As a previous poster mentioned, it's not just the IT world that can be crippled by patents. Thank you, Monsanto! Does this mean we can't eat your GM foods without a license? Eating food definitely falls under the category of "use."
What happens when we have things like this happen to public waterworks? The end result surely wouldn't be pretty. This is purely theoretical, but imagine a patent on water created by a special cleaning process. That water somehow ends up in city reservoirs. Company sues city for unlicensed use of "special" water. It may seem like a stupid example, but it's the best I could come up with in 10 seconds.
Although this may not be an example of a submarine patent, it certainly isn't acting for the public interest. I entirely agree with you regarding the approach taken to extracting money from violators.
I'm fully expecting the trolls to come out and complain about all of the whiney bleeding-hearts and how life isn't fair, but think about it. Why isn't life fair? Because there's always someone out there wanting to screw over others for their own benefit. If our society were such that more for self was not the highest motivation, problems like these would be drastically reduced. Then again, maybe I'm being overly idealistic.
1) Angry much? 2) I was simply amused by the Mac in the background. Billy G got his ideas from somewhere. 3) I didn't know about that thread. I'll make sure I search the previous 50 years of Slashdot before I ever post my amusements again. 4) Here's your Prozac. Have a great day slashing other comments.
Come back when you've got something better to do than cut someone down because you're being a grouch.
Nothing beats a reliable paycheck unless it's a reliable paycheck in a healthy work environment. A good boss is one that lets you get out after you've put in your honest day's work, and also treats you well. The overlords make all the difference.
When I read this, it just occurred to me exactly what type of people PHBs are. Well, aside from being PHBs. They're like the kids who buy performance computer parts, destroy them by not knowing how to install them properly, and send them back for exchange or refund. Think of yourself in this example as the performance parts. Your PHB overclocks the hell out of you until you die in a poof of smoke, and he incurs no penalty for doing so. In fact, he is often rewarded for bleeding so much life out of you.
Holy bold text tag, Batman! Yeah, that sounds like typical corporate antics. Drop the team as soon as the work is done. They'd probably get contractors if they didn't think hiring and laying off was cheaper.
Heh. I'd be happy to get anything for a job well done. As it is, my boss typically doesn't notice when a job is completed. Sometimes he'll say "thanks for the good work", but I think that's more of a nicety than anything else.
Working at a private college, I'm not expecting bonuses, but when I do work that adds value to the college, I want my boss to not take credit for my work. It's frustrating to feel like all of your work only merits you with doing more of the same. It's like pouring your soul into a vacuum.
I think "Interesting" or "Informative" would have been a more appropriate moderation for this thread than "Insightful". There's nothing insightful about this.
I will say that I agree with the parent about the inconsistencies adopted by many who would label themselves as morally superior to the rest. That's pretension at its worst.
I however do not agree with the parent's stance on "potential" tripe. Is this to say that before a fetus has a developing brain that it has no chance of becoming a living being? That seems like an absurd argument to me. But then, I do not believe in murder in any of its forms - this includes death penalty. Instating the death penalty is an interesting way of being self-righteous. I'm sure most people on this earth have done something that merits more consequences than have been received, but those judgements were not dealt.
I haven't had the same issues that you've talked about, but I've noticed that certain plugins tend to make Firefox very unstable at times. It's usually Sun Java or Quicktime responsible, as far as I can tell. I'm no Firefox developer, and I don't have years to pore over the code, so I'm not sure what exactly happened. Just my observation.
Did anyone else notice the Mac Plus sitting in the corner of one of the photos on the snopes site? Wouldn't that be similar to taking a Stanley tool, making a mold of said tool, and using that mold to make and sell your own tools?
You know that Mac probably wasn't sitting there because he had so much love, admiration, and need for it.
This sounds way too familiar... I work for a beancounter also. Apparently it's cheaper to slap a new bandaid on the problem every couple of months rather than mustering the funding to purchase a solution that will work, be updated, and be supported...
So, instead of doing the duties that I have been hired to do, it ends up with my boss saying stupid things like "Oh, couldn't you just write a script for that?"
Note that my boss also likes to call applications "scripts." Of course, it's always used in a diminutive sense.
So yes, I entirely agree with the parent on this. You can develop in-house applications, but unless you have the resources to dedicate to supporting those applications - pay for your visit to the doctor. Don't just slap a bandaid on your severed artery.
You may also want to be careful of that sort of job. If you get hired on at a small college by a stupid manager and you're a salaried employee (like myself), your hours are almost guaranteed to not be stable. I'm on call 24/7 for my job at a college with 1700 students, as I'm one of two network techs. As anyone here who's ever been a network tech could tell you, every problem that happens on any system is a network problem.
Of course, you could get lucky with a job in the upper education system and actually have an employeer who doesn't treat you like you're his personal slave. That would be a plus. You'd probably be treated better if you were able to get onto an applications development team as the parent suggests. If you don't want everyone blaming you for every problem that happens, don't join a networking staff. People can be really damn ugly when they mistype an email address and think you did something to block them..
Heh. From my personal experience, most of their beta software is more stable than the shrinkwrapped stuff. I think so far Windows 2000 and Windows XP have been the exceptions. Most instability there has been caused by crap platform drivers from nVidia or crap video drivers from ATi, or crap platform drivers from VIA. Pick your poison, as they say. Thankfully, the stability of said drivers has vastly improved over the months and years..
I'm just curious here. If you had adequate resources to do what you want when you want, why wouldn't you want to make the things that interest you into what you do? Then again, maybe you don't have a strictly rigid definition of what work is compared to the status quo. I personally pursue work that is like play, although my employeer doesn't share the same viewpoint and likes to make work as stonefaced as possible. Gotta keep up that image, after all. You can't have the image of a kind-hearted group of people who enjoy what they do working for you. Gotta be all business-professional.
I do appreciate your sentiment about feeling useless having accomplished nothing with your time. I tend to feel the same way. It's emotionally draining.
*blink blink blink* I read the whole speech, and I didn't come away from it with the feeling that the author was telling me that I have to work hard every day all day just so I can do it all over again the next day.
What I got out of it was an encouragement for individual growth outside of the day job mindset. I think his point was that working just to work is like a big vacuum sucking the life out of us, and that we need to experience things in life in order to ask ourselves the hard questions that motivate us to be so much more than just a lump of flesh consuming resources and grinding out the work.
I'm not so sure about it. As I read the speach he had laid out, I found that his point was not "High school sucks. It's such a waste of time." Rather, his point was "I'm wasting my time by being in this class if I'm only here to do the busy work."
The motivation was to get young adults to think about what they were doing and to engage themselves, so that they can be more than just typical sedentary students.
That aside, I think you are correct that his advice would be better received by adults than high school students. Most high school students are just "doing their time." It would be received by most as a useful diversion to get out of class for an hour.
Then again, same said students will shape the world we live in after we're gone. I'd like to have some hope that at least a handful of kids would soak in these ideas and cultivate them.
Lest we forget, Newton's discoveries did not come from a vacuum. It's nothing short of arrogance that leads someone to say that their heroes are much better than the heroes of the past, especially when their heroes built on those same heroes of the past.
Also, I believe you were taking the parent post out of context. I believe it was intended to be a marvelling at what a people viewed largely as "primitive" had come up with, prior to "modern" scientific discovery.
This says it best:
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675
And before we should forget, he was also comparing DRM to the little speed bump in the parking lot. You know, that speed bump that's there to keep you from flying through at 80MPH?
Did anyone else find that example number to be extremely ridiculous? Speed bumps aren't there to keep you from going 80MPH; they're to screw up your car and jar you to reality if you drive faster than 5MPH. Any faster than that and your car will likely be airborne.
That seem to me more in-line with what DRM is about. Don't want people to listen to your song more than once? No problem! It'll render itself useless after the first listening.
DRM is totalitarianism for the masses. The iron fist for the digital age.
Critics aren't spouting out petty complaints about something unless it's complete and utter crap. They offer critiques (read: useful suggestions) regarding what they felt could be better about what they have just experienced.
Although, some critics are just people with loud opinions who think they could do what you did even better, but lack the skillset to do so.
And still others will make "think about the children"-style comments, just like the parent. If you don't agree with an oppinion like that one, you are instantly villainised, whether it was correct or not!
I believe you are thinking along the lines of what bootsplash http://www.bootsplash.org/ does. This is nothing similar; it's designed to visualize where performance bottlenecks are located during the startup procedures. But then, after reading all of the other commentary on here, you may have picked up on that fact already. In that case, I apologize for the redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
s/IT
As a previous poster mentioned, it's not just the IT world that can be crippled by patents. Thank you, Monsanto! Does this mean we can't eat your GM foods without a license? Eating food definitely falls under the category of "use."
What happens when we have things like this happen to public waterworks? The end result surely wouldn't be pretty. This is purely theoretical, but imagine a patent on water created by a special cleaning process. That water somehow ends up in city reservoirs. Company sues city for unlicensed use of "special" water. It may seem like a stupid example, but it's the best I could come up with in 10 seconds.
I call it a land-grab.
Parent: +1, Insightful.
Although this may not be an example of a submarine patent, it certainly isn't acting for the public interest. I entirely agree with you regarding the approach taken to extracting money from violators.
I'm fully expecting the trolls to come out and complain about all of the whiney bleeding-hearts and how life isn't fair, but think about it. Why isn't life fair? Because there's always someone out there wanting to screw over others for their own benefit. If our society were such that more for self was not the highest motivation, problems like these would be drastically reduced. Then again, maybe I'm being overly idealistic.
1) Angry much?
2) I was simply amused by the Mac in the background. Billy G got his ideas from somewhere.
3) I didn't know about that thread. I'll make sure I search the previous 50 years of Slashdot before I ever post my amusements again.
4) Here's your Prozac. Have a great day slashing other comments.
Come back when you've got something better to do than cut someone down because you're being a grouch.
I'd like to make an addition to your statement.
Nothing beats a reliable paycheck unless it's a reliable paycheck in a healthy work environment. A good boss is one that lets you get out after you've put in your honest day's work, and also treats you well. The overlords make all the difference.
When I read this, it just occurred to me exactly what type of people PHBs are. Well, aside from being PHBs. They're like the kids who buy performance computer parts, destroy them by not knowing how to install them properly, and send them back for exchange or refund. Think of yourself in this example as the performance parts. Your PHB overclocks the hell out of you until you die in a poof of smoke, and he incurs no penalty for doing so. In fact, he is often rewarded for bleeding so much life out of you.
Holy bold text tag, Batman! Yeah, that sounds like typical corporate antics. Drop the team as soon as the work is done. They'd probably get contractors if they didn't think hiring and laying off was cheaper.
Heh. I'd be happy to get anything for a job well done. As it is, my boss typically doesn't notice when a job is completed. Sometimes he'll say "thanks for the good work", but I think that's more of a nicety than anything else.
Working at a private college, I'm not expecting bonuses, but when I do work that adds value to the college, I want my boss to not take credit for my work. It's frustrating to feel like all of your work only merits you with doing more of the same. It's like pouring your soul into a vacuum.
Who modded these posts? They should all be either -1 Offtopic or -1 Troll. How did they get modded Insightful or Informative? Time to meta-moderate!
I think "Interesting" or "Informative" would have been a more appropriate moderation for this thread than "Insightful". There's nothing insightful about this.
I will say that I agree with the parent about the inconsistencies adopted by many who would label themselves as morally superior to the rest. That's pretension at its worst.
I however do not agree with the parent's stance on "potential" tripe. Is this to say that before a fetus has a developing brain that it has no chance of becoming a living being? That seems like an absurd argument to me. But then, I do not believe in murder in any of its forms - this includes death penalty. Instating the death penalty is an interesting way of being self-righteous. I'm sure most people on this earth have done something that merits more consequences than have been received, but those judgements were not dealt.
I haven't had the same issues that you've talked about, but I've noticed that certain plugins tend to make Firefox very unstable at times. It's usually Sun Java or Quicktime responsible, as far as I can tell. I'm no Firefox developer, and I don't have years to pore over the code, so I'm not sure what exactly happened. Just my observation.
Embarassing? Watching that clip gave me the jimmies. Brrrr! I'd laugh if I wasn't petrified from the absurdity of it all!
Did anyone else notice the Mac Plus sitting in the corner of one of the photos on the snopes site? Wouldn't that be similar to taking a Stanley tool, making a mold of said tool, and using that mold to make and sell your own tools?
You know that Mac probably wasn't sitting there because he had so much love, admiration, and need for it.
This sounds way too familiar... I work for a beancounter also. Apparently it's cheaper to slap a new bandaid on the problem every couple of months rather than mustering the funding to purchase a solution that will work, be updated, and be supported...
So, instead of doing the duties that I have been hired to do, it ends up with my boss saying stupid things like "Oh, couldn't you just write a script for that?"
Note that my boss also likes to call applications "scripts." Of course, it's always used in a diminutive sense.
So yes, I entirely agree with the parent on this. You can develop in-house applications, but unless you have the resources to dedicate to supporting those applications - pay for your visit to the doctor. Don't just slap a bandaid on your severed artery.
You may also want to be careful of that sort of job. If you get hired on at a small college by a stupid manager and you're a salaried employee (like myself), your hours are almost guaranteed to not be stable. I'm on call 24/7 for my job at a college with 1700 students, as I'm one of two network techs. As anyone here who's ever been a network tech could tell you, every problem that happens on any system is a network problem.
Of course, you could get lucky with a job in the upper education system and actually have an employeer who doesn't treat you like you're his personal slave. That would be a plus. You'd probably be treated better if you were able to get onto an applications development team as the parent suggests. If you don't want everyone blaming you for every problem that happens, don't join a networking staff. People can be really damn ugly when they mistype an email address and think you did something to block them..
If I had mod points and you were logged in, I'd mod you +1, Funny. I laughed, I cried, it was a wash.
Heh. From my personal experience, most of their beta software is more stable than the shrinkwrapped stuff. I think so far Windows 2000 and Windows XP have been the exceptions. Most instability there has been caused by crap platform drivers from nVidia or crap video drivers from ATi, or crap platform drivers from VIA. Pick your poison, as they say. Thankfully, the stability of said drivers has vastly improved over the months and years..
I'm just curious here. If you had adequate resources to do what you want when you want, why wouldn't you want to make the things that interest you into what you do? Then again, maybe you don't have a strictly rigid definition of what work is compared to the status quo. I personally pursue work that is like play, although my employeer doesn't share the same viewpoint and likes to make work as stonefaced as possible. Gotta keep up that image, after all. You can't have the image of a kind-hearted group of people who enjoy what they do working for you. Gotta be all business-professional.
I do appreciate your sentiment about feeling useless having accomplished nothing with your time. I tend to feel the same way. It's emotionally draining.
*blink blink blink* I read the whole speech, and I didn't come away from it with the feeling that the author was telling me that I have to work hard every day all day just so I can do it all over again the next day.
What I got out of it was an encouragement for individual growth outside of the day job mindset. I think his point was that working just to work is like a big vacuum sucking the life out of us, and that we need to experience things in life in order to ask ourselves the hard questions that motivate us to be so much more than just a lump of flesh consuming resources and grinding out the work.
At least, that's part of what I got out of it.
I'm not so sure about it. As I read the speach he had laid out, I found that his point was not "High school sucks. It's such a waste of time." Rather, his point was "I'm wasting my time by being in this class if I'm only here to do the busy work."
The motivation was to get young adults to think about what they were doing and to engage themselves, so that they can be more than just typical sedentary students.
That aside, I think you are correct that his advice would be better received by adults than high school students. Most high school students are just "doing their time." It would be received by most as a useful diversion to get out of class for an hour.
Then again, same said students will shape the world we live in after we're gone. I'd like to have some hope that at least a handful of kids would soak in these ideas and cultivate them.
On all of the (actual) servers I've worked with, the onboard NICs are exactly the same hardware that you get with the server-grade PCI NICs.
Also, I believe you were taking the parent post out of context. I believe it was intended to be a marvelling at what a people viewed largely as "primitive" had come up with, prior to "modern" scientific discovery.
This says it best:
And before we should forget, he was also comparing DRM to the little speed bump in the parking lot. You know, that speed bump that's there to keep you from flying through at 80MPH?
Did anyone else find that example number to be extremely ridiculous? Speed bumps aren't there to keep you from going 80MPH; they're to screw up your car and jar you to reality if you drive faster than 5MPH. Any faster than that and your car will likely be airborne.
That seem to me more in-line with what DRM is about. Don't want people to listen to your song more than once? No problem! It'll render itself useless after the first listening.
DRM is totalitarianism for the masses. The iron fist for the digital age.
Another difference.
Critics aren't spouting out petty complaints about something unless it's complete and utter crap. They offer critiques (read: useful suggestions) regarding what they felt could be better about what they have just experienced.
Although, some critics are just people with loud opinions who think they could do what you did even better, but lack the skillset to do so.
And still others will make "think about the children"-style comments, just like the parent. If you don't agree with an oppinion like that one, you are instantly villainised, whether it was correct or not!
I believe you are thinking along the lines of what bootsplash http://www.bootsplash.org/ does. This is nothing similar; it's designed to visualize where performance bottlenecks are located during the startup procedures. But then, after reading all of the other commentary on here, you may have picked up on that fact already. In that case, I apologize for the redundancy.