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Domain: boston.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to boston.com.
Comments · 1,409
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Re:Reporters...
Actually, I just read about a Chrysler dealership that was charging 299.99 for a so called y2k update. What they were actually doing was firmware upgrades that Chrysler Corp. did not feel necessitated a recall. It looks like the dealership was just trying to make money off the hype. Slimy. if ya wanna read it, scroll down like crazy, and go quickly, as ths Globe will probably remove it shortly
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Didn't work on ABC TV! Won't work on me!Large companies and groups try to do this.
In yesterday's Boston Globe there is a piece on the Metabolife Metabolife. Metabolife sued WCVB-TV (the ABC affiliate) and Susan Warnick for libel. The court threw it out.
Mattel is trying to shut me up! I received a $139k judgment against them in a lawsuit. This lawsuit is on my website. Mattel filed and continue with a countersuit for libel by my website. This is because the websitestates that they violated the FMLA, ADA, etc, which are the grounds for the lawsuit that they paid over $140k last month. They want to shut me up.
There are protection for ISPs in cases like this for websites. It is fair to use company names (even if trademarked) when talking about them. This will come out in the courts in relation to meta tags. The judges and juries will have to be educated on tags and search engines.
Injured geek wins against Mattel and Mattel still retaliates!
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Copyright violation?
Would reprinting this book be considered copyright violation?
Even if the book wasn't copyrighted in the U.S., supposedly the Sonny Bono-named copyright extension was "to bring us in line with European convention" which is life plus 70 years, right?
Jay (=
(As the Boston Globe article says, copyright extensions do more than protect "Steamboat Willie"...) -
Yup, big-time lossesThere was a story in yesterday's Boston Globe about The Learning Company. It seems that the top two officer's have abruptly resigned after losing $100M+ for the most recent reporting period.
The story reports that
Mattel officials issued an earnings warning in October. At the time, Bozarth said Mattel headquarters staff had been kept in the dark about problems at Learning Co. until the third quarter was nearly over. Bozarth said Mattel would launch ''a complete organizational review'' to find out how this could have happened.
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
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Yup, big-time lossesThere was a story in yesterday's Boston Globe about The Learning Company. It seems that the top two officer's have abruptly resigned after losing $100M+ for the most recent reporting period.
The story reports that
Mattel officials issued an earnings warning in October. At the time, Bozarth said Mattel headquarters staff had been kept in the dark about problems at Learning Co. until the third quarter was nearly over. Bozarth said Mattel would launch ''a complete organizational review'' to find out how this could have happened.
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
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Re:If only docs were adequate...There is a lot of truth in what you say. Those who say comments and documentation aren't important have obviously never had the experience of returning to a large program a few years after writing it. Taking over code written by someone else is harder. It is *possible* to maintain binary code with a disassembler, true, and it is *possible* to maintain source without documentation or comments. But no one should have to.
The problem as I see it is the disconnect between the documentation and code. Both are descriptions of what the software does, one is readable by humans, the other by the target platform. Problems in both documentation and code arise when the two descriptions aren't equivalent.
One early attempt to remedy this was COBOL. This was to be a computer language that read like a natural language but could be compiled to a machine language. Little documentation should be necessary given a well-structured program source. Needless to say, COBOL didn't really succeed, the mapping between language and operation was too clumsy to be very effective or useful.
Knuth's made some good attempts in the direction of unifying human and machine code specificiations in his CWEB tool.
One day, who knows how long from now, programming may consist of having a conversation with a computer, and explaining a problem to it in natural language, while the details of implementation and correctness are mostly left to the computer. Nice documentation may be output, right along with the executable binary.
If you think that is far-fetched, you may be right. But just this morning I read a report that someone has written software capable of reading a Time magazine and answering questions about it. Very impressive, if true.
Jim
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More in the Boston Globe
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what is the choir singing?
As I recall they're singing a couple of lines in Sanskrit. If you go to the Boston Globe's website and search around for articles dating back to the first week of April, you ought to find a very nice article about John Williams and the new music. Ain't It Cool News also had a link to this, earlier in the month.
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Boston Globe blunderThe Boston Globe's boston.com today carried the Reuter's story that was also on http://news.yahoo.com . But their blurb about the article on the boston.com homepage reads
IBM Corp. and Red Hat Software Inc. said today that IBM will begin selling computers with Linux, a Red Hat version of the Unix operating system for network computers.
"Linux, a Red Hat version..."?!? Isn't the whole point that Linux isn't owned by any one vendor?Oy.