April 18, 2007, 10:21 am
Benoit Lavigne wonders if ageism is a problem in the software development profession. Oh, hell yeah. From the minute I began editing software development magazines (when I was 25) I began hearing from professionals in their 40s and higher who faced disproportionate difficulty getting work. There is not a question in my mind that this is a real problem. True, this is a field that is unforgiving to those who don’t keep their skills current, but I’ve heard far too many stories to believe that’s the only, or even dominant, factor.
Now that I have a touch of gray around the temples myself, I worry about this myself. I’m the oldest person on my programming team right now and I’m at least two decades away from retiring. I have no doubt that it will be harder and harder for me to get work as a developer, no matter how current my coding skills stay. If I’m on the phone with a potential client and they ask about my experiences, I don’t say “Professional programmer for 27 years,” because I think that could very well trigger ageism; I say “I sold my first program when I was 16.”
I fear the day when I’m so old that the only work I’ll be able to get will be drawing lines between boxes and pretending I’m delivering value.
April 18, 2007, 9:39 am
Disc Link, a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies Group (an organization that basically buys up patents so that it can sue anyone who violates them), claims that it’s patent number 6,314,574 covers hyperlinks from documents stored on a CD that send users to sites on the web.
Last week, Disc Link filed suit against Borland, Business Objects, Compuware, Corel, Eastman Kodak, Novell, Oracle, and SAP, claiming they all violate its patent.
via Download Squad
The patent was filed on Nov 8, 1998.
I first put a hyperlink to the Web on a commercial CD in 1994. (The proceedings of the Software Development Conference. And, yeah, to the Web.) I continued the practice on several subsequent CDs that shipped before ‘98. I have copies of several of these CDs sitting on my shelf.
I can’t see how the claims of the patent cover such links, but if anyone involved in the lawsuit thinks I could be of help, let me know.
Coincidentally, I have a press release in my Inbox from the “Coalition for Patent Fairness” praising the Patent Reform Act of 2007. Maybe, but the bullet item “Reform to make it easier to file a patent application without the inventor’s cooperation;” doesn’t seem very nice. Intellectual Property legislation has been such a disaster in the past decade that I fear that the only thing worse than the current patent system would be “reform” written by the same people who brought us the DMCA.
