If you posted as yourself rather than anonymous coward, I could friend you, which on slashdot just means I see your posts while other less worthy people have their posts collapsed. It also adds +1 if you post as yourself, so far more people see it. It's rare that I which an anonymous poster weren't anonymous, but it's true here.
Panasonic sold 100,000,000 batteries to Tesla so far this year. They reopened shuttered plants, and are investing in new ones. They already push the state of the art vs competitors, likely due in part to their collaboration on the Tesla Roadster battery packs. With the volume Panasonic now has, they are simultaneously making a bunch of money and dropping prices for Tesla dramatically, rumored to be less than $2/battery now (some speculate as low as $1.20, but I doubt that), which is huge when you're buying 7,000 of them per car.
There are so many problems with these batteries that make them expensive. Do you know how many battery chemistries are competing in the 18650 format? I'm no battery expert, but apparently, there are so many that we now have Li-Ons, TiGrs, BeArs (Oh, my!), and even LiGrs. That fragments economies of scale benefits. Add on top of that crazy low-volume customers (a laptop may have 4 or 6 cells), individual protection circuits *per battery*, built in, and a market fragmented in it's needs: RC cars need high power, as in A123, laptops need power density, equipment often needs long shelf life, etc.
So... 100,000,000 batteries in the first 8 months of 2013, all bought from one company... yes, I think this will have an impact on lowering costs.
For unmanned missions, LEO is the first step. Once you have a craft in LEO, it can use massively more efficient propulsion to get where it needs to go, so long as you're not in a hurry. If you put a man in it, every day becomes critical and you're forced to continue burning fuel inefficiently, but if it's just a robot, even a few years in space is no biggie. If you want to get 1000 tons of stuff to the Moon, I doubt we'd want to do that in a hurry. Instead of a few SLS launches, in reality, we'd do a lot more small launches to LEO and let the cargo take it's time getting to the Moon.
Even for manned missions, is it clear that we want to launch to deep space directly from the ground? How much complexity would it add to use Russian rockets to get people to the Space Station, and cheap unmanned rockets to get the deep space craft and it's fuel there? I'm sure NASA looked at all of the options, but I'm not convinced that they settled on the SLS because it's the best idea. I think politics is involved. It seems like they like they prefer huge line items with many billions funding, like "Space Shuttle", rather than a bunch of little projects. That keeps it simple for all those morons in congress, who have to sell the idea to an even dumber public.
Absolutely right. Not only that, but politics forced NASA to behave stupidly, pushing giant missions that would be popular with the public, rather than multiple smaller missions that make more sense. The Space Shuttle practically killed NASA, but because it looks and lands like a plane, it was very popular. Congress also gave NASA a monopoly on space launches. SpaceX would have been illegal up to a few years ago, which is why American companies couldn't get a satellite into space cost effectively, and had to use services from other countries instead. American companies developed most of the technology that put men on the moon, but they were forced to scrap it, and were banned from using that technology for anything but NASA approved projects and weapon systems, which of course were screwed up by politics.
I hate to say it, but it's a good thing, IMO, that NASA is being pushed to the side. A lot of those bright people leaving NASA are joining companies like SpaceX, and they're finally getting the chance to make a difference. If NASA had gotten out of the way decades ago, I think we'd be a lot further along.
Since that's an actual security precaution that could work, I suspect a paid shill with mod points will mod your comment down into oblivion, or at least post such drivel in response that no one wants to join in. I've been reading these security related posts on slashdot for years, and the pattern of ass holes making the conversation no fun when we might start collaborating on real security seems to be a highly repetitive pattern.
That extra computer could be a Raspberry Pi. For $35, it seems like a good investment to me.
That's daft, and must be an opinion of a non-parent. As a parent, you do what's best for your kids, and the public schools can go to hell if they are not the best option. Are you seriously saying that you would force your kids to have a second rate education when as their parents, you could do far far better for them?
Clearly you don't have a clue what your talking about.
It's luck of the draw. I bought into the "best" public school system in NC, as of 2000, which was Chapel Hill, and I pay an obscene level of property tax for this benefit, which I don't mind. I'm all for paying for high quality education. Then, Chapel Hill screwed us, and redistricted so many non-English speaking people to one school (FPG), they felt they needed to send our well-off neighborhood there to make up for it. My son was one of two white kids, and maybe one of four who had any knowledge of English, out of a kindergarten class of over 20, in a run-down school, where he was in a trailer all day. Very few of us in our neighborhood even gave the school a chance, but for those of us who stayed, they screwed us over big-time. So, I put our kids into private school for a year until we could get in to Woods Charter, which is a very good school.
This is typical of the South, but where I'm from, the Bay Area, it's much much worse. To live in a crime-ridden neighborhood in a run down 3-bedroom house will cost you around $1M, and the schools will be dangerous to your kids. So, everyone sends their kids to private school, thus insuring that the public schools remain like a demilitarized zone.
FPG sucked so bad, they had to shut it down last year. Now our neighborhood has been redistricted to the furthest school any neighborhood has had to be bused to, by far. It's brand new, but stupid Chapel Hill assumes all the kids in our neighborhood will actually attend, making up for the huge impoverished walk zone around the new school that cannot be redistricted to any other school. I know of not one child from our neighborhood who will attend, but I know for a fact that Chapel Hill counted every one of our kids in their redistricting spread sheet. Morons.
It's slashdot. You're supposed to complain bitterly about the paywall, but when they EDIT it and post the free link, your supposed to lose interest. As evidence, I present every post before this and many follow... which one is actually about the topic of the article? The fixed free link has been posted now for some time.
Since I know these fuckers, I'll tell you who Nuance is. These are the people who buy up companies that get their start helping people with disabilities, and convert them to cash cows that fuck the disabled. They've fucked me three times already, and my ass is pretty sore. In the late 1990's they bought Dragon Systems, who wrote Dragon Dictate, which helped a whole generation of people who couldn't type to use computers by voice. I personally wrote over 1,600 Dragon Dictate/Emacs macros after my RSI injury, and programmed by voice for three years. It was a slow single-word recognition program, and was incapable of either blazing fast text entry or code dictation, but the devs worked very hard to make it work for people who could not type. They were promising continuous command recognition, a feature that would make me likely a faster programmer than with a keyboard, when Nuance bought them. Nuance dumped 100% of their effort on accessibility, and focused solely on the continuous voice dictation into Word market instead. 17 years later, Nuance has not improved voice command and control one iota. This poor guy is just as slow as I was in 1996. Note the long pauses he is forced to make between each command.
My hands mostly recovered, and I type now. However, now I have trouble seeing the computer screen, because I've got some weird central vision problem, similar to Macular Degeneration (but most similar to Stargardt's Disease). So, I learned to listen fast to a computer generated voice which is popular with the blind, called Eloquence. Virtually every highly productive blind computer user in the country uses this text-to-speech engine. I've talked to the primary author, and I know she was highly motivated by how her system could help the blind. She didn't sell directly to Nuance, but after trading hands a couple of times, that's where the #1 voice for the blind is now owned. What does Nuance do with it? They fucking refuse to sell it! It used to be available for ARM processors, and it was awesome on Symbian phones. Now, it's only available bundled with > $1,000 software (JAWs) for the blind, and only in Windows, unless you are OK with using the old IBM version (IBM owned Eloquence for a while) which they generously made available for the blind in Linux. Several attempts have been made by the blind community to enable the blind to continue purchasing Eloquence from Nuance, but they fucking don't care. Now my brain is wired to understand a voice that I can't use. You have no idea how many neurons I devoted to understanding Eloquence at 600 wpm, and my blind friends who can listen twice as fast as me have devoted a significant portion of their brains. The callousness of Nuance is unrivaled.
So... I don't read books in print anymore. Instead I listen to them, spoken by the Mary TTS software, and you have no idea how many hours I spent making that work for me. It's on the order of a man-year, mostly because I couldn't buy Eloquence. I even had to invent a new algorithm to speed up voice by more than 2X with decent quality. I get most of my e-books for almost free from a wonderful service for people with reading disabilities, called Bookshare.org. Unfortunately, my reading interests are not very mainstream, and I often want to read a book available only in print. To do this, I spend $1.50 (yes, only a dollar and a half) at Kinkos (or whatever they are now - I can't read the new sign) to remove the binding but I have to scan the book myself. It's only legal in the US if I do it personally - I'm not allowed to get the scanned version from a blind friend
By the way, "Lord Blair" is a top-ranking policeman, like our head of the FBI, and is not related to the ex-prime minister, AFAIK. In fact, a "lord" cannot be a prime minister. It's his job to beg for police rights to violate privacy, restrict citizens from video taping arrests, and of course punish anyone who would reveal police secrets. This isn't really news worthy. It's like saying the Queen is in favor of constitutional monarchies.
The EFF is a good start, and maybe the ACLU. All Snowden and Manning did was tell the truth. We should be *very* careful about outlawing the truth in America.
I think your point and one post earlier basically point out that there is innovation at Microsoft, "deep down in the woodwork" as the previous poster said. I wholeheartedly agree, and can point out a few places I'm blown away: Microsoft's HTK (HMM Tool Kit) is keey to research in speech recognition, and Microsoft massively innovated in accessible computing, which is actually a big deal for me personally. Bill Gates made it happen. There are probably thousands of such examples.
I think one reason there is so much under-the-radar innovation at Microsoft is that they have all these amazing people who live to innovate. If they can't place their mark on the flagship OS product, at least they can sneak in some innovation here and there. However,when we take a look at the desktop environments they shipped... someone over there (Ballmer?) was a bit too high on something?
Since I graduated from college in 1986, Microsoft has been a place where great minds go to die. They were the hottest employer, and it sickens me to see how little Microsoft has allowed their amazing talent to produce. They had, and continue to have, essentially a monopoly on the desktop OS market. They don't need innovation to remain on top, and could even be damaged by it, so it's no wonder that they wouldn't let their great minds produce much of consequence. If Windows Me didn't convince you that Microsoft is anti-innovation, certainly Windows Vista and Windows 8 should make it clear.
That said, I have no problem with companies being the best company in their field. Microsoft's market is shrinking, and it's not their fault. They remain the dominant PC OS, even with crappy Windows 8. Few would argue with my claim that Sun Microsystems was the best workstation vendor ever, but when cheap x86 CPUs began to have enough power for most users, Sun's market went away.
Most people think it's stupidity for companies to remain the best in their market while their market shrinks, but I don't feel that way. There's always another company ready to take over a new market, and a company without the PC OS baggage is going to do a lot better. That's the way it should be.
The opposite is likely more true. For example, Einstein wrote all is great papers in his 20's. It is often said that the only way for science to move forward is for the old scientists to die. If we old farts stick around too long, we'll crush the crazy out-there creativity of the young. There's a reason we age and die: because it is better for the species. We here on slashdot have mostly become experts at something. I'm considered something of a "place and route" guru. Now I'm doing web programming instead! I love doing new stuff, but holy cow! The next generation of programmers need to grow up with this rat-bastard twisted way of accomplishing very little each day. I can hardly stand it. If geeks like us refuse to die, we'll stall this age of incredible progress.
Yes, more study needed. Here's a correlation I bet they could prove: companies where employees go through company provided aspirin bottles rapidly have employees who die younger. We used to joke that the effort and often results from employees could be measured by the aspirin bottle, sort of like measuring coffee consumption.
First... sorry. Someone should flame-bait my post to -1 for impoliteness. The cost for complying with Obamacare to the US government is minimal. Its states, hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies that have to do the heavy lifting. There are very few new requirements on any federal agency. There will not be any flood of new regulations as you suggested. Not only that, anyone who's read the bill and has read a number of bills has to admit that overall the bill is relatively well written, clear, and does little of that painful patching of other bills that make so many bills hard to read, unlike what you stated. The voter ID law, in comparison, patches a regulation in another law per paragraph. The Obamacare bill (why does Obama get all the credit? He didn't write it) does a fair amount of revamping obscure legislation effecting how we educate nurses and doctors, but the text is quite plain, and obviously those portions were written by doctors, not lawyers.
You are highly misinformed about the voter ID law in NC.
A "simple voter ID" bill would two sentences, and it would not be controversial. It would state, "A voter must show a state-issued photo ID. Voter ID cards will be made available at no cost at the DMV". Lawyers would nit pick that to death and get a whole page by accounting for people who for religious reasons don't want to be photographed, what to do with an expired photo ID, who gets to determine if the ID is valid at the polls and so on. Still, it would be one page, and not controversial. I would support such a bill. ID needed at the polls? Fine.
Here's a short list of the crap I found in that horribly obscure bill. First, they've reintroduced the "poll tax". The voter ID is $15 initially, plus $10 if you need a copy of your birth certificate, and $4 per year from then on, unless you have an NC drivers license, in which case it's free. You may think that's not much to pay for the right to vote, but that will eliminate a ton of poor Obama voters. They've restricted early voting to harm the "souls to the polls" busing that was popular at many predominately black churches. They've eliminated most of the controls on absentee ballot voting - by far the most serious vector for voter fraud. Anyone can vote in NC without any ID, SSN, drivers license, or anything but a signature, so long as they do it by mail. It restricts out of state student voters by rejecting their out of state drivers licenses, and shuts down the popular early voting locations like the one near me on the UNC campus - now you'll have to drive over an hour total to vote early, because each county can have only one location. It restricts voting by people in old-folks homes by making it illegal for any employee to aid them in voting. It legalizes poll harassment by Tea Party activists, allowing partisan "observers" inside the polling station, who are allowed to "challenge" any voter they think needs more scrutiny. It introduces the old Jim Crow notion that only people of "high morale character" be allowed to work at polling stations - this is the language used originally in NC to exclude blacks. It gives our new Republican governor the right to appoint a Senator if one does not finish their term, rather than having a special election. It restricts (and I support this part) cities from annexing neighborhoods against their will. It effectively eliminates any new airports from being created, as all people living nearby would have to vote in favor of the project. Fortunately, they did not make such a provision for opening a new trash dump, or we'd have no place to deal with garbage. It changes how taxes can be passed by counties and towns, not in a bad way I think, but it certainly changes the landscape of how counties and towns fund things. As for regulations, the vast majority of the bill is about regulating county boards and towns. The legal fees just to have every town council understand it's new obligations will be staggering. It has carve-outs for specific counties, which I take to be pork.
It's totally obvious that you have not read the law. I have. You have no clue where it's strong or weak. Instead of learning for yourself, you get your opinions from your favorite vending machine. You said Obamacare, "requires dozens or hundreds of executive offices to add tens of thousands more pages of regulations and other rule-making on top of the legislative part of the law."
Bullshit. Try reading this tiny Voter ID law passed yesterday in my state (which, yes, I've read). It's 35,000 words, or about 1/12th the size of Obamacare. The NC voter ID law commands tons of county and municipal governments to take various actions to comply with the new law. Obamacare is light in comparison. Our state agencies will be much more laden with additional red tape due to the voter ID law compared to Obamacare. Why don't you try and point out some concrete examples of why I'm wrong? Or... are you just a stupid bag of hot air?
It's sad, but the inaccurate opinion you're expressing is close to reality. Encryption should be a check box you set once, and only think about every few years.
Instead, every effort to make encryption on by default had disappeared. Even if you want all your email encrypted, you'd have a heck of a time training all your email buddies to work with you. I blame the NSA. In several discussions I've been involved in about the direction of security on public email lists, some a-hole would chime in and dominate the discussion with stupid opinions that basically amount to we can't afford to change. They'd get nasty enough to drive sane people to avoid the thread. Look at the gpg plugin for gmail in firefox. Google had to change their API to break it. Eventually the gpg plugin devs gave up. I think the NSA simply won.
In reality, as a population, we're easy to manipulate. As I've got nothing to hide anyway, I just give up privacy all together. I'll likey post my exome sometime next week online. The NSA wins.
I have to gripe about the statement that HeLa is "relatively stable." What the heck does that mean? Did they bother to count the number of chromosomes?!? Is it still even human, or are these cells simply adapting to the environment where they can succeed - in a medical lab. Surely HeLa has changed the world of medicine for the better, but claims that it's stable seem incredulous.
Actually, I look for certain personality disorders in an algorithms programmer. What I promise is that we will give them super hard problems that wont have published solutions, and expect them to invent and code commercial quality implementations. They wont be able to publish their work, but the two or three of us who are capable of understanding the amazing work they do will be suitably impressed, and we might ask them to file a patent on their innovations, which will be owned by the company. They'll slave at a computer keyboard all day. The best guys I've hired don't even turn on the lights, and code in the dark.
Yes... they, and I, are very much outside the bounds socially. Dress? Totally optional. Feel free to code naked.
There are extenuating circumstances in my case, but I've usually been paid more than my boss, and sometimes more than anyone else in the company, and they've never let me manage anyone. Sure, you've got "countless studies" you can quote, but the geeks here on slashdot aren't the average sort of guys that get studied. I suspect that the individual contributor route among super-geeks has worked out pretty well for a bunch of us.
Not that I think you're wrong, but there are counter examples.
The most amazing team I ever worked with had a manager who didn't even want to hire the team. The manager, let's call him Bob, was made VP of Software Dev because he was a founder and they didn't know what else to do with him. He didn't believe in software automation, and preferred manual editors for electronic design, so when he was told to hire a software team, he hired one guy who was amazing by accident, which is a funny story. Bob accidentally triple-scheduled his morning, with two interviews at the same time as a board meeting. Bob is one seriously brilliant ADHD kind of guy, so this is normal for him. When the first guy showed up, who we'll call Charlie, the VP told him to interview the next guy when he arrived, who we'll call Dan, and then Bob went to the board meeting. Charlie simply sat behind Bob's desk and when Dan showed up, Charlie pretended to be Bob, and make short work of Dan's interview, convincing Dan to look for a job elsewhere. With only one candidate left, Bob naturally hired Charlie. Bob then refused to have much of anything to do with Charlie, who then went and hired the rest of the team as the CEO wanted Bob to do. Charlie could tell good talent from bad and did a great job hiring, even though he was not the manager. In fact, we didn't really have a manager, as Bob refused to have anything to do with automation software development. So, we kind of self-organized, and then we kicked butt. It was thrilling watching what our team could do.
What I always wonder is how much credit does Bob deserve? If all that counts is results, then Bob did a fantastic job as VP of Software Dev.
There is an interesting contrast between attitudes in Silicon Valley vs RTP, NC. In Silicon Valley, after we'd hire a guy with promising ability and work with him in a team environment for a couple years, he'd often increase his productivity by 2-4X, while simultaneously increasing the quality of work. At this point, we'd have a guy worth over 4X what we originally paid him. We'd offer 15%-ish raises every year, but eventually we'd lose him because another company would make him an offer he could not refuse. That was all fine... it was part of the process. We'd have multiple such guys at any time, getting less than what they are worth, helping train the next generation, while Silicon Valley benefitted from these amazing guys who work well with others in addition to being exceptional coders. Some managers out there are always looking for the best talent, and are willing to pay for it.
Here in NC, where few companies have headquarters, companies are mostly interested in hiring talent cheaply. Those same two super-algorithms guys we hired last decade are still working for us, and they are both worth 4X what we originally paid them. I suspect we pay them pretty well for around here, but with all the bean counters, there are few companies smart enough to rip them off from us. I try to explain how much they are really worth to management, and I think they understand, but they've gotten used to rock-star performance from these guys and probably simply expect all algorithms guys to be able to do that. One of those guys is currently saving my bacon, because this whole central vision deterioration thing has not only slowed me down, but it's distracted me greatly. I'm currently hogging 1 CPU and 30 gig of memory on one of our servers building a human genome database with bwa, and I'm parsing my family's exomes with custom code and slinging gene sequences around looking for any clues about color blindness or central vision loss... not good for my schedule at work. Fortunately, with this rock star on my project, we can catch up and knock this project out of the park.
Granted, but this lawsuit still would have made more sense a couple of years ago. Right now, a reasonable programmer or IT professional who complains about not being able to find a job sounds like a whiner. Job numbers this week show we gained 200,000 jobs, but mostly low paying part-time positions. At the same time, the jobs most in demand right now may be web programmers, though we could use some algorithms geeks. It's not a good time to try and gain sympathy from a jury about the plight of programmers in America.
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Agreed. I have nothing to add to your comment.
If you posted as yourself rather than anonymous coward, I could friend you, which on slashdot just means I see your posts while other less worthy people have their posts collapsed. It also adds +1 if you post as yourself, so far more people see it. It's rare that I which an anonymous poster weren't anonymous, but it's true here.
Panasonic sold 100,000,000 batteries to Tesla so far this year. They reopened shuttered plants, and are investing in new ones. They already push the state of the art vs competitors, likely due in part to their collaboration on the Tesla Roadster battery packs. With the volume Panasonic now has, they are simultaneously making a bunch of money and dropping prices for Tesla dramatically, rumored to be less than $2/battery now (some speculate as low as $1.20, but I doubt that), which is huge when you're buying 7,000 of them per car.
There are so many problems with these batteries that make them expensive. Do you know how many battery chemistries are competing in the 18650 format? I'm no battery expert, but apparently, there are so many that we now have Li-Ons, TiGrs, BeArs (Oh, my!), and even LiGrs. That fragments economies of scale benefits. Add on top of that crazy low-volume customers (a laptop may have 4 or 6 cells), individual protection circuits *per battery*, built in, and a market fragmented in it's needs: RC cars need high power, as in A123, laptops need power density, equipment often needs long shelf life, etc.
So... 100,000,000 batteries in the first 8 months of 2013, all bought from one company... yes, I think this will have an impact on lowering costs.
For unmanned missions, LEO is the first step. Once you have a craft in LEO, it can use massively more efficient propulsion to get where it needs to go, so long as you're not in a hurry. If you put a man in it, every day becomes critical and you're forced to continue burning fuel inefficiently, but if it's just a robot, even a few years in space is no biggie. If you want to get 1000 tons of stuff to the Moon, I doubt we'd want to do that in a hurry. Instead of a few SLS launches, in reality, we'd do a lot more small launches to LEO and let the cargo take it's time getting to the Moon.
Even for manned missions, is it clear that we want to launch to deep space directly from the ground? How much complexity would it add to use Russian rockets to get people to the Space Station, and cheap unmanned rockets to get the deep space craft and it's fuel there? I'm sure NASA looked at all of the options, but I'm not convinced that they settled on the SLS because it's the best idea. I think politics is involved. It seems like they like they prefer huge line items with many billions funding, like "Space Shuttle", rather than a bunch of little projects. That keeps it simple for all those morons in congress, who have to sell the idea to an even dumber public.
Absolutely right. Not only that, but politics forced NASA to behave stupidly, pushing giant missions that would be popular with the public, rather than multiple smaller missions that make more sense. The Space Shuttle practically killed NASA, but because it looks and lands like a plane, it was very popular. Congress also gave NASA a monopoly on space launches. SpaceX would have been illegal up to a few years ago, which is why American companies couldn't get a satellite into space cost effectively, and had to use services from other countries instead. American companies developed most of the technology that put men on the moon, but they were forced to scrap it, and were banned from using that technology for anything but NASA approved projects and weapon systems, which of course were screwed up by politics.
I hate to say it, but it's a good thing, IMO, that NASA is being pushed to the side. A lot of those bright people leaving NASA are joining companies like SpaceX, and they're finally getting the chance to make a difference. If NASA had gotten out of the way decades ago, I think we'd be a lot further along.
Since that's an actual security precaution that could work, I suspect a paid shill with mod points will mod your comment down into oblivion, or at least post such drivel in response that no one wants to join in. I've been reading these security related posts on slashdot for years, and the pattern of ass holes making the conversation no fun when we might start collaborating on real security seems to be a highly repetitive pattern.
That extra computer could be a Raspberry Pi. For $35, it seems like a good investment to me.
That's daft, and must be an opinion of a non-parent. As a parent, you do what's best for your kids, and the public schools can go to hell if they are not the best option. Are you seriously saying that you would force your kids to have a second rate education when as their parents, you could do far far better for them?
Clearly you don't have a clue what your talking about.
It's luck of the draw. I bought into the "best" public school system in NC, as of 2000, which was Chapel Hill, and I pay an obscene level of property tax for this benefit, which I don't mind. I'm all for paying for high quality education. Then, Chapel Hill screwed us, and redistricted so many non-English speaking people to one school (FPG), they felt they needed to send our well-off neighborhood there to make up for it. My son was one of two white kids, and maybe one of four who had any knowledge of English, out of a kindergarten class of over 20, in a run-down school, where he was in a trailer all day. Very few of us in our neighborhood even gave the school a chance, but for those of us who stayed, they screwed us over big-time. So, I put our kids into private school for a year until we could get in to Woods Charter, which is a very good school.
This is typical of the South, but where I'm from, the Bay Area, it's much much worse. To live in a crime-ridden neighborhood in a run down 3-bedroom house will cost you around $1M, and the schools will be dangerous to your kids. So, everyone sends their kids to private school, thus insuring that the public schools remain like a demilitarized zone.
FPG sucked so bad, they had to shut it down last year. Now our neighborhood has been redistricted to the furthest school any neighborhood has had to be bused to, by far. It's brand new, but stupid Chapel Hill assumes all the kids in our neighborhood will actually attend, making up for the huge impoverished walk zone around the new school that cannot be redistricted to any other school. I know of not one child from our neighborhood who will attend, but I know for a fact that Chapel Hill counted every one of our kids in their redistricting spread sheet. Morons.
It's slashdot. You're supposed to complain bitterly about the paywall, but when they EDIT it and post the free link, your supposed to lose interest. As evidence, I present every post before this and many follow... which one is actually about the topic of the article? The fixed free link has been posted now for some time.
Since I know these fuckers, I'll tell you who Nuance is. These are the people who buy up companies that get their start helping people with disabilities, and convert them to cash cows that fuck the disabled. They've fucked me three times already, and my ass is pretty sore. In the late 1990's they bought Dragon Systems, who wrote Dragon Dictate, which helped a whole generation of people who couldn't type to use computers by voice. I personally wrote over 1,600 Dragon Dictate/Emacs macros after my RSI injury, and programmed by voice for three years. It was a slow single-word recognition program, and was incapable of either blazing fast text entry or code dictation, but the devs worked very hard to make it work for people who could not type. They were promising continuous command recognition, a feature that would make me likely a faster programmer than with a keyboard, when Nuance bought them. Nuance dumped 100% of their effort on accessibility, and focused solely on the continuous voice dictation into Word market instead. 17 years later, Nuance has not improved voice command and control one iota. This poor guy is just as slow as I was in 1996. Note the long pauses he is forced to make between each command.
My hands mostly recovered, and I type now. However, now I have trouble seeing the computer screen, because I've got some weird central vision problem, similar to Macular Degeneration (but most similar to Stargardt's Disease). So, I learned to listen fast to a computer generated voice which is popular with the blind, called Eloquence. Virtually every highly productive blind computer user in the country uses this text-to-speech engine. I've talked to the primary author, and I know she was highly motivated by how her system could help the blind. She didn't sell directly to Nuance, but after trading hands a couple of times, that's where the #1 voice for the blind is now owned. What does Nuance do with it? They fucking refuse to sell it! It used to be available for ARM processors, and it was awesome on Symbian phones. Now, it's only available bundled with > $1,000 software (JAWs) for the blind, and only in Windows, unless you are OK with using the old IBM version (IBM owned Eloquence for a while) which they generously made available for the blind in Linux. Several attempts have been made by the blind community to enable the blind to continue purchasing Eloquence from Nuance, but they fucking don't care. Now my brain is wired to understand a voice that I can't use. You have no idea how many neurons I devoted to understanding Eloquence at 600 wpm, and my blind friends who can listen twice as fast as me have devoted a significant portion of their brains. The callousness of Nuance is unrivaled.
So... I don't read books in print anymore. Instead I listen to them, spoken by the Mary TTS software, and you have no idea how many hours I spent making that work for me. It's on the order of a man-year, mostly because I couldn't buy Eloquence. I even had to invent a new algorithm to speed up voice by more than 2X with decent quality. I get most of my e-books for almost free from a wonderful service for people with reading disabilities, called Bookshare.org. Unfortunately, my reading interests are not very mainstream, and I often want to read a book available only in print. To do this, I spend $1.50 (yes, only a dollar and a half) at Kinkos (or whatever they are now - I can't read the new sign) to remove the binding but I have to scan the book myself. It's only legal in the US if I do it personally - I'm not allowed to get the scanned version from a blind friend
By the way, "Lord Blair" is a top-ranking policeman, like our head of the FBI, and is not related to the ex-prime minister, AFAIK. In fact, a "lord" cannot be a prime minister. It's his job to beg for police rights to violate privacy, restrict citizens from video taping arrests, and of course punish anyone who would reveal police secrets. This isn't really news worthy. It's like saying the Queen is in favor of constitutional monarchies.
The EFF is a good start, and maybe the ACLU. All Snowden and Manning did was tell the truth. We should be *very* careful about outlawing the truth in America.
I think your point and one post earlier basically point out that there is innovation at Microsoft, "deep down in the woodwork" as the previous poster said. I wholeheartedly agree, and can point out a few places I'm blown away: Microsoft's HTK (HMM Tool Kit) is keey to research in speech recognition, and Microsoft massively innovated in accessible computing, which is actually a big deal for me personally. Bill Gates made it happen. There are probably thousands of such examples.
I think one reason there is so much under-the-radar innovation at Microsoft is that they have all these amazing people who live to innovate. If they can't place their mark on the flagship OS product, at least they can sneak in some innovation here and there. However,when we take a look at the desktop environments they shipped... someone over there (Ballmer?) was a bit too high on something?
Since I graduated from college in 1986, Microsoft has been a place where great minds go to die. They were the hottest employer, and it sickens me to see how little Microsoft has allowed their amazing talent to produce. They had, and continue to have, essentially a monopoly on the desktop OS market. They don't need innovation to remain on top, and could even be damaged by it, so it's no wonder that they wouldn't let their great minds produce much of consequence. If Windows Me didn't convince you that Microsoft is anti-innovation, certainly Windows Vista and Windows 8 should make it clear.
That said, I have no problem with companies being the best company in their field. Microsoft's market is shrinking, and it's not their fault. They remain the dominant PC OS, even with crappy Windows 8. Few would argue with my claim that Sun Microsystems was the best workstation vendor ever, but when cheap x86 CPUs began to have enough power for most users, Sun's market went away.
Most people think it's stupidity for companies to remain the best in their market while their market shrinks, but I don't feel that way. There's always another company ready to take over a new market, and a company without the PC OS baggage is going to do a lot better. That's the way it should be.
The opposite is likely more true. For example, Einstein wrote all is great papers in his 20's. It is often said that the only way for science to move forward is for the old scientists to die. If we old farts stick around too long, we'll crush the crazy out-there creativity of the young. There's a reason we age and die: because it is better for the species. We here on slashdot have mostly become experts at something. I'm considered something of a "place and route" guru. Now I'm doing web programming instead! I love doing new stuff, but holy cow! The next generation of programmers need to grow up with this rat-bastard twisted way of accomplishing very little each day. I can hardly stand it. If geeks like us refuse to die, we'll stall this age of incredible progress.
Yes, more study needed. Here's a correlation I bet they could prove: companies where employees go through company provided aspirin bottles rapidly have employees who die younger. We used to joke that the effort and often results from employees could be measured by the aspirin bottle, sort of like measuring coffee consumption.
First... sorry. Someone should flame-bait my post to -1 for impoliteness. The cost for complying with Obamacare to the US government is minimal. Its states, hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies that have to do the heavy lifting. There are very few new requirements on any federal agency. There will not be any flood of new regulations as you suggested. Not only that, anyone who's read the bill and has read a number of bills has to admit that overall the bill is relatively well written, clear, and does little of that painful patching of other bills that make so many bills hard to read, unlike what you stated. The voter ID law, in comparison, patches a regulation in another law per paragraph. The Obamacare bill (why does Obama get all the credit? He didn't write it) does a fair amount of revamping obscure legislation effecting how we educate nurses and doctors, but the text is quite plain, and obviously those portions were written by doctors, not lawyers.
You are highly misinformed about the voter ID law in NC.
A "simple voter ID" bill would two sentences, and it would not be controversial. It would state, "A voter must show a state-issued photo ID. Voter ID cards will be made available at no cost at the DMV". Lawyers would nit pick that to death and get a whole page by accounting for people who for religious reasons don't want to be photographed, what to do with an expired photo ID, who gets to determine if the ID is valid at the polls and so on. Still, it would be one page, and not controversial. I would support such a bill. ID needed at the polls? Fine.
Here's a short list of the crap I found in that horribly obscure bill. First, they've reintroduced the "poll tax". The voter ID is $15 initially, plus $10 if you need a copy of your birth certificate, and $4 per year from then on, unless you have an NC drivers license, in which case it's free. You may think that's not much to pay for the right to vote, but that will eliminate a ton of poor Obama voters. They've restricted early voting to harm the "souls to the polls" busing that was popular at many predominately black churches. They've eliminated most of the controls on absentee ballot voting - by far the most serious vector for voter fraud. Anyone can vote in NC without any ID, SSN, drivers license, or anything but a signature, so long as they do it by mail. It restricts out of state student voters by rejecting their out of state drivers licenses, and shuts down the popular early voting locations like the one near me on the UNC campus - now you'll have to drive over an hour total to vote early, because each county can have only one location. It restricts voting by people in old-folks homes by making it illegal for any employee to aid them in voting. It legalizes poll harassment by Tea Party activists, allowing partisan "observers" inside the polling station, who are allowed to "challenge" any voter they think needs more scrutiny. It introduces the old Jim Crow notion that only people of "high morale character" be allowed to work at polling stations - this is the language used originally in NC to exclude blacks. It gives our new Republican governor the right to appoint a Senator if one does not finish their term, rather than having a special election. It restricts (and I support this part) cities from annexing neighborhoods against their will. It effectively eliminates any new airports from being created, as all people living nearby would have to vote in favor of the project. Fortunately, they did not make such a provision for opening a new trash dump, or we'd have no place to deal with garbage. It changes how taxes can be passed by counties and towns, not in a bad way I think, but it certainly changes the landscape of how counties and towns fund things. As for regulations, the vast majority of the bill is about regulating county boards and towns. The legal fees just to have every town council understand it's new obligations will be staggering. It has carve-outs for specific counties, which I take to be pork.
It's totally obvious that you have not read the law. I have. You have no clue where it's strong or weak. Instead of learning for yourself, you get your opinions from your favorite vending machine. You said Obamacare, "requires dozens or hundreds of executive offices to add tens of thousands more pages of regulations and other rule-making on top of the legislative part of the law."
Bullshit. Try reading this tiny Voter ID law passed yesterday in my state (which, yes, I've read). It's 35,000 words, or about 1/12th the size of Obamacare. The NC voter ID law commands tons of county and municipal governments to take various actions to comply with the new law. Obamacare is light in comparison. Our state agencies will be much more laden with additional red tape due to the voter ID law compared to Obamacare. Why don't you try and point out some concrete examples of why I'm wrong? Or... are you just a stupid bag of hot air?
It's sad, but the inaccurate opinion you're expressing is close to reality. Encryption should be a check box you set once, and only think about every few years.
Instead, every effort to make encryption on by default had disappeared. Even if you want all your email encrypted, you'd have a heck of a time training all your email buddies to work with you. I blame the NSA. In several discussions I've been involved in about the direction of security on public email lists, some a-hole would chime in and dominate the discussion with stupid opinions that basically amount to we can't afford to change. They'd get nasty enough to drive sane people to avoid the thread. Look at the gpg plugin for gmail in firefox. Google had to change their API to break it. Eventually the gpg plugin devs gave up. I think the NSA simply won.
In reality, as a population, we're easy to manipulate. As I've got nothing to hide anyway, I just give up privacy all together. I'll likey post my exome sometime next week online. The NSA wins.
I wish I could mod up what you said so eloquently, but you're maxed out at 5. Thanks for this insightful post.
I have to gripe about the statement that HeLa is "relatively stable." What the heck does that mean? Did they bother to count the number of chromosomes?!? Is it still even human, or are these cells simply adapting to the environment where they can succeed - in a medical lab. Surely HeLa has changed the world of medicine for the better, but claims that it's stable seem incredulous.
Actually, I look for certain personality disorders in an algorithms programmer. What I promise is that we will give them super hard problems that wont have published solutions, and expect them to invent and code commercial quality implementations. They wont be able to publish their work, but the two or three of us who are capable of understanding the amazing work they do will be suitably impressed, and we might ask them to file a patent on their innovations, which will be owned by the company. They'll slave at a computer keyboard all day. The best guys I've hired don't even turn on the lights, and code in the dark.
Yes... they, and I, are very much outside the bounds socially. Dress? Totally optional. Feel free to code naked.
By the way... "super-geek" is kind of like "super-model" :-P
There are extenuating circumstances in my case, but I've usually been paid more than my boss, and sometimes more than anyone else in the company, and they've never let me manage anyone. Sure, you've got "countless studies" you can quote, but the geeks here on slashdot aren't the average sort of guys that get studied. I suspect that the individual contributor route among super-geeks has worked out pretty well for a bunch of us.
Not that I think you're wrong, but there are counter examples.
The most amazing team I ever worked with had a manager who didn't even want to hire the team. The manager, let's call him Bob, was made VP of Software Dev because he was a founder and they didn't know what else to do with him. He didn't believe in software automation, and preferred manual editors for electronic design, so when he was told to hire a software team, he hired one guy who was amazing by accident, which is a funny story. Bob accidentally triple-scheduled his morning, with two interviews at the same time as a board meeting. Bob is one seriously brilliant ADHD kind of guy, so this is normal for him. When the first guy showed up, who we'll call Charlie, the VP told him to interview the next guy when he arrived, who we'll call Dan, and then Bob went to the board meeting. Charlie simply sat behind Bob's desk and when Dan showed up, Charlie pretended to be Bob, and make short work of Dan's interview, convincing Dan to look for a job elsewhere. With only one candidate left, Bob naturally hired Charlie. Bob then refused to have much of anything to do with Charlie, who then went and hired the rest of the team as the CEO wanted Bob to do. Charlie could tell good talent from bad and did a great job hiring, even though he was not the manager. In fact, we didn't really have a manager, as Bob refused to have anything to do with automation software development. So, we kind of self-organized, and then we kicked butt. It was thrilling watching what our team could do.
What I always wonder is how much credit does Bob deserve? If all that counts is results, then Bob did a fantastic job as VP of Software Dev.
There is an interesting contrast between attitudes in Silicon Valley vs RTP, NC. In Silicon Valley, after we'd hire a guy with promising ability and work with him in a team environment for a couple years, he'd often increase his productivity by 2-4X, while simultaneously increasing the quality of work. At this point, we'd have a guy worth over 4X what we originally paid him. We'd offer 15%-ish raises every year, but eventually we'd lose him because another company would make him an offer he could not refuse. That was all fine... it was part of the process. We'd have multiple such guys at any time, getting less than what they are worth, helping train the next generation, while Silicon Valley benefitted from these amazing guys who work well with others in addition to being exceptional coders. Some managers out there are always looking for the best talent, and are willing to pay for it.
Here in NC, where few companies have headquarters, companies are mostly interested in hiring talent cheaply. Those same two super-algorithms guys we hired last decade are still working for us, and they are both worth 4X what we originally paid them. I suspect we pay them pretty well for around here, but with all the bean counters, there are few companies smart enough to rip them off from us. I try to explain how much they are really worth to management, and I think they understand, but they've gotten used to rock-star performance from these guys and probably simply expect all algorithms guys to be able to do that. One of those guys is currently saving my bacon, because this whole central vision deterioration thing has not only slowed me down, but it's distracted me greatly. I'm currently hogging 1 CPU and 30 gig of memory on one of our servers building a human genome database with bwa, and I'm parsing my family's exomes with custom code and slinging gene sequences around looking for any clues about color blindness or central vision loss... not good for my schedule at work. Fortunately, with this rock star on my project, we can catch up and knock this project out of the park.
Granted, but this lawsuit still would have made more sense a couple of years ago. Right now, a reasonable programmer or IT professional who complains about not being able to find a job sounds like a whiner. Job numbers this week show we gained 200,000 jobs, but mostly low paying part-time positions. At the same time, the jobs most in demand right now may be web programmers, though we could use some algorithms geeks. It's not a good time to try and gain sympathy from a jury about the plight of programmers in America.