I am sure that there are some countries who do put images of centuries old rulers on the back of their coins, but it isn't Canada.
You, sir (or madame) are a teller of tall tails: we don't put images of centuries old rulers on the backs of our coinage (or paper money): we put them on the fonts of the money, where they belong!
The number of TVs isn't really important, the number of households, however, is very important. In all likelihood, the ~250 million TVs only represents about 100 million homes, while the 33 million TVs still using analog represents about 30 million homes. It's not the TVs that the advertisers care about, but the people watching them, and you are likely to lose 25%-35% of your audience by discarding 12% of the TVs in the U.S.
If you simply need to burn a few more callories and work on your posture, why not switch to a standingdesk? It doesn't do much to get you outside more often, but you will get more exercise. It might be a good stop-gap while you find the non-deskbound job.
At my work, the keyboard trays in the cubicles can be lifted up an extra foot or so, which is almost perfect for typing while standing. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for a way to raise the moitor.
Both engineering and mathematics are ancient disciplines, with origins dating back almost as far as written history itself. The ancient Babylonians, Sumerians and Egyptians were aware of mathematics to the extent that they were able to contruct mathematical proofs for the same geometric theorems that we all learned in high school. These same cultures obviously had a superb understanding of engineering in order to be able to build monumental architechture that stood for millenia, all without the benefit algebra or decimal arithmetic (much less, calculus).
There is no reason to think that the sorts of folks that became engineers or mathematicians 5000 years ago were, tempermentally, any differnt from the sorts of folks that become engineers or mathematicians today.
There were, no doubt, other highly skilled and technical professions that would have attracted ancient geeks: other's have mentioned smithing, scribing is another possability (just being literate enough to read and write was analogous to the general level of education of most geeks today), as is accountancy (conducting simple arithmetic without the benefit of decimal numbers must have required great patience and dedication). In the far east, at least since about 200 B.C., there was a good chance that anyone with reasonable education would have become a government functionary under the Confucian civil service system. I also suspect that, in other times, when people's conception of the world was very different from ours, many geeks may have gone into fields that would seem highly esoteric by modern standards: ancient geeks may have become musicians, artists, poets or monks as a means of persuing the life of the mind.
Finally, we should recognize the uncomfortable fact that most ancient geeks probably never got the opportunity to persue any career whatsoever. Throughout most of history, most people, no matter what their personal interests or inate abilities, were destined to be peasant farmers, servants, slaves or other bondsmen, like their fathers and grandfathers and so on. The idea that people, no matter what their station by birth, should be able (or even required) to choose their path in life, is a thoroughly modern concept.
Re:When I was a little boy...
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 1
I'd ask my dad and say, "where can I get insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound". He'd say, "Son, we live in a pussy age where you'd get arrested for just asking about that stuff." I guess this is how we grow up today. Sterile, hairless wimps.
No, the reason you grew up as a sterile, hairless wimp is because all those highly-toxic-explosive-compounds your father and grandfather played around with had horrible effects on their genes and reproductive systems.
Funny, I thought that the reason we grew up as sterile, hairless wimps was because we didn't get poisoned or blown to smithereens in childhood whilst playing with insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound.
It's just you. The Lisa interface was, essentially, indistinguishable from the early Macintosh interface. If anything, Symphony OS looks more like a cross between Windows XP and that new widget environment in OS X 10.4 (Dashboard?).
The Lisa interface would be immediately familiar to anyone accustomed to modern GUIs. It had all the expected behaviors:
icons representing disks, applications and files
double clicking to open files or launch applications
a trash can into which items could be dragged to be deleted
overlapping, movable, resizable windows
pull-down menus in the same arrangment we see today (File, Edit,...)
a clipboard supporting multiple data types
and applications that were, essentially, indistinguisable from their modern equivalents
It lacked some of the modern fluff (animated icons and menus, drag-and-drop editing, "lickable" themes, etc.) but all the basics were there.
But school (at least in the US) wasn't designed to teach people to think, but to teach them to memorize facts and follow directions.
That's odd, that's not what public school seemed like in Maryland in the 70s and 80s (I can't vouch for what the private schools were doing to their vict... er, students): very little memorization of facts was actually required. The pedagogical intent was to teach concepts, creativity and problem solving skills. The actual practice was a mixture of crowd control and busywork sprinkled with propaganda.
So long a Apple isn't endangering anybodies' lives or committing any criminal acts, they have a right to keep their internal operations secret until such time as they see fit to reveal them...
No question there. I'm just objecting to the way that corporate secrets are being treated as more valuable than national security. I agree that the Pentagon Papers should not have been classified, but the fact remains that they were.
The problem is that corporate secrets are protected by the same laws that protect the secrets of private individuals, at least those individuals that own their own businesses (sole-proprietorships or partnerships). There are some technical/historical/legal reasons that corporations are considered to have the same rights as individuals (which I won't go into, mainly because I only have a vague understanding of the arguments and history) and so long as that is settled law, the same laws that apply to individuals also apply to corporations.
Now, you may think (reasonably) that corporations should not enjoy the same protections as natural persons, but that's not how the law currently stands. If you'd like to do something about that, however, you'll have to convince at least one of your elected representatives (assuming that you have elected representatives, wherever you live) to introduce new legislation to change your local laws, get the legislation passed over the strenuous oppostion of existing corporate interests, get it ratified by the executive branch, and hope that it survives judicial review.
That's all going to be pretty tough to ensure in the good old U.S. of A., since some people (who happen to have lots of money and consequently loud political voices) will oppose any changes to the status quo. Even worse, since most of the legal structure that defines corporations as persons isn't legislative but judicial there is no guarantee that, if you could enact legislation to strip corporations of their full personhood, that the laws would be interpreted the way you intended (or, for that matter, even upheld).
People who publish trade secrets that might hurt a company are forced to reveal their sources, but people who publish Top Secret documents are protected. (Anybody remember that stupid ruling on The Pentagon Papers?) I guess that proves that businesses are more important than National Security.
The judge addressed this distinction directly in his ruling (quoting from daveschroeder who quoted the ruling above):
Unlike the whistleblower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials, [the enthusiast sites] are doing nothing more than feeding the public's insatiable desire for information.
The Pentagon Papers were evidence of gross malfeasance on the part of our elected government and the public interest value of their revelation far outweighed the their value as government secrets (no matter how much conservatives in this country would like to believe otherwise). Apples plans for new products have no public interest value (that is, they have no effect on the public well-being) and should get the full protection of the trade secret laws (so long as Apple can show that the information was, in fact, a trade secret as defined by those same laws).
So long a Apple isn't endangering anybodies' lives or committing any criminal acts, they have a right to keep their internal operations secret until such time as they see fit to reveal them (just as any private citizen has a right to keep their own affairs secret, so long as they are not endangering another person or committing criminal acts). The people who revealed Apple's product plans to ThinkSecret did so in violation of a lawfull agreement they signed with Apple Computer Corp. and Apple should be allowed to discover who the leakers were so that a breach of contract suit can be persued.
Like the recent Vioxx scandal. That was all protected under NDA. There were concerns that Vioxx might increase heart attacks but the initial research was statistically inconclusive and so the results were buried. For several years.
In this case, the object of the contract is still lawful (there wasn't CONCLUSIVE evidence) but a corporate leak at this point might've saved hundreds of lives.
Or how about Windows virus announcements? You could have a security issue that Microsoft wants to keep buried. But it's only a theoretical issue not seen in the wild and Microsoft's going to patch it in the next service pack release... Is it a violation of NDA to leak that info?
Neither of the examples you gave are obviously unlawful, un-ethical maybe, but not unlawful on their face: violation of the constitutional protection against involutary servitude is obviously unlawful on it's face. Any NDA that might prevent revelation of such matters would be voidable if an attempt were made to enforce it.
Like someone else on here posted. How do you know you have a protected violation of the NDA until after you've violated the NDA and other people have decided that for you? (and maybe not in your favor)
Obviously, if you think that you have witnessed unlawfull actions and are bound by an NDA that may prevent you from discussing the matter, get yourself a lawyer (hire your own, don't use the lawyer for the folks you signed the NDA with) and ask his or her advice. Your lawyer will be able to tell you what to do from there.
The problem with hard fast rules like that is they're frequently not right. Take a state machine for example. A simple one with 6 or 7 states will go over 100 lines, and will go over 4 nestings. Heck, you'll take one up with the loop and one with the switch alone.
If you are coding state machines with switch statements, then you don't know what you're doing.
The state transitions, transition functions and accepting states should be stored in tables (2-dimensional arrays) and the entire state machine is then coded in about a dozen lines:
int next_state[NSTATES][NTOKENS]={{...}...}; int state_trans[NSTATES][NTOKENS]={{...}...}; int accept[NSTATES]={...}; int retval[NSTATES]={...}; int (*trans_func[NFUNCS])(...)={...};/* syntax may be wrong */
int state_machine(...) {
int st = 0, tok = 0, err = 0;
while(accept[st] == 0)
{
tok = get_token();
err = trans_func[state_trans[st][tok]](...);
if(err)
return err;
st = next_state[st][tok];
}
return retval[st]; }
All the real work is in the state tables and the transition functions referenced in the transfunc array. I've found it a hell of a lot easier to get the state tables right than to find all the mistakes in a giant, nested switch statement. In most circumstaces the state tables can be constructed from the state diagram by inspection. For anything big enough that you can't construct the state diagram by hand, there are automated tools.
I guess my point is- lines of code isn't the enemy, some things are complex and need many lines to do. Nesting isn't the enemy, some things require many loops/ifs. The enemy is a lack of clear separation of functionality and lack of clear abstraction between parts.
Lines of code or nesting depth may not be the enemy, but they're no ally either. It can be quite difficult to specify to a diverse team what is meant and expected by clear abstraction and separation of functionality, but almost anyone can wrap their brain around a LOC or nesting depth limit. If you don't want to make hard and fast rules, you can use these limits as warning signs during the code review.
On the average you can say something like: "good code shouldn't have functions longer than two pages (120 lines) and no more than 4 or 5 levels of nesting" and hand out indulgences where needed. At least you might get some of the lower functioning members of the team to think before they code a 5000-line monstrosity.
What if someone violated Apple's NDA and reported on Apple employing slave labor to clean floors at company headquarters? In your world, karmaflux, the NDA violator would be in the wrong, get punished, and the slaves would still be slaves.
Nice example, but, unfortunately, wrong:
The NDA is simply a contract. In order for a contract to be valid, the object of the contract must be lawfull. In this case, the object of the contract would be to cover-up an unlawfull act (use of slave labor) thus the contract (the NDA) would be void, and karmaflux could not, then, be in violation of the NDA.
Overall, the tips are pretty good, except for #9: Turn off the computer. The tip quotes an unnamed source from Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory:
As Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory points out, "The belief that frequent shutdowns [of PCs] are harmful persists from the days when hard disks did not automatically park their heads when shut off; frequent on-off cycling could damage such hard disks." The lab's experts reassure us that, "Shutting down computers at night and on weekends saves significant energy without affecting the performance."
First, modern hard disks have a limited number of head parking cycles that they can perform before failing (go read the technical specs on a few 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives and you will find that they have an upper limit).
Second, modern hard disks are still much more likely to fail during a power cycle than during continuous operation, so gratuitously cycling the power increases the likelihood of a failure, even if the heads park themselves automatically.
Finally, if you use aggressive power management on your desktop computer, you should be able to get nearly as good a reduction in power consumption as you can by turning the entire system off (you'll need to have a monitor that powers down in response to loss of video signal. Any monitor manufactured in the past decade should do this, but older monitors may not).
I have all my computers at home set to drop video output after 15 minutes of inactivity and sleep after half an hour. As a result, my office is much cooler than it used to be, and my electicity bill lower by about 30%.
An easy way to tell if you are effectively saving energy with your computer (or other consumer electronics) is to see if the case of the computer or monitor is warm when it hasn't been in use for a few hours (such as when you come home from work or when you get up in the morning). If the back or top of the case are warm to the touch, then the device has been burning power recently.
Yes, I think that's how most people decide to buy computers - word of mouth from trusted friends & family.
Lucky for her (and Apple), you're obviously a Mac enthusiast, but 97% of the market is not, and will continue to advise people to get what THEY know.
Unfortunately, you are making an argument based on mind-share (people buy what they know) and backing it up with figures based on market-share (how many computers of each brand are sold in a given year). Mind-share is not equal to market-share for three reasons:
Most of the computers purchased are not purchased by individuals, but by companies.
The purchase rate of computers, in a saturated market, depends on replacement rate, not popularity.
Some sizable fraction of private owners own more than one computer.
The first reason (corporate purchases) greatly skews the market-share numbers toward whatever type of computer is bought most by corporations, and corporations are influenced more by price than any other consideration (they have to be, because they buy in such large quantities). Once the trend of buying to price is established, network effects set in (all my suppliers or customers use X, so I need to use X as well, so I can exchange files with them) and eliminate all other concerns. Under any circumstance, the computers bought by companies, while representing a huge market-share, represent only a small mind-share: the mind-share of the purchasing managers making the decisions on tens or hundreds of units purchased.
The second reason (replacement rate) is a simple multiplier against the actual ownership base: if product A needs to be replaced at N-times the rate of product B, then product A will have N-times the market share of product B even if they represent the same size installed base. It is well known that the replacement rate of PCs is about 1.5 times the rate for Macs, so the size of the installed base, as inferred from the market-share numbers, needs to be scaled accordingly. Unfortunately, the replacement rate effect punishes the higher quality products, and rewards lower quality products, in the market by giving the lower quality products a higher market-share.
The third reason (multi-computer homes) is another multiplier to market-share based on ownership base: if a single person buys two of the same type of computer, they contribute twice as much to market-share as someone who only buys one computer, but the person with two computers is still only one person (and one mind). Further, someone who buys two computers of different makes (one PC and one Mac, for instance) contributes to the market-shares of both brands: how should we count this person's contribution to mind-share?
Ultimately, mind-share is difficult to measure. This is why people prefer to talk about market-share, which is much easier to measure. But market-share is an almost meaningless value (unless you are the one selling computers, in which case market-share means a lot to your bottom line, but that's not what we are talking about here) and we would, almost always, prefer to know a product's mind-share.
The 97% market-share that you quote above, might easily represent only a 50% or 60% mind-share (and, conversely, the 3% Mac market-share might easily represent a 6% or 12% mind-share). The numbers still slant the direction you would expect (more people like PCs than like Macs), but not to the degree you would expect just from the purchase rate.
As a simple example, take 'if (!ptr)' instead of 'if (ptr==NULL)'. The reason someone might use the former code snippet is because they believe it would result in smaller machine code
Anyone who thinks this doesn't deserve the title Programmer. Any C compiler written in the past 25 years should emit exactly the same code for if(!x) as for if(x==NULL), regardless of optimization. The test in the if statement has an implicit meaning which is generially identical to a comparison to zero or NULL. Anyone who doesn't know this is a moron, especially if they still don't know this after writing C code for 10 years.
In general, any programmer optimization below the level of selecting an appropriate algorithm is a waste of time. In most cases, anything you can think to do with a variable or expression will be caught by the simplest optimizers out there. In some cases, things that you think will make things faster will actaully slow things down. In all cases, optimizations in the source will make the code harder to read and maintain, which will cost orders of magnitude more (in wasted programmer time) than the savings (in machine cycles) will deliver.
(I'm tempted to make some racist crack about the submitter, but I've met lots of programmers, from every corner of the planet, with similarly dimwitted notions about what happens to their source code when it is submitted to the compiler. Obviously, the general quality of computer science education (or computer science students) is depressingly low the world over.)
The invention of the wheel must have happend some time around 3000 B.C.
juuri wrote:
That can't possibly be correct as pottery wheels were in use in Mesopotamia as far back as 3500B.C. Mesopotamians also had chariots before 3k B.C.
I stand corrected (and I deserve it, for nit-picking). A quick google search comes up with severalresults that support an invention date between 3500 B.C. and 3200 B.C. I could try to claim that the 3000 B.C. figure was a typo, or that 3500 B.C. is, technically, around 3000 B.C. (what's half a millennium between friends?), but it was really just a sloppy reading of the same google results.
Still, my main point stands: the wheel was not invented in pre-historic times, nor was it invented by pre- or proto-humans: the wheel was invented by people essentially identical to ourselves well after the inventions of agriculture and writing.
There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.
...
The size and complexity of an invention AND its environment are also key: If Linus never wrote a whole and usable kernel and published it, chances are that no other homebrew kernel would have grown with the same fervor. The complexity of the task, and the complexity of the eco-political forces at work, helped to spur the adoption in a unique way.
I agree with most what you wrote, except for this last bit. Back in the early ninties, when Linus released the early versions of Linux, there were plenty of competitors for the Linux kernel: NetBSD, Mark Williams' Coherent, Doug Comer's Xinu, Linux's close cousin MINIX, and (dare I say it) the GNU HURD. While Linus' political skill was helpfull, but the real impetus to the rise of Linux was the easy availability of home computers with full memory management hardware. Once we had 386 and 486 based PCs, it was inevitable that a full version of unix would find its way into the mainstream. If Linux had not been, something else would have taken its place.
<NITPICK>I have one other problem with what your wrote:
If Ungh Blungh didn't invent the wheel, some other proto-Sapiens halfwit would have invented it in the following year. It's not like there was a shortage of halfwits in the golden crescent.
In fact, the wheel was invented in the golden crescent in historical times not in ancient pre-history as you imply. The invention of the wheel must have happend some time around 3000 B.C., which ensures that whoever did invent it was fully human and part of a complex society (a society whose name is, probably, still known today)</NITPICK>
This sounds very rational. And this is probably what people should do. However, both the original poster and you assume that other fellow's lawyers' right to read anything that you've written is natural and obvious. But shouldn't there be a limit? If that would be technologically possible to subpoena someone's thoughts would you see it as natural and right? I really don't like the idea that anything I write or draw might be used against me - I thought this rule applied only to testimonies after being arrested.
It is currently techologically possible to subpoena a person's thoughts: A witness can be subpoenaed to testify regarding their thoughts, and they are required by law to tell the truth. The only time your thoughts are protected (under the U.S. constitution) from testimony are when their revelation may incriminate you. If you commit your thoughts to physical form, however, they are subject to discovery just like any other physical object: should we be prevented from using a bloody knife as evidence simply because it is personal property of the defendant? If not, why should we exempt a written note?
You may not like the idea that your scribblings may be used against you in court, but it is the case, and has been for many, many years. If you commit a crime, then write about it in your diary, or send a letter to a friend confessing to the crime (or bragging about it, or whatever), those confessions damn well aught to be able to be used against you: they are directly material to the prosecution of the case and there is no state interest in protecting such communication (as there is in protecting communication between spouses, doctors and patients and lawyers and clients).
In the prosecution of almost any crime, there are two vital aspects that must exist: the actus reus (guilty act), and the mens rea (guilt mind). If the legal system can't attempt to substantiate mens rea, then we must either accept that no crimes can be prosecuted without a direct confession (completely unacceptable) or that intent is irrelevent to the crime (meaning that simple negligence would become criminal, also unacceptable).
I, for one, welcome our new...oh never mind... I'll never trust a robot with a gun. It's like trusting a redneck buffoon with the presidency of the United States...oh wait...
Hey! that's an insult to rednecks! Besides, Bush is no redneck buffoon: he's a silver-spoon buffoon. He's just pandering to the redneck vote.
Leaving out S/PDIF is silly, it should not have costed more than $2 or $3 (there are soundcards based on the CMI8738 chipset both with optical and coaxial inputs and outputs (and analog inputs/outputs as well) costing something like $10)
<pedantic>Conjugate the verb to cost:
past tense: it did cost, or it cost
present tense: it does cost, or it costs
future tense: it will cost
subjunctive tense: it would cost
</pedantic>
On a serious note, however, every component you add to a product increases cost out of proportion to the component's unit cost: there are tooling costs, inventory costs, assembly costs, engineering costs and an increased likilihood of failure or malfunction. There are also costs that can't be easily quantified, such as the cost of increasing the complexity of the product and its interface, which can be offputting to users.
One of the signature features of Apple products (at least since the introduction of the original Macintosh) is minimalism. This has become even more pronounced since the return of Steve Jobs and the release of the iMac.
And how the fuck does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?
By getting a part-time job, maybe? If you work 10 hours per week during the school year, and 30 hours per week during the summer at a minimum wage job you will easiy make $3000.00 per year (actaully, more like $4500.00). If you can get a job that pays above minimum wage, you'll have plenty of money to burn and still put a cool $3000.00 in an IRA.
Another option is for the parents to put the money away for their kids (I think the current tax code allows a parent to put money in an IRA for a child, but I'm not certain).
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir (or madame) are a teller of tall tails: we don't put images of centuries old rulers on the backs of our coinage (or paper money): we put them on the fonts of the money, where they belong!
<Farnsworth>Good news! It's a suppository!</Farnsworth>
The number of TVs isn't really important, the number of households, however, is very important. In all likelihood, the ~250 million TVs only represents about 100 million homes, while the 33 million TVs still using analog represents about 30 million homes. It's not the TVs that the advertisers care about, but the people watching them, and you are likely to lose 25%-35% of your audience by discarding 12% of the TVs in the U.S.
At my work, the keyboard trays in the cubicles can be lifted up an extra foot or so, which is almost perfect for typing while standing. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for a way to raise the moitor.
There is no reason to think that the sorts of folks that became engineers or mathematicians 5000 years ago were, tempermentally, any differnt from the sorts of folks that become engineers or mathematicians today.
There were, no doubt, other highly skilled and technical professions that would have attracted ancient geeks: other's have mentioned smithing, scribing is another possability (just being literate enough to read and write was analogous to the general level of education of most geeks today), as is accountancy (conducting simple arithmetic without the benefit of decimal numbers must have required great patience and dedication). In the far east, at least since about 200 B.C., there was a good chance that anyone with reasonable education would have become a government functionary under the Confucian civil service system. I also suspect that, in other times, when people's conception of the world was very different from ours, many geeks may have gone into fields that would seem highly esoteric by modern standards: ancient geeks may have become musicians, artists, poets or monks as a means of persuing the life of the mind.
Finally, we should recognize the uncomfortable fact that most ancient geeks probably never got the opportunity to persue any career whatsoever. Throughout most of history, most people, no matter what their personal interests or inate abilities, were destined to be peasant farmers, servants, slaves or other bondsmen, like their fathers and grandfathers and so on. The idea that people, no matter what their station by birth, should be able (or even required) to choose their path in life, is a thoroughly modern concept.
Funny, I thought that the reason we grew up as sterile, hairless wimps was because we didn't get poisoned or blown to smithereens in childhood whilst playing with insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound.
The Lisa interface would be immediately familiar to anyone accustomed to modern GUIs. It had all the expected behaviors:
- icons representing disks, applications and files
- double clicking to open files or launch applications
- a trash can into which items could be dragged to be deleted
- overlapping, movable, resizable windows
- pull-down menus in the same arrangment we see today (File, Edit,
...)
- a clipboard supporting multiple data types
- and applications that were, essentially, indistinguisable from their modern equivalents
It lacked some of the modern fluff (animated icons and menus, drag-and-drop editing, "lickable" themes, etc.) but all the basics were there.That's odd, that's not what public school seemed like in Maryland in the 70s and 80s (I can't vouch for what the private schools were doing to their vict... er, students): very little memorization of facts was actually required. The pedagogical intent was to teach concepts, creativity and problem solving skills. The actual practice was a mixture of crowd control and busywork sprinkled with propaganda.
The problem is that corporate secrets are protected by the same laws that protect the secrets of private individuals, at least those individuals that own their own businesses (sole-proprietorships or partnerships). There are some technical/historical/legal reasons that corporations are considered to have the same rights as individuals (which I won't go into, mainly because I only have a vague understanding of the arguments and history) and so long as that is settled law, the same laws that apply to individuals also apply to corporations.
Now, you may think (reasonably) that corporations should not enjoy the same protections as natural persons, but that's not how the law currently stands. If you'd like to do something about that, however, you'll have to convince at least one of your elected representatives (assuming that you have elected representatives, wherever you live) to introduce new legislation to change your local laws, get the legislation passed over the strenuous oppostion of existing corporate interests, get it ratified by the executive branch, and hope that it survives judicial review.
That's all going to be pretty tough to ensure in the good old U.S. of A., since some people (who happen to have lots of money and consequently loud political voices) will oppose any changes to the status quo. Even worse, since most of the legal structure that defines corporations as persons isn't legislative but judicial there is no guarantee that, if you could enact legislation to strip corporations of their full personhood, that the laws would be interpreted the way you intended (or, for that matter, even upheld).
The judge addressed this distinction directly in his ruling (quoting from daveschroeder who quoted the ruling above):
The Pentagon Papers were evidence of gross malfeasance on the part of our elected government and the public interest value of their revelation far outweighed the their value as government secrets (no matter how much conservatives in this country would like to believe otherwise). Apples plans for new products have no public interest value (that is, they have no effect on the public well-being) and should get the full protection of the trade secret laws (so long as Apple can show that the information was, in fact, a trade secret as defined by those same laws).
So long a Apple isn't endangering anybodies' lives or committing any criminal acts, they have a right to keep their internal operations secret until such time as they see fit to reveal them (just as any private citizen has a right to keep their own affairs secret, so long as they are not endangering another person or committing criminal acts). The people who revealed Apple's product plans to ThinkSecret did so in violation of a lawfull agreement they signed with Apple Computer Corp. and Apple should be allowed to discover who the leakers were so that a breach of contract suit can be persued.
Neither of the examples you gave are obviously unlawful, un-ethical maybe, but not unlawful on their face: violation of the constitutional protection against involutary servitude is obviously unlawful on it's face. Any NDA that might prevent revelation of such matters would be voidable if an attempt were made to enforce it.
Obviously, if you think that you have witnessed unlawfull actions and are bound by an NDA that may prevent you from discussing the matter, get yourself a lawyer (hire your own, don't use the lawyer for the folks you signed the NDA with) and ask his or her advice. Your lawyer will be able to tell you what to do from there.
If you are coding state machines with switch statements, then you don't know what you're doing.
The state transitions, transition functions and accepting states should be stored in tables (2-dimensional arrays) and the entire state machine is then coded in about a dozen lines:
All the real work is in the state tables and the transition functions referenced in the transfunc array. I've found it a hell of a lot easier to get the state tables right than to find all the mistakes in a giant, nested switch statement. In most circumstaces the state tables can be constructed from the state diagram by inspection. For anything big enough that you can't construct the state diagram by hand, there are automated tools.
Lines of code or nesting depth may not be the enemy, but they're no ally either. It can be quite difficult to specify to a diverse team what is meant and expected by clear abstraction and separation of functionality, but almost anyone can wrap their brain around a LOC or nesting depth limit. If you don't want to make hard and fast rules, you can use these limits as warning signs during the code review.
On the average you can say something like: "good code shouldn't have functions longer than two pages (120 lines) and no more than 4 or 5 levels of nesting" and hand out indulgences where needed. At least you might get some of the lower functioning members of the team to think before they code a 5000-line monstrosity.
Nice example, but, unfortunately, wrong:
The NDA is simply a contract. In order for a contract to be valid, the object of the contract must be lawfull. In this case, the object of the contract would be to cover-up an unlawfull act (use of slave labor) thus the contract (the NDA) would be void, and karmaflux could not, then, be in violation of the NDA.
Overall, the tips are pretty good, except for #9: Turn off the computer. The tip quotes an unnamed source from Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory:
First, modern hard disks have a limited number of head parking cycles that they can perform before failing (go read the technical specs on a few 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives and you will find that they have an upper limit).
Second, modern hard disks are still much more likely to fail during a power cycle than during continuous operation, so gratuitously cycling the power increases the likelihood of a failure, even if the heads park themselves automatically.
Finally, if you use aggressive power management on your desktop computer, you should be able to get nearly as good a reduction in power consumption as you can by turning the entire system off (you'll need to have a monitor that powers down in response to loss of video signal. Any monitor manufactured in the past decade should do this, but older monitors may not).
I have all my computers at home set to drop video output after 15 minutes of inactivity and sleep after half an hour. As a result, my office is much cooler than it used to be, and my electicity bill lower by about 30%.
An easy way to tell if you are effectively saving energy with your computer (or other consumer electronics) is to see if the case of the computer or monitor is warm when it hasn't been in use for a few hours (such as when you come home from work or when you get up in the morning). If the back or top of the case are warm to the touch, then the device has been burning power recently.
Unfortunately, you are making an argument based on mind-share (people buy what they know) and backing it up with figures based on market-share (how many computers of each brand are sold in a given year). Mind-share is not equal to market-share for three reasons:
The first reason (corporate purchases) greatly skews the market-share numbers toward whatever type of computer is bought most by corporations, and corporations are influenced more by price than any other consideration (they have to be, because they buy in such large quantities). Once the trend of buying to price is established, network effects set in (all my suppliers or customers use X, so I need to use X as well, so I can exchange files with them) and eliminate all other concerns. Under any circumstance, the computers bought by companies, while representing a huge market-share, represent only a small mind-share: the mind-share of the purchasing managers making the decisions on tens or hundreds of units purchased.
The second reason (replacement rate) is a simple multiplier against the actual ownership base: if product A needs to be replaced at N-times the rate of product B, then product A will have N-times the market share of product B even if they represent the same size installed base. It is well known that the replacement rate of PCs is about 1.5 times the rate for Macs, so the size of the installed base, as inferred from the market-share numbers, needs to be scaled accordingly. Unfortunately, the replacement rate effect punishes the higher quality products, and rewards lower quality products, in the market by giving the lower quality products a higher market-share.
The third reason (multi-computer homes) is another multiplier to market-share based on ownership base: if a single person buys two of the same type of computer, they contribute twice as much to market-share as someone who only buys one computer, but the person with two computers is still only one person (and one mind). Further, someone who buys two computers of different makes (one PC and one Mac, for instance) contributes to the market-shares of both brands: how should we count this person's contribution to mind-share?
Ultimately, mind-share is difficult to measure. This is why people prefer to talk about market-share, which is much easier to measure. But market-share is an almost meaningless value (unless you are the one selling computers, in which case market-share means a lot to your bottom line, but that's not what we are talking about here) and we would, almost always, prefer to know a product's mind-share.
The 97% market-share that you quote above, might easily represent only a 50% or 60% mind-share (and, conversely, the 3% Mac market-share might easily represent a 6% or 12% mind-share). The numbers still slant the direction you would expect (more people like PCs than like Macs), but not to the degree you would expect just from the purchase rate.
Anyone who thinks this doesn't deserve the title Programmer. Any C compiler written in the past 25 years should emit exactly the same code for if(!x) as for if(x==NULL), regardless of optimization. The test in the if statement has an implicit meaning which is generially identical to a comparison to zero or NULL. Anyone who doesn't know this is a moron, especially if they still don't know this after writing C code for 10 years.
In general, any programmer optimization below the level of selecting an appropriate algorithm is a waste of time. In most cases, anything you can think to do with a variable or expression will be caught by the simplest optimizers out there. In some cases, things that you think will make things faster will actaully slow things down. In all cases, optimizations in the source will make the code harder to read and maintain, which will cost orders of magnitude more (in wasted programmer time) than the savings (in machine cycles) will deliver.
Dvorak wasn't referring to Windows or Linux users when he wrote 'people'. He was referring to the people who could fill in the blank in:
juuri wrote:
I stand corrected (and I deserve it, for nit-picking). A quick google search comes up with several results that support an invention date between 3500 B.C. and 3200 B.C. I could try to claim that the 3000 B.C. figure was a typo, or that 3500 B.C. is, technically, around 3000 B.C. (what's half a millennium between friends?), but it was really just a sloppy reading of the same google results.
Still, my main point stands: the wheel was not invented in pre-historic times, nor was it invented by pre- or proto-humans: the wheel was invented by people essentially identical to ourselves well after the inventions of agriculture and writing.
I agree with most what you wrote, except for this last bit. Back in the early ninties, when Linus released the early versions of Linux, there were plenty of competitors for the Linux kernel: NetBSD, Mark Williams' Coherent, Doug Comer's Xinu, Linux's close cousin MINIX, and (dare I say it) the GNU HURD. While Linus' political skill was helpfull, but the real impetus to the rise of Linux was the easy availability of home computers with full memory management hardware. Once we had 386 and 486 based PCs, it was inevitable that a full version of unix would find its way into the mainstream. If Linux had not been, something else would have taken its place.
<NITPICK> I have one other problem with what your wrote:
In fact, the wheel was invented in the golden crescent in historical times not in ancient pre-history as you imply. The invention of the wheel must have happend some time around 3000 B.C., which ensures that whoever did invent it was fully human and part of a complex society (a society whose name is, probably, still known today) </NITPICK>LIES! Apple invented everything first! Bill stole it all from the Steves, and didn't even do it half as well!
It is currently techologically possible to subpoena a person's thoughts: A witness can be subpoenaed to testify regarding their thoughts, and they are required by law to tell the truth. The only time your thoughts are protected (under the U.S. constitution) from testimony are when their revelation may incriminate you. If you commit your thoughts to physical form, however, they are subject to discovery just like any other physical object: should we be prevented from using a bloody knife as evidence simply because it is personal property of the defendant? If not, why should we exempt a written note?
You may not like the idea that your scribblings may be used against you in court, but it is the case, and has been for many, many years. If you commit a crime, then write about it in your diary, or send a letter to a friend confessing to the crime (or bragging about it, or whatever), those confessions damn well aught to be able to be used against you: they are directly material to the prosecution of the case and there is no state interest in protecting such communication (as there is in protecting communication between spouses, doctors and patients and lawyers and clients).
In the prosecution of almost any crime, there are two vital aspects that must exist: the actus reus (guilty act), and the mens rea (guilt mind). If the legal system can't attempt to substantiate mens rea, then we must either accept that no crimes can be prosecuted without a direct confession (completely unacceptable) or that intent is irrelevent to the crime (meaning that simple negligence would become criminal, also unacceptable).
Hey! that's an insult to rednecks! Besides, Bush is no redneck buffoon: he's a silver-spoon buffoon. He's just pandering to the redneck vote.
<pedantic>Conjugate the verb to cost:
- past tense: it did cost, or it cost
- present tense: it does cost, or it costs
- future tense: it will cost
- subjunctive tense: it would cost
</pedantic>On a serious note, however, every component you add to a product increases cost out of proportion to the component's unit cost: there are tooling costs, inventory costs, assembly costs, engineering costs and an increased likilihood of failure or malfunction. There are also costs that can't be easily quantified, such as the cost of increasing the complexity of the product and its interface, which can be offputting to users.
One of the signature features of Apple products (at least since the introduction of the original Macintosh) is minimalism. This has become even more pronounced since the return of Steve Jobs and the release of the iMac.
By getting a part-time job, maybe? If you work 10 hours per week during the school year, and 30 hours per week during the summer at a minimum wage job you will easiy make $3000.00 per year (actaully, more like $4500.00). If you can get a job that pays above minimum wage, you'll have plenty of money to burn and still put a cool $3000.00 in an IRA.
Another option is for the parents to put the money away for their kids (I think the current tax code allows a parent to put money in an IRA for a child, but I'm not certain).
That's not reality setting in, it's the hangover wearing off.
My advice: take another drink, it's going to be a long few years.