A Microsoft spokesman said that it had struck a groundbreaking deal with the US government to to repave the entire nation's freeways. "We believe that this new technology will protect road users from the dangers of open source road surfaces."
I agree. Your cover letter is your opportunity to show your human side. Write about what you enjoyed in your prevous work and what a smashing job you did.
Your prospective employer should read the cover letter and think "this sounds like the sort of person we want", THEN read the cv and see that you have the experience and technical credentials to confirm his/her reaction to the cover letter.
-sjf Yes, big brother is watching you. (But only you, no-one else)
Patents were devised as an alternative to trade secrets. In exchange for publically disclosing, and sharing your discovery or invention with the public, the state gives you a limited time monopoly on your idea. This is far better than a monopoly so long as you can hide the invention from anyone else.
Children in Africa are dying from AIDS because of poverty and greed, not because of the patent system. IT IS THANKS TO THE PATENT SYSTEM that some countries in Africa and S.E. Asia (India) are saying SCREW YOU to the drug companies and manufacturing unlicensed generics.
If these were trade secrets, the price would be higher and more would be death.
Of course, the US government doesn't help with it's policy of Free Trade meaning little more than "Buy our stuff or else."
Mac OS X is as much a bastardized Unix as any other currently available Unix you might like to point to: Linux (er, which Linux ?), Solaris, IRIX, BSD, System V, FreeBSD...
Thank heavens Apple didn't use KDE or Gnome. Theirs is IMHO the best desktop available on any Unix: it's fast, optimised for the hardware and ubiquitous. Apple has design guidelines that result in consistent behavour between apps. "Quartz Extreme" is not the equivalent of the Unix window manager: it's an even more accelerated version of "Quartz", the rendering layer.
You want X11 ? Download Apple's implementation from their website. Oh wait, don't bother, it will be part of the install in the next release. "but it is emulation" WTF ? Do you have a clue what you're talking about ? Emulating what ? Like every other X11 implementation it is a software renderer for X commands.
"moral issues with closed software ?" Oh gimme a fricking break !
"other *nixes use standard ELF binaries" Plenty don't thank you very much. "It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple." Not proprietory to Apple. Very much public domain: developed at CMU, what 20 years ago ? "Unproven" ? a value judgement. What's your evidence for this ? There's a lot of good software that uses it quite succesfully for real world applications. (Granted, I don't like Mach-O's linking method and subroutine branching overhead is rather excessive, but I'm nitpicking. That's not to say it's unproven - it's been used for approx 20 years.)
"Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel)" Darwin is a complete cross platform unix implementation. It's far more than the kernel. EVERYTHING in Darwin is Open Source, freely downloadable, and anything but "proprietory".
"with Mach-O [it is impossible to run most of their Lunix apps." Take a look at PORTS and FINK. Much of your precious linux code is just a recompile away.
"Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe." Actually Apple has moved some of the [technically aware]-human readable configuration files into xml files that are readable by various applications and [technically aware]-humans. Netinfo presents a common and somewhat simpler, but definitely safer interface to those files. Sure, if you and I want to stick a new CNAME into the hosts file, netinfo is overkill, but if I had to get my mother to do it, I'd be glad of netinfo.
The thing you should be comparing with the windows' registry is the IORegistry. Which avoids the pitfalls of the windows' registry, by being completely dynamic during the boot time of the system, and built from scratch during each boot. It's less a means of setting system parameters than a reflection of the current state of the system. Most importantly, there is NO PERSISTENT REPRESENTATION of the IORegistry.
" When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor." As is well attested, iTMS has the most liberal DRM implementation available in any legal means of obtaining music. In short, I can legally burn as many CDs of my purchased music as I choose.
I do not understand why "real *nix gurus" should give a damn about your complaints about Apple's DRM policies. The "real *nix gurus" I know are joyfully buying Powerbooks and *at last* running a complete, fast, powerful, optimised, Unix on their laptop.
Is this a job that entails skill ? Did it take you some period of on the job learning to become fully productive ? Did they pay you less while you were getting up to speed ? Did they know how good you'd be when they hired you.
It is utterly reasonable to make a counter offer and quite reasonable to accept. You're clearly marketable, you can take the risk of the company behaving like idiots.
They wouldn't make the offer unless the meant it. Sure they SHOULD have spotted how valuable you were and paid up at your last review, but clearly YOU didn't know what you were worth either, or you did but you didn't make the case.
If there are reasons to stay at the job besides the money, I'd take it and stay. There's no shame, and your boss will ask you not to mention the counter offer. YOU SHOULD AGREE TO THIS.
Be professional, your company IS being professional.
Yes, easy & poweful for the right projects.
Don't confuse "OSX" development with Cocoa development.
I'm working on porting a huge application from OS9 to OSX (macho). We're staying in C++ and it's pretty tough.
Our diags guy, however is writing tools from scratch in ObjC/Cocoa. - it's a breeze.
What are you talking about "direclty accessing memory registers" ? You can't do this on any system with real protected memory. Sounds like you don't know what your talking about, oh except that Apple == crap...
Apple has never mandated that machines be obsoleted. In fact, they give away, for free early versions of the OS that keep, say, 68K Macs running. Features released with newer OS versions are also often available, free, as add ons for older OSes: OT, QT, NavServices, DragManager etc... Apple has done a much better job at keeping older machines useful than the Wintel conspiracy.
1. QuickTime. QTSS is open source. Write your own. Sorenson is marvellous. The company that developed and owns the codec deserves to make money from it. APPLE LICENSES Sorensen. ALONG WITH MOST OTHER CODECS QT uses !!! (This was classic Be FUD. I once met JL Gassee, he was bitching to me that Apple wanted $1m to port QT player to Be. Sheesh, that's cheap, but Be damn well knew that wouldn't be much use without the third party Codecs - they did get Cinepak ported, and had a player.)
2. TrueType. Microsoft and Apple own patents on this technology. DOES THIS ANSWER YOUR QUESTION ?
Torvald's notoriety is much greater than his actual contribution. Linux owes more to GNU than Linus.
OSX isn't mach. Mach started life as an academic project, just like, erm Linux. It was an experiment: would this microkernel approach work ? It wasn't an optimised, it wasn't a commercial offering.
OSX's 'mach' kernel bears little relation to CMU's experiment. It has been optimised, it has been turned into something you would want in a real world OS. It's not perfect, it will get better. Hell, we all know that only Linus is capable of perfection.
TiVo has never made a secret that this happens. You can fairly easily view the logs that are sent to TiVo. They are detailed DOWN to every button press. Yes, TiVo knows that someone (though not a specific person) freeze framed on
Lucy Lawless when she got out of that bath.I know I did) You can opt out of this with a single phone call.
But, hell, I want TiVo to be a success. I want them to still be around in the future, this means they have to make money, and this information is GOLD to advertisers. TiVo can easily work out which adverts people REALLY watch - this is a good thing.
Surely the country that gave the world democracy,
the internet and apple pie can get its act together and offer cheap gas to its citizens?
Damnit ! I should be able to refill my car by pressing a button sitting naked at my computer.
I have to agree. The thread on the US electoral process really shows how far/. has gone up its own ass.
-sjf
Xerox didn't sue Apple because Apple gave Xerox 10% (?) of the company in exchange for access to PARCs technologies. Xerox made a lot of money on this deal.
What's wrong with PR ? Everytime you say Linux rOO1z, that's PR. Where would RedHat, Transmeta, Andover.net et.al. be without PR ?
Without PR a company will think. THANK GOD Steve Jobs reminded Apple of this. We're better off with Apple than without them.
Duh ! the cultural revolution was about re-educating those considered 'bourgeois' and/or intellectual. These were considered nefarious 'Western' traits. It certainly was not about reforming traditional chinese culture. In the sense that it returned the vast majority of the population to abject poverty, reliance on peasant scrub farming and promoted a small petty beaurocracy founded on favouritism and the arbitrary application of law, it very much resembled pre-revolutionary feudal China.
It's not so much that some Australians are descended from criminals that worries me. It's more that some must be descended from prison wardens.. (sorry, old Joke - I love Australia really.)
Anyone recall a certain war with Mexico that led to a whole bunch of land being taken by the US from Mexico - you guys must have missed that course while you were studying British History 101 right ?
As someone who would not be here had they been standing a few yards closer to an IRA bomb, I'd rather not hear this claptrap about British invasions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Get a fricken' clue. Try reading a book before spouting an opinion.
In the context of LeisureTown, these were actually pretty powerful parodies of the vapidity of Dilbert. Here, the parody defense was strong apposite.
On the other hand removing the cartoons from that context was a pretty stupid thing to do. In my opinion they had _no_ value and were little more than red-rag to UFS and its lawyers.
This is an interesting case in as much as freedom of expression rights collide with trademark legislation. If we "forget" that Dilbert is a cartoon and simply consider the Dilbert name and characters as trademarks, the lawyer's reaction is much more understandable. Unfortunately Dilbert is more than a cartoon strip. It's the "brand" for a slew of merchandising one small part of which we see in our newspapers.
I can fully understand why a lawyer would find that these images damaged the Dilbert branding. And having said that, the parody defense might still stand - but it was stronger when the images were isolated to the LeisureTown strips.
Finally, before you flame me, I love the Dilbert cartoons and own some of the merchandising myself.
Slashdot Mirror
I use either tcpdump - or I hack up a custom tool starting with the source to EtherPeg:
http://www.etherpeg.org/
(Shows you how to grab packets promiscuously. And you can learn an awful lot from reading and working with this code.)
Yes, it is Mac only.
-s
and MSAsphalt
A Microsoft spokesman said that it had struck a groundbreaking deal with the US government to to repave the entire nation's freeways. "We believe that this new technology will protect road users from the dangers of open source road surfaces."
I agree. Your cover letter is your opportunity to show your human side. Write about what you enjoyed in your prevous work and what a smashing job you did.
Your prospective employer should read the cover letter and think "this sounds like the sort of person we want", THEN read the cv and see that you have the experience and technical credentials to confirm his/her reaction to the cover letter.
-sjf
Yes, big brother is watching you. (But only you, no-one else)
Who modded this nonsense as insightful ?
Patents were devised as an alternative to trade secrets.
In exchange for publically disclosing, and sharing your discovery or invention with the public, the state gives you a limited time monopoly on your idea. This is far better than a monopoly so long as you can hide the invention from anyone else.
Children in Africa are dying from AIDS because of poverty and greed, not because of the patent system. IT IS THANKS TO THE PATENT SYSTEM that some countries in Africa and S.E. Asia (India) are saying SCREW YOU to the drug companies and manufacturing unlicensed generics.
If these were trade secrets, the price would be higher and more would be death.
Of course, the US government doesn't help with it's policy of Free Trade meaning little more than "Buy our stuff or else."
Utter rubbish.
Mac OS X is as much a bastardized Unix as any other currently available Unix you might like to point to: Linux (er, which Linux ?), Solaris, IRIX, BSD, System V, FreeBSD...
Thank heavens Apple didn't use KDE or Gnome. Theirs is IMHO the best desktop available on any Unix: it's fast, optimised for the hardware and ubiquitous. Apple has design guidelines that result in consistent behavour between apps. "Quartz Extreme" is not the equivalent of the Unix window manager: it's an even more accelerated version of "Quartz", the rendering layer.
You want X11 ? Download Apple's implementation from their website. Oh wait, don't bother, it will be part of the install in the next release. "but it is emulation" WTF ? Do you have a clue what you're talking about ? Emulating what ? Like every other X11 implementation it is a software renderer for X commands.
"moral issues with closed software ?" Oh gimme a fricking break !
"other *nixes use standard ELF binaries" Plenty don't thank you very much.
"It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple." Not proprietory to Apple. Very much public domain: developed at CMU, what 20 years ago ? "Unproven" ? a value judgement. What's your evidence for this ? There's a lot of good software that uses it quite succesfully for real world applications. (Granted, I don't like Mach-O's linking method and subroutine branching overhead is rather excessive, but I'm nitpicking. That's not to say it's unproven - it's been used for approx 20 years.)
"Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel)" Darwin is a complete cross platform unix implementation. It's far more than the kernel. EVERYTHING in Darwin is Open Source, freely downloadable, and anything but "proprietory".
"with Mach-O [it is impossible to run most of their Lunix apps." Take a look at PORTS and FINK. Much of your precious linux code is just a recompile away.
"Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe." Actually Apple has moved some of the [technically aware]-human readable configuration files into xml files that are readable by various applications and [technically aware]-humans. Netinfo presents a common and somewhat simpler, but definitely safer interface to those files. Sure, if you and I want to stick a new CNAME into the hosts file, netinfo is overkill, but if I had to get my mother to do it, I'd be glad of netinfo.
The thing you should be comparing with the windows' registry is the IORegistry. Which avoids the pitfalls of the windows' registry, by being completely dynamic during the boot time of the system, and built from scratch during each boot. It's less a means of setting system parameters than a reflection of the current state of the system. Most importantly, there is NO PERSISTENT REPRESENTATION of the IORegistry.
" When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor." As is well attested, iTMS has the most liberal DRM implementation available in any legal means of obtaining music. In short, I can legally burn as many CDs of my purchased music as I choose.
I do not understand why "real *nix gurus" should give a damn about your complaints about Apple's DRM policies.
The "real *nix gurus" I know are joyfully buying Powerbooks and *at last* running a complete, fast, powerful, optimised, Unix on their laptop.
NOT the first HDD camcorder. The Editcam had REMOVEABLE HDDs:
5 .h tm
http://www.tvcameramen.com/equipment/equipment1
Excellent Machine !
-Simon
Is this a job that entails skill ? Did it take you some period of on the job learning to become fully productive ? Did they pay you less while you were getting up to speed ? Did they know how good you'd be when they hired you.
It is utterly reasonable to make a counter offer and quite reasonable to accept. You're clearly marketable, you can take the risk of the company behaving like idiots.
They wouldn't make the offer unless the meant it. Sure they SHOULD have spotted how valuable you were and paid up at your last review, but clearly YOU didn't know what you were worth either, or you did but you didn't make the case.
If there are reasons to stay at the job besides the money, I'd take it and stay. There's no shame, and your boss will ask you not to mention the counter offer. YOU SHOULD AGREE TO THIS.
Be professional, your company IS being professional.
sjf
The best ratio is n:1 where n is the number of
bits of information in the data, and 1 is 1 bit.
The worst ratio should be n:n+1.
The point being you can compress random data if the decoder knows what the random data is beforehand.
Yes, easy & poweful for the right projects.
Don't confuse "OSX" development with Cocoa development.
I'm working on porting a huge application from OS9 to OSX (macho). We're staying in C++ and it's pretty tough.
Our diags guy, however is writing tools from scratch in ObjC/Cocoa. - it's a breeze.
What are you talking about "direclty accessing memory registers" ? You can't do this on any system with real protected memory. Sounds like you don't know what your talking about, oh except that Apple == crap...
-Simon
Apple has never mandated that machines be obsoleted. In fact, they give away, for free early versions of the OS that keep, say, 68K Macs running. Features released with newer OS versions are also often available, free, as add ons for older OSes: OT, QT, NavServices, DragManager etc... Apple has done a much better job at keeping older machines useful than the Wintel conspiracy.
-Simon
1. QuickTime. QTSS is open source. Write your own. Sorenson is marvellous. The company that developed and owns the codec deserves to make money from it. APPLE LICENSES Sorensen. ALONG WITH MOST OTHER CODECS QT uses !!! (This was classic Be FUD. I once met JL Gassee, he was bitching to me that Apple wanted $1m to port QT player to Be. Sheesh, that's cheap, but Be damn well knew that wouldn't be much use without the third party Codecs - they did get Cinepak ported, and had a player.)
2. TrueType. Microsoft and Apple own patents on this technology. DOES THIS ANSWER YOUR QUESTION ?
So what's left of substance in this article?
-Simon
Thank God Einstein did not assert IP over his equations
I think God might have a pretty sound prior art claim.
-sjf
This slashdot handle for sale.
Torvald's notoriety is much greater than his actual contribution. Linux owes more to GNU than Linus.
OSX isn't mach. Mach started life as an academic project, just like, erm Linux. It was an experiment: would this microkernel approach work ? It wasn't an optimised, it wasn't a commercial offering.
OSX's 'mach' kernel bears little relation to CMU's experiment. It has been optimised, it has been turned into something you would want in a real world OS. It's not perfect, it will get better. Hell, we all know that only Linus is capable of perfection.
-sjf
Erm, mach is a microkernel.
-sjf
There is an opt-in bonus, it's just that everyone gets it even if they have opted out.
The bonus is that TiVo stays in business and we get better quality advertising and a TiVo box that remains useful for the long-term.
-Simon
TiVo has never made a secret that this happens. You can fairly easily view the logs that are sent to TiVo. They are detailed DOWN to every button press. Yes, TiVo knows that someone (though not a specific person) freeze framed on
Lucy Lawless when she got out of that bath.I know I did) You can opt out of this with a single phone call.
But, hell, I want TiVo to be a success. I want them to still be around in the future, this means they have to make money, and this information is GOLD to advertisers. TiVo can easily work out which adverts people REALLY watch - this is a good thing.
-Simon
I never thought about that before: I have a three letter nick. Who want to start the bidding ? -Simon
Surely the country that gave the world democracy, the internet and apple pie can get its act together and offer cheap gas to its citizens? Damnit ! I should be able to refill my car by pressing a button sitting naked at my computer. I have to agree. The thread on the US electoral process really shows how far /. has gone up its own ass.
-sjf
Xerox didn't sue Apple because Apple gave Xerox 10% (?) of the company in exchange for access to PARCs technologies. Xerox made a lot of money on this deal.
What's wrong with PR ? Everytime you say Linux rOO1z, that's PR. Where would RedHat, Transmeta, Andover.net et.al. be without PR ?
Without PR a company will think. THANK GOD Steve Jobs reminded Apple of this. We're better off with Apple than without them.
"Way to go!" this is possibly the most /.
aposite comment I have ever read on
-sjf
Duh ! the cultural revolution was about
re-educating those considered 'bourgeois' and/or
intellectual. These were considered nefarious
'Western' traits. It certainly was not about
reforming traditional chinese culture. In the sense that it returned the vast majority of the population to abject poverty, reliance on
peasant scrub farming and promoted a small petty
beaurocracy founded on favouritism and the arbitrary application of law, it very much resembled pre-revolutionary feudal China.
It's not so much that some Australians are
descended from criminals that worries me. It's
more that some must be descended from prison
wardens.. (sorry, old Joke - I love Australia
really.)
Anyone recall a certain war with Mexico that
led to a whole bunch of land being taken by the US from Mexico - you guys must have missed that
course while you were studying British History 101 right ?
As someone who would not be here had they been standing a few yards closer to an IRA bomb, I'd rather not hear this claptrap about British invasions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Get a fricken' clue. Try reading a book before spouting an opinion.
In the context of LeisureTown, these were actually
pretty powerful parodies of the vapidity of Dilbert. Here, the parody defense was strong apposite.
On the other hand removing the cartoons from that context was a pretty stupid thing to do. In my opinion they had _no_ value and were little more than red-rag to UFS and its lawyers.
This is an interesting case in as much as freedom of expression rights collide with trademark legislation. If we "forget" that Dilbert is a cartoon and simply consider the Dilbert name and characters as trademarks, the lawyer's reaction is much more understandable. Unfortunately Dilbert is more than a cartoon strip. It's the "brand" for a slew of merchandising one small part of which we see in our newspapers.
I can fully understand why a lawyer would find that these images damaged the Dilbert branding. And having said that, the parody defense might still stand - but it was stronger when the images were isolated to the LeisureTown strips.
Finally, before you flame me, I love the Dilbert cartoons and own some of the merchandising myself.