"We have investigated ourselves and found that we did nothing wrong." - Facebook/Police
"Except for that politically biased 'trending news' selection that made the news during last year's election, but we stopped that, honest." - Zuckerberg
Lowe is doing even worse than just complaining that planning knowledge work is hard: he's complaining that it is not only impossible, but that it is harmful to try. It's great for consultants if they can convince the customer that is true, because then the customer won't actually hold them responsible for time or dollar budgets, but it is essentially not true. Almost no software development is comparable to building a fusion reactor from scratch, or sending a manned spacecraft to Jupiter, and competent managers can usually recognize when a project involves that many unknowns. Lowe's blog post is essentially a prolonged admission of the first "value" of Zed A. Shaw's Programming, Motherfucker.
Of course, if you have a cookie-cutter project which is something you've done before with a few changes, you can predict the time taken to reach milestones, because your team has done it before.
That's silly. Depending on the size of the project and how good the team is at developing a work breakdown (decomposing big tasks into smaller, but still well-defined, ones), more than 50% and probably more than 75% of any project will look familiar. You may be developing a new web service, but if you've done NoSQL or RPC or whatever before, you usually have a pretty good idea how long it takes to bring up a small/medium/large instance of NoSQL/RPC/whatever, even though the application-specific details will be new.
If that number is less than 50%, it should be a major red flag for upper management, because the team doesn't have enough experience to make a plan that they can hope to execute. The best hope is to go off, do trials to understand the kinds of problems you'll run into, and then make a plan. If you can break the work into small enough chunks that 75% of the effort looks reasonably familiar, then you have also identified the high-risk areas, and those are the ones where management needs to pay more attention to progress.
You don't have to go full Team Software Process -- where the target is usually to plan with a work breakdown where the leaf tasks take no more than 8 hours -- to get most of the benefit of the approach.
"Granting" in patent field means you attempt to get a patent whether the application is approved.
That is not what grant means in the patent process. The patent grant is when the government (or other body) officially recognizes the inventor(s) as holding exclusive rights to the invention. That happens after the applicant files a patent application, after the government reviews the claimed invention and existing art, and after the government approves the issuance of the patent.
If what you say were true, then there would be no sense in complaining that "the USPTO is funded by charging fees for granting patents (and not just applying for them)", because "granting patents" would include applying for them.
My point was that the USPTO is funded mostly by things besides the fees that drinkypoo complained about. According to the USPTO's most recent annual report, issue fees provide less than 10% of their income from fees (see the figure on page 40). Given that there are substantial expenses related specifically to the publication of a patent -- for example, costs to archive the patent essentially for the life of the USA -- it seems particularly frivolous to complain about the USPTO charging fees to issue a patent.
You can insist that words don't mean what they do, but your mis-definitions would obliterate the distinction that drinkypoo was trying to make. He argued that the patent office should be funded by fees for things besides issuing patents, which is already essentially true. It's not clear that the "issue fee" is disproportionately high compared to the work it entails.
So drinkypoo's comment is still essentially wrong, but somehow gets modded to +4 because it gives people something to feel outraged over? This is a large part of what is wrong with/. these days.
That business model never really went away, it just became less prominent. For example, you can still buy a "Unisys ClearPath Forward(tm) Dorado" system (their marketing department keeps up with the latest fads, at least...) with a limit on how many MIPS it lets you use.
The thing a patentee is "maintaining" is his or her exclusive rights to the patented invention. One must to pay every few years, and those fees escalate over the potential life of the patent, to defer people from maintaining or asserting patents that are not in live use. Those maintenance fees are a small fraction of the USPTO's budget, but even if they were the majority, it would not make correct your claim that "the USPTO is funded by charging fees for granting [emphasis in the original] patents".
Patent examiners are not the USPTO. They are employees of the USPTO, and the USPTO is -- contrary to drinkypoo's assertion -- not "funded by charging fees for granting patents". There are extensive fees for applying for a patent, but no fees are due upon grant of a patent.
Where on the USPTO's fee schedule (https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule) do you see a fee for issuing a patent? There are fees for applying, fees for very large applications, fees to maintain an issued patent, but I see none for issuing a patent.
The voltage variations in question are driven by the random defects in the silicon and in the fabrication process, not so much the CPU design or the OS (or even firmware) running on the chip.
It takes Courage (tm) and money -- lots of money -- for Apple to create innovations like edge-to-edge screens, splash resistance, HDR displays in a mobile form factor, and OLED screens in phones. It's only fair for Apple to charge more than Android devices to deliver the kind of inventions that they do.
If Furie was bringing a trademark lawsuit, his case would be pretty strong, but the DMCA does not allow take-down notices over alleged trademark infringement, and sending a take-down notice with the intention of pursuing trademark claims would be a blatant violation of the "good faith" claim required in the DMCA takedown notice. That's the kind of thing that can lead to a judge throwing a plaintiff's complaint right out of court.
No, they were trying to stop the spread of a "circumvention" tool that bypasses a mechanism that "effectively controls access to" a copyrighted work. The DMCA made sharing such information effectively the same as direct copyright infringement. I don't think any court ever got around to pointing out that legitimate research into the mechanism would be protected by the First Amendment.
Man-in-the-middle attacks require an attacker to be in the middle. Only third parties with access to the network links (or routing tables), not "any" third party.
Studies praised for being groundbreaking are more likely to be fraudulent, or at least hyped out of all proportion to their actual rigor and analytical strength.
No, Microsoft's "premier" office product runs on their servers. Whether those servers run Linux is irrelevant: the important factor is that the core logic does not run on the end user's computer. If you're not sending whatever data Microsoft wants to Microsoft, you can't use their "premier" office product.
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I am not sure what base you were working in, but here in decimal land, 3 years is 36 months, and 3000 / 36 = 55.55....
"We have investigated ourselves and found that we did nothing wrong." - Facebook/Police
"Except for that politically biased 'trending news' selection that made the news during last year's election, but we stopped that, honest." - Zuckerberg
Lowe is doing even worse than just complaining that planning knowledge work is hard: he's complaining that it is not only impossible, but that it is harmful to try. It's great for consultants if they can convince the customer that is true, because then the customer won't actually hold them responsible for time or dollar budgets, but it is essentially not true. Almost no software development is comparable to building a fusion reactor from scratch, or sending a manned spacecraft to Jupiter, and competent managers can usually recognize when a project involves that many unknowns. Lowe's blog post is essentially a prolonged admission of the first "value" of Zed A. Shaw's Programming, Motherfucker.
That's silly. Depending on the size of the project and how good the team is at developing a work breakdown (decomposing big tasks into smaller, but still well-defined, ones), more than 50% and probably more than 75% of any project will look familiar. You may be developing a new web service, but if you've done NoSQL or RPC or whatever before, you usually have a pretty good idea how long it takes to bring up a small/medium/large instance of NoSQL/RPC/whatever, even though the application-specific details will be new.
If that number is less than 50%, it should be a major red flag for upper management, because the team doesn't have enough experience to make a plan that they can hope to execute. The best hope is to go off, do trials to understand the kinds of problems you'll run into, and then make a plan. If you can break the work into small enough chunks that 75% of the effort looks reasonably familiar, then you have also identified the high-risk areas, and those are the ones where management needs to pay more attention to progress.
You don't have to go full Team Software Process -- where the target is usually to plan with a work breakdown where the leaf tasks take no more than 8 hours -- to get most of the benefit of the approach.
That is not what grant means in the patent process. The patent grant is when the government (or other body) officially recognizes the inventor(s) as holding exclusive rights to the invention. That happens after the applicant files a patent application, after the government reviews the claimed invention and existing art, and after the government approves the issuance of the patent.
If what you say were true, then there would be no sense in complaining that "the USPTO is funded by charging fees for granting patents (and not just applying for them)", because "granting patents" would include applying for them.
My point was that the USPTO is funded mostly by things besides the fees that drinkypoo complained about. According to the USPTO's most recent annual report, issue fees provide less than 10% of their income from fees (see the figure on page 40). Given that there are substantial expenses related specifically to the publication of a patent -- for example, costs to archive the patent essentially for the life of the USA -- it seems particularly frivolous to complain about the USPTO charging fees to issue a patent.
You can insist that words don't mean what they do, but your mis-definitions would obliterate the distinction that drinkypoo was trying to make. He argued that the patent office should be funded by fees for things besides issuing patents, which is already essentially true. It's not clear that the "issue fee" is disproportionately high compared to the work it entails.
So drinkypoo's comment is still essentially wrong, but somehow gets modded to +4 because it gives people something to feel outraged over? This is a large part of what is wrong with /. these days.
That business model never really went away, it just became less prominent. For example, you can still buy a "Unisys ClearPath Forward(tm) Dorado" system (their marketing department keeps up with the latest fads, at least...) with a limit on how many MIPS it lets you use.
The thing a patentee is "maintaining" is his or her exclusive rights to the patented invention. One must to pay every few years, and those fees escalate over the potential life of the patent, to defer people from maintaining or asserting patents that are not in live use. Those maintenance fees are a small fraction of the USPTO's budget, but even if they were the majority, it would not make correct your claim that "the USPTO is funded by charging fees for granting [emphasis in the original] patents".
Patent examiners are not the USPTO. They are employees of the USPTO, and the USPTO is -- contrary to drinkypoo's assertion -- not "funded by charging fees for granting patents". There are extensive fees for applying for a patent, but no fees are due upon grant of a patent.
Where on the USPTO's fee schedule (https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule) do you see a fee for issuing a patent? There are fees for applying, fees for very large applications, fees to maintain an issued patent, but I see none for issuing a patent.
The voltage variations in question are driven by the random defects in the silicon and in the fabrication process, not so much the CPU design or the OS (or even firmware) running on the chip.
That comment was posted as AC, so I would guess it passed for the AC's idea of "stinky bait". Please don't feed the trolls.
"Eventually" will have a stable ABI. In the mean time, they still break the whole language about as often as C++ releases a new revision.
Now I feel about about already having used the Apple "courage" joke today.
Perhaps you misunderstood the antecedent of "they" at the end of my comment ;)
If it helps clarify, I should have also mentioned wireless charging among the expensive innovations that Apple charges so much for.
It takes Courage (tm) and money -- lots of money -- for Apple to create innovations like edge-to-edge screens, splash resistance, HDR displays in a mobile form factor, and OLED screens in phones. It's only fair for Apple to charge more than Android devices to deliver the kind of inventions that they do.
Why do you think "his case is pretty clear cut"? What facts and case law do you rely on in that judgment? Are you aware that determining whether something is copyright infringement "can be maddeningly complex, and frustratingly (or entertainingly) fact specific"?
Did Furie's targets copy an image to the extent that his Pepe "really constitutes the story being told" by their uses? Has he defeated the fair use factors that supported 2 Live Crew when they were sued over Pretty Woman ?
If Furie was bringing a trademark lawsuit, his case would be pretty strong, but the DMCA does not allow take-down notices over alleged trademark infringement, and sending a take-down notice with the intention of pursuing trademark claims would be a blatant violation of the "good faith" claim required in the DMCA takedown notice. That's the kind of thing that can lead to a judge throwing a plaintiff's complaint right out of court.
No, they were trying to stop the spread of a "circumvention" tool that bypasses a mechanism that "effectively controls access to" a copyrighted work. The DMCA made sharing such information effectively the same as direct copyright infringement. I don't think any court ever got around to pointing out that legitimate research into the mechanism would be protected by the First Amendment.
Now that's what I call ignorance.
Man-in-the-middle attacks require an attacker to be in the middle. Only third parties with access to the network links (or routing tables), not "any" third party.
And IPsec is still a thing.
I run my development server on a Raspberry Pi, you insensitive clod!
Studies praised for being groundbreaking are more likely to be fraudulent, or at least hyped out of all proportion to their actual rigor and analytical strength.
What, intercompany politics never cause problems for IT departments? Like Java or SCO lawsuits?
Yup, and pushing garbage ideas like "enterprises that don't want open source politics infesting their IT" is part of that.
No, Microsoft's "premier" office product runs on their servers. Whether those servers run Linux is irrelevant: the important factor is that the core logic does not run on the end user's computer. If you're not sending whatever data Microsoft wants to Microsoft, you can't use their "premier" office product.