They don't view censorship as we do, they accept it as a tool the government use for their well-being. Now, if you ask a Chinese if he thinks that protecting corrupt politicians, hiding abuse (economical or physical) of his friends, keeping him in poverty or lying to him about decisions that are killing him (like health issues) is part of his well-being, I'm sure you will hear a different tune. What the chinese elite sees when they go back in China is abuse of government power, however their solution is not to adopt the american system, but to remove the abuse from the Chinese one.
The closest analogy is how European sees government compared to the americans. European accept, even expect big government taking care of loads of aspect that scream communism to any american. When there is a problem, they do not demonstrate for less government as in the US, they demonstrate for better/more government involvement.
That is true if productivity and automation does not increase. To put it in other words, does taking care of 100 person takes 100 times the effort than taking care of 1 person ?
Now we have managed in the past, because it was compensated by an increase of consumption: eg: you need less farmer but you need more factory worker. And later, you need less factory worker but you need more service worker. Considering that we seem to hit the limit of earth is term of raw consumption, we will need to find a sustainable way of consuming even more in a field that possibly requires tremendous amount of averagely skilled manpower. We should start to see trends in first world economies, but the only thing there seem to be is IT services. These are well sustainable, but they use a very tiny fraction of very high skilled manpower - so that is not good.
What will be the sustainable, average skill, high employment sectors to employ the masses of the future ? If we don't make huge progress in space exploration in the next 20 years, there seem to be only the time tested global war or, with a little help of a god, a good pandemic or other global cataclysm.
Glad you don't want our American Culture. Oh, by the way, don't forget to toss any modern cellphone you have, Apple/Google/Microsoft/WebOS, what country did they come from again?
Just hope you don't like Chinese restaurant. I heard being a communist is not so popular in the US.
Actually, the JCP is massively slow and inefficient. Java may aswell be controlled by a lone dead blogger considering the glacial pace things get moving. Frankly, MS is much better than the JCP at churning API and improving its language.
What really sets java appart though is the open source community around it and its legitimacy. Almost everything a java developer considers the standard java nowadays includes a myriad of open source projects (JUnit, Spring, Hibernate,...) That is the main difference between Java and C#. It does not matter who controls the JDK, but it still matters with C#. Time will tell how it is for Dart. But if Android is any indication, that will be Google solo.
a lot of the things Jobs did in computing were horrible. Pretty, and king of usability, but all a thing veneer on something fundamentally malign.
Jobs transform specialist machines and nerdy toys into an every day commodity. The cost of not shipping without a 200 pages long manual geared to people with technical knowledge is that the machine become locked down. Same happened with cars ( remember the time when you got for free the servicing manual and all the tools where standard ?), tv (remember the time when the tv schematic were provided with the tv set ),...
So yeah, the stuff he did are horrible to us, basement dwellers, and the closer you share Stallman point of view the closer Jobs looks like Satan. However, for a lot of people (the majority), he is the genius that made computer, internet, music,... accessible without interacting with their awkward neighbors kid.
Thanks to Apple though it does appear to becoming standard
That has always existed. Various tech companies have sued competitors like crazy - all the big corps have tons of cross licensing agreement. For some reason, big companies managed to convince us that they were nice people and only got patent to protect against evil companies (troll). That is simply not true - they use their patents in the way that is the most profitable to them, like they do with everything else. They are companies, not some sort of charity.
First to file has nothing to do with prior art. You are just the "first to file" for a patent on something not patentable (prior art, obvious,...). So you won't get it - and if you get it, it can be invalidated in court.
First to file only matter when 2 or more people try to patent the same patentable invention at the same time (remember, it takes years to get a patent). The patent office needs to give the patent to one of the applicants, before it tried to painfully determine the first to invent, now it just give it to the first to file.
One is that the company really couldn't afford to lose you at that time, and goes bust.
If the whole business of the company is critically dependent on that guy only, and management still decide to pay him less than market rate, it is their failure, not his : the company is one broken bone away from bankruptcy. Besides, there are plenty of tool that management has in its power to reward identified critical individual and make them feel like they belong. Even if they are short in cash, they could still make him a partner, promote him, give him stock, a big office, offer remote working several day a week,...
If you don't get any extra tangible consideration, you are not critical in management eyes.
Also you get the benefits as soon as you become critical. It does not come after the facts: either management continues to not realise, or in the best case for them, they eventually realise they dodged a bullet and promptly solve the issue (i.e. finding a way to make you less critical)
Faced with impending doom, management can be very creative. If they know you are critical, they will make the kind of counteroffer you cannot refuse (i.e. much more than just match your offer) If you don't get that when leaving, you can take the other offer with peace of mind: either management screwed up or you simply were not critical.
FRAND is not revoked if you sue the owner on something not related. Samsung can use their 3G patent to defend against Apple - but using them in retaliation is contrary to the "N" (Non-Discriminatory) part of FRAND. (Note that this is Apple argument that the patent is necessary to implement 3G. If not, then it is simply not part of the FRAND license)
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
Gardens don't like walls. either you control it to tightly and everything whither and dies
Actually... tightly controlling your garden works amazingly well in the real world, there are countless example around the world, and that is a typical post retirement hobby in most of the first world.
The goal was to avoid easy loopholes of the patent. If buying from somebody would magically absolve you of patented IP it contained, "clever individual / corps" would just legally setup arrays of little intermediaries companies to launder their dirty IP. Rendering patent useless.
Obviously closing the loopholes meant that you can pick and chose the most juicy target between from the real infringer to the dog of the final customer. Rendering patent enforcement the protection racket we have learned to love.
But yeah, that just confirms what you said - the system is so fundamentally broken that its application can only be unfair or useless.
Note that you make some assumptions aswell here. You assume that this incident is to be taken in isolation and that there is no wider context to the behavior of the professor or the Campus Police. In other word, there could be missing step 0, -1, -2,...
I have seen people put on edge after months of little personal nagging that explode suddenly. (so the CP could have pissed him off, or vice versa)
Both were jerk, but I expect better from the so-called campus police. If the CP had bothered to think before screaming, this would have been a non-issue.
Ouch, I said metal smithing, but actually that is silversmithing ( privacy by obscurity fail ) - not exactly the same skill set, but more practical in a flat...
Other than that, the best start is to take introduction classes. Here in the UK, a cheap and good way to start is starting a guild type degree (an evening or afternoon class for several weeks) That will give you tons of contact about where to buy the tool and raw material in your area. You will also be introduced to the industry behind it and with that chose what you want to do. If it is anything like silversmithing, you can either do everything by hand from raw silver bar or use to various degree existing part (findings), use traditional tool or modern ones,... Since it is the US, you should not have any problem to find resources.
Be ready to be humbled by how little you knew about a whole industry and branch of science and reflect upon that when you blame people for not understanding IT.
If you can't tell the difference between something built by somebody that has more skill than you do, so there is no reason not to be proud of yourself. For entry to moderate level DIY or craft, the main difference between an amateur and a professional is the productivity: i.e. how much time it takes the professional and his consistency in result.
For high level stuff, that is another matter. I can only talk personally, but since I have started metal smithing as a hobby, I value a lot less the average piece you can buy all assembled (not even talking about the mass produced shit). However, I began to be amazed by what master craftman can do. ( and as collateral damage, I have paid price for piece that I would not have considered reasonable before )
No that's called investing. When a company get money from the bank or investor, they also compete with money from unrelated activities.
Also the product is not free - they are not a charity - they expect people to pay for their service: ads placement. Giving away the search engine is a mean to capture eyeballs and therefore sell the ads placement for more money.
I think dumping 9 billion bucks into your online offerings and still not being able to shake an any substantial way the market leader
That is a bit scary as well. There is only Microsoft actively going against Google (at least in the markets that affect me the most - the western world). Google is sitting on a pile of personal information, a real goldmine that their advertiser client would dream to tap. You need some serious competition on the market to help them continue to make the right decision (i.e. leave our data alone)
You do not need "evil reasons" to keep your source closed. The fact that Google is not willing to release the source of the most current version of Android and only promise to do so with the next version shows only a lack of commitment to the open source aspect of Android. That may or may not be important, (hell loads of people are just fine with Windows and iPhone, not all of them are stupid).
However if I invested some real time developing Android (note: != developing for Android), that would make me think twice. For example, a small startup could be trying to create some original handset using Android to cut on the dev. Their investors could see Google attitude as a risk of being pwned.
Antibiotics allow the cattle to digest corn and produce more meat, for reasons not completely understood. Chicken raised per square meter can be much higher with antibiotics. So, regardless how screwed the drug companies are, the food producer (notice: != farmer) are in the same pot.
That is unfortunately one of the so many example of capitalism working as expected without either regulations or customer information (like for tobacco, it should be mandatory to describe your nugget as "mutilated chicken fed with cow feces, minced whole and soaked in ammonia and petrol-based chicken flavor")
This one is not really a big problem - actually that is a simplification that is probably welcome for a script embedded in a HTML page.
What is bothering is the complete lack of support for the multithreaded environment in which run javascript: no way to wait for an event (except for alert()). Sure you can use callbacks, but then that is the same - there is no tool built-in in the language to deal with the explosion of callback that you get as soon as you get in moderately complicated scripts.
4. 'null' and 'undefined' are two different values
Also undefined is an actual value. You can define a variable with the value undefined, a great source of subtle bugs.
I think it's a genuinely dangerous slippery slope.
Let's not exaggerate too much. The UK and the US are free and open societies, and yet there are law that prevent you to use your freedom to abuse somebody else's. That is the foundation of society and community to behave in some sort of acceptable way together.
We have to keep in mind, that each geek online is the equivalent in the physical world equivalent of a king living in a castle with an army at his disposal. Of course, we don't feel the need (or even resent) stuff like police and laws.
To a layman an office building may be "just an office building", but that doesn't mean that it is true and that the design of a building doesn't have social and psychological impact on those who experience the building and interact with it.
Or in simpler term, Architects are not immune to delusion of self worth. Prostitutes in the street and opening time of the asian corner shop also has a social and psychological impact.
There is a reason why architecture is more demanding and requires a lot more technical know-how than what is expected from mere designers and even civil engineers.
Funny, the civil engineers say exactly the opposite and boast how they need so much more technical know-how than for mere architects.
There is the same BS for any profession using their brain. For developers, work is pure abstract art and so much more challenging than for mere mortals working in a physical world with easy to grasp physics. Math people have the purest thought next to god, Physicist are gods,...
At the end of the day, with all my superior brain, I still had to pay a plumber 150 GBP an hour to unclog my toilet to avoid drowning in shit.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't view censorship as we do, they accept it as a tool the government use for their well-being. Now, if you ask a Chinese if he thinks that protecting corrupt politicians, hiding abuse (economical or physical) of his friends, keeping him in poverty or lying to him about decisions that are killing him (like health issues) is part of his well-being, I'm sure you will hear a different tune. What the chinese elite sees when they go back in China is abuse of government power, however their solution is not to adopt the american system, but to remove the abuse from the Chinese one.
The closest analogy is how European sees government compared to the americans. European accept, even expect big government taking care of loads of aspect that scream communism to any american. When there is a problem, they do not demonstrate for less government as in the US, they demonstrate for better/more government involvement.
That is true if productivity and automation does not increase. To put it in other words, does taking care of 100 person takes 100 times the effort than taking care of 1 person ?
Now we have managed in the past, because it was compensated by an increase of consumption: eg: you need less farmer but you need more factory worker. And later, you need less factory worker but you need more service worker. Considering that we seem to hit the limit of earth is term of raw consumption, we will need to find a sustainable way of consuming even more in a field that possibly requires tremendous amount of averagely skilled manpower. We should start to see trends in first world economies, but the only thing there seem to be is IT services. These are well sustainable, but they use a very tiny fraction of very high skilled manpower - so that is not good.
What will be the sustainable, average skill, high employment sectors to employ the masses of the future ? If we don't make huge progress in space exploration in the next 20 years, there seem to be only the time tested global war or, with a little help of a god, a good pandemic or other global cataclysm.
Glad you don't want our American Culture. Oh, by the way, don't forget to toss any modern cellphone you have, Apple/Google/Microsoft/WebOS, what country did they come from again?
Just hope you don't like Chinese restaurant. I heard being a communist is not so popular in the US.
Actually, the JCP is massively slow and inefficient. Java may aswell be controlled by a lone dead blogger considering the glacial pace things get moving. Frankly, MS is much better than the JCP at churning API and improving its language.
What really sets java appart though is the open source community around it and its legitimacy. Almost everything a java developer considers the standard java nowadays includes a myriad of open source projects (JUnit, Spring, Hibernate, ...) That is the main difference between Java and C#. It does not matter who controls the JDK, but it still matters with C#. Time will tell how it is for Dart. But if Android is any indication, that will be Google solo.
a lot of the things Jobs did in computing were horrible. Pretty, and king of usability, but all a thing veneer on something fundamentally malign.
Jobs transform specialist machines and nerdy toys into an every day commodity. The cost of not shipping without a 200 pages long manual geared to people with technical knowledge is that the machine become locked down. Same happened with cars ( remember the time when you got for free the servicing manual and all the tools where standard ?), tv (remember the time when the tv schematic were provided with the tv set ), ...
So yeah, the stuff he did are horrible to us, basement dwellers, and the closer you share Stallman point of view the closer Jobs looks like Satan. However, for a lot of people (the majority), he is the genius that made computer, internet, music, ... accessible without interacting with their awkward neighbors kid.
Thanks to Apple though it does appear to becoming standard
That has always existed. Various tech companies have sued competitors like crazy - all the big corps have tons of cross licensing agreement. For some reason, big companies managed to convince us that they were nice people and only got patent to protect against evil companies (troll). That is simply not true - they use their patents in the way that is the most profitable to them, like they do with everything else. They are companies, not some sort of charity.
First to file has nothing to do with prior art. You are just the "first to file" for a patent on something not patentable (prior art, obvious, ...). So you won't get it - and if you get it, it can be invalidated in court.
First to file only matter when 2 or more people try to patent the same patentable invention at the same time (remember, it takes years to get a patent). The patent office needs to give the patent to one of the applicants, before it tried to painfully determine the first to invent, now it just give it to the first to file.
One is that the company really couldn't afford to lose you at that time, and goes bust.
If the whole business of the company is critically dependent on that guy only, and management still decide to pay him less than market rate, it is their failure, not his : the company is one broken bone away from bankruptcy. Besides, there are plenty of tool that management has in its power to reward identified critical individual and make them feel like they belong. Even if they are short in cash, they could still make him a partner, promote him, give him stock, a big office, offer remote working several day a week, ...
If you don't get any extra tangible consideration, you are not critical in management eyes.
Also you get the benefits as soon as you become critical. It does not come after the facts: either management continues to not realise, or in the best case for them, they eventually realise they dodged a bullet and promptly solve the issue (i.e. finding a way to make you less critical)
Faced with impending doom, management can be very creative. If they know you are critical, they will make the kind of counteroffer you cannot refuse (i.e. much more than just match your offer) If you don't get that when leaving, you can take the other offer with peace of mind: either management screwed up or you simply were not critical.
FRAND is not revoked if you sue the owner on something not related. Samsung can use their 3G patent to defend against Apple - but using them in retaliation is contrary to the "N" (Non-Discriminatory) part of FRAND. (Note that this is Apple argument that the patent is necessary to implement 3G. If not, then it is simply not part of the FRAND license)
Gardens don't like walls. either you control it to tightly and everything whither and dies
Actually ... tightly controlling your garden works amazingly well in the real world, there are countless example around the world, and that is a typical post retirement hobby in most of the first world.
The goal was to avoid easy loopholes of the patent. If buying from somebody would magically absolve you of patented IP it contained, "clever individual / corps" would just legally setup arrays of little intermediaries companies to launder their dirty IP. Rendering patent useless.
Obviously closing the loopholes meant that you can pick and chose the most juicy target between from the real infringer to the dog of the final customer. Rendering patent enforcement the protection racket we have learned to love.
But yeah, that just confirms what you said - the system is so fundamentally broken that its application can only be unfair or useless.
Note that you make some assumptions aswell here. You assume that this incident is to be taken in isolation and that there is no wider context to the behavior of the professor or the Campus Police. In other word, there could be missing step 0, -1, -2, ...
I have seen people put on edge after months of little personal nagging that explode suddenly. (so the CP could have pissed him off, or vice versa)
Both were jerk, but I expect better from the so-called campus police. If the CP had bothered to think before screaming, this would have been a non-issue.
Ouch, I said metal smithing, but actually that is silversmithing ( privacy by obscurity fail ) - not exactly the same skill set, but more practical in a flat ...
Other than that, the best start is to take introduction classes. Here in the UK, a cheap and good way to start is starting a guild type degree (an evening or afternoon class for several weeks) That will give you tons of contact about where to buy the tool and raw material in your area. You will also be introduced to the industry behind it and with that chose what you want to do. If it is anything like silversmithing, you can either do everything by hand from raw silver bar or use to various degree existing part (findings), use traditional tool or modern ones, ... Since it is the US, you should not have any problem to find resources.
Be ready to be humbled by how little you knew about a whole industry and branch of science and reflect upon that when you blame people for not understanding IT.
If you can't tell the difference between something built by somebody that has more skill than you do, so there is no reason not to be proud of yourself. For entry to moderate level DIY or craft, the main difference between an amateur and a professional is the productivity: i.e. how much time it takes the professional and his consistency in result.
For high level stuff, that is another matter. I can only talk personally, but since I have started metal smithing as a hobby, I value a lot less the average piece you can buy all assembled (not even talking about the mass produced shit). However, I began to be amazed by what master craftman can do. ( and as collateral damage, I have paid price for piece that I would not have considered reasonable before )
You patent a specific implementation, not the concept. That's not only the designers and engineers that are able to "Think Different" at Apple.
No that's called investing. When a company get money from the bank or investor, they also compete with money from unrelated activities.
Also the product is not free - they are not a charity - they expect people to pay for their service: ads placement. Giving away the search engine is a mean to capture eyeballs and therefore sell the ads placement for more money.
I think dumping 9 billion bucks into your online offerings and still not being able to shake an any substantial way the market leader
That is a bit scary as well. There is only Microsoft actively going against Google (at least in the markets that affect me the most - the western world). Google is sitting on a pile of personal information, a real goldmine that their advertiser client would dream to tap. You need some serious competition on the market to help them continue to make the right decision (i.e. leave our data alone)
You do not need "evil reasons" to keep your source closed. The fact that Google is not willing to release the source of the most current version of Android and only promise to do so with the next version shows only a lack of commitment to the open source aspect of Android. That may or may not be important, (hell loads of people are just fine with Windows and iPhone, not all of them are stupid).
However if I invested some real time developing Android (note: != developing for Android), that would make me think twice. For example, a small startup could be trying to create some original handset using Android to cut on the dev. Their investors could see Google attitude as a risk of being pwned.
That is unfortunately one of the so many example of capitalism working as expected without either regulations or customer information (like for tobacco, it should be mandatory to describe your nugget as "mutilated chicken fed with cow feces, minced whole and soaked in ammonia and petrol-based chicken flavor")
Thanks but no thanks, I think I'll be sticking with offline compilers
Will nobody ever think of the NSA ? You must be a terrorist.
More than one airport, each with a different contractor but the same flights.
2. No multithreading.
This one is not really a big problem - actually that is a simplification that is probably welcome for a script embedded in a HTML page.
What is bothering is the complete lack of support for the multithreaded environment in which run javascript: no way to wait for an event (except for alert()). Sure you can use callbacks, but then that is the same - there is no tool built-in in the language to deal with the explosion of callback that you get as soon as you get in moderately complicated scripts.
4. 'null' and 'undefined' are two different values
Also undefined is an actual value. You can define a variable with the value undefined, a great source of subtle bugs.
I think it's a genuinely dangerous slippery slope.
Let's not exaggerate too much. The UK and the US are free and open societies, and yet there are law that prevent you to use your freedom to abuse somebody else's. That is the foundation of society and community to behave in some sort of acceptable way together.
We have to keep in mind, that each geek online is the equivalent in the physical world equivalent of a king living in a castle with an army at his disposal. Of course, we don't feel the need (or even resent) stuff like police and laws.
To a layman an office building may be "just an office building", but that doesn't mean that it is true and that the design of a building doesn't have social and psychological impact on those who experience the building and interact with it.
Or in simpler term, Architects are not immune to delusion of self worth. Prostitutes in the street and opening time of the asian corner shop also has a social and psychological impact.
There is a reason why architecture is more demanding and requires a lot more technical know-how than what is expected from mere designers and even civil engineers.
Funny, the civil engineers say exactly the opposite and boast how they need so much more technical know-how than for mere architects. There is the same BS for any profession using their brain. For developers, work is pure abstract art and so much more challenging than for mere mortals working in a physical world with easy to grasp physics. Math people have the purest thought next to god, Physicist are gods, ...
At the end of the day, with all my superior brain, I still had to pay a plumber 150 GBP an hour to unclog my toilet to avoid drowning in shit.
I think we need to modernize Godwin's law to include terrorism to stay relevant in the "post 9/11" world.