akeefer

32 ms·

211.
by akeefer 17y ago
The point is that patent trolls are pure IP companies that don't actually do anything; they can't possibly be infringing one of your patents because they have no products. That's why they're so much worse to deal with than other companies
212.
by akeefer 17y ago
Yes, but legal maneuverings are incredibly sensitive things, and anything officially entered into the public record becomes evidence. It's generally not a matter of silently capitulating, but if you want to fight back and have any hope of
213.
by akeefer 17y ago
Interestingly (to me, at least), the foundation for IP law is different in the US versus the UK. In the US, they're not considered natural rights. The relevant clause of the Constitution is: "The Congress shall have Power To promote the P
214.
by akeefer 17y ago
I'm just arguing against patents on software, not patents in general. Novels aren't protected by patents, yet people still manage to write books. Athletic training techniques aren't patentable, yet people still manage to innovate and shar
215.
by akeefer 17y ago
I disagree . . . the fundamental differences are that 1) copyright already protects software, 2) any given software program could literally fall afoul of hundreds or thousands of patents, 3) the patents themselves do little to encourage inn
216.
by akeefer 17y ago
Honestly, how many actual software engineers do you know that are in favor of patents and that think it will help them protect their invention, rather than being terrified of accidentally running afoul of someone's patents? And how many ca
217.
by akeefer 17y ago
Well, I'm biased because my company is basically being sued over a patent that is, essentially, about as broad as bridge building (i.e. someone else essentially claims to have patented the idea of storing insurance claims in a database. Se
218.
by akeefer 17y ago
Part of what's unfortunate about the attitude of a lot of people in the dynamic language community (honestly, Ruby attracts this far more than Python for some reason) seems to be a complete lack of understanding of why anyone would do anyth
219.
by akeefer 17y ago
One thing that I think is often missed in the discussion around LOC and features like closures is that, while sometimes denser code is terser, often it's more expressive. For example, the code: List<String> userNames = new ArrayLis
220.
by akeefer 17y ago
See Perceval's comment above that links to studies showing that glucose levels influence willpower. In other words, it is basically a physical substance on some level.
221.
by akeefer 17y ago
No question, it's a fine line . . . you need to be pragmatic and ask "is writing and maintaining this test going to save me more time than it costs?" Over several years, the maintenance of the tests themselves becomes a huge cost, which is
222.
by akeefer 17y ago
The presentation by Cliff Click at the JVM language conference made that all a lot more clear; it's a shame the article on Artima doesn't go into much in the way of details. Basically, the limitations on conventional VMs are at least somewh
223.
by akeefer 17y ago
I agree that there's no overarching rule that makes the tradeoffs easy to analyze. I will, however, say that after working on the same code base for over 7 years now, and watching the company grow from 15 employees to 400, I can't imagine e
224.
by akeefer 17y ago
That's a bad conclusion to make: it's the classic tradeoff between importance and urgency. If you only ever do the urgent stuff, the hair-on-fire-has-to-be-done-yesterday stuff, you'll never make time to get to long-term strategic project
225.
by akeefer 17y ago
Yeah, that bit made me cringe a bit too, since you have to do the something similar for storing insurance policies (track when things become effective, including forward-dated changes, storing past versions, etc.). No predictions necessary
226.
by akeefer 17y ago
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the target these days (especially thanks to the costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance) is closer to $100 MM in revenue to even think about an IPO.
227.
by akeefer 17y ago
I definitely agree . . . it's a fairly standard "agile" practice to make sure that product managers/"customers" work closely with developers, but it's often not done that way. The bottleneck at my company has historically been around seati
228.
by akeefer 17y ago
They don't store it themselves; they use Yodlee to actually store everything, and Yodlee is the one that actually has done all the work (and it's a huge undertaking) to keep everything secure.
229.
by akeefer 17y ago
I struggled with what to do when I was in college, and ended up with a philosophy bachelor's and CS masters. I've been working as a software engineer since then. One of the hard parts for me, both in school and later, was that I never real
230.
by akeefer 17y ago
Let me try to phrase the argument more clearly: if you want to pass on a checked exception via redeclaration in the "throws" clause, you've broken encapsulation because a change to the lower layer implies changes all the way up the stack.
231.
by akeefer 17y ago
To me one of the fundamental issues with checked exceptions is that they break encapsulation. There's no way around it: if foo calls bar, and bar calls readFile which throws an IOException, assuming bar is unable to handle the exception i
232.
by akeefer 17y ago
Um, I'm not entirely sure why you think teachers only work 6 hours a day. I know a few high school teachers, and between lesson prep, grading, meeting with parents, etc. they work way, way more than 40 hours a week.
233.
by akeefer 17y ago
Is that really good enough, though? For example, suppose that I write a blogging platform, and I want to ensure that a user can only query their own blog entries. How would I do that if the query is coming from the client (which always ha
234.
by akeefer 17y ago
Beyond just the obvious "this is a bad way to design things" message, another good takeaway is just the fact that most OO-design tutorials/discussions/books use the worst possible examples that teach people bad habits. When done well, the u
235.
by akeefer 17y ago
"A subtle form of class discrimination" is a far cry from "class warfare." I'm saying that, ethically speaking, unpaid internships help to further close off certain careers to people who are traditionally disadvantaged by giving opportunit
236.
by akeefer 17y ago
I'll take a crack at justifying it. First of all, if you have a minimum wage law (which we do), it has to be enforced. Allowing people to work as "unpaid interns" is a half-assed way that corporations take to work around that law. You can
237.
by akeefer 17y ago
eMusic is a download service that sells DRM-free MP3s (though it's a subscription service), and they do offer the ability to re-download tracks. (One qualification: It's limited in how many times you can re-download so that you don't use it
238.
by akeefer 17y ago
Honestly, it somewhat boggles my mind that the original poster (and the post he links to) could both discuss the issue without reference to "worse is better," as if this was some sort of new insight that Twitter and Facebook have made . . .
239.
by akeefer 17y ago
The main decision criteria are likelihood and recoverability. If the error isn't recoverable (maybe it leads to data corruption, say), then you generally have to really batten down all your hatches and fix and/or test everything you can, e
240.
by akeefer 17y ago
Sure, but don't discount the fact that having the VC money is a non-trivial component of the company's success in many cases. So it's not just "is this a good team/business" but also "is this a good team/business and do they have enough ru

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