Fortran "should" be dead? not by a long shot. No, Fortran (not FORTAN anymore, btw) is not the language to use for everything. Even though Prime did it, it is not a good choice for writing an OS.
But when it comes time to due high level number crunching (or beyond that, merely bashing them into submission), Fortran has no peer--nothing even close.
Yes, you can usually tune c to give similar performance. But by the time you're done tuning, I've already used the Fortran code, and am on to the next project--or the one afterwards.
Fortan does not inlcude large portions of what c contains--which is what allows it to make assumpitons and optimizations that would be disastrous in c. It is also much faster to write (especially with F90 free-format), and easier for an "outsider" to read. (but then, there's no language yet built which is proof against crummy coding)
I hate to think of how much longer the dynamic programming project for my dissertation would have takein in c than Fortran *shudder*.
I haven't done it with apt, but I used to do it on 486 installs with dselect.
Simply go to the directory where it stores the downloads, and type
dpkg -iGER *
which causes it to install anything it can, recursively through the directory structure, but skipping packages already installed. Dpkg won't install anything whose dependencies are not met.
I did it not for download speed, but because some of the packages took so long to install on a 486/33.
You could then try this same command in directories, and delete everthing if it came back saying they were all already installed.
>Interesting idea... The robot is probably not >tasty, but perhaps creatures that don't mind >eating dead slugs will learn to raid the slugbot >hopper?
Yes, why eat a tin can, when you can munch on a nice, tasty, juicy, slugbot?
Twin is another attempt to make windows libraries. It is backed by a company, but GPL'd.
Twine is an attempt to mix twin & wine. However, since the licenses are different, it has to use the less-free license (GPL).
I think this is the first time I've heard of it since the announcement of twine; I can't say for certain whether it still exists, or ever would have been possible.
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you need some, see a laywer licensed in your jurisdiction.
The original idea of a jury was that the king's judges would have their bailiffs round up the men of the town as a jury, since they're the ones that knew what happened (a disqualification today).
Rather than a jury of twelve random people, there are many cases where we'd be better off with, say, three people who know the subject matter, or a group with one of each kind of special knowledge needed--an engineer, a programmer, etc.
We already have "special verdicts" rather than "general verdicts" as a possiblity--rather than yes/no and a number, the jury issues findings point by point, which can be assembled by the judge. The experts could also issue such findings.
And going back to a weregild concept on injuries might be a good idea--an arm is worth X dollars, a leg Y, a death Z, and so forth . . .
*duh* Two's complement. This is just shifting the zero point. And all the other things we do to get a little negative range out of a positive variable.
Or abstract math and measure theory explained begining with bundles of sticks . . .
>That much is obvious, but isn't it also obvious >why this course of action would affect the price >of each share, and specifically the shares that >were owned before the dilution? I mean, assuming >that people were assigning a value to these >shares in terms of the value of future dividends >or earnings in some way.
I would expect it to be included, yes. I'd expect the information to be reflected in the market price (it only takes one person with significant assets recognizing the pricing error to correct it).
>1.If Microsoft does not (or cannot) buy back the >option shares, they dilute the stock, and this >has a material effect on existing stockholders.
Yes, certainly. But the effect shrinks the earnings per shareholder; it can never make them negative.
>2.If Microsoft does buy back the option shares, >then the cash used to perform the buy back has to >come from *somewhere*, and this also has >material effect on existing stockholders.
It's the same amount of dilution as in 1. This way, though, the shares are for a smaller company than in 1. The company is giving up part of its assets to remove some of its owners, just like what happens when partner leave partnerships. It's a change in capital, not an expense as Parrish claims.
>And I think there have to be far more sensible >ways to estimate the likely value of the option, >or at least its possible effect on shareholders. >One way would be to use the company's historical >data: how much was an option of $X over the >market price really worth in the past?
This one *can't* work. If this was an accurate predictor, it would also by definition predict the future share price. If that were true, people would borrow to buy the stock until the price today was smaller than that future price by only the interest rate. Since this hasn't happened, the predictor can't be reliable.
Now you make me take off the economist hat, and reach for my statistician's hat:)
>Another way would be to use "normative" data over >a market sector: in the software services sector, >what is the current value of an option of $X over >the market price? The problems with those >methods, however, are clear: the past history >might not be relevant, or there may be no history >at all
There are a variety of ways to do this, but they come down to weighted averages of the potential future gains, with zero value for all values with the stock below the exercise price. There's a lot of literature on this in both econ and finance. The problem comes from agreeing on the relative probabilities and finding the comparison stocks. Before using this, you'd need to be convinced that you have created a system *less* prone to manipulation than the current system--and that's going to be a very hard sell (who chooses?). And even with this, you're still talking about a rearrangement or redemption of capital, not a true loss. It still all comes down to dilution, and giving up capital to avoid the dilution.
None of this should be read as meaning that the undiluted earnings per share figure has any meaning. The inclusion of diluted earnings in a footnote is certainly a first step. But whatever the solution is, I don't think it involves treating the options as some type of expense rather than a capital issue; any such solution would be more misleading than the current version, where at least the true data exists.
Geesh, I had to do this on a Tandy 102 when I was in law school, and I finished in 1988. Hmm, and in crude financial projections in 1986.
And now that I think of it, I used this in a couple of different ways in the Nighthawk MIS system in 1982--and so has everyone else who used INKEY$ to map ascii to action codes.
And I seriously doubt that I did anything that hadn't been done 20 years earlier . . .
It's exponential. For every b units, a new unit is added (b is the base). So Y=k * b^t , where k is some positive constant.
If you take the logarithm of something that's growing exponentially, then you get a straight line. That is, use a logarithmic display/graph paper to see exponential growth as a straight line.
His claim of fraud is, in itself, fraudulent (or incompetent).
His claims seem to come primarily from the notion that microsoft sees a cost when stock options are exercised.
Take a step back, and think about this.
1) the existence of large number of options understates the potential number of shares. This is true--if there are 100 shares and 200 stock options, 1 real share represents not 1%, but 1/3% of the company. Thus the earnings per share are overstated. This is what the "footnote" business is: the "diluted" earnings, spreading earnings out over potential shares rather than actual shares, only occur in footnotes. The result is indeed that earnings *per share* are lower than reported. It does *not* affect total earnings.
2) The "debt" from these. Here is where this turns into nonsense. Many companies, including microsoft, do indeed buy back the shares when employees excercise options, in order to keep the total number of shares outstanding stable. But they have *NO* obligation to do so. Microsoft could simply allow more shares to exist. Done. No cost to Microsoft.
So why doesn't microsoft do this? Again, step back a moment. *If* the number of shares increases, the price drops. If you triple the number of shares due to options, the price will fall to (roughly) one third of its previous level. By buying back the stock, each share claims a larger portion of microsoft, and is thus worth more. Investors prefer this, and thus corporations do it.
If we assume, though, that a corporation *will* buy back the stock, it may make some sense to include that future cost (after discounting) to the business in some way (there are a number of ways to do this). However, to do so, we have to estimate or know the future price of the stock. If we knew this with certainty, this would also be the current price (less the interest in the mean time). And the important thing about options is that they are issued at *more* than the current price. If the current price is ten, the corporation might issue options to buy at a price of twelve. This would show each option as an *asset* rather than a liability (which, of course, is also nonsense).
The fundamental failure here is that the options are not so much transactions between employees and ms, but between employees and the current shareholders--a chance to become shareholders. This doesn't actually affect ms at all; it's a question of who owns ms. [though there is an effect in the wages--owners can be paid a lower wage than non-owners, just like any other business].
Bottom line: profit or loss is revenue less costs. Changing who owns the additional shares does not change the total profit, but merely the number of people splitting it.
3) Let's grant the division by zero, and assume that he really can predict future share price. Deduct what employees pay to exercise the options from the future share price that ms pays to clear them, and we get the cost to microsoft (more accurately: the transfer among owners of the various assets).
Oops, there's the problem: as more of these shares issue, the price drops. If microsoft has options outstanding for twice as many shares as the current share base, the proper share price to consider now is the price that would occur *if* the shares were exercised. That is, the price that would occur if the employees *kept* the shares after exercising the options. The more shares on the market, the lower the price for buy-back. Even if you grant the economically dubious assumption that the market price can be manipulated for small amounts of options (change is close to zero for a small number of extras), you have to assume that not only every shareholder of ms is a complete idiot, but that every other potential investor in the world is as well. Yes, the footnotes may "fool" some ("it's only a 3% error" may fly) for small amounts of options, but to assume that the same happens when the employees hold huge portions is silly.
Bottom line: to make the costs add up to enough to create a loss instead of profit would require the share price to stay up in the face of massive actual dilution, which wouldn't happen. Microsoft would buy back the shares at much lower prices in face of the dilution.
While I'm at it: the list of folks that agree with him set's off my b.s. baffle . . .
But the most important line is:
>6) Request to have me as a guest on your talk >show, radio station or other media outlet or >speak at your convention.
There we go: make me rich and famous.
Bottom bottom line: the claims of "fraud" are primarily arguments with existing accounting practice, some of which use the equivalent of division by zero to reach their conclusions. The author has a lot to gain, however, should not be dismissed. By the "unorthodox" definition (to be charitabl) of fraud used here, the claims themselve are fradulent.
[Note: I'm not arguing that ms stock isn't a price bubble. I believe so, but not for the non-reasons in this article.]
It was possible (they had been notified by panasonic) that, while under heavy graphical or other load, data written to the floppy could be lost.
Toshiba was unable to duplicate this in the lab. No customers reported lost data. But panasonic sent the memo saying that it *could* happen, and they didn't change the design. *wham*
Look at your car. Any car. The manufacturor knows of all kinds of things that *could* go wrong and cause death, most of which could be fixed for a few dollars. The manufacturor chooses which ones are worth fixing, and which risks are too remote. If they fixed them all, all cars would start at $100,000, weigh five tons and up, and get four miles to the gallon.
But then, when one of the remote risks does come true, they get hit not only for actual economic damages (which is not a problem; this much is really just a variation on insurance), but also general damages (loss of quality of life, pain & suffering, etc.) in whatever multi-million dollar figure amount a jury pulls out of thin air, and even punitive damages.
And this is before class-actions get abused. The idea of a class action suit is to handle similar claims for damage together for judicial economy. But now, as here, we've eliminatged the "damage" requirement.
I don't see the situation getting any better. And why did I close down most of my practice to head for law school? . . .
>Star Trek is not about science or technology. >Those are just a medium for the real stuff that >goes on. Star Trek is about the characters and >moral issues. To enjoy the show, you have to >watch it consistantly. You have to know the >characters. Half (if not more) of the content of >the show is just about the characters and how >they are growing.
This is *exactly* what is *wrong* with these newer three-lettered spinoffs. Star Trek was *not* about the characters; the characters, though they had personalities, were not individuals but personifications of human traits. It was the situations and conflicts that made Star Trek interesting, not the collection of second-rate actors playing characters.
This meant that they were able to use the entire program for the plot. Between the longer commercials today and the "sub-plots," "character devlopment," and miscellaneous junk, they get about half as much time for the program itself as Star Trek did.
Send my 50 cents by email:) [pity I can only charge him for a newspaper and not an hour:)]
>I've heard anti-non-competition rules called >"right-to-work laws" on any number of occaisions. >I suppose that's what I deserve for learning law >from human resource people.:^)
not just law:)
Check Black's, or any of the literature on the National Labor Relations Act.
Also, those anti-non-competition rulese aren't needed, since the Common Law already does that. And the areas where the Common Law *does* permit them are so narrow that legislation to strike the clauses would usually be unconstitutional anyway--it would (usually) take away either the right to sell a business, or the ability to enter into a contract to perform one's trade (in the cases where noone would pay for the work without the protection of non-competiton).
>>Right-to-work laws are pretty widespread in the US.
>annecdotal
Actually, it's irrelevant:) Right-to-work laws are laws that make closed union shops (where one must belong to the union to work) illegal. The rules treating non-competiton clause hostilly go back at least thee hundred year.
1) is an injunction which is readily given. It came up with a famous actress a couple of years ago when she refused to make a movie (though the claim that there was a binding contract sounded questionable to me). The courts will grant these unless there's a really good reason not to (being a disguised non-competition clause might be such a reason, or there being something illegal about what the company would do with the work if the person completed the contract [e.g., it turs out to be the control software for an anthrax bomb . ..]).
2) are rarely enforced, unless very narrowly drawn.
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, see an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
The level of misinformation and erroneous explanations of law I'm seeing in other posts is unusually high . . .
The law has *always* been hostile to agreements in restraint of trade, *including* non-competition clauses. Not just in some states, not just in the U.S., but the entire English speaking world which inheritted the Common Law of England.
In front of me is a case on the subject from 1711. Yes, nearly 300 years old. [Mitchel v. Reynoldds, 1 P. Wms. 181, 24 Eng. Rep 347 (K.B. 1711)]
It applies the same rules used today. An agreement in restraint of trade, particularly one barring a man from engaging in his trade, is presumed illegal, and must be shown to be necessary, Particularyly, a non-competition clause must be necessary to accomplish the purpose of the contract.
In Mitchell, a baker sold his bakehouse, and agreed not to compete in that parish for five years--which he promptly violated, claiming that the bond was void by law. The court found the clause enforceable because it was the only way the business could possibly be transferred--if the old baker could open again across the street, he would take all of the business that had supposedly sold to the new baker. So in that one parish (not even the entire city), the baker couldn't sell--but he could in the rest of England.
Essentially the same rules apply today. To enforce such a clause, it must 1) actually be necessary to achieve the contract, 2) be as limited in time as possible--only long enough to achieve the purpose needed, and 3) be limited in geography, only covering the minimal region needed.
Overstep any of these by even a little bit, and the entire clause is thrown out. In five years of full-time practice, I only saw one non-compete clause that it wasn't clear I could have thrown out [hint: *don't* try to write your own--pay someone who knows what he's doing.].
So there's nothing new or shocking here. If there's no trade secrets (these could include in-house techniques for getting the job done faster), you fail part one. Today, a year is forever, and it would be hard to conceive of any internet related field where a year wouldnt' be too long, and two fails. Three, however, isn't clear--the entire world might be a single geography for purposes of competition.
Just for an example: suppose that a week after they sold slashdot, rob, hemos, & rob quit andover and formed the new cmdrtaco site, covering the exact same topics, and with discussion forums. If this were possible, and the non-compete clause couldn't be enforced, andover would be nuts to pay anything, and would certainly pay much less than they did. On the other hand, if andover could prevent them from competing for a year, andover would probably keep the audience if, a year later, they opened a competing site. In fact, much less than a year would do.
>Nor will there be...ever. Until the K7, AMD has >never included multiprocessor support in their >x86 designs
*sigh*
This again.
Yes, the K6 (and the M2) have multi-processor support. No, it's not the same standard as intel (for which they would have had to pay royalties), and noone ever made a chipset to support it. But the support is there on the chips (Cyrix & AMD even used the same standard, but I forget what it was called)
I've seen it happen twice, once on my K6, and once on my thinkpad. For no apparent reason, its fdisk shifts the labels of all of the partitions up by one. Fortunately, I didn't have a partition 4 either time . . .
>Buffering data and collecing writes together >increases performance, and that wouldn't be >possible is you could just eject the damn thing >anytime you pleased!
This was one of the bestthings about the long-lost mac floppies. Physical ejection was under program control, giving a chance to unmount (which to varying degrees at different times, macos did).
Somewhere along the way I saw a pc with similar drives, but it seems to have been lost along the way . . .
Slashdot Mirror
Fortran "should" be dead? not by a long shot. No, Fortran (not FORTAN anymore, btw) is not the language to use for everything. Even though Prime did it, it is not a good choice for writing an OS.
But when it comes time to due high level number crunching (or beyond that, merely bashing them into submission), Fortran has no peer--nothing even close.
Yes, you can usually tune c to give similar performance. But by the time you're done tuning, I've already used the Fortran code, and am on to the next project--or the one afterwards.
Fortan does not inlcude large portions of what c contains--which is what allows it to make assumpitons and optimizations that would be disastrous in c. It is also much faster to write (especially with F90 free-format), and easier for an "outsider" to read. (but then, there's no language yet built which is proof against crummy coding)
I hate to think of how much longer the dynamic programming project for my dissertation would have takein in c than Fortran *shudder*.
I haven't done it with apt, but I used to do it on 486 installs with dselect.
Simply go to the directory where it stores the downloads, and type
dpkg -iGER *
which causes it to install anything it can, recursively through the directory structure, but skipping packages already installed. Dpkg won't install anything whose dependencies are not met.
I did it not for download speed, but because some of the packages took so long to install on a 486/33.
You could then try this same command in directories, and delete everthing if it came back saying they were all already installed.
>Interesting idea... The robot is probably not
>tasty, but perhaps creatures that don't mind
>eating dead slugs will learn to raid the slugbot
>hopper?
Yes, why eat a tin can, when you can munch on a nice, tasty, juicy, slugbot?
:)
vonSlugman device, I suppose :)
Twin is another attempt to make windows libraries. It is backed by a company, but GPL'd.
Twine is an attempt to mix twin & wine. However, since the licenses are different, it has to use the less-free license (GPL).
I think this is the first time I've heard of it since the announcement of twine; I can't say for certain whether it still exists, or ever would have been possible.
hawk
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you need some, see a laywer licensed in your jurisdiction.
The original idea of a jury was that the king's judges would have their bailiffs round up the men of the town as a jury, since they're the ones that knew what happened (a disqualification today).
Rather than a jury of twelve random people, there are many cases where we'd be better off with, say, three people who know the subject matter, or a group with one of each kind of special knowledge needed--an engineer, a programmer, etc.
We already have "special verdicts" rather than "general verdicts" as a possiblity--rather than yes/no and a number, the jury issues findings point by point, which can be assembled by the judge. The experts could also issue such findings.
And going back to a weregild concept on injuries might be a good idea--an arm is worth X dollars, a leg Y, a death Z, and so forth . . .
ignoring the bad form of replying to myself . . .
*duh* Two's complement. This is just shifting the zero point. And all the other things we do to get a little negative range out of a positive variable.
Or abstract math and measure theory explained begining with bundles of sticks . . .
>That much is obvious, but isn't it also obvious
:)
>why this course of action would affect the price
>of each share, and specifically the shares that
>were owned before the dilution? I mean, assuming
>that people were assigning a value to these
>shares in terms of the value of future dividends >or earnings in some way.
I would expect it to be included, yes. I'd expect the information to be reflected in the market price (it only takes one person with significant assets recognizing the pricing error to correct it).
>1.If Microsoft does not (or cannot) buy back the
>option shares, they dilute the stock, and this
>has a material effect on existing stockholders.
Yes, certainly. But the effect shrinks the earnings per shareholder; it can never make them negative.
>2.If Microsoft does buy back the option shares,
>then the cash used to perform the buy back has to
>come from *somewhere*, and this also has
>material effect on existing stockholders.
It's the same amount of dilution as in 1. This way, though, the shares are for a smaller company than in 1. The company is giving up part of its assets to remove some of its owners, just like what happens when partner leave partnerships. It's a change in capital, not an expense as Parrish claims.
>And I think there have to be far more sensible
>ways to estimate the likely value of the option,
>or at least its possible effect on shareholders.
>One way would be to use the company's historical
>data: how much was an option of $X over the
>market price really worth in the past?
This one *can't* work. If this was an accurate predictor, it would also by definition predict the future share price. If that were true, people would borrow to buy the stock until the price today was smaller than that future price by only the interest rate. Since this hasn't happened, the predictor can't be reliable.
Now you make me take off the economist hat, and reach for my statistician's hat
>Another way would be to use "normative" data over
>a market sector: in the software services sector,
>what is the current value of an option of $X over
>the market price? The problems with those
>methods, however, are clear: the past history
>might not be relevant, or there may be no history
>at all
There are a variety of ways to do this, but they come down to weighted averages of the potential future gains, with zero value for all values with the stock below the exercise price. There's a lot of literature on this in both econ and finance. The problem comes from agreeing on the relative probabilities and finding the comparison stocks. Before using this, you'd need to be convinced that you have created a system *less* prone to manipulation than the current system--and that's going to be a very hard sell (who chooses?). And even with this, you're still talking about a rearrangement or redemption of capital, not a true loss. It still all comes down to dilution, and giving up capital to avoid the dilution.
None of this should be read as meaning that the undiluted earnings per share figure has any meaning. The inclusion of diluted earnings in a footnote is certainly a first step. But whatever the solution is, I don't think it involves treating the options as some type of expense rather than a capital issue; any such solution would be more misleading than the current version, where at least the true data exists.
Geesh, I had to do this on a Tandy 102 when I was in law school, and I finished in 1988. Hmm, and in crude financial projections in 1986.
And now that I think of it, I used this in a couple of different ways in the Nighthawk MIS system in 1982--and so has everyone else who used INKEY$ to map ascii to action codes.
And I seriously doubt that I did anything that hadn't been done 20 years earlier . . .
It's exponential. For every b units, a new unit is added (b is the base). So Y=k * b^t , where k is some positive constant.
If you take the logarithm of something that's growing exponentially, then you get a straight line. That is, use a logarithmic display/graph paper to see exponential growth as a straight line.
\begin{\economics professor}
His claim of fraud is, in itself, fraudulent (or incompetent).
His claims seem to come primarily from the notion that microsoft sees a cost when stock options are exercised.
Take a step back, and think about this.
1) the existence of large number of options understates the potential number of shares. This is true--if there are 100 shares and 200 stock options, 1 real share represents not 1%, but 1/3% of the company. Thus the earnings per share are overstated. This is what the "footnote" business is: the "diluted" earnings, spreading earnings out over potential shares rather than actual shares, only occur in footnotes. The result is indeed that earnings *per share* are lower than reported. It does *not* affect total earnings.
2) The "debt" from these. Here is where this turns into nonsense. Many companies, including microsoft, do indeed buy back the shares when employees excercise options, in order to keep the total number of shares outstanding stable. But they have *NO* obligation to do so. Microsoft could simply allow more shares to exist. Done. No cost to Microsoft.
So why doesn't microsoft do this? Again, step back a moment. *If* the number of shares increases, the price drops. If you triple the number of shares due to options, the price will fall to (roughly) one third of its previous level. By buying back the stock, each share claims a larger portion of microsoft, and is thus worth more. Investors prefer this, and thus corporations do it.
If we assume, though, that a corporation *will* buy back the stock, it may make some sense to include that future cost (after discounting) to the business in some way (there are a number of ways to do this). However, to do so, we have to estimate or know the future price of the stock. If we knew this with certainty, this would also be the current price (less the interest in the mean time). And the important thing about options is that they are issued at *more* than the current price. If the current price is ten, the corporation might issue options to buy at a price of twelve. This would show each option as an *asset* rather than a liability (which, of course, is also nonsense).
The fundamental failure here is that the options are not so much transactions between employees and ms, but between employees and the current shareholders--a chance to become shareholders. This doesn't actually affect ms at all; it's a question of who owns ms. [though there is an effect in the wages--owners can be paid a lower wage than non-owners, just like any other business].
Bottom line: profit or loss is revenue less costs. Changing who owns the additional shares does not change the total profit, but merely the number of people splitting it.
3) Let's grant the division by zero, and assume that he really can predict future share price. Deduct what employees pay to exercise the options from the future share price that ms pays to clear them, and we get the cost to microsoft (more accurately: the transfer among owners of the various assets).
Oops, there's the problem: as more of these shares issue, the price drops. If microsoft has options outstanding for twice as many shares as the current share base, the proper share price to consider now is the price that would occur *if* the shares were exercised. That is, the price that would occur if the employees *kept* the shares after exercising the options. The more shares on the market, the lower the price for buy-back. Even if you grant the economically dubious assumption that the market price can be manipulated for small amounts of options (change is close to zero for a small number of extras), you have to assume that not only every shareholder of ms is a complete idiot, but that every other potential investor in the world is as well. Yes, the footnotes may "fool" some ("it's only a 3% error" may fly) for small amounts of options, but to assume that the same happens when the employees hold huge portions is silly.
Bottom line: to make the costs add up to enough to create a loss instead of profit would require the share price to stay up in the face of massive actual dilution, which wouldn't happen. Microsoft would buy back the shares at much lower prices in face of the dilution.
While I'm at it: the list of folks that agree with him set's off my b.s. baffle . . .
But the most important line is:
>6) Request to have me as a guest on your talk
>show, radio station or other media outlet or
>speak at your convention.
There we go: make me rich and famous.
Bottom bottom line: the claims of "fraud" are primarily arguments with existing accounting practice, some of which use the equivalent of division by zero to reach their conclusions. The author has a lot to gain, however, should not be dismissed. By the "unorthodox" definition (to be charitabl) of fraud used here, the claims themselve are fradulent.
[Note: I'm not arguing that ms stock isn't a price bubble. I believe so, but not for the non-reasons in this article.]
It was possible (they had been notified by panasonic) that, while under heavy graphical or other load, data written to the floppy could be lost.
Toshiba was unable to duplicate this in the lab. No customers reported lost data. But panasonic sent the memo saying that it *could* happen, and they didn't change the design. *wham*
Look at your car. Any car. The manufacturor knows of all kinds of things that *could* go wrong and cause death, most of which could be fixed for a few dollars. The manufacturor chooses which ones are worth fixing, and which risks are too remote. If they fixed them all, all cars would start at $100,000, weigh five tons and up, and get four miles to the gallon.
But then, when one of the remote risks does come true, they get hit not only for actual economic damages (which is not a problem; this much is really just a variation on insurance), but also general damages (loss of quality of life, pain & suffering, etc.) in whatever multi-million dollar figure amount a jury pulls out of thin air, and even punitive damages.
And this is before class-actions get abused. The idea of a class action suit is to handle similar claims for damage together for judicial economy. But now, as here, we've eliminatged the "damage" requirement.
I don't see the situation getting any better. And why did I close down most of my practice to head for law school? . . .
hawk, disgruntled & disillusioned esq.
>Star Trek is not about science or technology. >Those are just a medium for the real stuff that
>goes on. Star Trek is about the characters and
>moral issues. To enjoy the show, you have to
>watch it consistantly. You have to know the
>characters. Half (if not more) of the content of
>the show is just about the characters and how
>they are growing.
This is *exactly* what is *wrong* with these newer three-lettered spinoffs. Star Trek was *not* about the characters; the characters, though they had personalities, were not individuals but personifications of human traits. It was the situations and conflicts that made Star Trek interesting, not the collection of second-rate actors playing characters.
This meant that they were able to use the entire program for the plot. Between the longer commercials today and the "sub-plots," "character devlopment," and miscellaneous junk, they get about half as much time for the program itself as Star Trek did.
>That's news to me.
:) [pity I can only charge him for a newspaper and not an hour :)]
:^)
:)
Send my 50 cents by email
>I've heard anti-non-competition rules called
>"right-to-work laws" on any number of occaisions.
>I suppose that's what I deserve for learning law >from human resource people.
not just law
Check Black's, or any of the literature on the National Labor Relations Act.
Also, those anti-non-competition rulese aren't needed, since the Common Law already does that. And the areas where the Common Law *does* permit them are so narrow that legislation to strike the clauses would usually be unconstitutional anyway--it would (usually) take away either the right to sell a business, or the ability to enter into a contract to perform one's trade (in the cases where noone would pay for the work without the protection of non-competiton).
hawk, esq.
>>Right-to-work laws are pretty widespread in the US.
:) Right-to-work laws are laws that make closed union shops (where one must belong to the union to work) illegal. The rules treating non-competiton clause hostilly go back at least thee hundred year.
>annecdotal
Actually, it's irrelevant
Hawk, esq.
Heavens, no. A summary of how it had been charged to the already paid retainer :)
Yes, that's exactly the difference.
.]).
1) is an injunction which is readily given. It came up with a famous actress a couple of years ago when she refused to make a movie (though the claim that there was a binding contract sounded questionable to me). The courts will grant these unless there's a really good reason not to (being a disguised non-competition clause might be such a reason, or there being something illegal about what the company would do with the work if the person completed the contract [e.g., it turs out to be the control software for an anthrax bomb . .
2) are rarely enforced, unless very narrowly drawn.
hawk, esq.
>In the case of non-compete clauses, courts have
>generally enforced them.
No, they haven't. The courts have always been hostile to these, and only enforced them when absolutely necessary.
>But, it would be great if more courts did side
>with the little guy like this!
The courts have been siding with the little guys on this for hundreds of years.
hawk, esq.
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, see an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
The level of misinformation and erroneous explanations of law I'm seeing in other posts is unusually high . . .
The law has *always* been hostile to agreements in restraint of trade, *including* non-competition clauses. Not just in some states, not just in the U.S., but the entire English speaking world which inheritted the Common Law of England.
In front of me is a case on the subject from 1711. Yes, nearly 300 years old. [Mitchel v. Reynoldds, 1 P. Wms. 181, 24 Eng. Rep 347 (K.B. 1711)]
It applies the same rules used today. An agreement in restraint of trade, particularly one barring a man from engaging in his trade, is presumed illegal, and must be shown to be necessary, Particularyly, a non-competition clause must be necessary to accomplish the purpose of the contract.
In Mitchell, a baker sold his bakehouse, and agreed not to compete in that parish for five years--which he promptly violated, claiming that the bond was void by law. The court found the clause enforceable because it was the only way the business could possibly be transferred--if the old baker could open again across the street, he would take all of the business that had supposedly sold to the new baker. So in that one parish (not even the entire city), the baker couldn't sell--but he could in the rest of England.
Essentially the same rules apply today. To enforce such a clause, it must
1) actually be necessary to achieve the contract,
2) be as limited in time as possible--only long enough to achieve the purpose needed, and
3) be limited in geography, only covering the minimal region needed.
Overstep any of these by even a little bit, and the entire clause is thrown out. In five years of full-time practice, I only saw one non-compete clause that it wasn't clear I could have thrown out [hint: *don't* try to write your own--pay someone who knows what he's doing.].
So there's nothing new or shocking here. If there's no trade secrets (these could include in-house techniques for getting the job done faster), you fail part one. Today, a year is forever, and it would be hard to conceive of any internet related field where a year wouldnt' be too long, and two fails. Three, however, isn't clear--the entire world might be a single geography for purposes of competition.
Just for an example: suppose that a week after they sold slashdot, rob, hemos, & rob quit andover and formed the new cmdrtaco site, covering the exact same topics, and with discussion forums. If this were possible, and the non-compete clause couldn't be enforced, andover would be nuts to pay anything, and would certainly pay much less than they did. On the other hand, if andover could prevent them from competing for a year, andover would probably keep the audience if, a year later, they opened a competing site. In fact, much less than a year would do.
hawk, esq.
>Nor will there be...ever. Until the K7, AMD has
>never included multiprocessor support in their >x86 designs
*sigh*
This again.
Yes, the K6 (and the M2) have multi-processor support. No, it's not the same standard as intel (for which they would have had to pay royalties), and noone ever made a chipset to support it. But the support is there on the chips (Cyrix & AMD even used the same standard, but I forget what it was called)
But the patented genes are artificial, or in some way artificially moved into another organism.
:)
A patent on a gene in general would seem to have a few billion problems with "prior art."
Cascade hops from that region are a wonderful thing. They're the best finishing hop I've found, and give Sierra Nevada Pale Ale that wonderful smell.
(ok, for the purists, those aren't finishing hops, but come from the hop-back).
I've seen it happen twice, once on my K6, and once on my thinkpad. For no apparent reason, its fdisk shifts the labels of all of the partitions up by one. Fortunately, I didn't have a partition 4 either time . . .
>Buffering data and collecing writes together
>increases performance, and that wouldn't be
>possible is you could just eject the damn thing
>anytime you pleased!
This was one of the bestthings about the long-lost mac floppies. Physical ejection was under program control, giving a chance to unmount (which to varying degrees at different times, macos did).
Somewhere along the way I saw a pc with similar drives, but it seems to have been lost along the way . . .
Quite obvious: to comply with the language laws, they'd have to encrypt the french translation as well :)