By definition, competition is a key value for any successful group activity. Otherwise, the given activity would be crowded out by other more competitive activities.
So basically your argument against software patents is because you all can't handle the accounting?
No, it's because the cost of handling the accountanting is often more than the software is worth in the first place. So the software doesn't get produced, and the market is diminished. (And the patent holder doesn't even get paid for the software that didn't get written due to patent license burdens.)
Take the example of the.GIF patents. Unisys probably made no more than a few million dollars in royalties, but the cost and distractions of working around license problems with.GIFs surely cost the software and webhosting industries orders of magnitude more. It was a net drain on the economy.
The reason that software and patents are a bad mix is basically cost of accounting. With physical goods, the burden of dealing with patents, licensing and royalties are compartmentalized along with each physical item. Since physical items in general can't be acquired for free or duplicated, there's already a financial transaction involved with each component that goes into a finished product. Any patent royalties are almost always built into that transaction, so the patent burden is confined and walled off as a problem that the component supplier deals with.
With software, there is no lower limit on the raw cost of components, the components can be replicated at will, and many more components are typically included in the final product. Even simple apps call libraries which in turn call other libraries which can end up using millions of different concepts. Any one of those concepts might potentially infringe on one of the millions of outstanding patent claims in force. There's really no easy way to match what's going on in a program against all of the outstanding patent claims, so almost nobody even tries. That makes the landscape into a legal minefield. Keeping track of the compliance of all that is a logistical nightmare, especially when so many business models behind software products involve distribution of free copies (not just OSS, but shareware, demo versions, ad-supported apps, etc.). It's hard enough to track copyright licenses between the author and user on something as ephemeral as software; having 3rd parties pop out of the woodwork demanding patent licenses makes things impossible. This problem shifts patents from being a probable positive factor for physcal goods to being a net drain when applied to software.
All these problems are compounded by the unique requirement for backwards compatibility in most software products. In physical products, a manufacturer can often just substitute different parts to work around patent problems with part of their products. OTOH, software is often stuck with few viable options once the marketplace has been seeded with a particular implementation. If this weren't so, then the patents on outmoded technologies like.GIF, VFAT filesystems, MP3, etc. wouldn't be such a burden. As it stands, the owners of patents over backwards compatibility simply use them as tools to build moats around their market share so they can sit back and collect tolls long after any intrinsic value of their patents has passed.
I can't for the life of me figure out what makes people hate software patents more than other types of patents...
Most likely because you don't know anything about writing software. If you did, you'd understand how much patents are an incredibly poor fit as a tool to enhance the software industry.
I'm currently rethinking that resume and interview with Novell now...
It could be a good thing: This will probably drive their stock price down quite a bit. If they hire you, any options you get will be set that much lower. After this all blows over, the price will recover and you collect the difference.
The actual thing that should make you rethink your interview is their almost uninterrupted history of marketing blunders over the past 15 years.
IMHO, the need to use that idiom was the single worst failing of Python up until now. I've been bitten by real-world bugs where the middle term was accidentally "false" more times than I care to remember. In contrast, I can't remember a single time that I've had a bug caused by the possibility that every Python critic obsesses over: inconsistent whitespace.
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1, Insightful
there is no reason for our languages to reinforce that and make us say stupid things like "the zeroth element".
Array indices don't point at elements; they point between them. The "first element" doesn't make much sense either since it actually occupies the whole imaginary fractional space between 0 and 1. People who don't understand this saddle the world with things like date systems where the years are counted..., -2, -1, 1, 2,...
So a language arbitrarily picks whether an index refers to the element to the right or to their left. I've used both, and each way has annoying special cases. However, counting from 0 seems more natural for a lot of manipulations that combine ranges or use a modulo operator to create indices, and it has the advantage of not needing an extra bit in the index when handling arrays with a power-of-two size.
Want to go to the end of the document? 99% of editors, Ctrl-end. Vim, G.
In vim, Ctl+End does go to the end of the document. All of the other arrow key motions work like you would expect as well.
Does Vim still default to starting in command mode?
It starts in command mode probably because you almost always need to move the cursor before you resume editing a file. Command mode gives you dozens of powerful commands to navigate to where you need to go in a couple of keystrokes instead of just banging on the arrow and Pgup/Pgdn keys like a monkey with RSI.
Ok. Now suppose that I have an OEM copy of windows licensed for use only on the computer that it was sold with. Now, I start replacing components one at a time, rebooting after each swap. By the time I've replaced *all* of the components, my copy must not be "genuine" anymore because I'm now running the OS in violation of the EULA.
But at what point did this occur? After I swapped the CPU? The motherboard? The hard drive? Maybe it was whenever the WGA service decided that something was amiss... But then we'd be letting some logic routine written by some dweeb in the bowels of Microsoft define the English language. What's more, the definition would change when the detection algorithm is tweaked with each service pack. And what if the algorithm is buggy? Do we define "genuine" by the incorrect algorithm, or do we have to go to 3rd party arbitration?
I haven't seen any studies or statistics, but just from my own common sense and experience, I know that riding a bike on roads in the US is as dangerous as hell. (ie: more injuries/deaths per man hour on a bike vs a car).
A while back I actually spent a few hours tracking down the statistics from places like the NHTSA website. It's hard to do a direct comparison, but from what I could tell the risk per hour of riding a bicycle in daylight was roughly comparable to driving. (The risk per mile would be much higher of course given that it takes longer to go the same distance.) The statistics are somewhat skewed because riding at night is far more dangerous. To make things worse, apparently there are quite a few drunks who have lost their drivers licenses, and they get hammered in bars and then try to ride their bikes home in the dark.
By my math, I figured my life expectency increase from the exercise outweighed the decrease from the risk from a crash by a good margin. Even so, just to be sure I try to stick to bike paths or residential streets as much as possible. IMHO, the people who ride on hilly, narrow country roads with lots of no-passing zones and no shoulders are being both reckless and rude.
PDF is incredibly useful...to people other than yourself. The bloat that annoys you so much guarantees layout and color fidelity to people who care about those things.
So it's incredibly useful to the people who work at a printing company. For the 99% of the rest of us, it's not very useful at all. Of all the text PDF documents that I've been subjected to downloading, I can't think of a single one wouldn't have rendered better on my screen and been more convenient to navigate as an HTML page. Some could argue that PDF is good for graphics like large maps, but the ones I've used have been so bloated and slow that I'm sure a plain old 4000x3000 pixel.PNG would have been quicker, easier and more compact.
I really don't care what the original looked like in the author's word processor. I rarely print things out anymore, and with 1600x1200 LCD monitors available for around $300, there's going to be less and less need for anyone to print hard copies as time goes by. The whole PDF concept is a vestige of dead tree technology, and it should be relegated those those people who work mainly with physical paper. It doesn't really have business being used as a document format on any general-purpose web server.
When the surgeons and doctors were shouting hoarse in 1970s, people ignored them as fools and continued smoking.. and now they sue the companies for supplying them in first place.
You're forgetting the part about where the companies fraudulently and systematically denied that there were severe health risks with their products even though they know otherwise.
Also, when someone dies of a heroin overdose, they often track down the dealer who sold the drugs and charge him with a homicide. Why should the tobacco companies be held to a different standard?
Spoken like someone who doesn't fly internationally for a living.
Since a person's lifetime risk of dying from some pandemic spread by international fliers is orders of magnitude higher than dying from a terrorist attack, I kind of wish that most people like you would find other lines of work anyway.
You have Wh in the US? I thought you measure energy in ounceyards or something like that?
No, silly. That unit doesn't make any sense because it doesn't define units of energy. You probaby mean ouncedalyards. That's what I use; it's the perfect unit for my job of designing elevator systems for chipmunks. It's just a trivial conversion:
$ units 2438 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: ouncedal*yard You want: watt*hour * 2.1947974e-06 / 455622.92
If all you want to do is play your music on alternative devices, make backups, post snippets for review, etc. then you're entirely within your legal rights. But currently, the technologies that allow you to do that also enable wholesale trading of music in violation of copyright.
Who cares if you are in a *war* and you hurt the enemy?
We haven't been in a *war* since 1945. However, successive administrations have wanted to use the armed forces for various tasks anyway. In very few of those tasks was the total annihilation of a well-defined "enemy" a politically viable option. Hence it's not surprising that the military would look for tools to use in the non-*war*s that they regularly get put into.
I really envy you that you didn't lose any minutes of your life watching coverage of election commission workers in Florida holding up paper ballots to the light
Those were punched cards. That's simply another example of inappropriate application of computer technology to voting. (Punch cards were designed to be written with card punch machines, not by random members of the public blindly poking a stick into little holes.) That doesn't imply that *proper* paper ballots have any problems at all.
I've been studying extrasolar planets for exactly 40 years. My findings don't agree at all with the hypotheses presented in the article. Here is what I've found out:
All extrasolar planets have a mass and density such that gravitational acceleration at the surface is 9.8 m/s^2.
All extrasolar planets have an atmosphere breathable by humans and a surface temperature of approximately 70 degrees F.
Imaging shows that from space, in the visual wavelengths different extrasolar planets reflect a wide variety of random but usually Da-Glo colors. Few if any surface features are visible from space.
Nevertheless, the surface of most extrasolar planets are largely covered with a similar beige sandy soil. The planets have many rock outcroppings, and remarkably, the rocks are almost exclusively comprised of a polystyrene polymer.
All extrasolar planets harbor life. Almost all of them have a climate and flora very similar to the desert regions of southern California.
Most extrasolar planets have an unexplained energy field emanating from some point on the surface.
I.e., a $5 HDMI cable will be just as effective as a $100 cable
But the copper in the $5 HDMI cable might be riddled with oxygen!! I'd pay any price to avoid that fate. I don't want my digital video experience ruined by oxygen.
Slashdot Mirror
Try your line of argument the next time you deal with a wedding photographer and see how far it gets you.
The definition that I explained in my second sentence.
The total available space == 6 billion people * 24 hours/dayBy definition, competition is a key value for any successful group activity. Otherwise, the given activity would be crowded out by other more competitive activities.
No, it's because the cost of handling the accountanting is often more than the software is worth in the first place. So the software doesn't get produced, and the market is diminished. (And the patent holder doesn't even get paid for the software that didn't get written due to patent license burdens.)
Take the example of the .GIF patents. Unisys probably made no more than a few million dollars in royalties, but the cost and distractions of working around license problems with .GIFs surely cost the software and webhosting industries orders of magnitude more. It was a net drain on the economy.
With software, there is no lower limit on the raw cost of components, the components can be replicated at will, and many more components are typically included in the final product. Even simple apps call libraries which in turn call other libraries which can end up using millions of different concepts. Any one of those concepts might potentially infringe on one of the millions of outstanding patent claims in force. There's really no easy way to match what's going on in a program against all of the outstanding patent claims, so almost nobody even tries. That makes the landscape into a legal minefield. Keeping track of the compliance of all that is a logistical nightmare, especially when so many business models behind software products involve distribution of free copies (not just OSS, but shareware, demo versions, ad-supported apps, etc.). It's hard enough to track copyright licenses between the author and user on something as ephemeral as software; having 3rd parties pop out of the woodwork demanding patent licenses makes things impossible. This problem shifts patents from being a probable positive factor for physcal goods to being a net drain when applied to software.
All these problems are compounded by the unique requirement for backwards compatibility in most software products. In physical products, a manufacturer can often just substitute different parts to work around patent problems with part of their products. OTOH, software is often stuck with few viable options once the marketplace has been seeded with a particular implementation. If this weren't so, then the patents on outmoded technologies like .GIF, VFAT filesystems, MP3, etc. wouldn't be such a burden. As it stands, the owners of patents over backwards compatibility simply use them as tools to build moats around their market share so they can sit back and collect tolls long after any intrinsic value of their patents has passed.
There are plenty of people who have "experience" writing software and yet still don't know the first thing about it.
Most likely because you don't know anything about writing software. If you did, you'd understand how much patents are an incredibly poor fit as a tool to enhance the software industry.
It could be a good thing: This will probably drive their stock price down quite a bit. If they hire you, any options you get will be set that much lower. After this all blows over, the price will recover and you collect the difference.
The actual thing that should make you rethink your interview is their almost uninterrupted history of marketing blunders over the past 15 years.
IMHO, the need to use that idiom was the single worst failing of Python up until now. I've been bitten by real-world bugs where the middle term was accidentally "false" more times than I care to remember. In contrast, I can't remember a single time that I've had a bug caused by the possibility that every Python critic obsesses over: inconsistent whitespace.
Array indices don't point at elements; they point between them. The "first element" doesn't make much sense either since it actually occupies the whole imaginary fractional space between 0 and 1. People who don't understand this saddle the world with things like date systems where the years are counted ..., -2, -1, 1, 2, ...
So a language arbitrarily picks whether an index refers to the element to the right or to their left. I've used both, and each way has annoying special cases. However, counting from 0 seems more natural for a lot of manipulations that combine ranges or use a modulo operator to create indices, and it has the advantage of not needing an extra bit in the index when handling arrays with a power-of-two size.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and speculate that when it runs out of gas, the engine stops turning.
In vim, Ctl+End does go to the end of the document. All of the other arrow key motions work like you would expect as well.
It starts in command mode probably because you almost always need to move the cursor before you resume editing a file. Command mode gives you dozens of powerful commands to navigate to where you need to go in a couple of keystrokes instead of just banging on the arrow and Pgup/Pgdn keys like a monkey with RSI.
Yes, that's exactly what I said in the 3rd sentence.
But at what point did this occur? After I swapped the CPU? The motherboard? The hard drive? Maybe it was whenever the WGA service decided that something was amiss... But then we'd be letting some logic routine written by some dweeb in the bowels of Microsoft define the English language. What's more, the definition would change when the detection algorithm is tweaked with each service pack. And what if the algorithm is buggy? Do we define "genuine" by the incorrect algorithm, or do we have to go to 3rd party arbitration?
A while back I actually spent a few hours tracking down the statistics from places like the NHTSA website. It's hard to do a direct comparison, but from what I could tell the risk per hour of riding a bicycle in daylight was roughly comparable to driving. (The risk per mile would be much higher of course given that it takes longer to go the same distance.) The statistics are somewhat skewed because riding at night is far more dangerous. To make things worse, apparently there are quite a few drunks who have lost their drivers licenses, and they get hammered in bars and then try to ride their bikes home in the dark.
By my math, I figured my life expectency increase from the exercise outweighed the decrease from the risk from a crash by a good margin. Even so, just to be sure I try to stick to bike paths or residential streets as much as possible. IMHO, the people who ride on hilly, narrow country roads with lots of no-passing zones and no shoulders are being both reckless and rude.
So it's incredibly useful to the people who work at a printing company. For the 99% of the rest of us, it's not very useful at all. Of all the text PDF documents that I've been subjected to downloading, I can't think of a single one wouldn't have rendered better on my screen and been more convenient to navigate as an HTML page. Some could argue that PDF is good for graphics like large maps, but the ones I've used have been so bloated and slow that I'm sure a plain old 4000x3000 pixel .PNG would have been quicker, easier and more compact.
I really don't care what the original looked like in the author's word processor. I rarely print things out anymore, and with 1600x1200 LCD monitors available for around $300, there's going to be less and less need for anyone to print hard copies as time goes by. The whole PDF concept is a vestige of dead tree technology, and it should be relegated those those people who work mainly with physical paper. It doesn't really have business being used as a document format on any general-purpose web server.
You're forgetting the part about where the companies fraudulently and systematically denied that there were severe health risks with their products even though they know otherwise.
Also, when someone dies of a heroin overdose, they often track down the dealer who sold the drugs and charge him with a homicide. Why should the tobacco companies be held to a different standard?
Since a person's lifetime risk of dying from some pandemic spread by international fliers is orders of magnitude higher than dying from a terrorist attack, I kind of wish that most people like you would find other lines of work anyway.
No, silly. That unit doesn't make any sense because it doesn't define units of energy. You probaby mean ouncedalyards. That's what I use; it's the perfect unit for my job of designing elevator systems for chipmunks. It's just a trivial conversion:
You mean technologies like LPs, CDs and tapes?
We haven't been in a *war* since 1945. However, successive administrations have wanted to use the armed forces for various tasks anyway. In very few of those tasks was the total annihilation of a well-defined "enemy" a politically viable option. Hence it's not surprising that the military would look for tools to use in the non-*war*s that they regularly get put into.
Those were punched cards. That's simply another example of inappropriate application of computer technology to voting. (Punch cards were designed to be written with card punch machines, not by random members of the public blindly poking a stick into little holes.) That doesn't imply that *proper* paper ballots have any problems at all.
But the copper in the $5 HDMI cable might be riddled with oxygen!! I'd pay any price to avoid that fate. I don't want my digital video experience ruined by oxygen.
set hidden
to your
A handy thing I've also added to make buffer selection easier: :ls<CR>:b
nmap <F3>
This displays a list of open files and lets you pick one to jump to.