As I said, check the history. Watt got a number of extensions beyond the standard period, using much the same logic that Disney uses to get copyright extensions (although in Watt's case they only applied to him, not to everyone).
I'm pretty sure Google is not on the list anymore, and opinion is split on Valve (they use DRM, but some people seem to like it because it hasn't bitten them personally yet). Nintendo might still be there. They've done some evil things, but they're not sufficiently influential for it to matter to anyone except their customers.
If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.
Or we'll actually see some innovation. I have an Android phone, and the UI sucks. From playing with an iPhone, it seems most of the bad ideas were ones copied from iOS. I played very briefly with a Windows phone and it was at least different, although I didn't use it for long enough to tell if it was actually better. It was owned by someone leaving MSR, who was looking forward to replacing it, so he apparently didn't think so, but if enough people are trying new ideas then eventually one will end up with something better. My favourite tablet UI so far has been WebOS, but it was mismanaged into oblivion. I don't know how well it scaled down to a phone, because the lack of decent SIP support is a deal breaker for me in a mobile phone.
I thought the idea behind patents was to ALLOW copying?
The idea of patents was to encourage disclosure. Patents traditionally increase in cost for every year of renewal, and so if you're not making money from it your best bet was to let it lapse. This failed once big companies started doing cross licensing deals based on the total number of patents, not the number that either actually wanted to use, so even a completely useless patent was valuable for the full 20 years.
Patent abuse isn't exactly new either though. Go and read up on the shenanigans Watt pulled (if he'd managed to get a business model patent, his descendants could sue Disney).
I don't think I understand. Your word order doesn't really make sense, but assuming you meant what I think you meant, you're still wrong. All of the cats I've known think getting a pet human was a great decision.
I'll repeat the sentiment I posted above: "Quality of life" does not put food on your table or pay your mortgage. CASH MONEY does that. The more cash, the better, independent of ANYTHING ELSE. Not "quality of life" or "fun" or "feeling of accomplishment", CASH MONEY.
Absolute nonsense. The point of money is to buy a better quality of life. Money has no value by itself, the only value is in the things it can buy. If you don't have the time to enjoy the things that money can buy, then it does you no good. If you're too stressed or too tired to enjoy the things that money can buy, then it does you no good.
Once you have enough money to afford a comfortable home, good food, and a reasonable selection of luxuries, the benefits from increasing your income drop off rapidly. If I made more, I'd pay off my mortgage more quickly, but then I'm already on track to pay it off in a third of the time the bank demands, so there's no massive benefit there. On the other hand, spending my days doing interesting, challenging, and fun things with intelligent people is of clear value to me.
They're talking about paper abstracts. These are (usually) the first thing that the reviewer reads and set their frame of mind for the rest of the paper. A good (meaning interesting, not necessarily accurate) abstract means a higher probability of the paper being accepted. It also means that it is more likely to be cited when people are thinking 'I need to cite a paper about this, but I'm not going to reread them all to work out which one makes the most sense here'. Both having papers accepted and having them cited help academics a lot.
Each core has 320KB of local cache, but the 8 all share 20MB of L3 cache, so for most efficient use you either want each core to have a working set (including code) of under 2.5MB, or for them to be accessing 256KB of independent data from a shared set of 20MB. That's not quite the whole story, because there is no cache coherency problem if two cores are reading the same data.
So you actually like sitting in a cubicle farm all day, having to deal with a boss and deadlines, having to waste lots of time in meetings instead of working on interesting things, having to commute in rush-hour traffic? I don't like any of those things.
So, uh, why do you do it? I spent a few years as a freelance programmer. Deadlines were what I agreed to: If I thought they were too tight, I'd just say 'sorry, I can't do that, you'll have to find someone else'. A couple of companies tried that, and then learned that it was much easier to find people who were happy to claim that they could meet deadlines I wasn't happy with than ones that actually could. I worked from my living room, overlooking the sea, usually for people on different continents (I think I only had two customer with a UK presence, and in both cases I was actually working for the US part of the companies).
Of course, I didn't have the absolute certainty of a regular pay cheque and was only paid if I actually did some work that people wanted. On the other hand, I could afford my relatively modest lifestyle working 2-3 days a month and was putting the income from anything on top of that into savings and then into mortgage repayments.
I'm now in academia, where again there are no cubicle farms (well, the PhD students live in something a bit like one) and it took me two months to learn who my nominal boss was supposed to be. The only meetings are sessions where someone wants feedback on a design or where multiple people need to sit down and discuss a part that they're all working on and IRC / email would not be convenient (no whiteboard). My commute is a 10-minute bike ride, and I usually leave home at around 10 and work at around 6 so I miss the traffic. Oh, and I get to play with all sorts of fun technology (when I arrived, the first thing on my desk was a high-end FPGA dev board) and seem to have an unlimited travel budget.
And, of course, I'm making about a quarter of what I'd earn working in industry (based on the offers I had in hand when I took this job). I think it's worth it for the quality of life.
So what is the whine here? Fresh college grads don't instantly perform at the level of seasoned veterans?
No, it's fresh college grads that don't instantly perform at the level of seasoned veterans, don't want to learn on the job, and expect to be paid at veteran salary levels.
Nope, the grandparent was correct. When IBM wants to raise more money in the future, they have two choices:
Take a loan from a bank
Issue more stock
Using option 1 immediately adds a liability to the company and adds an extra expense in the interest that they have to pay. Option 2, however, does not add any more liability, it just dilutes the value of the stock. Assuming that they want to raise more money to expand the business so that the stock price will go up beyond its diluted value, then even the existing investors won't complain.
When you sell Joe Jackass your 10 shares of IBM, you are defining the current value of those shares. This is important for IBM, because that is the value at which they can price new shares when they offer them.
I can't speak for the food that the grandparent is buying, but in the '90s I knew someone who stocked up on canned food as soon as rationing ended in the late '40s. He was still regularly eating things like sardines that he'd bought during that time, and lived to be 86.
Nope. I remember when 'Internet search' meant whichever your favourite search engine was, with Yahoo! and AltaVista being the ones that people I knew typically used, but Lycos and Infoseek were often also used. I don't remember any point when Yahoo! was close to a monopoly in the search arena.
Instructions per clock for A9 are 5-50% faster depending on the benchmark, but in most workloads you don't see more than a 10% difference clock-for-clock.
Java requires lots of reflection aware code because there is no conditional compilation.
Well, kind of. There is no preprocessor (although you can, of course, run Java code through the C preprocessor before compiling if you really want to, or through some other text processing system), but you can conditionally compile different versions of the same class, so you can implement shared functionality in a superclass and pre-target functionality in a subclass and then just compile the correct subclass for your target.
As I said above, new phones are not the only issue. A number of major manufacturers do not provide updates, so even though the hardware in my phone meets the minimum requirements for 4.0, it's probably going to stay on 2.2 for a long time (2.3 works with cyanogen mod, I may eventually get some third-party upgrade to 4.0). Apple is a lot better at getting users of older devices to upgrade, but they also have a simpler problem for two reasons: XNU has stable kernel interfaces, so porting drivers is minimal effort, and the total number of different iPhone models ever released (even counting ones that only differ in the amount of flash) is smaller than the current lineup of Android phones offered by a company like HTC or Samsung. Additionally, Apple gets revenue from app sales and is the one responsible for pushing OS updates so they have a strong incentive to make sure that development is easy. Google gets revenue from app sales, but HTC, Samsung, and so on are responsible for pushing OS updates and have no such incentive.
the ones being sold with 2.x are the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that frankly won't run anything heavier thanks to low end CPUs and pathetic amounts of RAM!
It's not just ones being sold that are the problem. My phone shipped with 2.2 and has a vaguely-supported (as in, from the manufacturer, but not made available through their developer channel) upgrade to 2.3. It has a 1GHz CPU with 576MB of RAM (512MB for the Android). In fact, its specs are higher than my Smartbook, which manages to run LibreOffice or Firefox (it struggles a bit running both at the same time). If you're writing a mobile phone app that requires more CPU power and RAM than this, then you're either in a very small market or you're doing something badly wrong.
It can. There is a clang plugin for Visual Studio which can generate ARM binaries. If you have the correct headers and build project settings, it will generate binaries for the RPi. However, it will not use clang for syntax highlighting, so if you write C99 / C11 or GNU-flavoured C++ then the syntax highlighter will become confused, as will the autocompletion logic. There is also nothing on the RPi that speaks the (undocumented?) protocol that VS uses for remote debugging, so you won't get to use the integrated debugger. So, while it will technically work, there it won't really be an IDE anymore, just a pretty crappy text editor (once you break autocompletion and syntax highlighting, it will be quite frustrating to use). You'd be better off with Vim and the clang plugin - at least then context-sensitive autocompletion will work...
Where are you looking? You're unlikely to get that much as an unknown coming in to a company. The ones I've dealt with offer relatively low salaries to people who don't have an existing track record with the company and either promote from within or hire contract programmers as full-time employees for more senior positions. A lot of this is because a senior job requires a lot of domain-specific experience that may not be transferrable: Just because you were in a senior position elsewhere doesn't mean that you'll have the required skills for the new job. They want you to prove that you either have them or are capable of acquiring them first. This can be inside the company (take a junior job, get promoted quickly), or outside (do some contract work, show what you can do). Just because they don't put the high-paying jobs on monster.com doesn't mean that they don't exist. They're more difficult to find qualified people for, so the screening process is more long-term.
When I was contracting full time, a few companies I worked for offered me more than I was making contracting to work for them full time, but I decided I was having more fun working on a wide selection of projects so I didn't take them. Now I'm back in academia, which probably proves that offering more money is not the correct way of motivating me...
We took a load of machines to the dump a few years ago that were too slow to even give away (60MHz sort of speed). At the same time, people were throwing away 1GHz+ machines. We ended up with a few upgrades as a result of that...
So, do entrepreneurs need to learn to code? If code has to be written, and the number of founders is 1, and there's no money to hire coders, then yes. Otherwise, probably not
You're assuming that you learn to code is to write code, not to learn a specific way of thinking. You can learn to think logically about problem solving without learning to code, of course, but it's harder. To me the question is like someone 200 years ago saying 'do I really need to learn to write? I'm not going to be a scribe.' Algorithmic systems are the foundation of a modern society. If you don't understand them then you're at an immediate disadvantage.
Not necessarily. The definition of 'success' is 'still in business', which means either breaking even or at least making a sufficiently small loss that your backers don't pull out (e.g. banks call in loans or you run out of VC capital). It doesn't mean that the entrepreneur is making more money than they would have in more conventional employment. The probability of making enough to retire on is a fair bit higher than the lotto, but the probability of going completely broke is also a lot higher.
If you start a company with the aim of making massive amounts of money, you're probably going to be disappointed. On the other hand, if you start a company with the aim of doing something that you really want to do (and are either good at paperwork or find someone you can delegate it to) then you're probably going to have a lot of fun and lead a more fulfilling life than someone who works a 9-5 job in the same time.
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Except that patents only last 20 years
As I said, check the history. Watt got a number of extensions beyond the standard period, using much the same logic that Disney uses to get copyright extensions (although in Watt's case they only applied to him, not to everyone).
I'm pretty sure Google is not on the list anymore, and opinion is split on Valve (they use DRM, but some people seem to like it because it hasn't bitten them personally yet). Nintendo might still be there. They've done some evil things, but they're not sufficiently influential for it to matter to anyone except their customers.
If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.
Or we'll actually see some innovation. I have an Android phone, and the UI sucks. From playing with an iPhone, it seems most of the bad ideas were ones copied from iOS. I played very briefly with a Windows phone and it was at least different, although I didn't use it for long enough to tell if it was actually better. It was owned by someone leaving MSR, who was looking forward to replacing it, so he apparently didn't think so, but if enough people are trying new ideas then eventually one will end up with something better. My favourite tablet UI so far has been WebOS, but it was mismanaged into oblivion. I don't know how well it scaled down to a phone, because the lack of decent SIP support is a deal breaker for me in a mobile phone.
I thought the idea behind patents was to ALLOW copying?
The idea of patents was to encourage disclosure. Patents traditionally increase in cost for every year of renewal, and so if you're not making money from it your best bet was to let it lapse. This failed once big companies started doing cross licensing deals based on the total number of patents, not the number that either actually wanted to use, so even a completely useless patent was valuable for the full 20 years.
Patent abuse isn't exactly new either though. Go and read up on the shenanigans Watt pulled (if he'd managed to get a business model patent, his descendants could sue Disney).
Either you're trolling, you're trying to be ironic, or you lead a very sad life.
I don't think I understand. Your word order doesn't really make sense, but assuming you meant what I think you meant, you're still wrong. All of the cats I've known think getting a pet human was a great decision.
I'll repeat the sentiment I posted above: "Quality of life" does not put food on your table or pay your mortgage. CASH MONEY does that. The more cash, the better, independent of ANYTHING ELSE. Not "quality of life" or "fun" or "feeling of accomplishment", CASH MONEY.
Absolute nonsense. The point of money is to buy a better quality of life. Money has no value by itself, the only value is in the things it can buy. If you don't have the time to enjoy the things that money can buy, then it does you no good. If you're too stressed or too tired to enjoy the things that money can buy, then it does you no good.
Once you have enough money to afford a comfortable home, good food, and a reasonable selection of luxuries, the benefits from increasing your income drop off rapidly. If I made more, I'd pay off my mortgage more quickly, but then I'm already on track to pay it off in a third of the time the bank demands, so there's no massive benefit there. On the other hand, spending my days doing interesting, challenging, and fun things with intelligent people is of clear value to me.
They're talking about paper abstracts. These are (usually) the first thing that the reviewer reads and set their frame of mind for the rest of the paper. A good (meaning interesting, not necessarily accurate) abstract means a higher probability of the paper being accepted. It also means that it is more likely to be cited when people are thinking 'I need to cite a paper about this, but I'm not going to reread them all to work out which one makes the most sense here'. Both having papers accepted and having them cited help academics a lot.
Each core has 320KB of local cache, but the 8 all share 20MB of L3 cache, so for most efficient use you either want each core to have a working set (including code) of under 2.5MB, or for them to be accessing 256KB of independent data from a shared set of 20MB. That's not quite the whole story, because there is no cache coherency problem if two cores are reading the same data.
So you actually like sitting in a cubicle farm all day, having to deal with a boss and deadlines, having to waste lots of time in meetings instead of working on interesting things, having to commute in rush-hour traffic? I don't like any of those things.
So, uh, why do you do it? I spent a few years as a freelance programmer. Deadlines were what I agreed to: If I thought they were too tight, I'd just say 'sorry, I can't do that, you'll have to find someone else'. A couple of companies tried that, and then learned that it was much easier to find people who were happy to claim that they could meet deadlines I wasn't happy with than ones that actually could. I worked from my living room, overlooking the sea, usually for people on different continents (I think I only had two customer with a UK presence, and in both cases I was actually working for the US part of the companies).
Of course, I didn't have the absolute certainty of a regular pay cheque and was only paid if I actually did some work that people wanted. On the other hand, I could afford my relatively modest lifestyle working 2-3 days a month and was putting the income from anything on top of that into savings and then into mortgage repayments.
I'm now in academia, where again there are no cubicle farms (well, the PhD students live in something a bit like one) and it took me two months to learn who my nominal boss was supposed to be. The only meetings are sessions where someone wants feedback on a design or where multiple people need to sit down and discuss a part that they're all working on and IRC / email would not be convenient (no whiteboard). My commute is a 10-minute bike ride, and I usually leave home at around 10 and work at around 6 so I miss the traffic. Oh, and I get to play with all sorts of fun technology (when I arrived, the first thing on my desk was a high-end FPGA dev board) and seem to have an unlimited travel budget.
And, of course, I'm making about a quarter of what I'd earn working in industry (based on the offers I had in hand when I took this job). I think it's worth it for the quality of life.
So what is the whine here? Fresh college grads don't instantly perform at the level of seasoned veterans?
No, it's fresh college grads that don't instantly perform at the level of seasoned veterans, don't want to learn on the job, and expect to be paid at veteran salary levels.
Using option 1 immediately adds a liability to the company and adds an extra expense in the interest that they have to pay. Option 2, however, does not add any more liability, it just dilutes the value of the stock. Assuming that they want to raise more money to expand the business so that the stock price will go up beyond its diluted value, then even the existing investors won't complain.
When you sell Joe Jackass your 10 shares of IBM, you are defining the current value of those shares. This is important for IBM, because that is the value at which they can price new shares when they offer them.
I can't speak for the food that the grandparent is buying, but in the '90s I knew someone who stocked up on canned food as soon as rationing ended in the late '40s. He was still regularly eating things like sardines that he'd bought during that time, and lived to be 86.
I, for one, don't want to live in a society where being awake at 6am on a Saturday is not regarded as suspicious...
Remember when "internet search" meant "Yahoo"?
Nope. I remember when 'Internet search' meant whichever your favourite search engine was, with Yahoo! and AltaVista being the ones that people I knew typically used, but Lycos and Infoseek were often also used. I don't remember any point when Yahoo! was close to a monopoly in the search arena.
Instructions per clock for A9 are 5-50% faster depending on the benchmark, but in most workloads you don't see more than a 10% difference clock-for-clock.
Java requires lots of reflection aware code because there is no conditional compilation.
Well, kind of. There is no preprocessor (although you can, of course, run Java code through the C preprocessor before compiling if you really want to, or through some other text processing system), but you can conditionally compile different versions of the same class, so you can implement shared functionality in a superclass and pre-target functionality in a subclass and then just compile the correct subclass for your target.
As I said above, new phones are not the only issue. A number of major manufacturers do not provide updates, so even though the hardware in my phone meets the minimum requirements for 4.0, it's probably going to stay on 2.2 for a long time (2.3 works with cyanogen mod, I may eventually get some third-party upgrade to 4.0). Apple is a lot better at getting users of older devices to upgrade, but they also have a simpler problem for two reasons: XNU has stable kernel interfaces, so porting drivers is minimal effort, and the total number of different iPhone models ever released (even counting ones that only differ in the amount of flash) is smaller than the current lineup of Android phones offered by a company like HTC or Samsung. Additionally, Apple gets revenue from app sales and is the one responsible for pushing OS updates so they have a strong incentive to make sure that development is easy. Google gets revenue from app sales, but HTC, Samsung, and so on are responsible for pushing OS updates and have no such incentive.
the ones being sold with 2.x are the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that frankly won't run anything heavier thanks to low end CPUs and pathetic amounts of RAM!
It's not just ones being sold that are the problem. My phone shipped with 2.2 and has a vaguely-supported (as in, from the manufacturer, but not made available through their developer channel) upgrade to 2.3. It has a 1GHz CPU with 576MB of RAM (512MB for the Android). In fact, its specs are higher than my Smartbook, which manages to run LibreOffice or Firefox (it struggles a bit running both at the same time). If you're writing a mobile phone app that requires more CPU power and RAM than this, then you're either in a very small market or you're doing something badly wrong.
It can. There is a clang plugin for Visual Studio which can generate ARM binaries. If you have the correct headers and build project settings, it will generate binaries for the RPi. However, it will not use clang for syntax highlighting, so if you write C99 / C11 or GNU-flavoured C++ then the syntax highlighter will become confused, as will the autocompletion logic. There is also nothing on the RPi that speaks the (undocumented?) protocol that VS uses for remote debugging, so you won't get to use the integrated debugger. So, while it will technically work, there it won't really be an IDE anymore, just a pretty crappy text editor (once you break autocompletion and syntax highlighting, it will be quite frustrating to use). You'd be better off with Vim and the clang plugin - at least then context-sensitive autocompletion will work...
Or better syntax highlighting. If nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs were all different colours, the sentence would be a lot easier to read...
Where are you looking? You're unlikely to get that much as an unknown coming in to a company. The ones I've dealt with offer relatively low salaries to people who don't have an existing track record with the company and either promote from within or hire contract programmers as full-time employees for more senior positions. A lot of this is because a senior job requires a lot of domain-specific experience that may not be transferrable: Just because you were in a senior position elsewhere doesn't mean that you'll have the required skills for the new job. They want you to prove that you either have them or are capable of acquiring them first. This can be inside the company (take a junior job, get promoted quickly), or outside (do some contract work, show what you can do). Just because they don't put the high-paying jobs on monster.com doesn't mean that they don't exist. They're more difficult to find qualified people for, so the screening process is more long-term.
When I was contracting full time, a few companies I worked for offered me more than I was making contracting to work for them full time, but I decided I was having more fun working on a wide selection of projects so I didn't take them. Now I'm back in academia, which probably proves that offering more money is not the correct way of motivating me...
We took a load of machines to the dump a few years ago that were too slow to even give away (60MHz sort of speed). At the same time, people were throwing away 1GHz+ machines. We ended up with a few upgrades as a result of that...
So, do entrepreneurs need to learn to code? If code has to be written, and the number of founders is 1, and there's no money to hire coders, then yes. Otherwise, probably not
You're assuming that you learn to code is to write code, not to learn a specific way of thinking. You can learn to think logically about problem solving without learning to code, of course, but it's harder. To me the question is like someone 200 years ago saying 'do I really need to learn to write? I'm not going to be a scribe.' Algorithmic systems are the foundation of a modern society. If you don't understand them then you're at an immediate disadvantage.
Not necessarily. The definition of 'success' is 'still in business', which means either breaking even or at least making a sufficiently small loss that your backers don't pull out (e.g. banks call in loans or you run out of VC capital). It doesn't mean that the entrepreneur is making more money than they would have in more conventional employment. The probability of making enough to retire on is a fair bit higher than the lotto, but the probability of going completely broke is also a lot higher.
If you start a company with the aim of making massive amounts of money, you're probably going to be disappointed. On the other hand, if you start a company with the aim of doing something that you really want to do (and are either good at paperwork or find someone you can delegate it to) then you're probably going to have a lot of fun and lead a more fulfilling life than someone who works a 9-5 job in the same time.