Here's the money quote from http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-great-news-for-olpc-team-their-cto.html:
Another question worth asking is whether Mary Lou Jepsen actually managed to retain ownership of her designs while working for OLPC, a 501(c)(3) organization. If so, doesn't this mean that in effect taxpayers subsidized the R&D for whatever "for-profit company" Mary Lou Jepsen is now about to launch? If so, this is no small thing. I know. Our company uses technology that we tech-transferred from the US gov (we developed it while there) and I can tell you for a certain fact - it is illegal to profit at the taxpayers' expense. Part of our contract required very high payback (sorry, I cannot disclose all details), but think of a $400 hammer that we paid $4000 to the US gov for, specifically to be legal and ensure the taxpayers got their money back - and I mean everything - retirement, direct costs, benefits, facilities costs, everything - went into the calculation for us to know what we owed. Then it was multiplied just as all things are multiplied to avoid cheating.
Maybe Fake Steve is just tossing bananas for fun, as usual, but he's right, then she's waaaaaaaay wrong and needs to expect extraordinary start up costs. IANAL, YMMV, etc.
More quasi-informative tripe from mainstream media. I like old movies - a lot - so I'm a fan of Turner Classic Movies. From time to time, they've gone over what it took to restore this or that film to viewable, and those were in cold storage (and not all on celluose, either). The costs given by the article don't match reality.
While the subject is an interesting intellectual one, the entire comparison is specious for obvious reasons, including entropy.
Do you even know what an atheist is? Yes, in fact, well enough to know that they come in various kinds. Labels are not the same as reality; glad to help you on this.
Many years ago, the USA and USSR developed launch detection capability, and have had a tendency to dismiss bolides since then. At one point, Los Alamos National Lab had an open-to-the-public display of the satellite system used to detect nuclear detonations (for treaty monitoring) and some poster boards explaining how the system differentiated between nukes and natural phenomena.
The general idea originally, under MAD, was that each superpower represented a sphere of influence, and the right info would go out to satellite countries pretty quickly.
Here's some public info if this particular sub-point to the question is of interest: http://space.au.af.mil/enhance.htm - scan for USNDS.
However, as the political and military climate have changed, for many non-aligned areas, I'd agree with the respondent that said, badly - only to add, way badly. I don't think they'd blame God, they'd blame the US. Outside of the conspiracy nuts in the US (that wouldn't believe what happened even after it was established and reported), there'd be the fundie-rightists who'd credit God for smiting the victims, and the armchair atheists that would blame God for giving us another problem. Those of us left over that got it would have to be nervous about the conspiracy nuts, the fundies and any other subgroups I've left out - at home and abroad.
Let's face it - these days, which part of the globe isn't a more nervous area?
It wasn't just that for Carter. I seem to recall a news broadcast where he grew to the size of a skyscraper, as did the cleaning lady, and the east coast was overrun by giant lobsters.
On a more serious note - who's going to design and build these things in the future when no one is designing and building these things today?
I'm going to point out information entropy - not just the the levels that Shannon published. Somebuddy got a copy of the original NASA moon tapes? We're at a loss to properly archive what we have and each year there's more to do.
Should commercial demand happen for nuclear power in a few generations (at the level it did in the 40s and 50s for military and commercial apps), where will the baseline information come from? Wikipedia?
Not only did I not read the RTFA, I need to share that I stopped reading the summary when it hit "I think it's a great opportunity," out of sheer depression.
I used the old net, before public ISPs. I watched small businesses - really good guys! - in my town grow up into a service I could early adopt, then later share with friends, then later turn people on to as better and more cost-effective than AOL. I've used three of those guys locally (one of them I still do for one of our business units), Earthlink and Qwest. Despite flamey this or thats over the years, I'm going to tell you something - I've had good service for my money from all of those guys.
Now, here comes the jerk with an oh-such-clear-opportunity. Allow me to state it plainly: "Hi. I have a business problem. I can make it someone else's business problem. I have a plan to require them to solve my business problem. I am not going to pay them money, in fact, as I said, they will have everything to lose and nothing to gain. I can solve this with the expenses of political lobbying and litigation, which I'm already budgeted for. I have a very good chance of succeeding."
And if that becomes a requirement for the ISPs, then they'll meet the requirement. And how do you think they are going to recover their costs? You bet, by passing the costs on to the subscribers, you and me. So all of us will end up paying for the actual piracy of a few and peceived piracy of many.
And that will be just the beginning.
I am depressed, boys and girls. Over an opportunity. Thanks for listening.
From TFA - AT&T is only operating pay phones in 13 states, will phase those out, hoping/expecting another firm or firms to pick up the slack.
Therefore, this already doesn't affect 37 states - whose pay phones are still working without AT&T. It didn't say America would lose payphones, it said AT&T is getting out of the business.
PPPS - the enviroment is quiet - developers need quiet quite often and respect each other. There. That fits in with the whole meme in this discussion about developers needing quiet.
Someone tell me why they're all wearing headphones and grinning half the time? (Like me, right now.).......right.......
When we were growing and felt like moving, we expanded instead, using the older space strictly as a lab. To get to the office, you have to cross the parking lot to another building, so there's some "campus" to it - no schlepping carpet, you actually get to walk through the elements.
The new office space has about 2k square feet for about 7 to 10 people, one entire wall is windowed, facing trees, mountains (and parking lot and gas station - ok, location, location - perfection is hard) and two private rooms - also individually windowed to the outside and to the common area.
One thing we looked for was an irregularly shaped space - not to save money, but for several simple reasons. First, acoustics - squares and rectangles are good for having resonant frequencies (lambda=(1100 ft/sec) / individual_room_dimension = resonance in Hz, btw) - irregular trapezoidal rooms don't boom and echo so much. Second, harmony - work in a sqaure space then you think in a square space - work in a soft space, create software. Finally, marketing - there is no thinking outside the box, we've left the box behind - good for any customers wanting to see our facilitites (hey, it happens).
Each person gets a glass ergonomic workstation, a suede ergonomic chair, and a locking small cabinet for personal items (workstations are **all** 24" iMacs/4GB/500GB/1TB backup/wireless everything/Parallels). People are free to use the room however they want, and they're still learning (we've only been there since Sep 1).
Communication is largely skyped, with other VOIP, plus iChat, plus Jabber, video to offsite wherever offsite bandwidth allows.
No one's complaining about noise or space for personal calls - this works I think because there's a single team in the environment (despite separate projects sometimes), the ability to stretch your legs and visit the lab, and because everyone is used to using their cell phones away from everyone else for personal calls anyway.
As far as monitoring what people do on the web, mostly we couldn't care less. My philosophy was to give software professionals a professional environment and they'd have better things to do than surf the web. And so what if they do? Maybe they'll read this.;P
An open office environment doesn't have to be about management saving a buck or taking away privacy or turf. In my concept, it's about collaboration, it's about empowerment, it's about removing class barriers. I did a cost-benefit analysis for my partners that went like this: human intellect has no price, but any barriers to intelligent people we put up have costs we'll never understand - let's remove the barriers and call it squaresies.
I came in for a meeting with them and to give some updates on the other divisions. Instead of big paper on walls or easels, one guy asked why I couldn't sit on the floor with the big pad and have everyone cluster around. Great fucking meeting for a change - see what happens when you relax the requirement of fitting people into square desks, square cubes, square rooms, square conference tables?
Water seeks its own level. So does intelligence.
PS - no open seating. WTF is the point of violating someone's well-adjusted comfy chair? Work is uncomfortable to begin with, that's my thought on that.
PPS - that's how it's done, people. I challenge all execs reading here to follow suit! Take everything you've hated about it felt when you were coming up the ranks and just fucking stop doing those things!!!
Holy smokes! I never looked at their devel history - I heard about it from media pros in LA using the hell out of it. Talk about violations - I won't name names, but I'd be surprised if it weren't a staple at a lot of places in the US as a sort of universal client, among other things. Sure, I have Quicktime + iTunes, so I didn't think too carefully due to VLC's widespread use as I saw it - already had an OK AAC player, why not another?
It's that thin veneer of denialibity though - VLC is ok to have, but the FFmpeg is quite a different thing altogether. I prolly knew this in the past and didn't care - now, I suppose I should.
From the AAC page on Wikipedia (I'm not going to repeat it, sorry):
"AAC was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies including Dolby, Fraunhofer IIS, AT&T, Sony and Nokia, and was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Pictures Experts Group in April 1997."
2. "Microsoft will never support AAC..." - except, it seems that they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune (not to mention Windows Mobile....)
3. The faad and faac are illegal in the US - try http://www.audiocoding.com/ - source is there, not binaries (see Wiki, again) and then also try to tell me what is the issue? Are you trying to suggest that there is nothing available for free on Linux / other that plays AAC files - legally? How about VLC? The world doesn't begin and end at the FSF - although the FSF is really, really fab, it's not the world. If anything in media playback is the word, it's VLC - but that's just me.....
Otherwise, your idea of Walmart dropping WMA because it is proprietary and won't play on iPods is probably quite true - I think that was the insightful part.
That's not even the half of it. I googled the address you gave and got several interesting hits, as it seems there is more than one business there - such as this Microsoft certified partner....
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the parent didn't have this link. It seems to clarify Oyegbola's position, which are not those I'd have believed from reading previous comments alone. (Hey - it was such a bad day, I tried to RTFM, couldn't, and tracked it down. So, I'm not ragging on anyone for their comments, I'm just saying about how I things came across, today.)
First, I heartily agree with those who have advised to discuss this openly with the project lead - privately! - but openly.
Get the lay of the land. How much of this product that about's to be fielded has been Frankensteined this way? Was the adopted code so easy to understand? How much adopted code will there be in the distribution for which there are no orignal authors to work with when it comes time for doing maintenance? And will you be on the hook for that maintenance?
If you have a personal problem with the practice, assuming that you even got a {copyright | moral | public domain} acceptable answer - go ahead and quit. This won't be your last job, so if the corporate culture doesn't sit well with you personally, move on and find your right home.
There's plenty of drek software out there from compromising programmers - don't become one of them.
On the other hand, if the answer turns out ok, then you've learned a lot, and you might consider staying and learning more and contributing more.
Otherwise - speaking as a past developer and present employer of developers - my advice would be to ignore those who have been flaming you one way or another, regardless of how their posts were modded. Being a developer or employer empowers no one with any special insights whatsoever - being a good developer or good employer is only what counts.
You sound like you want to be a good developer. Find out if you have a good employer and make your choice. There is a karma outside of Slashdot, I shit you not - so be brave.
PS - Don't rewrite the code - the method is already known to you, and plagarism is plagarism whether you copy verbatim or move a few words about after the fact.
Booookay. I thought it was "you don't line up with my thinking, so I think I'll poke a little fun" sort of thing. Then again, maybe you're the AC now out of the closet and I'm just talking to two sock puppets - but that humor prolly escapes you, too.
I have an experience leading to a question. I was involved in a civil suit, the other side's attorney pulled shenanigans, lying to the court, etc. My lawyer was incensed, and it seemed the suit was going to drag on for years, so he offered to settle with me for my hoped-for amount out of his pocket provided I release him to sue the other attorney (he was going to make way more money that way, he was that confident). I was ok with that, so that's how it went down.
From that, I learned that attorneys can be sued for shenanigans - malfeasance? - and that's my question(s). Could the RIAA be stopped that way? Attorneys are officers of the court, that makes them liable for malfeasance charges, doesn't it? If not in court, what about the Bar Association(s)? (All I know about the bar I learned on TV.....)
Can't the attorneys be punished and thereby discourage those practices? Is our system so broken that the answer is really no?
I'm sure this prolly isn't really true or anything.... they wouldn't include desiring hiring future Harvard grads to do their legal dirty work as a reason to not ding students there.....
Prolly not - but anything involving these guys and following this issue makes me just that cynical and twisted.
My brother - whoever modded your post as troll was obviously too lazy to get who M.C. Hawking - lyrical terrorist and hard-jamming physicist - really is.
I'd mod you up for the reminder - but I don't have mod rights now - pretend others get it, because we do.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Fake Steve is just tossing bananas for fun, as usual, but he's right, then she's waaaaaaaay wrong and needs to expect extraordinary start up costs. IANAL, YMMV, etc.
More quasi-informative tripe from mainstream media. I like old movies - a lot - so I'm a fan of Turner Classic Movies. From time to time, they've gone over what it took to restore this or that film to viewable, and those were in cold storage (and not all on celluose, either). The costs given by the article don't match reality.
While the subject is an interesting intellectual one, the entire comparison is specious for obvious reasons, including entropy.
Nothing to see here.
http://play.rhapsody.com/album/grease/rocknrollisheretostay
Takes more than bad execs and bad decisions to kill this stuff.
Many years ago, the USA and USSR developed launch detection capability, and have had a tendency to dismiss bolides since then. At one point, Los Alamos National Lab had an open-to-the-public display of the satellite system used to detect nuclear detonations (for treaty monitoring) and some poster boards explaining how the system differentiated between nukes and natural phenomena.
The general idea originally, under MAD, was that each superpower represented a sphere of influence, and the right info would go out to satellite countries pretty quickly.
Here's some public info if this particular sub-point to the question is of interest: http://space.au.af.mil/enhance.htm - scan for USNDS.
However, as the political and military climate have changed, for many non-aligned areas, I'd agree with the respondent that said, badly - only to add, way badly. I don't think they'd blame God, they'd blame the US. Outside of the conspiracy nuts in the US (that wouldn't believe what happened even after it was established and reported), there'd be the fundie-rightists who'd credit God for smiting the victims, and the armchair atheists that would blame God for giving us another problem. Those of us left over that got it would have to be nervous about the conspiracy nuts, the fundies and any other subgroups I've left out - at home and abroad.
Let's face it - these days, which part of the globe isn't a more nervous area?
It wasn't just that for Carter. I seem to recall a news broadcast where he grew to the size of a skyscraper, as did the cleaning lady, and the east coast was overrun by giant lobsters.
On a more serious note - who's going to design and build these things in the future when no one is designing and building these things today?
I'm going to point out information entropy - not just the the levels that Shannon published. Somebuddy got a copy of the original NASA moon tapes? We're at a loss to properly archive what we have and each year there's more to do.
Should commercial demand happen for nuclear power in a few generations (at the level it did in the 40s and 50s for military and commercial apps), where will the baseline information come from? Wikipedia?
Not only did I not read the RTFA, I need to share that I stopped reading the summary when it hit "I think it's a great opportunity," out of sheer depression.
I used the old net, before public ISPs. I watched small businesses - really good guys! - in my town grow up into a service I could early adopt, then later share with friends, then later turn people on to as better and more cost-effective than AOL. I've used three of those guys locally (one of them I still do for one of our business units), Earthlink and Qwest. Despite flamey this or thats over the years, I'm going to tell you something - I've had good service for my money from all of those guys.
Now, here comes the jerk with an oh-such-clear-opportunity. Allow me to state it plainly: "Hi. I have a business problem. I can make it someone else's business problem. I have a plan to require them to solve my business problem. I am not going to pay them money, in fact, as I said, they will have everything to lose and nothing to gain. I can solve this with the expenses of political lobbying and litigation, which I'm already budgeted for. I have a very good chance of succeeding."
And if that becomes a requirement for the ISPs, then they'll meet the requirement. And how do you think they are going to recover their costs? You bet, by passing the costs on to the subscribers, you and me. So all of us will end up paying for the actual piracy of a few and peceived piracy of many.
And that will be just the beginning.
I am depressed, boys and girls. Over an opportunity. Thanks for listening.
Dont' forget the top sig the week that was published - "I am Pentium of Borg - you will be approximated."
Doing this in our Albuquerque office. Our Silicon Valley staff are telecommuting now, but considering this option as well.
From TFA - AT&T is only operating pay phones in 13 states, will phase those out, hoping/expecting another firm or firms to pick up the slack.
Therefore, this already doesn't affect 37 states - whose pay phones are still working without AT&T. It didn't say America would lose payphones, it said AT&T is getting out of the business.
Nothing to see here.
PPPS - the enviroment is quiet - developers need quiet quite often and respect each other. There. That fits in with the whole meme in this discussion about developers needing quiet.
.......right.......
Someone tell me why they're all wearing headphones and grinning half the time? (Like me, right now.)
When we were growing and felt like moving, we expanded instead, using the older space strictly as a lab. To get to the office, you have to cross the parking lot to another building, so there's some "campus" to it - no schlepping carpet, you actually get to walk through the elements.
;P
The new office space has about 2k square feet for about 7 to 10 people, one entire wall is windowed, facing trees, mountains (and parking lot and gas station - ok, location, location - perfection is hard) and two private rooms - also individually windowed to the outside and to the common area.
One thing we looked for was an irregularly shaped space - not to save money, but for several simple reasons. First, acoustics - squares and rectangles are good for having resonant frequencies (lambda=(1100 ft/sec) / individual_room_dimension = resonance in Hz, btw) - irregular trapezoidal rooms don't boom and echo so much. Second, harmony - work in a sqaure space then you think in a square space - work in a soft space, create software. Finally, marketing - there is no thinking outside the box, we've left the box behind - good for any customers wanting to see our facilitites (hey, it happens).
Each person gets a glass ergonomic workstation, a suede ergonomic chair, and a locking small cabinet for personal items (workstations are **all** 24" iMacs/4GB/500GB/1TB backup/wireless everything/Parallels). People are free to use the room however they want, and they're still learning (we've only been there since Sep 1).
Communication is largely skyped, with other VOIP, plus iChat, plus Jabber, video to offsite wherever offsite bandwidth allows.
No one's complaining about noise or space for personal calls - this works I think because there's a single team in the environment (despite separate projects sometimes), the ability to stretch your legs and visit the lab, and because everyone is used to using their cell phones away from everyone else for personal calls anyway.
As far as monitoring what people do on the web, mostly we couldn't care less. My philosophy was to give software professionals a professional environment and they'd have better things to do than surf the web. And so what if they do? Maybe they'll read this.
An open office environment doesn't have to be about management saving a buck or taking away privacy or turf. In my concept, it's about collaboration, it's about empowerment, it's about removing class barriers. I did a cost-benefit analysis for my partners that went like this: human intellect has no price, but any barriers to intelligent people we put up have costs we'll never understand - let's remove the barriers and call it squaresies.
I came in for a meeting with them and to give some updates on the other divisions. Instead of big paper on walls or easels, one guy asked why I couldn't sit on the floor with the big pad and have everyone cluster around. Great fucking meeting for a change - see what happens when you relax the requirement of fitting people into square desks, square cubes, square rooms, square conference tables?
Water seeks its own level. So does intelligence.
PS - no open seating. WTF is the point of violating someone's well-adjusted comfy chair? Work is uncomfortable to begin with, that's my thought on that.
PPS - that's how it's done, people. I challenge all execs reading here to follow suit! Take everything you've hated about it felt when you were coming up the ranks and just fucking stop doing those things!!!
Holy smokes! I never looked at their devel history - I heard about it from media pros in LA using the hell out of it. Talk about violations - I won't name names, but I'd be surprised if it weren't a staple at a lot of places in the US as a sort of universal client, among other things. Sure, I have Quicktime + iTunes, so I didn't think too carefully due to VLC's widespread use as I saw it - already had an OK AAC player, why not another?
It's that thin veneer of denialibity though - VLC is ok to have, but the FFmpeg is quite a different thing altogether. I prolly knew this in the past and didn't care - now, I suppose I should.
OK, thanks for education - it's much appreciated.
From the AAC page on Wikipedia (I'm not going to repeat it, sorry):
"AAC was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies including Dolby, Fraunhofer IIS, AT&T, Sony and Nokia, and was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Pictures Experts Group in April 1997."
1. AAC is not Apple proprietary, nor was it developed, subsidized or (parent company) purchased by Apple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
2. "Microsoft will never support AAC..." - except, it seems that they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune (not to mention Windows Mobile....)
3. The faad and faac are illegal in the US - try http://www.audiocoding.com/ - source is there, not binaries (see Wiki, again) and then also try to tell me what is the issue? Are you trying to suggest that there is nothing available for free on Linux / other that plays AAC files - legally? How about VLC? The world doesn't begin and end at the FSF - although the FSF is really, really fab, it's not the world. If anything in media playback is the word, it's VLC - but that's just me.....
Otherwise, your idea of Walmart dropping WMA because it is proprietary and won't play on iPods is probably quite true - I think that was the insightful part.
That's not even the half of it. I googled the address you gave and got several interesting hits, as it seems there is more than one business there - such as this Microsoft certified partner....
http://www.bscinternational.com/
I am not making this up.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the parent didn't have this link. It seems to clarify Oyegbola's position, which are not those I'd have believed from reading previous comments alone. (Hey - it was such a bad day, I tried to RTFM, couldn't, and tracked it down. So, I'm not ragging on anyone for their comments, I'm just saying about how I things came across, today.)
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/11/28/laptops_for_kids_group_sued_over_keyboard_design/
Anyway, it's an interesting article. I'd be curious about how much of it is actually true, but it is interesting.
First, I heartily agree with those who have advised to discuss this openly with the project lead - privately! - but openly.
Get the lay of the land. How much of this product that about's to be fielded has been Frankensteined this way? Was the adopted code so easy to understand? How much adopted code will there be in the distribution for which there are no orignal authors to work with when it comes time for doing maintenance? And will you be on the hook for that maintenance?
If you have a personal problem with the practice, assuming that you even got a {copyright | moral | public domain} acceptable answer - go ahead and quit. This won't be your last job, so if the corporate culture doesn't sit well with you personally, move on and find your right home.
There's plenty of drek software out there from compromising programmers - don't become one of them.
On the other hand, if the answer turns out ok, then you've learned a lot, and you might consider staying and learning more and contributing more.
Otherwise - speaking as a past developer and present employer of developers - my advice would be to ignore those who have been flaming you one way or another, regardless of how their posts were modded. Being a developer or employer empowers no one with any special insights whatsoever - being a good developer or good employer is only what counts.
You sound like you want to be a good developer. Find out if you have a good employer and make your choice. There is a karma outside of Slashdot, I shit you not - so be brave.
PS - Don't rewrite the code - the method is already known to you, and plagarism is plagarism whether you copy verbatim or move a few words about after the fact.
Are you kidding? I strapped them to his freaking head!!
Touche - cheers.
Booookay. I thought it was "you don't line up with my thinking, so I think I'll poke a little fun" sort of thing. Then again, maybe you're the AC now out of the closet and I'm just talking to two sock puppets - but that humor prolly escapes you, too.
So. How's the pay at RIAA? Pretty good?
So. How do they pay over at the RIAA? Pretty good?
Hi Ray,
Many thanks for your fine work in this area.
I have an experience leading to a question. I was involved in a civil suit, the other side's attorney pulled shenanigans, lying to the court, etc. My lawyer was incensed, and it seemed the suit was going to drag on for years, so he offered to settle with me for my hoped-for amount out of his pocket provided I release him to sue the other attorney (he was going to make way more money that way, he was that confident). I was ok with that, so that's how it went down.
From that, I learned that attorneys can be sued for shenanigans - malfeasance? - and that's my question(s). Could the RIAA be stopped that way? Attorneys are officers of the court, that makes them liable for malfeasance charges, doesn't it? If not in court, what about the Bar Association(s)? (All I know about the bar I learned on TV.....)
Can't the attorneys be punished and thereby discourage those practices? Is our system so broken that the answer is really no?
Thanks,
Earl
I'm sure this prolly isn't really true or anything.... they wouldn't include desiring hiring future Harvard grads to do their legal dirty work as a reason to not ding students there.....
Prolly not - but anything involving these guys and following this issue makes me just that cynical and twisted.
My brother - whoever modded your post as troll was obviously too lazy to get who M.C. Hawking - lyrical terrorist and hard-jamming physicist - really is.
I'd mod you up for the reminder - but I don't have mod rights now - pretend others get it, because we do.