There was an article related to this in the Business Week the other day. Their discussion focused around the devastating effects today's Wall Street has had on long-term corporate research. When a company is publicly traded, every move it makes is to be focused on short-term shareholder value, even so far as the the detriment of long-term viability in many cases. Companies are not nearly as willing or able to invest in long term research. The old giants that helped get us where we are today (Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM's research arm, etc etc) can no longer justify all those open-ended speculative research projects because almost all of Wall Street's money today is focused on short-term gains and not long-term investment. It does not even matter if you are a big research giant who's past record can easily absorb a research failure or two: look what happened to Proctor & Gamble when their Olean research product didn't do so well - their stock tanked from $70 to $15 (they have since managed to recover pretty well).
Then you add on top of that the fact that Mr. Bush and his administration was anti-science. Public-private partnership was also a huge part of what drove a lot of the advancement we saw through the 70s, 80s, and 90s through the likes of DARPA and others. With that "backstop" money drying up, companies are even less able to justify research projects to their shareholders.
All that said, at least we are still seeing some progress still occuring. The iPhone initiated a pretty significant advancement in smartphone interface design which we have seen Palm, Blackberry, and others jump on.
"And, gratified by the success of this technology, what would be the next logical step of companies like Massive? Wouldn't they seek new publishers and use it in other software?"
The answer there is simple. If MS were to try to implement this kind of thing in, say, Office - how fast do you think people would be jumping over to OpenOffice? They can't make you watch ads if you control the source code.
I love acronyms.:) My mind read your first sentence as, "I was charged with writing [Piece of Shit] software where I work." "Point of Sale" is only a secondary parsing of that acronym for my language framework.;)
Users can smell the money getting involved and abandon sites as they commercialise
...with the notable exception of Facebook...:-(
I don't know... Isn't Facebook just the current MySpace? Four years ago, MySpace was all the rage and no one even used Facebook. Twitter didn't even exist. How likely is it that the social crowd will still be using Facebook in 2014?
Yeah, I'll concede the suggestion was ill-conceived and spur-of-the-moment. I was actually mainly intending to voice that 50 years, or even 25, is a ridiculous amount of time to protect software code.
50 years? While I can possibly see argument (agreement aside) for a 50 year window on copyrighted creative works like Mickey Mouse, I definitely cannot see 50 years as an acceptable window for copyright protection of code. That would mean it would only now allow us to open and use code written in 1949. Personally - I would suggest that copyright protection would be acceptable for "twice as long as it took you to create it, all told" - if you spent 3 years from concept/analysis to final product, then you get 6 years of profit protection for your effort. If it only took you 2 months to come up with, you only get 4 months protection. Of course, that's nearly un-enforcable and way too complicated.
How about having cases of health decided by Bureaucrats rather than you and your doctor?
Everything else in your post aside, your argument against Universal Health Care fell apart at this question. It sounds by the tone of the question that you believe those in control of paying the doctor are, in fact, the ones controlling what care is administered. If so, how is that different from the current system in which the insurance provider is controlling that payment?
You really want healthcare reform? How about looking at malpractice cases and torte reform? Protection from malpractice suits costs tons in redundant tests. Malpractice insurance makes up about a third of healthcare costs in the US. It would be a lot more cost effective to treat our sick if our doctors didn't have to spend so much time and money protecting themselves from our recovered.
Your conclusion is debatable, particularly resting on the tenuous footing of your supplied argument. However, that doesn't matter at all. You see, it doesn't really matter whether Unix or Windows is easier to compromise. What matters is that the easiest people to compromise use Windows.
...which is actually precisely how capitalism, the US, etc, predominantly works. All of the rules apply, unless you have enough money that you can give to the guy who makes the rules - then the rules bend as much as the money allows.
Are you assuming that it would be impossible for him to assume a different identity and that it would be impossible for him to conduct business with people who never see his face? I'd wager half the financial advisors who were directing money his way never knew what he looked like until the scandal broke.
I think that the sentence indicates an argument that he is a danger to society. One could argue that he has been more of a danger to society than most violent criminals already incarcerated. Who's to say he won't go out and conduct more scams? Just because he seems sorry now that he's in trouble? How can you bar a person from being a con-artist? The man ruined more lives than most other criminals ever have...
You dont censor the truth in this manner. I am VERY disappointed in wikipedia's stance on this. They should be COMPLETELY impartial. Either you represent facts or you have interests, choose wisely wikipedia. I had no idea that the people who run wikipedia actively changed stories for political ends.
I fail to see how this was political at all. They changed facts for humanitarian reasons. I see nothing in this story that indicates any kind of agenda other than keeping Mr. Rodhe alive. You may argue that the methods were right or wrong, but they were definitely not political. I will not tread down the slippery slope of trying to suggest the ends justify the means, as any kind of censorship is itself a slippery slope - but I am glad to hear that he was able to survive and eventually escape.
Almost any time I visit a website and the website is slow to load, I can be sure to look in the status bar of my browser and see that it's trying to get data from one of the advertising websites. Ad networks are almost ALWAYS the bottleneck. Sure, once in a while it's a massive site or poorly designed... but mostly, it's just stupid ads taking the time.
ThinkPads are common business laptops, and developers are often issued laptops because they are often required to perform off-hours support. I, myself, have a company issued T61 and I do try to follow general standards when I write my code. Granted, I often dock and use a real keyboard because laptops interfaces generally just suck, but sometimes working from the laptop itself is unavoidable. Am I the only one out there?
I don't care much about the Delete and Escape key changes mentioned in TFA... but I think the article's author gives a glimpse of tech-naivete' by suggesting that the Caps Lock key is obsolete. Just because he doesn't see a reason for Caps Lock out there in his little business world doesn't mean the key isn't highly useful to application developers. I'll point out SQL capitalization standards as just one example.
DELETE FROM my.memory WHERE opinion = his / COMMIT
Slashdot Mirror
...why does it seem like every nightmare I have relating to patents and copyrights comes true?
Please, for the sake of us all, stop sleeping...
I tend to stay away from broad bands...
It should be relatively easy to establish "rules of the sky"
Tell that to the helicopter tour over the Hudson...
You clearly haven't seen how well a Death Glider handles...
There was an article related to this in the Business Week the other day. Their discussion focused around the devastating effects today's Wall Street has had on long-term corporate research. When a company is publicly traded, every move it makes is to be focused on short-term shareholder value, even so far as the the detriment of long-term viability in many cases. Companies are not nearly as willing or able to invest in long term research. The old giants that helped get us where we are today (Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM's research arm, etc etc) can no longer justify all those open-ended speculative research projects because almost all of Wall Street's money today is focused on short-term gains and not long-term investment. It does not even matter if you are a big research giant who's past record can easily absorb a research failure or two: look what happened to Proctor & Gamble when their Olean research product didn't do so well - their stock tanked from $70 to $15 (they have since managed to recover pretty well).
Then you add on top of that the fact that Mr. Bush and his administration was anti-science. Public-private partnership was also a huge part of what drove a lot of the advancement we saw through the 70s, 80s, and 90s through the likes of DARPA and others. With that "backstop" money drying up, companies are even less able to justify research projects to their shareholders.
All that said, at least we are still seeing some progress still occuring. The iPhone initiated a pretty significant advancement in smartphone interface design which we have seen Palm, Blackberry, and others jump on.
Request for car analogy here, I don't get this woman thing.
Software development is a lot like a having a baby in a car. 1 woman, 9 glasses of wine, 1 romantic overlook = 1 baby.
Hmm.. my anology seems to fall apart. When I add more women to that, I get more babies.. sorry...
Cuz I have yet to hear of one ever working in the US...
"And, gratified by the success of this technology, what would be the next logical step of companies like Massive? Wouldn't they seek new publishers and use it in other software?"
The answer there is simple. If MS were to try to implement this kind of thing in, say, Office - how fast do you think people would be jumping over to OpenOffice? They can't make you watch ads if you control the source code.
Good luck with that. You have heard of guys like RAZOR1911?
I like that. It's right up there with my favorite customer service motto: "We're not happy until you're not happy."
I love acronyms. :) My mind read your first sentence as, "I was charged with writing [Piece of Shit] software where I work." "Point of Sale" is only a secondary parsing of that acronym for my language framework. ;)
Users can smell the money getting involved and abandon sites as they commercialise
...with the notable exception of Facebook... :-(
I don't know... Isn't Facebook just the current MySpace? Four years ago, MySpace was all the rage and no one even used Facebook. Twitter didn't even exist. How likely is it that the social crowd will still be using Facebook in 2014?
Wow, I got a Troll for this? Ha. Moderation fail. :P
Yeah, I'll concede the suggestion was ill-conceived and spur-of-the-moment. I was actually mainly intending to voice that 50 years, or even 25, is a ridiculous amount of time to protect software code.
50 years? While I can possibly see argument (agreement aside) for a 50 year window on copyrighted creative works like Mickey Mouse, I definitely cannot see 50 years as an acceptable window for copyright protection of code. That would mean it would only now allow us to open and use code written in 1949. Personally - I would suggest that copyright protection would be acceptable for "twice as long as it took you to create it, all told" - if you spent 3 years from concept/analysis to final product, then you get 6 years of profit protection for your effort. If it only took you 2 months to come up with, you only get 4 months protection. Of course, that's nearly un-enforcable and way too complicated.
How about having cases of health decided by Bureaucrats rather than you and your doctor?
Everything else in your post aside, your argument against Universal Health Care fell apart at this question. It sounds by the tone of the question that you believe those in control of paying the doctor are, in fact, the ones controlling what care is administered. If so, how is that different from the current system in which the insurance provider is controlling that payment?
You really want healthcare reform? How about looking at malpractice cases and torte reform? Protection from malpractice suits costs tons in redundant tests. Malpractice insurance makes up about a third of healthcare costs in the US. It would be a lot more cost effective to treat our sick if our doctors didn't have to spend so much time and money protecting themselves from our recovered.
Your conclusion is debatable, particularly resting on the tenuous footing of your supplied argument. However, that doesn't matter at all. You see, it doesn't really matter whether Unix or Windows is easier to compromise. What matters is that the easiest people to compromise use Windows.
...which is actually precisely how capitalism, the US, etc, predominantly works. All of the rules apply, unless you have enough money that you can give to the guy who makes the rules - then the rules bend as much as the money allows.
Are you assuming that it would be impossible for him to assume a different identity and that it would be impossible for him to conduct business with people who never see his face? I'd wager half the financial advisors who were directing money his way never knew what he looked like until the scandal broke.
I think that the sentence indicates an argument that he is a danger to society. One could argue that he has been more of a danger to society than most violent criminals already incarcerated. Who's to say he won't go out and conduct more scams? Just because he seems sorry now that he's in trouble? How can you bar a person from being a con-artist? The man ruined more lives than most other criminals ever have...
You dont censor the truth in this manner. I am VERY disappointed in wikipedia's stance on this. They should be COMPLETELY impartial. Either you represent facts or you have interests, choose wisely wikipedia. I had no idea that the people who run wikipedia actively changed stories for political ends.
I fail to see how this was political at all. They changed facts for humanitarian reasons. I see nothing in this story that indicates any kind of agenda other than keeping Mr. Rodhe alive. You may argue that the methods were right or wrong, but they were definitely not political. I will not tread down the slippery slope of trying to suggest the ends justify the means, as any kind of censorship is itself a slippery slope - but I am glad to hear that he was able to survive and eventually escape.
Almost any time I visit a website and the website is slow to load, I can be sure to look in the status bar of my browser and see that it's trying to get data from one of the advertising websites. Ad networks are almost ALWAYS the bottleneck. Sure, once in a while it's a massive site or poorly designed... but mostly, it's just stupid ads taking the time.
Proper editors don't futz around with your capitalization.
Proper editors make it configurable, so it's up the user.
Proper hardware should support both configurations for said editor and said user.
ThinkPads are common business laptops, and developers are often issued laptops because they are often required to perform off-hours support. I, myself, have a company issued T61 and I do try to follow general standards when I write my code. Granted, I often dock and use a real keyboard because laptops interfaces generally just suck, but sometimes working from the laptop itself is unavoidable. Am I the only one out there?
I don't care much about the Delete and Escape key changes mentioned in TFA... but I think the article's author gives a glimpse of tech-naivete' by suggesting that the Caps Lock key is obsolete. Just because he doesn't see a reason for Caps Lock out there in his little business world doesn't mean the key isn't highly useful to application developers. I'll point out SQL capitalization standards as just one example.
DELETE FROM my.memory WHERE opinion = his
/
COMMIT