I assume you are correct about the non-compete though you will probably need lawyers if they attempt to intimidate you. If they have a patent on any of the software you could be in trouble if the features you decide to re-engineer are included in the patent. Otherwise, I would document your requirments and design very carefully so you can demonstrate how you developed your product and why it is in the marketspace it is in. It is quite possible that your employer is going to be hoping mad and looking to inflict as much pain on you as possible since you exit may be the best way to explain their failure. Of course if you stay, you will probably be blamed anyway. In situations like this, in my experience, the incompetants always are on the lookout for someone else to blame. Good luck
I guess I am getting tired of this argument since both sides are missing critical functional specs (so to speak). A national ID will never furnish any "security" and will, at best, marginally improve government ability to track individuals (assuming they can actually competently implement a system of the size needed). Our privacy has already been compromised by the government and zillions of corporations, opposing the national id protects nobody. The right wing nut cases in intelligence and law enforcement are lazy and think this is some type of magic bullet that is why this thing never dies.
On the other hand, the id is useful for delivering services to citizens, such as national health insurance or at least consolidating one's health records so that you never have to fill out the same idiotic form every time you visit a new doctor and your history is already there including the last time you had a tetanus shot. It will also be important if you end up unconscious in the ER and are allergic to the drug they think they need to give you immediately.
I believe it is more important to fight for legislation that demands that information is used properly for the right reasons and that all use of personal information be audited and available for individuals on demand. That combined with serious penalties for abuse, especially from the private sector (which I think does far more with this than the government) would be a much more potent way of addressing a national id.
I think the problem is in the author's head. Difficulties always exist between vendors. They are worked out when the beneifts of cooperation outweigh the benefits of non-cooperation. I believe what we are calling the semantic web has other features that many consider failure but in reality are inherent to sharing the amount of information we are trying to share, namely, universal uniformity and a single clean interface into human civilization (which is really what the sm is) is impossible and foolish to hope for. The semantic web will make some things vastly easier and the price we will pay is that other things will become far more difficult. This will stimulate more innovations and hence more problems, etc.
A lot of the latest work in OWL can be related to topos theory which is used by mathematical logic but is grounded in Grothendieck's scheme theory from algebraic geometry. This gets into very abstract stuff, on the other hand people working in embedded systems may do better with a grounding in differential equations and classical controls theory. I think that computer science has become too big to consider as a subject to be mastered, rather it (as mathematics, physics, engineering or biology) is a large umbrella over over a variety of sub-disciplines each of which has a distinct set of pre-requisites.
I agree. Microsoft's approach is to grab share and then gee whiz everyone to death with new features that nobody really wants. It worked with windows because Apple misunderstood the market and never was able to recover it because its gee whiz features couldn't overcome the momentum windows had(s). Apple has this (ipod-mpg) market and I don't think the gee whiz features of Zune will appeal to many outside the Bill Gates geek worshiper crowd which is rather small imho.
It is also a non-issue, because the commercial outfits want avenues into the OSS base. If Oracle buys JBoss, say, if they start to charge for JBoss, they will loose access to the most active and creative elements of the market. These are the folks who are driving things forward, these are the individuals that Oracle wants to make nice with.
I think we need to understand that while many of us like OSS for a variety of political and technical reasons, we represent a very important and growing market segment. This gives us a lot of power in the marketplace, including preserving the movement even in elements of the movement that are captured by commercial concerns.
Pretentious or not, it would be nice to have an agreed upon xml document standard and a central body that supports it. When competition is focused on the creation of new technologies it can be a tremendous stimulus. When it is focused on maintaing control of large and mature markets, it tends to become a tradeoff between being raped or being pillaged. An open standard gets us out of the latter so we can all focus our energies on the former.
I agree wholeheartedly. We are putting out applications for parents to sign up their children for health insurance (in the state of Illinois). The ability to deliver this application over the web is a major advance for the state. Use of Ajax makes this much better for the user as well as the developer. Most of the issues that Jakob raises are irrelevant here which shows imho that he is out of touch with the way the use of the web is developing. His domain, usability in web pages, is shrinking as the actual usage of the web is increasing not only in users but in types of applications.
One of the problems with this discussion is that it appears that writers are trying to characterize wikipedia as a whole. In my view, from what I have seen, some of it is really useful, say, the entries on Linux and some of it can get out into the weeds say in philosophy.
A project like this, if it can continue as it seems it will, should be judged by the spectrum of quality it produces. What categories appear reliable over a large population of users? What categories' credibility is limited to small populations of users? What does that say about the communities of users contributing to and consuming the encyclopedia?
Those who expect any information resource to achieve high levels of credibility indpendent of those that use it should have been born in Greece about 2500 years ago - that was the last time to my mind that those ideas were really able to advance society.
While I am not completly thrilled with wifi prices, I use tmobile for $10/day (24 hours) and can get unlimited during a month for $40. I think earthlink is similarly priced. Since I don't need it that often, I go by the day, but whoever is charging $10/hour will probably not be in business for long. I live in Chicago not San Francisco, but I find it hard to believe that the prices are that much higher anywhere in the country.
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I assume you are correct about the non-compete though you will probably need lawyers if they attempt to intimidate you. If they have a patent on any of the software you could be in trouble if the features you decide to re-engineer are included in the patent. Otherwise, I would document your requirments and design very carefully so you can demonstrate how you developed your product and why it is in the marketspace it is in. It is quite possible that your employer is going to be hoping mad and looking to inflict as much pain on you as possible since you exit may be the best way to explain their failure. Of course if you stay, you will probably be blamed anyway. In situations like this, in my experience, the incompetants always are on the lookout for someone else to blame. Good luck
On the other hand, the id is useful for delivering services to citizens, such as national health insurance or at least consolidating one's health records so that you never have to fill out the same idiotic form every time you visit a new doctor and your history is already there including the last time you had a tetanus shot. It will also be important if you end up unconscious in the ER and are allergic to the drug they think they need to give you immediately.
I believe it is more important to fight for legislation that demands that information is used properly for the right reasons and that all use of personal information be audited and available for individuals on demand. That combined with serious penalties for abuse, especially from the private sector (which I think does far more with this than the government) would be a much more potent way of addressing a national id.
I think the problem is in the author's head. Difficulties always exist between vendors. They are worked out when the beneifts of cooperation outweigh the benefits of non-cooperation. I believe what we are calling the semantic web has other features that many consider failure but in reality are inherent to sharing the amount of information we are trying to share, namely, universal uniformity and a single clean interface into human civilization (which is really what the sm is) is impossible and foolish to hope for. The semantic web will make some things vastly easier and the price we will pay is that other things will become far more difficult. This will stimulate more innovations and hence more problems, etc.
A lot of the latest work in OWL can be related to topos theory which is used by mathematical logic but is grounded in Grothendieck's scheme theory from algebraic geometry. This gets into very abstract stuff, on the other hand people working in embedded systems may do better with a grounding in differential equations and classical controls theory. I think that computer science has become too big to consider as a subject to be mastered, rather it (as mathematics, physics, engineering or biology) is a large umbrella over over a variety of sub-disciplines each of which has a distinct set of pre-requisites.
I agree. Microsoft's approach is to grab share and then gee whiz everyone to death with new features that nobody really wants. It worked with windows because Apple misunderstood the market and never was able to recover it because its gee whiz features couldn't overcome the momentum windows had(s). Apple has this (ipod-mpg) market and I don't think the gee whiz features of Zune will appeal to many outside the Bill Gates geek worshiper crowd which is rather small imho.
It is also a non-issue, because the commercial outfits want avenues into the OSS base. If Oracle buys JBoss, say, if they start to charge for JBoss, they will loose access to the most active and creative elements of the market. These are the folks who are driving things forward, these are the individuals that Oracle wants to make nice with.
I think we need to understand that while many of us like OSS for a variety of political and technical reasons, we represent a very important and growing market segment. This gives us a lot of power in the marketplace, including preserving the movement even in elements of the movement that are captured by commercial concerns.
Pretentious or not, it would be nice to have an agreed upon xml document standard and a central body that supports it. When competition is focused on the creation of new technologies it can be a tremendous stimulus. When it is focused on maintaing control of large and mature markets, it tends to become a tradeoff between being raped or being pillaged. An open standard gets us out of the latter so we can all focus our energies on the former.
I agree wholeheartedly. We are putting out applications for parents to sign up their children for health insurance (in the state of Illinois). The ability to deliver this application over the web is a major advance for the state. Use of Ajax makes this much better for the user as well as the developer. Most of the issues that Jakob raises are irrelevant here which shows imho that he is out of touch with the way the use of the web is developing. His domain, usability in web pages, is shrinking as the actual usage of the web is increasing not only in users but in types of applications.
One of the problems with this discussion is that it appears that writers are trying to characterize wikipedia as a whole. In my view, from what I have seen, some of it is really useful, say, the entries on Linux and some of it can get out into the weeds say in philosophy.
A project like this, if it can continue as it seems it will, should be judged by the spectrum of quality it produces. What categories appear reliable over a large population of users? What categories' credibility is limited to small populations of users? What does that say about the communities of users contributing to and consuming the encyclopedia?
Those who expect any information resource to achieve high levels of credibility indpendent of those that use it should have been born in Greece about 2500 years ago - that was the last time to my mind that those ideas were really able to advance society.
While I am not completly thrilled with wifi prices, I use tmobile for $10/day (24 hours) and can get unlimited during a month for $40. I think earthlink is similarly priced. Since I don't need it that often, I go by the day, but whoever is charging $10/hour will probably not be in business for long. I live in Chicago not San Francisco, but I find it hard to believe that the prices are that much higher anywhere in the country.