I remember whan I was first scanning the market for an ISP (a looong time ago).
There was one that looked OK (one of the larger ones in my country; solid looking; good financial conditions; etc. etc.), until I checked out their code of conduct. It litterally read: "It is not allowed to transfer copyright (sic) material over the <ISP name here> network."
I sent them an e-mail to point out the error in their ways, but they did not even understand what I said! Needless to say I took my business elsewhere.
Indeed. If it would have been me, I would most likely have let the crackdown come. If the univ has nothing to hide, no harm is done. If it does have something to hide, it would have been the univ that would have been caught with its pants down, not the teacher who did nothing wrong. Of course, after all that he'd have been forced out of the job anyay, but that's exactly why he shouldn't have been afraid of staying till the shit would have hit the fan. Defnitely not considering that he's now doing everything he can to keep this in the news and to glue it for ever after to his CV.
But the funny thing is how the patent lawyers interpret this exclusion. When it comes to aesthetic creations, they all agree that you can't get a patent on them, because of this wording in the EPC.
But when it comes to computer programs, they claim that the law as written doesn't apply any more. Even though both films and computer programs are part of the same list in the same article in the same international convention.
The software patents get awarded because they can be carefully worded as "method and apparatus for..." or something similar. This cannot be applied to aesthetic creations, but it sure can to "procedures" such as software. In theory you could indeed build a physical (electro-mechanical or even purely mechanical) apparatus that performs task so-and so. OK, maybe not for all of them, but at least for many.
Re:Comments to come: blah, Perl hard to read/maint
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: 1
One of the brilliant aspects of perl is that it allows you to write code like you think about code.
While that point of view does have some merit, it also points out the worst failure of Perl. Far to many people do almost no thinking about their code and then get to live with just what they bargained for. Sadly, any later maintainers didn't bargain at all but still have to survive the mess created in the mean time. In se, this "why would I need to think" attitude is not a problem of Perl, but Perl does implicitly encourage it.
I am a European tax payer. Therefore I'm better off if people fly Airbus, because then at least my tax money will have been put to good European use (job creation etc.).
For several years now, I've had a nightly cron job that ramdomly changes the id information in my google cookie. So even though they are logging my searches, they sure as hell are not going to be able to find them back.
Speaking bout the Slashdot rendering problem. I used to see it all the time in Mozilla 1.7.1 at work and Mozilla 1.7.x at home. But recently the problem has gone away. Did the Slashdot gang at long last so something about the crappy HTML that actually triggered it?
Our oldest sun server is 6 years of age. Our oldest HP server is 7 years of age. All of these are still running fine and reasonably fast enough for what we use them for.
Last year we finally shut down 6 entry-level HP workstations (715/50) that were of +- 8 years old at the time. These had indeed become too slow for real use, but were still being used as X terminals by students.
I wouldn't want to try any of that with our Intel based Compaq servers, because we know from experience (this translates as: yes we did try) that they are designed to last 3 years and will predictably break soon after their third birthday. The record so far is one that lasted a full 3.5 years.
Bad idea. I'm on the LKML, just to stay up to date with what's going on in kernel land. But every so often I'm away from the net for a few days and when I'm back I regularly have no time to read up on everything that happened in the mean time (look up the average daily volume of the LKML and multiply by +-5 to get an idea how many mails this can be about). So when this happens, I mass-delete all my unread LKML mails without looking at them. That doesn't make my LKML feed unwanted SPAM, tough.
In what way does it help the author of a program to receive tens, hundreds, or thousands of irrelevant patches done for some internal (test)project that uses some of his code? Real bug fixes, yes. But local customisations? Or even completely different projects that just happen to reuse one modified file out of a GPL-ed project???
Not only that. A file can also have only one group. So to implement the scheme the (grand)parent proposed with pure UNIX groups, you need to create artificial groups for all the intersections of the real groups. Not something you want to do.
Of course, UNIX has had ACLs back when Windows still had not even a semblance of access security.
There seem to be far too many people that feel that they need the "Pro" version of something, simply because it's better.
It actually is better, but that's not the point I want to make. In my view, the fact that such people are actually buying Pro really is good marketing by MS.
Many people use Home, which shows that Home is not perceived the same as Crippled or Starter. But those who want Pro "simply because it's better, even if they don't really know why it is better or why they need this betterness", are a real market segment. Such people want Pro in any case "because it's better", no matter what, and MS is rightfully exploiting that market segment just as any sane for-profit company does or should do.
The reason why I'm attending these lectures is that I work in a research institute that has as one of its evaluation criteria the number of startups that it creates per year (has to be 3 at least in order for us to get our government funding, but our own goal is 10 per year). So far, we have consistently over achieved the 3 goal for a period of 20 years (during 16 of which I worked here). My personal research has already given rise to one such startup that still exists after 2 years. So I guess I do know a bit what I'm talking about...
Besides, the lectures are being given by people who specialise in nothing but guiding startups.
I work in micro-electronics research. The main pogram driving most of what the people in my division do, is aimed at enabling future low power multi-media multi-mode terminals with no end of features. The stuff we work on today is aimed for appearing on the consumer market in 2009/2010.
So even though I personally will never ever buy one of these godzilla cell phones, they sure as hell pay my living. But another thing they do, is define the research goals of my team (amongst others). As such, I can tell you that in the quest for the ultimate device that does everything that product managers dream of with just a single battery, we're (in more ways than one) stretching the limit of the design complexity that can be managed. An enormous amount of (wo)manpower is being invested (sometimes I say wasted) for making possible all these toys with feature lists that nobody fully understands and even less people use.
Why on earth would you pack a personal TV?
And if you do need TV access and really can't rely one having one in your hotel, then sure as hell a real TV (even if it's a small portable one) is going to give you a lot better quality than a cellphone. So your imaginary super-cellphone is by no means equivalent to the sum of your first list of stuff.
It just so happens that I'm attending a series of lectures about how to make good startups.
As it turns out, the number one indicator for predicting whether someone will succeed with his or her startup is whether he or she has an urge/drive to take control over his/her own destiny! Not how hard he or she works, not how briliant the idea or innovative the product is, not how good a sales person or manager he or she is, nor how much money is available.
When measuring success post-factum, resources (i.e. mostly money) are not the key factor either. You need: 1) an opportunity (this includes "a good market" and "good timing"); 2) a good team; 3) enough resources. All of them are important, but in that order
What SCO has done in 2004, is put Linux in the media. What it will do in 2005, is make it rock-solidly clear that the fear of anything GPL-ed that many CIOs undoubtedly have is not valid. Once they've managed that, these CIOs will have a solid reason for considering Linux. After all, SCO will have tried and failed to break Linux.
God created humans and gave them intelligence. He then delegated the job of climate control together with all the rest to them. In the end, He will judge whether we just let things explode or whether we made the best out of our given talents and preserved his creation. If things exploded we'll effectively have created hell-on-earth and evil Lucifer will have won.
There you have it: I'm not at all religious, but I do know enough bible stuff to claim heavenly support for whatever view on global warming that I want to promote. Which also means that all this god/bible motivated talk is rubbish.
Weather prediction and climate trend analysis are two very different things. I cannot predict whether it's going to rain on my little corner of the planet this time next week, but I sure as hell can predict with extreme accuracy that it's going to rain here somewhere between now and one year from now. And I can look at data from the past in order to find out whether the probability of it raining here is changing.
I read Usenet not "for finding specific information" (google is better at that) or for "asking specific questions" (who says I have questions that need solving here and now and that I can ask "in the open"), but mainly to lurk on ongoing discussions of topics that interest me.
For instance, these days I'm tracking a very interesting (to me) discussion on sci.military.naval about how torpodo's actually got fired during WW2 including all the details of keeping the boat from rising in the process etc. etc. This has been going on for a few days now (can't have that on Slashdot, where the topic is only hot as long as nobody tried the "first post" trick and only active as long as it sits on the top page). Because I've been lurking said group for years, I also know who to trust on what topics (try that on Slashdot...). Oh, and I have a very effective killfile for sci.military.naval (try that on Slashdot, where the moderation helps but does not put me in control).
Note that, while I have military connections, this kind of thing is not job related. E-mail lists offers lurking as well, but I don't want to be bothered with e-mails about non-work things I read during lunch time. And I don't want to give out my e-mail adres. With Usenet, my adress only goes out of the door when I actually decide to participate in the discussion.
Millions of people don't download music. My parents, for instance. They know how to buy and play a CD. They don't know where/how to download music from the net. They know even less how to convert it to a suitable format for they enjoyment.
Not everybody is a geek/nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
There was one that looked OK (one of the larger ones in my country; solid looking; good financial conditions; etc. etc.), until I checked out their code of conduct. It litterally read: "It is not allowed to transfer copyright (sic) material over the <ISP name here> network."
I sent them an e-mail to point out the error in their ways, but they did not even understand what I said! Needless to say I took my business elsewhere.
Indeed. If it would have been me, I would most likely have let the crackdown come. If the univ has nothing to hide, no harm is done. If it does have something to hide, it would have been the univ that would have been caught with its pants down, not the teacher who did nothing wrong. Of course, after all that he'd have been forced out of the job anyay, but that's exactly why he shouldn't have been afraid of staying till the shit would have hit the fan. Defnitely not considering that he's now doing everything he can to keep this in the news and to glue it for ever after to his CV.
But when it comes to computer programs, they claim that the law as written doesn't apply any more. Even though both films and computer programs are part of the same list in the same article in the same international convention.
The software patents get awarded because they can be carefully worded as "method and apparatus for ..." or something similar. This cannot be applied to aesthetic creations, but it sure can to "procedures" such as software. In theory you could indeed build a physical (electro-mechanical or even purely mechanical) apparatus that performs task so-and so. OK, maybe not for all of them, but at least for many.
While that point of view does have some merit, it also points out the worst failure of Perl. Far to many people do almost no thinking about their code and then get to live with just what they bargained for. Sadly, any later maintainers didn't bargain at all but still have to survive the mess created in the mean time. In se, this "why would I need to think" attitude is not a problem of Perl, but Perl does implicitly encourage it.
Yes overflowing is always bad, but overflowing down opens up a lot more opportunities for the kiddies.
I am a European tax payer. Therefore I'm better off if people fly Airbus, because then at least my tax money will have been put to good European use (job creation etc.).
Fortunately these treaties apply! The GPL is nothing but clever use of Copyright.
For several years now, I've had a nightly cron job that ramdomly changes the id information in my google cookie. So even though they are logging my searches, they sure as hell are not going to be able to find them back.
Speaking bout the Slashdot rendering problem. I used to see it all the time in Mozilla 1.7.1 at work and Mozilla 1.7.x at home. But recently the problem has gone away. Did the Slashdot gang at long last so something about the crappy HTML that actually triggered it?
Our oldest sun server is 6 years of age. Our oldest HP server is 7 years of age. All of these are still running fine and reasonably fast enough for what we use them for.
Last year we finally shut down 6 entry-level HP workstations (715/50) that were of +- 8 years old at the time. These had indeed become too slow for real use, but were still being used as X terminals by students.
I wouldn't want to try any of that with our Intel based Compaq servers, because we know from experience (this translates as: yes we did try) that they are designed to last 3 years and will predictably break soon after their third birthday. The record so far is one that lasted a full 3.5 years.
Bad idea. I'm on the LKML, just to stay up to date with what's going on in kernel land. But every so often I'm away from the net for a few days and when I'm back I regularly have no time to read up on everything that happened in the mean time (look up the average daily volume of the LKML and multiply by +-5 to get an idea how many mails this can be about). So when this happens, I mass-delete all my unread LKML mails without looking at them. That doesn't make my LKML feed unwanted SPAM, tough.
In what way does it help the author of a program to receive tens, hundreds, or thousands of irrelevant patches done for some internal (test)project that uses some of his code? Real bug fixes, yes. But local customisations? Or even completely different projects that just happen to reuse one modified file out of a GPL-ed project???
Of course, UNIX has had ACLs back when Windows still had not even a semblance of access security.
It actually is better, but that's not the point I want to make. In my view, the fact that such people are actually buying Pro really is good marketing by MS.
Many people use Home, which shows that Home is not perceived the same as Crippled or Starter. But those who want Pro "simply because it's better, even if they don't really know why it is better or why they need this betterness", are a real market segment. Such people want Pro in any case "because it's better", no matter what, and MS is rightfully exploiting that market segment just as any sane for-profit company does or should do.
Besides, the lectures are being given by people who specialise in nothing but guiding startups.
I work in micro-electronics research. The main pogram driving most of what the people in my division do, is aimed at enabling future low power multi-media multi-mode terminals with no end of features. The stuff we work on today is aimed for appearing on the consumer market in 2009/2010.
So even though I personally will never ever buy one of these godzilla cell phones, they sure as hell pay my living. But another thing they do, is define the research goals of my team (amongst others). As such, I can tell you that in the quest for the ultimate device that does everything that product managers dream of with just a single battery, we're (in more ways than one) stretching the limit of the design complexity that can be managed. An enormous amount of (wo)manpower is being invested (sometimes I say wasted) for making possible all these toys with feature lists that nobody fully understands and even less people use.
Why on earth would you pack a personal TV? And if you do need TV access and really can't rely one having one in your hotel, then sure as hell a real TV (even if it's a small portable one) is going to give you a lot better quality than a cellphone. So your imaginary super-cellphone is by no means equivalent to the sum of your first list of stuff.
It just so happens that I'm attending a series of lectures about how to make good startups.
As it turns out, the number one indicator for predicting whether someone will succeed with his or her startup is whether he or she has an urge/drive to take control over his/her own destiny! Not how hard he or she works, not how briliant the idea or innovative the product is, not how good a sales person or manager he or she is, nor how much money is available.
When measuring success post-factum, resources (i.e. mostly money) are not the key factor either. You need: 1) an opportunity (this includes "a good market" and "good timing"); 2) a good team; 3) enough resources. All of them are important, but in that order
You are right only on the short term.
What SCO has done in 2004, is put Linux in the media. What it will do in 2005, is make it rock-solidly clear that the fear of anything GPL-ed that many CIOs undoubtedly have is not valid. Once they've managed that, these CIOs will have a solid reason for considering Linux. After all, SCO will have tried and failed to break Linux.
It all depends who you are and who your employer is.
Microsoft and Bill .
There you have it: I'm not at all religious, but I do know enough bible stuff to claim heavenly support for whatever view on global warming that I want to promote. Which also means that all this god/bible motivated talk is rubbish.
Weather prediction and climate trend analysis are two very different things. I cannot predict whether it's going to rain on my little corner of the planet this time next week, but I sure as hell can predict with extreme accuracy that it's going to rain here somewhere between now and one year from now. And I can look at data from the past in order to find out whether the probability of it raining here is changing.
For instance, these days I'm tracking a very interesting (to me) discussion on sci.military.naval about how torpodo's actually got fired during WW2 including all the details of keeping the boat from rising in the process etc. etc. This has been going on for a few days now (can't have that on Slashdot, where the topic is only hot as long as nobody tried the "first post" trick and only active as long as it sits on the top page). Because I've been lurking said group for years, I also know who to trust on what topics (try that on Slashdot...). Oh, and I have a very effective killfile for sci.military.naval (try that on Slashdot, where the moderation helps but does not put me in control).
Note that, while I have military connections, this kind of thing is not job related. E-mail lists offers lurking as well, but I don't want to be bothered with e-mails about non-work things I read during lunch time. And I don't want to give out my e-mail adres. With Usenet, my adress only goes out of the door when I actually decide to participate in the discussion.
Millions of people don't download music. My parents, for instance. They know how to buy and play a CD. They don't know where/how to download music from the net. They know even less how to convert it to a suitable format for they enjoyment. Not everybody is a geek/nerd.