I'm not sure if it's the responsibility of the patent office to bring up prior art. I think the entity filing the patent may be responsible for doing so, but obviously there's no strong disincentive. If it were a criminal offense to file a patent in the existence of obvious prior art, maybe we could stop this nonsense.
I've worked in a number of large companies, and I've seen the damage caused by trying to force technological decisions (like which programming language to use, or which communication package to use) down on everyone from upper management. As a result of these experiences, I believe that most technology decisions should be made locally - at the group level - rather than at the department or enterprise level.
Software development is a team activity. It works best when the teams are small (< 6 people) and relatively autonomous. The team members and team leader are ultimately judged by the success or failure of what they deliver, and it should be up to them to decide which technologies they want to use.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't have rules at higher levels, it just means that the higher you go the more general your rules should be. Rules like "you must use languages X, Y, and Z" are inappropriate for the enterprise level. On the contrary, a rule like "before a language can be adopted, there must be at least N employees who are familiar with it" is a lot more sensible.
From what I've seen in this discussion and heard elsewhere, the basic argument of language standardization boils down to two contradictory mandates:
1) use the right tool for the job 2) use a tool that others are familiar with
Placing the decision at the team level allows you to make a nice compromise. You get the flexibility to pick the right tool and the guarantee that the ones who are going to be most involved with the tool will be familiar with it.
The disadvantage to this approach is that you can end up with "islands of technology" in your enterprise, where a team builds a successful product with an obscure technology and then moves on, leaving the company with something that must be supported but cannot be maintained. Note that this can also happen even with familiar technologies - you can make a mess in any language.
The best guard against this scenario is to make teams responsible for supporting what they have built. There's a lot of stuff that goes along with this idea, but that's a separate discussion.:-)
This is no joke. I live near NYC and I personally know two people who have been accosted by police for taking pictures in train stations. One of them (a dark skinned Indian guy) was taken down to the station for questioning.
I think there might actually be a law against photographing or publishing maps of public facilities during wartime (I seem to recall something to this effect from an issue of 2600, given as a reason for not publishing pictures of US payphones in that issue). Since we seem to be in a state of perpetual warfare, it is effectively always illegal to engage in such activities.
But as other posters have suggested, this would seem to be an outdated law given the widespread availability of miniature cameras, cell-phone cameras, public security cameras and satellite imagery.
There's not much you can do if your company reacts to your departure as an "act of betrayal". In my experience, fewer companies are behaving this way these days although there are still a few (including a former employer of my own - I recently had a similar experience).
I really don't understand this, it seems like a very bad business decision to me - ostensibly the reason I was given was fear of sabotage, but it seems to me that if you are intent on sabotage you are much more likely to do it before (or in lieu of) giving notice. It would seem to make much more sense to make use of those two weeks as an orderly transition period.
I think what it really comes down to is (as an earlier poster suggested) an immature corporate culture. Let's face it: the whole job security myth flies in the face of everything we've seen over the past half century. Any CEO who promises that your job will be safe is either lying outright or deluded. Companies die, they conduct massive layoffs - this is a good thing. It frees up resources to go into more productive channels. You can't expect that your employer will have a job for as long as you want, and it's unreasonable for them to expect you to work for them for as long as they want. To respond in this manner when someone gives notice is just silly - employment is not a marriage, it's a business relationship.
But the good part is, you basically get two weeks paid vacation...
AFAIK, Weir was never implicated in this. Everything I've read has been very fuzzy about specifically which members of the band were involved - can you cite something more authoritative?
AFAIK, the standard for representing international characters in a hostname is via IDNA encoding (see RFC3490) which maps international characters to ascii characters. It looks like name components in this spec have to begin with ascii "xn--", so a single international character domain name would be at least a 5 character ascii domain name which may already be allowed.
That said, I'm really not too familiar with this subject at all (I just looked up the RFC) so please someone correct me if I'm wrong...
I would love to see something like fairtax or a flat tax replace our current tax system, but I don't hold out much hope for it. From a political perspective, producing "tweaks" in the tax code is a great way for our representatives to pander to special interest groups. Plus, there are a lot of people for whom the current tax code is their bread & butter - the IRS, H&R Block and many independent accountants. Such a bill would face some serious opposition.
Even if such a broad, sweeping reform were made, I fully expect that by the next year, our politicians would introduce special exception cases to benefit politically powerful groups.:-(
Ok, let's consider the dynamics of this situation: there are companies in the business of collecting patents and threatening other companies with lawsuits if they don't submit to licensing. Large companies like Microsoft feel inclined to patent everything they can conceive of just to protect themselves from the patent arsenals of other companies (I don't recall hearing about any truly ridiculous patents by MS until after they were sued over the Eolas patent).
So we have a situation where large companies have enormous patent arsenals that they can use in their defense (or as part of an attack on their competitors), smaller companies who use trivial patents as a primary revenue stream, and developers who actually want to produce something caught in the middle.
It seems to me that this will produce the following results:
1) more high-profile lawsuits between big players (unfortunately, low-profile lawsuits are probably unlikely because the cost of giving in to licensing demands is much lower than the cost of defending yourself in a patent lawsuit) 2) more patent extortion against individuals and corporations, effectively raising the entry barriers of software development from "got a computer and a dream" to "got the backing of a multi-million dollar corporation with a formidable patent portfolio" 3) pushing open-source into the underground. OSS developers will have to hide their identity and exchange software through channels that preserve their anonymity. Since OSS is now very much a part of the corporate universe, this entangles the business world with a software "black market". 4) More corporate anxiety over the use of patents in their software, resulting in lots of efforts to insure that software is patent free. This goal is of course impossible in an environment where every trivial idea is patented, but it will raise the cost of development to an astronomical level and make the lives of IT professionals unbearable, causing many of us to leave the industry.
So basically, lots of people will get pissed off (and not just Slashdot readers). And when lots of people get pissed off in a democracy, laws get changed. Hopefully they will change for the better.
So patent everything you can! Can we patent the for loop? Let's do it! Stoop to the level of our oppressors!:-P Seriously, I want to see the FSF or EFF form an initiative to patent every dumb idea we can think of and just start suing people at random. I would donate to that cause.
For a company that's "getting tough on spam", they don't seem too interested in implementing one of the more common measures to reduce it...
One of the servers that I administer is on Comcast. I just set up SPF records for that domain, and I "include comcast.net" because we send most of our stuff through their SMTP server. Now if only Comcast would set up their SPF records, we could comply to this lovely standard.
Sorry to take this opportunity to rant about one of my pet peeves...
Can't wait to get a hold of the logo...
on
FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
·
· Score: 4, Funny
... so I can slap a circle & slash on it for my own stuff.
Keyboard HOWTO traces this back to Linus, who made Backspace key == Delete on the console because it holds the location of the delete key on the VT100 terminal.
Problem is, there's no single location in which to indicate your preference (which for most of us, raised on the PC, is backspace).
I think I've got it down, though: change the consoles with "loadkeys", change X-windows with "xmodmap", then change preferences on all the *%^^$! applications that reverse the mapping to provide their own solution to the problem.
When you are going in and out of tools all day long, it becomes a major annoyance to have to wait for the darned thing to start up.
Yup, And there's also stuff like daemons started from inetd, tools launched from cron jobs and shell scripts and data manipulation programs - the general UNIX philosophy favors launching these kinds of things as short-lived processes.
I know java advocates who would probably recommend that all the other code that interfaces with these things just be written in java and run as a long-lived JVM process, but to me it seems kind of silly to try to rebuild your entire world in Java to work around its shortcomings.
This may be changing faster than you might expect. The Indian government has made tech education a central component of their economic plans and judging from the quality of some of the programmers I've run into here in the US, we should be worried.
It's certainly true that we have a lot of very talented programmers from India here, in fact, I helped start my company with two of them. They're good friends of mine.
But from the reports I'm hearing, the quality of tech workers who have been migrating from India in recent years has significantly deteriorated. I've also heard that these "government univerities" have started becoming degree mills.
Like the original poster, I'm also very skeptical of the ability of outsourced projects to succeed. Maybe in the ten year timeframe, but then again, that timeframe may also bring an about an economic "leveling of the playing field" with India, bringing their wages and standards of living more in line with our own and decreasing their status as a source of cheap tech labor.
Buddhism is very much about open-minded thinking and compassion, neither of which are really compatible with the capitalist system.
You raise an interesting point. The essence of capitalism is competition, it need not be cut-throat competition, although that's often the approach that people take.
Can you imagine what the corporate world would be like if everyone was compassionate and open-minded? How about if corporate officers adopted the "do not create evil" precept? Most people would probably say that a corporation that embraced these ideals would be at a severe disadvantage in the market.
There are certain advantages to "playing dirty". But there are also certain advantages to compassion and open-mindedness. I think that a company that plays by the latter principles would gain extraordinary trust among its consumers and employees, and would probably produce more innovation with less waste.
I try to bring Buddhist ideals into every part of my life, including my business relationships. For the most part, I believe that this has helped my career rather than hindered it.
It did nothing for me other than waste a few hours of my life when I could have been doing something.
If you only wasted "a few hours" on it, you really don't have much experience with meditation. Try it for about six months, preferably at a good Zen center, then get back to me:-)
Have you missed the dozens of articles about people recently patenting things that've been around for 30+ years, then suing small businesses for cash?
That's different: that's just blatant disregard for prior art. It's quite a another matter if you announce something in a huge press release and _then_ tried to patent it. You'd look like a moron because you yourself created the prior art! Not that this would stop Amazon...
It is well established that you can cite portions of a work (which seems to be what they're doing), if the portions are especially large, I would imagine that they'd have to get permission from the publishers.
Of course, as Amazon, they're probably in a position to do so.
I'm tempted to write to all SCO customers telling them that for only $100 I will guarantee that they can run SCO without fear of litigation from me.
Yes. Thank you. This was my thinking exactly!
In fact, a bunch of us should start a business. We should start selling licenses to large companies allowing them to freely use any software of ours that they might have (and we know they have some, but we're not saying what it is).
You can't license GPL software, even if it contains some of your code.
Sure you can! You can license anything! In fact, forget SCO. I'll sell you a license to use Linux at half what they're charging! As part of the terms of the license, I guarantee you that I won't sue you for using my proprietary intellectual property and copyrighted code (some of which must be in the Linux kernel, because I happen to have the very source same code on my computer, although I'm not disclosing which parts because that would compromise my sensitive and valuable IP).
Of course, according to the GPL, you're free to use and redistribute the kernel even without my license, but do you really want to risk me suing you? Do ya? Huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Some of them clearly do, they have a pretty nice website.
I'm not sure if it's the responsibility of the patent office to bring up prior art. I think the entity filing the patent may be responsible for doing so, but obviously there's no strong disincentive. If it were a criminal offense to file a patent in the existence of obvious prior art, maybe we could stop this nonsense.
I've worked in a number of large companies, and I've seen the damage caused by trying to force technological decisions (like which programming language to use, or which communication package to use) down on everyone from upper management. As a result of these experiences, I believe that most technology decisions should be made locally - at the group level - rather than at the department or enterprise level.
:-)
Software development is a team activity. It works best when the teams are small (< 6 people) and relatively autonomous. The team members and team leader are ultimately judged by the success or failure of what they deliver, and it should be up to them to decide which technologies they want to use.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't have rules at higher levels, it just means that the higher you go the more general your rules should be. Rules like "you must use languages X, Y, and Z" are inappropriate for the enterprise level. On the contrary, a rule like "before a language can be adopted, there must be at least N employees who are familiar with it" is a lot more sensible.
From what I've seen in this discussion and heard elsewhere, the basic argument of language standardization boils down to two contradictory mandates:
1) use the right tool for the job
2) use a tool that others are familiar with
Placing the decision at the team level allows you to make a nice compromise. You get the flexibility to pick the right tool and the guarantee that the ones who are going to be most involved with the tool will be familiar with it.
The disadvantage to this approach is that you can end up with "islands of technology" in your enterprise, where a team builds a successful product with an obscure technology and then moves on, leaving the company with something that must be supported but cannot be maintained. Note that this can also happen even with familiar technologies - you can make a mess in any language.
The best guard against this scenario is to make teams responsible for supporting what they have built. There's a lot of stuff that goes along with this idea, but that's a separate discussion.
This is no joke. I live near NYC and I personally know two people who have been accosted by police for taking pictures in train stations. One of them (a dark skinned Indian guy) was taken down to the station for questioning.
I think there might actually be a law against photographing or publishing maps of public facilities during wartime (I seem to recall something to this effect from an issue of 2600, given as a reason for not publishing pictures of US payphones in that issue). Since we seem to be in a state of perpetual warfare, it is effectively always illegal to engage in such activities.
But as other posters have suggested, this would seem to be an outdated law given the widespread availability of miniature cameras, cell-phone cameras, public security cameras and satellite imagery.
There's not much you can do if your company reacts to your departure as an "act of betrayal". In my experience, fewer companies are behaving this way these days although there are still a few (including a former employer of my own - I recently had a similar experience).
I really don't understand this, it seems like a very bad business decision to me - ostensibly the reason I was given was fear of sabotage, but it seems to me that if you are intent on sabotage you are much more likely to do it before (or in lieu of) giving notice. It would seem to make much more sense to make use of those two weeks as an orderly transition period.
I think what it really comes down to is (as an earlier poster suggested) an immature corporate culture. Let's face it: the whole job security myth flies in the face of everything we've seen over the past half century. Any CEO who promises that your job will be safe is either lying outright or deluded. Companies die, they conduct massive layoffs - this is a good thing. It frees up resources to go into more productive channels. You can't expect that your employer will have a job for as long as you want, and it's unreasonable for them to expect you to work for them for as long as they want. To respond in this manner when someone gives notice is just silly - employment is not a marriage, it's a business relationship.
But the good part is, you basically get two weeks paid vacation...
AFAIK, Weir was never implicated in this. Everything I've read has been very fuzzy about specifically which members of the band were involved - can you cite something more authoritative?
AFAIK, the standard for representing international characters in a hostname is via IDNA encoding (see RFC3490) which maps international characters to ascii characters. It looks like name components in this spec have to begin with ascii "xn--", so a single international character domain name would be at least a 5 character ascii domain name which may already be allowed.
That said, I'm really not too familiar with this subject at all (I just looked up the RFC) so please someone correct me if I'm wrong...
... is that the patent office page linked to would itself seem to be in violation of this patent!
I would love to see something like fairtax or a flat tax replace our current tax system, but I don't hold out much hope for it. From a political perspective, producing "tweaks" in the tax code is a great way for our representatives to pander to special interest groups. Plus, there are a lot of people for whom the current tax code is their bread & butter - the IRS, H&R Block and many independent accountants. Such a bill would face some serious opposition.
:-(
Even if such a broad, sweeping reform were made, I fully expect that by the next year, our politicians would introduce special exception cases to benefit politically powerful groups.
Ok, let's consider the dynamics of this situation: there are companies in the business of collecting patents and threatening other companies with lawsuits if they don't submit to licensing. Large companies like Microsoft feel inclined to patent everything they can conceive of just to protect themselves from the patent arsenals of other companies (I don't recall hearing about any truly ridiculous patents by MS until after they were sued over the Eolas patent).
:-P Seriously, I want to see the FSF or EFF form an initiative to patent every dumb idea we can think of and just start suing people at random. I would donate to that cause.
So we have a situation where large companies have enormous patent arsenals that they can use in their defense (or as part of an attack on their competitors), smaller companies who use trivial patents as a primary revenue stream, and developers who actually want to produce something caught in the middle.
It seems to me that this will produce the following results:
1) more high-profile lawsuits between big players (unfortunately, low-profile lawsuits are probably unlikely because the cost of giving in to licensing demands is much lower than the cost of defending yourself in a patent lawsuit)
2) more patent extortion against individuals and corporations, effectively raising the entry barriers of software development from "got a computer and a dream" to "got the backing of a multi-million dollar corporation with a formidable patent portfolio"
3) pushing open-source into the underground. OSS developers will have to hide their identity and exchange software through channels that preserve their anonymity. Since OSS is now very much a part of the corporate universe, this entangles the business world with a software "black market".
4) More corporate anxiety over the use of patents in their software, resulting in lots of efforts to insure that software is patent free. This goal is of course impossible in an environment where every trivial idea is patented, but it will raise the cost of development to an astronomical level and make the lives of IT professionals unbearable, causing many of us to leave the industry.
So basically, lots of people will get pissed off (and not just Slashdot readers). And when lots of people get pissed off in a democracy, laws get changed. Hopefully they will change for the better.
So patent everything you can! Can we patent the for loop? Let's do it! Stoop to the level of our oppressors!
ha! that would explain the swirly colored patterns...
For a company that's "getting tough on spam", they don't seem too interested in implementing one of the more common measures to reduce it...
One of the servers that I administer is on Comcast. I just set up SPF records for that domain, and I "include comcast.net" because we send most of our stuff through their SMTP server. Now if only Comcast would set up their SPF records, we could comply to this lovely standard.
Sorry to take this opportunity to rant about one of my pet peeves...
... so I can slap a circle & slash on it for my own stuff.
...online game-based economics ... will eventually serve as the bases for "real governments."
That's assuming that those in power are in the market for a better way to do things - pretty questionable assumption in my book.
Yes! This is my all time biggest annoyance.
Keyboard HOWTO traces this back to Linus, who made Backspace key == Delete on the console because it holds the location of the delete key on the VT100 terminal.
Problem is, there's no single location in which to indicate your preference (which for most of us, raised on the PC, is backspace).
I think I've got it down, though: change the consoles with "loadkeys", change X-windows with "xmodmap", then change preferences on all the *%^^$! applications that reverse the mapping to provide their own solution to the problem.
Hopefully they'll set up a PayPal address so individuals can donate to the fund. I could easily see that $1M doubling in no time.
When you are going in and out of tools all day long, it becomes a major annoyance to have to wait for the darned thing to start up.
Yup, And there's also stuff like daemons started from inetd, tools launched from cron jobs and shell scripts and data manipulation programs - the general UNIX philosophy favors launching these kinds of things as short-lived processes.
I know java advocates who would probably recommend that all the other code that interfaces with these things just be written in java and run as a long-lived JVM process, but to me it seems kind of silly to try to rebuild your entire world in Java to work around its shortcomings.
This may be changing faster than you might expect. The Indian government has made tech education a central component of their economic plans and judging from the quality of some of the programmers I've run into here in the US, we should be worried.
It's certainly true that we have a lot of very talented programmers from India here, in fact, I helped start my company with two of them. They're good friends of mine.
But from the reports I'm hearing, the quality of tech workers who have been migrating from India in recent years has significantly deteriorated. I've also heard that these "government univerities" have started becoming degree mills.
Like the original poster, I'm also very skeptical of the ability of outsourced projects to succeed. Maybe in the ten year timeframe, but then again, that timeframe may also bring an about an economic "leveling of the playing field" with India, bringing their wages and standards of living more in line with our own and decreasing their status as a source of cheap tech labor.
Buddhism is very much about open-minded thinking and compassion, neither of which are really compatible with the capitalist system.
You raise an interesting point. The essence of capitalism is competition, it need not be cut-throat competition, although that's often the approach that people take.
Can you imagine what the corporate world would be like if everyone was compassionate and open-minded? How about if corporate officers adopted the "do not create evil" precept? Most people would probably say that a corporation that embraced these ideals would be at a severe disadvantage in the market.
There are certain advantages to "playing dirty". But there are also certain advantages to compassion and open-mindedness. I think that a company that plays by the latter principles would gain extraordinary trust among its consumers and employees, and would probably produce more innovation with less waste.
I try to bring Buddhist ideals into every part of my life, including my business relationships. For the most part, I believe that this has helped my career rather than hindered it.
It did nothing for me other than waste a few hours of my life when I could have been doing something.
:-)
If you only wasted "a few hours" on it, you really don't have much experience with meditation. Try it for about six months, preferably at a good Zen center, then get back to me
I must retract my former statement: you are correct. According to BitLaw:
Have you missed the dozens of articles about people recently patenting things that've been around for 30+ years, then suing small businesses for cash?
That's different: that's just blatant disregard for prior art. It's quite a another matter if you announce something in a huge press release and _then_ tried to patent it. You'd look like a moron because you yourself created the prior art! Not that this would stop Amazon...
It is well established that you can cite portions of a work (which seems to be what they're doing), if the portions are especially large, I would imagine that they'd have to get permission from the publishers.
Of course, as Amazon, they're probably in a position to do so.
IANAL, but I think now that they've announced it, it can't be patented (unless it already has been).
I'm tempted to write to all SCO customers telling them that for only $100 I will guarantee that they can run SCO without fear of litigation from me.
Yes. Thank you. This was my thinking exactly!
In fact, a bunch of us should start a business. We should start selling licenses to large companies allowing them to freely use any software of ours that they might have (and we know they have some, but we're not saying what it is).
You can't license GPL software, even if it contains some of your code.
Sure you can! You can license anything! In fact, forget SCO. I'll sell you a license to use Linux at half what they're charging! As part of the terms of the license, I guarantee you that I won't sue you for using my proprietary intellectual property and copyrighted code (some of which must be in the Linux kernel, because I happen to have the very source same code on my computer, although I'm not disclosing which parts because that would compromise my sensitive and valuable IP).
Of course, according to the GPL, you're free to use and redistribute the kernel even without my license, but do you really want to risk me suing you? Do ya? Huh?