I've been in the product development game too long to be suprised by this. I've seen a lot of pretty strange mechanical damage, often to do with batteries.
Batteries are pretty dense and thus tend to have a lot of inertia relative to the rest of the guts of a device. If you drop an electronic device (or anything for that matter) onto a hard surface, it is in for a good few gs of acceleration. Sure, there are posts and reatining plastic etc, but these tend to be stronger in some angles than others.
Sometimes certain damage only happens within a certain "shock window". Eg. Drop from 2 ft and nothing breaks, the plastic retains everything; drop from 3ft and the two posts retaining the battery fail allowing the battery to strike the hard disk and get dented; drop from 6 ft and a different buch of posts fail causing the stress to be relieved in a different way and the battery does not strike the hard disk.
And, actually, lab engineers do routinely test for drop and vibration failure but that is more in the interests of seeing at what point a system fails rather than looking for safety issues a battery explosion.
The 5c (or whatever) can recycling "tax" on cans is an excellent example of how this can work. If there is an insentive, then a service will emerge.
You pay the tax up-front. You can hand the unit in to a recycling centre, they pay you some sort of refund (to say thanx for not dumping it, or -- like cans -- to promote dumpster diving homeless folk to bring them in) and they get paid to reprocess out of the rest of the tax.
These are only the submitters, not necessarily the actual authors of the changes.
Many patches are fed in through email lists etc where the maintainer (more likely to be a "named person") picks it up and pushes it upstream. I expect many volunteers will be in that group.
It has already been speculated by many that if Asia (well China in particular) gets its shit together it can wipe the world as a commodity agricultural producer (just like it has as a manufacturer). Water is a huge constraint to massive agricultural output. If they have a huge amount of water available, they're all go!
I was not talking of hardware that can be replicated in software, but hardware than can be simulated in software. These days electronics, buildings, lasers, whatever, are designed using simulations, be those electrical rules checking, stress analysis, whatever.
My argument is that there is no valid reason to treat one differently than the other.
At a functional-block level, an op-amp is a building block like, say, a sort algorithm is a building block in software. The general concept of an opamp is an **idea** you can build one out of discrete transistors, much like a sort algorithm (read an explanation and then write one in C). Why should you be allowed to patent all op amps: "I thought of opamps, so everybody who builds an op amp should pay me royalties" but not allowed to patent a specific sort algorithm: "I thought of qsort so everyone who writes/uses a qsort should pay me royalties?"?
Software copyright does not protect an algorithm, it only protects a body of code that implements it. The same applies to electronics too. If you have built a particular opamp in a chip then copyright protects that op amp lithography, or if you have built an opamp out of discretes, then Copyright protects the PCB layout.
Why is hardware really different? These days so much hardware is designed in a very similar way to how software is designed.... You get an idea, sit at a work station, pull up part specs etc and draw schematics. You then run suimulations -- pretty much like how you'd test code. Then once you have a design that appears to work, send it off for a trial build. No real stuff "hard stuff" involved so far.
Sure, when you get the hard stuff back, you have something tangible.
Here's the kicker though. If you get a patent, then you're protecting the **idea**, not a physical board. At the stage in the process when the ideas emerged (ie. design), there was no "hard stuff" involved. I don't really think that there is a case to treat sw and hw patents differently.
The biggest problem with software patents is that they are examined badly. Being able to spot really novel software is very difficult, but the same applies to, say, a hardware motor driver circuit.
And, for the record, I design both hardware and software.
Is Groovy a buzzword container class?
on
Groovy in Action
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· Score: 1
"Groovy is... agile dynamic web applications shell scripts test cases integration prototyping industrial strength applications"
ISPs (or phone companies) have ligitimate reasons to be concerned about what you run.
A misbehaving application can cause a computer to cause endless crap on a network and similarly a misbehaving application on a mobile phone can cause a lot of problems on a phone network. However, a misbehaving phone can be far more damaging than a misbehaving network device.
Many/most/.ers are engineers or like-wired people. You cannot be pessimistic and survive as an engineer or developer for very long. You have to be able to believe that the thing you are designing/developing can and will exist even though when you start out it likely does not exist. That is surely not pessimistic.
The flip side, however is that you can't just wish problems away or ignore them. Good engineers actively seek out the problems and figure out how to address them or work around them.
The trade press etc is full of all kinds of hype suggesting that there are silver bullets: "Use Product X and all your development problems will go away". The good engineer is no more fooled by this than the Good Housewife believes that Brand X detergent really gets your whites whiter than white!
Often the devil is in the details. A good engineer will know this.
Those of us who've been around a bit have seen a lot of activity from companies both large and small where the PR is better than reality (MS is an obvious candidate here, but almost all companies etc have a vested interest in what they are doing and telling us about). Is Bill Gates really a philanthropist or is he trying to buy karma?.
So, forgive me for restating your 3Ps in a more positive but meaningful terms:
Detailed (previously pissy): Ignore the details at your peril.
Cautious (previously pessimistic): Sure there are potential advantages, but look at the whole picture. Don't get sucked in without a healthy appraisal.
Skeptical (previously Paranoid): Why are they telling me this? What are they not telling me? What's their game plan?
Scientists sell too. They need funding to feed their families and buy machines than go beep. They need to use teaser language to get people interested in their work to get funding.
It is amazing how much navigation software does not handle the East/West rollover properly. Having international development/testing teams scattered over the whole globe sure helps.
If you're going to write software like this, then test it or simulate it at all the wierd places in the world: date line [East/West rollover], equator [north/south chnange], GMT+13 hours [NZ daylight saving time].
Parent is utterly correct. The people that buy MS products are not the customers, they are Microsoft assets.
What does Microsoft have? They have market share (ie. a customer base). They don't have particularly innovative or high quality software products/services and their revenues are largely independent of their offerings. They have you (*). They just have to keep finding ways to repackage you (*) to keep generating income. If MS didn't make Vista, they'd keep selling XP. However, it is very hard to keep dishing up left overs and still keep a straight face. Vista is a statement more than a product.
Wel from MS's perspective anyway. The main purpose of Vista is to generate huge piles of income and revitalising interest to keep MS "fresh" in the eyes of the investors.
It works pretty much like the Linux caching system has done since V2.0 or so. Pick up any book on Linux kernel internals and just skip over the newer stuff.
The whole idea of parliments is very outdated. It came about because communications were bad, so your village/town etc sent a representative to the parliment so that the issues of your region could be dealt with.
We no longer have those communications restrictions. With TV, www etc, you can find out everything you want to know about pretty much any issue immediately. So, why have representatives and parliments?
Instead of voting in representatives, why not just have an online referendum for every law change etc?
That would make a lot more sense than the current set up. Say you like Party A's education policy but Party B's health policy. Under the current mechanism you're stuffed: you have to pick one or the other and make a compromise. With individual voting on each issue you'd be able to vote for what you want on every issue. Surely that would be more democratic?
Education probably won't do much either. Who does not know that bullying is bad?
Why should schools be doing this? What is wrong with the parents?
Schools started off being there for education, then sport and now they're also day care -- a place to dump the kids so that the parents can go to work. Should they also be the moral guardians too? If this trend continues, the schools/government will own your kids and allow you to borrow them for a few hours on weekends.
There is nothing really magic about internet start ups vs any other start ups. Ultimately all businesses share some common traits. If you don't have a solid business plan, then you only have a dream. This is the same if you're in i-business, selling hardware or if you're a hooker.
To have a business, you need to understand cash flow (current & projected), customers, your product and how the hell you're going to get the product in front of the customer.
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Batteries are pretty dense and thus tend to have a lot of inertia relative to the rest of the guts of a device. If you drop an electronic device (or anything for that matter) onto a hard surface, it is in for a good few gs of acceleration. Sure, there are posts and reatining plastic etc, but these tend to be stronger in some angles than others.
Sometimes certain damage only happens within a certain "shock window". Eg. Drop from 2 ft and nothing breaks, the plastic retains everything; drop from 3ft and the two posts retaining the battery fail allowing the battery to strike the hard disk and get dented; drop from 6 ft and a different buch of posts fail causing the stress to be relieved in a different way and the battery does not strike the hard disk.
And, actually, lab engineers do routinely test for drop and vibration failure but that is more in the interests of seeing at what point a system fails rather than looking for safety issues a battery explosion.
You pay the tax up-front. You can hand the unit in to a recycling centre, they pay you some sort of refund (to say thanx for not dumping it, or -- like cans -- to promote dumpster diving homeless folk to bring them in) and they get paid to reprocess out of the rest of the tax.
Many patches are fed in through email lists etc where the maintainer (more likely to be a "named person") picks it up and pushes it upstream. I expect many volunteers will be in that group.
It has already been speculated by many that if Asia (well China in particular) gets its shit together it can wipe the world as a commodity agricultural producer (just like it has as a manufacturer). Water is a huge constraint to massive agricultural output. If they have a huge amount of water available, they're all go!
My argument is that there is no valid reason to treat one differently than the other.
At a functional-block level, an op-amp is a building block like, say, a sort algorithm is a building block in software. The general concept of an opamp is an **idea** you can build one out of discrete transistors, much like a sort algorithm (read an explanation and then write one in C). Why should you be allowed to patent all op amps: "I thought of opamps, so everybody who builds an op amp should pay me royalties" but not allowed to patent a specific sort algorithm: "I thought of qsort so everyone who writes/uses a qsort should pay me royalties?"?
Software copyright does not protect an algorithm, it only protects a body of code that implements it. The same applies to electronics too. If you have built a particular opamp in a chip then copyright protects that op amp lithography, or if you have built an opamp out of discretes, then Copyright protects the PCB layout.
Gas in, horsepower and transistors out!
Sure, when you get the hard stuff back, you have something tangible.
Here's the kicker though. If you get a patent, then you're protecting the **idea**, not a physical board. At the stage in the process when the ideas emerged (ie. design), there was no "hard stuff" involved. I don't really think that there is a case to treat sw and hw patents differently.
The biggest problem with software patents is that they are examined badly. Being able to spot really novel software is very difficult, but the same applies to, say, a hardware motor driver circuit.
And, for the record, I design both hardware and software.
Hmmm, I wonder if it could be useful for teaching robotics on Lejos http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ ?
A misbehaving application can cause a computer to cause endless crap on a network and similarly a misbehaving application on a mobile phone can cause a lot of problems on a phone network. However, a misbehaving phone can be far more damaging than a misbehaving network device.
I suggest that suing a Blogger for hosting a comment is a bit like suing New York City because it hosts the graffiti written on building walls.
The flip side, however is that you can't just wish problems away or ignore them. Good engineers actively seek out the problems and figure out how to address them or work around them.
The trade press etc is full of all kinds of hype suggesting that there are silver bullets: "Use Product X and all your development problems will go away". The good engineer is no more fooled by this than the Good Housewife believes that Brand X detergent really gets your whites whiter than white!
Often the devil is in the details. A good engineer will know this.
Those of us who've been around a bit have seen a lot of activity from companies both large and small where the PR is better than reality (MS is an obvious candidate here, but almost all companies etc have a vested interest in what they are doing and telling us about). Is Bill Gates really a philanthropist or is he trying to buy karma?.
So, forgive me for restating your 3Ps in a more positive but meaningful terms:
Detailed (previously pissy): Ignore the details at your peril.
Cautious (previously pessimistic): Sure there are potential advantages, but look at the whole picture. Don't get sucked in without a healthy appraisal.
Skeptical (previously Paranoid): Why are they telling me this? What are they not telling me? What's their game plan?
The big bag has come and gone. Why don't we study platform shoes and flare pants from the 60s!
Scientists sell too. They need funding to feed their families and buy machines than go beep. They need to use teaser language to get people interested in their work to get funding.
If you're going to write software like this, then test it or simulate it at all the wierd places in the world: date line [East/West rollover], equator [north/south chnange], GMT+13 hours [NZ daylight saving time].
He went from a technically superior person wiith use positive impact and a great standing in the OSS community to a cynical self-promoting has-been.
What does Microsoft have? They have market share (ie. a customer base). They don't have particularly innovative or high quality software products/services and their revenues are largely independent of their offerings. They have you (*). They just have to keep finding ways to repackage you (*) to keep generating income. If MS didn't make Vista, they'd keep selling XP. However, it is very hard to keep dishing up left overs and still keep a straight face. Vista is a statement more than a product.
Wel from MS's perspective anyway. The main purpose of Vista is to generate huge piles of income and revitalising interest to keep MS "fresh" in the eyes of the investors.
Well you have to be best at something.
It works pretty much like the Linux caching system has done since V2.0 or so. Pick up any book on Linux kernel internals and just skip over the newer stuff.
On /. it used to be that you didn't RTFA, but now I think that it is now time you didn't RTFSummary! Editing and summarising are just crap!
It did help the chick find a reasonably intelligent husband.
We no longer have those communications restrictions. With TV, www etc, you can find out everything you want to know about pretty much any issue immediately. So, why have representatives and parliments?
Instead of voting in representatives, why not just have an online referendum for every law change etc?
That would make a lot more sense than the current set up. Say you like Party A's education policy but Party B's health policy. Under the current mechanism you're stuffed: you have to pick one or the other and make a compromise. With individual voting on each issue you'd be able to vote for what you want on every issue. Surely that would be more democratic?
Why should schools be doing this? What is wrong with the parents?
Schools started off being there for education, then sport and now they're also day care -- a place to dump the kids so that the parents can go to work. Should they also be the moral guardians too? If this trend continues, the schools/government will own your kids and allow you to borrow them for a few hours on weekends.
To have a business, you need to understand cash flow (current & projected), customers, your product and how the hell you're going to get the product in front of the customer.