Now, if you're engineering software with an obviously mathematical bent, then yeah, there's a lot of mathematics involved. In general, however, the abstract/modern algebra courses I took where we redefine "number system" to be any arbitrary collection of elements related by extraordinarily generic "arithmetic operators" isn't going to help you produce a better payroll application. I'm quite certain that the "HELL OF A LOT OF MATH" you're talking about doesn't very often require using roots of unity or designing new and never-before-seen graph algorithms. Sure, sure, I readily admit that in particular fields relating to those subjects, they'll be used, but I strongly doubt that much lambda calculus went into desiging Microsoft's Outlook.
Unless you're doing highly specialized development, a masters won't be worth the time or money.
Could have sworn I said I was working on a Master's in computation. I'd be surprised if more than 20% of Slashdot's readership really knows what that field actually is.
I would advise you that a 4 year degree in "computer science" is basically worthless by itself. It is a vital step toward a graduate degree in "computer science", however.
If you want to do 4 years of school and start a career, I strongly advise you to focus on software engineering. Take as little mathematics as possible and focus on business and more software engineering.
I was a mathematics & computer science double major in my undergrad years and I was all but unemployable with my BS degrees. To work in software development, you need to show experience working in... software development, go figure. I had academic experience working in computation, graph theory, programming language concepts, algorithm analysis, and all sorts of mathematics that were pretty exotic at the undergrad level in CS. That's all fantastic, but what the hell type of job did that qualify me for? Basically nothing.
It did virtually assure me a seat in graduate school, where I was working toward a graduate degree in computation. I dropped out of graduate school for a career that met all my "reasonably ideal" criteria for post-undergrad school, though, so my Master's remains unfinished to date.
Anyway, I advise that you do NOT focus in "computer science", but rather in software development. It is INCREDIBLY more employable with a 4 year degree.
I've seen a ton of incompetent males in IT, and somehow that's not perpetuating any stereotype. There's probably more incompetent IT males than there are IT females, even.
The BOFH is male. The prototypical PHB is male (if Dilbert is a reference of any authority). When people talk about clueless management, I'm thinking about men. When people talk about clueless Microsoft certified fools, I'm thinking about men. (Someone chime in with a funny joke about thinking about men.)
I think there are fewer incompetent women in IT, though, because the incompetent women have a greater incentive to change fields. The women I have worked with in IT were all intelligent and excellent employees.
Although I did tutor a student in a freshman level CS course and she used no fewer than 24 nested for loops (at various levels of nesting) to achieve what I wrote with 3 for loops and 2 additional classes. I refused to help her debug her code but she did finally get it running.
Anyway, I'm not even sure there is a stereotypical CS woman, unless that stereotype is of someone who succeeds despite being doubted. I think the problem is the opinion of women in general held by the stereotypical men in CS, but these are also full grown men who froth at the mouth when arguing about Dungeons & Dragons, so you have to keep it all in context.
If you want to better patents, make people supply a working model. I'm quite sure alot of patents would not be granted or would be shown to to prior art.
True, but the USPTO takes in about 350,000 applications per year and runs the largest federal mail room, second only to (drumroll please) the US Postal System.
It's just impractical, but it would have its advantages. A lot of time is spent examining "magic" inventions and dealing with the lawyers for said magic inventions. The examiners don't want to deal with them, but the lawyers demand every last detail examined else the application will end up in appeals.
So if you have office space for 350,000 models of various size per year, let the USPTO know.
Just FYI, the first two digits of a patent number are known as "series". They are mostly, but not strictly sequential.
For example, there are patents in the "09" and "10" series, but I don't believe there are any "08" series. I could be wrong about that, but I've never seen an "08" series in my technology.
Also, it should be observed that there weren't any television patents before 1940, there weren't any cable tv patents before 1950, and there weren't any flat panel tv patents before 1990. There are simply a lot more different technologies to patent these days.
I too am interested in exactly when this was true. I spent 9 months working in the PC Repair service shop industry and must have worked on 300 different Dell machines ranging from Pentium through Pentium 4. I saw a couple Dells with odd brackets attached to a standard power supply, but those could be unscrewed and reattached to a new, standard power supply.
I've heard of these non-standard power supply pinouts from Dell often enough that I don't doubt it's true, but I am curious when and for how long they were doing it. In my experience, it certainly is not a widespread problem.
By this logic you are a proponent of the idea that OSS is bad for software ISVs because commercial applications constantly get undercut or made expensive by free OSS apps which creates unemployment - as OSS software destroys their market, commercial software vendors got nothing to do and are forced go out of business.
If by "logic" you mean "magical reasoning", sure. The rather clear difference is that OSS software does not exist because of flaws in closed source, proprietary software nor would OSS be run out of business should closed source, proprietary software improve their product.
Why would anyone go in such trouble for an 8% increase in sales
Yes, indeed. Why would anyone go through such trouble (ie, continue their shoddy practices rather than invest time and money into fixing them) in order to spawn a well developed spin-off industry of successful products, marketing, and experts, all of which exist at the mercy of the first producer. And all for just 8% increase in sales?
Think, think, think. The only things I can come up with are 1) it is very easy, 2) there's no way they can get stuck for abusing monopoly powers on this one, and 3) it's a freaking 8% increase in sales. I really don't know what type of background you have related to running a business, but if you can get 13 months of profit out of a 12 month year, you sure as shit shoot for that goal.
If there's anything to sweat about, I'm sure they'd choose to sweat over making OS more secure and then focusing on more productive tasks.
I totally agree, but think about how they're going to do that. Do you hire an army of college recruits to repeat the work of the AV industry, or should you wait until they have a handle on things and pull the rug out from underneath? Of course, time will tell, but I'm pretty sure we'll see a large migration of AV security experts being headhunted by Microsoft over the next 10 years, and as Microsoft (hopefully, oh so hopefully) produces more secure products, the AV industry will dry up. Just my off-the-cuff prediction, but it'll be significantly harder to find consumer-market AV products in ten years.
Yeah good point! Gosh I was silly to think that Microsoft would engage in dubious business practices! Golly, it's completely shocking to think that Microsoft stands more profit more from the A/V business than from fixing its own security problems.
Hmm.. let's think about that. Let the flaws continue and create an industry that doesn't compete with core Microsoft business. When that industry is rolling in cash, point out that Microsoft has them by the balls. If they fixed the flaws, those businesses would tank. Looks like a prime scenario for Microsoft to take over, keep on a leash, make a bitch out of, or whatever you like regarding the A/V corporations. Hell, it's practically a corporate takeover without buying a single share.
How could this go any better for Microsoft? If they muscle the A/V companies into submission/eventual purchase, how can those companies complain? Surely fixing the flaws in their own products is not an abuse of monopoly powers.
Even if Microsoft doesn't end up holding the keys to the A/V companies, those companies are spawning grounds for experienced workers that Microsoft can headhunt. Farfetched, right? Yeah good point, Microsoft will take the brightest and most experienced workers from the OTHER antivirus industry.. the uh, the TI-85 antivirus industry.
Quit thinking that you're so damned special for a second. The A/V and popup industries are literally pimping themselves out for Microsoft's ultimate profit. They're sweating to produce the experts; they're producing the profits that REQUIRE that Microsoft doesn't tighten up their software.
If something rattles when you shake your head, you got a couple of brain cells and you can probably recognize that it is far more advantageous for Microsoft to continue to ship shoddy software until they feel like absorbing/tackling/obliterating the A/V popup industry.
This is quite true and it is more than just games.
If you want the latest greatest software (typically games) that uses a variety of obscure USB hardware (MIDI and Digital Audio software, in my case) you want a Windows machine. This isn't insightful or informative, it's just an observation that drivers are and software are professionally developed for Windows en masse.
That said, one of my three, soon to be four machines runs Windows, but it's true that Windows has its place in my home computing equipment.
So I must agree! Windows is NOT completely useless!
When it stops forcing a refresh to fix the sidebar then I will believe Firefox is "acceptable".
So uh, what exactly would it take before IE is "acceptable"?
I'll kick things off. When the industry whose livelihood depends on charging Microsoft's customers money to fix the numerous design flaws in IE collapses and ceases to exist, then IE will be "acceptable". (Pop up blockers, spyware removal tools, and the ilk.)
Bet me ANYTHING that IE will be "acceptable" before Firefox is "acceptable".
And I was once told, "I saw the program you wrote. It's really just a bunch of typing. Anybody could do that."
And there is a kernel of truth to it. Anybody can code badly.
So I turned my education into CS - Computation and Algorithms. Not very employable, but I was on the fast track to a Master's degree without writing a line of code. (Graduate school was worse than working in a factory for $5 an hour, in my opinion, so I left for a nice job working in simulation, emulation, and computability. My win.)
But back on track - anybody can turn a screwdriver. It doesn't mean Mick the Mechanic can design a race car engine. Any dumbass can write code. It doesn't mean Hank the HTML Wizard is improving the lower bound on matrix multiplication.
Learn the distinction between doing it and being gifted.
It stifles innovation because any "innovation" a normal person or company comes up with is quite likely to have been thought of by somebody else previously.
So just to be clear, you are saying that you disagree with the decision to include patents in the Constitution of the United States. That's a fair stance to take, however I feel one that is terribly difficult to defend.
Command economies of Communist nations tend to fail catastrophically because there is no incentive for any given worker to excel; each factory receives a quota and a budget. If you reach the quota, you get a positive review. If you come up with a plan that saves money or produces more efficiently, then your budget shrinks and your quota grows. Not surprisingly, the Soviet economy did precious little innovating and the notion of "continuous improvement" would have been unthinkable.
In quite an analogous way, without patents, the "normal person or company" has little incentive to invent or market anything themselves. Larger companies, with comparably limitless capital, can simply market an identical product leveraged by their brand name recognition, and the "little guy" is immediately muscled out of the market that HE created via invention. Not surprisingly, the little companies won't bother bringing new products to market and will instead try to produce cheaper imitations of well known products. This is far from the utopian "innovation friendly" worldview I hear about so often from the people who dislike patents. To be perfectly honest and not the least bit facetious, I find it difficult to separate a disdain for patents from a fondness for command economies - truly the patent system was intended as a protection against an authoritarian economic system, the very type embraced by the (once) Soviets and (previously by the) Chinese.
Patents are indeed intended as fair legal protection regardless of whether you are an individual or a large corporation. That is a fundamentally "innovation friendly" concept. Disparity only enters into the situation when patent attorneys start playing ball and running up legal fees. That's not a problem created by the USPTO, of course, but rather by the judicial system.
That doesn't mean they didn't think of the idea themselves.
True, but "thinking of the idea themselves" doesn't mean they are entitled to a patent. When I was in pre-Calc class I realized that it was possible to take a derivative in reverse - that doesn't mean I invented integration or that text books ought to cite me as "Father of Integration". (I just noticed the title of this thread, and will comment that) Patents are indeed licenses; they are licenses to sue people who infringe on what you have invented. If you did not invent it, you do not get a license to sue people. It is that simple.
In practice it's impossible to find out whether somebody else had the same idea previously, and most likely not by searching millions of pages of legalese from a patent database.
But there are numerous ways to deal with this. Patent searches can be hired. "Searching millions of pages from the patent database" is hyperbole at its finest. Patent examiners perform this very function day in and day out without any superhuman powers. The patent examining process is a dialogue between the examiner and the applicant through which the applicant can revise his claims so that they are patentable.
Patents were intended to promote innovation. Unfortunately, they are more and more frequently being used to stifle innovation instead.
I really wish people would actually think about the meanings of these words before spouting them like they're legitimate words of wisdom.
Patents, by design, stifle competition. They are supposed to stifle competition. Look it up in the Constitution of the US.
If somebody has a patent for a software concept, that means that they've apparently already made that "innovation". If other people are doing something that predates that patent, they can take that patent to court and challenge the validity. If they are doing the same thing but the patent predates their operation, it is a classic case of the patent system working as intended by those dumb idiots who wrote the Constitution. Well, you know what I mean.
The issue of submarine patents was rather remarkably resolved by the Patent Cooperation Treaty. If you file a patent application, it will be publicly published within 18 months.
A patent only protects what the applicant can prove he has invented. ("Overly broad", though popular among Slashdot critics, is not a concept found in 35 U.S.C. or 37 CFR, the laws and rules governing the patent granting process, respectively.)
So seriously, how in hell can you "stifle innovation" with a patent? If it's a bad patent, then the "stifled" party can take it to court and prove so. If it's not a bad patent, then the "stifled" innovation is validly covered by the existing patent and the patent system worked as intended.
Anyhow, patents stifle innovation, Slashdot stifles intelligence, blowing hard stifles insight, we all pay taxes and die.
Ah, but now you're infringing on the fabled "Everybody is really quite special" clause in the, um, Bill of Rights or something, which guarantees that each individual (and his or her or its speech) gets preferential treatment. You know what I'm talking about. "Sure, everybody knows that nobody gives a rat's ass about morons, but when I'm the one being a moron, then I'm exercising my Right to Free Speech and the whole world must listen!"
It's really only a hop, skip, and a jump to a socialist utopia once we get a functional implementation of the "Everybody is really quite special" clause. And then, brother, all your problems will vanish and it will be nothing be food and drink for the rest of your days.
That or the grandparent post's sig is full of crap. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Oh yeah, I remember playing a castle adventure game on my friend's dad's 286 with ASCII characters for all the monsters, stairs, keys, etc. Couldn't tell you the name, though.
I remember playing Othello on the Vic-20 when I was like 4. I didn't really understand the strategy but I knew you had to have the most pieces to win and I sure tried to win. I also had one of these hot numbers, but it never wrote the data to the casette tape properly so I couldn't actually save & load anything. The good old dependable Vic-20 casette drive never gave me such problems.
I had a Sega Master System which was by FAR the coolest of the early consoles. It had LCD shutter 3D glasses, a flight simulator that required both controllers to operate, the first Phantasy Star game with quasi-3D dungeon crawls, and in general more innovative games. I was the only kid in my whole town who had a Sega instead of a Nintendo.
I didn't actually get a PC myself until I was 12. The family blew $2G on a Gateway 486SX25MHz with 4 megs of ram, no sound, no CD drive, no graphics acceleration, no modem, no network, but TWO floppy drives and a dot matrix printer. I satisfied myself with shareware on floppy disks that I was picking up in a Pigeon Forge, TN used bookstore. That's where I first found DooM, Wizardry, and a number of other rad games.
First game? Are you old enough to drive? I was born in 1980 and my first computer game was on a Vic-20. DooM as the Model-T of PC gaming? Are you watching Nickelodeon as you type? Over Christmas my much younger brother asked me what "Atari" was and couldn't believe that there were video games before the Playstation. Maybe you two could hang out.
Yeah, glasses protect you alright. They protect you from being bitten in the face by rabid squirrels (happens all the time to me since I got contacts) and also from nasty cooties that spawn within girls.
Suppose you buy an ink pen, and using that ink pen as it was intended will get ink all over your clothes every single time you use it. Buy a replacement pen - ink all over your clothes. Get the upgraded version of the pen - ink all over your clothes.
Now, if that ink pen cost you $100-$250 and it wasn't usable as an ink pen, I trust you would want your money back.
That's not a big stretch from where we stand with Microsoft Windows. The Internet Explorer internet browser is integrated into the operating system in such a way that we must conclude that using the internet is one of the primary functions of their operating system. What happens if you put a fresh installation of Windows XP on the internet? Anyone? You get a virus and the box WILL become inoperative.
Microsoft sells a defective operating system. There are no two ways about it. The whole "Pop-up blocker" industry exists to fix a flaw in Microsoft's product. There is no analogous industry -ANYWHERE-. Sure, there are mechanics, but there is no "Lemon Automobile Repair" industry. There are lots of service repair industries, but there are no other industries that fix the fundamental flaws of someone else's product.
Suppose Boeing 747s simply didn't fly and it took a 3rd party to make them functional airplanes. Suppose Sony TVs didn't display viewable pictures and it took a 3rd party to fix every last single unit that came off the Sony production line. Imagine if Dockers pants -always- fell off and you had to -always- take your pants to another company in order to get a zipper and button installed.
In all those cases, the company producing the inoperative product would go out of business - but Microsoft hasn't. Either they are extremely shrewd or there is clear evidence that they have somehow circumvented the open market economy.
Bottom line: If any other company in any other industry tried to pull off what Microsoft does as standard operating procedure, they would be regulated to hell and back. They only get away with it because few white-haired politicians really understand computer software in terms of a standard sector of industry.
Re:Regarding conciousness
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Lysergically Yours
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Just have a few moments to drop a note.
I had a rather peculiar home life and developed into an extremely self concious, introverted, self loathing kid. My mother was chronically depressed, my dad worked enough so that I only saw him on weekends, I found out later that my siblings and I were intentionally kept seperated from our extended family because of emotional rifts between my (Ma & Pa) and their siblings. I had an incredibly difficult time interacting with my peers, was gifted (enough to eventually score 2200 on the GREs without studying) but on the fast road to flunking out of high school.
And then after some experimental tries, I dosed on 7.5 hits of gel tab and sat around a playground at 1am. I climbed up the slide, sat on the top, and intended to slide down it. As I sat at the top, I looked up at the stars and was immediately struck by the oddness of my situation. I was legally insane, sitting on a slide on a cloudless moonlit night, and staring straight up at the stars.
And then I was hit with the question: "What am I like?" It just kept going through my head over and over until the syllables didn't even sound like English. The phrase was just some gibberish that inquired about the most fundamental core of my whole identity. "What am I like?"
Then I felt like the star above me was perfectly in line with my spine, that the universe was locked onto me and turning around me. (This has always been my way of relating to Achilleus - the one Man in history with the audacity, confidence, blackened heart, and glory to defy the gods. This is mostly tangential, hence the parenthesis, but at the time Achilleus was my most idolized literay figure and therefore this had great coincidential significance.)
I sat like this for probably 15 minutes. "What am I like?" Fuck it, at my core, I am everybody else.
I did not slide down that slide. While I was up there, the act of sliding down really took on a monumental significance to me, but I can't really define it. I climbed back down the ladder.
Ever since that night, I've felt like I'm just as valuable a person as anyone else. I assert myself, I speak up, I feel like I'm worthy of being liked.
As another poster described, it is incredibly difficult to relate your LSD experiences to someone who hasn't taken them, but that was my two cents. LSD can be some dangerous shit, but rightly or wrongly, I feel like I got 15 years of therapy in 15 minutes.
Calm down, man. The whole British vs. American language thing is the result of the English having a national identity that has as its foundation the fact that the had, and then lost a global empire.
Seriously, who gives a rat's ass how we Americans spell? The greater issue is that the British national identity has a terrible time coming to grips with the fact that it IS a tiny little island that few foreign people actually need - not a special condition, for it applies to almost every nation in the world. That's the problem, though, because 200 years ago, that island was the most powerful nation on the planet. They lost that empire, they lost a glorious identity with that, and now they're so low as to throw temper tantrums over a former colonist's spelling.
But For however long it takes people like me will continue to try to better your world for you until you wake up and realize there is nothing great about this country.
Oh kill me now. I've heard more enlightened things from fifth graders. Your momma thinks you're really special and soooo clever, but to convince the rest of us, you'll actually have to BE special and clever.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, sure it is. (I'm rolling my eyes.)
Now, if you're engineering software with an obviously mathematical bent, then yeah, there's a lot of mathematics involved. In general, however, the abstract/modern algebra courses I took where we redefine "number system" to be any arbitrary collection of elements related by extraordinarily generic "arithmetic operators" isn't going to help you produce a better payroll application. I'm quite certain that the "HELL OF A LOT OF MATH" you're talking about doesn't very often require using roots of unity or designing new and never-before-seen graph algorithms. Sure, sure, I readily admit that in particular fields relating to those subjects, they'll be used, but I strongly doubt that much lambda calculus went into desiging Microsoft's Outlook.
Unless you're doing highly specialized development, a masters won't be worth the time or money.
Could have sworn I said I was working on a Master's in computation. I'd be surprised if more than 20% of Slashdot's readership really knows what that field actually is.
If you want to do 4 years of school and start a career, I strongly advise you to focus on software engineering. Take as little mathematics as possible and focus on business and more software engineering.
I was a mathematics & computer science double major in my undergrad years and I was all but unemployable with my BS degrees. To work in software development, you need to show experience working in... software development, go figure. I had academic experience working in computation, graph theory, programming language concepts, algorithm analysis, and all sorts of mathematics that were pretty exotic at the undergrad level in CS. That's all fantastic, but what the hell type of job did that qualify me for? Basically nothing.
It did virtually assure me a seat in graduate school, where I was working toward a graduate degree in computation. I dropped out of graduate school for a career that met all my "reasonably ideal" criteria for post-undergrad school, though, so my Master's remains unfinished to date.
Anyway, I advise that you do NOT focus in "computer science", but rather in software development. It is INCREDIBLY more employable with a 4 year degree.
The BOFH is male. The prototypical PHB is male (if Dilbert is a reference of any authority). When people talk about clueless management, I'm thinking about men. When people talk about clueless Microsoft certified fools, I'm thinking about men. (Someone chime in with a funny joke about thinking about men.)
I think there are fewer incompetent women in IT, though, because the incompetent women have a greater incentive to change fields. The women I have worked with in IT were all intelligent and excellent employees.
Although I did tutor a student in a freshman level CS course and she used no fewer than 24 nested for loops (at various levels of nesting) to achieve what I wrote with 3 for loops and 2 additional classes. I refused to help her debug her code but she did finally get it running.
Anyway, I'm not even sure there is a stereotypical CS woman, unless that stereotype is of someone who succeeds despite being doubted. I think the problem is the opinion of women in general held by the stereotypical men in CS, but these are also full grown men who froth at the mouth when arguing about Dungeons & Dragons, so you have to keep it all in context.
True, but the USPTO takes in about 350,000 applications per year and runs the largest federal mail room, second only to (drumroll please) the US Postal System.
It's just impractical, but it would have its advantages. A lot of time is spent examining "magic" inventions and dealing with the lawyers for said magic inventions. The examiners don't want to deal with them, but the lawyers demand every last detail examined else the application will end up in appeals.
So if you have office space for 350,000 models of various size per year, let the USPTO know.
For example, there are patents in the "09" and "10" series, but I don't believe there are any "08" series. I could be wrong about that, but I've never seen an "08" series in my technology.
Also, it should be observed that there weren't any television patents before 1940, there weren't any cable tv patents before 1950, and there weren't any flat panel tv patents before 1990. There are simply a lot more different technologies to patent these days.
I've heard of these non-standard power supply pinouts from Dell often enough that I don't doubt it's true, but I am curious when and for how long they were doing it. In my experience, it certainly is not a widespread problem.
If by "logic" you mean "magical reasoning", sure. The rather clear difference is that OSS software does not exist because of flaws in closed source, proprietary software nor would OSS be run out of business should closed source, proprietary software improve their product.
Why would anyone go in such trouble for an 8% increase in sales
Yes, indeed. Why would anyone go through such trouble (ie, continue their shoddy practices rather than invest time and money into fixing them) in order to spawn a well developed spin-off industry of successful products, marketing, and experts, all of which exist at the mercy of the first producer. And all for just 8% increase in sales?
Think, think, think. The only things I can come up with are 1) it is very easy, 2) there's no way they can get stuck for abusing monopoly powers on this one, and 3) it's a freaking 8% increase in sales. I really don't know what type of background you have related to running a business, but if you can get 13 months of profit out of a 12 month year, you sure as shit shoot for that goal.
If there's anything to sweat about, I'm sure they'd choose to sweat over making OS more secure and then focusing on more productive tasks.
I totally agree, but think about how they're going to do that. Do you hire an army of college recruits to repeat the work of the AV industry, or should you wait until they have a handle on things and pull the rug out from underneath? Of course, time will tell, but I'm pretty sure we'll see a large migration of AV security experts being headhunted by Microsoft over the next 10 years, and as Microsoft (hopefully, oh so hopefully) produces more secure products, the AV industry will dry up. Just my off-the-cuff prediction, but it'll be significantly harder to find consumer-market AV products in ten years.
Hmm.. let's think about that. Let the flaws continue and create an industry that doesn't compete with core Microsoft business. When that industry is rolling in cash, point out that Microsoft has them by the balls. If they fixed the flaws, those businesses would tank. Looks like a prime scenario for Microsoft to take over, keep on a leash, make a bitch out of, or whatever you like regarding the A/V corporations. Hell, it's practically a corporate takeover without buying a single share.
How could this go any better for Microsoft? If they muscle the A/V companies into submission/eventual purchase, how can those companies complain? Surely fixing the flaws in their own products is not an abuse of monopoly powers.
Even if Microsoft doesn't end up holding the keys to the A/V companies, those companies are spawning grounds for experienced workers that Microsoft can headhunt. Farfetched, right? Yeah good point, Microsoft will take the brightest and most experienced workers from the OTHER antivirus industry.. the uh, the TI-85 antivirus industry.
Quit thinking that you're so damned special for a second. The A/V and popup industries are literally pimping themselves out for Microsoft's ultimate profit. They're sweating to produce the experts; they're producing the profits that REQUIRE that Microsoft doesn't tighten up their software.
If something rattles when you shake your head, you got a couple of brain cells and you can probably recognize that it is far more advantageous for Microsoft to continue to ship shoddy software until they feel like absorbing/tackling/obliterating the A/V popup industry.
But hey, I'm sure you have your own opinion.
Insecure software creates a whole economy for crutch-software. If software were secure, entire corporations would go bankrupt.
If you want the latest greatest software (typically games) that uses a variety of obscure USB hardware (MIDI and Digital Audio software, in my case) you want a Windows machine. This isn't insightful or informative, it's just an observation that drivers are and software are professionally developed for Windows en masse.
That said, one of my three, soon to be four machines runs Windows, but it's true that Windows has its place in my home computing equipment.
So I must agree! Windows is NOT completely useless!
So uh, what exactly would it take before IE is "acceptable"?
I'll kick things off. When the industry whose livelihood depends on charging Microsoft's customers money to fix the numerous design flaws in IE collapses and ceases to exist, then IE will be "acceptable". (Pop up blockers, spyware removal tools, and the ilk.)
Bet me ANYTHING that IE will be "acceptable" before Firefox is "acceptable".
Words of wisdom for very nearly everyone named Miguel.
And there is a kernel of truth to it. Anybody can code badly.
So I turned my education into CS - Computation and Algorithms. Not very employable, but I was on the fast track to a Master's degree without writing a line of code. (Graduate school was worse than working in a factory for $5 an hour, in my opinion, so I left for a nice job working in simulation, emulation, and computability. My win.)
But back on track - anybody can turn a screwdriver. It doesn't mean Mick the Mechanic can design a race car engine. Any dumbass can write code. It doesn't mean Hank the HTML Wizard is improving the lower bound on matrix multiplication.
Learn the distinction between doing it and being gifted.
So just to be clear, you are saying that you disagree with the decision to include patents in the Constitution of the United States. That's a fair stance to take, however I feel one that is terribly difficult to defend.
Command economies of Communist nations tend to fail catastrophically because there is no incentive for any given worker to excel; each factory receives a quota and a budget. If you reach the quota, you get a positive review. If you come up with a plan that saves money or produces more efficiently, then your budget shrinks and your quota grows. Not surprisingly, the Soviet economy did precious little innovating and the notion of "continuous improvement" would have been unthinkable.
In quite an analogous way, without patents, the "normal person or company" has little incentive to invent or market anything themselves. Larger companies, with comparably limitless capital, can simply market an identical product leveraged by their brand name recognition, and the "little guy" is immediately muscled out of the market that HE created via invention. Not surprisingly, the little companies won't bother bringing new products to market and will instead try to produce cheaper imitations of well known products. This is far from the utopian "innovation friendly" worldview I hear about so often from the people who dislike patents. To be perfectly honest and not the least bit facetious, I find it difficult to separate a disdain for patents from a fondness for command economies - truly the patent system was intended as a protection against an authoritarian economic system, the very type embraced by the (once) Soviets and (previously by the) Chinese.
Patents are indeed intended as fair legal protection regardless of whether you are an individual or a large corporation. That is a fundamentally "innovation friendly" concept. Disparity only enters into the situation when patent attorneys start playing ball and running up legal fees. That's not a problem created by the USPTO, of course, but rather by the judicial system.
That doesn't mean they didn't think of the idea themselves.
True, but "thinking of the idea themselves" doesn't mean they are entitled to a patent. When I was in pre-Calc class I realized that it was possible to take a derivative in reverse - that doesn't mean I invented integration or that text books ought to cite me as "Father of Integration". (I just noticed the title of this thread, and will comment that) Patents are indeed licenses; they are licenses to sue people who infringe on what you have invented. If you did not invent it, you do not get a license to sue people. It is that simple.
In practice it's impossible to find out whether somebody else had the same idea previously, and most likely not by searching millions of pages of legalese from a patent database.
But there are numerous ways to deal with this. Patent searches can be hired. "Searching millions of pages from the patent database" is hyperbole at its finest. Patent examiners perform this very function day in and day out without any superhuman powers. The patent examining process is a dialogue between the examiner and the applicant through which the applicant can revise his claims so that they are patentable.
I really wish people would actually think about the meanings of these words before spouting them like they're legitimate words of wisdom.
Patents, by design, stifle competition. They are supposed to stifle competition. Look it up in the Constitution of the US.
If somebody has a patent for a software concept, that means that they've apparently already made that "innovation". If other people are doing something that predates that patent, they can take that patent to court and challenge the validity. If they are doing the same thing but the patent predates their operation, it is a classic case of the patent system working as intended by those dumb idiots who wrote the Constitution. Well, you know what I mean.
The issue of submarine patents was rather remarkably resolved by the Patent Cooperation Treaty. If you file a patent application, it will be publicly published within 18 months.
A patent only protects what the applicant can prove he has invented. ("Overly broad", though popular among Slashdot critics, is not a concept found in 35 U.S.C. or 37 CFR, the laws and rules governing the patent granting process, respectively.)
So seriously, how in hell can you "stifle innovation" with a patent? If it's a bad patent, then the "stifled" party can take it to court and prove so. If it's not a bad patent, then the "stifled" innovation is validly covered by the existing patent and the patent system worked as intended.
Anyhow, patents stifle innovation, Slashdot stifles intelligence, blowing hard stifles insight, we all pay taxes and die.
It's really only a hop, skip, and a jump to a socialist utopia once we get a functional implementation of the "Everybody is really quite special" clause. And then, brother, all your problems will vanish and it will be nothing be food and drink for the rest of your days.
That or the grandparent post's sig is full of crap. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
I remember playing Othello on the Vic-20 when I was like 4. I didn't really understand the strategy but I knew you had to have the most pieces to win and I sure tried to win. I also had one of these hot numbers, but it never wrote the data to the casette tape properly so I couldn't actually save & load anything. The good old dependable Vic-20 casette drive never gave me such problems.
I had a Sega Master System which was by FAR the coolest of the early consoles. It had LCD shutter 3D glasses, a flight simulator that required both controllers to operate, the first Phantasy Star game with quasi-3D dungeon crawls, and in general more innovative games. I was the only kid in my whole town who had a Sega instead of a Nintendo.
I didn't actually get a PC myself until I was 12. The family blew $2G on a Gateway 486SX25MHz with 4 megs of ram, no sound, no CD drive, no graphics acceleration, no modem, no network, but TWO floppy drives and a dot matrix printer. I satisfied myself with shareware on floppy disks that I was picking up in a Pigeon Forge, TN used bookstore. That's where I first found DooM, Wizardry, and a number of other rad games.
First game? Are you old enough to drive? I was born in 1980 and my first computer game was on a Vic-20. DooM as the Model-T of PC gaming? Are you watching Nickelodeon as you type? Over Christmas my much younger brother asked me what "Atari" was and couldn't believe that there were video games before the Playstation. Maybe you two could hang out.
Words of wisdom, man.
DUR DUH DUR DUR, THAT'S WHAT A PATENT IS.
Oh, +1 Insightful from me, why the fuck not?
Suppose you buy an ink pen, and using that ink pen as it was intended will get ink all over your clothes every single time you use it. Buy a replacement pen - ink all over your clothes. Get the upgraded version of the pen - ink all over your clothes.
Now, if that ink pen cost you $100-$250 and it wasn't usable as an ink pen, I trust you would want your money back.
That's not a big stretch from where we stand with Microsoft Windows. The Internet Explorer internet browser is integrated into the operating system in such a way that we must conclude that using the internet is one of the primary functions of their operating system. What happens if you put a fresh installation of Windows XP on the internet? Anyone? You get a virus and the box WILL become inoperative.
Microsoft sells a defective operating system. There are no two ways about it. The whole "Pop-up blocker" industry exists to fix a flaw in Microsoft's product. There is no analogous industry -ANYWHERE-. Sure, there are mechanics, but there is no "Lemon Automobile Repair" industry. There are lots of service repair industries, but there are no other industries that fix the fundamental flaws of someone else's product.
Suppose Boeing 747s simply didn't fly and it took a 3rd party to make them functional airplanes. Suppose Sony TVs didn't display viewable pictures and it took a 3rd party to fix every last single unit that came off the Sony production line. Imagine if Dockers pants -always- fell off and you had to -always- take your pants to another company in order to get a zipper and button installed.
In all those cases, the company producing the inoperative product would go out of business - but Microsoft hasn't. Either they are extremely shrewd or there is clear evidence that they have somehow circumvented the open market economy.
Bottom line:
If any other company in any other industry tried to pull off what Microsoft does as standard operating procedure, they would be regulated to hell and back. They only get away with it because few white-haired politicians really understand computer software in terms of a standard sector of industry.
I had a rather peculiar home life and developed into an extremely self concious, introverted, self loathing kid. My mother was chronically depressed, my dad worked enough so that I only saw him on weekends, I found out later that my siblings and I were intentionally kept seperated from our extended family because of emotional rifts between my (Ma & Pa) and their siblings. I had an incredibly difficult time interacting with my peers, was gifted (enough to eventually score 2200 on the GREs without studying) but on the fast road to flunking out of high school.
And then after some experimental tries, I dosed on 7.5 hits of gel tab and sat around a playground at 1am. I climbed up the slide, sat on the top, and intended to slide down it. As I sat at the top, I looked up at the stars and was immediately struck by the oddness of my situation. I was legally insane, sitting on a slide on a cloudless moonlit night, and staring straight up at the stars.
And then I was hit with the question: "What am I like?" It just kept going through my head over and over until the syllables didn't even sound like English. The phrase was just some gibberish that inquired about the most fundamental core of my whole identity. "What am I like?"
Then I felt like the star above me was perfectly in line with my spine, that the universe was locked onto me and turning around me. (This has always been my way of relating to Achilleus - the one Man in history with the audacity, confidence, blackened heart, and glory to defy the gods. This is mostly tangential, hence the parenthesis, but at the time Achilleus was my most idolized literay figure and therefore this had great coincidential significance.)
I sat like this for probably 15 minutes. "What am I like?" Fuck it, at my core, I am everybody else.
I did not slide down that slide. While I was up there, the act of sliding down really took on a monumental significance to me, but I can't really define it. I climbed back down the ladder.
Ever since that night, I've felt like I'm just as valuable a person as anyone else. I assert myself, I speak up, I feel like I'm worthy of being liked.
As another poster described, it is incredibly difficult to relate your LSD experiences to someone who hasn't taken them, but that was my two cents. LSD can be some dangerous shit, but rightly or wrongly, I feel like I got 15 years of therapy in 15 minutes.
Remember when that post would have been funny?
Seriously, who gives a rat's ass how we Americans spell? The greater issue is that the British national identity has a terrible time coming to grips with the fact that it IS a tiny little island that few foreign people actually need - not a special condition, for it applies to almost every nation in the world. That's the problem, though, because 200 years ago, that island was the most powerful nation on the planet. They lost that empire, they lost a glorious identity with that, and now they're so low as to throw temper tantrums over a former colonist's spelling .
Oh kill me now. I've heard more enlightened things from fifth graders. Your momma thinks you're really special and soooo clever, but to convince the rest of us, you'll actually have to BE special and clever.