Does the place have a name? Sounds like in your round alone, there were 12 people who walked out. Probably dozens, if not hundreds, have walked out over time.
It's a little bit tricky... copyright and patents are awarded by the federal government (talking U.S. here, obviously), but no such analogue applies for trade secrets. For example, secrets deemed “business information” are only protected under state law, if at all for that matter. One of the obvious differences between trade secrets and copyright & patents is filing/disclosure with the federal government. The whole idea of a trade secret is that you... wait for it... keep it secret. Not even the government knows.
Now since 2016 there is the DTSA, but generally, trade secret cases are tried in state court. (I'm speaking as an expert witness who has testified in state court and federal court, and in matters of copyright, patent and trade secret infringment).
Last thing I'll say, again from the perspective of an expert witness, is that it's very common that employees from Company A leave and go to competitor Company B. I've seen the entire spectrum, working both for plaintiffs and defense, from "walking out with everything that's not bolted down" to "doing it a better way, but old employer has sour grapes" and either wants to simply crush the new company with legal fees, or actually believes "they must have taken our stuff" when they actually didn't.
Like it or not, that's why we have the court system. From my experience, the truth is often somewhere in the middle - the employees aren't completely clean-handed, but the jilted ex-employer attempts to "throw the book" at the ex-employees.
For anyone who doesn't follow the link to read the story you posted -- apparently the gang members who donned brass knuckles and beat the kid into a coma were all Six Flags employees - WTF?!?! Kinda makes you wonder what the hiring process is like there.
Eliminating left turns to save time at the expense of longer distance is plausible.
Making the journey shorter by eliminating left turns is not. So what is the article not telling us?
I had exactly the same question. I watched the ~2 minute video (linked at the bottom of the summary) and I think the answer was in there -- they'll have multiple trucks conquering a neighborhood, often passing each other on a 2-lane road as each serves the buildings on the right hand side of the road. To me it's totally plausible that under such a scheme, the net distance could be less.
Holy crap. After reading the slide show on Imgur, I think we should call a doctor to help Mr. Thomas Goebl, Director of Marketing and author of the presentation. He patted himself and the company so much on the back, he must have broken his arm! I have never seen a more self-indulgent, self-congratulatory presentation in my life.
Speaking of RISC-V and its instruction set, I recently read an interesting & informative blog post on the topic by Adam Langely at his blog Imperial Violet
Wish I had mod points to mod you up. Also there was the guy on Hacker News (emcrazyone) who I think was a systems engineer at Ford, he (or she?) explained the BSquare shitshow.
I feel for you guys... having these asinine decisions rammed down your throats, and being told to "make it work". Sounds like you guys never had a fighting chance...
My understanding is that if this goes to trial, which in the U.S. is public and open, all the documents presented (except possibly source code?) will be available to the public.
Sounds like Ford is in very, very bad position on this one. Usually attorneys save the most damning material for trial. Maybe we'll see.
It's even worse than Microsoft -- actually some hack 'n' sack firm called BSquare (was a publicly-traded company, I think they're swirling the drain) did the initial version of Sync Gen 2. Oh, but BSquare is a Microsoft "Gold Certified Partner", whatever the hell that means.
There was a story on Hacker News a couple years ago, an embedded systems engineer (inside Ford) was lamenting upper-management's choice of Windows CE and BSquare for the system.
Interesting that the 3rd generation of SYNC (out since 2016 I think) is based on QNX and appears to very well received. No Microsoft, no BSquare, no Windows CE. QNX is a real-time operating system. Windows CE purports to be, but a) all the middleware crap that comes in MS Auto is so buggy and full of priority inversions etc,, give me a break.
Someone (maybe the Hacker News article?) said something along the lines of "the decision to use WinCE in MyFord Touch was a handshake on a golf course, and Ford has felt the pain ever since."
Easy to see how this could back-fire and cause more harm to Spotify. Seems like a childish reaction instead of doubling down & re-grouping to make their service better and more appealing.
I mean, the last time I used Apple Music, I think I said something out loud along the lines of, "This app [on my phone] is buggiest, most confusing and counter-intuitive piece of crap I've ever used." And yet Spotify is still scrambling...
TFA's implication is that a white person has a right to make $700k/year, while the Chinese don't deserve to make a living because they are yellow skinned sub-humans.
You're way out of line here, dragging skin color (not nationality, but skin color) into this.
I think the article / story would have published even if the American was black, Native American, "brown", "yellow", etc. [I put those terms in quotes, because if I said Latino or Asian, that would be nationality, and I'm debating your choice to drag skin color into this. Personally, I think simplistic terms like white / yellow / brown to describe skin color over-simplify things, but I don't make the conventions...]
I totally agree with you about the patent bullshit, about similar products being around forever, etc. but I don't think this is a "Chinese are sub-human animals" piece. That's way too sensitive.
Chinese knock-offs, both legal and illegal, are widely acknowledged as being a reality. They have nothing to do with skin color.
The lady's business was fragile, she should think she had a good run. That also has nothing to do with her skin color.
"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." - Bjarne Stroustrup (from the excellent book, "The Design and Evolution of C++")
I use C++ for embedded systems, not a hater at all, but I feel that the language is becoming bigger, with more features, more keywords, larger libraries, and over-ebullient language nerds who aren't building stuff that powers the world (PC-centric Herb Sutter: "Hey, let's add a 2D graphics API! Because PC and Windows and Microsoft!") How is that useful to my embedded implantable medical device? Why does this need to be part of the core language specification? (Well, really the standard library, which is part of the language specification, let's not get pedantic here.) )
Look, I think some of the newer stuff is OK, but enough is enough... plus, and I know I'm in the minority here, but many of the platforms I work on don't use a compiler with C++11 (let alone C++14) support.
This makes my job as a "C++ evangelist" even tougher; organizations that are already scared by the size & complexity of the language are terrified by the "every 3 years, more stuff!" tendency.
I know some of you will say, "If you don't like it (C++11, C++14, etc) , just don't use it." or "these new features make the language/less/ complex." I don't have the time to debate that, but I'll just say that in my (working) world, those arguments don't work.
Re-programming an on-chip "ROM" that is really flash memory - e.g., many microcontroller bootroms / bootloaders, I get that. But if you're talking about "re-writing" the **mask ROM** - how exactly would your typical hacker do that? I'm being sincere, I'm not trying to be argumentative. (BTW, I'm familiar w/ de-capping, FIB, etc., but that is really outside the capability of 99.999% of hacker's budgets and expertise, surely you're not talking about that.)
I don't know about MS Sync; I think Sync is name of the application, which runs on top Windows CE and MS Auto. My recollection could be wrong -- I've tried incredibly hard to forget everything 've ever known about WinCE, but I think WinCE and maybe MS Auto are "Shared Source", where you can obtain the source.
...the MISRA standard for embedded systems includes these rules:
2) absolutely no local variables. it could lead to stack overflows.
????
Could you please cite the MISRA C 2004, C 2012, or C++ 2008 rule that forbids local variables? I don't remember such a rule.
Also I'll make the distinction between a local variable (which could be static, and thus not on the stack) and an "automatic" variable, which is local and almost always allocated on the stack (but not required by the standard -- in fact, small automatics might only live in registers & not even use stack memory).
While it's absolutely true that a large automatic object ("variable") can blow the stack, I don't recall MISRA forbidding such objects.
I've made the exact same argument to co-workers at many firms... namespaces (e.g. Timer_Init()), virtual functions (tables of function pointers), etc. can be approximated / kludged together... but automatically invoking a function at the right place (destructor and, let's face it, the constructor is pretty handy too) is something that has to be baked into the language, and C++ has it. I work in safety-critical systems, and knowing that I can't leave a function with interrupts disabled, I can't forget to close this socket, etc. is incredibly comforting.
I'll quote Bjarne Stroustrup here:
"Just that closing brace. Here is where all the ‘magic’ happens in C++. Variables get destroyed, memory gets released, locks get freed, files get closed, names from outside the closed scope regain their meaning, etc. This is where C++ most significantly differs from other languages. It is interesting to see how destructors -- an invention (together with constructors) from the first week or so of C++ -- have increased in importance over the years. So many of the modern and most effective C++ techniques critically depend on them"
I'd be interested to know if the data-crunchers at Amazon have looked at the Amazon Vine reviews, as a group, to see if they are slanted positive.
Amazon Vine is the program where a certain select demographic of Amazon customers receive free stuff (including items such as 60" TVs, laptops, etc.), with the understanding that they will objectively review the product and post the review on Amazon. My experience is that almost every Amazon Vine review is 4-5 stars. I'd also be curious to see if Amazon looks at the spread of reviews from Vine reviewers -- by that I mean, "Do reviewers in the Vine program rate free Vine products higher than other products they've bought?"
The implication being that Vine reviews (many of them) probably feel that a good review of a product that Amazon wants to sell is "quid pro quo". I strongly suspect that Amazon wants exactly the opposite of quid pro quo; they want early Vine reviews to weed out marginal or bad products.
Yep, and how about the occasional review where the moron says something like, "I love the product, but (the shipment was late | the box was dented | the delivery man didn't smile), so, you know, 1 star."
Absolutely. In a similar vein, have you noticed, the reviews with "Amazon Vine" next to them are typically full of platitudes & praise?
I appreciate Amazon's transparency, in fact I applaud it, but I think the whole Vine program is a bit brain-dead ("Hey we just shipped you a brand-new 60" Samsung HDTV, please let us know if you like it.")
IMO the Vine reviewers would have a lot more credibility if reviewers had to return the product after 30 days (shipping paid for by Amazon). I'll bet if you check most Vine reviews, they are made within 7 days of receiving the product, and I bet they average something like 4.5 stars.
If there is a big-data person from Amazon reading this, try instituting a 30-day "use & return" policy for Vine, and watch participation go down, along with average review. That will tell you who's in it for free stuff, and who's actually interested in using products & writing meaningful reviews (don't get me wrong, I'm not one of them, I wouldn't do it...)
Even though Vine "membership" isn't tied to the average review you give, and (in theory) the terms of participation in Vine are such that Amazon can ask for any Vine item to be returned to Amazon at any time, that's not the reality.
I'd just be happy to know that firmware images for every processor on my vehicle (at least important ones, like the Engine Control Unit (ECU)) have to be digitally signed. Unfortunately, I have little confidence in that.:-(
I swear on my life, I have the exact same story (Dave or John, is that you?!?!)
Back country camping the Tetons (this was summer 1990 I think), we took care to hoist anything with smell 100ft away, up in the trees... all of a sudden in the middle of the night, we hear an animal, which sounded very large, moving around our camp. Snorfling, walking, breathing, exploring.... it was probably only 5 minutes, but I swear, it felt like an hour. I have never, ever been more motionless in my life. 2 of us think it was a bear, one thinks it was a moose. All 3 of us agree at the time it sounded like a bear, and we all were having visions of huge bear claws shredding our tent into ribbons.
I've lost contact with my buddies (the aforementioned Dave & John), but I am 100% sure if I told this story, they would remember it instantly. Thank you for posting this, as I said, you described my/our experience to a T, so much so that I had to post a reply.
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Place sounds like a dumpster fire.
Does the place have a name? Sounds like in your round alone, there were 12 people who walked out. Probably dozens, if not hundreds, have walked out over time.
It's a little bit tricky... copyright and patents are awarded by the federal government (talking U.S. here, obviously), but no such analogue applies for trade secrets. For example, secrets deemed “business information” are only protected under state law, if at all for that matter. One of the obvious differences between trade secrets and copyright & patents is filing/disclosure with the federal government. The whole idea of a trade secret is that you... wait for it... keep it secret. Not even the government knows.
Now since 2016 there is the DTSA, but generally, trade secret cases are tried in state court. (I'm speaking as an expert witness who has testified in state court and federal court, and in matters of copyright, patent and trade secret infringment).
Last thing I'll say, again from the perspective of an expert witness, is that it's very common that employees from Company A leave and go to competitor Company B. I've seen the entire spectrum, working both for plaintiffs and defense, from "walking out with everything that's not bolted down" to "doing it a better way, but old employer has sour grapes" and either wants to simply crush the new company with legal fees, or actually believes "they must have taken our stuff" when they actually didn't.
Like it or not, that's why we have the court system. From my experience, the truth is often somewhere in the middle - the employees aren't completely clean-handed, but the jilted ex-employer attempts to "throw the book" at the ex-employees.
For anyone who doesn't follow the link to read the story you posted -- apparently the gang members who donned brass knuckles and beat the kid into a coma were all Six Flags employees - WTF?!?! Kinda makes you wonder what the hiring process is like there.
In Germany the limit is 0.05; she was 4x this level.
Eliminating left turns to save time at the expense of longer distance is plausible.
Making the journey shorter by eliminating left turns is not. So what is the article not telling us?
I had exactly the same question. I watched the ~2 minute video (linked at the bottom of the summary) and I think the answer was in there -- they'll have multiple trucks conquering a neighborhood, often passing each other on a 2-lane road as each serves the buildings on the right hand side of the road. To me it's totally plausible that under such a scheme, the net distance could be less.
Holy crap. After reading the slide show on Imgur, I think we should call a doctor to help Mr. Thomas Goebl, Director of Marketing and author of the presentation. He patted himself and the company so much on the back, he must have broken his arm! I have never seen a more self-indulgent, self-congratulatory presentation in my life.
Speaking of RISC-V and its instruction set, I recently read an interesting & informative blog post on the topic by Adam Langely at his blog Imperial Violet
I feel for you guys... having these asinine decisions rammed down your throats, and being told to "make it work". Sounds like you guys never had a fighting chance...
Sounds like Ford is in very, very bad position on this one. Usually attorneys save the most damning material for trial. Maybe we'll see.
There was a story on Hacker News a couple years ago, an embedded systems engineer (inside Ford) was lamenting upper-management's choice of Windows CE and BSquare for the system.
Interesting that the 3rd generation of SYNC (out since 2016 I think) is based on QNX and appears to very well received. No Microsoft, no BSquare, no Windows CE. QNX is a real-time operating system. Windows CE purports to be, but a) all the middleware crap that comes in MS Auto is so buggy and full of priority inversions etc,, give me a break.
Someone (maybe the Hacker News article?) said something along the lines of "the decision to use WinCE in MyFord Touch was a handshake on a golf course, and Ford has felt the pain ever since."
Easy to see how this could back-fire and cause more harm to Spotify. Seems like a childish reaction instead of doubling down & re-grouping to make their service better and more appealing.
I mean, the last time I used Apple Music, I think I said something out loud along the lines of, "This app [on my phone] is buggiest, most confusing and counter-intuitive piece of crap I've ever used." And yet Spotify is still scrambling...
TFA's implication is that a white person has a right to make $700k/year, while the Chinese don't deserve to make a living because they are yellow skinned sub-humans.
You're way out of line here, dragging skin color (not nationality, but skin color) into this.
I think the article / story would have published even if the American was black, Native American, "brown", "yellow", etc. [I put those terms in quotes, because if I said Latino or Asian, that would be nationality, and I'm debating your choice to drag skin color into this. Personally, I think simplistic terms like white / yellow / brown to describe skin color over-simplify things, but I don't make the conventions...]
I totally agree with you about the patent bullshit, about similar products being around forever, etc. but I don't think this is a "Chinese are sub-human animals" piece. That's way too sensitive.
Chinese knock-offs, both legal and illegal, are widely acknowledged as being a reality. They have nothing to do with skin color.
The lady's business was fragile, she should think she had a good run. That also has nothing to do with her skin color.
"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out."
- Bjarne Stroustrup (from the excellent book, "The Design and Evolution of C++")
I use C++ for embedded systems, not a hater at all, but I feel that the language is becoming bigger, with more features, more keywords, larger libraries, and over-ebullient language nerds who aren't building stuff that powers the world (PC-centric Herb Sutter: "Hey, let's add a 2D graphics API! Because PC and Windows and Microsoft!") How is that useful to my embedded implantable medical device? Why does this need to be part of the core language specification? (Well, really the standard library, which is part of the language specification, let's not get pedantic here.) )
Look, I think some of the newer stuff is OK, but enough is enough... plus, and I know I'm in the minority here, but many of the platforms I work on don't use a compiler with C++11 (let alone C++14) support.
This makes my job as a "C++ evangelist" even tougher; organizations that are already scared by the size & complexity of the language are terrified by the "every 3 years, more stuff!" tendency.
I know some of you will say, "If you don't like it (C++11, C++14, etc) , just don't use it." or "these new features make the language /less/ complex." I don't have the time to debate that, but I'll just say that in my (working) world, those arguments don't work.
The most significant weakness in a 4-digit PIN is that (in this case) merely by guessing you have a 0.1% chance to get it right.
Wait, what? 4-digit PIN = 0-9,999 = 1 in 10K chance = 0.01% chance, correct? I mean, that's an order of magnitude...
Re-programming an on-chip "ROM" that is really flash memory - e.g., many microcontroller bootroms / bootloaders, I get that. But if you're talking about "re-writing" the **mask ROM** - how exactly would your typical hacker do that? I'm being sincere, I'm not trying to be argumentative. (BTW, I'm familiar w/ de-capping, FIB, etc., but that is really outside the capability of 99.999% of hacker's budgets and expertise, surely you're not talking about that.)
I don't know about MS Sync; I think Sync is name of the application, which runs on top Windows CE and MS Auto. My recollection could be wrong -- I've tried incredibly hard to forget everything 've ever known about WinCE, but I think WinCE and maybe MS Auto are "Shared Source", where you can obtain the source.
QNX is definitely open-source.
...the MISRA standard for embedded systems includes these rules: 2) absolutely no local variables. it could lead to stack overflows.
????
Could you please cite the MISRA C 2004, C 2012, or C++ 2008 rule that forbids local variables? I don't remember such a rule.
Also I'll make the distinction between a local variable (which could be static, and thus not on the stack) and an "automatic" variable, which is local and almost always allocated on the stack (but not required by the standard -- in fact, small automatics might only live in registers & not even use stack memory).
While it's absolutely true that a large automatic object ("variable") can blow the stack, I don't recall MISRA forbidding such objects.
I've made the exact same argument to co-workers at many firms... namespaces (e.g. Timer_Init()), virtual functions (tables of function pointers), etc. can be approximated / kludged together... but automatically invoking a function at the right place (destructor and, let's face it, the constructor is pretty handy too) is something that has to be baked into the language, and C++ has it. I work in safety-critical systems, and knowing that I can't leave a function with interrupts disabled, I can't forget to close this socket, etc. is incredibly comforting.
I'll quote Bjarne Stroustrup here:
"Just that closing brace. Here is where all the ‘magic’ happens in C++. Variables get destroyed, memory gets released, locks get freed, files get closed, names from outside the closed scope regain their meaning, etc. This is where C++ most significantly differs from other languages. It is interesting to see how destructors -- an invention (together with constructors) from the first week or so of C++ -- have increased in importance over the years. So many of the modern and most effective C++ techniques critically depend on them"
I'd be interested to know if the data-crunchers at Amazon have looked at the Amazon Vine reviews, as a group, to see if they are slanted positive.
Amazon Vine is the program where a certain select demographic of Amazon customers receive free stuff (including items such as 60" TVs, laptops, etc.), with the understanding that they will objectively review the product and post the review on Amazon. My experience is that almost every Amazon Vine review is 4-5 stars. I'd also be curious to see if Amazon looks at the spread of reviews from Vine reviewers -- by that I mean, "Do reviewers in the Vine program rate free Vine products higher than other products they've bought?"
The implication being that Vine reviews (many of them) probably feel that a good review of a product that Amazon wants to sell is "quid pro quo". I strongly suspect that Amazon wants exactly the opposite of quid pro quo; they want early Vine reviews to weed out marginal or bad products.
Reddit employees - no need to watch this video, salary negotiating skills are no longer relevant to you: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/c...
Yep, and how about the occasional review where the moron says something like, "I love the product, but (the shipment was late | the box was dented | the delivery man didn't smile), so, you know, 1 star."
Except for the fact that adding the "kilo" prefix would result in 9 decimal places more water, not 3 ;-)
Absolutely. In a similar vein, have you noticed, the reviews with "Amazon Vine" next to them are typically full of platitudes & praise?
I appreciate Amazon's transparency, in fact I applaud it, but I think the whole Vine program is a bit brain-dead ("Hey we just shipped you a brand-new 60" Samsung HDTV, please let us know if you like it.")
IMO the Vine reviewers would have a lot more credibility if reviewers had to return the product after 30 days (shipping paid for by Amazon). I'll bet if you check most Vine reviews, they are made within 7 days of receiving the product, and I bet they average something like 4.5 stars.
If there is a big-data person from Amazon reading this, try instituting a 30-day "use & return" policy for Vine, and watch participation go down, along with average review. That will tell you who's in it for free stuff, and who's actually interested in using products & writing meaningful reviews (don't get me wrong, I'm not one of them, I wouldn't do it...)
Even though Vine "membership" isn't tied to the average review you give, and (in theory) the terms of participation in Vine are such that Amazon can ask for any Vine item to be returned to Amazon at any time, that's not the reality.
I'd just be happy to know that firmware images for every processor on my vehicle (at least important ones, like the Engine Control Unit (ECU)) have to be digitally signed. Unfortunately, I have little confidence in that. :-(
I swear on my life, I have the exact same story (Dave or John, is that you?!?!)
Back country camping the Tetons (this was summer 1990 I think), we took care to hoist anything with smell 100ft away, up in the trees... all of a sudden in the middle of the night, we hear an animal, which sounded very large, moving around our camp. Snorfling, walking, breathing, exploring.... it was probably only 5 minutes, but I swear, it felt like an hour. I have never, ever been more motionless in my life. 2 of us think it was a bear, one thinks it was a moose. All 3 of us agree at the time it sounded like a bear, and we all were having visions of huge bear claws shredding our tent into ribbons.
I've lost contact with my buddies (the aforementioned Dave & John), but I am 100% sure if I told this story, they would remember it instantly. Thank you for posting this, as I said, you described my/our experience to a T, so much so that I had to post a reply.