That certainly does not sound like basic research to me. Indeed, it does not even sound like research. It is a software development project.
It's more like university research than a software development project because it's centered around theoretical ideas by individual researchers who spend some time to build a tool that embodies their idea. I worked on one of these tools ("Zing") six years ago but it's been superseded and replaced by completely new ideas many times since then.
"Generics for.NET" was an MSR research project that significantly affected the computer industry. This form of generics hadn't existed before. It's different from C++ templates (which are done at compile-time) and difference from Java generics (which are erased at runtime).
"C-omega" was an MSR research project that significantly affected the computer industry. It introduced LINQ -- a form Haskell monads, sort of like Python list comprehensions on steroids -- and they're now used by C#+VB i.e. by about 15% of the world's programmers.
"F#" was an MSR research project that became the world's first "industrial" functional language ("industrial" in the sense of being available commercially). It's taken certain markets e.g. financial by storm. It also introduced some genuine innovations that haven't yet had time to affect programming language practice but which I think will do within five years -- "extended static typing" (where type hierarchies are downloaded on the fly from semantic web sources) and "async workflows" (a new form of co-routines).
My job is as a language designer, so I've only picked the language-design innovations out of MSR.
You're proposing that our tax dollars, which have already paid for NASA's research, then get given away for free to benefit the directors of the companies who use the patents, who use their profits to buy large yachts (say), so a small amount of the benefit trickles down to the shipyard workers.
I prefer what NASA has done. It ensures that the tax dollars we've paid to NASA will continue to benefit NASA (rather paying for a director's yacht).
I think the overwhelming lesson learned from the iPhone is that "mobile developers don't care that they have to manually translate their apps from one language to another, if it's going to get the money from the app store."
I used to have it as a javascript button to open all the links. This was EVEN WORSE, because the whole of Firefox (and IE8) froze for several seconds while it tried to open the links.
In any case it misses the point. There are lots of situations where I want to ctrl+click to open lots of tabs, e.g. when I'm reading a forum and want to pre-load page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] all at once. I hate that my browsers can't capture all the clicks that I generate.
1. "claimed he had a proof" 2. "hasn't held up" 3. "spur a massive effort"
It was missing the only IMPORTANT hyperlink:
4. "this article". --- The slashdot submission was about an article. I'd like to read the article. I'd like a hyperlink which unambiguously takes me to the article. As it was, I didn't know which of the hyperlinks would take me to the article.
1. "claimed he had a proof" -- did this hyperlink take me to his claim? No: it took me to a online collaborative discussion of his claim (i.e. the original slashdot article).
2. "didn't hold up" -- did this hyperlink take me to the announcement that it didn't hold up? No: it took me to a slashdot article that maybe had a link to the statement about how it didn't hold up.
3. "spur a massive effort" -- did this hyperlink take me to that effort? Or did it take me to the spur in question? No: it took me to a REVIEW of that effort.
The hyperlinks in Slashdot summaries are always confusing.
I strongly disagree with "2. Functions and methods should be as small as possible. You should make it an obsession to split methods and functions into the smallest possible components."
I figure that an extra STATEMENT adds a bit of extra work for the person who maintains your code to understand;
an extra FUNCTION adds about five times as much work since the control-flows into and out of it are now harder to understand;
and an extra CLASS adds four times as much work again to understand what it abstracts and how lifetime &c. work.
So, every time you use a function for what could have been done with a statement, you're making your code harder to maintain.
Yes! The thing that appeals to me the most about using Gmail is that searching through 5+GB of old emails won't make everything in my machine slow to a crawl.
Why so slow?
I'm using Outlook as my mail client, connected to 3Gb of email archives in a linux IMAPS server running in my basement. My laptop's about two years old now.
It's plenty fast enough. I just tested it with a complete search for the phrase "happy birthday". it took a little over 2 seconds.
Agreed. I have only one plugin installed (Adblock). But even so, when I Ctrl+Click to open my six daily comic strips in quick succession, it still misses a few of the clicks. I wish it were more responsive.
EVERY SINGLE human endeavor has accidents, bar none. Cheap and quick human endeavors have accident, multi-million-dollar industry investments like BP have accidents, highly-over-engineered government investments like NASA have accidents.
Accidents are an inevitable fact of life.
And industry on this scale is an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
Therefore, accidents like this are an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
It goes hand in hand with the fishing to destruction of the Novia Scotia cod banks, with the desertification of the Sahara, with the deforestation of the Amazon, with the giant Dead Zone in the gulf from fertilizer eutrophication, with the Bhopal disaster, with the Boston Molasses disaster, with the logging to extinction of the Easter Islanders.
That said, I depend on capitalism, and I agree that negligence should be prosecuted. But all this will do is slightly reduce the rate of disasters. It won't stop them.
I think our way into the post-apocalyptic future we see in films won't come through a global war, or zombie invasion, or epidemic. It'll happen one step at a time through this kind of capitalism accident.
while I'm certainly no economist, I believe that advertisements are very healthy for the economy. The market adjusts if they become too invasive or unhealthy (people revolt against the products using such tactics) but it results in more cash in my pocket to make more purchases with and entices me to make more purchases.
That's a very wrong way to look at the economy of ads. Ask yourself: where does that "cash in your pocket" actually come from? Answer: it comes from YOU, the consumer, through the higher prices you pay for everything.
I've only heard the figures for 1999. But then, if you took the entire amount spent on advertising in the US and divided it by the population, it worked out at $6k per person (young, old, everyone).
That's basically a $6k TAX that you're paying every year solely for the privilege of having ads thrust in your face.
I hate it.
The economist's view is that ads are good inasmuch as they make a more perfect marketplace, i.e. they increase knowledge and awareness on the part of the consumer so they can make the best rational economic decision. (conversely, ads which *distort* these decisions, by appealing to emotion or creating buzz about style rather than substance, are bad for the economy).
Latency is DIRECTLY related to bandwidth (in the sense bandwidth is determined by latency). That's how TCP's rate control algorithm works. It has a "window" of outstanding packets that it's sent and for which it's awaiting a response. It won't send more until it's had a response from the earlier ones. Therefore, latency and window-size together determine bandwidth. And window-size is fixed...
Of course it's possible that rate-throttling happens along the way for other reasons (i.e. giving lower bandwidth than what TCP's rate control algorithm would allow). But I believe this happens less often than one would expect.
It might be a design flaw, but it's also the inevitable consequence of a free market economy...
The companies that put their control systems on VPN over public internet got by a heck of a lot more cheaply then their competitors. And they haven't yet been attacked badly enough so it's been cost-effective so far. Meanwhile their more robust competitors go out of business.
Sure, the fish have higher levels of stress and disease. But that doesn't matter since we're going to eat them anyway and we won't catch their diseases.
Sure, the fish live at higher densities than seen in the wild. So what? Doesn't affect their taste.
Sure, the fish have higher levels of lice. That's a problem if they infect wild populations. So that's adequately and properly solved with a greater distance between the two.
Sure, the fish are sometimes fed too many antibiotics. Solution? feed them less! It's just an equation between antibiotics and profitability. It'd be fine to pay a bit more in exchange for a bit less antibiotic use.
Sure, the fish cause pollution from their feces etc. But that's no problem in places of high current.
I love fish, and almost all the dishes I cook with them the taste difference between wild and farmed is minimal. And even though the farmed and quite as healthy for you as the wild, they're still pretty darned healthy.
That's the observation that we as humans tend to adjust our behavior to have the same overall level of risk. So: cars are made safer through seatbelts and airbags, and we've taken to riskier faster driving, and the risks balanced out. If cars were made more dangerous through spears mounted in steering columns pointed at our chests, then we'd drive more slowly to balance the risks.
I'm entirely in favor of seat-belts -- they're the things that encourage fast exhilarating driving!
You, sir, are probably the guy responsible for all those irritating slow drivers right in front of me on the freeway.
No, that's not the number one risk, and I don't think it's ever been.
Adjusting the radio and the climate control is correlated with a DECREASED risk of accidents. The hypothesis for this experimental correlation is that typically the kind of driver who fixes his/her driving environment is the kind of driver who's more attentive to road risks as well. I don't have the cite to hand, but this data and hypothesis were from a paper in the past year somewhere in the east coast. I have a vague memory that it was a federal traffic research unit in Pennsylvania, but am not sure. (I read the report cover to cover but didn't save it).
Cellphone use and sleepy drivers were each FAR more risky than any other behavior.
The spirit of patents is, as you say, to protect the inventors innovation.
The nature of a free market is that, through brokers and middle-men buying and selling stuff, everything achieves its correct price, and this price is a fair reflection of the worth of something.
All this company's doing is acting as that broker, i.e. one of the cogs in the free market machine, with the effect that the market gets the correct price for patents.
Blaming this company is like blaming corn speculators acting as the cogs that fine-tune the markets valuation of corn prices -- or like blaming ebay bidders for fine-tuning ebay's valuation of the cost of items.
Slashdot Mirror
That certainly does not sound like basic research to me. Indeed, it does not even sound like research. It is a software development project.
It's more like university research than a software development project because it's centered around theoretical ideas by individual researchers who spend some time to build a tool that embodies their idea. I worked on one of these tools ("Zing") six years ago but it's been superseded and replaced by completely new ideas many times since then.
"Generics for .NET" was an MSR research project that significantly affected the computer industry. This form of generics hadn't existed before. It's different from C++ templates (which are done at compile-time) and difference from Java generics (which are erased at runtime).
"C-omega" was an MSR research project that significantly affected the computer industry. It introduced LINQ -- a form Haskell monads, sort of like Python list comprehensions on steroids -- and they're now used by C#+VB i.e. by about 15% of the world's programmers.
"F#" was an MSR research project that became the world's first "industrial" functional language ("industrial" in the sense of being available commercially). It's taken certain markets e.g. financial by storm. It also introduced some genuine innovations that haven't yet had time to affect programming language practice but which I think will do within five years -- "extended static typing" (where type hierarchies are downloaded on the fly from semantic web sources) and "async workflows" (a new form of co-routines).
My job is as a language designer, so I've only picked the language-design innovations out of MSR.
You say it's a VC firm now but started out as a VT firm?
You're proposing that our tax dollars, which have already paid for NASA's research, then get given away for free to benefit the directors of the companies who use the patents, who use their profits to buy large yachts (say), so a small amount of the benefit trickles down to the shipyard workers.
I prefer what NASA has done. It ensures that the tax dollars we've paid to NASA will continue to benefit NASA (rather paying for a director's yacht).
I think the overwhelming lesson learned from the iPhone is that "mobile developers don't care that they have to manually translate their apps from one language to another, if it's going to get the money from the app store."
I used to have it as a javascript button to open all the links. This was EVEN WORSE, because the whole of Firefox (and IE8) froze for several seconds while it tried to open the links.
In any case it misses the point. There are lots of situations where I want to ctrl+click to open lots of tabs, e.g. when I'm reading a forum and want to pre-load page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] all at once. I hate that my browsers can't capture all the clicks that I generate.
They're not bookmarks. My homepage is set to c:\users\ljw1004\Documents\Home.html. This page is a list of links. I ctrl+click each of them.
Mine has *NEVER* been "good enough".
Every morningn I ctrl+click to open my ten favourite comic-strips -- and both firefox and IE lose a few clicks because they can't keep up.
This summary had three hyperlinks:
1. "claimed he had a proof"
2. "hasn't held up"
3. "spur a massive effort"
It was missing the only IMPORTANT hyperlink:
4. "this article". --- The slashdot submission was about an article. I'd like to read the article. I'd like a hyperlink which unambiguously takes me to the article. As it was, I didn't know which of the hyperlinks would take me to the article.
1. "claimed he had a proof" -- did this hyperlink take me to his claim? No: it took me to a online collaborative discussion of his claim (i.e. the original slashdot article).
2. "didn't hold up" -- did this hyperlink take me to the announcement that it didn't hold up? No: it took me to a slashdot article that maybe had a link to the statement about how it didn't hold up.
3. "spur a massive effort" -- did this hyperlink take me to that effort? Or did it take me to the spur in question? No: it took me to a REVIEW of that effort.
The hyperlinks in Slashdot summaries are always confusing.
I strongly disagree with "2. Functions and methods should be as small as possible. You should make it an obsession to split methods and functions into the smallest possible components."
I figure that an extra STATEMENT adds a bit of extra work for the person who maintains your code to understand;
an extra FUNCTION adds about five times as much work since the control-flows into and out of it are now harder to understand;
and an extra CLASS adds four times as much work again to understand what it abstracts and how lifetime &c. work.
So, every time you use a function for what could have been done with a statement, you're making your code harder to maintain.
Yes! The thing that appeals to me the most about using Gmail is that searching through 5+GB of old emails won't make everything in my machine slow to a crawl.
Why so slow?
I'm using Outlook as my mail client, connected to 3Gb of email archives in a linux IMAPS server running in my basement. My laptop's about two years old now.
It's plenty fast enough. I just tested it with a complete search for the phrase "happy birthday". it took a little over 2 seconds.
Agreed. I have only one plugin installed (Adblock). But even so, when I Ctrl+Click to open my six daily comic strips in quick succession, it still misses a few of the clicks. I wish it were more responsive.
EVERY SINGLE human endeavor has accidents, bar none. Cheap and quick human endeavors have accident, multi-million-dollar industry investments like BP have accidents, highly-over-engineered government investments like NASA have accidents.
Accidents are an inevitable fact of life.
And industry on this scale is an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
Therefore, accidents like this are an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
It goes hand in hand with the fishing to destruction of the Novia Scotia cod banks, with the desertification of the Sahara, with the deforestation of the Amazon, with the giant Dead Zone in the gulf from fertilizer eutrophication, with the Bhopal disaster, with the Boston Molasses disaster, with the logging to extinction of the Easter Islanders.
That said, I depend on capitalism, and I agree that negligence should be prosecuted. But all this will do is slightly reduce the rate of disasters. It won't stop them.
I think our way into the post-apocalyptic future we see in films won't come through a global war, or zombie invasion, or epidemic. It'll happen one step at a time through this kind of capitalism accident.
That sounds fun. Is it available on Steam?
while I'm certainly no economist, I believe that advertisements are very healthy for the economy. The market adjusts if they become too invasive or unhealthy (people revolt against the products using such tactics) but it results in more cash in my pocket to make more purchases with and entices me to make more purchases.
That's a very wrong way to look at the economy of ads. Ask yourself: where does that "cash in your pocket" actually come from? Answer: it comes from YOU, the consumer, through the higher prices you pay for everything.
I've only heard the figures for 1999. But then, if you took the entire amount spent on advertising in the US and divided it by the population, it worked out at $6k per person (young, old, everyone).
That's basically a $6k TAX that you're paying every year solely for the privilege of having ads thrust in your face.
I hate it.
The economist's view is that ads are good inasmuch as they make a more perfect marketplace, i.e. they increase knowledge and awareness on the part of the consumer so they can make the best rational economic decision. (conversely, ads which *distort* these decisions, by appealing to emotion or creating buzz about style rather than substance, are bad for the economy).
Latency is DIRECTLY related to bandwidth (in the sense bandwidth is determined by latency). That's how TCP's rate control algorithm works. It has a "window" of outstanding packets that it's sent and for which it's awaiting a response. It won't send more until it's had a response from the earlier ones. Therefore, latency and window-size together determine bandwidth. And window-size is fixed...
Of course it's possible that rate-throttling happens along the way for other reasons (i.e. giving lower bandwidth than what TCP's rate control algorithm would allow). But I believe this happens less often than one would expect.
It might be a design flaw, but it's also the inevitable consequence of a free market economy...
The companies that put their control systems on VPN over public internet got by a heck of a lot more cheaply then their competitors. And they haven't yet been attacked badly enough so it's been cost-effective so far. Meanwhile their more robust competitors go out of business.
"Realized they had it"?? They're like the kid who only "realizes" his hand is in the cookie jar after his mother catches him.
I suspect most users of Visual Studio don't add significant hacks (other than installing third-party plugins like Resharper)
That's why there's so little obesity and diabetes in countries like India with its rice-heavy diet, and Italy with its pasta-heavy diet.
I want two toys!!!
Fish farming isn't a disaster at all.
Sure, the fish have higher levels of stress and disease. But that doesn't matter since we're going to eat them anyway and we won't catch their diseases.
Sure, the fish live at higher densities than seen in the wild. So what? Doesn't affect their taste.
Sure, the fish have higher levels of lice. That's a problem if they infect wild populations. So that's adequately and properly solved with a greater distance between the two.
Sure, the fish are sometimes fed too many antibiotics. Solution? feed them less! It's just an equation between antibiotics and profitability. It'd be fine to pay a bit more in exchange for a bit less antibiotic use.
Sure, the fish cause pollution from their feces etc. But that's no problem in places of high current.
I love fish, and almost all the dishes I cook with them the taste difference between wild and farmed is minimal. And even though the farmed and quite as healthy for you as the wild, they're still pretty darned healthy.
It's amazing just how many books this "Ibid" chap has written.
And "et al" seems a really common surname among authors of scientific papers.
"Risk Homeostasis"
That's the observation that we as humans tend to adjust our behavior to have the same overall level of risk. So: cars are made safer through seatbelts and airbags, and we've taken to riskier faster driving, and the risks balanced out. If cars were made more dangerous through spears mounted in steering columns pointed at our chests, then we'd drive more slowly to balance the risks.
I'm entirely in favor of seat-belts -- they're the things that encourage fast exhilarating driving!
You, sir, are probably the guy responsible for all those irritating slow drivers right in front of me on the freeway.
No, that's not the number one risk, and I don't think it's ever been.
Adjusting the radio and the climate control is correlated with a DECREASED risk of accidents. The hypothesis for this experimental correlation is that typically the kind of driver who fixes his/her driving environment is the kind of driver who's more attentive to road risks as well. I don't have the cite to hand, but this data and hypothesis were from a paper in the past year somewhere in the east coast. I have a vague memory that it was a federal traffic research unit in Pennsylvania, but am not sure. (I read the report cover to cover but didn't save it).
Cellphone use and sleepy drivers were each FAR more risky than any other behavior.
The spirit of patents is, as you say, to protect the inventors innovation.
The nature of a free market is that, through brokers and middle-men buying and selling stuff, everything achieves its correct price, and this price is a fair reflection of the worth of something.
All this company's doing is acting as that broker, i.e. one of the cogs in the free market machine, with the effect that the market gets the correct price for patents.
Blaming this company is like blaming corn speculators acting as the cogs that fine-tune the markets valuation of corn prices -- or like blaming ebay bidders for fine-tuning ebay's valuation of the cost of items.