IANAL (gods I hate that acronym!) but doesn't public statements like patent pledge create pretty effective estoppel? If yes, then there's no worry about the two patents in the pledge but I guess there's still 104 left to worry about and more to come...
Without Linux we'd still have at least BSD which is more/less free than Linux depending how you view software freedom (BSD vs GPL). Without that AT&T vs Berkeley nonsense couple of decades ago who knows where BSD would be nowadays!
I meant that allthough there is "cancel" command it does not actually cancel the query asynchronously but synchronously thus blocking until cancellation is complete. I may wrong here though and it wouldn't be the first time:)
IIRC NT 5.1 and earlier didn't have asynchronous I/O canceling. That caused some problems even when I/O stuff were ran asynchronously. But my memory is bit flaky so I just can't remember what those problems were... Vista and 7 has asynchronous canceling also.
You are not supposed to send money over mail in Finland. Post's own web pages says that it is forbidden. There's no law about it though (in Finland we have laws about almost everything!)
But now after the ParkCom trial you could change your sign to read "Mainoksista laskutetaan 50 euroa kappaleelta. Toimittamalla mainoksen hyväksyt sopimuksen." (Adds will be charged 50 euros/add. By delivering the add you have accepted this aggreement.) and start making money by receiving adds \o/
Yes but it's rather easy to destroy everything the OS manufacturer has made for you by just doing something heavy and lenghty when you should be refreshing the UI. In the end I would say it comes to the application developers.
But I have to confess I know nothing about iPhone/iPad development.
Yes, you are right. It all depends on what you do. If you write applications that do financial forecasting then you're gonna need some skills in statistics.
But I still have to politely disagree a bit. We have house full of people with expert knowledge about statitics and stuff. They come to us (that's the IT department) and asks us for a raport about this and that. They give us formulas how to calculate this and that and we just implement it. When we have these kind of people in markenting and sales I don't think it would do any good for me to start learning that stuff:)
And yes, I'm happy about my work. I'm implementing warehouse system which saves houndreds of thousands euros a month for my employer so why wouldn't I? I'm gonna get big bonuses when the system is up and running! \o/
Well, maybe. I know nothing about set theory but I do know what different SQL statements do and how to use them. I simply learned by trying and reading a lot of MSDN. Hmmm. Maybe I try to read something about the set theory if I find an article about it written in my native language (which isn't English). It might help me in my job!:)
Maybe programming is more about logic than maths? I personally find programming to be most logical. If I do this, the outcome is that and if I reverse that, then I get this. So if X+1=2 then it must be that X=2-1. I know that it maths but it's a really logical clause which even I can understand. I can follow execution paths in my mind, even if the program is threaded, because I know that if this happens then execution must go there and so on. This btw helps a lot when fixing bugs.
Maybe someone should ask a question: Is logical thinking necessary for programmers or not?
Btw. My friend when he saw this Slashdot article said "Is German language necessary for programmers - Yes if you need to localize your stuff in German":)
Yes, of course. But that's nothing more complex that, for instance, calculating how many boxes we have in storehouse, how many product items in those boxes, adding up them together, grouping them by product etc. You can do that with pretty simple SQL query without great knowledge about maths.
Now of course if you don't even get THAT right then you better move to do something else.
I know I wouldn't be able to do, for example, 3D graphics. I've understood that you need to do some weird mathematical operations which looks like witchcraft to me to get objects running around the screen. I stay away from those kind of jobs, leave them to the experts in that field, and concentrate in what I'm good at. So effectively I don't need great knowledge about maths to do my job. I think I could learn more about maths but don't see the point in it.
I hope this clears my point and I'm not underrating those that do know a great deal about maths. In fact, I'm a little jealous:)
I've been in the field for 10 years now and mathematical operators I've used so far are plus, minus, add, divide and modulo. Oh, and on one project I needed to use Pythagoras so add POW and SQRT. When you work with simple business applications you don't need to do complex calculations:)
This is general warning not to use any software that has known and/or unknown bugs in it. This warning goes moot when every known and/or unknown issue is solved.
Yes and when iPad has the market share of Windows then you'll see browser ballot screen on it too and the problem is not alleviated a bit. Or at least I would expect it to have it. Otherwise you would be just replacing Microsoft/IE domination with Apple/ domination.
Some could say this is slippery slope argument but I'm not one of them. And I assure everyone that I'm not a typical paranoid tinfoil-hat-wearing-guy:) I'm just concerned about our rights.
I don't know much about UK but where I live our rights have been reduced little by little. Recently government gave rights to companies to spy on their employees' web traffic. There are limitations to what you can spy upon but it's a start and in couple of years who know if these limitations are to be relaxed. And in fact, companies don't even need this right. They can achieve their goals (there were some discussion about watching over what people do on company time) without the spying part also.
Earlier it was given rights to police to filter out network traffic going out of the country. It was supposed to be used to "prevent people accidentally finding child porn in the internet". It's that that nobody really knows, except couple of police officers, which sites are being filtered (they are being filtered by URL in ISPs DNS server). It's been discovered that "they" have actually filtered out completely legitimite sites that displays adult gay porn for instance plus local site that critisises the filtering. The law does not permit filtering local sites so this is a great example how authorities exceeds their rights whenever they are given the opportunity.
All these well-meaning laws can and will be used against their purpose. Not neccessarily on this year or next one but when you open the door to corruption it is hard to close. And you know what "they" are planning now... Electric voting system where computer calculates the results. Possibly including voting from home over the internet too. Our current voting system effectively prevents corruption so I don't know why it needs to be changed.
You probably right about "career politicians" but there are some of us who actually like to serve the people. I'm a small time politician (I've worked in a small communal commitee which I found out to be really fun) who wishes to move to the big league in the future but with thoughts like this I don't think it's going to happen any time soon:)
Use procedures/views where possible and never allow dynamically created queries.
There's an excellent article on dynamic queries and little bit about SQL injections here but it's Sql Server specific so I don't know if it's any good for the Slashdot crowd: http://www.sommarskog.se/dynamic_sql.html
Yes, but I wasn't talking about patents. I was talking about copyrights and especially EU since Brian brought it up. I don't have much knowledge about patents.
Well, protocols are the subject of patents rather than copyright
I second that. I live in Finland which is part of EU. Of course Finnish laws applies only in Finland and not in other EU countries. Here's my translation of our copyright law's opening section. I couldn't find official translation.
He, who has created literary or artistic creation, has copyright on the said creation, may it be literary or explanatory, in writing or spoken representation, composition or performance, a film, photograph or other artistic composition, architectural, art handicraft or product of industrial art.
Maps and desing plans and graphic designs and computer programs are also considered as literary work.
This is pretty clear. Protocol specification document is a literary work and it can and will be placed under copyright law and it can be GPLed too. But not the actual protocol since it is not a literary work. Literary work is something concrete like a book or computer program while protocols are abstract by nature.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a single precedent from our supreme court or in any other lower court. This means that no-one has ever tried to copyright protocols and defend them in the court or that someone has tried but the court hasn't even taken it under consideration.
And yes, I'm not a lawyer but I love doing research on legal stuff.
I'd say that the UAC in Vista nagged constantly early on because it was written to complain about software that was written to standard procedures at the time.
There's a heck load of software which doesn't follow even the basic instructions found in MSDN. Also there is many programmers who doesn't even know that MSDN has these instructions. There is even programmers who don't know what MSDN is!
There is nothing inherently "poorly written" about writing to the current working directory
You do know that you shouldn't trust current working directory, don't you? There's this thing that even if application is installed in the folder X it can be started from folder Y and now your current workind directory points to Y. What's the problem in asking the Operating System where %APPDATA% is?
Windows has added dozens of new layers of "default" directories over the years
And they all can be found via environment settings.
Also, seeing as how applications were allowed to do more or less anything in XP / NT
No they weren't. User let them by running them with administrator privileges.
I don't think the next step would be to learn new languages. You can learn them anytime. Next I would learn like what object-oriented paradigm means. If you don't know how to use classes you end up with weird looking objects and poorly maintainable code. When I moved from C to C++ it was major jump to me to learn not to write static methods all over the place. Luckily Niris has started with OO language so maybe it's easier for him.
So I would probably start from here. I would pick up some small projects for myself, not too big so I wouldn't lose interest in the middle of it, where I would try different approaches to solve problems. This way I could learn which approach and technique is (probably) the best. It's that that you can do X in n+1 ways but which one is the most efficient, productive, maintainable, etc. - that's the question.
And in fact, after 10 years of professional career behind me, this is what I am still doing. Great way to learn new stuff!
Then you could go and learn different languages. Maybe Perl or Lisp. Maybe C and C++. Maybe even C#. Ruby or Python would be nice. Last language I learned was Haskell. That is a weird, weird language but really funny too!
But let's not forget databases. Every programmer has to deal with databases once or twice in his career. At least one should learn simple SQL syntax and maybe even little more complex stuff like views, indexes, procedures and functions.
Okay. I can't be serious anymore so I'll think I'll stop here:)
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL (gods I hate that acronym!) but doesn't public statements like patent pledge create pretty effective estoppel? If yes, then there's no worry about the two patents in the pledge but I guess there's still 104 left to worry about and more to come...
Without Linux we'd still have at least BSD which is more/less free than Linux depending how you view software freedom (BSD vs GPL). Without that AT&T vs Berkeley nonsense couple of decades ago who knows where BSD would be nowadays!
Ah, okay. Thank you. Simple googling would have provided the same information but I seem to be lazy for that :)
I meant that allthough there is "cancel" command it does not actually cancel the query asynchronously but synchronously thus blocking until cancellation is complete. I may wrong here though and it wouldn't be the first time :)
Wasn't Windows CE and offspring of NT4.something? If yes, then NT has been ported to ARM and MIPS at least, allthough support has been dropped lately.
IIRC NT 5.1 and earlier didn't have asynchronous I/O canceling. That caused some problems even when I/O stuff were ran asynchronously. But my memory is bit flaky so I just can't remember what those problems were... Vista and 7 has asynchronous canceling also.
You are not supposed to send money over mail in Finland. Post's own web pages says that it is forbidden. There's no law about it though (in Finland we have laws about almost everything!)
But now after the ParkCom trial you could change your sign to read "Mainoksista laskutetaan 50 euroa kappaleelta. Toimittamalla mainoksen hyväksyt sopimuksen." (Adds will be charged 50 euros/add. By delivering the add you have accepted this aggreement.) and start making money by receiving adds \o/
Yes but it's rather easy to destroy everything the OS manufacturer has made for you by just doing something heavy and lenghty when you should be refreshing the UI. In the end I would say it comes to the application developers.
But I have to confess I know nothing about iPhone/iPad development.
Yes, you are right. It all depends on what you do. If you write applications that do financial forecasting then you're gonna need some skills in statistics.
But I still have to politely disagree a bit. We have house full of people with expert knowledge about statitics and stuff. They come to us (that's the IT department) and asks us for a raport about this and that. They give us formulas how to calculate this and that and we just implement it. When we have these kind of people in markenting and sales I don't think it would do any good for me to start learning that stuff :)
And yes, I'm happy about my work. I'm implementing warehouse system which saves houndreds of thousands euros a month for my employer so why wouldn't I? I'm gonna get big bonuses when the system is up and running! \o/
Well, maybe. I know nothing about set theory but I do know what different SQL statements do and how to use them. I simply learned by trying and reading a lot of MSDN. Hmmm. Maybe I try to read something about the set theory if I find an article about it written in my native language (which isn't English). It might help me in my job! :)
Maybe programming is more about logic than maths? I personally find programming to be most logical. If I do this, the outcome is that and if I reverse that, then I get this. So if X+1=2 then it must be that X=2-1. I know that it maths but it's a really logical clause which even I can understand. I can follow execution paths in my mind, even if the program is threaded, because I know that if this happens then execution must go there and so on. This btw helps a lot when fixing bugs.
Maybe someone should ask a question: Is logical thinking necessary for programmers or not?
Btw. My friend when he saw this Slashdot article said "Is German language necessary for programmers - Yes if you need to localize your stuff in German" :)
Yes, of course. But that's nothing more complex that, for instance, calculating how many boxes we have in storehouse, how many product items in those boxes, adding up them together, grouping them by product etc. You can do that with pretty simple SQL query without great knowledge about maths.
Now of course if you don't even get THAT right then you better move to do something else.
I know I wouldn't be able to do, for example, 3D graphics. I've understood that you need to do some weird mathematical operations which looks like witchcraft to me to get objects running around the screen. I stay away from those kind of jobs, leave them to the experts in that field, and concentrate in what I'm good at. So effectively I don't need great knowledge about maths to do my job. I think I could learn more about maths but don't see the point in it.
I hope this clears my point and I'm not underrating those that do know a great deal about maths. In fact, I'm a little jealous :)
I've been in the field for 10 years now and mathematical operators I've used so far are plus, minus, add, divide and modulo. Oh, and on one project I needed to use Pythagoras so add POW and SQRT. When you work with simple business applications you don't need to do complex calculations :)
This is general warning not to use any software that has known and/or unknown bugs in it. This warning goes moot when every known and/or unknown issue is solved.
Yes and when iPad has the market share of Windows then you'll see browser ballot screen on it too and the problem is not alleviated a bit. Or at least I would expect it to have it. Otherwise you would be just replacing Microsoft/IE domination with Apple/ domination.
Some could say this is slippery slope argument but I'm not one of them. And I assure everyone that I'm not a typical paranoid tinfoil-hat-wearing-guy :) I'm just concerned about our rights.
I don't know much about UK but where I live our rights have been reduced little by little. Recently government gave rights to companies to spy on their employees' web traffic. There are limitations to what you can spy upon but it's a start and in couple of years who know if these limitations are to be relaxed. And in fact, companies don't even need this right. They can achieve their goals (there were some discussion about watching over what people do on company time) without the spying part also.
Earlier it was given rights to police to filter out network traffic going out of the country. It was supposed to be used to "prevent people accidentally finding child porn in the internet". It's that that nobody really knows, except couple of police officers, which sites are being filtered (they are being filtered by URL in ISPs DNS server). It's been discovered that "they" have actually filtered out completely legitimite sites that displays adult gay porn for instance plus local site that critisises the filtering. The law does not permit filtering local sites so this is a great example how authorities exceeds their rights whenever they are given the opportunity.
All these well-meaning laws can and will be used against their purpose. Not neccessarily on this year or next one but when you open the door to corruption it is hard to close. And you know what "they" are planning now... Electric voting system where computer calculates the results. Possibly including voting from home over the internet too. Our current voting system effectively prevents corruption so I don't know why it needs to be changed.
You probably right about "career politicians" but there are some of us who actually like to serve the people. I'm a small time politician (I've worked in a small communal commitee which I found out to be really fun) who wishes to move to the big league in the future but with thoughts like this I don't think it's going to happen any time soon :)
Ugh. I have spoken.
And my Renault Megane is just Ford Model T with some patches and tweaks. Ad infinitum. ;)
And to save that precious memory \o/
char *addr=0xB8000000; while(*addr++=argv[0]++);
% gcc -o "Hello, world!"
% "Hello, world!"
Separate UI from logic by well defined interface and the UI will come. Or not, but at least you learned probably something about MVC :)
There's an excellent article on dynamic queries and little bit about SQL injections here but it's Sql Server specific so I don't know if it's any good for the Slashdot crowd: http://www.sommarskog.se/dynamic_sql.html
Yes, but I wasn't talking about patents. I was talking about copyrights and especially EU since Brian brought it up. I don't have much knowledge about patents.
I second that. I live in Finland which is part of EU. Of course Finnish laws applies only in Finland and not in other EU countries. Here's my translation of our copyright law's opening section. I couldn't find official translation.
This is pretty clear. Protocol specification document is a literary work and it can and will be placed under copyright law and it can be GPLed too. But not the actual protocol since it is not a literary work. Literary work is something concrete like a book or computer program while protocols are abstract by nature.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a single precedent from our supreme court or in any other lower court. This means that no-one has ever tried to copyright protocols and defend them in the court or that someone has tried but the court hasn't even taken it under consideration.
And yes, I'm not a lawyer but I love doing research on legal stuff.
There's a heck load of software which doesn't follow even the basic instructions found in MSDN. Also there is many programmers who doesn't even know that MSDN has these instructions. There is even programmers who don't know what MSDN is!
You do know that you shouldn't trust current working directory, don't you? There's this thing that even if application is installed in the folder X it can be started from folder Y and now your current workind directory points to Y. What's the problem in asking the Operating System where %APPDATA% is?
And they all can be found via environment settings.
No they weren't. User let them by running them with administrator privileges.
Okey, I'll try to be serious for a while :)
I don't think the next step would be to learn new languages. You can learn them anytime. Next I would learn like what object-oriented paradigm means. If you don't know how to use classes you end up with weird looking objects and poorly maintainable code. When I moved from C to C++ it was major jump to me to learn not to write static methods all over the place. Luckily Niris has started with OO language so maybe it's easier for him.
So I would probably start from here. I would pick up some small projects for myself, not too big so I wouldn't lose interest in the middle of it, where I would try different approaches to solve problems. This way I could learn which approach and technique is (probably) the best. It's that that you can do X in n+1 ways but which one is the most efficient, productive, maintainable, etc. - that's the question.
And in fact, after 10 years of professional career behind me, this is what I am still doing. Great way to learn new stuff!
Then you could go and learn different languages. Maybe Perl or Lisp. Maybe C and C++. Maybe even C#. Ruby or Python would be nice. Last language I learned was Haskell. That is a weird, weird language but really funny too!
But let's not forget databases. Every programmer has to deal with databases once or twice in his career. At least one should learn simple SQL syntax and maybe even little more complex stuff like views, indexes, procedures and functions.
Okay. I can't be serious anymore so I'll think I'll stop here :)
That or you could become a project manager.