserve to make it a success.
In the US, you have one year to file for a patent, so prior art needs to beat the filing date by a year. This is not true for patents in the rest of the world, which have an "absolute novelty" requirement.
:)
If the only prior art that can be found is from early '96, we will have to relocate all our websites to Europe, which will really show how US IP laws protect American business
The problem is that new fab lines cost billions of dollars and laying out a new iteration of a microprocessor is not cheap either, so the chip manufacturers need to be pretty brutal about producing money-makers on their fab lines.
Maybe the FSF could get funds by having everyone who uses one of their products give them a dollar.
Oh, wait...
Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.
It is possible to play chess either by raw computation or intelligence. People use their intelligence to play chess. Deep Blue did not.
Here's an analogy that works for me. A computer can be easily programmed to determine that 1000000003 is not a sum of two square by exhaustive computation. No one (I hope) would contend that is an intelligent computer program. On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence. Deep Blue took the exhaustive computation approach to chess.
Actually, Microsoft was ordered by the court to stop filtering spam because they were filtering out competitors' emails.
The article says that Eolas wants to be acquired, perhaps by an IBM or AOL. Microsoft has an immense patent portfolio that they would not be shy about using to retaliate in kind. If a company with other software products (such as IBM or AOL) tried to enforce a patent against Microsoft, then Microsoft would immediately try to enforce hundreds of their patents against that company. At that point, the company would have to license the patent to Microsoft or stop selling software.
Speaking from experience, it can take way more fiddling than the average computer user is capable of to get the Windows fonts (or acceptable substitutes) commonly used by Office installed and displaying well under Linux. If Suse has preconfigured this, it could make the difference between only geeks being able to use Crossover Office and anyone being able to use it.
Mike
Peter Jackson had to cut out scenes he wanted to keep to make the film short enough to show in theatres (and also to keep a PG-13 rating I believe). Commercial theatrical releases are generally limited to about three hours. If a film is longer, the theatre cannot have enough showings per night to make a good return, no matter how full the theatre is. None of these considerations apply to the DVD. Hence, the recut.
Embedding an invisible image has a variety of problems.
1. Relying on obscure side-effects leads to bad code. For example, one could imagine a highly-optimized browser-rendering engine may choose not to read the bits of the image because they won't be visible. It's much better to have an XHTML tag that explicitly expresses the desired semantics and leave it to the presentation tool to properly figure out how to present.
2. Languages, standards, and practices evolve. For example, if my webages are XML interpreted by XSL stylesheets, do I really want to start embedding browser hints in my XML pages (or have my XSL stylesheet assume a browser is the client)?
3. How does the browser know not to start prefetching the image before it has loaded the main page? The prefetching FAQ says that prefetching uses an idle test to avoid doing harm. Embedded images can't readily be optimized by an idle test.
Not so fast! You can order it without an office suite, but they'll charge you for it anyway.