This is proof of the adage that it's better to have a horrible ending than horrors without end.
Laying off about 15% of the workforce is never a good sign, and asking that they be kept anonymous (did they ask the employees to sign non-disclosure agreements about their employment status? I hope they'll be able to get unemployment if they did!) would be funny if it didn't seem so pathetic.
... I can see some of his complaints. His main gripe is that there is seriously bad software out there that is trying to keep people from seeing how bad it is with a variety of defenses like "copyright," "trade secret," and whatnot.
However, I would suggest that "badness" (horrible grammar, but the idea comes through) is in the eye of the beholder. I worked for one company that had licensed its source code to a customer, with the idea that they could make changes to "fix bugs." The customer proceeded to take the entire source code and write their own program, claiming that a "bug" is where a system doesn't do what the user wants it to do ("Minesweeper won't let me open Word documents! That's yet another bug in the program!") and convinced a judge that our software was so "bad" that they were justified in using our code to develop their system and to write utilities that let them migrate the data from our system to their new one.
Yes, the examples listed in the article were pretty egregious (and the Diebold debacle has convinced me to use absentee ballots instead of the machines our county has picked up), and the article is an opinion piece rather than a legal decision, but the point remains that "trade secret" protection shouldn't be thrown out because some use it to prevent embarrassment, because of the many worthy companies that it does help.
I was going to moderate this, but like others, I felt it was a better idea to speak my mind (such as it is).
The first company I worked for had developed the code in a proprietary fashion because, at the time, the owner of the company was afraid that one or more of our clients would take our code and proceed to reverse-engineer it. One of them actually went and hired one of our developers away from us, and during his two weeks notice (he hadn't bothered to mention that he was going to work for said client) he proceeded to take all of our source code and copy it to removable media (5-1/4" floppies, at the time).
Now, the client knew it was proprietary, and so did the programmer, and the courts did do a pretty decent job of whacking their collective pee-pee for doing it, but the owner decided that the only protection after that was to call it a trade secret.
On the other hand, how else could we have protected what we had spent years developing? My company had a serious interest in making sure that nobody took our work and proceeded to peddle it to whomever had the wherewithal to use it, and had it not, we'd have risked being out of business in nothing flat.
There are times when the lesser of two evils applies. A utilitarian framework would make this explicit, but there are times when rather than numerical comparison of numbers who are "happy" or whatever, a higher principle comes into play.
Heavens to Betsy, I thought I was one of the few who recognized the term "utilitarian" in a discussion of ethics!
I think you raised an interesting point. I think that Apple can claim that they're not breaking the DMCA, but it's not going to play well to a jury.
However, before it goes to a jury, someone's iPhone is going to have to get bricked first.
Meanwhile, I'm sure as anything not going to be getting an iPhone anytime soon....
Reminds me... a friend of mine always wondered why I was laughing when he told me he wanted to hook his computer up to a TV. I told him that they generally don't have a SVGA-compatible video jack, and that they also have a tendency to get up and walk around.
... I feel a bit safer. I don't know of many teens who aren't already technically inclined who are willing to spend 30 minutes straight trying to do anything computer-related. They usually get distracted pretty easily... oh, please excuse me, I have an IM from one of my friends. I wonder what they're up to...?
First off, let me add that I hold that the theory of evolution to be true so far.
Now, I disagree with your method of proof. To say "The finest minds agree" is a case of using the bandwagon fallacy and the appeal to authority. The bandwagon fallacy goes roughly like this:
Many people believe X.
A large amount of people cannot be wrong.
Therefore, X is true.
The appeal to authority takes a similar approach:
Experts believe X.
Experts cannot be wrong.
Therefore, X is true.
I suggest that, rather than trying these methods that have worked for advertising, we use a different method, one of inductive reasoning. We point out that, using ideas derived from the theory of evolution, we have discovered things to be true. Here are some of them...fill in the blanks with various discoveries, such as gene therapy and DNA identification, and we can show that we've been able to identify true things with these concepts. We can then show how the ideas are derived from evolutionary theory, and then, rather than say "Evolution is a fact," we say, "Evolution seems to fit the facts we've discovered."
This is similar to what was done with the heliocentric solar system view. Kepler said that, using this concept, he was able to predict the locations of various objects in the sky, and as a result, the heliocentric theory is stronger (though not necessarily proven true yet).
Rather than trying to say "Creationism is stupid, Evolution works, and anyone who says differently is a nincompoop," we should be saying "Evolution has worked well so far, and we've been able to apply it to other discoveries, so it does seem to explain a lot more than Creationism has explained so far."
Maybe their phones were disconnected for non-payment?
No, the problem was that they're in the process of moving.
Perhaps they're setting up shop in Lagos, Nigeria, so they can pay their creditors with $20,000,000 cashier's checks and ask them to send the change back to their post-office box.
On a side note - I'm willing to bet that if someone had asked most street cops in that area - they wouldn't have needed software or data mining tools to tell you that cash checking places in bad parts of town, on pay days were areas of higher crime.
But with software and/or data mining tools, they can back up their observations with information that's a little more quantifiable and probably more objective than anecdotal evidence.
I hate to say it, but you're probably right (my handle notwithstanding).
Most of the non-Slashdot crowd don't swap out motherboards - they buy ready-made systems that already have SATA-compliant motherboards, and will use CD-NET to swap their TaxCut files/Quicken files/MP3's/pron collections from their old machine to the new one, and then put the old machine as garage-sale fodder.
It strikes me as rather wasteful... but I don't see much alternative.
And my point is not Clinton versus Bush, it is to note that technological capabilities really bloomed for the Government under Clinton and have only increased.
Now, that I'll agree with. If it were already a totalitarian state, discussions like this would be taking place via PGP encryption on private out-of-country host machines.
And I also agree that this isn't a Republican-vs.-Democrat issue. However, these two parties have the most to gain by using the latest technological advances to ensure that the U.S. remains a two-party political system.
Historically, when a third party (such as Temperance, Reform, Bull Moose, what have you) shows itself to resonate with the voters, that's when one of the two parties usually starts to embrace the concept espoused by that third party, although not as whole-heartedly.
The problem at this point is that the public is too evenly divided for one party to take a (pardon the expression) radical idea in such a way as to ensure that the voters agree enough to put it into power. And meanwhile, the established party members find that it's easier to apply these newly available tools than to take risks.
You know they say "You do not know what you have till it is gone".
That's oh, so true. Some of the things I miss having are:
The ability to believe that you can talk to someone without being listened in on
The idea that your web surfing history is safe from surveillance
the belief that there is not a governmental department whose job is to compile a complete history of my travel habits
Now, I don't believe that we are at the point of being a police state. I agree that we are far from being at the point where someone who makes a suitably-public remark that is governmentally-insensitive will find themselves in a attitudinal-modification facility.
But can you honestly say that we aren't closer to that than we used to be?
...sometimes they run into the issue that crops up with many clubs - keeping new people engaged.
I speak from bitter experience. When I first encountered our local LUG, they were willing and able to help me get Mandrake loaded on an old laptop machine... and one of them was willing to let me -- some nobody that they'd just met that night -- take home a PCMCIA-connected portable CD-ROM drive, because once things were finally set up, it was closing time at the library.
Unfortunately, my schedule was such that I was unable to stay active with this group.
A few years later, I went back to one of the group meetings. There I discovered that, although most of the same people were there, all of them were involved in running the call-in net-radio show (ironically enough, it was designed to help new people use Linux). There was nobody there to help any newbies, nobody there to find out if there were new people... the latest shiny toy was the net-radio broadcast.
After about half an hour, when I found that there were, indeed, other new members who were also seeking help, and not getting any, we pretty much decided it was time to leave. I haven't been back since.
User groups, as long as the members don't lose sight of their purpose, can be invaluable. When they turn into the equivalent of a stereotypical fraternity, then they run the risk of running off potential new users.
When Windows 95 came out, lots of companies and individual users were leery of switching over from their working-just-fine Windows 3.11 systems. I remembered seeing a demo of Windows 95, and someone was asking whether they could disable the animated graphic display that played during the file copy process.
Microsoft has a long history of, well, "stubbornness" isn't too harsh a term. NT 3.1, Bob, and ME were all products that didn't make the grade as far as most people were concerned. However, they kept marketing them while they worked on replacement technology and/or service packs. Thus, we got NT 3.5, Windows 98 SE, and Windows XP, which all simply ran into the "new product" glitches and bitches.
I honestly think that Microsoft will just keep on marketing Vista until they get at least one service pack, and possibly two. At that point, they'll either have shaken out most of the bugs that people are complaining about, or will come up with a different package, a different name, a different UI, and call it a "brand new" product.
Is Microsoft hurting? Perhaps, but I don't believe they've been sending out large numbers of pink slips to their employees. Are people looking at alternatives? Yes, but many of them are either going to sit tight and hope that XP will last long enough until either Vista SP 2, because they have too much of an investment in existing technology to feel comfortable (rightly or wrongly) with anything else.
Bear in mind that the symptoms listed in the article are almost certainly NOT an exhaustive list. These are only some of the indications that a physician might use to test for the "weakened X" disorder. A complete list, however, would only end up boring most of the people who read the article, so I'm willing to forgive some incompleteness in a popular general news presentation.
And yes, society has jumped quickly onto bandwagons, as you've properly pointed out, and I agree that there is at least one instance where a child was medicated to become more socially convenient, rather than using more conventional treatments like therapy. But until doctors start using articles in the popular media as a source for definitive indicators of illness / dysfunction / what have you, I'm not going to let it ruin my sleep yet.
My brother has two sons, one very mildly autistic, one not so mildly. I have not sent him a link for this article for two reasons: (1) he and his wife probably have all kinds of well-meaning friends who have e-mailed this link, and (2) hope is painful, and the limited amount of hope that this offers is comes nowhere near the pain that would ensue.
The studies right now are only showing results for a particular kind of autism. This does not cover all of the different types that exist. This is like someone coming up with a "silver bullet" for bone cancer, that might not help people with lung cancer. It's a promising sign, and I hope to $DEITY that it works in humans, but it doesn't yet cover the rest of the types of autism that afflict us.
Meanwhile, since the treatments are not yet ready, the boys still need to get the therapies that they are already getting. My older nephew doesn't really show much sign of autism, and my younger one is starting to make breakthroughs on communicating with people. But until this shows more than promise, all that my brother and sister-in-law can do is keep on keeping on, and may the gods look on them kindly.
Slashdot Mirror
This is proof of the adage that it's better to have a horrible ending than horrors without end.
Laying off about 15% of the workforce is never a good sign, and asking that they be kept anonymous (did they ask the employees to sign non-disclosure agreements about their employment status? I hope they'll be able to get unemployment if they did!) would be funny if it didn't seem so pathetic.
"This... is... Slashdot!"
Stop it, you're quilling me!
... I can see some of his complaints. His main gripe is that there is seriously bad software out there that is trying to keep people from seeing how bad it is with a variety of defenses like "copyright," "trade secret," and whatnot.
However, I would suggest that "badness" (horrible grammar, but the idea comes through) is in the eye of the beholder. I worked for one company that had licensed its source code to a customer, with the idea that they could make changes to "fix bugs." The customer proceeded to take the entire source code and write their own program, claiming that a "bug" is where a system doesn't do what the user wants it to do ("Minesweeper won't let me open Word documents! That's yet another bug in the program!") and convinced a judge that our software was so "bad" that they were justified in using our code to develop their system and to write utilities that let them migrate the data from our system to their new one.
Yes, the examples listed in the article were pretty egregious (and the Diebold debacle has convinced me to use absentee ballots instead of the machines our county has picked up), and the article is an opinion piece rather than a legal decision, but the point remains that "trade secret" protection shouldn't be thrown out because some use it to prevent embarrassment, because of the many worthy companies that it does help.
I was going to moderate this, but like others, I felt it was a better idea to speak my mind (such as it is).
The first company I worked for had developed the code in a proprietary fashion because, at the time, the owner of the company was afraid that one or more of our clients would take our code and proceed to reverse-engineer it. One of them actually went and hired one of our developers away from us, and during his two weeks notice (he hadn't bothered to mention that he was going to work for said client) he proceeded to take all of our source code and copy it to removable media (5-1/4" floppies, at the time).
Now, the client knew it was proprietary, and so did the programmer, and the courts did do a pretty decent job of whacking their collective pee-pee for doing it, but the owner decided that the only protection after that was to call it a trade secret.
On the other hand, how else could we have protected what we had spent years developing? My company had a serious interest in making sure that nobody took our work and proceeded to peddle it to whomever had the wherewithal to use it, and had it not, we'd have risked being out of business in nothing flat.
Heavens to Betsy, I thought I was one of the few who recognized the term "utilitarian" in a discussion of ethics!
I think you raised an interesting point. I think that Apple can claim that they're not breaking the DMCA, but it's not going to play well to a jury.
However, before it goes to a jury, someone's iPhone is going to have to get bricked first.
Meanwhile, I'm sure as anything not going to be getting an iPhone anytime soon....
Perhaps we're jumping the gun here.
Daniel Lyons thought that SCO had a case at first... or at least had enough nuisance potential that someone would eventually blink and pay them off.
So he thought wrong. So did the people who thought the CueCat would be a tool found on every household computer.
As far as I see it, he's taken his lumps, and he's ready to go on with life.
Works for me... so am I.
Reminds me... a friend of mine always wondered why I was laughing when he told me he wanted to hook his computer up to a TV. I told him that they generally don't have a SVGA-compatible video jack, and that they also have a tendency to get up and walk around.
"It is not heresy, and I will not recant!" -- from To the Devil a Daughter, said by Christopher Lee
Well, everyone knows that a bun is the lowest form of wheat!
What the heel did you expect?
I'm reminded of an advertisement that was put in a Cyberpunk supplement:
"The Happy Valley Euthanasia Center - because nobody likes to see their parents suffering."
... I feel a bit safer. I don't know of many teens who aren't already technically inclined who are willing to spend 30 minutes straight trying to do anything computer-related. They usually get distracted pretty easily... oh, please excuse me, I have an IM from one of my friends. I wonder what they're up to...?
There's nothing in the Bible that says anything about absolutism... so you must be mistaken.
<IRONY=0%>
Oh, don't tell me I forgot my opening tag of <IRONY=100%> again. I hate it when I do that!
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
Now, I disagree with your method of proof. To say "The finest minds agree" is a case of using the bandwagon fallacy and the appeal to authority. The bandwagon fallacy goes roughly like this:
The appeal to authority takes a similar approach:
I suggest that, rather than trying these methods that have worked for advertising, we use a different method, one of inductive reasoning. We point out that, using ideas derived from the theory of evolution, we have discovered things to be true. Here are some of them...fill in the blanks with various discoveries, such as gene therapy and DNA identification, and we can show that we've been able to identify true things with these concepts. We can then show how the ideas are derived from evolutionary theory, and then, rather than say "Evolution is a fact," we say, "Evolution seems to fit the facts we've discovered."
This is similar to what was done with the heliocentric solar system view. Kepler said that, using this concept, he was able to predict the locations of various objects in the sky, and as a result, the heliocentric theory is stronger (though not necessarily proven true yet).
Rather than trying to say "Creationism is stupid, Evolution works, and anyone who says differently is a nincompoop," we should be saying "Evolution has worked well so far, and we've been able to apply it to other discoveries, so it does seem to explain a lot more than Creationism has explained so far."
No, the problem was that they're in the process of moving.
Perhaps they're setting up shop in Lagos, Nigeria, so they can pay their creditors with $20,000,000 cashier's checks and ask them to send the change back to their post-office box.
But with software and/or data mining tools, they can back up their observations with information that's a little more quantifiable and probably more objective than anecdotal evidence.
I hate to say it, but you're probably right (my handle notwithstanding).
Most of the non-Slashdot crowd don't swap out motherboards - they buy ready-made systems that already have SATA-compliant motherboards, and will use CD-NET to swap their TaxCut files/Quicken files/MP3's/pron collections from their old machine to the new one, and then put the old machine as garage-sale fodder.
It strikes me as rather wasteful... but I don't see much alternative.
Now, that I'll agree with. If it were already a totalitarian state, discussions like this would be taking place via PGP encryption on private out-of-country host machines.
And I also agree that this isn't a Republican-vs.-Democrat issue. However, these two parties have the most to gain by using the latest technological advances to ensure that the U.S. remains a two-party political system.
Historically, when a third party (such as Temperance, Reform, Bull Moose, what have you) shows itself to resonate with the voters, that's when one of the two parties usually starts to embrace the concept espoused by that third party, although not as whole-heartedly.
The problem at this point is that the public is too evenly divided for one party to take a (pardon the expression) radical idea in such a way as to ensure that the voters agree enough to put it into power. And meanwhile, the established party members find that it's easier to apply these newly available tools than to take risks.
That's oh, so true. Some of the things I miss having are:
Now, I don't believe that we are at the point of being a police state. I agree that we are far from being at the point where someone who makes a suitably-public remark that is governmentally-insensitive will find themselves in a attitudinal-modification facility.
But can you honestly say that we aren't closer to that than we used to be?
Arthur Ashe was a prime example of this.
I would like some of these posters who are making half-witty remarks about anyone who gets AIDS deserves it to explain how he was put into that group.
...sometimes they run into the issue that crops up with many clubs - keeping new people engaged.
I speak from bitter experience. When I first encountered our local LUG, they were willing and able to help me get Mandrake loaded on an old laptop machine... and one of them was willing to let me -- some nobody that they'd just met that night -- take home a PCMCIA-connected portable CD-ROM drive, because once things were finally set up, it was closing time at the library.
Unfortunately, my schedule was such that I was unable to stay active with this group.
A few years later, I went back to one of the group meetings. There I discovered that, although most of the same people were there, all of them were involved in running the call-in net-radio show (ironically enough, it was designed to help new people use Linux). There was nobody there to help any newbies, nobody there to find out if there were new people... the latest shiny toy was the net-radio broadcast.
After about half an hour, when I found that there were, indeed, other new members who were also seeking help, and not getting any, we pretty much decided it was time to leave. I haven't been back since.
User groups, as long as the members don't lose sight of their purpose, can be invaluable. When they turn into the equivalent of a stereotypical fraternity, then they run the risk of running off potential new users.
When Windows 95 came out, lots of companies and individual users were leery of switching over from their working-just-fine Windows 3.11 systems. I remembered seeing a demo of Windows 95, and someone was asking whether they could disable the animated graphic display that played during the file copy process.
Microsoft has a long history of, well, "stubbornness" isn't too harsh a term. NT 3.1, Bob, and ME were all products that didn't make the grade as far as most people were concerned. However, they kept marketing them while they worked on replacement technology and/or service packs. Thus, we got NT 3.5, Windows 98 SE, and Windows XP, which all simply ran into the "new product" glitches and bitches.
I honestly think that Microsoft will just keep on marketing Vista until they get at least one service pack, and possibly two. At that point, they'll either have shaken out most of the bugs that people are complaining about, or will come up with a different package, a different name, a different UI, and call it a "brand new" product.
Is Microsoft hurting? Perhaps, but I don't believe they've been sending out large numbers of pink slips to their employees. Are people looking at alternatives? Yes, but many of them are either going to sit tight and hope that XP will last long enough until either Vista SP 2, because they have too much of an investment in existing technology to feel comfortable (rightly or wrongly) with anything else.
Bear in mind that the symptoms listed in the article are almost certainly NOT an exhaustive list. These are only some of the indications that a physician might use to test for the "weakened X" disorder. A complete list, however, would only end up boring most of the people who read the article, so I'm willing to forgive some incompleteness in a popular general news presentation.
And yes, society has jumped quickly onto bandwagons, as you've properly pointed out, and I agree that there is at least one instance where a child was medicated to become more socially convenient, rather than using more conventional treatments like therapy. But until doctors start using articles in the popular media as a source for definitive indicators of illness / dysfunction / what have you, I'm not going to let it ruin my sleep yet.
I agree completely.
My brother has two sons, one very mildly autistic, one not so mildly. I have not sent him a link for this article for two reasons: (1) he and his wife probably have all kinds of well-meaning friends who have e-mailed this link, and (2) hope is painful, and the limited amount of hope that this offers is comes nowhere near the pain that would ensue.
The studies right now are only showing results for a particular kind of autism. This does not cover all of the different types that exist. This is like someone coming up with a "silver bullet" for bone cancer, that might not help people with lung cancer. It's a promising sign, and I hope to $DEITY that it works in humans, but it doesn't yet cover the rest of the types of autism that afflict us.
Meanwhile, since the treatments are not yet ready, the boys still need to get the therapies that they are already getting. My older nephew doesn't really show much sign of autism, and my younger one is starting to make breakthroughs on communicating with people. But until this shows more than promise, all that my brother and sister-in-law can do is keep on keeping on, and may the gods look on them kindly.