fkdjs · HackerTrans

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Maybe you and many others would be better off by paying attention to actions vs words, and notice which company was the first to push back on the government to provide transparency to national security letters when everyone else bowed down before the government. Being skeptical and not falling for feel good platitudes could help all of us.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Yup, and it's used by everyone, especially execs, and acts as a swiss army knife. Yet the team is mostly leaving in droves because although it's quite useful, it isn't correctly measured and it doesn't bring home the bacon. So the project is sometimes wrapped up and repackaged by a customer-facing team to steal the glory and get bonuses, or teams put it under them and scale back perks/force us to use them vs other teams who want us to cater to them. So silo'ing, everyone wants the goods. I've contributed lots of infrastructure code that customer-facing teams use, gets who gets the large bonuses. Proposals to fix this and measure impact have been brought up and slapped down by managers. I'm leaving the group after wrapping up some stuff. Fortunately I have high perf scores. People make warm comments about how useful the project is, but at the end of the day, it's never going to give me a $200k bonus, so it goes in one ear, out the other.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

That is great if your project impact can be measured, but sometimes metrics aren't available for accurate assessment. If sales uses your tool, bringing in millions, that's not so easy to measure, and those projects will languish unless some value can be placed for the project. Good luck with that, or at least coming up with a system that can measure it and having it be accepted. That's a big gap and you don't want to be in that group.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. You gotta be churning out new stuff at minimum, hopefully on sexy new products, maintenance of the old stuff is less sexy and doesn't give you the promotion/bonus. Of course you can reimplement a cache server every 6 months, if all else fails.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

http://ipcommission.org/report/IP_Commission_Report_052213.p...

> The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property > With U.S. companies suffering losses and American workers losing jobs

Jobs. Translation: this is a PR piece.

> The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and law enforcement agencies should have the legal authority to use threat-based deterrence systems that operate at network speed against unauthorized intrusions into national security and critical infrastructure networks

Huh? This includes national security now? Are they deliberately blurring the lines between pirating and national security? Why I think so.

> Informed deliberations over whether corporations and individuals should be legally able to conduct threat-based deterrence operations against network intrusion, without doing undue harm to an attacker or to innocent third parties, ought to be undertaken.

They want to legalize Sony's rootkit, but they want to do it right. Rootkits in the wild cannot be tamed, don't even go there.

> if counterattacks against hackers were legal, there are many techniques that companies could employ that would cause severe damage to the capability of those conducting IP theft.

You do something that the system thinks is pirating and your computer blows up. What could go wrong.

> ...The Commission is not ready to endorse this recommendation because of the larger questions of collateral damage caused by computer attacks

Ahh I see, they're reasonable after all! IOW, they want to make their rootkit legalization idea sound sane.

> Recommend to Congress and the administration that U.S. funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) program budget in whole or in part be withheld

At this point I want to punch someone in the face.

I can't read anymore.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Do you have an example of a good software patent?

Someone mentioned that having one syscall that sends multiple udp messages is patented. That is ridiculous IMO. It meets the guideline you lay out: you can define the abstract process of calling a method of an API then that itself sends out UDP messages. However, it's blatantly obvious to all programmers. But probably not to lawyers. Pretty much all software is blatantly obvious and trivial to implement. Microsoft's patent on long filenames is another example. Software is trivial to implement. Want long filenames? A high school student can do it.

However, with chemistry, it is nontrivial. It is not a matter of writing code that a CPU runs instantaneously. You have to devise a method on paper, try it(sorry, a cpu won't mix chemicals), go back to the drawing board. Vs software, where it's trivial so millions of people have probably already coded what you thought was novel.

That happens often with software: I come up with an imaginative awesome new algorithm, only to learn, it has been done before. that's because I work in a line of work that is trivial. We're glorified code monkeys, and we don't deserve to be awarded patents by any means.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I just tried fish, way too slow. I held down the backspace key, and instead of deleting 10 characters, the entire line was gone. zsh is also too slow. bash may not have the bells and whistles, but it's at least super fast and doesn't get in your way.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Shakespeare is entertaining and metaphors are fun. Do you disagree with a poem and bring up logical fallacies? Of course not, we read them for entertainment value and anything we learn is a bonus. That is separate from metaphors used when trying to discuss the nuances of an argument within the confines of trying to have a logical argument. Poems and Shakespeare aren't supposed to be logical all the time, that would be boring.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

OMG, it's like we can't focus on multiple things at once.

How about this revelation: people in cyprus can't use ATMs because they can't manage their money, and Chinese government-sponsored hackers are also targeting American businesses. I know, it's a lot to concentrate on.

But seriously, I like many others on this tech-centered news site where we pretty much run the entire internet collectively, have seen first hand Chinese-sponsored hackers. So you can't really pull the wool over our eyes so easily.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

You really shouldn't try to use metaphors when making an argument. Someone says A is like B, another person disagrees that A is like C. But no, says another, A is like D. Finally, an internet troll points out A is like B and D, but definitely not like C. By then, everyone's brain gives up trying to figure it all out.

If you're gonna make a point, make a point, it's that simple.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

None of those things you brought up are illegal. Oracle is a scourge and just a step above SCO, but that's a pretty low bar. Making it so you designate something arbitrarily as a "language" and you can be the only princess that implements it is plain evil. Fortunately the appeal is going no where.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

In that respect, I would say we are separating into different species.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Not only that, but it takes <1s to type in feedly.com, and lo and behold, a competitor. Not only that, but the site reveals an android app you can download. Any decent monopolist would have never allowed that.

Krugman should really do some research on what monopolists do, starting off with Standard Oil. The internet is a highly competitive environment.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

stopthecyborgs? Looks like more microsoft astroturfing. The backlash is growing in microsoft's dreams only.

fkdjs

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

wow, worse than the irc python channel.

fkdjs

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

How do you handle distributed joins with group by's? Are there certain SQL syntaxes which aren't handled well by queries? What are the 90th percentile response times?

fkdjs

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Here's what a bunch of smart people think:

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Law-and-Economics-Experts-Discu...

synposis: the antitrust case is at this point ridiculous.

As a formerly poor person who could only afford a G1 and not an iphone, allowing me to rise out of poverty, I'm not angry. The only angry people I know are Apple execs. Consumers are pretty happy about this. Which means the antitrust case is going nowhere.

The Microsoft case was different, Microsoft was found guilty for EOM shenanigans, and Bork, who authored modern antitrust law and thought microsoft was guilty, now thinks there is no antitrust case against Google.

When the FTC is done, they'll be a laughing stock.

If you want to really find a problem, you'll have to look at amazon who is not only selling at cost, they make no profit and have a high P/E since investors think they'll eliminate competition then raise prices.

fkdjs

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Except the articles selected where in the pro-coffee camp, the articles against coffee were not selected. This is called selection bias. I'd take what this guy has to say with a grain of salt.

fkdjs

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

You'll notice in that second link:

> However, because the antitrust laws are ultimately intended to benefit consumers, and discounting results in at least short-term net benefit to consumers, the U.S. Supreme Court has set high hurdles to antitrust claims based on a predatory pricing theory.

So yeah, good luck MS et al. You'll have better luck in the socialist paradise known as the EU.

fkdjs

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Unfortunately for you, anti-trust doesn't work like that. You have to prove concrete harm to customers.

And that's how it should be, before Google, your only option for a smartphone was to pay one company way too much money. Customers directly benefit, and are more productive, so it's basically impossible in the US to prove antitrust against google.