No one should be able to get a job until they've had a job. That'll fix everything.
It's not hiring newbs at all that's the problem -- it's hiring too many of them, and expecting them to be actually useful without an extended training and mentoring period. There are a few who can do that -- but even then, mentoring and simple experience is absolutely essential.
Bringing in a bit of new blood now and again is a good thing. Having a workforce devoid of practical experience is a recipe for disaster.
Interesting because UofW has an amazing Computer Science program, is reknown for the quality of the co-op students that they send out, and is one of the largest sources for technology labour in Canada.
The University of Texas is likewise renowned for its computer science program -- but as a programmer working in Austin (and thus frequently alongside UT graduates), I've only met one who's really impressed me.
CSU Chico, where I attended, had a strong claim to have one of the best computer science programs in California -- and some of the professors were very good -- but the grad students by and large left me unimpressed there as well.
All I can conclude is that graduating from a university, even a well-reputed one, does not imply strong real-world skills.
So if patents are abolished, what products will we in the US be able to sell on the world market? If the last of our marketable products - thought, are rendered worthless, what jobs will be left? We've all but lost the manufacturing jobs. If the development jobs go, too, what will we have? Answer: Nothing.
If all we can generate is government-enforced monopolies, we've already lost. Collecting patents isn't creating value; creating products creates value. And honestly -- if we get to the point where all we generate is patents, why in the world would China even pretend to honor them? If it comes to where all the actual wealth is being created on the other side of the world, I wouldn't expect them to share just because our government says that so-and-so has been granted this-and-such a monopoly right.
Believe me, it sucks to get boxed in by patent constraints when you are developing a patent - I have had to change direction on my designs in the past when I have found out that I was possibly treading on someone else's patents. But that is the price we pay for having the protection for our ideas.
It seems to me that you're arguing from the perspective that having "protection" for your ideas is an end goal in and of itself -- and for some, that may well be the case. However, in the US, the point of the patent system is encouraging invention -- not the creation of Yet Another Commodity.
I'm speaking as a shareholder and senior engineer at a startup making software targeted at a large and lucerative market. There are some extremely innovative elements to our product (where the unique part is not the number of man-hours but the concepts which guided how those man-hours were applied), and there are other elements which required large amounts of skilled labor from folks whose labor goes for a substantially higher market rate than your typical development staff. If I were looking out only for my immediate wealth (and not concerned about my company being sued for unknowingly infringing others' patents on non-differentiating technology), I would be strongly in favor of same sorts of "strong patent protection" you're espousing here.
However -- I can't honestly support that. Why? I'm not "developing a patent"; I'm developing software targeted to a very specific userbase. Part of my regular job duties is coming up with new devices and algorithms when necessary to efficiently perform some task I've been handed -- and as the geek-of-all-trades (unlike the many specialists we have in house), I perform a lot of different tasks, and build a lot of new tools. The goal of these isn't to have something we can sell to our customers -- rather, almost all of them are used to meet some immediate need, either for the customer or the business internally. Patenting the things I come up with over the course of my regular work (and there are a reasonable number of them which the USPTO would quite certainly accept -- some of the anti-tampering technology I developed comes to mind in particular, so long as nobody else has come up with it first) would be overhead: It would mean I'd have less time, and so invent less stuff. Worse, though, would be the case where I were obligated to check everything I create for infringements on others' patents -- my work would be damn near paralyzed. Can I justify patenting the big ideas that matter more than the implementation man-hour count? Absolutely... but those are very, very few and far between.
Finally, I have faith in our ability to make a good product -- not only to have differentiating features, but to get them out first, implement them best and provide our customers with good service. Let the competition try to play catch-up -- some of them may be larger, but being small means we can be faster on our feet, and we have some damn good talent. I'm much more afraid of the big guys driving us out of business (or convincing us to sell them our technology) by threating us with patents on items that should be obvious than I am of them beating us fair and square.
Why not? How do you think the patent holding companies got the patents they are holding? Answer: They paid someone for their ideas. There's the incentive. Or, they developed the ideas themselves, and they are hoping for a payoff at some point in the future - again an incentive.
It's an incentive, to be sure -- but if it's an excessive incentive, then it does the economy as a whole more harm than good. It should be enough to encourage innovation, but not so much as to result in the sorts of nonsense which presently occur (in which a company's ability to sell a large and complex product can be completely halted based on their ability to license a patent on some small and obvious component thereof -- thu
SQL injection flaws are related to how well the application using the database is written, not the database itself. Any database-backed application can have SQL injection flaws, no matter what the underlying database, so long as the application is written by an idiot.
Listen, kids: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER pass user-provided values into your SQL queries as strings. There's a reason every database access API in existance allows positional or named parameters to be passed outside the parser, and it's not just performance.
And if I sound a little grumpy on this topic -- like maybe I'd recently worked with a developer lacking just this sort of clue... well, maybe you'd be interpreting my tone correctly.
I mean, just because a boss is trying to be funny and cheer everyone up, doesn't mean he's succeeding...
Yes, yes, yes. I would far rather a boss who actually respects his team, takes our opinions seriously, fires the incompetant people and lets us do our blue-sky R&D projects now and again to one who makes jokes or tries to take the team out to lunch every week but lacks the former attributes.
Well, no, I don't. Sometimes they send me specs for a preexisting system we need to integrate with, and I'll send back issues wrt the system not meeting specs, or questions about places where it's fuzzy, or so forth... but in no case do I find myself editing their documents, or them editing mine.
For the business types, what you suggest may be a very legitimate concern -- but I'm engineering; my closest contact with 3rd parties is working on integrations as above. (And yes, that's pretty much the split -- OpenOffice is used on the engineering side of the house, MS Office by management).
The observation was made multiple times in the same thread, by different parties. I don't know about you, but I only check old threads when I receive a message that there's been a response to my post -- so I'd only have had an opportunity to discuss the point with one of the two individuals making the observation had I not responded twice. You'll also note I killed my +1, so as not to annoy folks by having my post made twice. I've never worked with Oracle, but I have been a company during its transition from engineering-driven to marketing-driven, and it wasn't a pleasing experience.
And yes, it's a bloody name -- indeed, that's what this entire thread is about. What things are called impacts how people think about them, and much information can be inferred by a name -- "10g", for instance, infers to those not in the know that it was preceded by Oracle 10, a through f. This obvious inference is false -- and that the marketers would lead a good many people to make a false inference just so they can choose one feature to point out is, indeed, a shame.
We don't touch this OOo crap lest some incompatibility creep in and embarass us with our customers.
You actually send editable documents to your customers? Eww!
Do you have some tool that takes out the change history and other metadata? I've always found it preferable to just send PDF.
This is slashdot, I dont have 2 use proper formatting here, oh wait, you must be new.
It would seem that you're new -- Anonymous Coward has been here since Taco first implemented accounts.
Paying attention to how you present yourself via your spelling, formatting and such would be appreciated: Lots of folks don't, but they're making themselves look like morons.
Yes, but that's only sensible if there were a simple "Oracle 10" for folks not doing grid computing. Since there isn't, the "g" in there is useless marketing fluff, and thus abominable.
So Firefox's new release should be 1.5u, because its spiffy new user-visible feature is the non-sucking update support?
If Oracle 10g were a release intended to be *only* used for grid computing (such that everyone else just used Oracle 10), it would make sense. Since this isn't the case, it's completely bogus.
I think it'll be interesting to see what ISO has to say -- they're not nearly the pushovers ECMA are reputed to be when it comes to being influenced by vendors rather than technical merits.
As soon as Microsoft releases a fully documented, non-patented format, or at least creates a perpetual license for F/OSS projects to use a patented format, I'll welcome them with open arms.
Will you do that even without considering the merits of their patented-yet-standardized format?
They've promised to create exactly that perpetual license, and there's pretty much no question at this point that they will indeed do so. The problem is this: Their proposed format sucks, and ECMA probably won't do anything about it.
Compared to ODF, the format Microsoft is proposing is vastly less suitable for XMLT transforms. It fails to leverage preexisting standards, so other implementations can't take advantage of existing code to render and manipulate SVG, MathML and the like.
Please see the OpenDocument Fellowship's introduction to the technical merits of Microsoft's proposed format to better understand the extralegal objections to the same.
I think you have just shown that you and your wife are not very well traveled inside the US, and even less so outside of the US.
Guilty as charged -- and I'm certainly not about to dispute your assertions, having neither data to do so nor any reason to believe that they're other than correct: My background is strictly West-coast US, and my wife has rarely left her native state of Texas. My assertion was, again, based not on any study of linguistics on my own part nor extensive personal experience but rather a rule of thumb taught to my wife in her time as a music student. I'd argue that in the context it was given (southern US) that this rule is largely correct, but gladly abandon any assertion that it applies elsewhere or as a general rule. I'd further argue that even if it fails to hold universally true with regard to speech that the written analogue is nonetheless applicable.
(As an aside, I've yet to meet anyone I'm uncomfortable being with -- I grew up in a upper-middle-class family but, on account of my father's involvement in local politics, have long been accustomed to interacting with my betters).
To me slashdot is a tech oriented daycare where there are 10 000 people all saying "notice me" or "i have something to contribute" or "in soviet russia..." etc.
True -- but that's a Bad Thing, right? Most of those people are noise rather than signal; why cater to them or otherwise permit them to impact your behaviour? And if you're intent on being signal yourself -- well, then, be quality signal, and write what you do in a way that's pleasing for others to read.
What if they are a natural progression of language?
It doesn't matter if they're "a natural progression of language"; they're still classless.
Have you noticed that people from higher social strata typically pronounce more of the letters of the words they speak, whereas those from lower classes tend to slur or leave sounds out? This was pointed out to me by my wife, who -- while from a lower-class background herself -- spent years of her life taking singing classes (which covered pronunciation and suppression of her native Southern accent) and who for quite some time worked in jewelery sales in establishments catering to the upper middle class.
Even if the natural progression of language is over the course of centuries, to leave more and more sounds out, that doesn't improve the image you project in the immediate term by doing so yourself. If you want to come off as low-class, by all means participate in this "evolutionary change" -- but if you want yourself to be percieved in a better light, I would advise against it.
To be sure, acronyms are widely used -- but acronyms can be used in the context of otherwise-gramatically-correct language, or at least language which indicates enough of an effort towards correctness as not to be an insult to the reader.
Perhaps in principal some correlation might be made between the practices -- but in practice, one of them is taken by a significant portion of the community to be an affront towards the reader, whereas the other is near-universally considered acceptable in the relevant context.
I guess the lack of class must not extend to using slang and shorthand such as '/.' and 'n00bs' then.
"n00bs" would indeed have been classless had its use in the context of an otherwise-well-written message not come to implicitly parody how t3h haxx0rs communicate among themselves. The acceptability of the abberiation '/.' is harder to explain -- but nonetheless, it is typically acceptable; it doesn't offend me or anyone else I know, whereas "u", "ur", "gr8", and such do. Put it down to some arbitrary meme if it makes you feel happier -- but even if the meme genuinely is arbitrary (and I'm not really inclined to believe so), that doesn't make following it any less of a social norm.
How very convenient for you.
My ability to follow norms isn't a matter of luck. I've been around for a while.
...especially for something as petty and inane to a technical discussion as prose...
Good writing is important in technical forums. How To Ask Questions The Smart Way is in my experience accurate in its assertion that those who write carelessly are often observed to be careless in other endevours as well, and that those who write poorly are consequently given less respect on mailing lists and such.
This is a civil, not a criminal, matter. (Well, nowadays it could be both, but in this particular case it'll certainly be civil). Civil cases only need to be won by a "preponderance of the evidence", not "beyond a reasonable doubt", and there's no grand jury to deal with. It's a much easier standard to meet.
Slashdot Mirror
MS isn't cenoring the reporter - CHINA IS.
Incorrect. If you RTFM, it is MSN's employees, rather than China's upstream infrastructure, removing content.
Did you read the settlement terms?
Having more than four qualifying repairs, he'll get $1000 back.
Hmm -- you're right; PHP's database API appears not to have that support.
Maybe I should have said "every competant database access API in existance".
Bringing in a bit of new blood now and again is a good thing. Having a workforce devoid of practical experience is a recipe for disaster.
CSU Chico, where I attended, had a strong claim to have one of the best computer science programs in California -- and some of the professors were very good -- but the grad students by and large left me unimpressed there as well.
All I can conclude is that graduating from a university, even a well-reputed one, does not imply strong real-world skills.
It seems to me that you're arguing from the perspective that having "protection" for your ideas is an end goal in and of itself -- and for some, that may well be the case. However, in the US, the point of the patent system is encouraging invention -- not the creation of Yet Another Commodity.
I'm speaking as a shareholder and senior engineer at a startup making software targeted at a large and lucerative market. There are some extremely innovative elements to our product (where the unique part is not the number of man-hours but the concepts which guided how those man-hours were applied), and there are other elements which required large amounts of skilled labor from folks whose labor goes for a substantially higher market rate than your typical development staff. If I were looking out only for my immediate wealth (and not concerned about my company being sued for unknowingly infringing others' patents on non-differentiating technology), I would be strongly in favor of same sorts of "strong patent protection" you're espousing here.
However -- I can't honestly support that. Why? I'm not "developing a patent"; I'm developing software targeted to a very specific userbase. Part of my regular job duties is coming up with new devices and algorithms when necessary to efficiently perform some task I've been handed -- and as the geek-of-all-trades (unlike the many specialists we have in house), I perform a lot of different tasks, and build a lot of new tools. The goal of these isn't to have something we can sell to our customers -- rather, almost all of them are used to meet some immediate need, either for the customer or the business internally. Patenting the things I come up with over the course of my regular work (and there are a reasonable number of them which the USPTO would quite certainly accept -- some of the anti-tampering technology I developed comes to mind in particular, so long as nobody else has come up with it first) would be overhead: It would mean I'd have less time, and so invent less stuff. Worse, though, would be the case where I were obligated to check everything I create for infringements on others' patents -- my work would be damn near paralyzed. Can I justify patenting the big ideas that matter more than the implementation man-hour count? Absolutely... but those are very, very few and far between.
Finally, I have faith in our ability to make a good product -- not only to have differentiating features, but to get them out first, implement them best and provide our customers with good service. Let the competition try to play catch-up -- some of them may be larger, but being small means we can be faster on our feet, and we have some damn good talent. I'm much more afraid of the big guys driving us out of business (or convincing us to sell them our technology) by threating us with patents on items that should be obvious than I am of them beating us fair and square.
It's an incentive, to be sure -- but if it's an excessive incentive, then it does the economy as a whole more harm than good. It should be enough to encourage innovation, but not so much as to result in the sorts of nonsense which presently occur (in which a company's ability to sell a large and complex product can be completely halted based on their ability to license a patent on some small and obvious component thereof -- thu
SQL injection flaws are related to how well the application using the database is written, not the database itself. Any database-backed application can have SQL injection flaws, no matter what the underlying database, so long as the application is written by an idiot.
Listen, kids: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER pass user-provided values into your SQL queries as strings. There's a reason every database access API in existance allows positional or named parameters to be passed outside the parser, and it's not just performance.
And if I sound a little grumpy on this topic -- like maybe I'd recently worked with a developer lacking just this sort of clue... well, maybe you'd be interpreting my tone correctly.
I mean, just because a boss is trying to be funny and cheer everyone up, doesn't mean he's succeeding...
Yes, yes, yes. I would far rather a boss who actually respects his team, takes our opinions seriously, fires the incompetant people and lets us do our blue-sky R&D projects now and again to one who makes jokes or tries to take the team out to lunch every week but lacks the former attributes.
But oh wait, you mean they ought to give it to you for free while you can make money out of it?
That's what their competition is doing.
You do no collaboration with your customers?
Well, no, I don't. Sometimes they send me specs for a preexisting system we need to integrate with, and I'll send back issues wrt the system not meeting specs, or questions about places where it's fuzzy, or so forth... but in no case do I find myself editing their documents, or them editing mine.
For the business types, what you suggest may be a very legitimate concern -- but I'm engineering; my closest contact with 3rd parties is working on integrations as above. (And yes, that's pretty much the split -- OpenOffice is used on the engineering side of the house, MS Office by management).
The observation was made multiple times in the same thread, by different parties. I don't know about you, but I only check old threads when I receive a message that there's been a response to my post -- so I'd only have had an opportunity to discuss the point with one of the two individuals making the observation had I not responded twice. You'll also note I killed my +1, so as not to annoy folks by having my post made twice. I've never worked with Oracle, but I have been a company during its transition from engineering-driven to marketing-driven, and it wasn't a pleasing experience.
And yes, it's a bloody name -- indeed, that's what this entire thread is about. What things are called impacts how people think about them, and much information can be inferred by a name -- "10g", for instance, infers to those not in the know that it was preceded by Oracle 10, a through f. This obvious inference is false -- and that the marketers would lead a good many people to make a false inference just so they can choose one feature to point out is, indeed, a shame.
Yes, but that's only sensible if there were a simple "Oracle 10" for folks not doing grid computing. Since there isn't, the "g" in there is useless marketing fluff, and thus abominable.
So Firefox's new release should be 1.5u, because its spiffy new user-visible feature is the non-sucking update support?
If Oracle 10g were a release intended to be *only* used for grid computing (such that everyone else just used Oracle 10), it would make sense. Since this isn't the case, it's completely bogus.
I think it'll be interesting to see what ISO has to say -- they're not nearly the pushovers ECMA are reputed to be when it comes to being influenced by vendors rather than technical merits.
They've promised to create exactly that perpetual license, and there's pretty much no question at this point that they will indeed do so. The problem is this: Their proposed format sucks, and ECMA probably won't do anything about it.
Compared to ODF, the format Microsoft is proposing is vastly less suitable for XMLT transforms. It fails to leverage preexisting standards, so other implementations can't take advantage of existing code to render and manipulate SVG, MathML and the like.
Please see the OpenDocument Fellowship's introduction to the technical merits of Microsoft's proposed format to better understand the extralegal objections to the same.
I think you have just shown that you and your wife are not very well traveled inside the US, and even less so outside of the US.
Guilty as charged -- and I'm certainly not about to dispute your assertions, having neither data to do so nor any reason to believe that they're other than correct: My background is strictly West-coast US, and my wife has rarely left her native state of Texas. My assertion was, again, based not on any study of linguistics on my own part nor extensive personal experience but rather a rule of thumb taught to my wife in her time as a music student. I'd argue that in the context it was given (southern US) that this rule is largely correct, but gladly abandon any assertion that it applies elsewhere or as a general rule. I'd further argue that even if it fails to hold universally true with regard to speech that the written analogue is nonetheless applicable.
(As an aside, I've yet to meet anyone I'm uncomfortable being with -- I grew up in a upper-middle-class family but, on account of my father's involvement in local politics, have long been accustomed to interacting with my betters).
Even if the natural progression of language is over the course of centuries, to leave more and more sounds out, that doesn't improve the image you project in the immediate term by doing so yourself. If you want to come off as low-class, by all means participate in this "evolutionary change" -- but if you want yourself to be percieved in a better light, I would advise against it.
What it is is easy to explain. Why it's acceptable while some other shorthand isn't is a different matter.
To be sure, acronyms are widely used -- but acronyms can be used in the context of otherwise-gramatically-correct language, or at least language which indicates enough of an effort towards correctness as not to be an insult to the reader.
Perhaps in principal some correlation might be made between the practices -- but in practice, one of them is taken by a significant portion of the community to be an affront towards the reader, whereas the other is near-universally considered acceptable in the relevant context.
There are other FS-aware tools available. ntfsclone, for instance, is considered mature and stable.