"it's very hard to predict how long writing any given piece of code is going to take"
Not true. You just need to learn how to estimate. The best method is to simply repeat your question as often as needed, in a more urgent tone of voice. Do this enough, and you'll be able to precisely estimate any project, no matter how vague or how far in the future, long before the customers have decided what the project will consist of.
Sometimes this method gives you bad estimates, which you'll be able to spot, because it'll always be 8 months. "How long will it take to write x?" 8 months. "How long to write a project plan?" 8 months. "Make me a cup of coffee?" 8 months.
The problem there is that you're asking a person who might know something. The solution is to ask someone else, preferably with no knowledge of the systems involved.
"Software patents are even more important than patents in other fields, due to the ease with which software techniques can be duplicated"
So you don't subscribe to the theory of incremental improvement? If you want to "stand on the shoulders of giants", you have to either pay a license fee, or improve things which are 20 years old?
Patents are absolutely necessary to protect small companies
If they've got enough spare cash to spend tens of thousands on patent-applications, they're either not a small company, or they're not producing anything.
from having their ideas taken without any credit or compensation to the original source
Who says it was their idea? Patents protect you from other people having their own original ideas which happen to be the same as yours. If many people are working on the same problem, they will invariably come up with one of the few solutions to that problem. Your theory is that they should all give money to the most litigous one?
People do not realize how specific patents are
Or how specific some standards-documents can be. The line between patenting a standard and standardising a patent is going to get pushed extremely hard by some very powerful companies if this goes through, and your faith in the robustness of the "for the purposes of interoperability" clause is touching.
"I would use the banners if they didn't look like the result of "My First Adventures in Photoshop"
Use a text link for stuff like that anyway - banners are so old-looking now I'm surprised people even see them
If it's your own website, then a text link will fit better with the theme of the site, won't slow you down, integrates properly with your stylesheet, won't risk your other images getting blocked if someone kills the banner in Mozilla, and has the proper effect on google ratings.
Plus, it makes it look like you personally endorse the advertisement, in a way that banners ("look what someone paid me to say") just don't do.
"I'm pretty sure lots of banners and links are going to have a minimal effect."
They inform the public, which is always good
People won't automatically believe the government's smoothly-put "facts"
Journalists and newsreaders might become informed, and this will affect how they present the stories in their media
People close to those making the decisions might become informed. Imagine if the next time a cabinet-minister goes to a party, someone asks him "why does he hate the free market?"
Putting up banners and informative websites means that less people will be duped by "Fact and fiction, the effects of Computer-Implemented Inventions" and other such misleading propoganda
"Considering that the bill will be decided by politicians"
Seems to be the Patent Office pulling the strings at the moment, but anyway...
"How come they don't organise an email campaign, where you can find your relevant politician, and send him an email?"
Well, from just my experience, I've written to my MP. He's replied, and passed-on the letter to the DTI. The DTI has received thousands of such letters, and has called a meeting, which means that (a) they know very well that they're lying about patents being good for small business, and (b) they won't be able to pretend they don't know about the damage software patents will cause
As to organised events, I believe that:
a large number of people visited Brussels when the matter was last discussed
FFII organised possibly the biggest "website blackout" ever, which was reported even in national papers
Thousands of letters have been received by MPs, MEPs, and the DTI
At the last consultation, hundreds of small businesses met the "european parliament" in person, and told them in no uncertain terms that small-business did not support software patents. The politician who had claimed to be listening to these people didn't even attend the meeting.
When the software-patents idea was last defeated, it was on BBC television news how "internet and websites" had caused this change
To give people an idea of what the DTI is saying (write to your MP to get all this information if you haven't already done so):
They claim that because "Open-source" software wan't harmed by copyright, there's no reason to believe that it will be harmed by software patents.
They claim that small business will benefit from software patents
They claim that patents will encourage innovation
They claim that they're not changing anything ("clarifying the current situation") but that somehow requires a change in the law
The DTI propoganda includes numerous case-studies of happy smiling patent-holders, but no mention at all of the people already being harmed by software patents
"Having a good open-source browser that appears to be evolving very quickly exposes Microsoft to the risk that Mozilla will get good enough to start luring folks to it."
Presumably the insightful bit is that although Firefox is the better software by far, it should be lucky if even a few people are convinced to try it because it's competing against Microsoft.
It might "lure" a few people away from the one true browser, but they're crazy to even bother, some of these journalists seem to be thinking, and then proceed by examining why someone would want to write a browser when Microsoft already has one.
Oh, and I like the way they write the name of that company. It's "Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) [Links to more microsoft stories] [links to Microsoft stock quotes]" don't you know? Nevermind this is a Mozilla article.
Ask again in a week. If nobody has sued the manufacturer by that time, then it's probably not compatible with inkjets.
Re:He was too fucking old to drive Goddamnit!
on
Spies Riding Shotgun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"He was just too fucking old to operate a motor vehicle, and guess what! There's millions more like him out there. Old folks are incredibly dangerous behind the wheel. We don't need black boxes in every car, we need annual vision, reaction and cognition testing for all drivers over 70 years old, and those who don't pass lose their licenses right then and there. While we're at it we can strip the licenses of anyone who has more than one DUI or who causes an accident where someone loses life or limb, this would go a long way towards making our roads a lot safer."
There was once a good slashdot comment:
Q: "why are aeroplanes safer than cars?"
A: "Because if pilot rules were applied to drivers, then 1/3 the population would never be allowed to drive at all, 2/3 of the rest would only be allowed to drive 50cc cars in clear weather at 30mph, and the remainder would have spent 10 years learning, get retested every year, and be grounded at the first suspicion of human-error"
Now if only they could apply those same standards to those in control of motor vehicles, and perhaps update the driving test. I don't care that someone's demonstrated that they were once able to control a small car whilst sober, calm, undistracted, and fully-rested, it doesn't have any bearing on the driving they actually do.
You need hardware-synchronised or "genlocked" video cards, which use cables to synchronise the drawing of each frame. Naturally, you will be using 3 graphics cards in 3 graphics computers, with the rest of your application running on one or more additional machines.
Graphics cards which can do this are things like the nVidia Quadro FX3000G - the G stands for genlocking. Yes, they cost more than the normal version.
"It would be great to have a "trickle-sync" directory designation, so you could automatically share amongst group members. It would work like this: One person would drop files into a directory designated as "trickle-sync", and it would be slowly passed-along to everyone else in the group automatically without any prompting (assuming they enabled that feature on their machines). Rather than using full available bandwidth, it might be set to, say, a 5kb/sec maximum or something (or dynamically adjust the bandwidth depending on what else is happening on the network at the time)."
Create a channel simply by publishing its key, and send out an anonymous announcement of the channel with a description of what you plan to use it for.
People receiving these annoucements sign-up for ones which sound interesting
When a channel-owner publishes a file, it magically and anonymously arrives on the PC of everyone who's subscribed to that channel.
Kind of like a TV or radio station, except you don't need millions of dollars to be the one speaking.
"I'm sick of this (and will probably get modded down) but this isnt the sole fault of the vendors, now is it. For whatever reason, they will not release their driver set under opensource licenses, and thats agreeable because its their code and their decision. On the other hand, the linux kernel devs wont supply a stable module API, because they dont like binary modules, which is also agreeable because its also their code and their decision. This does leave the end user in the unenviable position of recompilations, but IMHO nvidea seems to have found a suitable halfway point for this, only requiring a stub recompile. But from where Im standing, its not just nvideas fault, both sides are posturing and trying to make a good situation out of a less than good one, but the majority of people on slashdot seem to blame vendors for supplying closed drivers when they have no real need to."
Well that's all nice and eloquent,
but...
If it doesn't run a Free Software operating sytem, we're not buying it.
What makes people think we'd go to the trouble of writing billions of dollars' worth of software which is Free, only to sacrifice those principles for a crappy graphics card, modem, or motherboard?
"Hey, not only are Russians nice enough to ratify the Kyoto treaty, they're also nice enough to develop a nuclear weapon program that could avoid any possible defense (in the rare event that missile defense could actually work)."
And the US is developing scramjets so that they can deliver nuclear weapons past other peoples' missile shields -- are you saying that one is significantly more evil than the other???
"I hope the ban passes. Americans are badly overtaxed as it is."
But how will it help that the federal government is spending your money to investigate, debate, and implement additional rules like this for your state to comply with?
As far as I can tell, this only makes your tax bill higher, because the various organisations who tax you will still need as much money as before, and in addition, the size of the federal government has now increased to incorporate a "preventing people from levying an internet tax" function.
"Maybe coming from a country where ID cards (and having them with you) have been mandatory since I've been born has made me blid, but what exactly are people's concerns about them? As far as I remember, my privacy has never been threatened by them - I show it to the police to prove who I am, sometimes also to the post office when I collect a parcel."
Blunkett's vision of the ID card also involves a national database with biometric information. That alone would pose additional complications, as it would make it trivial to (for example) take an object and discover who had previously touched it.
That database isn't needed for biometric ID, as such information could be stored on the smartcard instead of in a database, but for some reason, it has been decided that this country must have a database of everyone in it.
You'll see other concerns listed by slashdotters, for example the possibility of forging these new cards, the identity-theft problem, the way that people "assume" that the card is unforgeable, the "feeling like a criminal" aspect of having your fingerprints taken, the possibility that this data might be exported to the axis of evil (USA), or just because Blunkett is forcing the country to accept something it doesn't want. The final insult to most people of course, is the amount of money they'll have to pay for this indignity.
The Register as usual, does a good job of keeping an eye on such things, and some useful analysis of what's coming out of whitehall.
"Only one company (Sony) has the resources to do that easily. (They currently offer all three of those pieces.) Unfortunately, they are too mired in IP idiocy and bad design to have any chance at it. Don't expect this to change any time soon."
Sony don't collectively have the intelligence to design even one of those items (PC software, music device, music shop) successfully, so the idea of getting all 3 is absurd.
Did they learn 10 years ago that proprietary and restrictive formats were unpopular? Hardly.
Did they compare their attitude ("we make music. you buy it") with Apple's ("everybody creates art")?
Yes I used to work there too, and it's a big company. Too big to make good products, by a very long shot.
"I think the important statistic is: Apple's market share is more than Creative's market share"
Well, I'm one of 'Creative's market share' and my comment is "probably never again"
I've never seen such bad software (both Windows drivers, and on-board software), and having a bigger hard drive for less money than the iPod is starting to wear thin as an excuse for it.
Spend advertising money all you like, I'm not buying my replacement jukebox until it comes with Linux drivers that are guaranteed to work.
Slashdot Mirror
"it's very hard to predict how long writing any given piece of code is going to take"
Not true. You just need to learn how to estimate. The best method is to simply repeat your question as often as needed, in a more urgent tone of voice. Do this enough, and you'll be able to precisely estimate any project, no matter how vague or how far in the future, long before the customers have decided what the project will consist of.
Sometimes this method gives you bad estimates, which you'll be able to spot, because it'll always be 8 months. "How long will it take to write x?" 8 months. "How long to write a project plan?" 8 months. "Make me a cup of coffee?" 8 months.
The problem there is that you're asking a person who might know something. The solution is to ask someone else, preferably with no knowledge of the systems involved.
"Software patents are even more important than patents in other fields, due to the ease with which software techniques can be duplicated"
So you don't subscribe to the theory of incremental improvement? If you want to "stand on the shoulders of giants", you have to either pay a license fee, or improve things which are 20 years old?
Patents are absolutely necessary to protect small companies
If they've got enough spare cash to spend tens of thousands on patent-applications, they're either not a small company, or they're not producing anything.
from having their ideas taken without any credit or compensation to the original source
Who says it was their idea? Patents protect you from other people having their own original ideas which happen to be the same as yours. If many people are working on the same problem, they will invariably come up with one of the few solutions to that problem. Your theory is that they should all give money to the most litigous one?
People do not realize how specific patents are
Or how specific some standards-documents can be. The line between patenting a standard and standardising a patent is going to get pushed extremely hard by some very powerful companies if this goes through, and your faith in the robustness of the "for the purposes of interoperability" clause is touching.
"I would use the banners if they didn't look like the result of "My First Adventures in Photoshop"
Use a text link for stuff like that anyway - banners are so old-looking now I'm surprised people even see them
If it's your own website, then a text link will fit better with the theme of the site, won't slow you down, integrates properly with your stylesheet, won't risk your other images getting blocked if someone kills the banner in Mozilla, and has the proper effect on google ratings.
Plus, it makes it look like you personally endorse the advertisement, in a way that banners ("look what someone paid me to say") just don't do.
They inform the public, which is always good
People won't automatically believe the government's smoothly-put "facts"
Journalists and newsreaders might become informed, and this will affect how they present the stories in their media
People close to those making the decisions might become informed. Imagine if the next time a cabinet-minister goes to a party, someone asks him "why does he hate the free market?"
Putting up banners and informative websites means that less people will be duped by "Fact and fiction, the effects of Computer-Implemented Inventions" and other such misleading propoganda
"Considering that the bill will be decided by politicians"
Seems to be the Patent Office pulling the strings at the moment, but anyway...
"How come they don't organise an email campaign, where you can find your relevant politician, and send him an email?"
Well, from just my experience, I've written to my MP. He's replied, and passed-on the letter to the DTI. The DTI has received thousands of such letters, and has called a meeting, which means that (a) they know very well that they're lying about patents being good for small business, and (b) they won't be able to pretend they don't know about the damage software patents will cause
As to organised events, I believe that:
a large number of people visited Brussels when the matter was last discussed
FFII organised possibly the biggest "website blackout" ever, which was reported even in national papers
Thousands of letters have been received by MPs, MEPs, and the DTI
At the last consultation, hundreds of small businesses met the "european parliament" in person, and told them in no uncertain terms that small-business did not support software patents. The politician who had claimed to be listening to these people didn't even attend the meeting.
When the software-patents idea was last defeated, it was on BBC television news how "internet and websites" had caused this change
To give people an idea of what the DTI is saying (write to your MP to get all this information if you haven't already done so):
They claim that because "Open-source" software wan't harmed by copyright, there's no reason to believe that it will be harmed by software patents.
They claim that small business will benefit from software patents
They claim that patents will encourage innovation
They claim that they're not changing anything ("clarifying the current situation") but that somehow requires a change in the law
The DTI propoganda includes numerous case-studies of happy smiling patent-holders, but no mention at all of the people already being harmed by software patents
From the nosoftwarepatents.com site:
<table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=980>
Offtopic maybe, but just why would you pick such a number?
"Why is this significant?"
It's not: MSIE is losing market-share to googlebot, htDig and LWP
"Having a good open-source browser that appears to be evolving very quickly exposes Microsoft to the risk that Mozilla will get good enough to start luring folks to it."
Presumably the insightful bit is that although Firefox is the better software by far, it should be lucky if even a few people are convinced to try it because it's competing against Microsoft.
It might "lure" a few people away from the one true browser, but they're crazy to even bother, some of these journalists seem to be thinking, and then proceed by examining why someone would want to write a browser when Microsoft already has one.
Oh, and I like the way they write the name of that company. It's "Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) [Links to more microsoft stories] [links to Microsoft stock quotes]" don't you know? Nevermind this is a Mozilla article.
"are these UV lights entirely safe for longterm exposure?"
They may not know the birthdate of Alexander Hamilton, but Wikipedia does have an article on ultraviolet light and its health effects.
"Can I put it in my inkjet?"
Ask again in a week. If nobody has sued the manufacturer by that time, then it's probably not compatible with inkjets.
"He was just too fucking old to operate a motor vehicle, and guess what! There's millions more like him out there. Old folks are incredibly dangerous behind the wheel. We don't need black boxes in every car, we need annual vision, reaction and cognition testing for all drivers over 70 years old, and those who don't pass lose their licenses right then and there. While we're at it we can strip the licenses of anyone who has more than one DUI or who causes an accident where someone loses life or limb, this would go a long way towards making our roads a lot safer."
There was once a good slashdot comment:
Q: "why are aeroplanes safer than cars?"
A: "Because if pilot rules were applied to drivers, then 1/3 the population would never be allowed to drive at all, 2/3 of the rest would only be allowed to drive 50cc cars in clear weather at 30mph, and the remainder would have spent 10 years learning, get retested every year, and be grounded at the first suspicion of human-error"
Now if only they could apply those same standards to those in control of motor vehicles, and perhaps update the driving test. I don't care that someone's demonstrated that they were once able to control a small car whilst sober, calm, undistracted, and fully-rested, it doesn't have any bearing on the driving they actually do.
You need hardware-synchronised or "genlocked" video cards, which use cables to synchronise the drawing of each frame. Naturally, you will be using 3 graphics cards in 3 graphics computers, with the rest of your application running on one or more additional machines.
Graphics cards which can do this are things like the nVidia Quadro FX3000G - the G stands for genlocking. Yes, they cost more than the normal version.
"but bypassing the adverts is not QUITE a victimless crime, as the networks are losing money by it"
"Not gaining money from it"
"It would be great to have a "trickle-sync" directory designation, so you could automatically share amongst group members. It would work like this: One person would drop files into a directory designated as "trickle-sync", and it would be slowly passed-along to everyone else in the group automatically without any prompting (assuming they enabled that feature on their machines). Rather than using full available bandwidth, it might be set to, say, a 5kb/sec maximum or something (or dynamically adjust the bandwidth depending on what else is happening on the network at the time)."
konspire.sourceforge.net/
Create a channel simply by publishing its key, and send out an anonymous announcement of the channel with a description of what you plan to use it for.
People receiving these annoucements sign-up for ones which sound interesting
When a channel-owner publishes a file, it magically and anonymously arrives on the PC of everyone who's subscribed to that channel.
Kind of like a TV or radio station, except you don't need millions of dollars to be the one speaking.
"I'm sick of this (and will probably get modded down) but this isnt the sole fault of the vendors, now is it. For whatever reason, they will not release their driver set under opensource licenses, and thats agreeable because its their code and their decision. On the other hand, the linux kernel devs wont supply a stable module API, because they dont like binary modules, which is also agreeable because its also their code and their decision. This does leave the end user in the unenviable position of recompilations, but IMHO nvidea seems to have found a suitable halfway point for this, only requiring a stub recompile. But from where Im standing, its not just nvideas fault, both sides are posturing and trying to make a good situation out of a less than good one, but the majority of people on slashdot seem to blame vendors for supplying closed drivers when they have no real need to."
Well that's all nice and eloquent,
but...
If it doesn't run a Free Software operating sytem, we're not buying it.
What makes people think we'd go to the trouble of writing billions of dollars' worth of software which is Free, only to sacrifice those principles for a crappy graphics card, modem, or motherboard?
"Hey, not only are Russians nice enough to ratify the Kyoto treaty, they're also nice enough to develop a nuclear weapon program that could avoid any possible defense (in the rare event that missile defense could actually work)."
And the US is developing scramjets so that they can deliver nuclear weapons past other peoples' missile shields -- are you saying that one is significantly more evil than the other???
"Treaties do constitute international law, but they are only binding on those nations which sign (and in the case of the US ratify) it."
Maybe they should put it in an EULA...
"Attention Europe! See what is going on? do you want this, too?"
The Patent Office wants it.
The UK government (i.e. lawyers, ex-lawyers, and the husbands of lawyers) also seem quite keen on it.
Can't think why...
"I hope the ban passes. Americans are badly overtaxed as it is."
But how will it help that the federal government is spending your money to investigate, debate, and implement additional rules like this for your state to comply with?
As far as I can tell, this only makes your tax bill higher, because the various organisations who tax you will still need as much money as before, and in addition, the size of the federal government has now increased to incorporate a "preventing people from levying an internet tax" function.
"It looks like Europe is leaning toward at least minimizing -- if not eliminating -- software patents"
It's not happening yet. Meeting on 14th December
"Maybe coming from a country where ID cards (and having them with you) have been mandatory since I've been born has made me blid, but what exactly are people's concerns about them? As far as I remember, my privacy has never been threatened by them - I show it to the police to prove who I am, sometimes also to the post office when I collect a parcel."
Blunkett's vision of the ID card also involves a national database with biometric information. That alone would pose additional complications, as it would make it trivial to (for example) take an object and discover who had previously touched it.
That database isn't needed for biometric ID, as such information could be stored on the smartcard instead of in a database, but for some reason, it has been decided that this country must have a database of everyone in it.
You'll see other concerns listed by slashdotters, for example the possibility of forging these new cards, the identity-theft problem, the way that people "assume" that the card is unforgeable, the "feeling like a criminal" aspect of having your fingerprints taken, the possibility that this data might be exported to the axis of evil (USA), or just because Blunkett is forcing the country to accept something it doesn't want. The final insult to most people of course, is the amount of money they'll have to pay for this indignity.
The Register as usual, does a good job of keeping an eye on such things, and some useful analysis of what's coming out of whitehall.
"Look at it like this: They will *buy* your shopping habit data by giving you discounts off their products."
0.2% discount. So about $1 every few months for most people. And in return, they're asking for about $50-worth of private information.
You're right about considering it a sale, but most people don't even attempt to calculate the figures involved.
"Only one company (Sony) has the resources to do that easily. (They currently offer all three of those pieces.) Unfortunately, they are too mired in IP idiocy and bad design to have any chance at it. Don't expect this to change any time soon."
Sony don't collectively have the intelligence to design even one of those items (PC software, music device, music shop) successfully, so the idea of getting all 3 is absurd.
Did they learn 10 years ago that proprietary and restrictive formats were unpopular? Hardly.
Did they compare their attitude ("we make music. you buy it") with Apple's ("everybody creates art")?
Yes I used to work there too, and it's a big company. Too big to make good products, by a very long shot.
"The first time you use your debit card or credit card with the card, both of them get linked & they have your real details."
(a) illegal in britain
(b) loyalty-card swapping events
(c) if they ever sent mail to the address on your credit-card, they'd reveal their crime, which means they can't use it for junkmail
"I think the important statistic is: Apple's market share is more than Creative's market share"
Well, I'm one of 'Creative's market share' and my comment is "probably never again"
I've never seen such bad software (both Windows drivers, and on-board software), and having a bigger hard drive for less money than the iPod is starting to wear thin as an excuse for it.
Spend advertising money all you like, I'm not buying my replacement jukebox until it comes with Linux drivers that are guaranteed to work.