I've run into bugs that would have been caught by a static type system
The experience with Java is that static type resolution is very important in reducing run time errors - so much so that it was the primary reason for introduction of generics into Java. The basic problem I have with dynamically typed languages is that run-time errors are far more costly to test for, catch and debug than compile time errors.
why Python proponents always mention the fact that whitespace is significant as a good thing
They always mention it in the hope that if they say it often enough you will eventually believe it. In reality invisible syntactic elements is plain stupid.
All I can say (and I've used both languages) is that Python does some things very nicely, However that does not make it a language suitable for enterprise programming - libraries are thin, IDE's are very thin, implicit variables are unacceptable and the global interpreter lock is a an automatic disqualification if you need multithreading.
I really like the concept of 20% for projects like this. Some other companies like 3M have tried it and benefitted tremendously both in terms of employee engagement and in innovative products.
This MS developer is lying. I used to talk with people programming VB6, when I was project lead for a big NYC insurance project that MS was hot to get started in the industry through.
Given the history of Microsoft on this issue I cannot imagine that anyone would take ANY pronouncements of this sort at face value until you can go into Add/Remove and uninstall IE and seemlessly replace it with another browser. If IE is only providing services to other applications in the manner they describe, MS should publish the API so alternatives can seamlessly replace IE.
If somebody from Microsoft is making pronouncements of this sort without first getting them approved by MS and their legal team there are either nuts or looking to be fired/sued. This developer should be viewed as the Mouth of Sauron until proven otherwise.
misreading an article about patents, and then submitting the erroneous conclusions to Slashdot who will then exercise their editorial bias against patents and post it as news.
There needs to be some sort of penalty for filing fraudulent patent applications like this, and it needs to be something more than financial
There are certainly laws against patent fraud. Whether the offense carries jail time usually depends on other issues. In exteme cases RICO has been brought into the picture.
Is it practical to switch from SQL Server to MySQL?
I guess it depends on how minimal your needs are. But one thing I have noticed is that MySQL maps better to MS-SQL than Postgres. Postgres maps better to Oracle.
Once you decide on your new employer they are going to be putting pressure on you to start sooneer rather than later, plus you are probably going to want to make a good first impression, put in some extra hours learning your new job, etc.
The last thing you want is some old job hanging over you while this is going on. Give your old boss 1 week notice, take a week off and start your new position refreshed.
Moving parts wear out. Books wear out after continued use. Software does not. Define OLD for me please?
That's the rub. While old software may run forever, being able to buy a printer that comes with drivers for ye olde OS can become an issue. My dad doesn't want to give up MS-DOS because he prefers qedit and qfiler, but recently he has been unable to find a laser printer that supports his OS.
My definition:
Software is old when you can't find hardware drivers that support it.
You were the one who stated that any country that has criminal penalties for copyright infringement was fucked up. After a quick read of the Australia copyright law, it appears that Australia does indeed meet that criteria.
They are not illegal because copying is inherently wrong, but simply because Congress has decided to make some types of copying temporarily illegal.
You have got to be kidding! In any constituency the definition of 'inherently wrong' is subject to a very wide range of interpitation. There are many things that fit this that are perfectly legal, and visa versa. LAWS ARE NOT BASED ON SOME HIGHER MORAL CONCEPT OF RIGHT AND WRONG. They are based on a pragmatic assesment of how a society should be structured. One such assesment is that copyright encourages production of creative works, which in general outweighs the negative effects of restricting the freedom to copy anything you damn well please.
As far as your reading that only certain types of infringement are considered criminal acts, well, yes. But the bar is very low. Under the NET act it reads (note that all important OR):
# for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
# by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
So the value of what you have copied need only exceed $1000 for criminal penalties to apply.
People seem to have a lot of misconception about copyrights here. For example, the terms of copyright vary depending on the material. For printed materials we have the following history:
The original grant under the Statute of Anne was 14 years with an option to renew for 14 more years.
In 1842 it was increased to the life of the author plus 7 years.
Later the Bono act (which actually was a matter of synchronizing the term with the European practice) made it life + 70. Interesting the European extension was retroactive, reviving already expired copyrights, while the Bono act did not include retroactive extension.
Now sound recordings are treated differently from printed material. I won't go into the history, but right now the term of copyright for a recording is 50 years from the time of first publication. So it is quite different from your scenario.
Other materials also have different copyright periods.
It's not criminal activity. It's a civil dispute between citizens.
Breaking copyright law is a criminal offense, with criminal penalties under law. The copyright holder may also sue you in civil court to recover his damages.
From thomas.loc.gov:
The current Copyright Act provides for criminal penalties for copyright infringement. Section 1204 of the bill also provides criminal penalties for violations of section 1201(a) and (b).
These penalites include fines of up to $1,000,000 and 10 years in prison for repeat offenders who are engaging in this for commercial gain.
So if one idea has been patented by 2 different corporations in 2 different countries.
Very unlikey. Prior art is universal, so if corp 1 patented in country a, corp 2 with have problems patenting the same thing in country b.
Not to mention a product can be covered by lots of different patents. And any of those patent-holders has the right to DENY you anything if they chose (ie. your money is not important to them).
Well,of course. Most products are built using a combination of multiple technologies.
I'm using the word idea deliberately, because that is what software patents are really covering. Copyrights cover the code.
That's a common misunderstanding. A patent covers an implementation, while a copyright covers an expression (of the idea). The same idea, i.e. flying machine can be implemented many different ways. Each is patentable so long as they are actually different. Where a patent becomes really valuable is when you've got one on the best implementation. For example the RSA patent was so useful because they had the implementation of RSA on computers, which was pretty much the most valuable way to do it. You could have used RSA all you wanted on an abacus, or by paper and pencil, but that isn't anywhere near as useful.
Copyright on the other hand is pretty weak. There are lots of ways to write a program that gives a user a spreadsheet on screen.
is an overseas company holding a us patent still able to enforce it's us patents from offshore?
About 50% of US patents are granted to foreign companies. However they can't enforce them from offshore, they have to sue in US court.
By world-wide patents they mean patents granted by other countries, say Australia, Japan, Canada etc. There is no one all-encompasing single worldwaide patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, on Google I zoomed in on New York.
Nah right back at you. When I zoomed in to my street address I could see one of my neighbors mowing his lawn and individual shrubs in my front lawn.
It is much higher res than the free access Multimap.
I've run into bugs that would have been caught by a static type system
The experience with Java is that static type resolution is very important in reducing run time errors - so much so that it was the primary reason for introduction of generics into Java. The basic problem I have with dynamically typed languages is that run-time errors are far more costly to test for, catch and debug than compile time errors.
why Python proponents always mention the fact that whitespace is significant as a good thing
They always mention it in the hope that if they say it often enough you will eventually believe it. In reality invisible syntactic elements is plain stupid.
All I can say (and I've used both languages) is that Python does some things very nicely, However that does not make it a language suitable for enterprise programming - libraries are thin, IDE's are very thin, implicit variables are unacceptable and the global interpreter lock is a an automatic disqualification if you need multithreading.
I was stupidly thinking
At least you tried. Most peolpe are stupid non-thinkers.
Is Nintendo somehow exempt?
They pay the license fees unlike Sony,
So Microsoft has just bought France to go along with their acquisition of evil?
Sounds like a matched set to me.
I really like the concept of 20% for projects like this. Some other companies like 3M have tried it and benefitted tremendously both in terms of employee engagement and in innovative products.
This MS developer is lying. I used to talk with people programming VB6, when I was project lead for a big NYC insurance project that MS was hot to get started in the industry through.
Given the history of Microsoft on this issue I cannot imagine that anyone would take ANY pronouncements of this sort at face value until you can go into Add/Remove and uninstall IE and seemlessly replace it with another browser. If IE is only providing services to other applications in the manner they describe, MS should publish the API so alternatives can seamlessly replace IE.
If somebody from Microsoft is making pronouncements of this sort without first getting them approved by MS and their legal team there are either nuts or looking to be fired/sued. This developer should be viewed as the Mouth of Sauron until proven otherwise.
misreading an article about patents, and then submitting the erroneous conclusions to Slashdot who will then exercise their editorial bias against patents and post it as news.
There needs to be some sort of penalty for filing fraudulent patent applications like this, and it needs to be something more than financial
There are certainly laws against patent fraud. Whether the offense carries jail time usually depends on other issues. In exteme cases RICO has been brought into the picture.
How so? Is it because of dialectic or feature reasons?
For example PG and Oracle use sequences, MySQL and MS use autoincrement fields.
Is it practical to switch from SQL Server to MySQL?
I guess it depends on how minimal your needs are. But one thing I have noticed is that MySQL maps better to MS-SQL than Postgres. Postgres maps better to Oracle.
Once you decide on your new employer they are going to be putting pressure on you to start sooneer rather than later, plus you are probably going to want to make a good first impression, put in some extra hours learning your new job, etc.
The last thing you want is some old job hanging over you while this is going on. Give your old boss 1 week notice, take a week off and start your new position refreshed.
Moving parts wear out. Books wear out after continued use. Software does not. Define OLD for me please?
That's the rub. While old software may run forever, being able to buy a printer that comes with drivers for ye olde OS can become an issue. My dad doesn't want to give up MS-DOS because he prefers qedit and qfiler, but recently he has been unable to find a laser printer that supports his OS.
My definition:
Software is old when you can't find hardware drivers that support it.
More or less anything is superior to CVS.
There are two things I know of that are nowhere near as good as CVS.
- No version control.
- VSS,
And sadly I have experience with all three choices.
Unfortunately, it's been my experience that quick, dirty and stupid is the rule with ALL languages rather than the exception.
Some languages enforce that rule with an iron fist, others actually make you work to obey the rule.
You were the one who stated that any country that has criminal penalties for copyright infringement was fucked up. After a quick read of the Australia copyright law, it appears that Australia does indeed meet that criteria.
They are not illegal because copying is inherently wrong, but simply because Congress has decided to make some types of copying temporarily illegal.
You have got to be kidding! In any constituency the definition of 'inherently wrong' is subject to a very wide range of interpitation. There are many things that fit this that are perfectly legal, and visa versa. LAWS ARE NOT BASED ON SOME HIGHER MORAL CONCEPT OF RIGHT AND WRONG. They are based on a pragmatic assesment of how a society should be structured. One such assesment is that copyright encourages production of creative works, which in general outweighs the negative effects of restricting the freedom to copy anything you damn well please.
As far as your reading that only certain types of infringement are considered criminal acts, well, yes. But the bar is very low. Under the NET act
it reads (note that all important OR):
# for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
# by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
So the value of what you have copied need only exceed $1000 for criminal penalties to apply.
And your fucked up country is? Oz? Canada?
Both have criminal penalties include possible jail time for copyright infringement.
it was originaly, what, 7 years?
People seem to have a lot of misconception about copyrights here. For example, the terms of copyright vary depending on the material. For printed materials we have the following history:
The original grant under the Statute of Anne was 14 years with an option to renew for 14 more years.
In 1842 it was increased to the life of the author plus 7 years.
Later the Bono act (which actually was a matter of synchronizing the term with the European practice) made it life + 70. Interesting the European extension was retroactive, reviving already expired copyrights, while the Bono act did not include retroactive extension.
Now sound recordings are treated differently from printed material. I won't go into the history, but right now the term of copyright for a recording is 50 years from the time of first publication. So it is quite different from your scenario.
Other materials also have different copyright periods.
It's not criminal activity. It's a civil dispute between citizens.
Breaking copyright law is a criminal offense, with criminal penalties under law. The copyright holder may also sue you in civil court to recover his damages.
From thomas.loc.gov:
The current Copyright Act provides for criminal penalties for copyright infringement. Section 1204 of the bill also provides criminal penalties for violations of section 1201(a) and (b).
These penalites include fines of up to $1,000,000 and 10 years in prison for repeat offenders who are engaging in this for commercial gain.
So if one idea has been patented by 2 different corporations in 2 different countries.
Very unlikey. Prior art is universal, so if corp 1 patented in country a, corp 2 with have problems patenting the same thing in country b.
Not to mention a product can be covered by lots of different patents. And any of those patent-holders has the right to DENY you anything if they chose (ie. your money is not important to them).
Well,of course. Most products are built using a combination of multiple technologies.
I'm using the word idea deliberately, because that is what software patents are really covering. Copyrights cover the code.
That's a common misunderstanding. A patent covers an implementation, while a copyright covers an expression (of the idea). The same idea, i.e. flying machine can be implemented many different ways. Each is patentable so long as they are actually different. Where a patent becomes really valuable is when you've got one on the best implementation. For example the RSA patent was so useful because they had the implementation of RSA on computers, which was pretty much the most valuable way to do it. You could have used RSA all you wanted on an abacus, or by paper and pencil, but that isn't anywhere near as useful.
Copyright on the other hand is pretty weak. There are lots of ways to write a program that gives a user a spreadsheet on screen.
Can you suggest such a clear cut answer for the "cheap, fast" vertex?
/dev/null ?
How about
is an overseas company holding a us patent still able to enforce it's us patents from offshore?
About 50% of US patents are granted to foreign companies. However they can't enforce them from offshore, they have to sue in US court.
By world-wide patents they mean patents granted by other countries, say Australia, Japan, Canada etc. There is no one all-encompasing single worldwaide patent.
The question that you didn't consider is whether or not those C# jobs also appear as .Net jobs in the search results.