Here is my idealistic solution to Patent law. Feel free to rip it apart:)
1. All patents must be detailed enough to be reproducible. Meaning if you want to patent a new chip you have to produce the schema. An Algorithm must be detailed enough to be programmed.
Problem: who determines what is reproducible? I couldn't take a Car design and reproduce it.
2. All patents are public record accessible to everyone.
3. All patents are usable by the public for personal use. I can go to the patent office website and get the Honda Accord 2003 patent, and build a Honda Accord for myself. What I couldn't do is build that Honda Accord and sell it to someone else for more than what it cost me to build.
4. All patents must be held by an individual. That individual can sell the patent to someone, or lease it for a given amount of time. Patents would travel with a person. So if I patent an algorithm at Dell, then jump over to IBM. I am still the owner of that patent. Unless I sold it to Dell.
Problem: Group efforts.
5. Regardless of how many times the patent changes hands, it goes into the public domain when the original patent holder dies. I.E. ownership dies with the inventor.
6. A patent is a new patent if it differs from a existing patent by > 50%. Meaning I can take my honda accord spec and mod it to where 50% is not the same, and receive a new patent for my design.
I know I know > 50% is relative. However I can't help to think if we had a strict patent description language we could do this with some sort of binary comparison. Sorry its the programmer in me:)
Well I would like to here what people have to say about these ideas.
Apoptosis
Who here would of stopped Hitler?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
At first I was ify on this war for the following reasons:
1. Who cares if another country has weapons of mass destruction. We have them, so it would be hypocritical to say others can't.
2. How much does this have to do with Terrorism? Maybe a little, but evidence is not strong.
3. Is this a Bush family grudge. Most definately. Bush even said this is a man who tried to kill my father.
Then I saw the History channel specials on Saddam, and my whole view changed. The specials maybe propaganda but the seemed to back up every statement with fact.
Fact: Saddam was a hitman who gained power by fear.
Fact: Saddam killed everyone in his own political party who's loyalty to the party was questionable.
(The video of him smoking a cigar and smiling as peoples names were called out is sicking).
Fact: Upon gaining power he hung the few Jews in country in the public square as "conspiritors".
Fact: He tourtures people for information by giving acid baths, cutting out eyes of their children, raping women. (Lots of exiles relating stories).
Fact: He used chemical weapons against his own people.
So I could care less what the "reasons" are for this war. This is a war that should happen to remove a guy who is acting much like Hitler. I will happily go to War now to prevent people like this from existing. I just wonder how many of you would of been the people saying america should stay out of WWII, that its none of our business. Its easy to act after the fact, hard to act before.
I wanted to mod this up, but everyone else did it for me. So instead I will comment. Reading this headline this was the first thing that popped into my mind. It certainly seems like Value is just a name now days, and yet it was obvious they had some real talent at one time. I beleive even The Carmack through some praises towards Valve at one time. Such a shame I still consider half-life my favorit single player FPS ever.
Business Object Persistance and Caching
on
Struts Kick Start
·
· Score: 1
We are doing a rewrite of our web application, and have pretty much decided to use struts. However, we can not decide on what to use for object persistance and caching. We have ruled out CMP for performance reasons, BC4J is a option but many of us don't like being tied to Oracle. Are there any open source frameworks for doing this that someone has used successfully and are happy with? Object Relational Bridge? Torque? We could really use some outside input on this.
I am not sure I understand the "Not Quite Ready" comment. I have been using Eclipse as my main IDE for nearly a year and I love it. Eclipse is just the framework to build the IDE you desire. Eclipse is complete, there are just some pluggins that aren't ready yet, however they are comming along very fast. Just last night I started using the Lomboz J2EE pluggin and so far I have been pretty impressed. http://www.objectlearn.com/
Also, I get all my plugins from:
http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/
I might not be up on all the politics of programming, but I know I didn't pay for Eclipse and no one has asked me for anything to use it. So it appears pretty damn free to me. I recommend Eclipse to everyone.
I am working on a new J2EE framework. I am trying to combine DbForms with features of BC4J.
Does anyone have any frameworks they really really like, and why?
Apoptosis
I must be the only one who wants TV shows to be tracked. And I find it hillarious that Broadcasters do to. I want TV shows to have to stand up to the same metrics as websites do. To have commercials linked directly to web pages, or to monitor how many people fast forward or leave the room during commercials.
I garentee TV would see the same Advertising withdraw that the Web did. Broadcasters have a really nice system going where the only messure of how much money the get for a advertising spot is how many people are watching the show. Do you think Ford will spend 10 million dollars on a super bowl add, if they found out everyone goes outside during half time an throws the ball around. (I know bad example, but you get the point). Basicly I don't think Broadcasters are ready for the revenue change new metrics of this type will bring.
Apoptosis
I know this is going to sound rediculas but it is true, I have been planning my next computer purchase around the release of Doom3 for almost two years now. Hopefully that new Nvidia GPU is out before the game, I would also like a Hammer (or whatever they are calling it today) to go with it.
I think Doom3 will be a big boost to computer sales. I remember going out and buying the first pentium computer just to play Doom 2 with my friends.
Is Doom 3 going to increase anyone elses computer spending?
I would support a movement which changed copyright law to be if you have a copyright then you don't own the material you own the right to profit from the material.
In this way sharing music, books, movies online would not be illegal. However, if they can show that your profiting from it than it is.
Hence, Napster would still be illegal because they were making money from banner ads. However, a program like Gnucleus would not be because the creators of Gnucleus don't profit from the trading of other people's work.
I would also like to see the concept of Novel taken out of copyright law. I think its clear that the creative process stems from the combining of other peoples work in a way which hasn't been done before. I.E. New ideas stem from the combination of previous ideas. This is not to belittle the creative process. Only to recognize what it really is.
I think in this way we will foster a civilization which individuals still receive the fruits of their labor, and at the same time allow others to be creative.
I measure quality by asking the people who use it if they like it, in that its a Qualitative experience.
This is why we have two words different words. They aren't to be mixed.
Perhaps measuring isn't the right word because when you survey you are measuring customer reaction/satisfaction. But I disagree with using Counting Quality.
Once in a meeting I heard the phrase "Code reviews increase Quality 94%". I knew then that the people making decisions were nothing but bean counters.
I will admit what I know about Extreme Programming is limited to a few things I haver read here and there so your probably right what we were doing was probably not Extreme Programming. I was making the association based on little or no documentation, greater interaction between developers and customers, and changing requirements. I understood these to be qualities of Extreme Programming, but thats probably not the whole picture.
Well thanks for listening to my rant:)
Since this thread is turning into a discussion about Extreme Programming I thought I would throw in my experiences with it.
I work on a web application which when I first joined the project was run very much "by the seat of its pants". The project was in its infancy and we were in constant contact with customers who had wildly verying ideas of what the finished product should be. At that time we were testing/building constantly with no documentation other than code comments. We were also taking requests right until the release. For these reasons I say we were doing Extreme Programming. Our customers loved us and we quickly made the project one of the top projects in a very large company.
On a side note I have often wondered if Extreme Programming is a simply a justification for what programmers tend to do when left on their own.
Well then our success bit us in the butt. The big wigs took notice and labled us "Mission Critical". Now we spend more time documenting the application then writting code. Any requirement a customer wants has to go through several levels of review, and they are never accepted just before a release. Management now "measures" quality by number of defects openned on a release. (Yes I too reject the whole notion of measuring a quality by the counting of ANYTHING). Releases now take longer, frustrate customers more, and have lowered the moral of the developers who now feel they are simply documentation monkeys. Yet Management insists the project is better than before.
The moral of the story I have taken away from this experience is that even if extreme programming is the better method for a given project management will regect it. It results in more defects being found, more change which scares the hell out of management types, and finally code which isn't well documented so that management can't replace skilled help with code monkeys at a moments notice.
You don't have to count beans to make coffee. However, management won't let you make coffee at all without knowing how many beans are in each cup.
I think the title of the topic gives a valid reason for the decline of electronic tinkering. I get my desire to tinker from my grandfather who would play with cb radios and what not, however now its so much cheaper to tinker with code and in my opinion more rewarding with its near instant gradification. I don't think these people have disappeared their minds are just now occupied with writing code.
I work on a Web Application, and we want to tell our users its ok to use mozilla, however we still have too many problems with Multilanguage support.
In particular use of Global IME for language input just does not work right in Mozilla. See defect (98434). Our web app has over a 1000 input fields. So this is a show stopper for us. Hence we can't back mozilla till this is fixed.
I imagine this is a show stopper for lots of other sites, especially overseas. Until this is fixed I don't think Mozilla is ready for the big time like everyone is claiming.
Ok, lots of people are saying this is right and that it isn't a company trying to price gouge. You guys are right in the purest sense, however I highly doubt this pay for what you get will move downward only upward where it benifits Time Warner. Meaning what about the guy who only uses his account for email and surfing? Under say 5 megs a month? Will he pay less? I don't think so. They will still want their $50 from him. If they are going to have a mettered service they better go all the way or I will cancel my account. They already force me to pay for Digital Cable with my internet. Apparently I am not gauged enough! Don't get me right Mettering is fair if it is done right, but I garentee that it will be a combination of mettering and fixed price which will allow the maximum gauging of the customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is my idealistic solution to Patent law. Feel free to rip it apart :)
:)
1. All patents must be detailed enough to be reproducible. Meaning if you want to patent a new chip you have to produce the schema. An Algorithm must be detailed enough to be programmed.
Problem: who determines what is reproducible? I couldn't take a Car design and reproduce it.
2. All patents are public record accessible to everyone.
3. All patents are usable by the public for personal use. I can go to the patent office website and get the Honda Accord 2003 patent, and build a Honda Accord for myself. What I couldn't do is build that Honda Accord and sell it to someone else for more than what it cost me to build.
4. All patents must be held by an individual. That individual can sell the patent to someone, or lease it for a given amount of time. Patents would travel with a person. So if I patent an algorithm at Dell, then jump over to IBM. I am still the owner of that patent. Unless I sold it to Dell.
Problem: Group efforts.
5. Regardless of how many times the patent changes hands, it goes into the public domain when the original patent holder dies. I.E. ownership dies with the inventor.
6. A patent is a new patent if it differs from a existing patent by > 50%. Meaning I can take my honda accord spec and mod it to where 50% is not the same, and receive a new patent for my design.
I know I know > 50% is relative. However I can't help to think if we had a strict patent description language we could do this with some sort of binary comparison. Sorry its the programmer in me
Well I would like to here what people have to say about these ideas.
Apoptosis
At first I was ify on this war for the following reasons: 1. Who cares if another country has weapons of mass destruction. We have them, so it would be hypocritical to say others can't. 2. How much does this have to do with Terrorism? Maybe a little, but evidence is not strong. 3. Is this a Bush family grudge. Most definately. Bush even said this is a man who tried to kill my father. Then I saw the History channel specials on Saddam, and my whole view changed. The specials maybe propaganda but the seemed to back up every statement with fact. Fact: Saddam was a hitman who gained power by fear. Fact: Saddam killed everyone in his own political party who's loyalty to the party was questionable. (The video of him smoking a cigar and smiling as peoples names were called out is sicking). Fact: Upon gaining power he hung the few Jews in country in the public square as "conspiritors". Fact: He tourtures people for information by giving acid baths, cutting out eyes of their children, raping women. (Lots of exiles relating stories). Fact: He used chemical weapons against his own people. So I could care less what the "reasons" are for this war. This is a war that should happen to remove a guy who is acting much like Hitler. I will happily go to War now to prevent people like this from existing. I just wonder how many of you would of been the people saying america should stay out of WWII, that its none of our business. Its easy to act after the fact, hard to act before.
I wanted to mod this up, but everyone else did it for me. So instead I will comment. Reading this headline this was the first thing that popped into my mind. It certainly seems like Value is just a name now days, and yet it was obvious they had some real talent at one time. I beleive even The Carmack through some praises towards Valve at one time. Such a shame I still consider half-life my favorit single player FPS ever.
We are doing a rewrite of our web application, and have pretty much decided to use struts. However, we can not decide on what to use for object persistance and caching. We have ruled out CMP for performance reasons, BC4J is a option but many of us don't like being tied to Oracle. Are there any open source frameworks for doing this that someone has used successfully and are happy with? Object Relational Bridge? Torque? We could really use some outside input on this.
I am not sure I understand the "Not Quite Ready" comment. I have been using Eclipse as my main IDE for nearly a year and I love it. Eclipse is just the framework to build the IDE you desire. Eclipse is complete, there are just some pluggins that aren't ready yet, however they are comming along very fast. Just last night I started using the Lomboz J2EE pluggin and so far I have been pretty impressed. http://www.objectlearn.com/ Also, I get all my plugins from: http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/ I might not be up on all the politics of programming, but I know I didn't pay for Eclipse and no one has asked me for anything to use it. So it appears pretty damn free to me. I recommend Eclipse to everyone.
I am working on a new J2EE framework. I am trying to combine DbForms with features of BC4J. Does anyone have any frameworks they really really like, and why? Apoptosis
I must be the only one who wants TV shows to be tracked. And I find it hillarious that Broadcasters do to. I want TV shows to have to stand up to the same metrics as websites do. To have commercials linked directly to web pages, or to monitor how many people fast forward or leave the room during commercials. I garentee TV would see the same Advertising withdraw that the Web did. Broadcasters have a really nice system going where the only messure of how much money the get for a advertising spot is how many people are watching the show. Do you think Ford will spend 10 million dollars on a super bowl add, if they found out everyone goes outside during half time an throws the ball around. (I know bad example, but you get the point). Basicly I don't think Broadcasters are ready for the revenue change new metrics of this type will bring. Apoptosis
I know this is going to sound rediculas but it is true, I have been planning my next computer purchase around the release of Doom3 for almost two years now. Hopefully that new Nvidia GPU is out before the game, I would also like a Hammer (or whatever they are calling it today) to go with it. I think Doom3 will be a big boost to computer sales. I remember going out and buying the first pentium computer just to play Doom 2 with my friends. Is Doom 3 going to increase anyone elses computer spending?
I would support a movement which changed copyright law to be if you have a copyright then you don't own the material you own the right to profit from the material. In this way sharing music, books, movies online would not be illegal. However, if they can show that your profiting from it than it is. Hence, Napster would still be illegal because they were making money from banner ads. However, a program like Gnucleus would not be because the creators of Gnucleus don't profit from the trading of other people's work. I would also like to see the concept of Novel taken out of copyright law. I think its clear that the creative process stems from the combining of other peoples work in a way which hasn't been done before. I.E. New ideas stem from the combination of previous ideas. This is not to belittle the creative process. Only to recognize what it really is. I think in this way we will foster a civilization which individuals still receive the fruits of their labor, and at the same time allow others to be creative.
I measure quality by asking the people who use it if they like it, in that its a Qualitative experience. This is why we have two words different words. They aren't to be mixed. Perhaps measuring isn't the right word because when you survey you are measuring customer reaction/satisfaction. But I disagree with using Counting Quality. Once in a meeting I heard the phrase "Code reviews increase Quality 94%". I knew then that the people making decisions were nothing but bean counters.
I will admit what I know about Extreme Programming is limited to a few things I haver read here and there so your probably right what we were doing was probably not Extreme Programming. I was making the association based on little or no documentation, greater interaction between developers and customers, and changing requirements. I understood these to be qualities of Extreme Programming, but thats probably not the whole picture. Well thanks for listening to my rant :)
Since this thread is turning into a discussion about Extreme Programming I thought I would throw in my experiences with it. I work on a web application which when I first joined the project was run very much "by the seat of its pants". The project was in its infancy and we were in constant contact with customers who had wildly verying ideas of what the finished product should be. At that time we were testing/building constantly with no documentation other than code comments. We were also taking requests right until the release. For these reasons I say we were doing Extreme Programming. Our customers loved us and we quickly made the project one of the top projects in a very large company. On a side note I have often wondered if Extreme Programming is a simply a justification for what programmers tend to do when left on their own. Well then our success bit us in the butt. The big wigs took notice and labled us "Mission Critical". Now we spend more time documenting the application then writting code. Any requirement a customer wants has to go through several levels of review, and they are never accepted just before a release. Management now "measures" quality by number of defects openned on a release. (Yes I too reject the whole notion of measuring a quality by the counting of ANYTHING). Releases now take longer, frustrate customers more, and have lowered the moral of the developers who now feel they are simply documentation monkeys. Yet Management insists the project is better than before. The moral of the story I have taken away from this experience is that even if extreme programming is the better method for a given project management will regect it. It results in more defects being found, more change which scares the hell out of management types, and finally code which isn't well documented so that management can't replace skilled help with code monkeys at a moments notice. You don't have to count beans to make coffee. However, management won't let you make coffee at all without knowing how many beans are in each cup.
Does anyone know where I could get a Sports Statistics Database, either free or reasonably priced? In particular NBA game by game Stats?
I think the title of the topic gives a valid reason for the decline of electronic tinkering. I get my desire to tinker from my grandfather who would play with cb radios and what not, however now its so much cheaper to tinker with code and in my opinion more rewarding with its near instant gradification. I don't think these people have disappeared their minds are just now occupied with writing code.
I work on a Web Application, and we want to tell our users its ok to use mozilla, however we still have too many problems with Multilanguage support. In particular use of Global IME for language input just does not work right in Mozilla. See defect (98434). Our web app has over a 1000 input fields. So this is a show stopper for us. Hence we can't back mozilla till this is fixed. I imagine this is a show stopper for lots of other sites, especially overseas. Until this is fixed I don't think Mozilla is ready for the big time like everyone is claiming.
Ok, lots of people are saying this is right and that it isn't a company trying to price gouge. You guys are right in the purest sense, however I highly doubt this pay for what you get will move downward only upward where it benifits Time Warner. Meaning what about the guy who only uses his account for email and surfing? Under say 5 megs a month? Will he pay less? I don't think so. They will still want their $50 from him. If they are going to have a mettered service they better go all the way or I will cancel my account. They already force me to pay for Digital Cable with my internet. Apparently I am not gauged enough! Don't get me right Mettering is fair if it is done right, but I garentee that it will be a combination of mettering and fixed price which will allow the maximum gauging of the customers.