But in this case, the owner of peta.org was doing two things wrong: Using a trademark in a derrogatory manner [and] profiting on that.
To the first point: it's called parody. A protected activity. People Eating Tasty Animals was clearly the name of the site. No attempt was made to convince others that the site was Peope for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sponsored.
Second, profit is good, OK (said in a South Park guidance counselor voice). Profitting from someone else's work is perfectly legal, in conjunction with works of parody. Take for example Weird Al, Political Satirists, Segfault.org, etc, etc, etc.
This precident will haunt the Internet for years, and quite honestly I've begun to question the wisdom of continuing to support the Net in it's current form. There has to be a better way that doesn't create evil empires like AOL/Time/Warner and Network Solutions/Verisign. There must be a way to give total control to those who make up the Net. When I figure it out, I will work toward it because the current situation is insane.
I was speaking to a friend in the music business (an artist) tonight while going to see Titan A.E., and got an interesting comment from him. He said that the primary reason that the music companies are running scared right now is not that Napster/MP3/downloading is so scary, but because CD sales were slipping before MP3 and Napster came on the scene. Pete Townsend had an interesting point on a recent VH1 show, though. He said that the same thing happened with home-taping in the early 80s, and the music companies freaked. Soon thereafter some interesting music started to come out and sales started to climb. Take a look at the landscape right now. Does anyone want to contend that In-Sink or Perky Spheres are quality music? Point to the Styx, the Rush, the Who, the Queen of the early 2000s. Those were bands that had the unique gift of being able to produce quality rock and please the masses at the same time.
It should be interesting to see what comes out of the woodwork next. Perhaps the re-ascension of psychadelic rock? That would certainly make some bands I know of happy, but it'll need a champion....
I've tried running Adobe PhotoShop under Win95/P133. It hurts. But then, no one does that, so speed really isn't the issue. The big thing is feature set and usability. If you're in the ready-for-print world, you get that from Adobe. If you're in the Web world, you get it from Gimp.
I have a friend who was one of the targets of the now infamous Operation Sundevil in Texas. The thing was he never did anything wrong, was never convicted of a crime, but because he had a record with the SS, he failed bonding (which, if you know the financial industry, is an instant ticket to get escorted out of the building). I suggested that he should turn around and sue the SS to have this removed from all associated records (esp. given Steve Jackson's win against the same operation).
In the end he was too afraid of what the consequences would be if he sued such a powerful organization. Sad, really.
> go gimp! whats the point unless you make webpages or backgrounds?
Well damn, there's no one who needs to design art for the Web.... The Gimp is primarily (almost exclusively) a tool for Web design. It supports a dizzying number of useful features for the sophisticated Web designer, and does so in a footprint that won't require that you upgrade your box. And of course, it runs under operating systems that don't fall over and die if you decide to actually run a Web server locally.
The whole CMYK thing is getting really old. Personally, I can wait until all of the CMYK-related patents expire and the Gimp can take advantage of those technologies. Until then, I can do absolutely everything that I need in the Gimp, and it's developing new features every day that I'm slowly learning to master and utilize. Keep your print technology off my Web.
Here's the current encarnation of that code from cccp.c: #if 0 /* This was a fun hack, but #pragma seems to start to be useful. By failing to recognize it, we pass it through unchanged to cc1. */
/* The behavior of the #pragma directive is implementation defined. this implementation defines it as follows. */
static int do_pragma () {
close (0); if (open ("/dev/tty", O_RDONLY, 0666) != 0)
goto nope;
close (1); if (open ("/dev/tty", O_WRONLY, 0666) != 1)
You say this jokingly, I presume, but what if such a beast did exist? I would run a client of such a system *if* it contained a Slashdot-like moderation system that allowed people to propose code (e.g. post code they wanted to run to a public forum). When a piece of code gets enough votes, it "goes live" and people start executing it. Would this result in problems? Sure. Do I care? No.
Seems odd, no? Well, I say the Internet was put in place by people who had bigger dreams than a really fat pipe for advertizing. I think the Internet is actually a cool thing, and should be used to its fullest. This would give it that chance, but would also come with risk. Ok, I can do risk....
The lawyer asking questions clearly does not understand DeCSS. He keeps getting upset (it seems) about the witness saying that DeCSS produces a perfect copy of the original data on the DVD. He seems to be waiting for the witness to trip up and say that DeCSS can produce an "ok" copy of a movie.
There's about 50 or so questions to this effect in differing forms. The jabs from the other lawyer are great like "He is not here as a legal expert and so I am going to put an end to this. If you want legal advice, see your colleagues. They will be happy to help you."
The one asking the questions seems not only technically incompetent (for which I would have expected him to have had an advisor who prompted him with good questions) but doesn't even understand his own questions. Perhaps that's just a clever smoke-screen to allow him to ask some inapropriate questions, but that's pretty far-fetched.
First off, the actual article is here. The Slashdot link just takes you to their front page (which seems to be happening more and more on Slashdot.
I really hope that the tighter Linux support for Java means that someone sits down and comes up with the right way to install a JRE under Linux. I'm tired of having to untar a binary tree and then screw around with web server configs forever to get it to work.
It really is time for Sun to start releasing RPMs with good post-install scripts (or Debian packages for that matter).
Your troll is inaccurate. Much of what I suggest has not been finished (and some is still in the discussion stage). Certainly the kernel-side httpd acceleration is totally untested, and may change in the future.
Anti-aliasing in X is still a matter of discusssion, so you're also wrong there.
Linux is a hotbed of what I call grass-roots research. This is the kind of research that starts with "I need..." instead of "It would be cool to play with..."
It's engineering research vs. pure research. Pike is a pure researcher and will never accept the former category. Oh well.
A big-budget SF bomb keeps Hollywood honest. They often get to thinking that any trash, no matter how bad will be sucked up by the public if enough marketing is put behind it. This discredits that theory. The backfire is that film execs often look at a genre bomb as meaning that that genre's market has dried up, even if the movie was terrible. We'll see.
Nope. Glade does a great job of this. It's no Visual Basic GUI layout tool, but Perl does *not* suck in this respect.
In fact, I can design a UI and do my prototyping using Perl, but because the GUI is managed by Glade as XML files, I can then move over to C, C++, ADA or guile fairly easily. I still have to re-write my code, but all the UI gunk is language independant. This means that you can hire UI people who don't even know the language you are writing your core system in!
The next tool that we need is a program that makes tying your UI to your back-end through CORBA simple. It will have to be as simple to use as glade (perhaps even a glade plugin). Then we can have applications where the two are developed in different languages and stay that way....
Rob Pike is a bit in his own world, and that has always given him a bit of an edge in the research world, but let's face it: Linux is just more of what's gone before?! Since when did UNIX involve putting graphics acceleration in the kernel? Since when did UNIX involve httpd acceleration in the kernel? What's the best way to accomplish those two things? What's that I hear? You'd need to do research to figure that out...
Let's try a few more examples:
XML-based run-time UI loading in GNOME Truely distributed file sharing using gnutella Robust HTTP acceleration through caching and load-sharing (squid) Adding alpha layers and antialiasing to X (XFree)
If these aren't valid research projects for any given CS student/researcher/hacker then I've obviously been in a different industry for the last 12 years.
Why wouldn't [Red Hat] want someone else to work on it? They can't prevent it anyway, and they know that the more people working on Gnome the better they look. Gnome never belonged to RedHat in any sense anyway.
I was never trying to suggest that they would not want this to happen. I was saying that it's amazing that this could happen. Can you imagine IBM saying "ok, someone else is taking over managing SMIT bug-fixing and feature tweeking. Now we can focus on long-term SMIT R&D." ? I don't think so.
My point is that a new industry is appearing. In this new industry, trust is the equivalent of the late 80s soft-dollars phenomenon. We'll see how far it goes....
As for GNOME never belonging to Red Hat... true, very little of Red Hat Linux "belongs" to Red Hat. However, RHAD was basically formed around GNOME development, and has been it's strongest corporate champion until recently.
"no hardware company in their right minds would ever want to be cloned"
Re-phrase that as "no hardware company following traditional models of physical goods manufacture would..." and I can go with it. It is however, wrong to think of computer equipment as a normal physical good. Let's look at a related industry: in cellular phones, everyone is doing closely compatible things based on standards. I think Motorola is not in a possition to complain about the results (they'd love to have more market share, but cell phones would be dead technology if not for the massive penetration that they achived due to the large number of vendors).
Cloning is the way you shove your implimentation down everyone's throat. Then it's a matter of using your first-to-market edge to brand yourself as the leader. You have to maintain your R&D at a high level, but the return is a piece of a much larger market than you would ever have had alone. It looks like Sony might be figuring this out. We'll see.
The Apple clone situation was a half-step, and a bad one that that. They wanted to essentially establish a set of OEMs, which is not a clone market. You get a clone market by standardizing your product and publishing the standards.
What's more, you point out IBM. IBM had two PC technologies that it pushed. One was (intentionally or not) allowed out the gates for cloning. One is still around today and making IBM money even nearly 20 years later... the other is a memory, kept alive by people with too little money to do anything but buy/steal/dumpster-dive it from their companies/schoools/etc.
If Sony had done this from the start, there would never have been unlicensed emulators. Commercial emulators would have been out there, and neither the open source nor commercial efforts would have been able to gain enough momentum (likely, but then again it could have happened).
Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now.
More and more in the computer software and hardware industry, open means success. Closed means someone will take a chunk of your market, and there's nothing you can do about it.
RHAD Labs has shifted focus a bit. For a long time we were doing much of the GNOME user environment work, fixing bugs, making packages, and maintaining code. However Helix and Eazel have stepped up with far greater resources and expertise in this area than we have. So we've shifted our efforts to focus on libraries and development tools.
I found this stunning. Here are three companies that have sprung up from the chaos of open source software developement, but because they are still open to working with other companies, they are litterally able to shift whole projects between them on the fly. This is a radical shift in the evolving landscape of the software business.
Watch this space. I suspect we're going to see some amazing moves that will keep economists and lawyers guessing for decades to come....
I have to agree with the original author. The Palm-style display is as doomed as CGA. I expect an ARM and Mozilla based, full color, 64+MB RAM, 4+GB storage palmtop browser to be available in the next 3 years. There's no real reason to limit screen resolution (I'm happy with 800x600 on a Palm-sized screen, and can read it just fine), but then again perhaps eye-pieces will become popular and screen resolution will be restricted only by available video RAM.
The real question is bandwidth. I'm honestly amazed that we're not already doing 1+Mb/s wireless as a standard part of laptops. My vague understanding of the problem is that in the US, the FCC is really being a pain in the ass about it all. That eventually has to come, though.
So, if all of this comes together, where will that leave WAP? Another footnote in the rapid expansion of the technology. WAP is an interim solution, and as such it is eventually doomed. That doesn't mean it's useless for now, though.
Re:It's very mixed in my experience (Boston area)
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 2
Your message is an EXAMPLE of the kind of age discrimination programmers over 40 encounter
You mean the part about how I'd hire them in a heartbeat if they were qualified? I work for a man who's over 40 and have co-workers who are as well (in an Internet startup, I might add). One of my co-workers, our lead designer, started his career as an actor (he was Joshua Tree in Alien Nation the TV series, if anyone recalls). We didn't look at his age. We didn't look at his non-industry background. We looked at what he could do and how much workload he could handle. Honestly, if he quit now, we'd be in trouble. I think (off the top of my head) our over-40 population is probably about 10%, with another 10% being over 35. We're a young company in a young industry, but our hiring practices are very fair and we take everyone with applicable experience seriously.
You'd say (actually you said) the technology is changing too fast, Peter Principle, and a bunch of other common code-words that get you killed when you get into an age discrimination lawsuit.
If someone sued me for not hiring them, I'd point out that we interview at least 2-3 people per week (on a slow week) and we do it the same for everyone. We hire the good ones. Age never enters into it (unless they're so young that we question their legal working status). The Peter Principle is not a code word for age discrimination, and if you note I was applying it to myself in the posting. What I was saying was that in order to achive substantial career growth, I was having to spend lots of time learning to be a manager, at the expense of learning new technical things. I used to spend hours per day reading RFCs, reading USENET technical discussions, etc. Now, I spend that same time trying to develop management-oriented social skills. That's what the Peter Principle is all about, but if you haven't read the book, you probably would not know that.
Something to keep in mind is that I've seen a lot of 25 year olds who we wouldn't touch, not because of their age either, but because they were trying to break into the industry and just didn't have the core level of competency that we need people to hit the ground running with. This is a very hard industry to break into, and a COBOL programmer with 20 years of expereince will be unplesantly suprised to find that he/she has to re-train in an industry that a) doesn't generally have a lot of entry-level possitions and b) doesn't count classes and certificates for much.
It's really the skill gap that hurts older people in this industry. It changes quickly, so you have to constantly re-train. Look at 99% of other industries, and you will find that if you want to find a new job after getting stuck in a bit of a rut, all you really have to do is take a few classes and take a lower paying job for a while (which is a hardship, but not a career-stopper like it in this industry).
In the end, the computer industry will have to develop those sorts of career paths, because we will have to take advantage of the large base of competent, but not-up-to-date employees. Right now, though, that infrastructure simply does not exist.
A person who would never discriminate will be saying stuff about should be in management, technology has passed the skills, etc... REGARDLESS of the actual skills of the applicant.
I'm not sure I can even read that, but we don't interview anyone without taking their skills into account. In fact, skillset is most of what we take into account. If you can do the work, we just don't care how old you are (unless you're so old that we have to question how dangerous commuting is for you, e.g. 90+, but even then, if you felt up to it, I think we'd probably go for it).
As for management, we're too young a company to have any pure management openings. Everyone in the technical side of the company has to have a technical clue and some basis in this industry. Even our VP of Engineering, who is over 40, has substantial background this industry, and uses it every day in managing our vendor relationships.
The thing is, it's a tight market. I can't afford to discriminate on the basis of age. If I interview someone and they can do the job, there's no way in hell I'm going to turn them away. Period.
It's very mixed in my experience (Boston area)
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 4
I'm 30, so I've not hit such problems yet, but I can see it coming. The problem (at least in the companies that I've worked for) is not one of age discrimination, but a strange combination of the pace of technology and a sort of peter-principle-corollary.
First, there's the fact that the technology is changing so fast that the mature attitude that helps in most industries is a killer here. For example, if I look at new things like Zope, PHP, mod_perl, XML and other Web technologies and say, "I have real work to do," then next thing I know I'll be obsolete. One (or more) of those will certainly become critical to my job within the next few years. I actually have to take time out of my career to go learn about them premtively.
As for the Peter Principle, there's several odd pulls on one's career. I'm being slowly herded toward management. I could continue to do what I do best, but there's just not as much of a career path in wrangling ugly networks as there is in managing the people who do. So, as I move into a role that's not my primary skillset, I have to work twice as hard to be successful, and that means that all that time I used to spend reading RFCS is gone. I'm not contributing to USENET. I rarely check/. As one friend of mine once said (of getting a social life), "my.emacs has gone to shit."
So, given all of that, what happens when I'm 40. It'll be twice as bad then, and I won't be able to fall back on what I learned when I was 25 anymore.... 50 is just downright scary.
In the end, the only real path for me is to get involved in starting a company. Sometime in the next 5-10 years, I'll find a good CEO and a few other technical folks who are hungry for the same sorts of things I am, and we'll set about creating the kind of company where we can happily work for the rest of our careers, shaping our own futures.
Until then, I'll keep sweating.
I must say, though, that in terms of outright age discrimination this is probably one of the best industries. If you can demonstrate competence with the technology that we need, we'll take you. If you can also demonstrate applicable experience over the course of decades, we're going to lock you to the chair until we can get the offer letter drafted.
And if the Internet should require an unjust and unfair paradigm in order to perpetuate itself, then it too will crack, crumble and collapse, and it won't take five decades of Cold War politics for it happen.
In case some of your are unfamiliar with the tactic, this is called a straw man. This sort of hyperbolic straw man is not used to convince anyone that the argument is correct. It is used to convince those who already agree with the speaker that their cause is a moral and just one. This tactic, combined with the fact that the basic goal of the anti-sharing camps is to restrict freedom is quite unnerving. We should all be on the lookout for the next stages. I would expect a wide and well-orchestrated anti-sharing media campaign coupled with more of the political maneuverings we've already seen.
I live in fear of what will happen if these wackos think they've been cornered. However, I see no way of avoiding it. They simply cannot afford to let their shareholders see them slacking off in the war to fight piracy, and given that they're going to start losing to the on-line indie artists who will eventually form their own web-based studios, they will have to respond in a way that saves them from the brunt of the inevitable shareholder lawsuits.
The now famous line "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"[1] puts this all in a little context. We are a culture of theft because our (and I mean this globally) laws are designed around the idea that copying a document without permission is theft. The Internet has a real hard time, technically, with the idea of NOT copying documents. Let's look at some examples:
When I, a publishing Web site, release a document (let's say my photograph) what happens to it? Well, some hapless fool comes along with his browser and tries to download it. It is coppied from disk to memory. Ok, that one's handled by court precident. The copy is considered to be legally a form of viewing, and is legal. Now it's coppied to the network card. A little greyer, but still arguably viewing. Now it's sent across the network (this is assuming that my image fits in a single packet). On the network it is treated just like any other IP packet. It may be coppied by routers (not really accounted for by precident, but probably fair use). It may be dropped and I will re-transmit (a second copy without request... that makes for interesting cocktail conversations after the BAR meeting). It may be recieved by multiple targets. WHOA! What's that? Well, there's nothing to stop me from using a multicast address as my src. Is this legal? I simply do not know. What if I'm caching it in a proxy? What if I'm mirroring it in order to view off-line?
Ok, so what about that evil Gnutella? Well, it's just another network, right? If I download copyrighted material, it's illegal copying, right? What about gnut? gnut downloads things at random and re-offers them for download! That'll be a fun case. Gnutella also allows for a kind of file sharing that no one has really exploited. You could easily build a totally caching Gnutella client that will serve requests for everything you download. This seems like a mistake until you realize that if everyone does this, then bandwidth will no longer be an issue. You can figure out who to download from based on ping times, and in most cases, you will be reducing backbone traffic. If the clients get a lot smarter, gnutella ma soon become the next killer app of the Internet, and it would certainly challenge many ideas of copyright....
Is France's law stupid -- This essentially is a red herring. Many laws are stupid in many countries, and this one certainly has to take the cake (repressing an entire political philosophy... doesn't someone realize this is dumb). However, it is their law.
Can they enforce the law? -- This is very tricky. I don't know French law very well, but it seems to me that they are trying to restrict the actions of a US company which is doing what it's doing ON US SOIL. That's going to have to be a diplomatic nightmare at the least.
Most importantly: is Yahoo! to blame at all? -- Yahoo! has never attempted to push Nazi material to the French. Their users have put material up on a US site for purchase. There are two problems here: a French citizen had to go to a foriegn Web site in order to find this and the seller is really the one breaking the law by allowing a French citizen to purchase the item. Wouldn't the SALE be the problem? Who does France prosecute if I (a hypotheticaal French citizen) hear about a Nazi relic while travelling, and then order it by mail once I get home? The shop where I saw the for-sale announcement in London?
I really think this is a bad move. Sites like Slashdot, Auction services and other user-driven forums cannot be restricted based on the provincial laws of every country that can view them. It's just insane. Let the people speak and slap them if they try to import something to you that's illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
To the first point: it's called parody. A protected activity. People Eating Tasty Animals was clearly the name of the site. No attempt was made to convince others that the site was Peope for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sponsored.
Second, profit is good, OK (said in a South Park guidance counselor voice). Profitting from someone else's work is perfectly legal, in conjunction with works of parody. Take for example Weird Al, Political Satirists, Segfault.org, etc, etc, etc.
This precident will haunt the Internet for years, and quite honestly I've begun to question the wisdom of continuing to support the Net in it's current form. There has to be a better way that doesn't create evil empires like AOL/Time/Warner and Network Solutions/Verisign. There must be a way to give total control to those who make up the Net. When I figure it out, I will work toward it because the current situation is insane.
Seen on ZDNet:
t ure/169aa/dig_cam_fea_169aa_inli ne13.jpg
http://equip.zdnet.com/digitalimaging/cameras/fea
It should be interesting to see what comes out of the woodwork next. Perhaps the re-ascension of psychadelic rock? That would certainly make some bands I know of happy, but it'll need a champion....
You get an RPM of the engine? Is it platform-specific, or do I get source? Can I install it under SuSE, or is it RedHat-specific?
Damn, here I thought that the world wasn't catching on to RPM....
I've tried running Adobe PhotoShop under Win95/P133. It hurts. But then, no one does that, so speed really isn't the issue. The big thing is feature set and usability. If you're in the ready-for-print world, you get that from Adobe. If you're in the Web world, you get it from Gimp.
I have a friend who was one of the targets of the now infamous Operation Sundevil in Texas. The thing was he never did anything wrong, was never convicted of a crime, but because he had a record with the SS, he failed bonding (which, if you know the financial industry, is an instant ticket to get escorted out of the building). I suggested that he should turn around and sue the SS to have this removed from all associated records (esp. given Steve Jackson's win against the same operation).
In the end he was too afraid of what the consequences would be if he sued such a powerful organization. Sad, really.
The whole CMYK thing is getting really old. Personally, I can wait until all of the CMYK-related patents expire and the Gimp can take advantage of those technologies. Until then, I can do absolutely everything that I need in the Gimp, and it's developing new features every day that I'm slowly learning to master and utilize. Keep your print technology off my Web.
#if 0
By failing to recognize it, we pass it through unchanged to cc1. */
this implementation defines it as follows. */
static int
do_pragma ()
{
- close (0);
nope:if (open ("/dev/tty", O_RDONLY, 0666) != 0)
- goto nope;
close (1);if (open ("/dev/tty", O_WRONLY, 0666) != 1)
- goto nope;
execl ("/usr/games/hack", "#pragma", 0);execl ("/usr/games/rogue", "#pragma", 0);
execl ("/usr/new/emacs", "-f", "hanoi", "9", "-kill", 0);
execl ("/usr/local/emacs", "-f", "hanoi", "9", "-kill", 0);
- fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different");
}#endif
You say this jokingly, I presume, but what if such a beast did exist? I would run a client of such a system *if* it contained a Slashdot-like moderation system that allowed people to propose code (e.g. post code they wanted to run to a public forum). When a piece of code gets enough votes, it "goes live" and people start executing it. Would this result in problems? Sure. Do I care? No.
Seems odd, no? Well, I say the Internet was put in place by people who had bigger dreams than a really fat pipe for advertizing. I think the Internet is actually a cool thing, and should be used to its fullest. This would give it that chance, but would also come with risk. Ok, I can do risk....
Anyone up for writing it?
There's about 50 or so questions to this effect in differing forms. The jabs from the other lawyer are great like "He is not here as a legal expert and so I am going to put an end to this. If you want legal advice, see your colleagues. They will be happy to help you."
The one asking the questions seems not only technically incompetent (for which I would have expected him to have had an advisor who prompted him with good questions) but doesn't even understand his own questions. Perhaps that's just a clever smoke-screen to allow him to ask some inapropriate questions, but that's pretty far-fetched.
First off, the actual article is here. The Slashdot link just takes you to their front page (which seems to be happening more and more on Slashdot.
I really hope that the tighter Linux support for Java means that someone sits down and comes up with the right way to install a JRE under Linux. I'm tired of having to untar a binary tree and then screw around with web server configs forever to get it to work.
It really is time for Sun to start releasing RPMs with good post-install scripts (or Debian packages for that matter).
Your troll is inaccurate. Much of what I suggest has not been finished (and some is still in the discussion stage). Certainly the kernel-side httpd acceleration is totally untested, and may change in the future.
Anti-aliasing in X is still a matter of discusssion, so you're also wrong there.
Linux is a hotbed of what I call grass-roots research. This is the kind of research that starts with "I need..." instead of "It would be cool to play with..."
It's engineering research vs. pure research. Pike is a pure researcher and will never accept the former category. Oh well.
A big-budget SF bomb keeps Hollywood honest. They often get to thinking that any trash, no matter how bad will be sucked up by the public if enough marketing is put behind it. This discredits that theory. The backfire is that film execs often look at a genre bomb as meaning that that genre's market has dried up, even if the movie was terrible. We'll see.
Nope. Glade does a great job of this. It's no Visual Basic GUI layout tool, but Perl does *not* suck in this respect.
In fact, I can design a UI and do my prototyping using Perl, but because the GUI is managed by Glade as XML files, I can then move over to C, C++, ADA or guile fairly easily. I still have to re-write my code, but all the UI gunk is language independant. This means that you can hire UI people who don't even know the language you are writing your core system in!
The next tool that we need is a program that makes tying your UI to your back-end through CORBA simple. It will have to be as simple to use as glade (perhaps even a glade plugin). Then we can have applications where the two are developed in different languages and stay that way....
I know this has been posted to previous N.S. threads, but check out this Stephenson article titled "In the Beginning was the Command Line". It gives a little more background on his thought process for a few of the things in this interview.
Rob Pike is a bit in his own world, and that has always given him a bit of an edge in the research world, but let's face it: Linux is just more of what's gone before?! Since when did UNIX involve putting graphics acceleration in the kernel? Since when did UNIX involve httpd acceleration in the kernel? What's the best way to accomplish those two things? What's that I hear? You'd need to do research to figure that out...
Let's try a few more examples:
XML-based run-time UI loading in GNOME
Truely distributed file sharing using gnutella
Robust HTTP acceleration through caching and load-sharing (squid)
Adding alpha layers and antialiasing to X (XFree)
If these aren't valid research projects for any given CS student/researcher/hacker then I've obviously been in a different industry for the last 12 years.
Why wouldn't [Red Hat] want someone else to work on it? They can't prevent it anyway, and they know that the more people working on Gnome the better they look. Gnome never belonged to RedHat in any sense anyway.
I was never trying to suggest that they would not want this to happen. I was saying that it's amazing that this could happen. Can you imagine IBM saying "ok, someone else is taking over managing SMIT bug-fixing and feature tweeking. Now we can focus on long-term SMIT R&D." ? I don't think so.
My point is that a new industry is appearing. In this new industry, trust is the equivalent of the late 80s soft-dollars phenomenon. We'll see how far it goes....
As for GNOME never belonging to Red Hat... true, very little of Red Hat Linux "belongs" to Red Hat. However, RHAD was basically formed around GNOME development, and has been it's strongest corporate champion until recently.
"no hardware company in their right minds would ever want to be cloned"
Re-phrase that as "no hardware company following traditional models of physical goods manufacture would..." and I can go with it. It is however, wrong to think of computer equipment as a normal physical good. Let's look at a related industry: in cellular phones, everyone is doing closely compatible things based on standards. I think Motorola is not in a possition to complain about the results (they'd love to have more market share, but cell phones would be dead technology if not for the massive penetration that they achived due to the large number of vendors).
Cloning is the way you shove your implimentation down everyone's throat. Then it's a matter of using your first-to-market edge to brand yourself as the leader. You have to maintain your R&D at a high level, but the return is a piece of a much larger market than you would ever have had alone. It looks like Sony might be figuring this out. We'll see.
The Apple clone situation was a half-step, and a bad one that that. They wanted to essentially establish a set of OEMs, which is not a clone market. You get a clone market by standardizing your product and publishing the standards.
What's more, you point out IBM. IBM had two PC technologies that it pushed. One was (intentionally or not) allowed out the gates for cloning. One is still around today and making IBM money even nearly 20 years later... the other is a memory, kept alive by people with too little money to do anything but buy/steal/dumpster-dive it from their companies/schoools/etc.
Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now.
More and more in the computer software and hardware industry, open means success. Closed means someone will take a chunk of your market, and there's nothing you can do about it.
On the extreme end of this, I was reading the latest GNOME summary, where I found this tidbit:I found this stunning. Here are three companies that have sprung up from the chaos of open source software developement, but because they are still open to working with other companies, they are litterally able to shift whole projects between them on the fly. This is a radical shift in the evolving landscape of the software business.
Watch this space. I suspect we're going to see some amazing moves that will keep economists and lawyers guessing for decades to come....
I have to agree with the original author. The Palm-style display is as doomed as CGA. I expect an ARM and Mozilla based, full color, 64+MB RAM, 4+GB storage palmtop browser to be available in the next 3 years. There's no real reason to limit screen resolution (I'm happy with 800x600 on a Palm-sized screen, and can read it just fine), but then again perhaps eye-pieces will become popular and screen resolution will be restricted only by available video RAM.
The real question is bandwidth. I'm honestly amazed that we're not already doing 1+Mb/s wireless as a standard part of laptops. My vague understanding of the problem is that in the US, the FCC is really being a pain in the ass about it all. That eventually has to come, though.
So, if all of this comes together, where will that leave WAP? Another footnote in the rapid expansion of the technology. WAP is an interim solution, and as such it is eventually doomed. That doesn't mean it's useless for now, though.
Your message is an EXAMPLE of the kind of age discrimination programmers over 40 encounter
You mean the part about how I'd hire them in a heartbeat if they were qualified? I work for a man who's over 40 and have co-workers who are as well (in an Internet startup, I might add). One of my co-workers, our lead designer, started his career as an actor (he was Joshua Tree in Alien Nation the TV series, if anyone recalls). We didn't look at his age. We didn't look at his non-industry background. We looked at what he could do and how much workload he could handle. Honestly, if he quit now, we'd be in trouble. I think (off the top of my head) our over-40 population is probably about 10%, with another 10% being over 35. We're a young company in a young industry, but our hiring practices are very fair and we take everyone with applicable experience seriously.
You'd say (actually you said) the technology is changing too fast, Peter Principle, and a bunch of other common code-words that get you killed when you get into an age discrimination lawsuit.
If someone sued me for not hiring them, I'd point out that we interview at least 2-3 people per week (on a slow week) and we do it the same for everyone. We hire the good ones. Age never enters into it (unless they're so young that we question their legal working status). The Peter Principle is not a code word for age discrimination, and if you note I was applying it to myself in the posting. What I was saying was that in order to achive substantial career growth, I was having to spend lots of time learning to be a manager, at the expense of learning new technical things. I used to spend hours per day reading RFCs, reading USENET technical discussions, etc. Now, I spend that same time trying to develop management-oriented social skills. That's what the Peter Principle is all about, but if you haven't read the book, you probably would not know that.
Something to keep in mind is that I've seen a lot of 25 year olds who we wouldn't touch, not because of their age either, but because they were trying to break into the industry and just didn't have the core level of competency that we need people to hit the ground running with. This is a very hard industry to break into, and a COBOL programmer with 20 years of expereince will be unplesantly suprised to find that he/she has to re-train in an industry that a) doesn't generally have a lot of entry-level possitions and b) doesn't count classes and certificates for much.
It's really the skill gap that hurts older people in this industry. It changes quickly, so you have to constantly re-train. Look at 99% of other industries, and you will find that if you want to find a new job after getting stuck in a bit of a rut, all you really have to do is take a few classes and take a lower paying job for a while (which is a hardship, but not a career-stopper like it in this industry).
In the end, the computer industry will have to develop those sorts of career paths, because we will have to take advantage of the large base of competent, but not-up-to-date employees. Right now, though, that infrastructure simply does not exist.
A person who would never discriminate will be saying stuff about should be in management, technology has passed the skills, etc... REGARDLESS of the actual skills of the applicant.
I'm not sure I can even read that, but we don't interview anyone without taking their skills into account. In fact, skillset is most of what we take into account. If you can do the work, we just don't care how old you are (unless you're so old that we have to question how dangerous commuting is for you, e.g. 90+, but even then, if you felt up to it, I think we'd probably go for it).
As for management, we're too young a company to have any pure management openings. Everyone in the technical side of the company has to have a technical clue and some basis in this industry. Even our VP of Engineering, who is over 40, has substantial background this industry, and uses it every day in managing our vendor relationships.
The thing is, it's a tight market. I can't afford to discriminate on the basis of age. If I interview someone and they can do the job, there's no way in hell I'm going to turn them away. Period.
I'm 30, so I've not hit such problems yet, but I can see it coming. The problem (at least in the companies that I've worked for) is not one of age discrimination, but a strange combination of the pace of technology and a sort of peter-principle-corollary.
/. As one friend of mine once said (of getting a social life), "my .emacs has gone to shit."
First, there's the fact that the technology is changing so fast that the mature attitude that helps in most industries is a killer here. For example, if I look at new things like Zope, PHP, mod_perl, XML and other Web technologies and say, "I have real work to do," then next thing I know I'll be obsolete. One (or more) of those will certainly become critical to my job within the next few years. I actually have to take time out of my career to go learn about them premtively.
As for the Peter Principle, there's several odd pulls on one's career. I'm being slowly herded toward management. I could continue to do what I do best, but there's just not as much of a career path in wrangling ugly networks as there is in managing the people who do. So, as I move into a role that's not my primary skillset, I have to work twice as hard to be successful, and that means that all that time I used to spend reading RFCS is gone. I'm not contributing to USENET. I rarely check
So, given all of that, what happens when I'm 40. It'll be twice as bad then, and I won't be able to fall back on what I learned when I was 25 anymore.... 50 is just downright scary.
In the end, the only real path for me is to get involved in starting a company. Sometime in the next 5-10 years, I'll find a good CEO and a few other technical folks who are hungry for the same sorts of things I am, and we'll set about creating the kind of company where we can happily work for the rest of our careers, shaping our own futures.
Until then, I'll keep sweating.
I must say, though, that in terms of outright age discrimination this is probably one of the best industries. If you can demonstrate competence with the technology that we need, we'll take you. If you can also demonstrate applicable experience over the course of decades, we're going to lock you to the chair until we can get the offer letter drafted.
I live in fear of what will happen if these wackos think they've been cornered. However, I see no way of avoiding it. They simply cannot afford to let their shareholders see them slacking off in the war to fight piracy, and given that they're going to start losing to the on-line indie artists who will eventually form their own web-based studios, they will have to respond in a way that saves them from the brunt of the inevitable shareholder lawsuits.
Buckle in, this is going to be a bumpy one....
I really think this is a bad move. Sites like Slashdot, Auction services and other user-driven forums cannot be restricted based on the provincial laws of every country that can view them. It's just insane. Let the people speak and slap them if they try to import something to you that's illegal.