I was flipping back and forth between Bloomberg and CNBC, and the anchors and analysts on both of those stations seemed to be questioning the whole 'patent portfolio' method of doing business, as well as the viability of these kinds of patents in general. It may be a good sign that some of them are waking up to the potential damage involved here.
I am curious what will happen if the remaining patents are ruled invalid, though. Can shareholders then sue to overturn the deal and retrieve the money, taking on the burden of the legal fight while letting RIM continue business?
And now for an opposite point of view. In the interests of full disclosure, my parents were middle-class, maybe lower-middle class, and grew up likewise.
My dad worked in aerospace for about fifteen years before he was hurt on the job. During that time, he was a union member, and participated in some of the strikes that were called. However, after a while, he stopped participating and started crossing lines when union compensation during strikes didn't pay the bills. The union leadership would show up in chauffeured cars wearing fancy suits trailed by aides, little different from the corporate management with whom they were negotiating. He became disillusioned, partially because benefits kept getting cut as more time was demanded of existing workers, but also because he saw people around him slacking off, doing the minimum to look busy, while he was not only working hard, but taking pride in doing so. The end result, of course, was exactly the same pay raise for everyone. To this day, he believes that this setup is unfair.
I've never been in a union. I will go out of my way to avoid being in one, too. I work hard, and I take pride in doing so. My smallest ever raise was 1.85%, and that was because I'd only been at that job for a half of a year, so it was pro-rated down from what it would have been (around 3.25%). Most of the time, my raises have been 4% or more, including two cases where I have managed raises of 8% or higher. I've managed larger than average raises in places that were deemed by other employees to be 'stingy.' Maybe I've just been lucky, but being lumped in with everyone else when it comes time for the annual review, keeping my job only because I wasn't convicted of a felony... That's not what I want. If I screw up, I deserve a smaller raise -- or none, for that matter. It's a punishment. Just let me know why -- that's all I ask.
I respect what unions have done. Unions were, indeed, the reasons that many things that we now often take for granted are here: sharing of healthcare costs, safety regulations, overtime pay, and labor board hearings might not exist as we know them today without the work of labor unions of the past. But they've become an anachronism, and you need look no further than the unions today who demand that pensions be maintained not only for existing workers, but for new workers as well. Even as companies go bankrupt under the weight of their pensions (not just airlines, but also the steel industry), even as pension demands rise while fewer workers are required to perform the same work, the unions won't drop the issue and move into the modern world, and that's detrimental to the very people they claim to be protecting.
More than a quarter of all US workers were in unions in the 1950s; today, that number is down to one in eight overall, and in private industry, it's one in 14. It's almost quaint to be part of a union these days, especially since their political actions are becoming more widely known. Whether on the level or hiding in the shade, a lot of people don't want their money spent on union activities, because they violate their beliefs. There is a federal law that requires that unions allow members to opt out, but just try to find that form with your local union. Merely calling may well put you on a list of people that the union might not be so willing to protect; the tales about that have been anecdotal, but there have been enough of them that they're hard to discount.
Their work of the past earned them respect and honor, but their refusal to adapt mires them in that past, yearning for the glory years of old. Unless they can overcome these limitations, their membership and clout will continue to dwindle towards irrelevance.
Re:It may function but will be fatter than ever
on
Why Vista Won't Suck
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· Score: 1
IIRC, Microsoft stopped providing OpenGL layers a few years ago, preferring instead to let the device driver authors provide the layer. It allowed people interested in it to handle the layer while removing it from the people that didn't want to support it (and perhaps enabling some more finger-pointing at the same time, but that's beside the point).
They may have wrappers for OpenGL functionality to translate it to DX functions, but the end result is slower than OpenGL.
You may be in the minority on this point. I've replayed HL1 at least a dozen times, and I've replayed HL2 three times. Sometimes it's for the fun of it, so it's on lower difficulty levels, and sometimes I'm going for a challenge so I change it to a very high level of difficulty. I know of several other people who have also replayed the games on a few occasions. Generally speaking, Valve gets credit for the good quality of the storyline in both games (the first one, perhaps, a little more than the sequel).
That depends on your sense of scale. A raft designed to carry a hunter and his catch down a river without getting his feet wet isn't going to ever carry commercially significant quantities of commodity products through Pacific storms, but it got the ideas going for larger craft which eventually could. Space Ship One, similarly, won't ever see orbit, but it may have triggered the imagination for something that will at a better cost-per-mass ratio than we traditionally have seen.
Call it rationalizing, then, because it's a secondary reason. I admit that I've been tempted by the latest versions of Logitech's wireless mice, especially after spending two hours rerunning all the cables around my desk.
And my answer was not "entering passwords," as that's a separate step. There's a difference between gathering entropy and selecting a password. Technically, they're similar, but they are not exactly the same.
I'm not as worried about the mouse, but there are times when it can hypothetically be used, such as when providing entropy to key-generating software, to reduce the complexity of a key crack attempt. Likely? No, it's not. I have probably a one in a billion chance of getting such attention in my life. But it still makes me uneasy, so I don't use it.
We have a policy that covers accessing the various locations of the facility, and technically forbids piggybacking. When it's someone I work with, I'm generally fine with allowing access to the person if I've not been told that they were not supposed to be there, so long as he has his badge with him. This has created some friction with a colleague with whom I used to be on good terms; he forgot his badge and I refused to let him in, telling him to go to the Command Center to get a temp badge like policy requires (no one goes anywhere without a badge). He tried to get me to relent, and I wouldn't. I ended up getting commended for this by the facilities manager.
Similar appreciation has been expressed because I stop anyone I don't know from entering doors where I'm not sure if they're allowed. I generally allow them to badge through first, verifying access. When people are around that I don't recognize but don't seem to be interested in going through the doors, I will open the door only enough for me to comfortably slip through (about two feet) and let it close rapidly behind me, paying attention to whether any hands slip through. If someone does want to get in, I will offer to go and find that person, but the visitor must remain outside of secure areas until I have found the person they seek.
There's been talk of overhauling the security system. I'm hoping that they don't plan on getting proximity readers, but that seems to be popular.
I'd like to see that, but cost is an issue. Magstripe cards cost a couple of bucks; smartcards cost $15 or more plus the additional technologies involved, and across 15,000 employees, that becomes a major expenditure.
Actually, partisan democrats and republicans take up about a third each of the voting population. The other third are the independants, 3rd party, and swing voters.
I would suggest that each partisan segment is about a quarter of the populace, with less than 20% being true independents and the remaining 30% or so just sort of swaying with the political breeze. This is the segment that would like to know more, but feels that the political landscape is too complex for them to understand and yet feels the need to vote anyway.
This is why I keep pressing my employer to not adopt RFID badges, and keep either the magnetic swipes or move to 2D barcodes. I have an inherent distrust of anything wireless, which is why I still have cables running from my mouse and keyboard, refuse to use Bluetooth, and use wireless only when I have to and even then almost exclusively in Linux (though with WPA/WPA2 and a nice, long, random shared key, it's not so bad). My current record in a lab for cracking 128-bit WEP is about 14 minutes, start to finish.
Paranoid? Yeah, a bit. But then I've never had to worry much about someone intercepting my phone calls or passwords over the air.
On the main topic, if no one is going to be fired for refusing, but part of their job is working on equipment in the datacenter, what happens?
Do you have hard numbers on these comparisons? I can sit for a half-hour in front of almost anyone's computer, change some settings, install this, remove that, and ask them if they think it's faster. They'll almost always say that it's much faster than before, even when the difference is so slight that a human would never notice it, or even when it's actually slower than it was. I tested this once by knocking a DMA-capable hard-drive down to PIO, and the user swore it was faster. There was no expression of speed or slowness when I later changed it back to DMA without saying anything.
I may just take you up on the numbers and throw something in VMWare at least to check for resource usage. If I do, I'll post them here.
We have a policy where assigned systems are signed out, with the understanding that damage due to avoidable negligence (which seems repetitive to me) can and will be taken from their final paycheck. In addition, upon leaving or termination, the final paycheck is held until all equipment is returned. There is rarely a problem with this, and to my knowledge, everyone's been pretty professional about it.
Do periodic captures of your data. Google does have a reputation to protect, and if it turned out that the parts they said wouldn't talk to their server turn out to be doing so, it would severely mar the reputation that they've worked so hard to build up.
I've tried using SCORE on four separate occasions, and found the information completely worthless. When asked about how to write a business plan, I was told I should write a business plan. When looking for information about how to handle pay for company owners, two different former HR people had no clue how to handle it. Finally, when asking about depreciation and asking for some pointers, all I got was a brief e-mail advising that I talk to an accountant, without even suggesting that the topic was too complex.
Considering the distractions that I get (network operations center, so phones, various alarms, and a television tuned to one of several news stations), I'd love to get some time alone, even in a small place. I don't have a lot of paper around, so I don't need space. I just need quiet.
They do still happen, but not with the frequency that they once did. Both skirmishes with Libya in the 1980s that resulted in kills for US fighters were the culmination of dogfights, and in the early hours of the Gulf War, there were several dogfights where coalition planes had to engage in close battle.
AWACS has so thoroughly changed the airborne battle arena that whoever can maintain their AWACS aircraft the longest will eventually control the skies. The primary reason that we're able to pick off enemy planes at range is this ultimate eye in the sky, which can watch enemy aircraft from their takeoff roll to their intercept run to their demise at the hands of US missiles, and which only the richest countries can generally afford to operate.
Battleships? When did this happen? The Soviets built some nuclear-powered heavy cruisers, and there are quite a few nuclear carriers, but the Iowas (the only battleships still active in the past almost half-century) are and always were conventionally powered.
Coal seam fires are regularly extinguished. It's difficult and expensive, but the value of the coal burned is higher than the cost of extinguishing it -- and that's in the US, which has centuries of coal remaining to be mined.
There's no reason that many of the coal seam fires in China could not be extinguished, other than that China does not care to spend the money on it.
Isn't Germany still trying to scrap their reactors?
Realistically, nuclear is the best option that we have. Modern designs are even cleaner, safer, and more efficient than we currently have operating, and are a guaranteed source that solar and wind cannot touch.
This wasn't the most scientific mission possible, but instead something people thought would be fun. It was kicked out the door of the ISS, basically, which means the trajectory wasn't exactly guaranteed. There was no way to ensure that it wasn't going to get hit by orbital debris -- a paint fleck on one extremity would have at least sent it spinning and significantly altered its course -- or even that it would be in something resembling a stable orbit, even for a few days.
It could be tied into the screensaver itself, so that when you walk away for a long-enough period of time, it switches off. The drawback to this is that modern mice are so sensitive that a truck driving by outside could set it off, so an actual off button would be better. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps it should be an on button -- once it's been powered down by the screensaver, you have to press the on button (or actually hit a key) in order to bring it back up.
Slashdot Mirror
I was flipping back and forth between Bloomberg and CNBC, and the anchors and analysts on both of those stations seemed to be questioning the whole 'patent portfolio' method of doing business, as well as the viability of these kinds of patents in general. It may be a good sign that some of them are waking up to the potential damage involved here.
I am curious what will happen if the remaining patents are ruled invalid, though. Can shareholders then sue to overturn the deal and retrieve the money, taking on the burden of the legal fight while letting RIM continue business?
And now for an opposite point of view. In the interests of full disclosure, my parents were middle-class, maybe lower-middle class, and grew up likewise.
My dad worked in aerospace for about fifteen years before he was hurt on the job. During that time, he was a union member, and participated in some of the strikes that were called. However, after a while, he stopped participating and started crossing lines when union compensation during strikes didn't pay the bills. The union leadership would show up in chauffeured cars wearing fancy suits trailed by aides, little different from the corporate management with whom they were negotiating. He became disillusioned, partially because benefits kept getting cut as more time was demanded of existing workers, but also because he saw people around him slacking off, doing the minimum to look busy, while he was not only working hard, but taking pride in doing so. The end result, of course, was exactly the same pay raise for everyone. To this day, he believes that this setup is unfair.
I've never been in a union. I will go out of my way to avoid being in one, too. I work hard, and I take pride in doing so. My smallest ever raise was 1.85%, and that was because I'd only been at that job for a half of a year, so it was pro-rated down from what it would have been (around 3.25%). Most of the time, my raises have been 4% or more, including two cases where I have managed raises of 8% or higher. I've managed larger than average raises in places that were deemed by other employees to be 'stingy.' Maybe I've just been lucky, but being lumped in with everyone else when it comes time for the annual review, keeping my job only because I wasn't convicted of a felony... That's not what I want. If I screw up, I deserve a smaller raise -- or none, for that matter. It's a punishment. Just let me know why -- that's all I ask.
I respect what unions have done. Unions were, indeed, the reasons that many things that we now often take for granted are here: sharing of healthcare costs, safety regulations, overtime pay, and labor board hearings might not exist as we know them today without the work of labor unions of the past. But they've become an anachronism, and you need look no further than the unions today who demand that pensions be maintained not only for existing workers, but for new workers as well. Even as companies go bankrupt under the weight of their pensions (not just airlines, but also the steel industry), even as pension demands rise while fewer workers are required to perform the same work, the unions won't drop the issue and move into the modern world, and that's detrimental to the very people they claim to be protecting.
More than a quarter of all US workers were in unions in the 1950s; today, that number is down to one in eight overall, and in private industry, it's one in 14. It's almost quaint to be part of a union these days, especially since their political actions are becoming more widely known. Whether on the level or hiding in the shade, a lot of people don't want their money spent on union activities, because they violate their beliefs. There is a federal law that requires that unions allow members to opt out, but just try to find that form with your local union. Merely calling may well put you on a list of people that the union might not be so willing to protect; the tales about that have been anecdotal, but there have been enough of them that they're hard to discount.
Their work of the past earned them respect and honor, but their refusal to adapt mires them in that past, yearning for the glory years of old. Unless they can overcome these limitations, their membership and clout will continue to dwindle towards irrelevance.
IIRC, Microsoft stopped providing OpenGL layers a few years ago, preferring instead to let the device driver authors provide the layer. It allowed people interested in it to handle the layer while removing it from the people that didn't want to support it (and perhaps enabling some more finger-pointing at the same time, but that's beside the point).
They may have wrappers for OpenGL functionality to translate it to DX functions, but the end result is slower than OpenGL.
You may be in the minority on this point. I've replayed HL1 at least a dozen times, and I've replayed HL2 three times. Sometimes it's for the fun of it, so it's on lower difficulty levels, and sometimes I'm going for a challenge so I change it to a very high level of difficulty. I know of several other people who have also replayed the games on a few occasions. Generally speaking, Valve gets credit for the good quality of the storyline in both games (the first one, perhaps, a little more than the sequel).
That depends on your sense of scale. A raft designed to carry a hunter and his catch down a river without getting his feet wet isn't going to ever carry commercially significant quantities of commodity products through Pacific storms, but it got the ideas going for larger craft which eventually could. Space Ship One, similarly, won't ever see orbit, but it may have triggered the imagination for something that will at a better cost-per-mass ratio than we traditionally have seen.
Florida goes before NYC and LA do. The downside is the loss of habitat for numerous endangered creatures. The upside is pretty much everything else.
That's a 6-7-5 format; haiku are written in 5-7-5 format.
You fail. Clean the erasers after class.
Call it rationalizing, then, because it's a secondary reason. I admit that I've been tempted by the latest versions of Logitech's wireless mice, especially after spending two hours rerunning all the cables around my desk.
And my answer was not "entering passwords," as that's a separate step. There's a difference between gathering entropy and selecting a password. Technically, they're similar, but they are not exactly the same.
I'm not as worried about the mouse, but there are times when it can hypothetically be used, such as when providing entropy to key-generating software, to reduce the complexity of a key crack attempt. Likely? No, it's not. I have probably a one in a billion chance of getting such attention in my life. But it still makes me uneasy, so I don't use it.
Besides, corded mice don't get dead batteries.
We have a policy that covers accessing the various locations of the facility, and technically forbids piggybacking. When it's someone I work with, I'm generally fine with allowing access to the person if I've not been told that they were not supposed to be there, so long as he has his badge with him. This has created some friction with a colleague with whom I used to be on good terms; he forgot his badge and I refused to let him in, telling him to go to the Command Center to get a temp badge like policy requires (no one goes anywhere without a badge). He tried to get me to relent, and I wouldn't. I ended up getting commended for this by the facilities manager.
Similar appreciation has been expressed because I stop anyone I don't know from entering doors where I'm not sure if they're allowed. I generally allow them to badge through first, verifying access. When people are around that I don't recognize but don't seem to be interested in going through the doors, I will open the door only enough for me to comfortably slip through (about two feet) and let it close rapidly behind me, paying attention to whether any hands slip through. If someone does want to get in, I will offer to go and find that person, but the visitor must remain outside of secure areas until I have found the person they seek.
There's been talk of overhauling the security system. I'm hoping that they don't plan on getting proximity readers, but that seems to be popular.
I'd like to see that, but cost is an issue. Magstripe cards cost a couple of bucks; smartcards cost $15 or more plus the additional technologies involved, and across 15,000 employees, that becomes a major expenditure.
I would suggest that each partisan segment is about a quarter of the populace, with less than 20% being true independents and the remaining 30% or so just sort of swaying with the political breeze. This is the segment that would like to know more, but feels that the political landscape is too complex for them to understand and yet feels the need to vote anyway.
Just my observations.
This is why I keep pressing my employer to not adopt RFID badges, and keep either the magnetic swipes or move to 2D barcodes. I have an inherent distrust of anything wireless, which is why I still have cables running from my mouse and keyboard, refuse to use Bluetooth, and use wireless only when I have to and even then almost exclusively in Linux (though with WPA/WPA2 and a nice, long, random shared key, it's not so bad). My current record in a lab for cracking 128-bit WEP is about 14 minutes, start to finish.
Paranoid? Yeah, a bit. But then I've never had to worry much about someone intercepting my phone calls or passwords over the air.
On the main topic, if no one is going to be fired for refusing, but part of their job is working on equipment in the datacenter, what happens?
Do you have hard numbers on these comparisons? I can sit for a half-hour in front of almost anyone's computer, change some settings, install this, remove that, and ask them if they think it's faster. They'll almost always say that it's much faster than before, even when the difference is so slight that a human would never notice it, or even when it's actually slower than it was. I tested this once by knocking a DMA-capable hard-drive down to PIO, and the user swore it was faster. There was no expression of speed or slowness when I later changed it back to DMA without saying anything.
I may just take you up on the numbers and throw something in VMWare at least to check for resource usage. If I do, I'll post them here.
We have a policy where assigned systems are signed out, with the understanding that damage due to avoidable negligence (which seems repetitive to me) can and will be taken from their final paycheck. In addition, upon leaving or termination, the final paycheck is held until all equipment is returned. There is rarely a problem with this, and to my knowledge, everyone's been pretty professional about it.
Do periodic captures of your data. Google does have a reputation to protect, and if it turned out that the parts they said wouldn't talk to their server turn out to be doing so, it would severely mar the reputation that they've worked so hard to build up.
I've tried using SCORE on four separate occasions, and found the information completely worthless. When asked about how to write a business plan, I was told I should write a business plan. When looking for information about how to handle pay for company owners, two different former HR people had no clue how to handle it. Finally, when asking about depreciation and asking for some pointers, all I got was a brief e-mail advising that I talk to an accountant, without even suggesting that the topic was too complex.
Considering the distractions that I get (network operations center, so phones, various alarms, and a television tuned to one of several news stations), I'd love to get some time alone, even in a small place. I don't have a lot of paper around, so I don't need space. I just need quiet.
They do still happen, but not with the frequency that they once did. Both skirmishes with Libya in the 1980s that resulted in kills for US fighters were the culmination of dogfights, and in the early hours of the Gulf War, there were several dogfights where coalition planes had to engage in close battle.
AWACS has so thoroughly changed the airborne battle arena that whoever can maintain their AWACS aircraft the longest will eventually control the skies. The primary reason that we're able to pick off enemy planes at range is this ultimate eye in the sky, which can watch enemy aircraft from their takeoff roll to their intercept run to their demise at the hands of US missiles, and which only the richest countries can generally afford to operate.
Battleships? When did this happen? The Soviets built some nuclear-powered heavy cruisers, and there are quite a few nuclear carriers, but the Iowas (the only battleships still active in the past almost half-century) are and always were conventionally powered.
Coal seam fires are regularly extinguished. It's difficult and expensive, but the value of the coal burned is higher than the cost of extinguishing it -- and that's in the US, which has centuries of coal remaining to be mined.
There's no reason that many of the coal seam fires in China could not be extinguished, other than that China does not care to spend the money on it.
Isn't Germany still trying to scrap their reactors?
Realistically, nuclear is the best option that we have. Modern designs are even cleaner, safer, and more efficient than we currently have operating, and are a guaranteed source that solar and wind cannot touch.
The strikes against Afghanistan were legitimate, if largely ineffective; the strikes the same night against Sudan were not.
Two orbits and it was fucked.
This wasn't the most scientific mission possible, but instead something people thought would be fun. It was kicked out the door of the ISS, basically, which means the trajectory wasn't exactly guaranteed. There was no way to ensure that it wasn't going to get hit by orbital debris -- a paint fleck on one extremity would have at least sent it spinning and significantly altered its course -- or even that it would be in something resembling a stable orbit, even for a few days.
It could be tied into the screensaver itself, so that when you walk away for a long-enough period of time, it switches off. The drawback to this is that modern mice are so sensitive that a truck driving by outside could set it off, so an actual off button would be better. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps it should be an on button -- once it's been powered down by the screensaver, you have to press the on button (or actually hit a key) in order to bring it back up.