A few years back I worked at a company that literally had the highest level of tech support possible from MS (full time MS staff ONSITE whose only job was to field calls from us and arrange for an MS DEVELOPER to call us back directly) i.e. we had paid for direct access to nearly anyone at MS, when we had questions about a particular MS product we could speak with that product's manager at MS.
(We also had a site licence to all of MS's software - I don't know the exact fees we paid MS - well my client paid MS - but they were well in to the double digit millions)
Even with this degree of support and access it was not uncommon for us to stress the upper limits of MS NT servers - we had to ensure that our main servers were routinely patched and rebooted often.
My point though, is that even with that level of support - MS while helpful, often came back with answers such as "we don't know" or "it can't be done" about as often as they would come back with "Here's what to do..."
I once had a set of NT servers running some specialized services - on a seemingly random basis my services would just stop (shifted in time, one server went down, then the other about 30 minutes later). The strangest part was that apparently the two servers did not have any direct connections - they never communicated or worked with each other.
After much research and work, and no useful support from MS, it was determined that a semi-rogue network administrator was remotely running an audit script on my servers - which had the effect of killing my services. Needless to say the administrator was given a serious "talking to"
There is an existing version of this which is used extensively by the Computer Science field - CiteSeer
This site indexes hundreds of thousands of papers, journal articles, and other publications (dissertations mostly). Each is cross-referenced and linked to the others through a widearray of pattern matching steps (sentance similarity for example)
Imagine if this was extended to all other fields of research - it would probably move the fields forward by leaps just by making it much easier for researchers to locate and reference related work by their peers.
Note that they do appear to be using standard printers (potentially even one from Xerox - so their patents etc. probably cover the cutting, binding, and collating features (to get the cover printed on one printer combined with the book printed on another) - thus I suspect there may be an issue with durability - though modern printers are MUCH better than copiers were years ago... but still different from regular book presses.
While at one of the largest and most prestigious art shows in North America (Art Chicago) where hundreds of galleries from around the world representing over 3000 artists were exhibiting, I saw some truely stunning and amazing pieces.
These images were pictures - some portraits, others reproductions of famous images - upon closer inspection however it was clear that each image was itself composed of 1000's of other images - which were themselves thematically connected to the larger image.
Check out the website that talks about this - it arose from MIT's media lab. His fine art pieces sell for $10,000+, as well the firm he has founded has commissions from hundreds of companies and organizations. For each image they limit the production of the large and small pieces (but then also sell posters I think) which adds to the rarity. By all perceptions - both the reactions of visitors like myself, the reaction of galleries, critics, and museums - these works are considered fine art.
More to the point of this topic - this is a type of image and art that could NOT be created in without highly sophisticated image databases and computer software - these images are "created" by a computer program that measures the colors and lightness/darkness of each image and arranges them to the best effect. What makes it "art" then is the composition, the concepts, and the sheer physical impact and beauty of the final images.
There are a number of good tools out there for version control - however there are very few that can handle binary files in a "good" manner.
Some issues:
One - Binary file formats - such as MS Word - cannot have diffs run on them that are meaningful - a binary diff will result in a file larger than the two original files. So most version control programs will store binary files as seperate versions - but will NOT show the differences between the versions.
Two - Microsoft HAS some built in support for versions within Word - however this will quickly result in VERY large files - which get increasingly less useable. Also note, that this will be ONE file containing all versions - if you "version" this file, you will have TWO files with different sets of the underlying versions.. sounds confusing? It would be.
Three - There ARE version control programs that have worked with Microsoft to learn how to understand the underlying MS file formats (I believe Clearcase may, possibly MS's own Sourcesafe (which is otherwise a dangerous version control software to use since it can have data integrity problems) and possibly a few others.
So - what would I recommend or suggest?
First - Look carefully at WHAT you are intending to version. Is it a collection of documents (i.e. a full manual)? Individual documents that change over time? A whole project structure (say a website for online help?) Or something else?
Can you seperate out the FORMATING (which might be in MS Word) from the content? For example by using a Master document format - importing TEXT documents into MS Word? This would allow great flexibility in versioning the underlying text documents, keep a smaller MS Word file, and that file could be "versioned" storing copies of each successive version?
Second - For simple document management systems, (which run on Linux but can be accessed by any browser) look at a system like InfoPlace - simple, open source (I think) and easy to use. It is however not a rigorous version control system, but a partial version control system.
Hope this is helpful - I spent 2+ years teaching and managing version control for a very large development operation (1000+ developers worldwide).
Shannon
Re:If you can't hack CS, don't be a programmer
on
CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
It is unlikely that even in the worst recession forseable, that highly technically skilled individuals will lack for work. The world and the economy are too dependant on computers and computer systems to run, and the number of devices and systems vs. the number of people who understand them is only growing in favor of those of us to have an understanding computer systems.
Certainly any given technical skillset will probably grow less valuable over time (how many new Fortran jobs have you seen lately?) but in the near future as we enter into a world with literally BILLIONS of devices connected to the network (with wireless devices probably being more pervasive than desktop PCs) the individuals capable of configuring, programming, and developing the underpinnings of the network will be in very high demand.
Personally both as a technologist myself, and as someone who hires programmers, what I look for first and foremost is an inherent understanding and love of computers coupled with specific knowledge of the technologies that the job requires. For what I need I would not hire someone from a techinical school with multiple certifications, rather I would prefer to hire the liberal arts major whose passion has always been technology, the type of developer who didn't take CS classes in college because their open source project was already taking up too much of their time (or their paid projects).
While I enjoy CS theory (though I myself am a historian by training) very little of it has a direct effect on the productitivy and skill of the developers. The most talented developers either figure much of the theory out themselves, or upon encountering it exploit and enhance the suggestions to make their jobs easier.
The best developers I know have become that by their reaction to computers, they think of something they want, and rather than just waiting for someone else to sell it to them, they figure out how to make it for themselves. For example, years ago (over 10) a friend wanted a first person shooter type of game for his computer, rather than waiting to buy one, he sat down with his Visual Basic (the language that he knew at the time) and wrote one. When he needed to enhance the graphics performance (this was back when a 486 was the top processor) he tought himself some C and some Assembler.
Individuals like him are who make technical leaps. Technologists who know the systems, learn the tools quickly, have the abililty and patience to get it right, and want a job will always be able to find one.
A few years back I had the following conversation with my grandmother. "Gran, you really should get a computer and get on the internet" She couldn't see a reason to so she did not (this was back in 1995 or so.
Then about 2 years ago she heard about the iMac and decided that that would be a good computer for her to get (she asked me and I agreed).
Last year, she ordered a cable modem from @home so she now has faster connections at home than I do (and I own an Internet Software company).
Her reason for getting a cable modem, so she could be online without tying up her phone (she lives in the Mountains of CA, getting a second phone line would cost her $1000's, since she already had cable it was the logical route.
What does she do online now?
Play bridge. Most evenings.
So, in her late 70's my grandmother is joining the Internet community to play bridge, exchange emails with friends, and sometimes do some research online. She still has problems with certain things like opening up attachments (just as well most of the time) but all in all an amazing journey from "no reason to have a computer, to having high speed access and using it every night".
A thought that I have had, though since I am busy working on another business opportunity at the moment so I am not pursueing it, is that there are some obvious places to gather very accurate data about website interest.
These are the main routers for the hosting providers hosting the website in question. At some level these machines "know" not just how much traffic is requesting the given website, but how many different IP addresses are requesting, how many of the requests are short/quick Cache refreshes vs. long "real" sessions etc.
Capturing this data would require some sort of sniffing, which could have a performance hit and does raise security implications but could be overcome. Additionally the main routers for most hosting companies are outside of the control of the client companies so this data could be seen as more trustworthy than the server logs from a machine to which the client company has root.
Anyway, just my thoughts a fair amount of work would need to take place to turn this into a new profitable line of business for the hosting companies, but given the market need for accurate data I think it would be worth pursueing.
When the outage occured (or only hours into it) I was online trying to check my email at Yahoo. I had been able to check it at approx. 9:30AM, was unable to at ~11:30AM (Central Standard time).
At that time I started to do some semi-routine troubleshooting to see if I could identify the problem. It appeared that all of the yahoo servers who were in the same Class C address space were down, but Yahoo servers in other address spaces were up.
All of the down servers were timing out on traceroutes at the same router in GlobalCenter's network, which leads me to conclude that the problem was certainly at the GlobalCenter's routers (whether it was a DoS or misconfiguration is another story).
Yahoo appeared to switch their main mail.yahoo.com's IP address rather quickly and restored service to it once they had also switched/restored access to all of their login servers as well.
In the past I noticed that Yahoo uses a number of clustered machines (I know this because periodically there will be a problem with one machine, a reload and a reconnect to a different login server usually solves my problems).
What surprised me was that on repeated traceroutes to Yahoo machines, all routes appeared to go through the one server, can you say Single Point of Failure? (I checked the routes from multiple machines on different networks so the route was not just my ISP to Yahoo!)
Additionally not all of Yahoo was down, certainly most of it was, but the Geocities pages stayed up throughout the outage, at least the few that I checked, again this is probably due to their being on a different Class C (and thus probably hanging off different servers, likely in a different hosting center).
Well in the cases that I am aware off they were often on the side of the "little" guy against much larger companies who had infringed on intellectual property (in the one case I know the most about it was originally a patent case, the patent got overturned, but they won the case as a trade secret case.)
Why would a contingency fee basis be unatractive to/.ers? Personally it seems to me like a very logical way for a lawyer to be aligned with the interests of his client. It means the law firm takes great risk than when on other fee structures, but it also means less upfront cost for smaller clients.
Personally I find software patents and similiar patents rather reprehensible (especially the current trend to being able to patent Business Processes, like Priceline's patent on the entire concept of reverse auctions!!!) However fundementally patents serve a very important function, and have been a source of the US's lead in technology.
Sure there are abuses, but the basic concept of offering the inventor protection and a period from which to profit from his invention, in return for making full disclosure of that invention to the public is a reasonable concept.
However, in recent years what is patentable seems to have been stretched almost to the breaking point, and the whole process has become very prone to abuse.
Things like the recent filing of almost 6000 patents on GENES feel very odd to me. How it is possible to patent a Mouse or a Tomato made via gene modifications, but not traditional plants made by cross breeding (or is that too possible?) seems highly odd. Let alone the whole concept of being able to OWN something discovered in nature (all benifical items resulting from the expression of a GENE, for example tests for the gene's presences, drugs from the proteins formed by the gene's expression, etc.) This seems abusive.
Am I the only one a bit concerned by the following tag line from Naviant's full page ads in many tech/business magazines from the past few months:
"New precision web targeting from naviant combines physical-world data with online behaviour - for the very first time"
The copy continues:
"With the acquisition of IQ2.net, we're taking data integrity to a level it's never reached before that includes name, address, demographics, psychographics and clickstream behavior."
- all quotes from page 115 of the November, 1999 issue of Fast Company, the ad has also run in a number of other magazines
The phrase "psychographics" is a peculiar one, very much makes me wonder where they are getting their information, and to what purposes it will be used.
Well you can always explore the past Slashdot posts, I know that when I have been away from/. for too long, I sometimes look at the past articles to catch.
Hope this helps make the article flow a bit better.
Re:Bah! What Utter Garbage!
on
Infinite Space
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· Score: 1
Infinity however means an unlimited number of something (ie something which cannot possibly be enumerated.)
With all of the web pages out there which are NOT purely simple files, but rather are GENERATED pages, I would say that the web can certainly be infinite. Sure the number of physical machines has a limit (albiet a very large one) and even the storage space on those machines is limited (albiet always growing), but the perception of the "internet" is that which appears before a given user, and this is ALWAYS growing, and unmeasuarable, both because people keep adding new information, but also because pages (and therefore "places") exist which are generated on the fly.
As someone currently holding this debate with myself, a few observations.
One, my degree (when I finally get it) will probably not immediately help my career, if anything the time I have had to spend taking classes to finish it has hurt my job related learning this year.
Two, the biggest value I expect to have from finishing the degree will be personal. The sense of accomplishment, and the knowledge that I finished. Also, it will perhaps, open up possibilities for further study which would have been closed without the degree (MBA programs etc).
Three, my degree will be in history, while my career is at present highly technical computer consulting.
Four, had I skipped college entirely, I would not have been ready for my current career, either socially or technically. Not that I learned any of my technical skills in college (did not take a computer courses there at all), but I was exposed to many facets of life and the world (including the Internet) which have stood me in good stead in the work world.
One of the biggest differences between attending College and not, is in the breadth of experiances which can be brought to problems, and in the soft skills you learn in college. Skills such as how to research a subject in depth, how to write, different ways to view the world than just what you learned about in High School.
There is also a vast difference between schools. A degree from the local junior college is not the same as a degree from the University of Chicago, which is a different degree than one from CalTech. Some of these differences are in the rigor of the coursework, some are in the social and alumni aspects to school, and others are in the focus (the University of Chicago is heavily tilted towards the Liberal Arts, not even having an engineering degree)
In the high tech world, a geek who has a modicum of technical skills, and a willingness and ability to learn more as needed, will not want for work whether or not there is a Degree on the resume. However, having the degree and the college experience will be a good thing throughout life. College is a chance to learn, not the specific skills needed at the moment, but the stuff you don't even know you will need later on in life.
The most valuable courses I took in College were the ones which have forced me to learn about things I would not have found on my own. When I finally have the degree, and not just a few years of attendance, on my resume, I know that it will help me in my career.
Not by specific skills which I learned, but by showing to prospective employers that I can learn quickly, that I am intelligent, and that I will likely bring a new perspective on job problems.
Why do I say this, I know employers who have told me that the actively recruit graduates of my school (The University of Chicago) not for the knowledge which they posess on graduation, but because they have proven that they can learn and learn well, and the past record of by earlier hires has proven this.
So, to sum up. If you are a geek just out of High School, I encourage you to take advantage of your college years. Take some classes in subjects outside your specific field of interest (and I'd personally recommend not being a CS major but studying something else, the specifics of technology can be learned elsewhere). If you need to, perhaps a few classes on basic computer programming (I took mine in High school, which is why I did not in college) will stand you in good stead, but focus on the basic stuff, the specifics can be learned as needed.
Above all else, College is a time to explore and learn, it is a luxurious time in your life, on which you will look back to and dream about.
Well, in at least the new versions of IE you can configure your news reader, and I think you can do the same with Netscape 4.x as well, of course the default is the newsreader bundled with the browser, but you can switch.
However, at least for those of us behind corporate firewalls, web-based tools are much nicer than using a newsreader.
Well, from what I remember, Mac OSX will pretty much be a "Unix" compatible machine, it will be incorporating a lot of the NeXT technologies, with the Mac OS GUI running on top of a new kernal (based on Mach like NeXTStep?).
I am not sure of the details, but from what I recall reading about Apple's plans, within a year or so their OS will be very much Unix like, albiet with a Mac GUI sitting on top of it.
What I suspect this means is that for most Mac users they will notice little difference, apart from much better multiprocessing, but if you need it (like on a server) much of the unix like functions will be there (perhaps even a command line?)
Does anyone know if this is possible? My concern is that I suspect many of the components of my Vaio are relitively proprietary (though the price/performance was fantastic). It does also have a built-in 56k modem which I suspect will be a problem, as might be the USB port, The IR port, and the power management/suspend mode stuff.
As a long time reader of Salon (since around their first issue or so) I must take issue with your statement. Of all the many sources of reading material online (websites, USNET, mailing lists) Salon is consistently the most interesting, most amusing, and one of the best written things online. Heck, they are far better than most magazines off-line.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back I worked at a company that literally had the highest level of tech support possible from MS (full time MS staff ONSITE whose only job was to field calls from us and arrange for an MS DEVELOPER to call us back directly) i.e. we had paid for direct access to nearly anyone at MS, when we had questions about a particular MS product we could speak with that product's manager at MS.
(We also had a site licence to all of MS's software - I don't know the exact fees we paid MS - well my client paid MS - but they were well in to the double digit millions)
Even with this degree of support and access it was not uncommon for us to stress the upper limits of MS NT servers - we had to ensure that our main servers were routinely patched and rebooted often.
My point though, is that even with that level of support - MS while helpful, often came back with answers such as "we don't know" or "it can't be done" about as often as they would come back with "Here's what to do..."
I once had a set of NT servers running some specialized services - on a seemingly random basis my services would just stop (shifted in time, one server went down, then the other about 30 minutes later). The strangest part was that apparently the two servers did not have any direct connections - they never communicated or worked with each other.
After much research and work, and no useful support from MS, it was determined that a semi-rogue network administrator was remotely running an audit script on my servers - which had the effect of killing my services. Needless to say the administrator was given a serious "talking to"
(all the above was on Windows NT 4.0)
hope this is of interest
There is an existing version of this which is used extensively by the Computer Science field - CiteSeer
This site indexes hundreds of thousands of papers, journal articles, and other publications (dissertations mostly). Each is cross-referenced and linked to the others through a widearray of pattern matching steps (sentance similarity for example)
Imagine if this was extended to all other fields of research - it would probably move the fields forward by leaps just by making it much easier for researchers to locate and reference related work by their peers.
Shannon
Here is the website for the company behind these machines (rather basic and short on details)
Perfect Systems LLC
Note that they do appear to be using standard printers (potentially even one from Xerox - so their patents etc. probably cover the cutting, binding, and collating features (to get the cover printed on one printer combined with the book printed on another) - thus I suspect there may be an issue with durability - though modern printers are MUCH better than copiers were years ago... but still different from regular book presses.
While at one of the largest and most prestigious art shows in North America (Art Chicago) where hundreds of galleries from around the world representing over 3000 artists were exhibiting, I saw some truely stunning and amazing pieces.
These images were pictures - some portraits, others reproductions of famous images - upon closer inspection however it was clear that each image was itself composed of 1000's of other images - which were themselves thematically connected to the larger image.
Check out the website that talks about this - it arose from MIT's media lab. His fine art pieces sell for $10,000+, as well the firm he has founded has commissions from hundreds of companies and organizations. For each image they limit the production of the large and small pieces (but then also sell posters I think) which adds to the rarity. By all perceptions - both the reactions of visitors like myself, the reaction of galleries, critics, and museums - these works are considered fine art.
More to the point of this topic - this is a type of image and art that could NOT be created in without highly sophisticated image databases and computer software - these images are "created" by a computer program that measures the colors and lightness/darkness of each image and arranges them to the best effect. What makes it "art" then is the composition, the concepts, and the sheer physical impact and beauty of the final images.
Check it out for yourselve at:
Photomosaics.com
There are a number of good tools out there for version control - however there are very few that can handle binary files in a "good" manner.
Some issues:
One - Binary file formats - such as MS Word - cannot have diffs run on them that are meaningful - a binary diff will result in a file larger than the two original files. So most version control programs will store binary files as seperate versions - but will NOT show the differences between the versions.
Two - Microsoft HAS some built in support for versions within Word - however this will quickly result in VERY large files - which get increasingly less useable. Also note, that this will be ONE file containing all versions - if you "version" this file, you will have TWO files with different sets of the underlying versions.. sounds confusing? It would be.
Three - There ARE version control programs that have worked with Microsoft to learn how to understand the underlying MS file formats (I believe Clearcase may, possibly MS's own Sourcesafe (which is otherwise a dangerous version control software to use since it can have data integrity problems) and possibly a few others.
So - what would I recommend or suggest?
First - Look carefully at WHAT you are intending to version. Is it a collection of documents (i.e. a full manual)? Individual documents that change over time? A whole project structure (say a website for online help?) Or something else?
Can you seperate out the FORMATING (which might be in MS Word) from the content? For example by using a Master document format - importing TEXT documents into MS Word? This would allow great flexibility in versioning the underlying text documents, keep a smaller MS Word file, and that file could be "versioned" storing copies of each successive version?
Second - For simple document management systems, (which run on Linux but can be accessed by any browser) look at a system like InfoPlace - simple, open source (I think) and easy to use. It is however not a rigorous version control system, but a partial version control system.
Hope this is helpful - I spent 2+ years teaching and managing version control for a very large development operation (1000+ developers worldwide).
Shannon
It is unlikely that even in the worst recession forseable, that highly technically skilled individuals will lack for work. The world and the economy are too dependant on computers and computer systems to run, and the number of devices and systems vs. the number of people who understand them is only growing in favor of those of us to have an understanding computer systems.
Certainly any given technical skillset will probably grow less valuable over time (how many new Fortran jobs have you seen lately?) but in the near future as we enter into a world with literally BILLIONS of devices connected to the network (with wireless devices probably being more pervasive than desktop PCs) the individuals capable of configuring, programming, and developing the underpinnings of the network will be in very high demand.
Personally both as a technologist myself, and as someone who hires programmers, what I look for first and foremost is an inherent understanding and love of computers coupled with specific knowledge of the technologies that the job requires. For what I need I would not hire someone from a techinical school with multiple certifications, rather I would prefer to hire the liberal arts major whose passion has always been technology, the type of developer who didn't take CS classes in college because their open source project was already taking up too much of their time (or their paid projects).
While I enjoy CS theory (though I myself am a historian by training) very little of it has a direct effect on the productitivy and skill of the developers. The most talented developers either figure much of the theory out themselves, or upon encountering it exploit and enhance the suggestions to make their jobs easier.
The best developers I know have become that by their reaction to computers, they think of something they want, and rather than just waiting for someone else to sell it to them, they figure out how to make it for themselves. For example, years ago (over 10) a friend wanted a first person shooter type of game for his computer, rather than waiting to buy one, he sat down with his Visual Basic (the language that he knew at the time) and wrote one. When he needed to enhance the graphics performance (this was back when a 486 was the top processor) he tought himself some C and some Assembler.
Individuals like him are who make technical leaps. Technologists who know the systems, learn the tools quickly, have the abililty and patience to get it right, and want a job will always be able to find one.
Just my few cents on this topic...
Just to echo the above poster's comments.
A few years back I had the following conversation with my grandmother. "Gran, you really should get a computer and get on the internet" She couldn't see a reason to so she did not (this was back in 1995 or so.
Then about 2 years ago she heard about the iMac and decided that that would be a good computer for her to get (she asked me and I agreed).
Last year, she ordered a cable modem from @home so she now has faster connections at home than I do (and I own an Internet Software company).
Her reason for getting a cable modem, so she could be online without tying up her phone (she lives in the Mountains of CA, getting a second phone line would cost her $1000's, since she already had cable it was the logical route.
What does she do online now?
Play bridge. Most evenings.
So, in her late 70's my grandmother is joining the Internet community to play bridge, exchange emails with friends, and sometimes do some research online. She still has problems with certain things like opening up attachments (just as well most of the time) but all in all an amazing journey from "no reason to have a computer, to having high speed access and using it every night".
A thought that I have had, though since I am busy working on another business opportunity at the moment so I am not pursueing it, is that there are some obvious places to gather very accurate data about website interest.
These are the main routers for the hosting providers hosting the website in question. At some level these machines "know" not just how much traffic is requesting the given website, but how many different IP addresses are requesting, how many of the requests are short/quick Cache refreshes vs. long "real" sessions etc.
Capturing this data would require some sort of sniffing, which could have a performance hit and does raise security implications but could be overcome. Additionally the main routers for most hosting companies are outside of the control of the client companies so this data could be seen as more trustworthy than the server logs from a machine to which the client company has root.
Anyway, just my thoughts a fair amount of work would need to take place to turn this into a new profitable line of business for the hosting companies, but given the market need for accurate data I think it would be worth pursueing.
Shannon
When the outage occured (or only hours into it) I was online trying to check my email at Yahoo. I had been able to check it at approx. 9:30AM, was unable to at ~11:30AM (Central Standard time).
At that time I started to do some semi-routine troubleshooting to see if I could identify the problem. It appeared that all of the yahoo servers who were in the same Class C address space were down, but Yahoo servers in other address spaces were up.
All of the down servers were timing out on traceroutes at the same router in GlobalCenter's network, which leads me to conclude that the problem was certainly at the GlobalCenter's routers (whether it was a DoS or misconfiguration is another story).
Yahoo appeared to switch their main mail.yahoo.com's IP address rather quickly and restored service to it once they had also switched/restored access to all of their login servers as well.
In the past I noticed that Yahoo uses a number of clustered machines (I know this because periodically there will be a problem with one machine, a reload and a reconnect to a different login server usually solves my problems).
What surprised me was that on repeated traceroutes to Yahoo machines, all routes appeared to go through the one server, can you say Single Point of Failure? (I checked the routes from multiple machines on different networks so the route was not just my ISP to Yahoo!)
Additionally not all of Yahoo was down, certainly most of it was, but the Geocities pages stayed up throughout the outage, at least the few that I checked, again this is probably due to their being on a different Class C (and thus probably hanging off different servers, likely in a different hosting center).
Hope this helps,
Shannon Clark
consultant with Sayers Group
Well in the cases that I am aware off they were often on the side of the "little" guy against much larger companies who had infringed on intellectual property (in the one case I know the most about it was originally a patent case, the patent got overturned, but they won the case as a trade secret case.)
/.ers? Personally it seems to me like a very logical way for a lawyer to be aligned with the interests of his client. It means the law firm takes great risk than when on other fee structures, but it also means less upfront cost for smaller clients.
Why would a contingency fee basis be unatractive to
Personally I find software patents and similiar patents rather reprehensible (especially the current trend to being able to patent Business Processes, like Priceline's patent on the entire concept of reverse auctions!!!) However fundementally patents serve a very important function, and have been a source of the US's lead in technology.
Sure there are abuses, but the basic concept of offering the inventor protection and a period from which to profit from his invention, in return for making full disclosure of that invention to the public is a reasonable concept.
However, in recent years what is patentable seems to have been stretched almost to the breaking point, and the whole process has become very prone to abuse.
Things like the recent filing of almost 6000 patents on GENES feel very odd to me. How it is possible to patent a Mouse or a Tomato made via gene modifications, but not traditional plants made by cross breeding (or is that too possible?) seems highly odd. Let alone the whole concept of being able to OWN something discovered in nature (all benifical items resulting from the expression of a GENE, for example tests for the gene's presences, drugs from the proteins formed by the gene's expression, etc.) This seems abusive.
Shannon Clark
One firm I know is good for general intellectual property items is Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro based in Chicago.
In interest of full disclosure, Bill Niro is a neighbor of my parents, and my dad has done work for him as an Expert Witness.
Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro specializies in Intellectual Property litigation, but they do most other Intellectual Property services as well.
Good luck!
Shannon Clark
Am I the only one a bit concerned by the following tag line from Naviant's full page ads in many tech /business magazines from the past few months:
"New precision web targeting from naviant combines physical-world data with online behaviour - for the very first time"
The copy continues:
"With the acquisition of IQ2.net, we're taking data integrity to a level it's never reached before that includes name, address, demographics, psychographics and clickstream behavior."
- all quotes from page 115 of the November, 1999 issue of Fast Company, the ad has also run in a number of other magazines
The phrase "psychographics" is a peculiar one, very much makes me wonder where they are getting their information, and to what purposes it will be used.
Shannon Clark
Well you can always explore the past Slashdot posts, I know that when I have been away from /. for too long, I sometimes look at the past articles to catch.
The original summary pointed to the second page of the article, here is a link to the first page. Network Computing Is It Time for Linux .
Hope this helps make the article flow a bit better.
Infinity however means an unlimited number of something (ie something which cannot possibly be enumerated.)
With all of the web pages out there which are NOT purely simple files, but rather are GENERATED pages, I would say that the web can certainly be infinite. Sure the number of physical machines has a limit (albiet a very large one) and even the storage space on those machines is limited (albiet always growing), but the perception of the "internet" is that which appears before a given user, and this is ALWAYS growing, and unmeasuarable, both because people keep adding new information, but also because pages (and therefore "places") exist which are generated on the fly.
Just my 2 cents.
As someone currently holding this debate with myself, a few observations.
One, my degree (when I finally get it) will probably not immediately help my career, if anything the time I have had to spend taking classes to finish it has hurt my job related learning this year.
Two, the biggest value I expect to have from finishing the degree will be personal. The sense of accomplishment, and the knowledge that I finished. Also, it will perhaps, open up possibilities for further study which would have been closed without the degree (MBA programs etc).
Three, my degree will be in history, while my career is at present highly technical computer consulting.
Four, had I skipped college entirely, I would not have been ready for my current career, either socially or technically. Not that I learned any of my technical skills in college (did not take a computer courses there at all), but I was exposed to many facets of life and the world (including the Internet) which have stood me in good stead in the work world.
One of the biggest differences between attending College and not, is in the breadth of experiances which can be brought to problems, and in the soft skills you learn in college. Skills such as how to research a subject in depth, how to write, different ways to view the world than just what you learned about in High School.
There is also a vast difference between schools. A degree from the local junior college is not the same as a degree from the University of Chicago, which is a different degree than one from CalTech. Some of these differences are in the rigor of the coursework, some are in the social and alumni aspects to school, and others are in the focus (the University of Chicago is heavily tilted towards the Liberal Arts, not even having an engineering degree)
In the high tech world, a geek who has a modicum of technical skills, and a willingness and ability to learn more as needed, will not want for work whether or not there is a Degree on the resume. However, having the degree and the college experience will be a good thing throughout life. College is a chance to learn, not the specific skills needed at the moment, but the stuff you don't even know you will need later on in life.
The most valuable courses I took in College were the ones which have forced me to learn about things I would not have found on my own. When I finally have the degree, and not just a few years of attendance, on my resume, I know that it will help me in my career.
Not by specific skills which I learned, but by showing to prospective employers that I can learn quickly, that I am intelligent, and that I will likely bring a new perspective on job problems.
Why do I say this, I know employers who have told me that the actively recruit graduates of my school (The University of Chicago) not for the knowledge which they posess on graduation, but because they have proven that they can learn and learn well, and the past record of by earlier hires has proven this.
So, to sum up. If you are a geek just out of High School, I encourage you to take advantage of your college years. Take some classes in subjects outside your specific field of interest (and I'd personally recommend not being a CS major but studying something else, the specifics of technology can be learned elsewhere). If you need to, perhaps a few classes on basic computer programming (I took mine in High school, which is why I did not in college) will stand you in good stead, but focus on the basic stuff, the specifics can be learned as needed.
Above all else, College is a time to explore and learn, it is a luxurious time in your life, on which you will look back to and dream about.
Hope this wan't too long.
Well, in at least the new versions of IE you can configure your news reader, and I think you can do the same with Netscape 4.x as well, of course the default is the newsreader bundled with the browser, but you can switch.
However, at least for those of us behind corporate firewalls, web-based tools are much nicer than using a newsreader.
Well, from what I remember, Mac OSX will pretty much be a "Unix" compatible machine, it will be incorporating a lot of the NeXT technologies, with the Mac OS GUI running on top of a new kernal (based on Mach like NeXTStep?).
I am not sure of the details, but from what I recall reading about Apple's plans, within a year or so their OS will be very much Unix like, albiet with a Mac GUI sitting on top of it.
What I suspect this means is that for most Mac users they will notice little difference, apart from much better multiprocessing, but if you need it (like on a server) much of the unix like functions will be there (perhaps even a command line?)
Does anyone know if this is possible? My concern is that I suspect many of the components of my Vaio are relitively proprietary (though the price/performance was fantastic). It does also have a built-in 56k modem which I suspect will be a problem, as might be the USB port, The IR port, and the power management/suspend mode stuff.
Any thoughts or ideas?
As a long time reader of Salon (since around their first issue or so) I must take issue with your statement. Of all the many sources of reading material online (websites, USNET, mailing lists) Salon is consistently the most interesting, most amusing, and one of the best written things online. Heck, they are far better than most magazines off-line.
Just my two cents.