Greg Aharonian in his PATNEWS mailing list comments on a paper drawing analogies between Intellectual and Personal Property:
… Epstein ignores Due Process (something you have to swear to do to become an IP professor) - in particular the issue of clear notice of the boundaries of exclusion. Imagine a house and the land it is on. With physical property, you are definitely sure there is a house there and pretty sure where the boundaries are (title check doesn’t hurt to do). With patent law, you are pretty sure a house is there, but not so sure where the boundaries are (there is still a massive contradiction explicit in Markman). With copyright law, you aren’t sure if there is house there let alone if there are any boundaries (17 USC 102), and worse, there is no definition what a ‘house’ is until a judge tells you so.
…[C]ompanies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users — these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.
vagueware.com brings up an important point about the diversity of work habits among programmers. Me, I need loud and distracting to work; silence and concentration inevitably let me go too far on my own, and take me down a dead end. This should be taken into account carefully when an agile team, in an open environment, is being staffed — we clearly can’t work together.
I used to argue in one job that if I was doing something particularly complicated in code, a 30-second interruption could cost me an hour of productivity. Colleagues thought I was joking and kept on interrupting. As a result, productivity slowed. They thought I was being lazy. I took a laptop out to a coffee shop, took some noise-cancelling headphones and didn’t come back until I was done coding. Eventually I was able to convince management that coders and sys admins doing complicated roll-outs could not afford to be disturbed if they wanted any work done, not because they were being prima donnas, but because coding requires a level of concentration I doubt they can even relate to. Most people don’t concentrate like coders do at any point in their life after they’ve left school - they forget what it feels like.
“Optimization of hierarchical structures of information flow”:
Abstract: The efficiency of a large hierarchical organisation is simulated on Barabasi-Albert networks, when each needed link leads to a loss of information. The optimum is found at a finite network size, corresponding to about five hierarchical layers, provided a cost for building the network is included in our optimization.
“The belief in the open source software community is that open access to the source turns on all the available brain power, full blast, on every problem, challenge or opportunity,” lead researcher and UC Davis Computer Science Professor Premkuma Devanbu told LinuxInsider. “In traditional products, bits of code tend to be owned or controlled by specific individuals, and thus each bit of code can be on a single-threaded critical path. In open source, anyone can read and comment on a file.”
(via Larry Seiford)
BoingBoing teases me terribly, by showing me a weekly serial steampunk novel that can only be purchased in the UK. Goddamned national borders.< hr />
A non-stealthy ad for stealth marketing :
I am the marketing director for a book publishing company, we are looking for a person or persons to post comments about our books on bulletin boards and book sites throughout the internet. You must be good at searching out sites to post to and able to write short “one paragraph” comments about the book. You will be paid per each comment submitted and can easily make $200 to $300 per month ongoing for only posting 16 comments per week.
(by sound wave from Barbara, via Phantom Scribbler)
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