You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.
the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid.
Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption. This is not "stupid", it's corruption working exactly as it's intended to. What's perhaps stupid is those ultimately footing the bill being too naive to realise it, and not holding the corrupt to account.
Sorry, but I have a pretty good idea what corruption looks like, and this stinks to high hell of corruption, the odds are about zero that it's anything else. Computers and how 'complex' they are great premises for corrupt bureaucrats to launch 'projects' that become huge money holes.
Oh sorry, I was confused 50 milliwatts = Nokia's claim, 6 microwatts = Intel. Hmm.. that implies just 20 cellphones could draw 1W from a 1MW antenna? Still small, but I suppose if hundreds of thousands of users did this in a built-up area it might make a tiny dent. Densely populated areas though tend to be more flooded with multiple antennae transmissions; I still doubt it would make a big difference, considering that cellphones are tiny, and the maximum absorption is the size of a cellphone... you don't usually have more than a few cellphones in a room. If you were right, it would imply that the majority of radio reception is from signals that have bounced hundreds of times already without being absorbed.
6 microwatts from a 1MW antenna - so a "mere" 166000 phones charging off just one transmitter would sink a massive 1W, or one millionth of that transmission power... that sounds trivial to me.
Software developers rarely manage their own machines. And that's not necessarily a bad thing... I got my degree in Computer Science. Great people to solve a hairy logic problem, not someone you'd want with admin access on any machine you have to support...
In my experience, only bad software developers are incapable of managing their own machines. The kind you probably don't want working for you anyway.
kdawson, you should be ashamed of yourself for posting this tripe.
Maybe, but this topic has by far the most comments out of any article on/.'s front page... it is his job after all to attract commenters and generate lively discussion... it's not his fault we're all so predictable as to fall for this every time.
They want the safety and protections afforded by operating in the US
"Safety and proections"? Well that's sufficiently vague as to mean nothing - be more specific - exactly what attributes of Microsoft's business model rely on their operational HQ being in the US, that they could not get by having it elsewhere (say, Canada or Australia or the UK)?
Ballmer should realize that maybe he owes a debt to the same damn society that got him here
So you're saying that Ballmer should legally be a slave to the state? Interesting viewpoint. By extension, you think that anyone who starts a business should become a slave to the state? I bet *that* would encourage entrepreneurialism and job creation. You know, I'm pretty sure that some countries have tried this kind of thing before, but gee, I don't quite remember, I mean you know, I never did bother with learning "history" much, I'd rather just repeat it[/sarcasm]
You should distinguish between government infrastructural jobs, and government jobs that actually "generate wealth" - the former would also be known as a socialised economy whereby government controls the means of production in some or all industries. And sure they can generate *some* wealth, but it's questionable as to whether it's worth the necessary cost of giving up essential liberty (as that is what government-run economies must, by definition, amount to).
There is also some debate about which generates *more* wealth - free market capitalism or government-run industries - personally I think that "debate" is a red herring anyway, because the more fundamental moral issue is freedom - it's not about "artificially engineering the most optimal economy", it's about basic human rights.
Using a legal loophole is NOT against the law - spirit of the law, sure, but if we start jailing and fining people for doing things that aren't even against the law, that would set an incredibly frightening precedent.
Sure, force them to fulfill their so-called "obligations" - we all know the next steps - they leave the country for more free countries elsewhere - and then the next step, make it illegal for them to leave the country! Starting to sound like the old Soviet Union yet?
One minute after Ballmer said that, MS should have ceased to be a legal operating US company. He can go try his luck someplace else
Actually, though they'd take a bit of a hit, Microsoft would probably survive just fine somewhere else - and they'd take 89000 jobs with them (and possibly millions of secondary jobs) too. You really think that's best for the US?
So if you were asked to do your current job for half the pay "for the good of your country", when you could get paid much more elsewhere, you wouldn't consider it?
Innocent? By this article's own admission they were "getting paramilitary training in Afghanistan" before 9/11... what exactly do you think they were doing there, learning to follow in Mother Teresa's footsteps? These aren't just some wonderfully delightful peaceful people who happened to be sitting around singing Kumbaya in the wrong place when they were arrested.
Or maybe boys aren't pushed as hard anymore to truly excel. Perhaps since that would be 'offensive'.
The title "The Myth of the Mathematics Gender Gap" is nonsensical, because the gap is an existing *fact* that even the article admits! - even after all these decades of feminism, men *still* outperform women in this field - the gap itself thus cannot be said to be a myth at all, the *only* thing still in question is the *cause* of the gap. The title is clearly biased, as it attempts to give the impression there is no gap when clearly there is. When they say "the myth of the gap", only if we're careful will we interpret that very loosely as having been intended to state "the myth that men are intrinsically better"... but this is not what is stated at all, and it suggests a bias that reveals an agenda - the submitter wants people to misread that as "the gap does not exist" - i.e. something completely false.
The title of the blog post itself is just "Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained ", so the bias may be at the submitter level.
In order to prove that women or men are superior at ANYTHING...
Anything? Are you sure? Why do we have separate categories for women in athletics then, where they consistently under-perform compared to men by a wide margin? At physical activities they don't come close. To deny that women on average are notably physically weaker and slower than men on average would be beyond absurd, like claiming the sky is purple - the evidence against it is right in front of your face, everywhere you look. And no, it isn't caused by "socialized gender roles" alone, it's basic human physiology. It isn't in doubt, not in the scientific world or anywhere else.
Now math is a different ball game, but you did say "anything" in capital letters.
Of the variety of parsing tasks out there to do, with the level of support available in terms of API's and frameworks, working with XML could be seen as slicing butter with a hot knife.
creimer wasn't talking about using a XML parsing API - of course it's easy if you use someone else's parsing and DOM API, that is not the point - he's talking about writing such a parser yourself. Look at the source code of an XML parser (like xerces) sometime if you think it's a quick 'n easy job to whip up something like that.
You're joking, right? I develop an XML editor as my living, so I'm more than passingly familiar with this topic. Generating XML is on the order of a few hundred lines of code. A proper, full XML parser is on the order of 100,000 lines of code. The xerces source code is over 300,000 lines of code - there's a reason for that - does that sound "simple" to you? Even the simplest of XML parsers (and even if you only a tiny subset of XML) is orders of magnitude more complex and time-consuming than merely generating XML, which is trivial. Sure there's "very specific documentation" - so what? Have you even looked at that specification? The full specification is large. Having "very specific documentation" for something has nothing to do with difficulty of implementation (I'm sure there's "very specific documentation" for wiring a 747 too). And a parser has to handle so many more cases than a generator. And is much more work to test. For reasonably simple cases, you can write a generator that can generate a valid fairly complex XML document in under an hour. Good luck writing a proper XML parser in under an hour for an XML document of the same complexity.
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You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.
that there's enough money to throw around for pie-in-the-sky socialized healthcare and bailouts of the corrupt and incompetent.
the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid.
Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption. This is not "stupid", it's corruption working exactly as it's intended to. What's perhaps stupid is those ultimately footing the bill being too naive to realise it, and not holding the corrupt to account.
Sorry, but I have a pretty good idea what corruption looks like, and this stinks to high hell of corruption, the odds are about zero that it's anything else. Computers and how 'complex' they are great premises for corrupt bureaucrats to launch 'projects' that become huge money holes.
For an aerospace company, you probably need something from a company with a better security track record - sorry, that's just due diligence.
Oh sorry, I was confused 50 milliwatts = Nokia's claim, 6 microwatts = Intel. Hmm .. that implies just 20 cellphones could draw 1W from a 1MW antenna? Still small, but I suppose if hundreds of thousands of users did this in a built-up area it might make a tiny dent. Densely populated areas though tend to be more flooded with multiple antennae transmissions; I still doubt it would make a big difference, considering that cellphones are tiny, and the maximum absorption is the size of a cellphone ... you don't usually have more than a few cellphones in a room. If you were right, it would imply that the majority of radio reception is from signals that have bounced hundreds of times already without being absorbed.
this could result in a non-trivial reduction
6 microwatts from a 1MW antenna - so a "mere" 166000 phones charging off just one transmitter would sink a massive 1W, or one millionth of that transmission power ... that sounds trivial to me.
Software developers rarely manage their own machines. And that's not necessarily a bad thing... I got my degree in Computer Science. Great people to solve a hairy logic problem, not someone you'd want with admin access on any machine you have to support...
In my experience, only bad software developers are incapable of managing their own machines. The kind you probably don't want working for you anyway.
kdawson, you should be ashamed of yourself for posting this tripe.
Maybe, but this topic has by far the most comments out of any article on /.'s front page ... it is his job after all to attract commenters and generate lively discussion ... it's not his fault we're all so predictable as to fall for this every time.
They want the safety and protections afforded by operating in the US
"Safety and proections"? Well that's sufficiently vague as to mean nothing - be more specific - exactly what attributes of Microsoft's business model rely on their operational HQ being in the US, that they could not get by having it elsewhere (say, Canada or Australia or the UK)?
Ballmer should realize that maybe he owes a debt to the same damn society that got him here
So you're saying that Ballmer should legally be a slave to the state? Interesting viewpoint. By extension, you think that anyone who starts a business should become a slave to the state? I bet *that* would encourage entrepreneurialism and job creation. You know, I'm pretty sure that some countries have tried this kind of thing before, but gee, I don't quite remember, I mean you know, I never did bother with learning "history" much, I'd rather just repeat it[/sarcasm]
You should distinguish between government infrastructural jobs, and government jobs that actually "generate wealth" - the former would also be known as a socialised economy whereby government controls the means of production in some or all industries. And sure they can generate *some* wealth, but it's questionable as to whether it's worth the necessary cost of giving up essential liberty (as that is what government-run economies must, by definition, amount to).
There is also some debate about which generates *more* wealth - free market capitalism or government-run industries - personally I think that "debate" is a red herring anyway, because the more fundamental moral issue is freedom - it's not about "artificially engineering the most optimal economy", it's about basic human rights.
Using a legal loophole is NOT against the law - spirit of the law, sure, but if we start jailing and fining people for doing things that aren't even against the law, that would set an incredibly frightening precedent.
Does that really sound like a good idea to you?
traitorous scumbags.
Sure, force them to fulfill their so-called "obligations" - we all know the next steps - they leave the country for more free countries elsewhere - and then the next step, make it illegal for them to leave the country! Starting to sound like the old Soviet Union yet?
One minute after Ballmer said that, MS should have ceased to be a legal operating US company. He can go try his luck someplace else
Actually, though they'd take a bit of a hit, Microsoft would probably survive just fine somewhere else - and they'd take 89000 jobs with them (and possibly millions of secondary jobs) too. You really think that's best for the US?
"Ballmer sounds like an unpatriotic ass."
So if you were asked to do your current job for half the pay "for the good of your country", when you could get paid much more elsewhere, you wouldn't consider it?
How was that a troll? Guess a moderator with an agenda didn't like me pointing out facts!
Innocent? By this article's own admission they were "getting paramilitary training in Afghanistan" before 9/11 ... what exactly do you think they were doing there, learning to follow in Mother Teresa's footsteps? These aren't just some wonderfully delightful peaceful people who happened to be sitting around singing Kumbaya in the wrong place when they were arrested.
Or maybe boys aren't pushed as hard anymore to truly excel. Perhaps since that would be 'offensive'.
The title "The Myth of the Mathematics Gender Gap" is nonsensical, because the gap is an existing *fact* that even the article admits! - even after all these decades of feminism, men *still* outperform women in this field - the gap itself thus cannot be said to be a myth at all, the *only* thing still in question is the *cause* of the gap. The title is clearly biased, as it attempts to give the impression there is no gap when clearly there is. When they say "the myth of the gap", only if we're careful will we interpret that very loosely as having been intended to state "the myth that men are intrinsically better" ... but this is not what is stated at all, and it suggests a bias that reveals an agenda - the submitter wants people to misread that as "the gap does not exist" - i.e. something completely false.
The title of the blog post itself is just "Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained ", so the bias may be at the submitter level.
In order to prove that women or men are superior at ANYTHING ...
Anything? Are you sure? Why do we have separate categories for women in athletics then, where they consistently under-perform compared to men by a wide margin? At physical activities they don't come close. To deny that women on average are notably physically weaker and slower than men on average would be beyond absurd, like claiming the sky is purple - the evidence against it is right in front of your face, everywhere you look. And no, it isn't caused by "socialized gender roles" alone, it's basic human physiology. It isn't in doubt, not in the scientific world or anywhere else.
Now math is a different ball game, but you did say "anything" in capital letters.
Not letting women opt to choose the very subjects they're interested in is, uh, the *opposite* of freedom for women.
In this case, Claim 1 is quite understandable
Please tell me you were joking, and I missed it ... that claim is about as opaque as a brick wall.
Really? I bet it will be their name on the check.
Oh, so Microsoft prints their own currency now?
Of the variety of parsing tasks out there to do, with the level of support available in terms of API's and frameworks, working with XML could be seen as slicing butter with a hot knife.
creimer wasn't talking about using a XML parsing API - of course it's easy if you use someone else's parsing and DOM API, that is not the point - he's talking about writing such a parser yourself. Look at the source code of an XML parser (like xerces) sometime if you think it's a quick 'n easy job to whip up something like that.
You're joking, right? I develop an XML editor as my living, so I'm more than passingly familiar with this topic. Generating XML is on the order of a few hundred lines of code. A proper, full XML parser is on the order of 100,000 lines of code. The xerces source code is over 300,000 lines of code - there's a reason for that - does that sound "simple" to you? Even the simplest of XML parsers (and even if you only a tiny subset of XML) is orders of magnitude more complex and time-consuming than merely generating XML, which is trivial. Sure there's "very specific documentation" - so what? Have you even looked at that specification? The full specification is large. Having "very specific documentation" for something has nothing to do with difficulty of implementation (I'm sure there's "very specific documentation" for wiring a 747 too). And a parser has to handle so many more cases than a generator. And is much more work to test. For reasonably simple cases, you can write a generator that can generate a valid fairly complex XML document in under an hour. Good luck writing a proper XML parser in under an hour for an XML document of the same complexity.