Actually, I miscalculated, since the bulk of the patent count has occurred in the past few years. He has 3000 patent submissions that are still under examination. If we estimate conservatively that those submissions occurred in the last 10 years (i.e., that some of the patents have take that long to receive a determination), then he has submitted an average of 300 patent applications per year over the last 10 years. Forget about the actual idea conception, the paperwork alone is daunting.
1085 patents granted and 3000 more submitted. That's 4085 patents. Assuming that he's worked on patents for 50 years, that's an average of over 80 patents per year. That's a lot of patents. The implication of the such a large number of patents is that all the patents are equally valuable. However, I'm not sure it's humanly possible to perform the work for 80 valuable patents per year.
This reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who made waves with 60 publications over 2 years, including 15 in leading journals such as Science and Nature. It was eventually determined that he made up important data for his papers, leading to retraction of many of his papers and even his PhD degree.
I'm not suggesting that there's any fraud in the case of Mr. Wood. Rather, there are many very common and even accepted ways to accumulate a huge number of patents. It's not unthinkable that many/most of the patents are (1) work mostly performed by others for which he provided guidance, review, or management, (2) black-box patents that describe what should be done instead of providing sufficient detail to allow someone else skilled in the art to actually utilize the idea, or (3) incremental ideas based on existing patents or prior art.
It may very well be that Mr. Wood is a genius that has contributed significantly to science and technology and has made a difference in the world. However, the number of patents is not a believable metric of that contribution. To convince me that he is a genius requires only a description of his impactful ideas, as encapsulated in a few (or even one or zero) patents. The large number of patents simply invites skepticism.
There are no car foundries or car part vendors that Apple can impose one-sided manufacturing or sourcing agreements with.
Uhh, GM, Ford, BMW, etc. already do and have far less cash on hand than Apple does to throw around. There are literally hundreds of parts suppliers in the world that would bend over backwards for Apple money!
GM, Ford et al. are lucky to reach 20% gross margins. Apple would struggle to equal those margins because it can't guarantee volumes similar to the incumbents. Phone suppliers sell their souls to Apple because of the volumes and because there are no viable alternatives. Apple will have neither of those advantages in the auto world.
There are tens of thousands of them actually, from everything from the screws to the thermostats, to the wiring harnesses, brakes, tires, seats, radios, speakers, steering wheels. How many parts do you think GM/Ford actually MAKES vs just assembles?
Actually, my full, unedited statement was "There are no car foundries or car part vendors that Apple can impose one-sided manufacturing or sourcing agreements with." That is a completely true statement. A huge component of Apple's financial success is the ability (ala Walmart, Costco, etc.) to squeeze vendor margins in order to gain an advantage relative to competitors. This will not be possible with cars.
Apple specializes in selling to the hipster market, so their hipstermobile will probably have more in common with a Smart Car than a traditional automobile. Basically a golf cart with doors. It will cost $4,500 to manufacture, be marketed as saving the world, cost $19,999 at retail, and sell like hotcakes to a certain demographic.
Yes, but manufacturing a car with 75% gross margins will be a bit tricky, since typical auto gross margins are less than 20% with large volume.
And the $4500 manufacturing cost will be equally challenging. There are no car foundries or car part vendors that Apple can impose one-sided manufacturing or sourcing agreements with.
And Apple would have to contend with the same logistic and legal distribution hurdles that Tesla is facing.
This is an incorrect use of the English word. Tolerance is a quality describing the observer, not the speaker. Being tolerant means that one strives not to be offended. For example, a drought-tolerant plant is able to exist in drought conditions; it makes no sense to talk about the weather's responsibilities with respect to drought tolerance.
This is PC-talk trying to use newspeak. The idea of trying not to offend others is laudable. However, tolerance is the wrong word for that.
Yes, Microsoft et al. should be allowed to shelter not only their hard earned money overseas but also the data describing that hard earned money.
Of course, Microsoft et al. should really investigate the idea of collecting money from individual citizens and sheltering that money abroad. The profits from that venture would probably be greater than their current efforts. Why can't we also share in the tax shelters? If corporations can be people, why can't people be corporations?
But, I'm glad we all support the right of Microsoft et al. to fight US government oppression. We support it here on slashdot with comments, and we support it with the extra taxes that we gladly and patriotically pay to offset the missing tax revenue from our esteemed corporations. Money well spent.
You sound pretty stupid and have apparently never heard of the smell test.
Tell me does your idea that our salaries would be e.g. $30k higher now if only these companies had actively poached back then pass the smell test? No. It does not.
Ahh, yes, the smell test, that bastion of truth. Why don't we use the smell test to settle arguments more often? Well, proponents of this technique implicitly mean only their noses are accurate.
Well, my inaccurate nose says that contrary to your wishes, the ghosts of Adam Smith and his pesky supply and demand ideas resulted in lost wages for the affected plaintiffs. That Jobs et al. may have actually cared more about avoiding turnover in their organizations and about the thrill of pulling marionette strings doesn't diminish the economic losses of the plaintiffs.
Of course, there is also the pesky inconvenience of trial testimony (e.g., the story of Mr. Hullot's team that never was and whose potential members suffered measurable economic damages), but certainly noses trump trial testimony.
This reminds me of a reported conversation between Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma) and Morris Chang (of TSMC):
“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”
So, Samsung's 15% of worldwide profits is still around $6 billion, and Xiaomi's 1% is still $500 million. This is only a problem for MBAs and shareholders but not for the longevity of the a company's operations.
Not only is this a slap on the wrist, it's actually encouragement for continuing the practice. A company can pay $5000/employee to save many times that amount. The ROI on this practice must have the CFOs drooling.
Also, I wonder if the $41 million not going to the lawyers ends up with the plaintiffs or the companies.
Of course, this entire decision is a laughable farce. The judge considered $4000/person unfair but $5000/person fair. I never went to law school, but that type of judgment is baffling to me.
So, to sum up, legally the companies lost, the lawyers won/lost, and the plaintiffs won, but in the real world, the companies won, the lawyers won, and the plaintiffs lost.
Things that are high on my work satisfaction list: Work-life balance Work-life balance Work-life balance (did I mention work-life balance?) Good working relationship with my boss Good working relationship with my coworkers Non-stressful commute
Things that don't matter: Work satisfaction (it's work; I get my enjoyment from the part away from work; hence the supreme importance of work-life balance) How well the company is doing financially (unless I'm going to be laid off soon or I own a huge amount of company stock) Lunch or snacks (free or otherwise) Promotion and titles (unless they come with financial compensation and I'm not yet adequately compensated)
Things that sort of matter: Financial compensation (but only up to the point where it meets my needs, some wants, and savings requirements for retirement; past that it doesn't matter) An office (cubicles and open space are horrible; I would trade an office for lowered financial compensation)
Even companies that have good reputations emphasize the lunches, cubicles, money, and work satisfaction but never mention work-life balance unless it's redefined to mean the exact opposite. Even here on slashdot, none of the moderated comments mention work-life balance.
I have visited Taiwan a few times, and each time I am scared when I ride in a car. Drivers swerve out of their lanes or pull out suddenly into traffic. Scooters weave all over the place. Crossing busy intersections is very different from American modes of driving. If I were to drive in Taiwan, I'm sure I would get into a daily accident. However, the locals seem to be able to manage what I see as chaos because they anticipate these driving behaviors and compensate by driving more slowly and continually looking out for actions that are not necessarily base on written law.
On the other hand, a Taiwanese driver may have difficulty driving in the US due to higher speeds and more than occasional intransigence at protecting one's legal right of way even at the cost of safety.
The idea I'm trying to convey is that the driving system seems to work if all drivers follow the same philosophy, and anticipation of other drivers' behavior matches reality. This is one of the problems with self-driving cars. They may be "perfect" at following the law and "common sense", but if their "common sense" conflicts with that of surrounding drivers, there's a potential problem, even if others are not technically following the law. Take for example the car driving at the speed limit on a highway where everyone else is driving 10-15 mph faster. The slow car is the only one technically following the law, but the speed differential from that one car potentially causes problems.
Yes. Quite a few of them actually. Reputation management is something we all do to some degree. I don't know how you would exist in a complex society without some amount of effort directed towards maintaining your reputation in the community.
Yes, but most of us do our "reputation management" by, you know, behaving properly rather than going around trying to erase any record of our misdeeds.
Behaving properly? Is that necessarily with a right to be forgotten? Isn't Wikipedia reputation optimization just the European model of reputation management, just with a bit more of a proactive bent?
Wow, I didn't realize that you could buy your own vote. Of course, that also means that you can pick up friends or strangers and buy their votes, too. Of all voting systems, this seems to me to be one of the easiest to manipulate.
In this case, "groundswell" could very easily be interpreted as vote buying.
The raw error rate for DRAM tends to correlate with DRAM chips. Raw, non-ECC soft error rates are in the neighborhood of 10 FIT/chip or say 160 FIT/DIMM for a DIMM with 16 chips. Let's consider a system with 4 DIMMs, which has 640 FIT. That's equivalent to a soft error every 178 years. Hard errors are additional, but for the typical amounts of DRAM in a PC, soft errors (and usually also hard errors) are inconsequential.
Also, field studies (see Sridharan, SC12) show that around half of all soft errors are not correctable with SECDED ECC.
Racism is not the problem. The problem is inequality of opportunities and resources, which happens to correlate somewhat with race and which has some causes characterized by racial history.
Refusing to recognize the existence of race or race-based historical causes of inequality would have the effect of freezing in place the current situation of inequality. This is a good thing for those who currently benefit and a bad thing for those at a disadvantage.
BTW, there appears to be several definitions of "racism" assumed by the various viewpoints on this topic. To some, it means any acknowledgement of the existence of race. To other, it means actions that put a particular race at a disadvantage. It seems to me that the underlying definitions are manipulated to support antithetical viewpoints.
That's why it's critical to focus on the inequalities rather than the malleable concept of racism. Of course, if we don't care about addressing the inequalities, then this entire discussion is fruitless and simply devolves into a rhetorical exercise in the semantics of a fuzzy term.
Race is the most meaningless metric of all when it comes to evaluating an ideal workforce. The last thing minority activists want is for competence to become the deciding factor when determining who to hire.
There are competing goals at play here. Some might want an ideally efficient workforce, whatever that means. I think the proponents of releasing the racial data are aiming for something else, i.e., for equal opportunity across races. I think both goals are arguably desirable. One of the great complications in evaluating equity is the complexity in evaluating competence and how that competence was attained. The argument behind race-based considerations is that competence is relative, and the disadvantaged level of competence for certain minority races is to some extent the result of past injustices that would today be considered not only illegal but crimes against humanity.
Yes, we weren't around when these injustices were carried out, but we reap the relative benefits. A few reap the direct benefit of direct financial inheritance from those injustices. However, many more reap the relative benefit of having a large portion of potential competitors relegated to less competent status due directly to the those injustices.
The HDD manufacturers are still making the 15k RPM SAS HDD. Why? Because you can't use cheap SSDs in the data center. So the enterprise SSDs we're talking about are several times more expensive than the laptop SSDs. Depending on the workload, cost per performance may or may not be better for SSDs. Because SSDs are mostly considered as a caching layer between DRAM and HDDs, the workloads tend be be write-heavy, which increases wear leveling overhead and impacts performance.
So, will SSDs kill off the enterprise HDD market? Maybe, but it's not happening now or in the near term. Also, SSDs as a caching layer is itself pressured by DRAM, which is much more expensive but also much faster.
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc. definitely have special talents to recognize a market opportunity and to assemble the necessary resources to bring a successful product to market. However, they also have to be "lucky". There has to be an opportunity to recognize. As Malcomb Gladwell notes, there's an uncanny correlation between birth years and success as a founder in Silicon Valley, and one possible explanation is the penalty of recognizing an opportunity too early before supporting technology matures or too late after first mover advantage is lost.
As many comments have noted, point people in the public eye often receive the credit for other people's work. Yes, these point people still have to have the talent to recognize which brilliant people to pay attention to or ignore. However, that talent is far less impressive than the brilliance that the masses and history books promote. One analogy might be ascribing credit for championships to a professional sports general manager that assembles superstars rather than lauding the actual athletes.
The general idea that SSDs will gradually encroach on HDD markets is correct and has been happening, albeit at a somewhat slow pace. While predictions about the disappearance of HDDs have existed for almost the last ten years, units sales of HDDs still dominate and probably will for quite a few more years. Microdrives disappeared about a decade ago, but that has so far been the only HDD market to completely evaporate. SSD are increasingly gaining ground in low-margin markets, such as laptops, but even there, most laptops still ship with HDDs due to cost and/or capacity reasons. In the enterprise performance and archive/cold storage markets, HDDs dominate even more as SSD cost and cost/capacity won't catch up to that for HDDs for a while (possible a very long while).
well it's not like they didn't know her age either, they saw that before they called her too
It's quite one thing to know an age beforehand, and another to experience the age firsthand.
Although how would they know the age beforehand? It's not legal to ask and most people don't say.
Even if explicit years aren't listed, it's usually not hard to decern how many decades of experience a person shows on their resume.
I think it can easily be that in-person, the group of younger people simply does not feel as comfortable with them. It's not even really age discrimination so much as cultural discrimination because the difference in cultural experience is so large... Frankly I don't even have an issue with it, because if a group is not comfortable working with you you are not going to be happy working with them either.
I totally agree that a lack of "fit" is almost always bidirectional. If they don't like you as an employee, you probably won't like them as an employer. However, this "culture" thing is totally bogus. It's a cop-out and a codewode for differences in gender, sexual orientation, age, race, family situation, appearance, height, weight, accents, religion, political views, hobbies, sports fandom, school attended, etc. It's another way to say that you are experienced and qualified in terms of skills, but I still don't want to hire you. In fact, someone of a different race would directly have differences in cultural experience, and that type of hiring consideration is illegal. There has to be a better codeword...
The Fed right now has $1.7 trillion in "toxic assets" on its balance sheet. In return, primary dealers got $1.7 trillion in deposit accounts at the Fed. No one else was going to lend to those dealers; they were tapped out, couldn't roll over their funding. But the Fed extended its unlimited safety net to them. Why not give Greece the same courtesy?
How many of those dealers were Americans? It was a case of a single country helping out its own economy. If Greece wants to do the same, it should go right ahead.
Please don't resist. In oppressive regimes such request should not be challenged. We feel sorry for folks living in USA or North Korea
What an utterly inane statement. This slashdot discussion is all about juries, judges, laws, interpretations of laws, justice, and freedom. Do you think any of these things matter in North Korea? That's the huge difference between the US and North Korea. Sure, there are a lot of things wrong with the US and its government and laws, but it's nowhere near the situation in North Korea. Not even close.
That's a common problem here on slashdot, the bubbling of emotions to cloud reasoning. Yes, prosecuting people based on words that would not be viewed by most people as threats is despicable. But equating that to having someone executed on a whim is utter nonsense.
No one may be disadvantaged or favoured because of his gender, ancestry, race, language, motherland, land of origin, faith/religion, religious or political "ideology". [...]
But residency, nationality, and immigration status are not on that list, unless somehow the above list is interpreted in a non-intuitive way. Are all non-EU people allowed to immigrate to Germany for the purposes of study or employment? Seems like at least for employment, the above list is not all-inclusive.
Each of my daughter's school performance videos is a 30-50GB file, and they quickly add up.
Is that a copy for watching or for editing? An extended DVD is 8 GiB, and it uses an obsolete codec (MPEG-2). I'll grant that video production needs more disk space, but I imagine that "most" people won't be doing that. Besides, I was under the impression that external interfaces (USB 3, eSATA, Thunderbolt) have become fast enough to support editing video, so you could leave the SSD inside the case and plug in the HDD only when needed.
Yes, I could transcode the video to something much more compact. I don't have a camcorder with a newer interface, so I wouldn't want to use it as a storage device. However, the main reason I don't do either is convenience. I already have an HDD, so I can simply copy the file. Why go to all the hassle just to fit the file into a smaller device?
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Actually, I miscalculated, since the bulk of the patent count has occurred in the past few years. He has 3000 patent submissions that are still under examination. If we estimate conservatively that those submissions occurred in the last 10 years (i.e., that some of the patents have take that long to receive a determination), then he has submitted an average of 300 patent applications per year over the last 10 years. Forget about the actual idea conception, the paperwork alone is daunting.
1085 patents granted and 3000 more submitted. That's 4085 patents. Assuming that he's worked on patents for 50 years, that's an average of over 80 patents per year. That's a lot of patents. The implication of the such a large number of patents is that all the patents are equally valuable. However, I'm not sure it's humanly possible to perform the work for 80 valuable patents per year.
This reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who made waves with 60 publications over 2 years, including 15 in leading journals such as Science and Nature. It was eventually determined that he made up important data for his papers, leading to retraction of many of his papers and even his PhD degree.
I'm not suggesting that there's any fraud in the case of Mr. Wood. Rather, there are many very common and even accepted ways to accumulate a huge number of patents. It's not unthinkable that many/most of the patents are
(1) work mostly performed by others for which he provided guidance, review, or management,
(2) black-box patents that describe what should be done instead of providing sufficient detail to allow someone else skilled in the art to actually utilize the idea, or
(3) incremental ideas based on existing patents or prior art.
It may very well be that Mr. Wood is a genius that has contributed significantly to science and technology and has made a difference in the world. However, the number of patents is not a believable metric of that contribution. To convince me that he is a genius requires only a description of his impactful ideas, as encapsulated in a few (or even one or zero) patents. The large number of patents simply invites skepticism.
There are no car foundries or car part vendors that Apple can impose one-sided manufacturing or sourcing agreements with.
Uhh, GM, Ford, BMW, etc. already do and have far less cash on hand than Apple does to throw around. There are literally hundreds of parts suppliers in the world that would bend over backwards for Apple money!
GM, Ford et al. are lucky to reach 20% gross margins. Apple would struggle to equal those margins because it can't guarantee volumes similar to the incumbents. Phone suppliers sell their souls to Apple because of the volumes and because there are no viable alternatives. Apple will have neither of those advantages in the auto world.
There are no car foundries or car part vendors
There are tens of thousands of them actually, from everything from the screws to the thermostats, to the wiring harnesses, brakes, tires, seats, radios, speakers, steering wheels. How many parts do you think GM/Ford actually MAKES vs just assembles?
Actually, my full, unedited statement was "There are no car foundries or car part vendors that Apple can impose one-sided manufacturing or sourcing agreements with." That is a completely true statement. A huge component of Apple's financial success is the ability (ala Walmart, Costco, etc.) to squeeze vendor margins in order to gain an advantage relative to competitors. This will not be possible with cars.
Apple specializes in selling to the hipster market, so their hipstermobile will probably have more in common with a Smart Car than a traditional automobile. Basically a golf cart with doors. It will cost $4,500 to manufacture, be marketed as saving the world, cost $19,999 at retail, and sell like hotcakes to a certain demographic.
Yes, but manufacturing a car with 75% gross margins will be a bit tricky, since typical auto gross margins are less than 20% with large volume.
And the $4500 manufacturing cost will be equally challenging. There are no car foundries or car part vendors that Apple can impose one-sided manufacturing or sourcing agreements with.
And Apple would have to contend with the same logistic and legal distribution hurdles that Tesla is facing.
Tolerant means we strive to not offend anyone.
This is an incorrect use of the English word. Tolerance is a quality describing the observer, not the speaker. Being tolerant means that one strives not to be offended. For example, a drought-tolerant plant is able to exist in drought conditions; it makes no sense to talk about the weather's responsibilities with respect to drought tolerance.
This is PC-talk trying to use newspeak. The idea of trying not to offend others is laudable. However, tolerance is the wrong word for that.
Yes, Microsoft et al. should be allowed to shelter not only their hard earned money overseas but also the data describing that hard earned money.
Of course, Microsoft et al. should really investigate the idea of collecting money from individual citizens and sheltering that money abroad. The profits from that venture would probably be greater than their current efforts. Why can't we also share in the tax shelters? If corporations can be people, why can't people be corporations?
But, I'm glad we all support the right of Microsoft et al. to fight US government oppression. We support it here on slashdot with comments, and we support it with the extra taxes that we gladly and patriotically pay to offset the missing tax revenue from our esteemed corporations. Money well spent.
You sound pretty stupid and have apparently never heard of the smell test.
Tell me does your idea that our salaries would be e.g. $30k higher now if only these companies had actively poached back then pass the smell test? No. It does not.
Ahh, yes, the smell test, that bastion of truth. Why don't we use the smell test to settle arguments more often? Well, proponents of this technique implicitly mean only their noses are accurate.
Well, my inaccurate nose says that contrary to your wishes, the ghosts of Adam Smith and his pesky supply and demand ideas resulted in lost wages for the affected plaintiffs. That Jobs et al. may have actually cared more about avoiding turnover in their organizations and about the thrill of pulling marionette strings doesn't diminish the economic losses of the plaintiffs.
Of course, there is also the pesky inconvenience of trial testimony (e.g., the story of Mr. Hullot's team that never was and whose potential members suffered measurable economic damages), but certainly noses trump trial testimony.
This reminds me of a reported conversation between Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma) and Morris Chang (of TSMC):
“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”
So, Samsung's 15% of worldwide profits is still around $6 billion, and Xiaomi's 1% is still $500 million. This is only a problem for MBAs and shareholders but not for the longevity of the a company's operations.
Not only is this a slap on the wrist, it's actually encouragement for continuing the practice. A company can pay $5000/employee to save many times that amount. The ROI on this practice must have the CFOs drooling.
Also, I wonder if the $41 million not going to the lawyers ends up with the plaintiffs or the companies.
Of course, this entire decision is a laughable farce. The judge considered $4000/person unfair but $5000/person fair. I never went to law school, but that type of judgment is baffling to me.
So, to sum up, legally the companies lost, the lawyers won/lost, and the plaintiffs won, but in the real world, the companies won, the lawyers won, and the plaintiffs lost.
Things that are high on my work satisfaction list:
Work-life balance
Work-life balance
Work-life balance (did I mention work-life balance?)
Good working relationship with my boss
Good working relationship with my coworkers
Non-stressful commute
Things that don't matter:
Work satisfaction (it's work; I get my enjoyment from the part away from work; hence the supreme importance of work-life balance)
How well the company is doing financially (unless I'm going to be laid off soon or I own a huge amount of company stock)
Lunch or snacks (free or otherwise)
Promotion and titles (unless they come with financial compensation and I'm not yet adequately compensated)
Things that sort of matter:
Financial compensation (but only up to the point where it meets my needs, some wants, and savings requirements for retirement; past that it doesn't matter)
An office (cubicles and open space are horrible; I would trade an office for lowered financial compensation)
Even companies that have good reputations emphasize the lunches, cubicles, money, and work satisfaction but never mention work-life balance unless it's redefined to mean the exact opposite. Even here on slashdot, none of the moderated comments mention work-life balance.
I have visited Taiwan a few times, and each time I am scared when I ride in a car. Drivers swerve out of their lanes or pull out suddenly into traffic. Scooters weave all over the place. Crossing busy intersections is very different from American modes of driving. If I were to drive in Taiwan, I'm sure I would get into a daily accident. However, the locals seem to be able to manage what I see as chaos because they anticipate these driving behaviors and compensate by driving more slowly and continually looking out for actions that are not necessarily base on written law.
On the other hand, a Taiwanese driver may have difficulty driving in the US due to higher speeds and more than occasional intransigence at protecting one's legal right of way even at the cost of safety.
The idea I'm trying to convey is that the driving system seems to work if all drivers follow the same philosophy, and anticipation of other drivers' behavior matches reality. This is one of the problems with self-driving cars. They may be "perfect" at following the law and "common sense", but if their "common sense" conflicts with that of surrounding drivers, there's a potential problem, even if others are not technically following the law. Take for example the car driving at the speed limit on a highway where everyone else is driving 10-15 mph faster. The slow car is the only one technically following the law, but the speed differential from that one car potentially causes problems.
Yes, but most of us do our "reputation management" by, you know, behaving properly rather than going around trying to erase any record of our misdeeds.
Behaving properly? Is that necessarily with a right to be forgotten? Isn't Wikipedia reputation optimization just the European model of reputation management, just with a bit more of a proactive bent?
Wow, I didn't realize that you could buy your own vote. Of course, that also means that you can pick up friends or strangers and buy their votes, too. Of all voting systems, this seems to me to be one of the easiest to manipulate.
In this case, "groundswell" could very easily be interpreted as vote buying.
The raw error rate for DRAM tends to correlate with DRAM chips. Raw, non-ECC soft error rates are in the neighborhood of 10 FIT/chip or say 160 FIT/DIMM for a DIMM with 16 chips. Let's consider a system with 4 DIMMs, which has 640 FIT. That's equivalent to a soft error every 178 years. Hard errors are additional, but for the typical amounts of DRAM in a PC, soft errors (and usually also hard errors) are inconsequential.
Also, field studies (see Sridharan, SC12) show that around half of all soft errors are not correctable with SECDED ECC.
Racism is not the problem. The problem is inequality of opportunities and resources, which happens to correlate somewhat with race and which has some causes characterized by racial history.
Refusing to recognize the existence of race or race-based historical causes of inequality would have the effect of freezing in place the current situation of inequality. This is a good thing for those who currently benefit and a bad thing for those at a disadvantage.
BTW, there appears to be several definitions of "racism" assumed by the various viewpoints on this topic. To some, it means any acknowledgement of the existence of race. To other, it means actions that put a particular race at a disadvantage. It seems to me that the underlying definitions are manipulated to support antithetical viewpoints.
That's why it's critical to focus on the inequalities rather than the malleable concept of racism. Of course, if we don't care about addressing the inequalities, then this entire discussion is fruitless and simply devolves into a rhetorical exercise in the semantics of a fuzzy term.
Race is the most meaningless metric of all when it comes to evaluating an ideal workforce. The last thing minority activists want is for competence to become the deciding factor when determining who to hire.
There are competing goals at play here. Some might want an ideally efficient workforce, whatever that means. I think the proponents of releasing the racial data are aiming for something else, i.e., for equal opportunity across races. I think both goals are arguably desirable. One of the great complications in evaluating equity is the complexity in evaluating competence and how that competence was attained. The argument behind race-based considerations is that competence is relative, and the disadvantaged level of competence for certain minority races is to some extent the result of past injustices that would today be considered not only illegal but crimes against humanity.
Yes, we weren't around when these injustices were carried out, but we reap the relative benefits. A few reap the direct benefit of direct financial inheritance from those injustices. However, many more reap the relative benefit of having a large portion of potential competitors relegated to less competent status due directly to the those injustices.
The HDD manufacturers are still making the 15k RPM SAS HDD. Why? Because you can't use cheap SSDs in the data center. So the enterprise SSDs we're talking about are several times more expensive than the laptop SSDs. Depending on the workload, cost per performance may or may not be better for SSDs. Because SSDs are mostly considered as a caching layer between DRAM and HDDs, the workloads tend be be write-heavy, which increases wear leveling overhead and impacts performance.
So, will SSDs kill off the enterprise HDD market? Maybe, but it's not happening now or in the near term. Also, SSDs as a caching layer is itself pressured by DRAM, which is much more expensive but also much faster.
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc. definitely have special talents to recognize a market opportunity and to assemble the necessary resources to bring a successful product to market. However, they also have to be "lucky". There has to be an opportunity to recognize. As Malcomb Gladwell notes, there's an uncanny correlation between birth years and success as a founder in Silicon Valley, and one possible explanation is the penalty of recognizing an opportunity too early before supporting technology matures or too late after first mover advantage is lost.
As many comments have noted, point people in the public eye often receive the credit for other people's work. Yes, these point people still have to have the talent to recognize which brilliant people to pay attention to or ignore. However, that talent is far less impressive than the brilliance that the masses and history books promote. One analogy might be ascribing credit for championships to a professional sports general manager that assembles superstars rather than lauding the actual athletes.
The general idea that SSDs will gradually encroach on HDD markets is correct and has been happening, albeit at a somewhat slow pace. While predictions about the disappearance of HDDs have existed for almost the last ten years, units sales of HDDs still dominate and probably will for quite a few more years. Microdrives disappeared about a decade ago, but that has so far been the only HDD market to completely evaporate. SSD are increasingly gaining ground in low-margin markets, such as laptops, but even there, most laptops still ship with HDDs due to cost and/or capacity reasons. In the enterprise performance and archive/cold storage markets, HDDs dominate even more as SSD cost and cost/capacity won't catch up to that for HDDs for a while (possible a very long while).
well it's not like they didn't know her age either, they saw that before they called her too
It's quite one thing to know an age beforehand, and another to experience the age firsthand.
Although how would they know the age beforehand? It's not legal to ask and most people don't say.
Even if explicit years aren't listed, it's usually not hard to decern how many decades of experience a person shows on their resume.
I think it can easily be that in-person, the group of younger people simply does not feel as comfortable with them. It's not even really age discrimination so much as cultural discrimination because the difference in cultural experience is so large... Frankly I don't even have an issue with it, because if a group is not comfortable working with you you are not going to be happy working with them either.
I totally agree that a lack of "fit" is almost always bidirectional. If they don't like you as an employee, you probably won't like them as an employer. However, this "culture" thing is totally bogus. It's a cop-out and a codewode for differences in gender, sexual orientation, age, race, family situation, appearance, height, weight, accents, religion, political views, hobbies, sports fandom, school attended, etc. It's another way to say that you are experienced and qualified in terms of skills, but I still don't want to hire you. In fact, someone of a different race would directly have differences in cultural experience, and that type of hiring consideration is illegal. There has to be a better codeword ...
The Fed right now has $1.7 trillion in "toxic assets" on its balance sheet. In return, primary dealers got $1.7 trillion in deposit accounts at the Fed. No one else was going to lend to those dealers; they were tapped out, couldn't roll over their funding. But the Fed extended its unlimited safety net to them. Why not give Greece the same courtesy?
How many of those dealers were Americans? It was a case of a single country helping out its own economy. If Greece wants to do the same, it should go right ahead.
Please don't resist. In oppressive regimes such request should not be challenged.
We feel sorry for folks living in USA or North Korea
What an utterly inane statement. This slashdot discussion is all about juries, judges, laws, interpretations of laws, justice, and freedom. Do you think any of these things matter in North Korea? That's the huge difference between the US and North Korea. Sure, there are a lot of things wrong with the US and its government and laws, but it's nowhere near the situation in North Korea. Not even close.
That's a common problem here on slashdot, the bubbling of emotions to cloud reasoning. Yes, prosecuting people based on words that would not be viewed by most people as threats is despicable. But equating that to having someone executed on a whim is utter nonsense.
No one may be disadvantaged or favoured because of his gender, ancestry, race, language, motherland, land of origin, faith/religion, religious or political "ideology". [...]
But residency, nationality, and immigration status are not on that list, unless somehow the above list is interpreted in a non-intuitive way. Are all non-EU people allowed to immigrate to Germany for the purposes of study or employment? Seems like at least for employment, the above list is not all-inclusive.
Each of my daughter's school performance videos is a 30-50GB file, and they quickly add up.
Is that a copy for watching or for editing? An extended DVD is 8 GiB, and it uses an obsolete codec (MPEG-2). I'll grant that video production needs more disk space, but I imagine that "most" people won't be doing that. Besides, I was under the impression that external interfaces (USB 3, eSATA, Thunderbolt) have become fast enough to support editing video, so you could leave the SSD inside the case and plug in the HDD only when needed.
Yes, I could transcode the video to something much more compact. I don't have a camcorder with a newer interface, so I wouldn't want to use it as a storage device. However, the main reason I don't do either is convenience. I already have an HDD, so I can simply copy the file. Why go to all the hassle just to fit the file into a smaller device?