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HP Fires Father of OOP
An anonymous reader writes "Wow. Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, reknowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
...to come up with a new DRM.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Especially appropriate, now that the mother of "Oops!" is out of the picture.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Looks like Hurd is turning HP into a lean machine to be as focused on products and price as Dell currently is.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
don't have to wait for netcraft to confirm it. 15K layoffs announced, and now a true visionary fired. HP is dying.
,
faeryman
I wouldn't be surprised if HP Execs got wind of him wanting to resign, so they beat him to it. This would save HP from an embarassing loss (someone jumping ship) and make it look like they were just "cleaning house."
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I predict that Google announces that they hired him in a week.
OOPs!
fsck hp.
Maybe Alan Kay'll be lucky, and Carly Fiorini will hire him for wherever she's going to be CEO next!
I hear she's a wiz at turning companies around!
Oh wait....
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Reminds me of the "Bad Idea Jeans" SNL commercial
Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him.
Or they might just wait until he comes up with something else revolutionary, swipe it, make it appealing to the masses, and sell it.
And then Microsoft will probably steal *that* and make it appealing to businesses and get even richer.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
EOT
As much as I love OS X, Microsoft needs Kay a lot more than Apple does. If they were to hire him, it'd benefit us all in the long run.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
not even close.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
the HP bio on Alan Kay
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Bidding ware anyone?
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
- Alan Kay
I don't know if this is a true quotation, or is apocryphal, but it's good enough to throw around at random.
I'm sure Mr. Kay will not have any problem finding a job, should he so desire one. Regardless, I wish him the best of luck.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Just because he was a promiment innovator many years ago doesn't imply he is just as innovative now. It's a possibility that HP is letting him go because he isn't innovating or contributing on par with other researchers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
How old is this guy? How much does he make? How many years until he retires? How many more great ideas can they expect to get out of him in the time he has left?
These are suits. Not nice guys. That's how they think.
All that intellectual property He came up with, and He still needs a job. Thats typical for engineers isn't it. I hope he was working for the fun of it, and didn't need the money.
At an MIT Media Lab thing back in 1992, I heard Kay say "Stuff that's gonna happen should be part of any prediction of the future." I quote that all the time.
So why pay someone that's still knee-deep in developing collaboration software in Smalltalk?
...research that does not yield immediate or forseeable applications seem to be frowned upon by many businesses nowadays. But then again, it's difficult to say what exactly HP is keeping him for. HP isn't exactly where you'd turn for innovation nowadays.
He was already at Apple. He'll probably go to Google.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...is the antithesis of the Java B&D philosophy. It's an aggressively dynamically typed language, and is much more of a precursor to Python or Ruby than Java.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Unfortunately, when HP bent over, and seductively waved it's corporate hieney at Microsoft and Intel, they gave up any chance they had of "inventing the future".
On the bright side, Kay will probably end up getting hired at a real company that wants to actually innovate.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That is why the Squeak license still mentions Apple
... or are they?
Wow. This is just, wow. I wish however is in control these days would spin off the "real hp" into a company unto its own and let the hp we see now continue its moronic quest to mirror Dell. Keep getting rid of the things that made hp and they'll kill hp for good, or at least debase it to a lame Dell knockoff. Sad to see it get this low.
There are some excellent videos on archive.org of Alan Kay explaining some of the early GUI projects (including Xerox and the early laptop "prototype") http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2
HP doesn't need innovators like Kay. HP is totally into innovating new ways to make money off of printer consumables, and that isn't an expertise that Kay brings to the table.
HP's downfall started to happen as soon as they started selling tons of LaserJet printers.
From there, HP seemed to take a little break and brought nothing new to market. Instead of making great new products, they kept on milking the same printer lines until they got old, crusty, and expensive to operate. They tried to do the same thing with their PC line. They unloaded or failed to focus on their other product lines.
I haven't bought an HP product in years. My ex-girlfriend bought an HP inkjet printer, but it failed quickly and the consumables were ridiculously expensive. It just didn't seem like an HP quality product to me.
So HP fired Alan Kay? That's good for Alan. Because who wants to work for an ink-n-toner company?
On that basis, the rest of us still haven't caught up with him! Things like GUIs, portable computers, wireless networking, and the web are all steps towards the future he envisioned. But that future is still a long ways away.
They will probably keep all the six sigma blackbelts because they are totally sweet!
I'll post instead of mod, but I think that /. should nix the HP logo. The entity known as "HP" is currently undeserving of any relation to the Hewlett-Packard legacy of computing, innovation, research, precision devices, calculators!, and, yes, printers. "HP" is really just a printer company now. Change the /. icon to a LaserJet or something, but "Hewlett-Packard" it's not. Okay, I have more b33r to drink...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Looks like Hurd is turning HP into a lean machine to be as focused on products and price as Dell currently is.
Sigh...Dell does what it does pretty well, but they are definitely not a company known for much imagination or innovation. They generally follow after someone else has blazed the path, a strategy that must fail once all of the true innovators have been eliminated. We don't really need any more Dells. If HP becomes just like Dell, then why should I buy from them? I might as well buy from Dell.
HP can still succeed, but they need to do so by being HP. Efficiency is good, but not at the expense of the good things that make HP stand out from the crowd and create future opportunities. I think farmers say that you shouldn't eat the seed corn.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Now when you buy HP, all you are buying is just a brand.
Novell could get him to join the MONO or the QT branch. That would revolutionalise the OSS OOP tools.
But I bet that HP will...outsource his projects to India.
his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java
Strange that it doesnt mention Objective-C given how heavily it is used in OSX development
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I had a close friend who worked for HP about a year ago. He was shocked at how inefficient everything was run, and how they participated in a lot of unprofitable (and wasteful) activities. His biggest comment was that their slogan should be "HP Rebrand", since that's all they do. There hasn't been any significant advancements or innovations made, nor any large pushes to making useful discoveries.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Actually, what they meant to say was "HP Invest." Just one letter. Simple mistake, really.
Actually actually, I think it meant to say "HP Invert", as in Rectal-Cranial Inversion, which is what HP has collectively accomplished with moves like this.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I wonder what will happen to Open Croquet [opencroquet.org] and TeaTime [doebe.li] without his leadership ... I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.
I wish I had mod points! This is both +Informative and way, way +Funny -- !
-kgj
-kgj
Layoff 15,000 Employees, shut down user group, now firing key persons in R&D.....even the dumbest employee could tell what's in their CEO Carly's mind - cutting as much cost as possible, create a artificial short-term profit hype, so that she can retreat with huge severance package for her 'accomplishment'; but what'd that leave HP? A living hell of disolation, without any competitive edge to continue their business as usual.
How could the board approve of her action which is obviously doing nothing more than achieving her own personal goal while damaging the company as a whole? Unless, of course, the major investors who back Carly approve of this. I cannot tell for sure, but that's very possible - the major investors believe that HP is doomed.
It may be that he's not such a huge loss after all, or it may be that I just haven't been paying attention. But I would like to know one way or the other. Somebody fill me in.
...but let's face it, what has he done for them lately? There are a lot of people out there riding on their reputations (like um, me for instance), my guess is they realized they could save a half million a year and not really lose that much.
:-))
Because there are all these open-source guys who will do it for the recognition... (ducking for cover
The revolution will NOT be televised.
If tomorrow he takes a job in Redmond, will he suddenly become "Darth" Kay?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
"The only way for evil to prevail is if good men do nothing"
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
i can understand that it's really too trivial to have mentioned in his Bio intro, but Alan Kay also won some minor award recently -- think it's called the TURING AWARD. i can't imagine why anyone would want to employ such a slacker. http://internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/33425 11/
-craig
HP didn't want Alan Kay's work, they wanted his name, and the prestige associated.
HP doesn't invent; Agilent (the spinoff with all the cool stuff) does, though I've heard bad rumors there, too.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Harry Potter fires the father of the Order Of the Phoenix? Wha?
...
OH.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Management is well on the way reducing HP to nothing more than another repackager and shipper of Chinese-manufactured hardware pre-loaded with Microsoft software. Next they'll spin off their instrumentation division in order to "boost shareholder equity" or some such. Someday, in the not too distant future, when the hollow shell of HP gets purchased for chump change by the Chinese companies currently building their products, none of us should be surprised.
HP laid off 15k workers, but is currently heavily recruiting engineers in India and China. Just take a look at the Job section on hp.com.
HP has obviously abandoned the USA and it's time we abandon this dying company.
Actually, what they meant to say was "HP Invest." Just one letter. Simple mistake, really.
Actually actually, I think it meant to say "HP Invert", as in Rectal-Cranial Inversion, which is what HP has collectively accomplished with moves like this.
Fact: they meant to say "HP Invect" -- that is, to issue invective.
Examples:
"Fuck you, losers -- we're better off without you!"
And:
"HP Rules! U-S-A-!! U-S-A-!!," etc.
-kgj
-kgj
eating your seed corn. Or more appropriately, throwing it in the garbage.
'yields false when preceded by its quotation' yields false when preceded by its quotation.
Patched-up C ought to be enough for anybody!
-- NOT Mr. Bill G.
Smalltalk by Parc Place Systems was my favorite language/programming environment of all time. Alan Kay will alsways be a hero to me.
I am sure he will get a super great job somewhere.
...otherwise, I can imagine him being screened out from all kinds of jobs because he hasn't used the latest version of VisualC++ or Java.
I worked at HP a number of years ago, when they valued employees and took a much longer view of technology investments. As soon as the company became Carly Corp, the writing was on the wall for it as a technology leader and a unique place to work. Bill and Dave's Hewlett-Packard is gone, and all that is left is yet another grist mill that just sticks their label on other company's products.
Where exactly is the added value in the HP iPod??? Not to mention the Gwen Stefani digital camera.
Glad I got out when I did!
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
Considering HP spun off the majority of its R&D organizations as Agilent Technologies, it's not surprising that they are getting rid of the rest of their R&D -- tis the only way to really compete with Dell.
For hiring him within a week.
In the news the next day, HP sues Google for helping a former employee by giving him a job.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I was just talking to someone yesterday about how HP has a thread of innovation and style (like Apple) and the entire PC market for the taking (like Dell), and if they do things right, they have an Apple-like hook with a much larger market potential. And they have Alan Kay.
Seems like a bonehead move to me. If Apple could make much of iLife under OS9 and now OSX, then someone with a great SW division could certainly push the PC software envelope in the Windows world.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yea you know me
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Now why is it that reading this thread, it seems more like Alan Kay has died?
Anyway, he can now enjoy a long well earned holiday.
/. is good for you.
I am thinking this notion of corporation, needs to go away. Make every business a sing propriatary whatever.. the people running the business need to have some sort of responsibility. The way corporations are now no one is responsible for anything anymore. If a corporation ends up doing something evil in the name of profit (which it will if it the reward is worth the risk, b/c a corporation as an entity has no conscience no purpose other than acrue wealth) there is no one to hold accountable (with the rara exception).
Who's up for amending the US constitution?
Bill Gates scooped up the VMS team. My bet is that BG is already on site and trying hard to pick up these folks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hi, software engineer, meet stockholder.
Software Engineer: You know HP could take the computer industry by storm and create the new computing environment for the 21st century!
Stockholder/Analyst: Yes, but HP should focus on it's primary industry, printer ink, 90% margins and $10B(best guess) volume are too important to get distracted by trivialities. Perhaps we could add that to our patent portfolio.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Look, Kay comes as close to someone I idolize in geek history, but it looks like the recent years are in 'trophy wife' mode. From HP...
He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and is now President of Viewpoints Research Institute.
He's been at Apple (and elsewhere) already. Has his job been to be "Alan Kay"?
I sincerely don't know, but it looks, well, unusual...
Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
About seven years ago I was a sub-sub-contractor working on a project for HP. A minor style issue came up on the documents I was formatting style sheets for: should there be a hyphen here or not? When I asked my contact at HP, he said: "I'll have to ask the committee about that."
I thought: This company is doomed!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
After reading the article and some of the feedback, a few thoughts came to me:
;-)
Not only is this probably because of the short sightedness of those now in command of HP (just like there have been one or two short sighted leaders/workers at Apple and other companies), but I also have to wonder if this isn't one of those things the OSS movement has impacted. (Not to mention the big move to have everything done in a third world country where labor is cheap.)
Now, before anyone starts screaming here - think about it. To a business person not in the know (that being that many major corporations are pouring millions into OSS software because the returns are great when everything is done correctly) see OSS as free programmers. That all of those dollars that HP has been spending on research can now be done for free because any project they come up with and put out there will be worked on by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people without HP ever having to pay a red cent for the work. In a weird, mixed up way, they are right. They are wrong only because it places them at the mercy of anyone and everyone - but so long as the current OSS outlook is maintained - then HP really does not need researchers for a lot of things software wise. (After all, remember that HP has switched to Linux for their main OS.)
And then there is the third world thing. On the average, the wages paid in a country like India is one half to one tenth of what is paid to someone here in America. So what if one person is brilliant? If there are billions of people living in a country then there will probably be at least one or two people living there who can do the same job as that one person in America. (After all, the US only has around 300 million people living in it and India has around 4 billion so the odds are good there are at least two people who can do the same kind of work.) As many software companies are finding out - in America you can hire twenty people to work on a software project - OR - you can hire two hundred to three hundred people to work on the same project in a third world country like India.
So there are three things working against America retaining its position as a leader in research: 1)Cost, 2)availability of people willing to work at low wages (ie: the grunts needed to carry out the tedious jobs as well as the advanced research), and 3)OSS Software.
Last, but not least, the motto of businesses everywhere is: If it ain't broke - don't fix it! The printers work - so why make them better? (After all, they can do photo quality now - who needs holographic capabilities?) The computers work - so why worry about making them better. Let someone else do that and then just include the new components in to the new machines. Ah! Mediocrity. The thing most businesses and governments are full of. (Mediocrity is also why we are not in space yet in a big way. Just let things float along. Don't make waves. Don't spill the cart. Let inertia take over. Ahhhhhhhhhh.)
What? Me sarcastic? Nahhhhh! Not me!
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
HP used to be the best you could get, such as the Laserjet III and Laserjet IV printers, many of which are still in service. Too bad Mark HURD is just part of a HERD of corporate raiders who loot the holds of companies, then take the last lifeboat as the ship sinks, taking thousands of people who work for a living with it. He is no different than Carly "The Hatchet" Fiorina. If instead of her, the board had picked someone named Hewlett or Packard to run the company, they might have given a damn, and HP would still be the best, period. Now, their products are manufactured garbage, and it is too late to save the sinking ship.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
They still have openings: Careers @ HP Labs: 2005 recruiting for interns, post docs and general researchers"
The guy must be about 70 by now. Whoever hires him next is a fool. Why pay out some huge salary so some famous old fart who did some neat things a few decades ago can dodder around your company's hallways?
You know, it may not be technological innovation, but I guarantee figuring out how to sell computers for what they do, at the margins they do, takes some imagination.
In the same sense, tax attorneys are some damned creative people.
You mean they fired the father of Dyn OOP to hire Jay and Singh in Bangalore who can "hack" scripts in Perl for 5 ruppees/hr?!? Are you fucking kidding me!?! The Indian education system must really have quite a material to offer!
I think i'd be able to lure her into the back of my van with a bag of marijuana.
Let's face it, the guy might of been a great inventor back in the day but it doesn't sound like he was on the forefront of anything nowadays. I don't blame HP, nor do I hold it against him... but being historically significant does not mean you can leech a salary off a company. He should either find an employer that needs his current level of capabilities, try starting up something himself, or just retire and enjoy the rest of his life.
He was one of the officers at MicroAge (the long gone retailer/franchiser that I used to work for). I've heard him speak several times, and always thought he was a bit off. Sort of a eccentric former "name" living off his rep.
This may be wrong, and I don't mean to demean him personally, but it probably isn't a bad thing that HP layed him off. They have some serious issues as a corporation, and paying for a "name" scientist is not in their interest. I wish HP well. HP hardware still is a whole lot higher quality than Dell. And they have been good supporters of Linux in my experience. They are just trying to right the corporate ship after a disasterous CEO.
It will be a poorer world if the hardware choices for "enterprises" ends up being Dell and Dell. Dell is the combination of Walmart mentality with their suppliers and Microsoft morality with their customers. I cringe everytime one of my customers chooses Dell.
Sorry, but it is probably better for me to remain anonymous.
Wow with that resume he should have his phone ringing off the hook.
I know that he would be an increidible mentor where I work but I doubt my company could afford him.
dude, nice.
you should add how they swarm any new idea or field to milk it dry, and make nests for their 401k's before moving on to "the next big thing". No surviving inventors in their wake! Fear the wrath of the SSBB Swarm!
Like the god-damned zerg, only with less individual thought.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Apple doesn't innovate. They just take already developed technology and make it more appealing. Maybe Google, Microsoft, Sun, or the other THOUSANDS of tech companies will hire him. Submitter is probably on Steve's payroll.
i think alan kay would be a great person to have at google. Google and Microsoft happen to be some of the last companies left that can 'afford' research.
So does that mean aspect-oriented programming is officially in?
..out of her mind. Yet HP is staying the course that she set. It looks like the trend breakers from the old guard have left, and all that's left are professional managers that don't have the technical capacity to imagine where the cutting edge stuff might apply.
So they're just going to imitate and try to cut margins to stay competitive. Welcome to the new face of HP, mediocre at best. Their riding on the coattails of geniuses that used to represent HP, betting that the brand's name will continue to sell products. The name itself though was not built on the commodity hardware that they are aiming at now, so I wonder just how well this will work. The awe for HP among techies is gone, and I don't get the impression HP is highly coveted brand among regular folks. Except for maybe printers, but Dell and others are now nipping at that cash cow, offering cheaper and equivalent alternatives.
I predict the executives will continue to run the present course, making big promises from a name that no longer represents the competence it used to. The stock price will make a run up, and the executives will take home big checks as they leave for other positions or retirement.
This yahoo groups posting says it all.
I'll excerpt:
"The company is scambling to try to prove that its failed direction regarding the CPQ merger was the right decision.
For the board of directors to conceed their failure now would result in the call for each of their resignations and so they are either unwilling or unable to accept their defeat.
They must band together with a secret oath of loyalty now in order to protect the status quo."
This is about a shift in it. In many areas of telecommunications, networking, software, and hardware the advances are coming from consortiums and associations of corporations and private organizations more than they are any individual member. This is good.
Don't believe me? Imagine more backplane standards than we already have covered by PICMG. Imagine one from every vendor. Imagine a different cable modem standard from every vendor. If you were around pre-DOCSIS when the IEEE could not find its arse with both hands, a hunting dog, a flashlight, and a copy of Gray's Anatomy with 802.14 then you know what I mean. Imagine forty different slot standards. Imagine ninety different processors.
More and more ideas are being expanded on and pushed forward by the force of more and more ideas from more and more people. Sometimes innovation does come from one company such as Sony's Passage system allowing the use of the formerly mutually exclusive Motorola and Scientific Atlanta systems. But the force of history is clear that cross-platform will become closer and closer to synthetic uniplatforms and the parents will give way to others in society shepherding their seed along.
Mr. Kay has plenty of places his contributions will be welcome. It's not about HP or Apple or any other single group. It's about the groups of groups and the individuals who comprise them.
I'll just be moving my investment targets away from companies like HP to those embracing better stuff.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I'm assuming this is a troll.
I'm going to make that assumption, because the only other option is too depressing.
Unless you'd like a future where everything is basically owned and run--to a far greater extent than it already is--by a very small number of tremendously rich individuals, corporations are a good thing. This is because very few people actually have the resources by themselves to bankroll significant and long-lasting ventures: scientific, industrial, or otherwise.
To do big things, like build factories, operate supertankers, run airlines, you need a lot of money. Much more than any one sane person would be willing to put up. This is why corporations exist: they allow people to pool their resources, while mitigating risk. Without the shelter from liability that corporations offer, no one would invest in them. Without the great pools of capital that corporations provide, a whole lot of things that we enjoy and make life more enjoyable would disappear.
Maybe you want to live in a world without corporations, but count me out of it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't find this hard to believe at all. HP's not in the blue-sky R&D business, and hasn't been for many years now.
What I don't get, is why he ever went to HP in the first place.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"maybe apple will hire him"
.
dream on . .
google will snatch him with ease.
Sun's got David Ungar already, giving some space to David Kay as well would make sense...
Not surprising. HP is a strange place to look for talent anyway. Maybe Google will hire him.
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
Company slogans are rarely based in reality.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not really, it's just an economy of scale.
The only hard part about it is "bootstrapping" an operation that big, once you have it running it's cake: you can dictate pricing terms to your parts suppliers (because you're so big, you can bankrupt them by canceling your orders), have everything manufactured overseas where labor is cheap, play your distributers against each other to keep their percentage minimal, and maintain your market share by undercutting any possible competition (which, not being as big as you, can't compete with your price).
Let's face it: Dell is the Wal-Mart of PCs. They're really good at what they do, but at the end of the day you need to step back and ask yourself 'is what they're doing really any good?'
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
With no viable Operating System development, and no hardware development (assembling a PC is not), I wonder if HP is a technology company at all? Their printer, graphics calculator business is on the way out. Exactly what do they do? Just like Walmart and Dell who don't make one thing on their own, HP too has reduced to a assembler.
OOP there it is.
OOP there it is....
OOP
OOP
Does anyone here think this guy would be useful at AMD? Maybe help with inventing a new breed of high performance compilers for AMD64 ?
And the king of all workgroup printers, the Laserjet 5si. Possibly the last great b&w laser printer. Great for high volume printing, and all of the ones I've worked with appeared to be made of unobtanium since they don't break like the 5000, 5100 do.
Fiorina was a mistake. Anyone who said otherwise was dead wrong. The Compaq acquisition was a tragedy. The only thing that's going to keep me looking at their laserprinters is their continuation, however poorly, of the 5si design stylings so their internal layout is still familiar when it comes right down to it.
Ok, that's harsh, but the 5si was the last high quality product they made. We've got a pretty nice 2U ( I have the serial but not the model handy, how's that ?) but it's dripping with Compaq design styling.
Maybe in the next design cycle.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Alan Kay is obviously "overqualified".
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
You mean "HP Infest", as in the infestation of a formerly engineering-driven company with airheads who think that their MBAs mean they inherently know better, and who have more or less fucked it up completely.
those who hand him his papers probably never knew a computer w/o windowing gui.
He invented what? Windows? Wasn't that Microsoft? Anyway, this is just like computers have been since I know them. We won't need someone to invent that!
If he's looking for some recognition of his lifetimes work the US probaly just isn't the right place for him. Mayx be he should go give lectures or found an institute in india or china. Theese are the places where innovation rules now and the economy is managed with some 20+ years perspective. Quite unlike the american style of capitalism which these days happily digests its own roots and hardly recognises anything more than 3 to 6 months away from now.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
A corporation is essentially an artificial entity that cannot exist without government fiat. It's the modern day version of a chartered company. What makes a corporation legally different from a private business is that the former is a legal "person". The results on the actual owners of the corporation (shareholders) being totally absolved of responsibility for the actions of the corporation. Their share price may plummet if the company does something stupid, but they themselves are not personally responsible for their property.
That's the legal aspect of corporations, and justification enough to get rid of them. But it also introduces a subtler monkeywrench into the economy: encouraging stock ownership as an investment, which severely dilutes company ownership. There are so many owners, millions in many cases, that it's impossible for the owners to exercise control, even if they wanted to. So they elect a board of directors instead, who hires executives to actually run it.
All in all, corporations are unnatural entities. But the fix is easy, and doesn't need a new constitutional ammendment. Just rescind the current laws of incorporation. But don't expect it anytime soon. Like copyright and patents, incorporation is too useful of a fiction to abolish. You'll be fought tooth and nail from every side. Who are you going to go to for legal assistance, some non-profit corporation?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Your story "HP FIres Father of OOP" is the tip of the iceburg. In the link from that article, it claims that the Cambridge Research Lab is also closing. This Lab was not just into Health and Wellness, but supported the open source community. Take a look at their people section:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/crl/
Jim Gettys the author of the X Windows System.
Keith Packard the founder of FreeDesktop.
All the founders and supporters of handhelds.org.
The open source community is going to be hit hard by this one. These are people that will be missed.
The Cambridge Research Lab was the last living ember of Digital Equipment Corps Lab. These are the folks that created alta vista, speechbot.com, jukebox (ipod), etc...
Check out the old DEC website and compare the projects:
http://www.crl.hpl.hp.com/
The difference in the spirit of the web sites says it all. The HP site looks cold and dead. The DEC site is alive.
You do realize, don't you, that Mark Hurd spent 30+ years with NCR before coming to HP. Hardly the resume of a "corporate raider," now is it?
"So HP fired Alan Kay? That's good for Alan. Because who wants to work for an ink-n-toner company?"
The same people who wouldn't work for a copier company.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is...perverts!
I had a 2-year stint at a smalltalk consulting shop during the dot-com boom. By that time, the Java drumbeat was getting too hard to ignore and we pretty much had to join the bandwagon to pull down decent gigs.
Java definitely felt much more like c++ than Smalltalk. I'd agree that Ruby is a better comparison. And when you look at everything inside the square brackets, objective-c looks and feels almost exactly like Smalltalk.
I'm not quite sure why Smalltalk didn't catch on like Java did. Was it bad timing, bad marketing, did it feel "too wierd" to more widely used languages? I dunno.
Here's irony: IBM's VisualAge for Java IDE was a Smalltalk image developed with IBM Visualage for Smalltalk (which had 1/10th as many sales).
Sounds like my company. They're too busy laying off the people who invented my particular industry to have any time to put out a quality product anymore.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
we know projects/departments but no real depth on the cut data. boulder? other prominent folk?
at&t did so brilliantly killing research. it's gotta work for hp. they have such a deep reputation for minimal margin high volume products. not.
If he's the messiah, why are so many bodies still hitting the floor?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I don't understand.
Employees shouldn't be allowed to rest on their laurels due to 20 year old achievements accomplished working for another company. HP is no longer in a position to be Santa Claus.
Employees in a company really need to be contributing in some way to the benefit of the company, or they should switch to a university. Reading some of the comments written by or about Alan Kay, he seems to be a bit arrogant actually.
Like what?
They started rebranding Luxeon LEDs and Tektronix/Fluke/etc. instruments?
It does suck that most Dell, HP and others' stuff is now made by someone else. What is the point of buying any American brand now that all branded laptops (for example) are actually made by Compal&friends? The day sub-contracting OEMs start gaining traction, HP&all will be one business model short from being able to generate any profits.
(Okay, the parent post may be intentionally sarcastic, but the Informative moderation is still misleading, to say the least.)
WELL DUH. Anyone with half a brain knows he was being sarcastic and I see nothing wrong with the informative moderation. Why do you think one can't use sarcasm to inform?
The thing about Alan is that he's a total arrogant jerk. He and Don Norman.
The results on the actual owners of the corporation (shareholders) being totally absolved of responsibility for the actions of the corporation.
While that's true, you conveniently forgot the part where the board of directgors ARE legally responsible. And unless you head has been in a dark place for a long time, you might have noticed an increase in the heads of such boards being brough up on charges and incarcerated where appropriate.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Because anyone who's used HP software recently has to have realized it's all crap. How hard could it be for them to make software with usable UIs? Apparently impossible as they invent new ones with each product. The scanner UI for my print/scanner is so counterintuitive it's not funny. Of course, I don't get to use it much because it often can't find the networked printer or else it's locked up from trying somethig it wasn't expecting.
"C++ (for which I have a love/hate thing going -- It is so needlessly messy, but gives me "close to the metal OOP")"
Try FORTH. Close to the metal, and it's abstraction (which OOP is) is what you want to make it.
Definetly HP is killing every thing withing itself, way to go Fiorina, your reign of stupidity is killing what once was a great brand and cutting edge tech company, at least my hp48gx will be valued when HP goes the way of the Do Do.
... yeah, you know me.
sometimes inventers get less visionary as they get older. thomas edison, for example, made some pretty strange inventions near the end of his life, many of which never worked.
there was one device he tried to make to talk to the dead. didn't really work well...
Alan Kay's replacement, Nadir Shamaladanirankan, starts Monday at 1/8 of Mr. Kay's former salary
Maybe in the next design cycle
Doubtful. Fiorina was brought in due to an existing and expanding culture of short-sighted management. Alan's departure is just the "other shoe dropping" on this phenomenon. Quick gain at the expense of long-term viability was the strategy. Having been in difficult strategic situations (e.g. totally screwed cashflow due to bad corporate decisions and totally hosed overhead), I've had to totally gut long-term plans to keep operations alive. HP has been in that situation for quite sime time, but in my assessment, had the bulk and time of a couple of years to pull out a strategic reorg. Alan should have been a real asset there, IMHO. Hell, a crazy idea might have been banking on Alan's agent driven systems idea, acquire Sun and incorporate Bill Joy's Jini vision as a mechanism to pull this off. Then again, this is a radical move for a tired old, worthless integrator. Now they're tossing him out, it is time for any investor to dump. Trust me... your stock is worthless in bankruptcy (I've been there) and where HP is going, you won't want to follow.
All things considered, they may deserve it due to their anti-customer culture. Consider HP's approach on inkjet printer cartridge auto-expiration, for example. I'll never forget the experience two years ago when I went through an entire cabinet of cartridges only to discover that every single new replacement was reported to be empty by the printer. We usually buy packs of ten at a time, and the particular printer we had ten for was my desktop inkjet (I'm the CTO and got one a little different than the run of the mill). As I usually used the laserjet for my black and white stuff, I didn't go through cartridges very fast. Every single one in the cabinet had self-expired, even though they were packed with ink.
Guess who banned HP from any further purchases? And not just printers. If they're going to play those games in software drivers, they're not going to be in my shop. Period. I wonder how many "former geek now CTO" vendor nightmares like me there are out there?
In 1998 through 2001, I had a $110 million capital budget. After Lucent screwed me with product after product that failed to deliver (and they had the balls to come to me to sell consulting at outrageous rates to fix what they had originally sold me but didn't work). I banned Lucent from our shop and I'm happy to see many others did the same. Bad vendors deserve to die.
HP is just the latest short-sighted "screw the customer" vendor to discover we pay their paychecks. I love the look on their faces when they suddenly discover that, come back in to recover their business with me, and I take them on the tour of failed projects and products of theirs. By the time I'm done with the rep, I've got them running to monster.com to find another job from the outright despair they experience.
The big picture is this: in IT, Clayton Christensen has pointed out that our company lifecycles are more like fruit flies than most other companies. The upside of this is that we get to see the crummy vendors suffer the consequence of their actions in very little time. Datapoint, Sun (still dying but fighting like mad - I helped kill one of their product lines, yea!), NeXT, Be, Data General, CDC, Inacom, Sequent, RealSCO, DEC (to my disappointment), and countless others all suffered the consequence.
So who's next? I can't believe Sun can hang on forever. HP's become little more than a final assembly manufacturer and will suffer Inacom's fate. Gateway has to be on its last hours. Who else am I overlooking?
I thought Harry Potter was firing the father of Order Of the Phoenix. Thank God it was something else.
I know this won't be a popular sentiment, but I think it's worth writing, so here goes...
You want to get into computer science? Look what happens to a winner of the Turing Award. Computer science, programming, and just about anything related to computers is now passe. It's no longer a book of spells from which you cast great power. It is a hack-n-slash battle of attrition. "Just get it done" is the new methodology. R&D is old school.
Everyone wants to launch in against HP or the corporation in general for this, but this doesn't surprise me. Guys like Kay are better suited in academia anyways.
"HP Invent" Nah, that was that other bitch's slogan. The new slogan should be: HP - fuck 'em Harder and Phaster. Anyway, who cares? I don't buy ANYTHING HP anymore. Its all shit.
OK, so they guy invented OOP and thought of laptops long before anybody else. Cool. Give him extra mod points or something. But what has he done for HP in the time he's been there? What products has he improved? What marketable new ideas has he come up with?
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
Which location? I was a subcontract techwriter in that same time period at HP's Corvallis Oregon facility. What you described would be minor stupidity compared to what happened there.
Your thoughts on the matter are not far from my own.
You assume there will be a world left to live in if the corporations continue to run amok. The environmental devastation alone is enough to make me weep.
Grandparent poster was not explicit enough in his condemnation of corporations, though he implied it: For-profit corporations should be abolished, unless they undergo a serious priority rearrangement. Currently, their only motivation is profit - not only that, but they are derelict in their duties if they do not do everything in their power to make obscene amounts of money for their "tremendously rich" stockholders. Such as system is not sustainable.
Unless you'd like a future where everything is basically owned and run--to a far greater extent than it already is--by a very small number of tremendously rich individuals, corporations are a good thing.
Um.... you mean it could get worse? I mean, certainly it's getting worse already, and at a fantastic rate, but surely you can't be suggesting that it could get even worse in whatever future the grandparent poster envisions. That sounds like a strawman argument to me. You're deliberately misrepresenting his goals in the most fantastic way - he hasn't even stated what he wishes to have instead of corporations! Naturally, you assume it would be something just like the current system, but worse. Brilliant!
Without the great pools of capital that corporations provide, a whole lot of things that we enjoy and make life more enjoyable would disappear.
Guess what - we're humans and we've always formed ourselves into groups of various sizes, and pooled our resources. Getting rid of corporations in no way changes that. You must have the imagination of a gnat. Can't you think of a way to get things done with out relying on for-profit monstrosities?
Non-profit corporations are great. They do good work every day, which is more than I can say for most for-profit corps. I would be fine without for-profits, as long as we can keep the cooperation and resources of large groups. I see no reason why innovation would have to cease or regress. On the contrary, an economy freed of the need for short-term thinking could arguably come up with vastly superior technology, which would increase our abundance to such a level that the need for a complex economy is drastically reduced. Imagine if we could invent replicators. It would change everything. The corporations would hate the freedom and power it would give to consumers so they would try to suppress it. At some point (:::cough-DRM-cough:::) for-profit corporations become more of a millstone around our necks than a saving grace. We are approaching that time rapidly. Your ideas seem to be based on fear of the future and fear of the unknown, and certainly, fear of people who do not see the value in the old ways. Such beliefs are extremely common, but they must give way to the future and its promise, or we shall all perish as the unfettered greed of capitalism tears our fragile earth apart.
Electric Monkey Pants
OOPs.
Time to dust off my old Prolog textbooks and fire up my logic programming skills!8-))
But seriously folks, I object! Or is it "I, Object!"
Spoken like someone who's never been outside the US in his/her life.
Go visit North Korea, Cuba, or one of the former Soviet states and then tell me how the environment looks over there. If you think "corporations" make you weep... all I can is, you need to get out more.
The father of the black box of computing is thrown out of the black box of HP.
I mean he showed that if you design a computer program into objects that contain both the methods and the data, then you can piece together programs more easily, and replace broken or outdated components. I'm not saying that Kay's broken, but HP has swapped the Kay object out of their program.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Ironically, this headline is also a spoiler for the new harry potter book
HP's not in the blue-sky R&D business, and hasn't been for many years now.
Not true at all. I worked for HP Labs last summer in their Information Dynamics Lab. Much of the research that this group, and others that I'm personally aware of, does is of a distinctly speculative nature and doesn't directly lead to a product. This is fine by HP, because pure research generally pays off in one way or another in the long run.
Corporate blue-sky R&D doesn't generally make the papers until it's no longer blue-sky, i.e., just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean it's not there. If you want to know who's doing research, try reading the scientific literature instead, .
That was the entire point of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to establish a clearer chain of accountability and hold a CEO and the Directors responsible. Contrary to what you may hear in the popular press, this accountability has always been there, and S-O just reinforces it. When we had an unfortunate incident with a very large check from a customer that bounced at my former company (I was a founder and an executive, but not the CEO and was no longer serving in a voting Board seat), I was threatened by our bank and told that I would be named in a lawsuit to collect the monies, and that all the executives and the board members would be held jointly and severally liable in the State of Massachusetts.
And this was for something that wasn't even any of our faults, but rather happened because a customer wrote a very large check that they knew was bad.
The issue is that sometimes as companies get particularly large, the question of who is responsible for what and who knows what becomes a bit more muddy, which is what S-O attempts to address. The solution is not to do away with the separation between labor and capital and remove the ability to use pooled resources, to sell equity and so on - basically completely destroy all the great tools that capitalism provides us to grow our economy. That would be incredibly foolish.
For the most part, the laws are on the books, it's just a matter of enforcing them properly, and tweaking some rules to make sure that there is always *somebody* to be held accountable if a company does bad things.
Anyone with half a brain knows he was being sarcastic and I see nothing wrong with the informative moderation. Why do you think one can't use sarcasm to inform?
Because "Informative" indicates that the comment conveys accurate and useful information, and here sarcasm involves making false statements deliberately as a taunt.
Sure, if you already know about Turing Award, you can recognize the comment as sarcastic, but then the comment would not be very informative (since you know all that already). If you have never heard of the Turing Award before, then you would get the wrong idea from that comment. Informing only people already in the know hardly qualifies as Informative.
Please also keep in mind that not everyone reading Slashdot is a computer scientist or in the IT business. Recognizing the original comment as sarcastic has nothing to do with brains... either you have heard of Turing Award before, or you have not.
Suppose you see a comment "Sora components are so much better than Dura-Ace" in a cycling forum marked as Informative. Can you really tell that the comment is meant as a joke? I think a Funny moderation would be more appropriate.
Um.... you mean it could get worse?
Yeah. It can get a whole fuck of a lot worse.
I'd recommend that you put down the Chomsky pipe and step outside the ivy curtain. You have a lot to learn about the world, the country you live in, the countries you don't live in, and human nature in general.
We had a printout posted in side isles and so on that took the corporate logo and placed "integrate" under it. An apt description. I knew months ago that Hurd was talking about cutting a lot of "unnecessary" research. In imaging and printing, we were pretty insulated from most of the turmoil during and after the Compaq merger. However, even we were ultimately not immune as consumable revenue decreased, the core laser business matured, and "underperforming" businesses (that is, something not #1 or #2 in its market) sucked money from growth areas. Another problem was some management with no long-term vision: "Yes! let's invest here. . . no, wait! That costs more money than we thought!" Planning and commitment were lacking before the so-called transformation, and maybe still are. So, how are you supposed to get to even #2? That and the incredibly stupid idea of combining printing and PCs. Vyomesh Joshi is actually a good leader who shoots strait and doesn't dance around hard questions; the imaging and printing organization as a separate company would do quite well. At least Carly was booted. Hurd is doing what he has to, and it's not easy (not that it makes it any nicer for those that are getting the axe). I think there will be plenty of post layoff survivor syndrome there for a while.
I'm sorry, I sound bitter. I'm not though, HP was fairly sensitive and generous to those of us that chose to leave on our own accord. I'm glad I did. There's just sadly nothing about HP anymore that makes it better to work for than anywhere else, and there once was. It has become, even at the printing level, an integrator of other technologies rather than a source. Thus the dissolution of this and other research groups will continue. Hurd wants to bring R&D "closer to the customer." I also doubt that severance packages will ever be that generous again. I found a good job in a completely different industry, and I wish HP the best of luck. Wow, that was therapeutic.
By the way, if you have not read it, check out the article that pissed off VJ. I don't know how they did it, but Business Week nailed it almost 100%.
>> HP Fires Father of OOP... ...also fires the mother of wOOPs, the uncle of UhOh, granddaughter of OHNO, and the third cousin twice removed of AhhShit. At a press conference later in the day a spokesman for HP claimed it was all an error.
Spoken like someone who is afraid to tackle my arguments head on. I have been outside of this country. And you have not rebutted a single thing I said.
Go visit North Korea, Cuba, or one of the former Soviet states and then tell me how the environment looks over there. If you think "corporations" make you weep... all I can is, you need to get out more.
Hmm.... so the only other solution than capitalism is communism, huh? You are a tool. Did you read anything that I wrote? I'm aiming for what is beyond capitalism - the next step. Communism is clearly a failure (and was never implemented fully anyway). Both systems are bad for the environment, and both are repressive - communism is just more obviously repressive. Capitalism is much more subtle and insidious, but it at least allows for greater freedom.
If you've finished attacking me, you might want to consider some possible alternatives; something that hasn't been done before. I think the answer is largely political. If we used a direct democracy approach, with a firm structure for protecting minority opinion we'd see a less oppressive system, methinks. We could vote on laws, rather than voting on greedy politicians who vote on laws for us (or 'for themselves', more accurately). I think it's time we progressed beyond greed as a motivating factor, since it is so obviously divisive. But if you think capitalism is the pinnacle of human endeavor, please tell me why.
Electric Monkey Pants
Wasn't OO invented in northern europe the mid 60's in the Simula language by a guy named something like Nygaard?
Table-ized A.I.
Of course Kay invented SmallTalk, one of the prettiest languages and programming IDES ever.
i guess they will have to spare money where they can... but seriously who would hire some one who has no background in computers and "has a bachelor's degree in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford University." 2 things that really dont have much to pertain to HP's field of deployment... that and you gotta love that she "was named an honorary fellow of the London Business School in July 2001. In 2002, she was honored with the Appeal of Conscience Award, and in 2003 she received the Concern Worldwide "Seeds of Hope" Award in recognition of her worldwide efforts to make global citizenship a priority for business." seriously if i was a computer oriented business there would be no way i would hire her as my Chairman and Chief Executive Officer... that would be committing business suicide... what if u look at HP's stock it pretty much was since she was hired 5 years ago and now that she was caned the stock is going back up again... oh well fire the ones who can save you and keep the ones who have failed you... thats how the world works... look at our president... http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fiorina.htm l
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
Alan Kay has been a source of great ideas and he's a nice guy too. I agree we owe him a debt and I hope he is rich. That said, has anybody here actually looked at his work over the last ten or 15 years? It's a very specialized kind of thing he's into and it's not my cup of tea and it is easy to understand how HP might feel it's not theirs either. Disney seemed to feel the same way. Before you go flaming HP you might want to do some minimal background research on re. the last decade, as opposed to the glory days of 1970.
Or Alan may follow the footsteps of Bill Joy.
0 6/1655234&tid=126&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/
Slashdot = Sarcasm
It all started when he suggested HP make printer cartridge ports polymorphic with other vendors.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, Funny doesn't get anyone any karma now, does it?
The purpose of a corporation is to make money for the shareholders (owners, etc..) within the Law. Period. The purpose of the government is to make Law.
If you don't like the environmental policies of the corporations, then you really should vote people in that will make the Law such the the environmental policies are improved.
Propriatorship are just a special case of a corporation - one shareholder, one director. Corporations are general form of other business types. There is nothing special about them.
In Communism they wanted to abolish the corporation the way it was to give "power to the people" or other bullshit. What they did was replace the rich cronies with dictator cronies in the government. Today's interpretation of what Communisn *should* have been was to give X amount of shares to each of the eployees per year. This was the only people that benefit from the profits of a corporation would be the workers. But that would give money to the little guy, so that would never work.
Anyway, in Capitalism the shareholder (investor in most cases) is the center of the Corporation. The government is there to regulate what a Corporation can do to make profit for the investor/shareholder. You don't like the environmental policies of Corporations, then complain to the gov't. That is what they are there for.
I've worked on two applications (whose names I won't mention. Oh all right, GFDM [Global Financial Data Model] and LoanIQ) which were composed of about 750 objects [GFDM] and 450 objects mapped onto 750 objects [LoandIQ, they didn't understand about objects with states!])
:-)
The interesting thing is that these databases represented about 1,200 relationships between these objects. (Note the difference in scale. There were two to three times as many relationships as there were objects. And they NEVER understood what they were dealing with. Relationships and extremely simple to implement, but you have to see that that bricks and mortar [the objects] do not a wall make [the relationships].)
Now, how do you visualize 750 objects at once?
It certainly doesn't fit on a flat sheet of paper. ERWin just doesn't cut it.
You have to use 3D (I did it with VRML) then topologically sort the objects and the relationships and then array the whole thing on the 'surface' of nested spheres. (The 'depth' of the sphere depends on the relationships that are being followed. GFDM was eight levels deep. 'Real world' objects were modeled on the outermost sphere.)
Each object was linked to a page describing the object and the lines represented the relationships and were linked to a page describing the relationships.
I was really PROUD of coming up with the visualization scheme and with the grunt work I had to do to come up with the bizzare quaternion math for arraying the objects on the nested spheres and for aligning the relationships.
The relationships were conceptually easier, (though if I had prettied them up to follow traces and arcs it would have been a test of the 4-colour map theorem.
3D enabled me to be the ONLY person to understand ALL of the objects and their relationships. I had ALL the meta-data available at the click of my mouse.
This could have been extended to have interfaces to manipulate (edit) the objects and the relationships themselves.
I did none of this for the 'cool' factor, but because it was the only possible way to handle that much meta-data.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Corporations are actually useful to the little guy, too. Small businesses often start up corporations (LLCs most commonly) to create a separate legal entity for all business assets. That way if the business becomes the target of some frivolous lawsuit, the only things the business owner can really lose are the business assets, and not the shirt off his back (though that may very well happen eventually if he has no business anymore).
Well, since HP just basically nuked their retirement benefits package -- they're not going to be putting new hires into it, and current employees will have it frozen at its current level -- he is going to be getting the exact same retirement benefits as he would if he stayed on there another 20 years.
It won't be long before there are no companies left in the US that have actual pension plans. Oddly, when people are talking about how the income of the people in the US is doing, they always discuss 'wage' as if it were god, but if your wages stayed flat (adjusted for inflation) over the last 10 years but you lost all your retirement benefits, you are six kinds of screwed. And I know a LOT of people in that position, and NOBODY in the opposite position.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I disagree. This is a nerd/geek site. Most jokes here require a level of understanding about computer science and anyone knowing a thing or two about computers has heard of, if not the reward, Alan Turing and can deduce the value of the reward and thus the sarcastic tone of the poster.
Sure, if you already know about Turing Award, you can recognize the comment as sarcastic, but then the comment would not be very informative (since you know all that already). If you have never heard of the Turing Award before, then you would get the wrong idea from that comment. Informing only people already in the know hardly qualifies as Informative.
If you know about the reward (which most people will), you are being informed. It is not the existance of the "turing award" he's informing you about. He's actually informing you about the lack of any mention of the Turing award in the article. Would it be more appropriate to mod him insightful? Maybe. But he's still informative -- especially for people who don't read articles.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm in a similar situation, and I'm less worried about the company going public and then having layoffs than I am about the company being bought by some other, larger company for its intellectual property, and shut down. (Or simply being destroyed by Microsoft, for that matter.)
I believe that's what the owners and the management are aiming for. (The former, not the latter, natch.) The executives will get enough to retire on; I will get enough to tide me over for six months and then I'll be back to eating shoe leather again, until someone decides to hire me for exactly what I was making five years ago, in unadjusted dollars.
Does it sound like I've been there before? You bet!
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I guess being the "father" of something means you're entitled to be set for life, huh? Good job, lots of speaking engagements, book deals, a couple of beehotches, why not?
So the guy's smart. So what? There are plenty of smart, forward-looking people in the world. Where is it written that you're guaranteed a job?
After all, the Smalltalk branch of OOP philosophy is the driving force behind Objective-C and Cocoa. And Apple is really starting to do some interesting work in advancing the usefulness of computers, which is right up Kay's alley.
There are so many owners, millions in many cases, that it's impossible for the owners to exercise control, even if they wanted to. So they elect a board of directors instead, who hires executives to actually run it.
What does that text remind me of?
Oh yes - a representative democracy.
"Maybe Apple will hire him"
Maybe he'll move to China and get hired by Google and then sued by HP?
Does anyone truely believe that this guy will have a difficult time getting hired by someone? I know I don't.
People shouldn't care about the old-skool developer who has 30 yrs under his belt. They should worry about the stiff who just graduated from college and is most likely to be laid off and will have a harder time getting a new job.
Actually, that would be a 'no.' The purpose of a corporation is to make money for its stakeholders. No 'law' about it. In fact, the joke is that if a corporation can make more money by flouting the law, or outright breaking it, than it can by working within the law, it only has two choices: break the law, or face shareholder lawsuits.
Heck, cigarette companies liked to hundreds of thousands of people about their products, and as a direct result, killed untold numbers of people. Legal? Well, actually, no. Accepted practice? Well, they're being sued now, but you rarely hear the argument that they shouldn't have done it to begin with. Why? Because they've made orders of magnitude more money off of those dead people than they will ever be fined. The shareholders are happy, the executives (who aren't fined themselves, and who have made zillions) are happy... pretty much the only people who aren't happy are the dead and dying people.
Or how about the case where Ford decided that it would be cheaper to be sued successfully by a few hundred families whose loved ones their defective products killed than to issue a recall of their products so those people wouldn't die in the first place. Legal? Well, no. Profitable? Absolutely. Shareholders happy? Well... not once it came out.
No, corporations are not evil. They are absolutely amoral and anethical. They have no business except making money, and no reason to ever obey a law that they can make more money by breaking, assuming you take into account probable consequences of breaking the law. And sometimes even if you don't, since corporations these days aren't very good at taking the long view...
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
the old slogan was "invent"
.....
the new slogan
"merge, layoff, and go out of business"
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
he was the first one who 'applied a few principles ruthlessly' to implement Smalltalk.
We see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Alan Kay was standing very tall indeed.
Smalltalk was demonstrably a failure. It never approached its stated goal of empowering children (the 'small' in Smaltalk) to control computers (the 'talk' in Smalltalk.)
Despite this it is a great language. But now, with the failure recognized, it should be renamed.
It was the first language that came up with the class #MetaCclass which allowed everything to be described in Smalltalk terms. The syntax of Smalltalk barely covers two pages of EBNF but it describes EVERYTHING a computer can do.
It is also at the heart of all of the code libraries out there. The best of which comes from Object Technologies International (OTI) which is at the heart of IBMs' Smalltalk.
I believe that the failure of Smalltalk, apart from the name, to deal with Relationships as first class objects, is what ultimately led to its stagnation in the marketplace.
(I blame von Neumann and his failure to recognize what the hardware was REALLY doing, in parallel, for the current lamentable state of programming. BTW Smalltalk is PERFECT for programming a Beowolf cluster.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It was "conviently" left out because it would weaken his "get rid of corporations" mantra. Slashdot isn't about enlightenment, or deep thinking. It's all about emotion, and lots of it. Rarely do you see a thread discussing "what if this person got his way?" What are the benefits, and disadvantages of his/her position? What are all the facts? Oh right, in the story that no one reads until much latter and further down in the forum, usually buried at (-1) someone points out the obvious, that the "first post" crowd missed, and everyone else rode coattails on. Knee-jerkism at it's finest.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is "forgot".
Please do not insult the Smalltalk programming environment by calling it a mere language. Smalltalk was a tap into the living heart of your software; you could alter and play with code as it ran. Alter your programs as they ran, modify types: smalltalk skewed the boundary between application usage and development.
Just because they're both VM powered OO doesnt give you the right to demean Smalltalk by associating it with java. The blasted thing isnt even dynamically typed! Such blaspheme. Java is just another langauge. Smalltalk is an environment.
F.U.
-Myren
it doesn't breakdown to tracking work delivered into lines of code delivered.
A good Smalltalk programmer refactors code to actually deliver fewer lines of code doing more and more varied kinds of work.
How do you pay somebody to deliver fewer lines of code?
Dynamic typing is only one of the tools available to a Smalltalk programmer; polymorphism is another great one.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
who cares...
Hp has been sucking eggs for a bit.
alan kay wont have to look far.
geez what 5... Interesting>? stupid>?
honestly, the workld could deal with a fresher approach than hooey-packa. they've done nothing but muck up reasonable technologies.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR.
i'm going to bed.
I suiggest all you guys sleep in a room without power.
no really.
fools.
Tell that to those screwed by Kenneth Lay.
Open Source Sushi
For some interesting anecdotes involving Alan
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Yes, but Carly's gone, and Mark is here, and he's the closest I've seen in 25 years to one who thinks like Bill and Dave.
And to address an earlier comment: much of this weeks announcements had to do with streamlining internal ops to remove the inefficiences. He's said more than once that some work (unecessary) will just have to stop.
Don't count us out yet!
Jim Gettys (the X Window System guy) also got the boot from HP. It is mentioned here.
"Non-profit corporations are great. They do good work every day, which is more than I can say for most for-profit corps. I would be fine without for-profits, as long as we can keep the cooperation and resources of large groups."
This is not really possible. Firstly, before people can pool there resources they have to be rich already. To be rich people have to take risks. They can take small risks and get small rewards (think small businesses turning only a few million per anum as oposed to corporations turning in billions). In other words, for people to pool resources together they need to get resources to pool in the first place, and to get resources you need to take risks. To take big risks you need to somehow limit those risks. This is where corporations come in.
"Imagine if we could invent replicators. It would change everything. The corporations would hate the freedom and power it would give to consumers so they would try to suppress it."
Replicators would be one of those things that would be considered risky, it would require lots of research and many many financial risk.
A good example to show why getting rid of corporations could best be described throught the space industry. The space industry is incredibly risky. NASA (a not for profit organisation) has a history of0 using(wasting) billions of dollars in its many operations. On the other hand since for-profit organisations have entered the space race there has been significant improvements and innovations going on. A private organisation has done something that was previously only possible through goverment subsidies using a budget a fraction of that of NASA's. Those group of course expect a return for their efforts(eg space tourism) they are certainly a not-for-profit organisation.
To limit the risks those groups form as a corporation. This is to limit the risks that may arise from accidents. Just imagine how much it would cost for people in the group if an accident were to happen. Without a form of limiting liability, there would not be as many people backing them up financially, because of the risks involved.
The reason slashdot hates corporations so much are because slashdot people are mostly involved around the computer/entertainment industry, sure many corporations in these sector do harm, but in other industries corporations are needed. Think of the mining industry, do you think people would take such risks as creating a mine without limitting their liabilities and not expecting a profit? I doubt it. If there are there would be very few.
"You must have the imagination of a gnat. Can't you think of a way to get things done with out relying on for-profit monstrosities?"
Yes it is possible to think of them, but they need utopian-ist idealogies to work.
HP is closing its R&D and outsourcing it. All "advances" to come from HP from now on will be the incrementally released and incrementally obsolescent plastic crap comong from the sweat shop next to the cubucle farm.
Alan Kay is losing nothing. HP is losing their soul.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Spoken like a true idiot. All stockholders are not "tremendously rich". In fact, the public at large owns about 60% of all the stocks in this country in direct ownership, mutual funds, retirement funds, and pension funds. Then add in insurance companies who invest premiums to have the money to pay claims... and banks who invest savings to pay interest and make loans... and...
I'd say you get the idea, but I'm pretty sure you don't.
So let's do away with savings accounts, mutual funds, pension funds, health, life, home, and car insurance, and all those other things made possible by stockholder ownership in those nasty, greedy, hateful corporations. Hell, half the U.S. population won't mind having their savings and retirement accounts wiped away.
Will they?
Idiot.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"Alan Kay should be an academic."
MIT Media Lab.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is disguise.
the road to s/Dell/Hell/ for HP... now they fire their best brains, which is a sure indicator that they will run out of new products in the immediate future and will become a commodity player like Dell.
HP stock dives when Lexmark sells 3 printers. Because HP is just a printing company.
HP stock dives when Dell changes their standard chassis color. Because HP is just a PC company.
HP stock dives when IBM does some new services campaign. Because HP is just a consulting company.
HP stock dives because they announce a new technology out of HP Labs. Because Dell doesn't have R&D, they save all that cash. HP is stupid for spending on that when they could just repaint Intel systems.
HP stock dove this week because somebody leaked that they'd lay off 25,000 people. When it ended up only being 14,500, HP just wasn't serious about cutting costs.
I am not saying that HP is fantastic, I am just saying that to call them just a PC company is silly. We all know that two articles from now (since there will be a dupe of this one before the next new article) it will be about printing, and everybody will say how HP is going to die since all they do is make printers...
It will be an interesting year for HP. By 6/1/06, the company could look completely different.
And one thing to consider, no computer seller is an engineering company any longer. Dell never was, Lenovo isn't going to be, Gateway isn't.
Agilent is the engineering half of HP.
My mom says I'm cool.
Perhaps Brandybuck can explain in more detail what (s)he was hoping would fill the void left by corporate capitalism if the laws enshrining it were repealed. Socialism? Partnerships?
Either way, the facts are wrong, and the conclusions are, at best, misinformed. Sorry to continue off-topic, but somebody modded this as an Interesting 4, so it is begging for a rebuttal.
Brandybuck decried limited liability as a way corporations can get away with crime. Incorporation provides limited liabiliy only to investors who do not participate in the day-to-day operations of the company. For example, if there were no limited liability and your retirement account had included a mutual fund with stock in Enron, then you'd be sharing a jail cell with Ken Lay as his co-conspirator rather than being considered one of his victims. Limited liability only protects the "little guy," not the guilty masterminds of evil conspiracies.
I sure hope Brandybuck isn't expecting socialism to be any better. Socialism is no different than a one-corporation economy where everyone owns one share and the board of directors takes over the government. If you dislike monopolies, just wait until the government becomes a monopoly dominating every industry. Nightmare.
Conversely, corporate capitalism is not much different than one country supporting thousands of socialist economies in microcosm-- each competing with the other to provide products or services at higher quality, lower price, or both. The worker can choose which of these microcosms to patronize, and can reap the rewards of voluntary investment to supplement labor-based income. In socialism, the worker has no choice-- except in casting one vote among hundreds of millions to elect the "board of directors." Economic freedom and socialism are mutually exclusive.
Without socialism or corporations, partnerships would take their place. Companies would be organized as "limited liability partnerships" (LLPs) so that mere investors would be protected from crimes committed by management. Nothing significant would change, either from a legal or operational perspective, other than a lot of former corporations calling themselves partnerships. In this case, Brandybuck's proposed solution doesn't solve any of the problems being complained about.
If the government were to outlaw both corporations and partnerships, without instituting socialism, we would be left with a proprietary mercantile economy usually associated with feudalism. Only the richest people could ever afford to amass the kind of wealth necessary to engage in industry, and the rest of us would be serfs, merchants or independent artisans with absolutely no hope of advancement unless a rich tycoon were to feel particularly generous. How quaint. How bleak.
Corporations made the US the world's economic superpower. No other economic theory holds a candle to corporate capitalism. But like every other human endeavor, corporations are susceptible to the aberrations of human nature-- management needs to be watched, and the lawbreakers among them need to be prosecuted. Make no mistake-- limited liability does not protect lawbreakers, but their unwitting victims among the investors, most of whom are just working-class folks with retirement plans trying to be responsible citizens.
Again, I would like to know what exactly Brandybuck thinks will be so much better than corporations.
Do you think that any geek who achieves momentary fame should have a job for life? Don't you think an employee should be measured by the value he's contributing now?
When I heard "Alan Kay" I remembered this load of whining. Here's my comment on that.
I have more respect for people who actually get things done, like the Linux kernel contributors, than people who pontificate on the future of OO or whatever. Anyone claiming that HP should keep this guy because of his long-past accomplishments should have his head examined. HP should only retain people who help the company make money and move forward.
Cambridge Research Laborotory is also apparently being disbanded. Both Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, prominient developers and architects of the X windowing system are part of this group.
I think they actually may have been contributing more useful things than Alan Kay
The purpose of a corporation is to make money for its stakeholders.
No, the purpose of a corporation is to mitigate risk and pool resources.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Why don't you post the number of jobs in the USA too? Kinda odd you omitted that huh? Well it's 243 jobs in the USA, but that's not even relevant because these job numbers include every field. This discussion is about computer science jobs, not marketing, sales or accounting.
Also it doesn't make sense to assume one job posting equals one job available. So the 3.6% number is meaningless to me.
Lets take a look at the type of jobs available in the USA vs. INDIA for IT at hp.com.
USA (9):
Technical Assoc. III Limited Term Employee
Limited Term Employee - Report Development/eSupport Tools Specialist
LTE - ITO Support Specialist V
Technical Lead - Business Intelligence Solutions
Managed Desktop Developer/Engineer
Unix Systems Administrator
Solution Architect II
India (15):
Software Engineer (Entry Level)
IT Support (Entry Level)
Technical Analyst-Web Technology Services - BSS - NSP - HP-GDIC
Network Engineer/Administrator
Software Engineer (Entry Level)EVG
Project Manager
Software Distribution Specialist
Entry Level Software Engineer -2005 Batch
Manager - Application support
See a trend?? No wait.. I'm sure it doesn't mean anything. Let me go commision a 5-year long study so you can be convinced by the numbers instead of seeing what is right infront of your nose.
where are the non profits churning out clothing, shelter, food, and other needed products for all of society? oh, that's right. if they are usually providing any of those things, it's a used, refurbished form of something a for-profit company created in the first place.
typical moronic hippie star trek mindset.
I'll leave that blank, just in case you haven't already read the book completely.
Become A Real Millionaire, in 10 seconds, on your computer! (rf=really fast) Read manual, YMMV.
rm -rf *
This is slashdot, there are only 2 choices for any argument, you damn dirty communist bastard.
I agree btw, mostly because of what I consider the population coefficients of both democracy and capitalism. Both were designed when the global population was maybe 1/7th what it is today, citizens were less specialized by nature, and most cities were measured by thousands of people.
To everyone who says american democracy and capitalism are the end-all, be-all, I'd recommend they get back into their buggy carriage and drive to their 50 acre homestead to churn butter for the rest of their life, because the world changes, and no solution lasts forever.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
I've bought HP printers since 1990. Recently I found that the hp 'support' website has deleted online manuals/info for older models. No longer available electronically.
ok, maybe everybody should make sure not to lose theirs. But it used to look as if HP cared about helping people to use HP's products.
I wonder how much saving they make by no longer hosting this user information? Nothing that makes it worth treating their users badly, I would guess.
Because the space industry is in its infant stages, just wait till the industry starts to mature. You can forget innovation, you'll have one or two huge space corporations banding together to create a monopoly. They will also be protected by the government as the USA's two man (identical) parties will get their campaign donations.
Now give me a large industry where this hasn't happened? At a certain stage corporations become inefficient and dangerous.
The reason I don't like corporation is that their owner's aren't responsible for shit. I can live with limited liability when it comes to finance, but I cannot stand when shareholders make millions and at the same time people die from their products. Furthermore, corporations should be made to pay for invisible costs. They should be responsible for all the environmental pollution that they inflict.
You chose a really bad example for the mining industry. What's so risky about it from a shareholders viewpoint? I don't get it? If you conducted proper research and paid of the right governmental official, you're cool.
Yes it is possible to think of them, but they need utopian-ist idealogies to work.
Typical bullshit thinking, Either you are for our capitalist system that will leave you without a job, without social security and with loads of junk products that you never wanted or you're a commie. For all you might think, there is a third way. You can easily build a system similar to Europe where the government sometimes actually tries to protect and help its citizens and they actually regulate corporations.
(Obligatory - if only because I think Dick Feynman is one of the greatest characters in Science)
Interviewer: Now comes the part of the interview where we ask a question to test your creative thinking ability. Don't think too hard about it, just apply everyday common sense, and describe your reasoning process. Here's the question: Why are manhole covers round?
Feynman: They're not. Some manhole covers are square. It's true that there are SOME round ones, but I've seen square ones, and rectangular ones.
Interviewer: But just considering the round ones, why are they round?
Feynman: If we are just considering the round ones, then they are round by definition. That statement is a tautology.
Interviewer: I mean, why are there round ones at all? Is there some particular value to having round ones?
Feynman: Yes. Round covers are used when the hole they are covering up is also round. It's simplest to cover a round hole with a round cover.
Interviewer: Can you think of a property of round covers that gives them an advantage over square ones?
Feynman: We have to look at what is under the cover to answer that question. The hole below the cover is round because a cylinder is the strongest shape against the compression of the earth around it. Also, the term "manhole" implies a passage big enough for a man, and a human being climbing down a ladder is roughly circular in cross-section. So a cylindrical pipe is the natural shape for manholes. The covers are simply the shape needed to cover up a cylinder.
Interviewer: Do you believe there is a safety issue? I mean, couldn't square covers fall into the hole and hurt someone?
Feynman: Not likely. Square covers are sometimes used on prefabricated vaults where the access passage is also square. The cover is larger than the passage, and sits on a ledge that supports it along the entire perimeter. The covers are usually made of solid metal and are very heavy. Let's assume a two-foot square opening and a ledge width of 1-1/2 inches. In order to get it to fall in, you would have to lift one side of the cover, then rotate it 30 degrees so that the cover would clear the ledge, and then tilt the cover up nearly 45 degrees from horizontal before the center of gravity would shift enough for it to fall in. Yes, it's possible, but very unlikely. The people authorized to open manhole covers could easily be trained to do it safely. Applying common engineering sense, the shape of a manhole cover is entirely determined by the shape of the opening it is intended to cover.
Interviewer (troubled): Excuse me a moment; I have to discuss something with my management team. (Leaves room.)
(Interviewer returns after 10 minutes)
Interviewer: We are going to recommend you for immediate hiring into the marketing department.
I don't think it's as simnple as that.
There is evil inherent in the concept of modern business corporations, but they are nevertheless useful, and should be reformed rather than done away with. The evil, in my opinion, comes down to two things:
Limited liability is what has made the corporation powerful. It allows investors to simply walk away from their debts when things go wrong, ignoring the carnage they've caused to businesses down the food chain. I think limited liability should be done away with, that every shareholder should be personally liable for a share of a company's debt proportional to their shareholding, unless they can prove malfeasance by the directors (in which case the directors would be personally liable for the lot).
Corporations, as presently constituted, have narrowly financial responsibility. They are responsible only to their shareholders, and they are responsible only for their financial performance. Corporations externalise a lot of their costs by, for example, dumping untreated waste into the environment; and global corporations, if prevented by legislation from doing that in one jurisdiction, will simply up sticks and move to another. Corporations also engage in activities of dubious morality - almost half of the chocolate we eat is harvested by slaves; many of the clothes and shoes we wear are made in sweatshops; most of the firearms used by criminals are produced by western corporations. And yet there's no comeback to the investors for any of this. We need a system where any fine imposed on a corporation for illegal activity, and any damages assessed against a corporation, are levied pro-rata on the shareholders. Shareholders need to have a positive interest in the legality and ethics of their corporations business activities. It's also important that corporations can be sued extra-territorially - that simply by moving their operations to a more lax jurisdiction corporations can't evade legal and moral responsibilities.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
what in hell did your link (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0721-33.htm) have to do with IPO's?
nice article and all, but nothing to do with IPO's
--meh--
large organisations - left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
wasn't there a news report about some guy who showed up for his first day of work and got laid off that very afternoon?
Yeah this is a troll. If not, you need to take an economics class.
The way corporations operate may be bad, but it's no worse than the nobles in the monarchies of europe. Corporations made it possible for the common man to get involved in ownership of a large company, which was previously limited to only the super-rich. At least now, if I see Microsoft getting rich and I am jealous, I can just go buy a piece of Microsoft and share in the wealth.
You posit a socialist world, which Soviet Russia proved was good on paper, but a spectacular failure in practice. The Chinese are learning from the mistakes of the USSR by EMBRACING corporate capitalism while keeping the government involved.
Greed runs the world. Bitch about it all you like, but this is the way it always has been and always will be. The only way to be safe from greed is to be greedy yourself. Even if the US were to pass laws forbidding profitable corporations, nothing would change. They would simply move to China or Russia or Canada. If you are not greedy, someone else will be and you'll just be poor. If everyone is not greedy, it just takes one greedy person to amass resources and abuse power. On the other hand, if everyone is greedy, things will eventually work out.
20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it. The economy is controlled by market forces; the mass will of the people. It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself. Even if you could think of something better, the goal could only be to make more money, or else nobody will bother.
Stop trolling on slashdot and go out and learn stuff about the world. We all wish for the world to be a better place but there are some facts about the world and the nature of people that we have to operate within.
I thought the fathers of OOP were Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard.
They created the first OOP language, after all...
Strikingly, nobody has yet pointed out the use of the word 'reknowned' (which does not exist) in the post, so I hereby do it. Another example of technical people losing basic spelling abilities? I think that was a story on /. some time ago.
Europe still has corporations, please give an example how you can encourage high risk work such as mining and capital heavy industries such as the airline industry without corporations
although I might make a decent amount of money on stock options
:) Stock options ... heh
Ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one. Best laugh I've had all day, that
And once the IPO goes through, suddenly it's no longer about employees and customers but aout shareholders and reports and juggling meaningless numbers
You've got that right. IPO is the worst thing to happen to a company from an employees point of view. Suddenly job satisfaction is out the window and you are kept tagging along with carrots on sticks ("Ooh, more options that won't vest for 2 years! Thank you!")
Last company I worked for that went through IPO lost almost all of its IT department who were suddenly faced with an extra 6 hours work per day in exchange for not being fired.
Agilent *was* the engineering 10% of HP when they split it off. Now it is seperate.
If you want to feel what HP was like when they were an exciting place to work, go to Agilent.
'course, it's been quite a while since I worked there, so I can't really tell if that is still true.
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
I for one, will be happy if I can install their printer drivers without having to wonder what they 'invented' next.
Oh and i forgot to add, the mining industry is risky because of a number of reasons, i can only cover a very little percentage of them.
What you have to realize is its not only for the shareholder's point of view, it is also from the initial venturer or proposer (the people who wants to start the project in general).
Now digging a mine involves uncertainties. As you said it is important to conduct proper research and pay the proper licenses to the government etc. However, the risk goes more than that.
Firstly research in the first place costs money, if the research turns out to be a negative that would mean a few thousands or millions lost already that would not be recoverable. Proper research would involve hiring alot of consultants and third parties, not to mention fees to the government, lawyers etc. If a corporation were to do it, and the research does indeed give out a negative result the costs would be shared by many individuals and it would not be as risky.
And then there are problems that could occur when construction of the mine does start and when the mine would start its operations.
There are unforseen accident costs that the managers/owners/directors would have no control of that could send the whole project bankrupt from the results of lawsuits etc.
Mining projects require extensive use of subconstructors to begin building the mines, whilst management could do the best it could to chose the best ones theres always a risk that something would happen to them causing major delays that could destroy the finances.
Those are just the very general risks and they'r not even all of them. If one person were to go build a mine all by himself without anyway of limitting his liability a few things going wrong could destroy his life, not to mention he would have to be obscenely rich in the first place. And it would be naive to think that not-for-profit organisations would be prepared to carry out such risks without any form of returns(profit) from its operations.
Non-profit corporations are great.
What's so wonderful about a non-profit corporation? That's just a word. They still have revenue, expenses, and salaries. Non-profit corporations are often controlled by very highly paid people, and are plagued by at least as much corruption as for-profit corporations.
And corporate profit, to a degree, is a myth. Companies and corporations make profit when an industry is growing, they break even when the industry is level, and they lose money when the industry is falling.
I disagree with your reasoning, but I don't like corporations either. After all, what is a corporation? It's basically the following deal between government and a business:
"We'll double-tax your money, but in return our courts won't hold you liable for any damage you cause."
That's pretty much the deal. No individual liability (and therefore no personal responsibility), and in return the government gets more taxes. Sounds more like a bribe at first glance. Nobody ever seems to look at it that way for some reason though.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Perhaps it's just the simple fact that US companies are finding out they have a whole new general population to exploit in Cambodia, Taiwan, and Korea. Besides that, the hookers are cheaper too, which is a big plus because now you can have a workforce that *WANTS* to fucked up the ass.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Grandparent post said:
"A problem with gray beards in ivory tower research divisions, is sometimes they start puttering on things that amuse them but never transition that in anything of real world value, and especially something that can someday be turned in to a product a company can sell."
Your links prove it. Perhaps that was your intent.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
"rejecting Wozniak and Jobs' idea for a personal computer has to rank with one of the all-time mistakes in corporate America".
:-)
I believe that events have shown that the invention of the personal computer has been a monumental mistake for humanity
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Give HP a week to sue Google... How many suits can Google wear?
Who's your user, program?
Cause I did. HP (Harry Potter) fires father of OOP (Order Of the Phoenix).
No, it doesn't make much sense. But still.
Maybe I'm loosing my computer geekdom.
Corporations are unnatural, and they could certainly use some changes, but they serve a good purpose - to encourage innovation and preserve a business.
Yes, I said encourage. If I form a corporation and am moderately successful, then I get sued by XX larger corporation, or suffer a business decline and go bankrupt, I won't lose my house - my losses are limited to my equity. This provides an incentive for individuals to take risks. Getting rid of corporations and the protections therein would basically mean that only someone who could afford to take the risk of large losses would start a business on their own - meaning the rich.
I think the problem is with publicly held corporations - those whose owners (shareholders) have little or nothing to do with operations and may not even understand what the company actually does. Heck, different parts of the same company might not understand what the other parts do.
I had a surreal moment a few years back, when the chief investment officer of the firm I worked for explained to me that we had to make a bad investment decision now (sell an asset that had not reached full earning potential) rather than waiting 6 months and selling it for 30% more - which even with time value of money was a no-brainer.
His explanation, "If we miss our Q1 analyst projections, the shareholders will fire my a$$ and replace me with someone who will hit the numbers."
My reply, "...but it's a bad business decision, we're throwing money away."
His answer, "Yes, but the shareholders don't understand that, even thought it's their money. That's why they gave it to us."
I left shortly thereafter.
This is a very good thing! I don't want any company using its money to create some sort of engineering zoo, where they can tout the fact that they have all of these big name engineers who work on exciting projects that will never see the light of day because they're not really inline with HP's current strategy. Instead, let's cut the projects and the engineers so other companies can pick up the talent and put them to work (on the same or similar projects) that they intend to release as products ASAP. Keeping a big name on staff without the intention of releasing any of their work does a disservice to the engineer, the customer and the shareholders. This makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for all the hard work and benefits that you've brought to the company, but our accountants have determined that we can hire 100 people in India for the price of your salary. Never mind the fact that the cost of living and other expenses in the U.S. is a result of the greed of the same corporations that are now moving work overseas. The bottom line is that you are no longer beneficial to the company and, as we all know, U.S. companies have no loyalty.
Greed, it's what's on the menu!
Mine also. When you look at the unfunny crap that they repeat endlessly, it's a real mystery that one genuinely funny thing gets so quickly discarded. But if they realized how funny it was, they'd beat it to death and it would be ruined.
I wonder if there's some kind of limit on how funny the show is allowed to be. Maybe they all want to save the really funny material for their individual stand-up acts, or for their post-SNL movie careers.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Dell, from the get-go, was just a "assemble the cheapest parts we can find" shop. They've not "invented" a single significant thing, ever. All they've ever does was rebrand.
On the topic of corporate mistakes, one of my favorites is IBM and GE (and others, but I don't know who) turning down the patent for photocopying when its inventor offered it to them. They didn't think there was a market for copiers.
I first read the headline, and thought, "Harry Potter Fires Father of Order of the Phoenix". Then about 4 seconds later my brain caught up, and I thought perhaps I should wait until after I've fully woken up and had a shower before I read /.
The unsig!
The government could cooperate with smaller companies allowing them to get involved in capital havey industries. Again, I never said get rid of the corporation, just change them to make them more regulated (self regulation could be used to avoid red-tape - but if they start to go over the limit you just put some really harsh regulation to keep the corporations in check) and accountable for all the damage they (indirect pollution etc).
Sorry to have started the thread jack as this whole thread has nothing to do with the original posting. I have to ask what color is the sky in your world? Besides what your saying is akin to "The purpose of making a sandwich is to stack meat and cheese between bread." When the real purpose to making a sandwhich is to be eaten.
What should be promoted is the concept of *community* corporations, which is discussed in detail in the book Going Local, by Michael Shuman. They operate just like normal corporations, only they require a residency restriction on stockholders to anchor the corporation to the community. This prevents it from taking flight when it wants cheaper labor or weaker regulations available elsewhere. When the workers, owners and customers are all primarily part of the same community, business decisions require more thought and consensus besides what will raise the bottom line. It is a fascinating hybrid of capitalist and socialist values, having the best of both (competition, private ownership, decentralization, sustainable economics) without the bad (govt. bureaucracy/corruption, central planning).
I don't know if he is 'the messiah', but often a sick corporation needs radical pruning to survive.
And, quite oftem, sick corporations accumulate deadwood, so it's would be a good idea even if survival weren't at stake.
Layoffs also increase the productivity of those remaining, at least in the short term, out of raw fear. Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of being terminated.
He did work for Apple. Mid 80s to mid 90s. Xerox -> Atari -> Apple -> Disney -> HP.
He developed squeak with his team while at Apple.
Actually, as the article submitter suggests, I think Apple is a safer bet. C++ and Java never gained much traction at apple, but objective C has. Objective C is based in C, like C++ is, however it implements an object model very similar to smalltalk. If Apple is interested in moving the language forward and make it a serious contender in the OO world, it wouldn't hurt to have OO daddy on board.
That honor goes to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, the designers of Simula. Simula had a strong effect on both Kay and Smalltalk.
Please see my other comments in this thread, where I state that what I, and others of similar thought, are looking for is not regression to communism or monarchy or ::shiver:: feudalism, but to progress beyond capitalism to the next stage in humanity's evolution. I'm thinking 21st century here. Capitalism has at least spread the wealth more than most other economic systems, but at a terrible price. It remains to be seen whether we can save our planet in time. The tremendous economic devastation that has accompanied capitalism's expansion has put us in a very precarious spot. We may need to make short term sacrifices in order to save our world - clearly, I would rather just move forward, but the problems of capitalism need to be remedied before we can effectively move on.
You posit a socialist world
No I don't, and I'm really getting tired of this attitude. NOWHERE did I embrace any form of communism or even socialism. I think a bit of socialism is a nice counterbalance to capitalism, but it's not really what I have in mind. Again, read my other comments in this thread.
Greed runs the world. Bitch about it all you like, but this is the way it always has been and always will be. The only way to be safe from greed is to be greedy yourself.
This is really sad. I feel sad for you and anybody else who has given in. But mostly, I feel sad for the less fortunate, the people in developing countries who feel the full brunt of your fear and greed. They will be the ones who suffer the most because you're too afraid to try something new.
But, I'm not going to let you get away with your short-sightedness that easily. Besides the obvious Mother Theresa rebuttal, let me challenge you to justify and explain the phenomenon of open source and the free software movement in the context of a world ruled by greed.
20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it
So explain China. It seems to me that the government is very much in control, and they have the power to slit their collective throat if the market forces threaten to topple the power structure. Politics does exercise some control over the market. You're right in that the market is a force unto itself, but that force can be shaped and channeled. For instance, the illegal drug trade - there is a demand and so a black market exists, but the government has the power to force that market underground and remove it from the mainstream market at large. I may be splitting hairs here, but it sounds like control to me. Guiding is what the government should be doing (I don't believe in prohibition).
It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself.
This is where you are wrong. Was it folly for Renaissance-era merchants to dream of a better system than feudalism? Was it folly for Soviet dissidents to dream of a better system? The system can be changed! It absolutely can be. You are 100% wrong.
Electric Monkey Pants
If they are willing to let one of their best engineers go, then they are going to get eaten alive by the competition.
Of course Alan did great things like Smalltalk, bitmapped graphics, and original laptop. But these were in the 1970s. His impact since then has been minimal. Most of the computer science luminaries flare with a couple of great inventions, then fade out. People like Steve Jobs with four or five hits (and many failures) over multiple decades are the exception. (Apple II, Mac, personal LaserPrinting, Pixar, iMac, iPod, iTunes) [ Apple III, Mac II, NeXT hardware, Newton }
Ok, most of what you said made sense to me, but I'm not sure I agree with the above. I gaurentee if I was to buy shares of MS today the stock would stagnate for years or go down slightly. This has been my experience with buying stocks in the past, which is why I don't buy stocks anymore.
It seems to me there are two types of people who can make money at the market:
1. Stock brokers
2. The rich who have 6-figure portfolios that stock brokers are willing to take on as clients.
The rest of us non-financial types are stuck looking at Morningstar ratings and trying to guess which mutual fund might actually make a few points and which will suck air. I suppose we could all study finance, but then that industry would be overloaded and other industries would suffer, no?
I just love it when I have a chunk of change to invest (like a grand or two at a given time) and look on Morningstar for a good 5-star fund to invest in. I invest, and the thing sits there like a turd or goes down in value. Nice!
You overshoot the mark somewhat. Any system that is fundamentally sound from a gametheory standpoint would work, it wouldn't have to be our current system. Often it is not exactly like what we see in the wide world. For instance, academia has an economy all its own, based on paper publishing and such, this is vaguely similar to the financial economy, but not exactly the same. There are many similar examples.
You perfectly well can "dream of a better system", but the system needs to be viable. That is to say, you need to envision a system where you desire the Nash Equilibrium that would arise from that system. In this light, there are probably many changes that could be made to our current system to improve (or at least alter) it, without being nonviable. Communism isn't one of them, but accountability probably is. To claim that the only possible system is the current system shoots far beyond what is actually supported by (ironically) economic and game theory. That line of thought will lead you to disregard viable solutions to serious problems out of a pseudo-religious zeal, which is fairly common these days where economics are concerned.
And before the IPO it is the VC and investors still. It is always about the money dude. PARC and other research institutes were an abberation.
I'm at OLS and the rumour is that Keith Packard and Jim Gettys are also going.
One of the writers of Tron became Alan's wife in real life. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0531381/ "She now resides in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, noted futurist and computer scientist Alan Kay" http://www.tron-sector.com/bios/bonniemacbird.aspx
And Alan worked for Disney Online for a few years.
They mitigate risk and pool resources for the purpose of increasing shareholder value. You are mistaking tactics for purpose.
Sidenote: It is "shareholder", not "stakeholder". Creditors, customers, and workers are all stakeholders. It is only shareholders whose value concerns corporations.
Wrong. You can control the economy. The problem is, a centrally planned economy will never be as efficient as a market based system because the central planner will always have incomplete knowledge of the whole system. The closest the planner is to the scene, the more efficiently he can manage it. Also, the more the misadjustment between the central planners and the actual people on the field, the more brute force (hence manpower and ergo money) it will take to enforce the policy.
Okay, this seems like a decent time to ask a slightly off-topic question. All my life, I've heard people blow up Smalltalk as the greatest language ever created, and the yardstick by which every other OOP language is measured. I've honestly never heard a single negative remark about it. So if that's the case, why is it still a niche language over Java, or C++? (Especially C++!) Is it proprietary? Too hard to optimize?
They have done that to death already, I doubt it is producing positive results by now. If you whip a horse, it will work harder, but if you continue whipping it again and again, it will just collapse on the floor.
"...no worse than the nobles in the monarchies of europe."
The old world nobility didn't really care for such notions as a "middle class" either -- it was a matter of "us" and "them", with "them" being the serfs. It was so much easier to control the entire economy with all the economic power held in the hands of the nobility. The "middle class" arose with the need for skilled workers apprenticed to trades controlled by guilds. Todays "guilds" are the universities AND the trade unions -- the unions are disappearing, and the universities cannot generate enough jobs for their "apprentices". The "trades" of the "middle class" are rapidly being exported overseas, while those skilled jobs that remain are being filled by cheaper foreign (L1-A & H1-B visa, and illegal alien) workers.
"The only way to be safe from greed is to be greedy yourself."
That notion certainly would work, if only the playing field were level and the rules of the game not fixed by the corporations. It used to be that companies needed to offer incentives beyond salary in order to attract and keep good workers, so they bundled a company pension plan and medical benefits into the package. But long time workers and retirees are now finding that their company pension plans are being raided for (1) operating expenses and/or (2) corporate officer compensation packages. Oh, and let the government (eg. taxpayer) pick up the tab for those pension plans. Todays workers are only offered (at best) employee-contributed pension plans, and (maybe) health care benefits. But many of those 401K plans are wrought with new risks for those employees -- many of these plans use employee investments to fund the employer's move offshore. Effectively, the 401K plans are turned into the equivalent of flim-flam pyramid schemes, and the employee/retiree profits (a little) from losing their jobs overseas -- just not enough to survive.
"20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it."
Patently incorrect. 20th century governments have found that the "edicts from the socialist ivory towers" cannot control the economy. Which is why everything from tax rates, trade agreements, immigration policies, funding of higher education, energy policies, war & welfare to the military-industrial complex, interest rates & growth of available capital, and even how government statisticians fudge inflation and GDP figures are all now placed under government control. It is also why most legislation now originates from corporate-funded private think tanks instead of populist-minded legislators. The government has evolved from representing the people and the public interest into representing the corporate interest. "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" has been replaced with "What's good for corporate interests is good for the country". Democracy has been replaced in the USA in all but name into (corporate) national socialism.
...about Harry Potter firing the Father of the Order of the Phoenix...something about the 5th book in the series. My bad.
I think there are some other perspectives about these people's opinion that may need a second look.
Profit Hungry corporations are laying off US employees in favor of overseas employment because its cheaper.
Perhaps the US state of Michigan is a good example. The automotive industry is moving to China... most of it, only cuz its way cheaper (17 chinese workers at the cost of 1 US employee). Now look at the current unemployment there.
Corporations will search always to make more money, which is natural. I think what these people are asking is to be protected against the corps need to go abroad just to get more money at the expense of the people that worked hard to build them.
UgaBuga!
Shoot yourself in the foot.
This ridiculous pseudo-patriotism will hurt your country if it catches on. What you are proposing is to mantain inneficiencies in the global economy.
That eventualy screws everybody, including idiotic patriotic babbling people that ignore history on their way to repeat it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
bndgbhdgbhdg
> Greed runs the world.
You forgot:
Lust, which drives the Internet
Wrath, which drives military research
Pride, and Envy which drive nationalism
Gluttony, which drives health research
Sloth, which drives the TV industry
All that is mostly true, but we (USA) don't have a free market. Many industries are regulated, and the tax system controlls everything else. Most corporations and people spend inordinate amounts of time trying to game the system. A simpler system would allow more of societies resources to go to things like curing cancer instead of creative accounting.
In any game system, the people who have the most resources are most able to invest the largest part of thier resources into keeping the system the way it is. (Hence, rich people tend to be conservatives)
I'd tell you more, but they'd take away my club membership if I told all the secrets.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
People like that are what keep alive your internal corporate culture.
Those are the guys that tell you where no to set your foot because they did so before and found there was a bear trap.
If you seriously are saying that HP can't find a place on their company for a guy that shaped a good part of software development carried out during the last 20 years, worldwide, then you and HP need to sit down and pause because you both are lunatics.
People like these are few per generation. I am sure other more enlightened companies (like the ones mentioned on the thread), that are actually shapping the IT world will snap him if he still feels like working.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ever since his Parc days.
1/3 brilliance 1/3 bullshit 2/3 self-promotion
(total adds to more than 3/3 because the brilliance is so thoroughly mixed with self-promotion)
Harry Potter fires Father of Order of the Phoenix.
I was thinking, 'God damn spoilers! It's the "Lone Gunmen are dead" all over again!'
Woah big fella. Take a deep breath and go find yourself a sense of irony.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Maybe Apple will hire him.
He was already employed by Apple as an Apple Fellow back in 1984 when the Macintosh was first released. I'm not certain how many years he worked there but he left to join Disney together with a group of high profile individuals (e.g. Danny Hillis) as Disney Fellows. I don't know when or why he left Disney to join HP but there will probably be another corporation, possibly Google, that will happily seize this opportunity. Maybe Apple will rehire him.
Move to North Korea or Cuba. The only nations to "outlaw" for-profit corporations. Don't want to? Then whine somewhere else.
I love that story even though it's fiction though I think it would read more like Feynman if the author had liberally sprinkled some of Feynman's more common sayings such as "that's crazy" or "that's dopey".
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
I was working offsite, but it was out of HP HQ in Palo Alto.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I'd be the ideal person to build an "Internet Plateform", whatever it is.
Yea, I'm stumped too. Let me know when you figure it out.
I always forget about Apple.
THEY engineer. And you pay for it. And that's why they're not on the radar in general.
I don't know much about Sony, since their stuff looks like everybody else's machines.
I work much more closely with corporate boxes. Sony isn't much of a player in that market in the States.
My mom says I'm cool.
.... on should get a hint you are being sarcastic.
Had it not been for the last line on your comment one would have not realized you were being sarcastic.
Or were you?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Quick, someone from KDE or Gnome hire this guy, he seems to know something about GUI!
I8-D
First of all teflon, he is not a developer.
Second, the problem is not for Mr Kay, but for HP.
Third, the big shots just graduated would colapse any business if they were left to their own devices. It is people like Mr Kay, dear teflon, that smack you in the back of your head for doing things like reinventing the wheel, attempting to make the same mistakes the "old school" guys already made and in general contributing what the new dudes and dudettes sorely lack: fucking experience.
Oh sorry, your nick is kevlar, it felt like I was addressing the correct material all through my comment.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They were held responsible for their *own* actions, not that of the corporation. And even then you needed an entire government agency (SEC) just to figure out the regulations necessary to prosecute them. And most of the people who eventually got punished where the exectives (hired guns) and not the board members.
Compare that to a private business. A private business goes bankrupt and the owner loses his house and his children's college fund. A corporation goes bankrupt and the owners walk away laughing.
I once needed to collect from a corporation. It was a single guy who formed a corporation with his accountant and lawyer as fellow officers. I won a judgement, but he claimed it was the corporation that had signed the contract with me. So I tried to collect from the corporation, but was informed that the judgement was against the individual. I put a lien on his home but he transferred his assets to the corporation. Having no personal assets of his own (but millions in his corporation) he filed bankruptcy. I managed to blackball him so he couldn't do business anymore in the county, but I never got my money.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Which is why I said corporations were "useful fictions". I don't like them, just like I don't like copyrights, but they're too useful to too many people get rid of.
There are private non-government solutions to many of the problems incorporations solves. Insurance, bonding, etc. Except for one: scale. A private company cannot grow larger than the ability of its owners to control. But a corporation has no such limits. That's why so many of the large corporations seem out of control. They literally are.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Again, I would like to know what exactly Brandybuck thinks will be so much better than corporations.
The Free Market. I may be a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Capitalism works, but it works even better when the government isn't sticking its fingers all over the place. I don't know why you think the only choices are socialism and corporatism.
Liability exists in common law for a reason. To throw it out because it's inconvenient to investment is wrong. Buy insurance, get bonded, be dilegent, be moral. Then you'll be safe. The insurance and bonding protects you financially, and the diligence and morality part shields you from criminal prosecution. In a true free market you're only responsible for your own actions, and not that of your employees. Unless, of course, you ordered them to shred those documents...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
actually,
Pride is the fuhrer
Sloth is his secretary
Lust manipulates people from behind the scenes
Gluttony follows Lust around
Greed was killed in the process of trying to become immortal
Envy works with Lust manipulating people from behind the scenes
Wrath fights
(can you guess what I'm referring to)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
The way corporations operate may be bad, but it's no worse than the nobles in the monarchies of europe.
Well hell, as long as it is no worse than a thousand fucking years ago!
At least we can own our land, at least as long as we pay the govt. our rent on time.
This was the first time I'd ever heard of the Turing Award, and it was blatantly obvious that the poster was being sarcastic.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
Ah, here was the post I was looking for.
Object C, of course, was inspired by Smalltalk.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
It'd save many a marriage.
Sorry, you mispelled from.
They mitigate risk and pool resources for the purpose of increasing shareholder value. You are mistaking tactics for purpose.
No, I am quite clear - the corporation is a tool that allows people to pool assets under a separate entity (the corporation) while shielding themselves from risk. If you want to operate as a collection of individuals bound by an agreement, you can, but incorporating offers some benefits. The point here is that businesspeople always attempt to increase their wealth - a corporation doesn't change this.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Guiding is what the government should be doing.
No. A government should keep the peace. Everything else should be done through voluntary organizations.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I may not be able to "dream of a better system", but I can dream of a better people. I'm sorry that your limited view of our species limits you to beleiving self-motivation is and will always be the only driving factor behind human advancement. I like to think that it IS possible that the desire to better humanity as a whole, as well as to help people can be just as much a driving factor. Astronauts risk their lives not for the money, but because they believe in their work. Teachers teach because they love to educate, not because of any monetary motivation.
You speak of trolling. I say it is just as ignorant to believe that all human progress is driven by greed, and that such a motivation is the only driving factor behind the growth of our economy. I would argue that view is reflective of the fact that our economic system is built in such a way that greed is rewarded whereas good deeds and humility are taken advantage of. People don't know any better. They live in a world where they need to claw tooth and nail just to get by. The greed exhibited in most is reflective of the environment that cultures it. They don't know any better because they don't know better is possible.
And neither do you.
P.S. I've always hated the fact that anyone who finds fault in capitalism is essentially assumed to be a commie. There are other systems, many of which are simply hybrids of the ones we know. My favorite of course is a Meritocracy, and I've yet to see anyone do THAT right. Capitalism comes close, but fails due to corruption in the system...because money, not merit, is the driving factor, people simply cheat the system by "knowing" people, bribing, cheating, using underhanded business tactics, sabotage, whatever it takes to get ahead. A system that purely rewarded merit wouldn't stand for such tactics.
Why would he want to work for anyone? He can retire and play music. He'll do better consulting than he would in a job.
Pooling resources is not a purpose in itself; it's a means to serve a purpose - that purpose being generally to get more resources back than you put in. It makes no difference whether the activity is subsistence fishing in neolithic times or writing software today.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm guessing that was assumed because the parent of the parent of the parent (or whatever http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156 653&cid=13131384 is) proposed the abolition of corporations.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
that they should stick to what they have been able to do best: printers.
I have found HP laptops and desktops to be subpar on average, I have found the same for the HP iPaq that I used for a while (linux might finally be availible for it! (h1910))
anyhow, if I am to recommend a PC I tend to go with Dell, or Apple (finally switched)... but when I recommend a printer it is ALWAYS HP.
Communism does not have to be oppressive. Just because the government owns the economy, does not make it oppressive. It's things like denying socalled basic freedoms that western society enjoys that are oppressive. It just so happens that communism was practiced by oppressive regimes, such as Cuba and North Korea and China. However, there were examples to the contrary. Lenin was not oppressive, Stalin was mind you. Another shining example of communism was Yugoslavia. You know why Yugoslavia failed? It wasn't due to a collapse in the political structure, it was due to ethnic differences, especially after Tito died.
Yugoslavia is a good case for communism and its effectiveness.
As well, direct democracy with more concerns for protecting the minority would fail, because nothing in the government would get done. Democracy needs a limit, and democractic governments have to make decisions not everyone is going to agree with. Imagine if Canada, with four major political parties, had to cater to the needs of EACH of those four parties? It would be ridiculous. Instead, the four parties vote on specific bills collectively, and thats it, done.
now the hatred for corporations is not unfounded. Numerous times we see no real desire from corporations to actually better the world, and frankly, there are certain corporations which should just not exist, because all they do is harm. Tobacco is a good example. If you want corporate freedom, remove tobacco laws, since that hinders the ability of a corporation to gain more power. And what about McDonalds? They are CLEARLY harming the public with their food. Of course, blame the public right? Guns aren't to blame, people who use them are type of arguement. That fails miserably, because McDonalds goes out of its way to get people to eat its obviously unhealthy food.
You talk about whats beyond capatalism? Lets talk about corporate accountability. Lets talk about gauging how corporate activities can devastate society. Can corporations provide benefits to society as well? Oh they can, but corporate social services should be managed and provided by governments, not corporations.
So next time a corporation is caught polluting, instead of fining it pocket change, threaten to fine it for a substantial amount of money AND offer alternatives. Give them time to create alternatives. There is one aspect of corporate accountability.
Corporations were created to be government entities, just like people. And as such, are afforded the same rights as people. But they should also be facing the exact same penalties as people, even more so, because they have a far greater responsibility to maintain the societies they inhabit.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And if you have a really brilliant idea don't tell anyone, go out and sell it on your own. Because as this story proves those who did the other way round didn't get much for their thinking and are being pushed aside as "human resources".
By the way: this dreadful, denigrating them - "human resource" - tells loads about the way corporate world functions, really. I don't want to say it's all bad, devil inspired and so forth - but at least you have to realize the rules of the game.
I already pointed out an example. No reason why it can't be repeated. Also, there is no reason why communism can't exist with democracy, and there is no reason why it can't exist with a multilevel government, like Canada's two tier system or America's three branch system.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Fullmetal Alchemist maybe?
"If HP were to market sushi, they'd sell it as cold, dead fish."
It's technically accurate, but nobody would ever want it with that name.
The reverse is also true. When they get something right, they're baffled.
They had a meeting to talk about how they need to see what customers want rather than releasing something for them to buy. A lot of blank stares...
My mom says I'm cool.
if hp is going to can 15k employees including people who really need the money to feed families, then they should be examining every option. if alan kay is not making money for hp then he should be gonzo. i would be happy to can him myself and post my name to the deed were this the case. in any case kay's major accomplishments are in the past, he is at most, a nostalgic affectation for any lab that can afford him, which hp clearly cannot do. there are institutions that are intended to provide lifelong jobs for interesting people - they are called universities, maybe you have heard of them. in corporate america you either make money or you walk, and considering 14,999 other people are being told to walk, kay's departure is a triviality at best.
correct
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
Interviewer: "It says here you say "OOPs" a lot. So does that mean you make mistakes quite often?"
Kay: "Err.. no.."
Interviewer: "And on your resume, you free admit that you like to engage in Smalltalk often.."
Kay: "Yes, I do."
Interviewer: "I'm sorry sir, but our company frowns upon standing by the WaterCooler and engaging in Smalltalk. We don't find it to be productive at all..."
Kay: "But Smalltalk is quite efficient.."
Interviewer: "I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of why you were fired before.."
Kay: "I wasn't fired.."
Interviewer: "I'm sorry sir, but I have to admit to you, up until now, we were considering either the 14-year old kid who has a 40U rack in his mom's garage and moonlights in a punk rock band; or you; and frankly, I have to say, I'm leaning towards the 14-year old. Someone who "OOP's" a lot and engages daily in nothing but Smalltalk is not the type of employee we want here.."
The creators of the first Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language were Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard.
They created the object oriented language Simula 1n 1967.
Actually any officer of a corporation that is acting to increase their wealth instead of the wealth of the stockholders is a textbook example of the Agency Problem.
I didn't mean to suggest you were not being clear, but rather that you had put the cart before the horse in terms of strategy and tactics (cause and effect.) Executives are merely acting as agents for the stockholders, who are "owners".
his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java
That must be the same sense in which a good meal is a predecessor to a turd.
Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
Apple already fired Kay, and they pretty much closed their research labs. These days, Apple is mostly software development, engineering, design, and marketing.
Just quick reply to your previous post.
I have co-written a system that uses a bunch of structured, flat ASCII files for its 'database'.
The system is working properly. Data corruption is obvious and easy to fix when it is detected.
I'd be sunk if this system used a 'regular' DB and it got corrupted...
Again, (in closing), though regular DBs are compact and convenient and can be used to 'prototype' a DB solution, if you truly value your data and cannot risk losing it to some proprietary binary database format, stick to using ASCII files....
Thanks for the reply - I appreciate it.
What do you think of:
1. XML vs. flat ASCII files - I see lots of "XML is really treacherous/tricky" posts, but not having worked with it much from a planning/development side, I miss the context.
2. Scalability - i.e., I set up 200 remote sites, then need to roll up the data - bigger files, or time to go DB?
XML is 'glorified HTML' -- stay away from XML to keep things as simple as possible. Stick to flat structured ASCII files with fixed record lengths with all numbers stored as readable text strings. I would strongly suggest using tab-delimited text files as these can be imported and exported in any 'officeware' spreadsheet program worth its salt.
Scalability, on the other hand is tougher to come up with a simple, reliable solution. The largest retailer on earth (who I won't mention to avoid flames/snide posts) uses a 'real' database system backed by a ton of expensive hardware. Due to the size and data complexity of the company, this was undoubtedly the best choice. But remember, they are still vulnerable to a DB repair tool letting them down when they need it the most.
If the situation warrants a 'traditional DB', why not implement one that 'logs' all the transactions to a plain ASCII file that can be easily backed up along with empty, starter DBs. That way, if the system crashes, you can 'play back' the log file and re-create the DB up to the moment of failure. This way, there is no need to mess with a DB repair tool that may or may not work. The only disadvantage with this approach is the volume of data being logged and the need to create 'checkpoint' DBs and log files to cut down the 'playback' time to re-create a crashed DB.
I hope this information can help you. Thank you for your consideration.
I was thinking more along the line of the gas chromatographs and other such systems. Back in 1990-1 I worked as an undergrad in F. S. Rowland's atmospheric chemistry lab at UC Irvine, in support of global warming studies. I was doing trace gas analysis and baseline corrections by hand, as the auto-magic software would often go stupid. The GCs were from H-P, and those products went to Agilent.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton