technoir

Yes, I had an awful experience with the stealth also, though it had nothing to do with linux support (managed to get everything working).

Multiple hardware failures and eventually had to return it. They should probably learn basic quality control techniques before spending any energy on better linux support.

If there is an analogue in the standard library you should have a compelling reason to use an alternative. Wish this could be filed under "common" sense. Thanks for articulating and presenting this principle, among others. Great writeup.

It rains all year in Portland-- and it's cold. Artisanal is just another word for amateur. Wages are low. This is bad advice -- do not move here.

It's not about 15-20% for the N workers sponsored.

It drives down wages across the industry by increasing unemployed labor supply. It's a lever to put downward pressure on wages in a macroeconomic sense.

Some seem to believe that software developers are so focused on programming that they were never exposed to basic macroeconomics.

If supply goes up, price goes down.

It may be better for employers, and the economy as a whole depending on how you measure, but it is not in the best economic interest of those already selling their development labor.

Still think it would be an okay patentability requirment to include source code. Yes, it is just one embodiment, but let's see the embodiment.

If there is a different way of implementing it than described in the patent, did the patent owner really invent the other method?

ChuckM, I appreciate your polite tone and sincerity.

To illustrate my point, consider my story. I'm a software developer with entrepreneurial ambition and I'm developing a product I have dreams of marketing and selling. Last week I probably came up with 5 methods of doing some novel data analysis that are patent-able.

How many will I patent? Well considering it would cost about 100-150k to adequately protect that intellectual property and I have only my own boots to my name, ... I'll patent zero of them.

Clearly the system does not work for me.

This is one extreme scenario, but consider the continuum. What about a startup with 500k in seed funding? Should they spend 50% of their capital to protect their intellectual property before they've finished a product and made sales?

Meanwhile large companies spend millions on patent programs which sweep up wide swaths of IP on nebulous grounds of validity. Not only can I not afford to prosecute a patent, I can't even afford to respond to a cease and desist letter based on an invalid patent which came out of the "innovation process" of MegaCorp.

Sorry, but the system is not for the little guy or the start up.

This is a nice story, but not an accurate reflection of reality. Look at the statistics on who are issued patents, who receives royalties. It's not the noble independent inventor, it's old MegaCorp that doesn't blink at underwriting the massive expense of prosecuting a good patent.

The story you describe is a convenient myth to justify a system that benefits established interests.

You can get predicted columns via https://github.com/no0p/alps ... Turns out that adding words like infer to the lex is kind of a big project in pgsql. Excellent work with the language aspect of it in BayesDB -- well thought out.

Too bad they didnt switch to windowlab. Now that is a lightweight window manager. Amiga style window management!

if data storage and data analysis were wholly independent activities, the logical separation would make a lot of sense, e.g. dumb database is good at data storage, utilities are good at specific analytic functions.

Due to resource bottlenecks these two activities are currently closely coupled. As a result there is no clear cut answer one way or the other.

One aspect currently is a trade off between managing complexity and performance. Of course there are many other factors. Case by case basis.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I originally created this page as an exercise in "marketing driven development" aka just testing the waters to see if there is a market for this sort of thing.

I did consider your last point of busting a bogus patent and self-funding the ex parte filing fee. I was considering going for a particular linked list implementation which was patented in the 2000s. My approach was more or less to grep / lucene a wide range of open source projects with extensive timestamps of publication dates (e.g. linux kernel).

It turns out that is a lot of work, and since I got no response to the site, I figured this kind of legal service is not really appealing -- for reasons I don't understand. At least, not enough demand to spend a bunch of time on it, since I have other projects I enjoy working on more.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

I once considered taking a serious crack at a subset of this problem. Didn't get any takers though.

http://libpatent.com/

Surprised this guy didn't write an article on how to sell his position to developers. In spite of claiming to understand the current labor market for development talent, it appears he's still got it backwards.

It's funny because there is a good philosophical debate out there on whether the written or spoken word is better.

Socrates felt that the spoken word was better, since it was less removed from the truth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Discussion_...

I also built something similar recently http://fit.io

Amazing how an idea can be implemented by a bunch of different folks all at the same time.

The article makes a great point, it's not necessary to be technical to be successful in technology management. Also you should be proud of your strengths and the contributions they enable you to make rather than focus on power psychology.

I would also agree with the author that a technical background helps.

It seems to me that without a technical background it's possible to make an incorrect appraisal about problems with tecnical projects.

For example, the product is incorrect or late. Why?

As a manager you need to determine a belief on why things are problematic and how they can be improved.

There are a lot of possible problems. If a non-technical person gets this incorrect it can have very negative consequences. It's a minefield that is typically, though not always, better traversed by people with technical skills.

statistics is hard. There is a good field description list out there... also it might be interesting to look at the status of applications.

For example are there any applications where the wage rate was below the prevailing wage and were accepted?

What is the relationship between % over prevailing wage and acceptance of the application? That might lead to a useful model.

looks like there was a minor error there. The prevailing wage is not the wage offered to the H1B visa recipient, so it's not necessarily how much is being spent. That field is a required field for filing the application and is itself a statistic generated by a third party. it's a nice analysis though.