I tried to be clear that the two results can't be directly compared. My main point is that Coverity likes to put open-source projects in a good light, because there's better PR value for them to do so. Any sort of "best project evuh!" claims from them should recognize that this is ad copy designed to draw attention with its superlatives.
Coverity's services have been useful to a number of open-source projects. But this article is carefully picking its terms to get a headline worthy result. Compare against the Coverity scan of PostgreSQL done in 2005 for example, and CPython's defect rate isn't very exciting at all. But that was "Coverity Prevent" and this is "Coverity Scan"...whatever that means.
Peer to peer communications over an electronic protocol have been in mass use since the phone was invented. Once your call is connected, you can keep talking even if some resources that routed your call go down. That makes FTP more like the first obvious program to do this "on the Internet". And if it works like a phone, but now it's on a computer, that's not non-obvious innovation even though it was a cool hack.
Expanding on this, peer to peer video using telephone lines as the transport was first demoed in 1927, and even by then the idea itself was decades old. Protocols for peer to peer video predate all commercial computers; the idea was already obvious a hundred years ago.
Apple isn't tasting their own medicine here, they're spitting it back at their users instead. They're happy to extract money from other companies with trivial patents. Pinch to zoom? Seriously? But when they're supposed to pay out under the same system they exploit, instead they're screwing their customers out of capabilities. I'd like to see a nice class action lawsuit over selling a product based on one quality of Facetime service, but now delivering another, weaker service. That's what they deserve for making their customers suffer, instead of coughing up the patent tribute they're happy to demand from other companies.
I'm rooting for Apple to lose so many of these lawsuits that they're forced to advocate patent reform. As disgusting as this one troll is, Apple's patent aggression across the industry is far worse.
Using open standards wouldn't change anything. Patent trolls sue Apple here because they have money to extract. They'd still do it whether or not the behavior was used in a standard. Submarine patents that cover standards described behavior happen regularly, but they never sue the people who set the standards. They sue companies with money who make stuff.
At best, using a standard behavior might pull in a patent pool of companies to help with your defense, if that's part of the legal agreement around licensing the standard. There are so many patents covering smartphone behavior, the logistics of covering them all with a pool would be impossible to sort out even if Apple wanted to. Their constant aggression in filing lawsuits suggests they wouldn't even if the option were available.
Apple is targeted by more patent lawsuits than any other company nowadays, because they're seen as a ripe target with lots of cash. If they rolled over and bought everyone who sued them, they'd get hit with even more of them. They have to fight the whole way or the trolls will really smell blood.
Apple started the smartphone wars patent lawsuits, and accordingly they deserve to be the most patent trolled company. Samsung does not. Between phones, display, and wireless tech, Samsung has been involved in patent lawsuits with Apple, LG, Ericsson, Kodak, AMD, Sharp, LG, Microsoft. But in none of those cases did Samsung start the suits; they have only been counter-suing.
well Ive written another book to an existing complition of books about an old man who lives on a a cloud and sends winged being to watch over Americans.
You're talking about an individual student; I was talking about how the typical outcome expected for an entire school faces impacts the outcome for everyone. The motivated, involved parent is important. But they may not have the ability to elevate a student that far above the average outcome for the school they're attending. And those averages all depend heavily on the income of the parents.
Income, parent education, and parent involvement are not disconnected. Table 3 here tries to map how related they all are to each other. For any one parent, yes getting involved can be the most important thing to improve outcomes. But a child placed into a low income school will be surrounded with children of parents without much parent involvement or education. All of that drags down the whole school in a way that's tough to overcome.
There's some useful data from Michigan that shows the trend here. As usual there are people there who believe that "support from parents is the most important way to improve the schools". But when you look at test scores, the biggest correlation is with differences in family income and the corresponding education of the parents. The University of Michigan spelled it out quite clearly: More Money, Better Grades. That cites a Harvard study that breaks the phenomenon down into small parts.
Work ethic surely is strengthened by being in a family with more useful forms of income, regardless of its source. The work might be as simple as "fill out these forms and we collect government money", but when it's there to support school that helps. Kids who see that working results in money can find plenty of desire to work from that. I grew up middle to lower middle class, and chasing after things like financial aid assistance sure did install a work ethic to gain those benefits.
And at the other end, any trip to your local Home Depot searching for manual labor will find young men with strong work ethics but without heavy education. The main difference between them a well to do college student isn't ethic, it's different home distractions that interfere with school, pressure making it hard to stay in school long enough without needing to take a job, and just being able to buy more of the optional but useful resources for learning kids have available. Work ethic is a pretty fuzzy thing to quantify or predict from, unlike adding money to the parents which on average is always a win.
In addition to the statistics supporting the idea being bad, saying that poor students are that way due to work ethic issues in their family is the typical white privilege comment blaming the victim. It's a bad general argument, and it would have to be a massively good one to overturn all of the bad associations clustered around that idea.
The most important "support of the community" you can have are parents with higher incomes. Everything about school is easier if your home life is economically stable. The impact of economic class is much more important than any other type of involvement; there was a good class breakdown in the NYT a few years ago. Teacher quality and parent involvement in studies all pales in comparison to just being in a higher class neighborhood. The heavy variation in school quality in the US is more due to the massive wealth inequality of the country than anything else.
Most of education outcome is more correlated with the parent's money than anything else. Children who grow up in poverty tend to underperform no matter what you do with them in school. Overcoming a difficult home life is really hard, and neither teachers nor their lesson plan will change that very much. Meanwhile, rich kids can do well anywhere. If all a child has to worry about are grades, their life is straightforward.
When someone has a terrible local school, their options include private school and moving to a higher class neighborhood. Since school quality depends more on the parent's wealth than anything else, those neighborhoods also cost more. That's not just a correlation, it's a direct cause and effect. Expensive areas block children from lower incomes, which makes all of the jobs a school has to do easier. Has nothing to do with the effort parents put into school or the kids; it's just plain easier to focus on being a student (and have the resources to do so) when your parents have money. The writer of this article is pretty naive to think that all parents can affect a change simply by being more involved.
The only way to equalize this issue across the population of the US would be a massive shift toward socialism, probably via higher taxation, to more evenly distribute wealth across the country. Good luck with that.
Drawing the line between obvious and less obvious may only be possible in a historical context. If you break down innovation into small enough pieces, each step always seems obvious given everything that came before. That's how the world advances: with a series of small steps that build into larger works. It's rare you can give someone an exclusive right to any one of those next steps without blocking some inevitable advance forward that comes next.
If there such a thing as non-obvious advances--the rich history of co-discovery suggest there might not be--the only people who are really qualified to make that call are the competitors of the person submitting the patent. Someone working at the patent office certainly can't do it successfully. You can't say what's obvious to a skilled worker in a field without having those skills yourself.
The only industry where it's clear the patent is motivating research that otherwise might not happen is in drug manufacturing. Next steps there take so many resources that it's not clear they would happen without the exclusive profit motive. But there we're only talking only about big company jobs; there are no small inventors to protect in that field.
The language used in patent applications is extremely hard to decode. The idea that people might be mining for innovation by reading patents has to clear that hurdle. They need to make sense of that mess with less work than developing the same idea from scratch.
Back when patents were disclosing major technical advances, there was some evidence people were doing that. I re-read Portraits in Silicon lately. One of the recurring themes among early computer researchers was the idea that they'd get a patent on some very fundamental and non-obvious technology. Could you reinvent the transistor faster than you could read about it its construction? Probably not.
But lately, there's a lot more evidence that people are concurrently discovering obvious advances that someone patented instead of that sort of thing. And even those old fundamental patents turn out to be not such a big deal after all. The actual history of the transistor shows the concurrent development of its ideas as being really inevitable.
Concurrent discovery is far more likely than unique innovation. The patent system is burdening what turns out to be one of the most common situations seen in scientific advancement: that the next step to build on any innovation will be co-discovered by multiple researchers in parallel. This happens far more often than the fantasy of the lone inventor working in isolation to create something no one else thought of before.
What makes you think inventors who "don't have the mental and financial stamina to sue a big corporation for patent infringement" are going to get a good deal out of a patent troll company? They have the same characteristics as other corporations, except they're run by even more shady individuals than average.
The way the patent system is currently run makes it extremely hard for anyone but an expensive patent attorney to navigate too. Your fantasy inventor here is unlikely to get their patent in the first place. Instead it's big corporations who have the resources to file so many garbage patents that the rest of the world is bogged down navigating them, including the small scale inventors. Odds are the mythical lone wolf inventor will be sued into oblivion rather than sue someone else successfully.
Comparing most expensive chips isn't fair or useful. Intel's most expensive chips can cost a lot more because AMD doesn't have anything competitive.
A AMD FX-8350 costs $200. In Intel land, a i5-3750 is the right cost equal, at about $215. Intel's lead is so large that even a previous generation unit from their line up is approximately equal performance to AMD's current models. Which of those two is faster depends on the benchmark.
At the $100 end of the market, there are a few really cheap models where AMD has a price performance lead over Intel. But the minute you get to even $200, they are at best evenly matched. And Intel's built in HD graphics chips are getting better fast enough that even the AMD APU models won't have a lead at any price level for much longer.
When the options are "only your hired staff reviews the security features" and "your staff plus outside researchers review the security features", the latter is always better. And releasing the source code is the easiest way to facilitate useful outside review.
If you're paying a dime for a dozen ideas, you're being ripped off. Most ideas don't actually work out when you try them, so their average value is less than zero.
Tomorrow's big enterprise companies come from today's small ones. And the small ones have just given up on Microsoft products. I spend a good chunk of time wandering around startups in the valley and NYC areas. The last time I saw Windows running on a computer at a startup was 2009. It's all Macs and Linux now in new companies; Microsoft programs reek of old, dying tech to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to be clear that the two results can't be directly compared. My main point is that Coverity likes to put open-source projects in a good light, because there's better PR value for them to do so. Any sort of "best project evuh!" claims from them should recognize that this is ad copy designed to draw attention with its superlatives.
Coverity's services have been useful to a number of open-source projects. But this article is carefully picking its terms to get a headline worthy result. Compare against the Coverity scan of PostgreSQL done in 2005 for example, and CPython's defect rate isn't very exciting at all. But that was "Coverity Prevent" and this is "Coverity Scan"...whatever that means.
The link goes to technologyadvice.com; I have some for them.
Peer to peer communications over an electronic protocol have been in mass use since the phone was invented. Once your call is connected, you can keep talking even if some resources that routed your call go down. That makes FTP more like the first obvious program to do this "on the Internet". And if it works like a phone, but now it's on a computer, that's not non-obvious innovation even though it was a cool hack.
Expanding on this, peer to peer video using telephone lines as the transport was first demoed in 1927, and even by then the idea itself was decades old. Protocols for peer to peer video predate all commercial computers; the idea was already obvious a hundred years ago.
Apple isn't tasting their own medicine here, they're spitting it back at their users instead. They're happy to extract money from other companies with trivial patents. Pinch to zoom? Seriously? But when they're supposed to pay out under the same system they exploit, instead they're screwing their customers out of capabilities. I'd like to see a nice class action lawsuit over selling a product based on one quality of Facetime service, but now delivering another, weaker service. That's what they deserve for making their customers suffer, instead of coughing up the patent tribute they're happy to demand from other companies.
I'm rooting for Apple to lose so many of these lawsuits that they're forced to advocate patent reform. As disgusting as this one troll is, Apple's patent aggression across the industry is far worse.
Using open standards wouldn't change anything. Patent trolls sue Apple here because they have money to extract. They'd still do it whether or not the behavior was used in a standard. Submarine patents that cover standards described behavior happen regularly, but they never sue the people who set the standards. They sue companies with money who make stuff.
At best, using a standard behavior might pull in a patent pool of companies to help with your defense, if that's part of the legal agreement around licensing the standard. There are so many patents covering smartphone behavior, the logistics of covering them all with a pool would be impossible to sort out even if Apple wanted to. Their constant aggression in filing lawsuits suggests they wouldn't even if the option were available.
Apple is targeted by more patent lawsuits than any other company nowadays, because they're seen as a ripe target with lots of cash. If they rolled over and bought everyone who sued them, they'd get hit with even more of them. They have to fight the whole way or the trolls will really smell blood.
Apple is targeted by so many patent suits because they have a lot of money. There's little cash to be extracted directly from standards committees.
Apple started the smartphone wars patent lawsuits, and accordingly they deserve to be the most patent trolled company. Samsung does not. Between phones, display, and wireless tech, Samsung has been involved in patent lawsuits with Apple, LG, Ericsson, Kodak, AMD, Sharp, LG, Microsoft. But in none of those cases did Samsung start the suits; they have only been counter-suing.
well Ive written another book to an existing complition of books about an old man who lives on a a cloud and sends winged being to watch over Americans.
You wrote a sequel to the Bible?
You're talking about an individual student; I was talking about how the typical outcome expected for an entire school faces impacts the outcome for everyone. The motivated, involved parent is important. But they may not have the ability to elevate a student that far above the average outcome for the school they're attending. And those averages all depend heavily on the income of the parents.
Income, parent education, and parent involvement are not disconnected. Table 3 here tries to map how related they all are to each other. For any one parent, yes getting involved can be the most important thing to improve outcomes. But a child placed into a low income school will be surrounded with children of parents without much parent involvement or education. All of that drags down the whole school in a way that's tough to overcome.
There's some useful data from Michigan that shows the trend here. As usual there are people there who believe that "support from parents is the most important way to improve the schools". But when you look at test scores, the biggest correlation is with differences in family income and the corresponding education of the parents. The University of Michigan spelled it out quite clearly: More Money, Better Grades. That cites a Harvard study that breaks the phenomenon down into small parts.
Work ethic surely is strengthened by being in a family with more useful forms of income, regardless of its source. The work might be as simple as "fill out these forms and we collect government money", but when it's there to support school that helps. Kids who see that working results in money can find plenty of desire to work from that. I grew up middle to lower middle class, and chasing after things like financial aid assistance sure did install a work ethic to gain those benefits.
And at the other end, any trip to your local Home Depot searching for manual labor will find young men with strong work ethics but without heavy education. The main difference between them a well to do college student isn't ethic, it's different home distractions that interfere with school, pressure making it hard to stay in school long enough without needing to take a job, and just being able to buy more of the optional but useful resources for learning kids have available. Work ethic is a pretty fuzzy thing to quantify or predict from, unlike adding money to the parents which on average is always a win.
In addition to the statistics supporting the idea being bad, saying that poor students are that way due to work ethic issues in their family is the typical white privilege comment blaming the victim. It's a bad general argument, and it would have to be a massively good one to overturn all of the bad associations clustered around that idea.
The most important "support of the community" you can have are parents with higher incomes. Everything about school is easier if your home life is economically stable. The impact of economic class is much more important than any other type of involvement; there was a good class breakdown in the NYT a few years ago. Teacher quality and parent involvement in studies all pales in comparison to just being in a higher class neighborhood. The heavy variation in school quality in the US is more due to the massive wealth inequality of the country than anything else.
Most of education outcome is more correlated with the parent's money than anything else. Children who grow up in poverty tend to underperform no matter what you do with them in school. Overcoming a difficult home life is really hard, and neither teachers nor their lesson plan will change that very much. Meanwhile, rich kids can do well anywhere. If all a child has to worry about are grades, their life is straightforward.
When someone has a terrible local school, their options include private school and moving to a higher class neighborhood. Since school quality depends more on the parent's wealth than anything else, those neighborhoods also cost more. That's not just a correlation, it's a direct cause and effect. Expensive areas block children from lower incomes, which makes all of the jobs a school has to do easier. Has nothing to do with the effort parents put into school or the kids; it's just plain easier to focus on being a student (and have the resources to do so) when your parents have money. The writer of this article is pretty naive to think that all parents can affect a change simply by being more involved.
The only way to equalize this issue across the population of the US would be a massive shift toward socialism, probably via higher taxation, to more evenly distribute wealth across the country. Good luck with that.
Drawing the line between obvious and less obvious may only be possible in a historical context. If you break down innovation into small enough pieces, each step always seems obvious given everything that came before. That's how the world advances: with a series of small steps that build into larger works. It's rare you can give someone an exclusive right to any one of those next steps without blocking some inevitable advance forward that comes next.
If there such a thing as non-obvious advances--the rich history of co-discovery suggest there might not be--the only people who are really qualified to make that call are the competitors of the person submitting the patent. Someone working at the patent office certainly can't do it successfully. You can't say what's obvious to a skilled worker in a field without having those skills yourself.
The only industry where it's clear the patent is motivating research that otherwise might not happen is in drug manufacturing. Next steps there take so many resources that it's not clear they would happen without the exclusive profit motive. But there we're only talking only about big company jobs; there are no small inventors to protect in that field.
The language used in patent applications is extremely hard to decode. The idea that people might be mining for innovation by reading patents has to clear that hurdle. They need to make sense of that mess with less work than developing the same idea from scratch.
Back when patents were disclosing major technical advances, there was some evidence people were doing that. I re-read Portraits in Silicon lately. One of the recurring themes among early computer researchers was the idea that they'd get a patent on some very fundamental and non-obvious technology. Could you reinvent the transistor faster than you could read about it its construction? Probably not.
But lately, there's a lot more evidence that people are concurrently discovering obvious advances that someone patented instead of that sort of thing. And even those old fundamental patents turn out to be not such a big deal after all. The actual history of the transistor shows the concurrent development of its ideas as being really inevitable.
Concurrent discovery is far more likely than unique innovation. The patent system is burdening what turns out to be one of the most common situations seen in scientific advancement: that the next step to build on any innovation will be co-discovered by multiple researchers in parallel. This happens far more often than the fantasy of the lone inventor working in isolation to create something no one else thought of before.
What makes you think inventors who "don't have the mental and financial stamina to sue a big corporation for patent infringement" are going to get a good deal out of a patent troll company? They have the same characteristics as other corporations, except they're run by even more shady individuals than average.
The way the patent system is currently run makes it extremely hard for anyone but an expensive patent attorney to navigate too. Your fantasy inventor here is unlikely to get their patent in the first place. Instead it's big corporations who have the resources to file so many garbage patents that the rest of the world is bogged down navigating them, including the small scale inventors. Odds are the mythical lone wolf inventor will be sued into oblivion rather than sue someone else successfully.
Comparing most expensive chips isn't fair or useful. Intel's most expensive chips can cost a lot more because AMD doesn't have anything competitive.
A AMD FX-8350 costs $200. In Intel land, a i5-3750 is the right cost equal, at about $215. Intel's lead is so large that even a previous generation unit from their line up is approximately equal performance to AMD's current models. Which of those two is faster depends on the benchmark.
At the $100 end of the market, there are a few really cheap models where AMD has a price performance lead over Intel. But the minute you get to even $200, they are at best evenly matched. And Intel's built in HD graphics chips are getting better fast enough that even the AMD APU models won't have a lead at any price level for much longer.
Seeing the actions being taken? That's cheating. Their only feedback should be the person on the phone describing what they see on the screen.
When the options are "only your hired staff reviews the security features" and "your staff plus outside researchers review the security features", the latter is always better. And releasing the source code is the easiest way to facilitate useful outside review.
And games that ran via an interpreter go back to at least the Infocom Z-Machine in 1979.
If you're paying a dime for a dozen ideas, you're being ripped off. Most ideas don't actually work out when you try them, so their average value is less than zero.
Tomorrow's big enterprise companies come from today's small ones. And the small ones have just given up on Microsoft products. I spend a good chunk of time wandering around startups in the valley and NYC areas. The last time I saw Windows running on a computer at a startup was 2009. It's all Macs and Linux now in new companies; Microsoft programs reek of old, dying tech to them.