For what it's worth, the best software developers I've ever met all had a good math background. The better the background, the better quality work done by the software developer. The worse the background, the worse the quality of the software.
Writing a high quality, very solid program is quite similar to proving a theorem by construction.
A good mathemetician covers every single possibility when proving a theorem and leaves nothing out.
Similarly, a good programmer covers every single contingency in his software. As a result, the software runs and it runs correctly.
What's your definition of a submarine patent then?
The person filing the patent does his best to draw out the process and make modifications to the patent in order to claim prior ownership of other people's recent work.
About 5 years ago, I set up an NT machine for this one lady at the office. Since then, I've forgotten the Administrator password. I've tried and tried to remember it, but so far, nothing.
I really don't want to bother reinstalling NT on the machine.
The woman retired last year and we have a new hire to take her place. The new woman knows absolutely nothing about computers at all. I'm tempted to install Linux on the machine and train her on that.
Air conditioning can be quite lucrative, too. I know a former IBM engineer who took early retirement and now owns his own air conditioning business. He appears to be doing much better in it than he ever did as an IBM engineer.
My usual suggestion is that if your oil light ever comes on when you're driving, you should do the following steps:
1) Add oil 2) Place ad in paper 3) Sell car 4) Buy new car.
Of course, there are exceptions. I was driving down the road one day in my '64 International pickup when the oil pressure guage suddenly showed no pressure at all.
I stopped on the side of the road, opened the hood, and found that the wire had come off the oil pressure sending unit.
So, if the oil pressure light comes on due to the wire coming off the oil pressure sending unit, you don't have to sell the car.
In my part of Texas, jury trials are few and far between.
Years ago, criminal trials were the rule. But the locals got kind of tired of all the trials and started getting tougher and tougher with the punishment.
Pretty soon, the criminals started to realize that they are better off if they pled guilty.
I don't know how accurate this is, but a number of years ago, someone with a long list of convictions was being tried for petty theft in this county. During the trial, evidence was found that proved beyond any doubt that he was innocent of that particular theft. True to form, several members of the jury wanted to find him guilty anyway.
If someone figured out a way to receive cable with an ultrasensitive receiver then good for him.
Actually, that has been done.
I don't know how effective it is now, but at one time, in many areas, you could point an antenna at the cable junction and receive free signal.
I have heard of people setting up an antenna a few inches away from the cable junction. As long as it wasn't mounted on cable company property, the cable employees couldn't do anything about it.
This was prior to the passage of the law applying theft of service to cable signal in Texas. And also prior to the DMCA. I suspect you might have bigger problems now.
How about the blonde who had one of these with a KVM switch to handle both screens?
One advantage (and a disadvantage)
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
Sign up but make sure your outgoing port 25 are blocked. The spammer will think the spams are going out.
However, the spammer could just send out multiple copies of the spam to each address from a variety of sources to ensure that the recipient is sufficiently annoyed.
A bit more than 20 years ago, I was working at a medium sized engineering company. One Sunday morning, I was bored and decided to go to the office and play with the PDP-11/70 computer.
About 7 am or so, the security guard came into the computer room and found me sitting there with every main board on the 11/70 pulled out and leaning against the computer. (I have no recollection of the intended purpose.)
I thought I was going to be in trouble, but fortunately, she didn't know I wasn't supposed do things like that. She just said hi and went along her way.
I preferred the guards who stayed down on the first floor.
Given two or more programmers looking for a job who are otherwise nearly equal, I'd hire one who knows assembly over the one who doesn't.
Assembly languaged used to be my favorite language for doing anything. Unfortunately, it is rare that I can use assembly language in my usual software development projects.
Go a bit further and institute a bidding system for allocation of resources.
For example, if I want to run some monster job and don't have the credits, I have to wait for credits to accumulate by letting others use my computer. Or I could submit a bid for the credits I have available in case the bid might win during a period when usage was light.
The bid would include the total number of credits offered to do the job, the amount of processing power desired (number of processors, minimum processor requirements, type of processors, and maximum length of time per processor).
During spring break when everyone is out of town, processing power could become cheap enough to run some really big jobs. Saturday night when everyone is out partying might give one a chance to run some reasonably large jobs.
In other words, the bidding system would try to maximize utility by giving priority to projects that the submitter thinks highly enough to offer more credits to run the project.
Add the ability to do checkpointing so you can restart the tasks being handled by one computer on another. An ability to migrate tasks from computers that suddenly become busy to other, less busy computers would be invaluable, too.
Some method of transferring credits from one person to another would help. You might be able to obtain additional credits from others by mowing their lawn or something.
One of the e-mail addresses I've had for a number of years gets an unbelievable amount of spam.
It appears as my contact address for information about certain ports on the IANA port assignment lists. I never thought about it until someone else pointed out that many of the spams arriving at addresses on the list have forged e-mail addresses from other addresses on the list.
Other addresses that I use extensively, including many Usenet postings, for much longer don't receive near as much spam.
There was more to it than that, but you are partly correct.
The big reason was that enough of the details of the Windows operating system were available that people could actually do something. Apple wanted to be the single source for most of the software as well.
From Apple's point of view, users were basically consumers of both hardware and software products.
With the PC and many other competing systems, the barriers to entry were much lower -- you could also be a producer of software as well.
Everyone I know who was into the Macintosh were strictly users with little idea of knowing how the software worked and no inclination to learn how to write their own software. Everyone with an interest in writing software were using other computers and operating systems.
With OSX, I think there is finally room for the technically savvy users to do something more with their Macintosh systems than to just run programs from Apple and other software vendors.
Why not require an extensive patent review by the patent office before any patent lawsuit can be brought against an alleged infringer?
Post official notices of all patent reviews and allow all interested parties to submit to the patent office any and all related material they think should be considered in the patent review.
Then, if the patent is still in place after the review, allow the lawsuit to be filed.
Several years ago, Bryan / College Station, Texas had two cable companies that competed directly against each other. In many areas of town, you could could call one cable company up up, cancel his service, call up the other, and subscribe.
The result was fabulous cable service at a low price.
When they merged, the price went up and the quality went down.
What I'd like is an ala carte service on Dish network. There is only a few channels I'd like to watch, primarily the Western Channel and Fox News. Why should I pay for all those other channels I don't want?
Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is.
They've already done it.
.biz was already in use when ICANN adopted it.
OpenNIC, for one, does not recognize ICANN's use of the.biz domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Proof?
For what it's worth, the best software developers I've ever met all had a good math background. The better the background, the better quality work done by the software developer. The worse the background, the worse the quality of the software.
Writing a high quality, very solid program is quite similar to proving a theorem by construction.
A good mathemetician covers every single possibility when proving a theorem and leaves nothing out.
Similarly, a good programmer covers every single contingency in his software. As a result, the software runs and it runs correctly.
Just tell them slashdot encrypts everything now.
The person filing the patent does his best to draw out the process and make modifications to the patent in order to claim prior ownership of other people's recent work.
About 5 years ago, I set up an NT machine for this one lady at the office. Since then, I've forgotten the Administrator password. I've tried and tried to remember it, but so far, nothing.
I really don't want to bother reinstalling NT on the machine.
The woman retired last year and we have a new hire to take her place. The new woman knows absolutely nothing about computers at all. I'm tempted to install Linux on the machine and train her on that.
Well, you could get a card reader.
But then, you get sued by DirectTV.
Passwords are much cheaper and less time consuming.
Air conditioning can be quite lucrative, too. I know a former IBM engineer who took early retirement and now owns his own air conditioning business. He appears to be doing much better in it than he ever did as an IBM engineer.
My usual suggestion is that if your oil light ever comes on when you're driving, you should do the following steps:
1) Add oil
2) Place ad in paper
3) Sell car
4) Buy new car.
Of course, there are exceptions. I was driving down the road one day in my '64 International pickup when the oil pressure guage suddenly showed no pressure at all.
I stopped on the side of the road, opened the hood, and found that the wire had come off the oil pressure sending unit.
So, if the oil pressure light comes on due to the wire coming off the oil pressure sending unit, you don't have to sell the car.
In my part of Texas, jury trials are few and far between.
Years ago, criminal trials were the rule. But the locals got kind of tired of all the trials and started getting tougher and tougher with the punishment.
Pretty soon, the criminals started to realize that they are better off if they pled guilty.
I don't know how accurate this is, but a number of years ago, someone with a long list of convictions was being tried for petty theft in this county. During the trial, evidence was found that proved beyond any doubt that he was innocent of that particular theft. True to form, several members of the jury wanted to find him guilty anyway.
Actually, that has been done.
I don't know how effective it is now, but at one time, in many areas, you could point an antenna at the cable junction and receive free signal.
I have heard of people setting up an antenna a few inches away from the cable junction. As long as it wasn't mounted on cable company property, the cable employees couldn't do anything about it.
This was prior to the passage of the law applying theft of service to cable signal in Texas. And also prior to the DMCA. I suspect you might have bigger problems now.
How about the blonde who had one of these with a KVM switch to handle both screens?
Sign up but make sure your outgoing port 25 are blocked. The spammer will think the spams are going out.
However, the spammer could just send out multiple copies of the spam to each address from a variety of sources to ensure that the recipient is sufficiently annoyed.
How much CPU time does it actually take to send traffic on a network?
Even if it were a gigabit network, you probably wouldn't see that great a network utilization.
On a regular cable modem, it might take a week to use a couple of hours of CPU time.
I'd bet the CPU utilization wouldn't max out even with an 80286 and earlier computer.
So, assume it uses about 2% of your CPU. Then, it would be:
$1/CPU hour * 24 hours/day * 7 days/week * 2 CPU hour/100 hours = $3.36 per week.
That could be a real pain.
A bit more than 20 years ago, I was working at a medium sized engineering company. One Sunday morning, I was bored and decided to go to the office and play with the PDP-11/70 computer.
About 7 am or so, the security guard came into the computer room and found me sitting there with every main board on the 11/70 pulled out and leaning against the computer. (I have no recollection of the intended purpose.)
I thought I was going to be in trouble, but fortunately, she didn't know I wasn't supposed do things like that. She just said hi and went along her way.
I preferred the guards who stayed down on the first floor.
You are exactly right.
Given two or more programmers looking for a job who are otherwise nearly equal, I'd hire one who knows assembly over the one who doesn't.
Assembly languaged used to be my favorite language for doing anything. Unfortunately, it is rare that I can use assembly language in my usual software development projects.
Go a bit further and institute a bidding system for allocation of resources.
For example, if I want to run some monster job and don't have the credits, I have to wait for credits to accumulate by letting others use my computer. Or I could submit a bid for the credits I have available in case the bid might win during a period when usage was light.
The bid would include the total number of credits offered to do the job, the amount of processing power desired (number of processors, minimum processor requirements, type of processors, and maximum length of time per processor).
During spring break when everyone is out of town, processing power could become cheap enough to run some really big jobs. Saturday night when everyone is out partying might give one a chance to run some reasonably large jobs.
In other words, the bidding system would try to maximize utility by giving priority to projects that the submitter thinks highly enough to offer more credits to run the project.
Add the ability to do checkpointing so you can restart the tasks being handled by one computer on another. An ability to migrate tasks from computers that suddenly become busy to other, less busy computers would be invaluable, too.
Some method of transferring credits from one person to another would help. You might be able to obtain additional credits from others by mowing their lawn or something.
It could be the basis for a whole new economy.
I think the primary reason is that there are enormous numbers of numerical routines in Fortran that are extremely well debugged and validated.
Change to other languages and those routines must be rewritten, redebugged, and revalidated.
That's sure good news. I have someone new that I'm teaching how to do some work that has lots of simple command line invocations.
It's slow going teach her to do it, but I'd sooner do that and have someone who doesn't think of command lines as "too hard".
One of the e-mail addresses I've had for a number of years gets an unbelievable amount of spam.
It appears as my contact address for information about certain ports on the IANA port assignment lists. I never thought about it until someone else pointed out that many of the spams arriving at addresses on the list have forged e-mail addresses from other addresses on the list.
Other addresses that I use extensively, including many Usenet postings, for much longer don't receive near as much spam.
There was more to it than that, but you are partly correct.
The big reason was that enough of the details of the Windows operating system were available that people could actually do something. Apple wanted to be the single source for most of the software as well.
From Apple's point of view, users were basically consumers of both hardware and software products.
With the PC and many other competing systems, the barriers to entry were much lower -- you could also be a producer of software as well.
Everyone I know who was into the Macintosh were strictly users with little idea of knowing how the software worked and no inclination to learn how to write their own software. Everyone with an interest in writing software were using other computers and operating systems.
With OSX, I think there is finally room for the technically savvy users to do something more with their Macintosh systems than to just run programs from Apple and other software vendors.
Maybe we'd better concentrate on teaching secure practices in India.
We'll all be working at Walmart, not writing software.
Why not require an extensive patent review by the patent office before any patent lawsuit can be brought against an alleged infringer?
Post official notices of all patent reviews and allow all interested parties to submit to the patent office any and all related material they think should be considered in the patent review.
Then, if the patent is still in place after the review, allow the lawsuit to be filed.
Several years ago, Bryan / College Station, Texas had two cable companies that competed directly against each other. In many areas of town, you could could call one cable company up up, cancel his service, call up the other, and subscribe.
The result was fabulous cable service at a low price.
When they merged, the price went up and the quality went down.
What I'd like is an ala carte service on Dish network. There is only a few channels I'd like to watch, primarily the Western Channel and Fox News. Why should I pay for all those other channels I don't want?
It is malware.
It should be removed on sight.
If I see it on someone's computer, I strongly advise them to remove it entirely from their computer.
They've already done it.
.biz was already in use when ICANN adopted it.
OpenNIC, for one, does not recognize ICANN's use of the .biz domain.
Now you could take Bjarne Stroustrup out to lunch at Texas A&M instead. There are quite a few good Mexican restraunts in Bryan and College Station.