mdkess

Lenovo is awesome, except they seem to pride themselves in having the worst displays on the market. It's downright bizarre.

How do you do that objectively though?

I mean, consider Apple's bouncing lists patent. When you use it, it's very intuitive, and any moderately skilled software developer could implement it in an afternoon. So it seems obvious, but the question is then - why did nobody do it before? Touchscreen devices existed previously, so that seems to suggest that it is non-obvious. Synthesizing a drug is not hard or novel, but arriving at the conclusion that this is indeed the correct drug that is the reason that pharma patents exist. So the same could be said of bouncy lists.

So how do you determine the obviousness of this, objectively? The most straightforward ways are prior art and to to consider claims from previous patents. It's mostly objective and is hard to argue against, as opposed to one patent examiner's opinion on obviousness.

The problem with software patents is that the benefits of a 20 year monopoly far outweighs the benefit of having it released to the public - which is not true for all patents. If Apple couldn't patent the bouncing list, they'd still have bouncing lists, and it would still be an advantage to their devices, even if everyone else copied them. If you couldn't have a patent on a drug that was going to take $1 billion in costs to bring to market, yet would only cost pennies to synthesize, you wouldn't even bother trying. So the question is instead, how do you objectively determine which industries require patent protection, and which don't. For the rest of the industries, copyright and trademark laws are more than enough protection.

I really like the idea of "forced benefits" - free meals, paid vacations, devices as "bonuses", etc, since they force you to raise your standard of living. I wouldn't eat out for lunch every day because there are other things that I'd rather spend my money on, but since work pays for it, I'm much happier - it makes my life easier, I get to eat better/more interesting food and saves me time. Same goes for vacations - I would love to go and see China, but it'll be a while before I can justify the expense. If someone were to hand me a check for $7,500 though and say "this is for your vacation", I would do it in a heartbeat - and I think be better off for it. I mean, presumably this comes on top of a generous salary already, but I think it's a good thing to help people get over their own biases toward spending.

I don't think that's true. They certainly knew about the iPhone before the public did, and so they had a ton of time and money to position themselves for it. Certainly the iPhone was a game changer, but there is absolutely no reason that a better managed RIM shouldn't have come out ahead. Look up some of the stuff that Lazaridis said about the iPhone.

I mean, read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/29/rim-chiefs-... . The iPhone didn't kill RIM, it was hubris and complacency.

I hate RIM because they represent everything that is wrong with the Canadian software scene in my mind. At the same time, they've put Canada on the map for technology, and done a ton of good for the community (the Accelerator Centre, donations to the university, etc), so it's sad to see that they've turned into such an abject failure. My thoughts (a rant in five parts):

1. RIM is a Canadian company, and from my experience (as a Canadian who went to school in Waterloo), Canadian companies like management - they are incredibly top heavy. This is especially true in the case of RIM - my friends there tell horror stories of how hard it is to make changes or even coordinate between teams. In contrast, I've found American companies err almost too far on the other side - not enough management to give some structure. So you have a lot of people who delegate, and not many people to actually do things, and nobody to organize the mess. Three bosses? I think yes.

2. They also don't pay very well. Out of school, my offer from RIM as a software developer was just over half of the offers I got from Microsoft, Amazon and co. So they're not getting the A team, or the B team, or really even the C team. To be fair, Waterloo is not nearly as expensive as Seattle or San Francisco, but still, as a whole they end up with the developers who are either unambitious (this is the best case, because many of these people are very smart), or just not very hard working. There are a lot of "retirees" too - people who want the 9-5 to raise a family (which is not itself bad, but you can't have an entire company made up of people like that). So basically, a whole lot of apathy.

3. There's a culture there of yes men. Look at how Laz ran the show - basically, it was a culture of denial that the iPhone even existed (look up some quotes from him about the iPhone from 2007 - 2009). Their product cycle has always been twice as long as the rest of the industry (and when they do, it's often incredibly half baked). While I think that Heins is really smart, and I certainly wouldn't want his job, he's stepped into a really broken culture. Their heads have been in the sand for ages.

4. If their public APIs/development chain are indicative of their internal workings, it's a mess over there - no wonder they can't ship anything. No documentation, poorly build APIs, and an awful, awful simulator (although to be fair, the last time I worked with BlackBerry's APIs was right after the iPhone came out, so they may have improved). It's a mess.

5. The ship is sinking! Anyone who can get a job elsewhere is going to get out as soon as they can. And why would people crunch to get the project out the door, if they think that they are going to get laid off anyway in six months? Nobody's getting raises, nobody's getting bonuses.

I would love for RIM to succeed, but it's much more than the market that is holding them back.

When I was in early university, I went through Introduction to Algorithms and chapter by chapter, I implemented nearly every algorithm presented in the book. At the time, I had no idea why I was doing it (fun? ACM practice?), but in hindsight it was incredibly important. I learn by doing, not by reading (at least doing cements what I read), so I make sure that I incorporate a lot of practice into my plans.

I'm talking about more formalized than that. For example, suppose that we had a model that would typically return double what a drug would (modelling for inflation and opportunity cost), but that the pharmaceutical company was obligated to sell the patent at that price. Furthermore, suppose that this model was tweaked to generally return 20% more to the pharma company than holding the drug for the length of the patent.

Now the voting public could say that a drug was important enough that it should be funded via tax dollars.

Another thought would be to give the government the option to purchase drug patents from industry at some fixed multiplier of research costs and profits during the lifespan of the patent. That way if the public thought that it was truly in the public good for a drug to be available, people could campaign on the promise of purchasing certain patents.

What will the immediate consequences be, if the injunction actually goes into effect? I have a ton of questions about this, but basically:

- Will Samsung/Google just tweak the software to get around the patent, and continue shipping?

- Could Samsung ship the device sans-Software, and have a US based facility install the OS to get around this?

- What is the appeal process that Google/Samsung can take? That is, when Samsung files the appeal, how long does it take to be reviewed and considered? Can Apple appeal an appeal?

- What is the meaning of this 2014 court date?

- What defines the "Galaxy Nexus"? Could they change the colors on it, or tweak the case, and call it a different device to continue shipping?

Of course, any answers are basically speculation at this point, but mostly I want to get a feel for some of the possible avenues that the parties have to take.

It's a question of the trade-offs to achieve that week of battery life. I have an extended battery for my phone which makes the phone bulky, but the battery lasts for nearly two days on a charge. If I were to significantly underclock the CPU and GPU, turn down the screen brightness, disable apps from running in the background, turn off GPS, keep data off, get an even bigger battery, etc., I could probably get a week of battery out of it, if not more. That would take away a lot from the experience though, and since I'm almost always near a power source, I'd rather keep the above features and charge every day. If you weren't, you might think that those tradeoffs were fair.

That's an interesting point that the parent post made - we probably shouldn't be thinking about these devices as just underclocked versions of first world devices. I think that you could design a positive user experience with all of the restrictions that I listed above (not ideal, but still positive), but it's not going to be achieved by disabling features of a super phone/tablet.

I feel shame over bugs. Of course, it depends on the nature of the bug, but there are definite moments of deep self reflection, which I think that I internalize as shame. While I reflect and move on, as a professional, I should be making as few mistakes as possible. When a star hockey player screws up a play that could have won their team the game, I imagine that they feel shame - not that they will get fired for the incident, but self relection is how you improve, and in many people, that manifests as a healthy amount of shame. (Not that I'm the Gretzky of software development).

Recently, a piece of code that I wrote crashed after running for over a month because I forgot to lock one of several methods that was concurrently accessing a collection. I was very ashamed of this - this was an amateur mistake, and one that someone with the amount of experience that I had should not have made. I didn't get any any trouble for this, but I was pretty ashamed. "I am better than this, and I should not be making this sort of mistake," I thought and have been very careful to avoid this sort of thing since.

What is the effect of this ruling, if it is upheld? Will Samsung have to disable this functionality? I imagine that they are not doing that immediately because that seems like an admission of guilt. Will they be able to ship their devices without software and have users install the software in question?

P/E ratio is a terrible, meaningless way to evaluate the price of a share. It sounds remotely technical, and hey, there are numbers there so I guess people talk about it like it's important. P/E ratio is the ratio between profits to price per share. If the company had shares trading at $100 and their profits were $10/share, their P/E ratio would be 10. The thing is, P/E ratio doesn't capture expenditures very well, or long term corporate plans. So if a company is spending a ton of money trying to expand their business, they will have a really high P/E ratio. That doesn't make it a bad thing, just a measure of how much they're spending. AMZN is spending a ton of money lately, so they are not as profitable as they could be (and hence, high P/E ratio), but it is presumably to secure their future success.

I like it.

One thought - one of the first things I do is search for GitHub on these pages. I see that your 'programmer' link points to your GitHub account, but you might want to add the keyword there too.

What happens to the person at the end of this? Assuming the individual isn't from a wealthy family, that is not a debt that they will be able to pay off over any timeframe. Since this is a fine, I imagine that they will be unable to declare bankruptcy, while assuming some wages are withheld, they also won't be able to pay rent.

That looks excellent, I really like it.

Could you talk a bit about how you did the text rendering? Basically my question is, how do you render nice text?

"If you require probable cause for every technique, then you are making it very, very hard for law enforcement"

That is a terrifying sentence.

On a federal level yes, but many states (including New York and California) have protection against sexual orientation. I'm surprised to learn that political affiliation is not protected.

If I ever had someone demand this, I would update my account to show my sexual orientation as homosexual, my religion to Islam, and my political views to whatever the opposite of my boss's were. Then if they ever tried to lay me off, or not give me a raise, I would point out that the only useful information they possibly could have gotten from demanding my Facebook account were these protected statuses.

Bubble, bubble, trouble, trouble!

I love Apple, but is a company that makes cell phones and fancy laptops going to really have a market cap of 10% of the (current value) of the DOW? I don't think so.

At this point, investing in a hot stock like AAPL is just gambling. It's a very real possibility that in the next 3 years, the influx of tablets and smart phones completely stalls iOS's growth. Plus with the newest wave of Ultrabooks, Apple is not as far ahead of the competition as they were two years ago. I mean, I don't think that Apple is going to go anywhere soon, and they will continue to grow, but I think that a lot of their near term future success is already built into the price of the stock.

Has anyone had any success with off shoring development jobs? At a large software company that I worked at, we worked with an Indian team, and I found that they were nothing but trouble. They would miss deadlines (with nothing but reassurances that everything was on track up until the day that we were supposed to release), and the code that they produced was both incredibly buggy and had poor code quality. Now, I probably cost the company 10x what they did, but still, I feel like it was a bad expense to offshore. They ended up creating a lot of work and resulted in lower quality products. Alas, software development is one field where it's easy to have very negative productivity. That said, this is only a single experience, so this may have been bad luck.

This is decidedly not true. While I wouldn't be so vain as to call myself the top 1% of developers, I've gotten job offers from most major software companies, but one of my criteria for where I accept a job is "do you have fewer than 50 people?"

I want to write code all day, and I want to work on interesting and very hard problems. While this exists at large companies, there are very few jobs at top tier small companies where this doesn't exist.

In many ways, NYC is an even harder market to compete in, due to the financial industry. If you are a good hacker, hedge funds will offer $150k+/year to start - and if you're able to deal the intensity of it, that'll quickly go up. I know guys in their late 20s making over $300k a year writing code for these firms. These are salaries that most software companies can't match, even if they wanted to.

Wages have gone up a lot since then, I would be very surprised if Fog Creek offered less $90,000 these days - that's about what most software companies offers start at. Heck, I hear that Facebook is offering $100,000 base salary for kids right out of school, so by all means they could be paying more. Also of note - the transition from $75,000 to $90,000 just means a wage increase of just shy of 4% per year, which seems expected.

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There seems to be a serious fear of change. Should we converge on some adequate solution and stop moving? Regardless of whether Windows 8 has a good user interface or not, it should be judged against the effectiveness of the change, not just because it is different.

For a long time I've wanted to cut myself off and figure out a natural sleep cycle. Normally (for better or for worse), I sleep 5-6 hours a night during the week, then get 8-9 on the weekends, but that's definitely shaped to the work week.

Also, maybe interesting - two 4 hour sleep cycle with a couple hours between is what happens naturally to me after a night of too much drinking. I wonder if there's some reason for that.

I worked at a major tech company, which gave pretty good stock options. The problem was, they then counted their value toward your salary if it went up while determining raises.

Stock goes up, no raises this year - look at how much you made! Stock goes down - standard raise this year! (And presumably, stock falls off a cliff, layoffs). Because the company was doing well, new hires out of college were making more base salary than people who had been there for several years and performing well. So it's just unstable income, effectively.

Anyone who did 10 minutes of research (or went to the "Hacker" wikipedia page) would know that the word "hacker" means a very different thing within the technology community than outside of it, yet I see article after article feigning ignorance to this. Is it just to manufacture controversy - is that what our media has become?