You're right. And there was one particular good response to that article:
I am a lawyer...
I guess the reason why this subject comes up more and more frequently is the fact that we programers don't care about the details of such contracts until we are bitten by them.
Well, the first paragraph is nice, but have a close look on this one:
1. Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of employer.
What does 'relate' mean? If your company does something web related, are you allowed to do any CGI-programming on your on time for example?
That's the problem with our field: Everything is somehow related with everything as soon as it is digitalized.
I'm posting this in order to erase my moderation. For some strange reason Konqueror applied my '-1' troll to this posting instead of the post below by 'mvuijlst', as I intended.
I wonder if moving to Linux in order to gain "mindshare" is becoming an accepted business strategy.
Well, for the PDA market this might work out very well. I'm actually quite excited about the new interest companies are showing for Linux based PDAs. (Compaq, Samsung, Sharp to name a few).
Palm made it easy to develop software for its OS and the number of available Palm applications made it a success. Linux enthusiasts will likely replicate (and maybe even exceed) this number for a Linux PDA.
The interesting thing about this perspective is that Linux won't come over the server onto John Smith's desktop, but maybe over PDAs. It will be the first time that 'normal' people (the majority of computer users) will see Linux doing the job.
MySQL is not a production database - it is a toy to play with at home, and I would fire anyone that recommended it as a 'serious' solution.
As the major shareholder of your company, I would immediately kick you out of the management if you make such commends officially with your name.
You obviously haven't used MySQL, nor are you aware of its capabilities. The original article is not specific about what they intend to do with the DB, and believe me, there are cases where MySQL is a very good choice. It won't solve all you problems, but if its strengths fits the task, then use it.
There's no need to play the big boss here, making these uninformed generalizations.
While I agree with most points in your post, I'm always amazed how quickly people give Microsoft credits for being innovative.
My opinion: They don't innovate. Go ahead, call me a fool. But read this first: Their market dominance gives them an incredible advantage. They can get into *every* game a little bit late and still win it.
They were late to the internet, and yet the could use their desktop OS monoply to overcome this easily. They 'integrated' IE (very much inspired by the Navigator) into the OS, you might call that 'innovation', a word that has been over-used in many ways lately.
Next example, media players: Once again, Microsoft was late to this. Is it really such a great achievement to study your prospective competitor's product (RealPlayer), come up with something better (note: I don't think this is true innovation) and to push it into the market, once again through desktop OS dominance? Also consider Microsoft's incredible amount of money they can spend for such projects.
There are other examples in the past and if Microsoft is allowed with such practices in the future we will see many more to come... until Microsoft is forced to really start innovating because nobody else dares to do so.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Microsoft extended the protocol and put those extensions under trade secret. While everything still remains interoperatible, this enables Microsoft to extend the client in a way which limits them if they had to use the non-extended protocol... that's where people will prefer the more feature rich (another term is 'bloated') server from Microsoft.
That's the essence of 'embrace and extend'... something they already did with Java for example.
Windows 2000 and MIT kerberos 5 are completely interoperable, and Microsoft's changes are well-documented and "legal" according to the kerberos spec.
It's completely irrelevant how well the changes are documented if the documentation is not freely available.
Re:The end of the Microsoft era?
on
Rebel Code
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· Score: 1
Hmmm... I'd debate that. Microsoft seem to be attacking Linux and Open Source recently. I haven't heard them attacking Apple in the same manner.
The reason here is simple: Microsoft has no control whatsoever over any opensource project. But they have a firm grip on Apple. Once Apple becomes a thread (which is unlikely), they just drop their software for it (Office, IE,...). Problem solved.
Everyone would laugh if they try that with Linux. So the only weapon they have is to publicly denounce open source. Everyone still laughs.
I think, unpopular as the view may be, that MS will always be around. Instead of Microsoft Hate, we should promote Linux Love - convince people that we have a viable alternative - not just a rebellion.
That's right, but Microsoft doesn't make this easy for us.:-)
In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."
Isn't this a contradiction or at least misleading? Why should taxpayer-funded development be owned by someone else than the public? To me it seems as if the GPL protects something here. To these Microsoft guys, everything that is free is not profitable and thus a thread.
It just amazes me how Microsoft has been interpreting the word 'Innovation' these days.
This a difficult question to answer and it entirely hinges on how you define art . For me, a piece of code, or an elegant mathematical proof is as much art as a Picasso, or Beethoven's 5th Symphony. As always, feel free to share your thoughts on this subject.
Programming is perceived as something stubborn, boring and uncreative by 'outsiders'. Programmers like to compare good code with art to counter this. Somehow we all like to see our efforts being admired, there is nothing wrong about this.
However, no matter how you look at it, code is no art, and will never be. It has a function, it makes sense and it serves a particular purpose. Art seldomly serves anything, and I would even say that this is one of it's main features.
Coding is an extremely creative activity but this doesn't make the programmer an artist.
Of course the question can't be answered in such a simplistic way, and there are many simliarities between coders and artists, but this doesn't make the 'product' (=code) art.
That's quite an interesting link you have there. I wish I had it a year ago. My company (now ex-company) gave me a new IP agreement to sign after I was working there for several month which considerably seems to have limited my rights according to the 'employers rights in employee inventions'.
One of the points which I found quite disturbing in the new contract was that everything I invent (invention was defined in a broad way... basically, any kind of programs, ideas, algorithms,...) during my employment (this includes off work time as well) belongs to the company. However I was allowed to disclose any inventions to my superiors if I want to have them exempted from this claim. The decision however would be the company's.
I asked for clarification about that clause and got to speak to a company's lawyer who told me, that such agreements are absolutely normal and there was nothing special about it. I probably should have gone to a more neutral lawyer.
First of all, I'd hardly call myself 'Apple apologist'.
What you have just said is really not true.
It isn't? You go on with lots of trivia that may all be true but doesn't prove me any wrong. Remember, I didn't criticize the Win-UI; they put *known things* into one UI which isn't necessarily bad... but my simple claim still stands: I have to this day not seen any significant innovation in the Win-UI. Nothing that hasn't been *on the market* already when they came out with it.
Now it might be true that Microsoft came up with nifty stuff in their secret labs, however, AFAIK, there have been two major revisions of Microsoft's UI: Win3 and Win95. When these products hit the market, they had nothing new. Zero. Nada. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
For Aqua, while I'd hardly call it revolutionary, there are at least some new elements that I haven't seen before. For instance, you can freely transorm windows into different shapes, (used in the geenie effect), the usage of transparency, (not new, but it's used in a useful way), the new modal windows,...
Sure, these are small things and won't change the way people use their computer, but at least it's a step forward. You'll soon see transparency heavily used in a future Windows.
There, it had to be said and I said it. Microsoft did *not* sue fvwm95 or any of the other Win-UI act-alikes for imitating the behaviour of the start bar/button/etc down to widget placement and structure, much less "look and feel" of windows and scroll-bars.
Ah... well... just for the records: There is virtually no innovation in the Win-UI. Every single element that you can see there (yes, even the ugly 'start'-button) has been invented elsewhere.
Guys like this ("dammit, I'm a programmer, not a technical writer," "the first thing the compiler throws out are the comments," "it was hard to write so it should be hard to read," "/* You wouldn't believe what this does if I told you. */," "the source is always the best explanation and it's never out of date") seem to keep me rolling in cash. I always end up being hired to fix these peoples' code, and
I'm pretty sure you never had to debug any code of mine or code from people like me.
[SNIP]...much work I get from guys like this? (Yes, always guys, would you think a woman would have that kind of egotistical attitude about coding?)
Rather than turning this into a silly war between genders, you could have read what I really wrote. If you need to reverse engineer comments in order to understand what the code is doing, then you're clearly not talking about good code. In case you didn't notice: This thread is about well written code.
Thanks for writing in a more consise way what I really wanted to say. I never meant that comments are useless and should be avoided (other replies to my post completely missed my point).
When people are looking for lots of comments, they're looking for the wrong thing. They should look for useful comments, and cleanly written code.
Code with no comments is not a sign that the author understands his code so well that he doesn't need them. It is a sign that the programmer is lazy, sloppy, and doesn't care whether or not his code is maintainable. I just can't emphasize this point enough: for Open Source projects commenting is even more important than code. A large faceless company can get away with releasing products built on hundreds of thousands of lines of uncommented code, because they have external documentation, and can afford to spend thousands of dollars training new programmers. But if you want other people to even look at your code, you have to help them understand it. People making patches to code they don't fully grok are just going to make a mess.
I wholeheartedly disagree. There are a lot of people around who sing the same song about "it's all about the comments..." I feel strange whenever I hear such claims.
First of all, if someone is supposed to maintain a piece of code, he or she has to read the code (not the comments!) and understand it. Period. In most of the cases, its even better to just forget about the comments at all. Comments won't be translated into machine code... but the source code will, and that's what's going to run in the end. It's unlikely that a programmer will adjust all the comments (if there are changes in the code) to be completely consistent all the time. You simply can't trust comments.
Thus, the more comments a code has, the more I try to ignore them.
Now, I'm not saying good code has no comments, I just disagree with your your claim: The best code has lots of comments.
Comments won't guarantee you good code, (and of course the lack of them won't guarantee you anything either.) There is good code around with plenty of comments, but there is also great code that is nearly comment free. You can find excellent examples at Dan Bernstein as an example.
Seriously, I was thinking along similar lines as well. As you point out, hierarchical file systems have some serious disadvantages.
You list some examples from a user's point of view, however, on a system (or programmer's) level, the benefits are obvious as well:
If we think about all these nifty tools like autoconf which do a great deal of work finding the right libraries (with version number) on your system, wouldn't that be the perfect job for a DB? (The current situation with different installation hierarchies is a nightmare.) Same for the dynamic linker which uses whatever matches and comes first in $LD_LIBRARY: There should be a better way.
Or the $PATH variable in which the shell looks for the given executable. That's not a very elegant solution... using the order of the PATH to determine which program to execute when the filenames clash, that's atrocious.
Another example are configuration files, startup scripts and the like: While the place of such files follow some conventions, this is not clean enough.
However, we should not forget that too much centralizing can bite back. Window's registry was conceptually a nice idea, but the real world shows many examples where it was an embarrasing failure.
You should have put a newline after 'Linux'... I first thought you were talking about a possible new Linux distro from Microsoft. But I guess not even they are so tasteless.
I think that they simply poll the web server on a constant interval. If the server doesn't respond, then it's down.
No, they use something different. I'm not sure what it is, since the
explanation is laking the details. For instance, they're reporting the uptime for my server (>90 days) accurately, even though I entered it only a month ago.
One question: Does the YOPY really exist? I know there are webpages, mailinglists, development toolkits, etc. I tried to get as much information as possible and so far my success was very limited. The creator of one mailinglist lately even announced that he now went with an iPAC and there is probably no such thing as a YOPY.
Personally, I don't need a PDA now and I'm willing to wait a little bit longer until the first Linux PDA comes along (or any other interesting non-WinCE PDA).
I just refuse to buy a WinCE PDA when my first action would be to replace the operating system.
There is no WinCE license fee for YOPY.
Is this true? It sounds quite unbelievable. Do you mean one can buy an iPAC without a preinstalled OS?
And Stuff Sega too for that matter. Sony have to be the greediest most amoral corporation ever.
Immoral because they want to make profits? Welcome to capitalism. That's perfectly normal. Sega, Sony and Co. don't make money with their hardware. Unless they control the distribution and sale of software (=games), there is no money in the video game market. No one upgrades consoles or updates the OS.
These guys make Microsoft look innocent!
I disagree: I have yet to see Sony to abuse a monopoly to embrace another market. Not that I'm terribly in fond of Sony, but good products are more important in this market than in the PC market: Everyone can easily decide whether a game is good. Bot not everyone has the knowledge to decide whether an Operating system is good or not.
Well, './configure --help' tells me at some line: --enable-debug creates debugging code [default=no] ...so I thought it was already switched off by default.
Don't you think a stable release version should be taylored towards end users?
Even with debug-output, you can configure what debug-stuff you want to see, check kdebugdialog.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the reason why this subject comes up more and more frequently is the fact that we programers don't care about the details of such contracts until we are bitten by them.
1. Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of employer.
What does 'relate' mean? If your company does something web related, are you allowed to do any CGI-programming on your on time for example?
That's the problem with our field: Everything is somehow related with everything as soon as it is digitalized.
Excellent post! Thank you! It made me realize that it's not really worth it. You saved me many hours. :-)
Sorry pivo ;)
Even if I already have an Oracle8 DB? I can smell easy money here. :-)
Well, for the PDA market this might work out very well. I'm actually quite excited about the new interest companies are showing for Linux based PDAs. (Compaq, Samsung, Sharp to name a few).
Palm made it easy to develop software for its OS and the number of available Palm applications made it a success. Linux enthusiasts will likely replicate (and maybe even exceed) this number for a Linux PDA.
The interesting thing about this perspective is that Linux won't come over the server onto John Smith's desktop, but maybe over PDAs. It will be the first time that 'normal' people (the majority of computer users) will see Linux doing the job.
But then again, they won't really care. :)
As the major shareholder of your company, I would immediately kick you out of the management if you make such commends officially with your name.
You obviously haven't used MySQL, nor are you aware of its capabilities. The original article is not specific about what they intend to do with the DB, and believe me, there are cases where MySQL is a very good choice. It won't solve all you problems, but if its strengths fits the task, then use it.
There's no need to play the big boss here, making these uninformed generalizations.
While I agree with most points in your post, I'm always amazed how quickly people give Microsoft credits for being innovative.
My opinion: They don't innovate. Go ahead, call me a fool. But read this first: Their market dominance gives them an incredible advantage. They can get into *every* game a little bit late and still win it.
They were late to the internet, and yet the could use their desktop OS monoply to overcome this easily. They 'integrated' IE (very much inspired by the Navigator) into the OS, you might call that 'innovation', a word that has been over-used in many ways lately.
Next example, media players: Once again, Microsoft was late to this. Is it really such a great achievement to study your prospective competitor's product (RealPlayer), come up with something better (note: I don't think this is true innovation) and to push it into the market, once again through desktop OS dominance? Also consider Microsoft's incredible amount of money they can spend for such projects.
There are other examples in the past and if Microsoft is allowed with such practices in the future we will see many more to come... until Microsoft is forced to really start innovating because nobody else dares to do so.
That's the essence of 'embrace and extend'... something they already did with Java for example.
Windows 2000 and MIT kerberos 5 are completely interoperable, and Microsoft's changes are well-documented and "legal" according to the kerberos spec.
It's completely irrelevant how well the changes are documented if the documentation is not freely available.
The reason here is simple: Microsoft has no control whatsoever over any opensource project. But they have a firm grip on Apple. Once Apple becomes a thread (which is unlikely), they just drop their software for it (Office, IE,...). Problem solved.
Everyone would laugh if they try that with Linux. So the only weapon they have is to publicly denounce open source. Everyone still laughs.
I think, unpopular as the view may be, that MS will always be around. Instead of Microsoft Hate, we should promote Linux Love - convince people that we have a viable alternative - not just a rebellion.
That's right, but Microsoft doesn't make this easy for us. :-)
In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use ... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."
Isn't this a contradiction or at least misleading? Why should taxpayer-funded development be owned by someone else than the public? To me it seems as if the GPL protects something here. To these Microsoft guys, everything that is free is not profitable and thus a thread.
It just amazes me how Microsoft has been interpreting the word 'Innovation' these days.
Programming is perceived as something stubborn, boring and uncreative by 'outsiders'. Programmers like to compare good code with art to counter this. Somehow we all like to see our efforts being admired, there is nothing wrong about this.
However, no matter how you look at it, code is no art, and will never be. It has a function, it makes sense and it serves a particular purpose. Art seldomly serves anything, and I would even say that this is one of it's main features.
Coding is an extremely creative activity but this doesn't make the programmer an artist.
Of course the question can't be answered in such a simplistic way, and there are many simliarities between coders and artists, but this doesn't make the 'product' (=code) art.
One of the points which I found quite disturbing in the new contract was that everything I invent (invention was defined in a broad way... basically, any kind of programs, ideas, algorithms,...) during my employment (this includes off work time as well) belongs to the company. However I was allowed to disclose any inventions to my superiors if I want to have them exempted from this claim. The decision however would be the company's.
I asked for clarification about that clause and got to speak to a company's lawyer who told me, that such agreements are absolutely normal and there was nothing special about it. I probably should have gone to a more neutral lawyer.
First of all, I'd hardly call myself 'Apple apologist'.
What you have just said is really not true.
It isn't? You go on with lots of trivia that may all be true but doesn't prove me any wrong. Remember, I didn't criticize the Win-UI; they put *known things* into one UI which isn't necessarily bad... but my simple claim still stands: I have to this day not seen any significant innovation in the Win-UI. Nothing that hasn't been *on the market* already when they came out with it.
Now it might be true that Microsoft came up with nifty stuff in their secret labs, however, AFAIK, there have been two major revisions of Microsoft's UI: Win3 and Win95. When these products hit the market, they had nothing new. Zero. Nada. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
For Aqua, while I'd hardly call it revolutionary, there are at least some new elements that I haven't seen before. For instance, you can freely transorm windows into different shapes, (used in the geenie effect), the usage of transparency, (not new, but it's used in a useful way), the new modal windows,...
Sure, these are small things and won't change the way people use their computer, but at least it's a step forward. You'll soon see transparency heavily used in a future Windows.
Ah... well... just for the records: There is virtually no innovation in the Win-UI. Every single element that you can see there (yes, even the ugly 'start'-button) has been invented elsewhere.
Microsoft would have had a very hard case.
I'm pretty sure you never had to debug any code of mine or code from people like me.
[SNIP]...much work I get from guys like this? (Yes, always guys, would you think a woman would have that kind of egotistical attitude about coding?)
Rather than turning this into a silly war between genders, you could have read what I really wrote. If you need to reverse engineer comments in order to understand what the code is doing, then you're clearly not talking about good code. In case you didn't notice: This thread is about well written code.
Thanks for writing in a more consise way what I really wanted to say. I never meant that comments are useless and should be avoided (other replies to my post completely missed my point).
When people are looking for lots of comments, they're looking for the wrong thing. They should look for useful comments, and cleanly written code.
I wholeheartedly disagree. There are a lot of people around who sing the same song about "it's all about the comments..." I feel strange whenever I hear such claims.
First of all, if someone is supposed to maintain a piece of code, he or she has to read the code (not the comments!) and understand it. Period. In most of the cases, its even better to just forget about the comments at all. Comments won't be translated into machine code... but the source code will, and that's what's going to run in the end. It's unlikely that a programmer will adjust all the comments (if there are changes in the code) to be completely consistent all the time. You simply can't trust comments.
Thus, the more comments a code has, the more I try to ignore them.
Now, I'm not saying good code has no comments, I just disagree with your your claim:
The best code has lots of comments.
Comments won't guarantee you good code, (and of course the lack of them won't guarantee you anything either.) There is good code around with plenty of comments, but there is also great code that is nearly comment free. You can find excellent examples at Dan Bernstein as an example.
...which you stole from me! ;)
Seriously, I was thinking along similar lines as well. As you point out, hierarchical file systems have some serious disadvantages.
You list some examples from a user's point of view, however, on a system (or programmer's) level, the benefits are obvious as well:
If we think about all these nifty tools like autoconf which do a great deal of work finding the right libraries (with version number) on your system, wouldn't that be the perfect job for a DB? (The current situation with different installation hierarchies is a nightmare.) Same for the dynamic linker which uses whatever matches and comes first in $LD_LIBRARY: There should be a better way.
Or the $PATH variable in which the shell looks for the given executable. That's not a very elegant solution... using the order of the PATH to determine which program to execute when the filenames clash, that's atrocious.
Another example are configuration files, startup scripts and the like: While the place of such files follow some conventions, this is not clean enough.
However, we should not forget that too much centralizing can bite back. Window's registry was conceptually a nice idea, but the real world shows many examples where it was an embarrasing failure.
You should have put a newline after 'Linux'... I first thought you were talking about a possible new Linux distro from Microsoft. But I guess not even they are so tasteless.
So, which ones of your many mp3s actually feature the sidstation? I'd be happy to finally hear this thing in action.
No, they use something different. I'm not sure what it is, since the explanation is laking the details. For instance, they're reporting the uptime for my server (>90 days) accurately, even though I entered it only a month ago.
Personally, I don't need a PDA now and I'm willing to wait a little bit longer until the first Linux PDA comes along (or any other interesting non-WinCE PDA).
I just refuse to buy a WinCE PDA when my first action would be to replace the operating system.
There is no WinCE license fee for YOPY.
Is this true? It sounds quite unbelievable. Do you mean one can buy an iPAC without a preinstalled OS?
Immoral because they want to make profits? Welcome to capitalism. That's perfectly normal. Sega, Sony and Co. don't make money with their hardware. Unless they control the distribution and sale of software (=games), there is no money in the video game market. No one upgrades consoles or updates the OS.
These guys make Microsoft look innocent!
I disagree: I have yet to see Sony to abuse a monopoly to embrace another market. Not that I'm terribly in fond of Sony, but good products are more important in this market than in the PC market: Everyone can easily decide whether a game is good. Bot not everyone has the knowledge to decide whether an Operating system is good or not.
--enable-debug creates debugging code [default=no]
Don't you think a stable release version should be taylored towards end users?
Even with debug-output, you can configure what debug-stuff you want to see, check kdebugdialog.
Ah, interesting! Thanks. :-)