My contract stipulates any IP/code generated during the course of my duties
But then I'm a contractor so they can't stop me doing other work and don't want to get in an IP fight with another well funded entity rather than just me.
I can live with the clause I signed & any fair employer would only want stuff you did in the course of your duties and not the new flavour of bubble gum you came up with at home.
The key thing though is to ensure there is clear separtation between work & non-work and document your ideas. IANAL but if you send yourself the idea recorded delivery & deposit the unopened envelope it with your solicitor you are a lot safer. This guy presumambly cannot prove he started work before he took the job & did not separate home ideas from work ideas - big mistake.
You're right, it is interesting I'll probably have a real read of this. It doesn't look as though they're trying to say that the main structure of DNA is a 4 stranded helix, rather that DNA can form 4 stranded structures in a way which seems quite compatible with the Watson-Crick model.
Yes, I think they were right. In the 50 years since the first published postulate of the double helical structure a lot of work has been done (to say the least) that supports it.
I am by training a molecular biologist and I'm pretty sure that the 4 strand helix model does not support the techniques used during genetic engineering in which proteins are used to cut DNA leaving single stranded "sticky" ends that then reattatch to the inserted genes. The structure & function of at least some of these proteins is very well characterised.
Nor does 4 stranded DNA map as readily to tRNA which is single stranded.
Nor does 4 stranded map particularly well to the macro structure of DNA with the extra folding around histone proteins.
Yes DNA does not retain it's classical double helix all of the time. Often it is being repaired or replicated & is unfolded or it is stored in a highly dense packed format but the one to one corrolation between A-T & G-C plus the strong natural binding between the bases means that they probably did get it right.
All my knowledge is out of date by nigh on 20 years but I know enough to be confident that Rosie's results were interpreted correctly by Watson & Crick.
How does a 4 stranded helix give better corrolation to the results? You can't just say these things without giving evidence.
I went to a speech recognition conference 15 years ago & Carnegie Mellon were reporting very similar sounding research they were doing for the US Navy.
Then it was natural speech database querying e.g. "How far can the USS Enterprise travel with the current fuel load?"
This is cool tech & it has been worked on before. If it's a program that sits over the editor & "understands" the code it could answer questions such as "why is the interest rate too high" and give you the lines where the interest rate is calculated
Er, not so. There is only one application in existance that can handle the land titling for the government office where I work and I am one of the three world authorities on that package:)
I get paid a crap rate for all of my unique expertise because it's government but there is no company coming in trying to sell a better package - they couldn't. Not because the code is flawless but because the business understanding is impossible to replicate. Other land titles offices probably have their own custom written solution so there is a third category of software - the custom written bespoke package. If Open source keeps going that is going to be the only way most programmers will be able to get employment. It really doesn't float my boat but it's a living. All the cool projects will be FOSS or games & how many people can earn a living doing that?
In the end, the programmer has to get paid or they can't make a living off it. What we're seeing is the destruction of huge profit margins and the market force establishing the 'true' value of a programmer.
Is it just me but I actually quite enjoyed earning lots of money as a contractor in the late '90s. Aren't we in danger of giving away so much for free that the world at large does not value software development at all?
As a group we should be aspiring more to being a profession like doctors, lawyers & accountants. We're as smart (IQ wise) as these people but they seem to be able to earn >4x the salary.
I talk to small companies & often find myself undercut by people charging so little for their services that I have no way of competing. All of the developers I've met with xCS "professional" recognition are hopeless but have been in the industry for 25+ years so they got a shoo in. Certifications are (generally) a joke - see the MCSE.
What we seem to have is a highly intelligent group of people doing their best collectively to destroy the industry they are a part of. Accountants aren't so badly hit by outsourcing are they? Why do you think that could be? Could it be the rock-solid closed shop of Chartered Accountancy?
I've been programming since the 70's & seriously since the '80s. I would HAPPILY take any exam at my own cost and pay any reasonable annual fee so long as I could be assured that no useless cowboys would be admitted to the professional body. Then we can start setting reasonable standards and costs for people who spend an inordinate amount of time on professional development for relatively little reward.
You leave your mobile turned on when you're recording?!
You're not Frankie "Er Hello Mum, I'm on stage at the moment" Poulain are you?
Seriously, even if you're home recording you have to do your best to isolate the studio from any possible interference, Phones, Taxi Radios, Power tools (unless you're in Einsturzende Neubaten or Slipknot) The phone calls can wait - the perfect take should be what matters
1) Longhorn will be the most expensive version of Windows yet developed (No shit Sherlock) BUT it will be the cheapest in real terms.
2) Linux will start to win around the time M$ start to push people towards Longhorn. Linux will have another 2 years of polish and development. Businesses will start to tale a long hard look at the choice of paying the Microsoft tax & taking it up the ass from Bill or shifting to Linux paying the short term pain (which will be a lot closer in cost for businesses when it comes to deploying Longhorn) with the long term gain.
We won't get everybody but as the O/S upgrade cycle swings around we will pick up a significant proportion of business. Once that business starts wanting features & sponsoring their development then it's bye bye monopoly.
I thought Moore had rebutted all of that.
"In Dude where's my country" on which Fareinheit 911 is based. Moore is particularly scrupulous about giving evidence & references. Yes he does make a "story" out of what he is trying to say. Yes he is selective. But no more so than mainstream news channels who neglect to tell the people of America that their President is in bed with the Bin Laden family.
I am personnally more scandalised that the only private planes flying in America in mid September 2001 contained the people best able to give leads on the location of the main culpret.
If it was a Democrat president doing this he would be crucified by the press.
Which means I've got to get a flight from Perth to Exmouth, drive down to Corel Bay (which as it's winter at the moment looks below par) hire a boat - throw up like mad & take a photo of the reef then I need to find a phone point so I can e-mail my image to the BBC.
Yeah, like that's going to happen.
Given more time I could have managed a pretty spectacular (and very DNA friendly - for those who have read the Salmon of doubt) shot but in less than a day I'll have to pass. Bugger (as they say in Australia)
Just ask the British - we've been doing the calculations in our heads for 35 years:)
I had a long argument with a particularly reactionary friend about the subject. He believes England should revert to imperial as well as leaving the EEC (and probably cloning Queen Victoria & Margaret Thatcher too)
The accepted American English spellings are "Meter", "Liter", and "Gram".
If you don't use the measurements why should you bother to change the spelling - geez!
I read in the Linux journal a few years ago that Minux was formed because AT&T wanted to charge $30,000 per cpu for sysV!
Talk about extortion!
Minux was formed as a result but was never updated when Bell labs lowered the price and allowed other people to make versions of Unix like Sun and SGI.
Unless I am wrong?
Not strictly wrong Minix was written by one person, college professor Andy Tannenbaum, in order to teach Operating System design to students and be able to give them a real example to work with. Obviously paying $30,000/CPU for a student is not feasible so that was probably part of the motivation but being able to show a fully functional operating system was the main reason. Minix is sold with a book. It was never an open source project in the way we now know & love. Andy didn't apply patches regularly and didn't want to overburden the core of MINIX because it would reduce its' value as a teaching tool. Hence people became frustrated and LINUX was born.
At the best job I ever had - only left to emigrate:) - I ended up interviewing the candidates for the role of my boss.
It was a telephone interview as I was working from home a couple of days a week. I concentrated on building raport, checking personality & general comprehension of the technology we used.
On a point of principal I do not buy copy protected CDs.
Currently this has cost the following artists sales:-
Radiohead
Jet
The Sleepy Jackson
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
The latter particularly because I would have bought a CD of Take them on... automatically on day of release. Having since borrowed a friends copy & hated it I won't be bothering.
Having been in a band I don't bootleg stuff. I just have a major aversion to being ripped off with broken non-CDs.
Anyway if they must release copy protected why don't they wait until the sales die down then release a Red-book CD version for people like me otherwise I'll never buy it.
In the real world someone is paying to get software done. That someone does not want to pay us to learn a new language just so a function doesn't need to be written because in language X it's a one liner. Write the equivalent function or find a suitable existing library. If you program in C/C++ the library probably does exist. In Haskell or Eiffel...
Also real commercial products do not exist in a vacuum. You will probably have existing code that does at least part of the job. The person paying the bills will not want to pay to port all of that code. They will want to leverage it.
That's why the new cool language du jour does not rule the world. It's frustrating if the language you want to use is demonstrably better but factor in the cost of finding more progammers that can use the language effectvely & most of the advantages you perceive evaporate.
I've got worse than that. Much worse.
Trying to set up RH9 for my 85 year old uncle (not exactly a computer newbie as he built his own computer in the '70s - from scratch) but totally inexperienced wrt PCs.
Day 1 - Can't boot from CD & I hadn't brought a boot floppy. Windows XP would have been worse (8 floppies anyone) so I return home to prepare the boot floppy.
Day 2 - Graphics turn out to be provided by some piece of crud SiS 630 chipset. Graphical install gives a nice black screen. Reboot & use nice text version. Flashbacks to the '80s. Have to work out that (ctrl)(alt)(backspace) kills the X server from first principles (I'm a dabbler myself). XConfigurator doesn't work. How do you save and exit from "vi" after you've manually edited XF86Config??? Summary: After an hour of manually editing X86Config & startx & killing the XServer I finally got it working in 256 colours 800x600. Uncle knows about startx & man pages. Introduced him to the idea of spreadsheets. Much for him to do...
Day 3 - his son has come over & changed the root password to something "easy" and tanked the X configuration. Oh & Uncle has now bought an Epson C63 printer (at my recommendation)
Day 4 - I go over & fix the X config learning all about the mv & cp commands in the process. Graphics card seems to be limited to 640x48 32 bit or 800x600 8 bit. He's 85 so 640x480 is acceptable. However the GUI unzip utility has a screen so big you cannot reach the buttons unless you move the bottom toolbar over to the lef of the screen. Note to developers no non resizable screen should be bigger than the available area in 640x480 - grrr. Install the printer under Gnome in about 5 minutes by guessing it would be compatible with the C62. Made sure the root password was not "easy" anymore;)
Day 5 - Uncle has accidently sent a directory to the printer instead of a file - the directory contains at least one binary. The print queue seems to survive rebooting & I can't talk him through accessing the Gnome print manager because he's managed to reconfigure his desktop to something obscure. Also have to field a really tricky question about Init 5 & default runlevels. I learn about *nix runlevels but would prefer to be ignorant.
I could write a book.
Looks as though M$ are patenting all of these stupid prior art things to use up all of the money donated to challenge software patents. Borland Delphi had a TO DO list made from comments in the source code around 1997-8 and I'm sure they weren't the first and I'm sure M$ weren't either. Prior art and trivial. Throw it out and award court costs against M$ - oh, you can't do that in America can you? The richest company keeps it in court on appeal until you run out of money then you lose...
I can't help feeling that such fundamental issues as the difference between the word for "coastal land" and "island" could have radically confused our understanding of ancient history...
And let's not start to talk about how the difference between "Virgin" and "Young woman" have radically confused our understanding of the Bible...
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My contract stipulates any IP/code generated during the course of my duties
But then I'm a contractor so they can't stop me doing other work and don't want to get in an IP fight with another well funded entity rather than just me.
I can live with the clause I signed & any fair employer would only want stuff you did in the course of your duties and not the new flavour of bubble gum you came up with at home.
The key thing though is to ensure there is clear separtation between work & non-work and document your ideas. IANAL but if you send yourself the idea recorded delivery & deposit the unopened envelope it with your solicitor you are a lot safer. This guy presumambly cannot prove he started work before he took the job & did not separate home ideas from work ideas - big mistake.
You're right, it is interesting I'll probably have a real read of this. It doesn't look as though they're trying to say that the main structure of DNA is a 4 stranded helix, rather that DNA can form 4 stranded structures in a way which seems quite compatible with the Watson-Crick model.
The worst bit is he's been modded up as interesting instead of down as Troll ;)
Yes, I think they were right. In the 50 years since the first published postulate of the double helical structure a lot of work has been done (to say the least) that supports it.
I am by training a molecular biologist and I'm pretty sure that the 4 strand helix model does not support the techniques used during genetic engineering in which proteins are used to cut DNA leaving single stranded "sticky" ends that then reattatch to the inserted genes. The structure & function of at least some of these proteins is very well characterised.
Nor does 4 stranded DNA map as readily to tRNA which is single stranded.
Nor does 4 stranded map particularly well to the macro structure of DNA with the extra folding around histone proteins.
Yes DNA does not retain it's classical double helix all of the time. Often it is being repaired or replicated & is unfolded or it is stored in a highly dense packed format but the one to one corrolation between A-T & G-C plus the strong natural binding between the bases means that they probably did get it right.
All my knowledge is out of date by nigh on 20 years but I know enough to be confident that Rosie's results were interpreted correctly by Watson & Crick.
How does a 4 stranded helix give better corrolation to the results? You can't just say these things without giving evidence.
Whatever floats your boat baby.
I went to a speech recognition conference 15 years ago & Carnegie Mellon were reporting very similar sounding research they were doing for the US Navy.
Then it was natural speech database querying e.g. "How far can the USS Enterprise travel with the current fuel load?"
This is cool tech & it has been worked on before. If it's a program that sits over the editor & "understands" the code it could answer questions such as "why is the interest rate too high" and give you the lines where the interest rate is calculated
Er, not so. There is only one application in existance that can handle the land titling for the government office where I work and I am one of the three world authorities on that package :)
I get paid a crap rate for all of my unique expertise because it's government but there is no company coming in trying to sell a better package - they couldn't. Not because the code is flawless but because the business understanding is impossible to replicate. Other land titles offices probably have their own custom written solution so there is a third category of software - the custom written bespoke package. If Open source keeps going that is going to be the only way most programmers will be able to get employment. It really doesn't float my boat but it's a living. All the cool projects will be FOSS or games & how many people can earn a living doing that?
As a group we should be aspiring more to being a profession like doctors, lawyers & accountants. We're as smart (IQ wise) as these people but they seem to be able to earn >4x the salary.
I talk to small companies & often find myself undercut by people charging so little for their services that I have no way of competing. All of the developers I've met with xCS "professional" recognition are hopeless but have been in the industry for 25+ years so they got a shoo in. Certifications are (generally) a joke - see the MCSE.
What we seem to have is a highly intelligent group of people doing their best collectively to destroy the industry they are a part of. Accountants aren't so badly hit by outsourcing are they? Why do you think that could be? Could it be the rock-solid closed shop of Chartered Accountancy?
I've been programming since the 70's & seriously since the '80s. I would HAPPILY take any exam at my own cost and pay any reasonable annual fee so long as I could be assured that no useless cowboys would be admitted to the professional body. Then we can start setting reasonable standards and costs for people who spend an inordinate amount of time on professional development for relatively little reward.
The battle lines are drawn. Good vs Evil.
Just engaged brain - you probably mean $80 US don't you? A 40Gb IDE costs around $80 Australian Dollars where I am.
Like they are going to use IDE drives on a server. Check out the SCSI prices & subtract the bulk discount :)
You leave your mobile turned on when you're recording?!
You're not Frankie "Er Hello Mum, I'm on stage at the moment" Poulain are you?
Seriously, even if you're home recording you have to do your best to isolate the studio from any possible interference, Phones, Taxi Radios, Power tools (unless you're in Einsturzende Neubaten or Slipknot) The phone calls can wait - the perfect take should be what matters
1) Longhorn will be the most expensive version of Windows yet developed (No shit Sherlock) BUT it will be the cheapest in real terms.
2) Linux will start to win around the time M$ start to push people towards Longhorn. Linux will have another 2 years of polish and development. Businesses will start to tale a long hard look at the choice of paying the Microsoft tax & taking it up the ass from Bill or shifting to Linux paying the short term pain (which will be a lot closer in cost for businesses when it comes to deploying Longhorn) with the long term gain.
We won't get everybody but as the O/S upgrade cycle swings around we will pick up a significant proportion of business. Once that business starts wanting features & sponsoring their development then it's bye bye monopoly.
You insensitive clod.
In Soviet Russia, houses are put on top of legends...
I thought Moore had rebutted all of that.
"In Dude where's my country" on which Fareinheit 911 is based. Moore is particularly scrupulous about giving evidence & references. Yes he does make a "story" out of what he is trying to say. Yes he is selective. But no more so than mainstream news channels who neglect to tell the people of America that their President is in bed with the Bin Laden family.
I am personnally more scandalised that the only private planes flying in America in mid September 2001 contained the people best able to give leads on the location of the main culpret.
If it was a Democrat president doing this he would be crucified by the press.
Which means I've got to get a flight from Perth to Exmouth, drive down to Corel Bay (which as it's winter at the moment looks below par) hire a boat - throw up like mad & take a photo of the reef then I need to find a phone point so I can e-mail my image to the BBC.
Yeah, like that's going to happen.
Given more time I could have managed a pretty spectacular (and very DNA friendly - for those who have read the Salmon of doubt) shot but in less than a day I'll have to pass. Bugger (as they say in Australia)
Just ask the British - we've been doing the calculations in our heads for 35 years :)
I had a long argument with a particularly reactionary friend about the subject. He believes England should revert to imperial as well as leaving the EEC (and probably cloning Queen Victoria & Margaret Thatcher too)
The accepted American English spellings are "Meter", "Liter", and "Gram".
If you don't use the measurements why should you bother to change the spelling - geez!
I read in the Linux journal a few years ago that Minux was formed because AT&T wanted to charge $30,000 per cpu for sysV! Talk about extortion! Minux was formed as a result but was never updated when Bell labs lowered the price and allowed other people to make versions of Unix like Sun and SGI. Unless I am wrong?
Not strictly wrong Minix was written by one person, college professor Andy Tannenbaum, in order to teach Operating System design to students and be able to give them a real example to work with. Obviously paying $30,000/CPU for a student is not feasible so that was probably part of the motivation but being able to show a fully functional operating system was the main reason. Minix is sold with a book. It was never an open source project in the way we now know & love. Andy didn't apply patches regularly and didn't want to overburden the core of MINIX because it would reduce its' value as a teaching tool. Hence people became frustrated and LINUX was born.
At the best job I ever had - only left to emigrate :) - I ended up interviewing the candidates for the role of my boss.
It was a telephone interview as I was working from home a couple of days a week. I concentrated on building raport, checking personality & general comprehension of the technology we used.
He ended up working out very well.
On a point of principal I do not buy copy protected CDs.
Currently this has cost the following artists sales:-
Radiohead
Jet
The Sleepy Jackson
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
The latter particularly because I would have bought a CD of Take them on... automatically on day of release. Having since borrowed a friends copy & hated it I won't be bothering.
Having been in a band I don't bootleg stuff. I just have a major aversion to being ripped off with broken non-CDs.
Anyway if they must release copy protected why don't they wait until the sales die down then release a Red-book CD version for people like me otherwise I'll never buy it.
It's more than that.
In the real world someone is paying to get software done. That someone does not want to pay us to learn a new language just so a function doesn't need to be written because in language X it's a one liner. Write the equivalent function or find a suitable existing library. If you program in C/C++ the library probably does exist. In Haskell or Eiffel...
Also real commercial products do not exist in a vacuum. You will probably have existing code that does at least part of the job. The person paying the bills will not want to pay to port all of that code. They will want to leverage it.
That's why the new cool language du jour does not rule the world. It's frustrating if the language you want to use is demonstrably better but factor in the cost of finding more progammers that can use the language effectvely & most of the advantages you perceive evaporate.
I've got worse than that. Much worse. ;)
Trying to set up RH9 for my 85 year old uncle (not exactly a computer newbie as he built his own computer in the '70s - from scratch) but totally inexperienced wrt PCs.
Day 1 - Can't boot from CD & I hadn't brought a boot floppy. Windows XP would have been worse (8 floppies anyone) so I return home to prepare the boot floppy.
Day 2 - Graphics turn out to be provided by some piece of crud SiS 630 chipset. Graphical install gives a nice black screen. Reboot & use nice text version. Flashbacks to the '80s. Have to work out that (ctrl)(alt)(backspace) kills the X server from first principles (I'm a dabbler myself). XConfigurator doesn't work. How do you save and exit from "vi" after you've manually edited XF86Config??? Summary: After an hour of manually editing X86Config & startx & killing the XServer I finally got it working in 256 colours 800x600. Uncle knows about startx & man pages. Introduced him to the idea of spreadsheets. Much for him to do...
Day 3 - his son has come over & changed the root password to something "easy" and tanked the X configuration. Oh & Uncle has now bought an Epson C63 printer (at my recommendation)
Day 4 - I go over & fix the X config learning all about the mv & cp commands in the process. Graphics card seems to be limited to 640x48 32 bit or 800x600 8 bit. He's 85 so 640x480 is acceptable. However the GUI unzip utility has a screen so big you cannot reach the buttons unless you move the bottom toolbar over to the lef of the screen. Note to developers no non resizable screen should be bigger than the available area in 640x480 - grrr. Install the printer under Gnome in about 5 minutes by guessing it would be compatible with the C62. Made sure the root password was not "easy" anymore
Day 5 - Uncle has accidently sent a directory to the printer instead of a file - the directory contains at least one binary. The print queue seems to survive rebooting & I can't talk him through accessing the Gnome print manager because he's managed to reconfigure his desktop to something obscure. Also have to field a really tricky question about Init 5 & default runlevels. I learn about *nix runlevels but would prefer to be ignorant.
I could write a book.
Looks as though M$ are patenting all of these stupid prior art things to use up all of the money donated to challenge software patents. Borland Delphi had a TO DO list made from comments in the source code around 1997-8 and I'm sure they weren't the first and I'm sure M$ weren't either. Prior art and trivial. Throw it out and award court costs against M$ - oh, you can't do that in America can you? The richest company keeps it in court on appeal until you run out of money then you lose...
I can't help feeling that such fundamental issues as the difference between the word for "coastal land" and "island" could have radically confused our understanding of ancient history...
And let's not start to talk about how the difference between "Virgin" and "Young woman" have radically confused our understanding of the Bible...