They're probably calling every carrier who offers their phones, and making sure they don't install it. RIM has had enough problems over the past few years, they don't need this one.
And I'm quietly waiting for them to pass a law telling the Mississippi when it can and cannot flood.
I swear, sometimes it's like the Senators are holding contests with each other, to see what is the dumbest bill they can pass before the people start screaming.
"His theory of capitalism was, in a nutshell, that an employer's goal was to increase profit by increasing the amount they could make their workers work without paying them anything extra. Which is, of course, exactly what is being codified in this law."
-> Indeed. However, worker productivity drops off after 6 hours, so 12 hours is considerably inefficient bang for buck. If you have enough work to keep the factory running 24 hours a day, then 3 eight hour shifts, or 4 six hours shifts are closer to the fabled sweet spot of worker productivity per dollar.
"But our capitalist wants to make more money, so he makes his worker work 12 hours instead of 6 (which the worker accepts, because being unemployed is so much worse), so now he has $600 worth of widgets, which are now $500 in materials, $50 in labor, and $50 in profit."
-> Arguably, most people would like to earn money, as it is a means to their ends. And they would prefer to earn more as opposed to less. As I pointed out earlier, worker productivity drops over time. And any task that a human being can do for 12-hour straight without a drop in productivity is one that can be easily automated. But, for the sake of not missing your point, yes, I understand that in a country with high unemployment and workers with no / niche skills, they can find themselves at the mercy of a idiot who wants to work them 12-hours a day. We could muse about allowing yourself to be placed into such a sorry state, but for fun, we will say someone has had a particularly bad run of luck (improbable, but then there's Murphy's law, whom everyone who is even remotely acquainted personally loathes). Arguably, there isn't a good solution to this problem. It's the programmers equivalent to an exception, and should be handled as such (unless you're getting a lot of exceptions...at which point there is a serious problem).
If enough of you are affected, maybe it's time to fax your boss's resume to a competitor, then float rumors about him jumping ship. Upper management can be so cutthroat when they get even the smallest whiff of disloyalty...^_^
"Regardless of what you think about communism, Marx's theories of capitalism need to be taken seriously, because the guy was predicting, in the 1870's, a lot of the economic behavior we see today."
-> Marx tended to report on what he saw was going on around him, during his time. The problem with his theory (later on), is that you never reach communism (in reality), you just hit the (supposedly brief) dictatorship beforehand. Like placing code after a jump statement, there is no way to get there from here.
10 years in IT (well, probably longer, but I stop counting at 10). Every decent and half-decent place I have worked, when working hourly, paid 1.5 - 2.0 times the normal rate for overtime.
Of course, those were the kinds of places where coming in to do work on a Saturday or holiday was something you would look forward to, for many reasons not limited to the overtime.
Actually, large changes in a contract (as per a change in the laws themselves) tend to nullify current contracts, provided the parties involved did not have knowledge of the possible / pending change when the contract was signed. Therefore, as per contract law, every affected contract can now be renegotiated without penalty. Though, IANAL, so check with a lawyer in your state.
I may be wrong here, but I do not believe this has worked so well for France. Things which work well on a small-scale do not necessarily work on a larger scale.
And this is America. They won't hire people to fill that gap, not when the economy is in the toilet. Hiring is the first thing that was destroyed...
Nonsense. Lawyers and doctors are professionals, which is why we pay them when we call them.
On the other hand, apparently, IT people are some sort of quasi trade job, kind of like a plumber or an electrician, except that they get paid better. We're salaried when it costs less, and hourly waged when it costs less. And one computer guy is interchangeable with another one, don't let them tell you otherwise!
BOFH: Now if you'll excuse me, I need to check on the Financial's server, the one with the multi-core CPU that gets really hot. My meatball sub should be almost finished reheating. Hope no one needed their paycheck this Friday.:/BOFH
Which is a bit of a pity. I've taken a few courses in Accounting / Finance, and they do understand the long term view of things (NPV), and yet the behavior being manifested is of one who never took those courses. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they DO account for inflation in every one of their equations. Perhaps a tree diagram / decision / opportunity cost is needed to explain to them what the potentials are for their decisions. Unfortunately, this is a task that is typically in their realm, not techs, but if you're dealing with people who are unwilling to understand the very company they are trying to run, try it out.
While the penny-pinching in inappropriate places (you hired me because my realm is technology, so why the f*ck are you second guessing my every decision) is very annoying, I'm more worried about general business students today who think that they (for lack of a better word) do not need to get their hands dirty when it comes to running a company ("I can hire a dozen people in India to build me the next Facebook, all for the price of some lunch money, wtf do I need to learn anything about programming for?"). If you're a business student, and you work at a chemical plant, you should be learning some chemistry; if you are a business student, and you work at a technology company, learn to build your own computer / programs. A fair number of them approach learning anything that is not completely management related (as dictated by various business / entrepreneur / self-help books to get your business in the Forbes 500) like the handling of a day old fish. Zero, nada, zippo interest in learning anything outside their realm, but constant / taxing demands on everyone else to translate from their own realm to the business realm. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted having a company chemist spend 4 hours in a meeting explaining for the 300th time what exactly he does for the company, and how magic doesn't make the reactants translate into the sought-after products? And yet these business people want to be the decision makers...first rule, which I will take from, I believe it is, Warren Buffet -> don't rely on other people to do the translating for you. Learn their languages, the subtle nuances, and get the information first-hand, for yourself. Understand how the company actually works, what the quirks and idiosyncrasies are. If you do not understand something, take a class on it or buy a book. Do not be like the American who goes to France, and demands everyone speak English -> you won't last.
But yes, the industry you are classified in tends to define who has the ultimate say in the company. If you are a marketing company, marketing rules. If you are a technology company, the techs rule. If you're a tech company, and marketing is dictating to the techs what to build and how much they are paid, you're doing it wrong. And yes, some people do make or break a company, and yes, money is an excellent motivator for the vast majority of people who are not business majors (the difference being we use factors of ten when deciding whether something is worth the extra effort).
Most forms of "cyber" emergency can be solved by not mandating an Ethernet port on your new rocket launcher (let alone 802.11n). I.e. If you want it to be secure, don't plug it into the f*cking internet!
But in all seriousness, I hope they (and the US) do spend breathe-taking amounts of their constituents money on another pointless endeavor; why, you ask? Because then Marines and every colorful variant thereof will have to field tech support calls from people "who think their Facebook has been hacked." I imagine after a year of that, they'll be signing up for every tour of duty that comes their way, as it's more satisfying to be shot at on the streets of Iraq and eating MREs than doing tier-1 tech support at home.
Hmm. AMD has been trying to topple Intel by merging the CPU and the GPU into a single unit.
Intel tends to be better in the single-threaded CPU performance, while AMD has been better with offering more cores. What changes with ATI and Intel is that Intel's graphics options are something of a terrible joke (played on corporate and value customers), and ATI's video cards are sought after as equally as Nvidias.
If AMD can offer a single chip that does both, and does it well (key factor here), with compilers that take advantage of the additional power a GPU can offer when its right next to the CPU, it could hurt Intel in dangerous ways. On another note, the one thing ATI is known for over Nvidia is the number of Stream processors it offers -> Nvidia's are more programmable, ATI has more of them. AMD choose the hardware route, which depending on their ability to combine the two designs may or may not pay off.
Or it could just as easily be someone floating a balloon -> a rumor is reported through various sources, and AMD gets a preview of how the market might react. Depending on the reaction, they might go one way or the other.
Granted, Bulldozer is...painful to look at. However, I am willing to give AMD the benefit of the doubt, and allow them one upgrade cycle to fix the bugs in their design before considering the competition. They claim that this design will ramp up better than the previous stuff, and others have claimed that a few software patches are needed for various OSs like Windows to take advantage of the change in architecture.
Mind you, it does kind of feel like Intel with the Itanium (the Itanic), but thankfully this design is still in the x86 world.
Perhaps, provided that one company is capable of providing the best service, at the lowest price, with the greatest amount of choice.
It is possible to have one company, in a given market, that does all of these. It's rare to have a completely (non-politically mandated or influenced) monopoly, but it does happen on occasion. It's more likely you will have a politically mandated monopoly (the post office, for mail), or politically influenced monopoly (GE in a few markets, I believe), or a somewhat natural monopoly (PECO, energy provider, electric power lines). But there are those rare moments, where a company, through no act of artifice, so completely out-competes its competitors by providing a better product, a better service, a better return to shareholders, a better employee standard, and a better paid workforce, with better resources, and intelligent planning / execution, that their competition is nuked out of the market. Again, it's exceptionally rare, but provided that they keep their services below the costs any competitor might hope to recoup by entering the market, they can "own" that market.
Meh. In common parlance, when one speaks of Americans, they are typically referring to citizens of the United States of America; calling them thus, or USAsians, doesn't really roll off the tongue, so Americans is chosen to simplify things.
Slashdot Mirror
They're probably calling every carrier who offers their phones, and making sure they don't install it. RIM has had enough problems over the past few years, they don't need this one.
Was replying to the first half of the comment, not the second half. ;-)
And I'm quietly waiting for them to pass a law telling the Mississippi when it can and cannot flood.
I swear, sometimes it's like the Senators are holding contests with each other, to see what is the dumbest bill they can pass before the people start screaming.
"His theory of capitalism was, in a nutshell, that an employer's goal was to increase profit by increasing the amount they could make their workers work without paying them anything extra. Which is, of course, exactly what is being codified in this law."
-> Indeed. However, worker productivity drops off after 6 hours, so 12 hours is considerably inefficient bang for buck. If you have enough work to keep the factory running 24 hours a day, then 3 eight hour shifts, or 4 six hours shifts are closer to the fabled sweet spot of worker productivity per dollar.
"But our capitalist wants to make more money, so he makes his worker work 12 hours instead of 6 (which the worker accepts, because being unemployed is so much worse), so now he has $600 worth of widgets, which are now $500 in materials, $50 in labor, and $50 in profit."
-> Arguably, most people would like to earn money, as it is a means to their ends. And they would prefer to earn more as opposed to less. As I pointed out earlier, worker productivity drops over time. And any task that a human being can do for 12-hour straight without a drop in productivity is one that can be easily automated. But, for the sake of not missing your point, yes, I understand that in a country with high unemployment and workers with no / niche skills, they can find themselves at the mercy of a idiot who wants to work them 12-hours a day. We could muse about allowing yourself to be placed into such a sorry state, but for fun, we will say someone has had a particularly bad run of luck (improbable, but then there's Murphy's law, whom everyone who is even remotely acquainted personally loathes). Arguably, there isn't a good solution to this problem. It's the programmers equivalent to an exception, and should be handled as such (unless you're getting a lot of exceptions...at which point there is a serious problem).
If enough of you are affected, maybe it's time to fax your boss's resume to a competitor, then float rumors about him jumping ship. Upper management can be so cutthroat when they get even the smallest whiff of disloyalty...^_^
"Regardless of what you think about communism, Marx's theories of capitalism need to be taken seriously, because the guy was predicting, in the 1870's, a lot of the economic behavior we see today."
-> Marx tended to report on what he saw was going on around him, during his time. The problem with his theory (later on), is that you never reach communism (in reality), you just hit the (supposedly brief) dictatorship beforehand. Like placing code after a jump statement, there is no way to get there from here.
10 years in IT (well, probably longer, but I stop counting at 10). Every decent and half-decent place I have worked, when working hourly, paid 1.5 - 2.0 times the normal rate for overtime.
Of course, those were the kinds of places where coming in to do work on a Saturday or holiday was something you would look forward to, for many reasons not limited to the overtime.
Actually, large changes in a contract (as per a change in the laws themselves) tend to nullify current contracts, provided the parties involved did not have knowledge of the possible / pending change when the contract was signed. Therefore, as per contract law, every affected contract can now be renegotiated without penalty. Though, IANAL, so check with a lawyer in your state.
I may be wrong here, but I do not believe this has worked so well for France. Things which work well on a small-scale do not necessarily work on a larger scale.
And this is America. They won't hire people to fill that gap, not when the economy is in the toilet. Hiring is the first thing that was destroyed...
Nonsense. Lawyers and doctors are professionals, which is why we pay them when we call them.
On the other hand, apparently, IT people are some sort of quasi trade job, kind of like a plumber or an electrician, except that they get paid better. We're salaried when it costs less, and hourly waged when it costs less. And one computer guy is interchangeable with another one, don't let them tell you otherwise!
BOFH: Now if you'll excuse me, I need to check on the Financial's server, the one with the multi-core CPU that gets really hot. My meatball sub should be almost finished reheating. Hope no one needed their paycheck this Friday. :/BOFH
Precisely. If the pay does not merit doing more work, do not do the work.
Thank You.
Easily done. Vote for the challenger, or if you're really unhappy, vote for a new form of government.
Only the intelligent ones, who will leave and seek work elsewhere.
Which is a bit of a pity. I've taken a few courses in Accounting / Finance, and they do understand the long term view of things (NPV), and yet the behavior being manifested is of one who never took those courses. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they DO account for inflation in every one of their equations. Perhaps a tree diagram / decision / opportunity cost is needed to explain to them what the potentials are for their decisions. Unfortunately, this is a task that is typically in their realm, not techs, but if you're dealing with people who are unwilling to understand the very company they are trying to run, try it out.
While the penny-pinching in inappropriate places (you hired me because my realm is technology, so why the f*ck are you second guessing my every decision) is very annoying, I'm more worried about general business students today who think that they (for lack of a better word) do not need to get their hands dirty when it comes to running a company ("I can hire a dozen people in India to build me the next Facebook, all for the price of some lunch money, wtf do I need to learn anything about programming for?"). If you're a business student, and you work at a chemical plant, you should be learning some chemistry; if you are a business student, and you work at a technology company, learn to build your own computer / programs. A fair number of them approach learning anything that is not completely management related (as dictated by various business / entrepreneur / self-help books to get your business in the Forbes 500) like the handling of a day old fish. Zero, nada, zippo interest in learning anything outside their realm, but constant / taxing demands on everyone else to translate from their own realm to the business realm. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted having a company chemist spend 4 hours in a meeting explaining for the 300th time what exactly he does for the company, and how magic doesn't make the reactants translate into the sought-after products? And yet these business people want to be the decision makers...first rule, which I will take from, I believe it is, Warren Buffet -> don't rely on other people to do the translating for you. Learn their languages, the subtle nuances, and get the information first-hand, for yourself. Understand how the company actually works, what the quirks and idiosyncrasies are. If you do not understand something, take a class on it or buy a book. Do not be like the American who goes to France, and demands everyone speak English -> you won't last.
But yes, the industry you are classified in tends to define who has the ultimate say in the company. If you are a marketing company, marketing rules. If you are a technology company, the techs rule. If you're a tech company, and marketing is dictating to the techs what to build and how much they are paid, you're doing it wrong. And yes, some people do make or break a company, and yes, money is an excellent motivator for the vast majority of people who are not business majors (the difference being we use factors of ten when deciding whether something is worth the extra effort).
Most forms of "cyber" emergency can be solved by not mandating an Ethernet port on your new rocket launcher (let alone 802.11n). I.e. If you want it to be secure, don't plug it into the f*cking internet!
But in all seriousness, I hope they (and the US) do spend breathe-taking amounts of their constituents money on another pointless endeavor; why, you ask? Because then Marines and every colorful variant thereof will have to field tech support calls from people "who think their Facebook has been hacked." I imagine after a year of that, they'll be signing up for every tour of duty that comes their way, as it's more satisfying to be shot at on the streets of Iraq and eating MREs than doing tier-1 tech support at home.
Because the processor (theoretically) supports the x86 instruction set?
Thank You.
And I think VirtualDub is compiled to take advantage of the AMD64 architecture.
We could just breathe life back into the Alpha architecture.
As a matter of fact, I believe that MS supports it right up until Windows 2000 (multiple RCs, no release).
I'd love to have an EV12 processor in my next machine. ^_^
Hmm. AMD has been trying to topple Intel by merging the CPU and the GPU into a single unit.
Intel tends to be better in the single-threaded CPU performance, while AMD has been better with offering more cores. What changes with ATI and Intel is that Intel's graphics options are something of a terrible joke (played on corporate and value customers), and ATI's video cards are sought after as equally as Nvidias.
If AMD can offer a single chip that does both, and does it well (key factor here), with compilers that take advantage of the additional power a GPU can offer when its right next to the CPU, it could hurt Intel in dangerous ways. On another note, the one thing ATI is known for over Nvidia is the number of Stream processors it offers -> Nvidia's are more programmable, ATI has more of them. AMD choose the hardware route, which depending on their ability to combine the two designs may or may not pay off.
Linux has had better support for ATI than Nvidia cards for at least a generation now.
Let Intel turn its full attention to ARM for a few cycles, and see if AMD doesn't punish them.
Or it could just as easily be someone floating a balloon -> a rumor is reported through various sources, and AMD gets a preview of how the market might react. Depending on the reaction, they might go one way or the other.
Granted, Bulldozer is...painful to look at. However, I am willing to give AMD the benefit of the doubt, and allow them one upgrade cycle to fix the bugs in their design before considering the competition. They claim that this design will ramp up better than the previous stuff, and others have claimed that a few software patches are needed for various OSs like Windows to take advantage of the change in architecture.
Mind you, it does kind of feel like Intel with the Itanium (the Itanic), but thankfully this design is still in the x86 world.
Perhaps, provided that one company is capable of providing the best service, at the lowest price, with the greatest amount of choice.
It is possible to have one company, in a given market, that does all of these. It's rare to have a completely (non-politically mandated or influenced) monopoly, but it does happen on occasion. It's more likely you will have a politically mandated monopoly (the post office, for mail), or politically influenced monopoly (GE in a few markets, I believe), or a somewhat natural monopoly (PECO, energy provider, electric power lines). But there are those rare moments, where a company, through no act of artifice, so completely out-competes its competitors by providing a better product, a better service, a better return to shareholders, a better employee standard, and a better paid workforce, with better resources, and intelligent planning / execution, that their competition is nuked out of the market. Again, it's exceptionally rare, but provided that they keep their services below the costs any competitor might hope to recoup by entering the market, they can "own" that market.
Meh. In common parlance, when one speaks of Americans, they are typically referring to citizens of the United States of America; calling them thus, or USAsians, doesn't really roll off the tongue, so Americans is chosen to simplify things.
tldr; Americans is fine for the country.
Yes, but it's probably close to election year, and the incumbents need some good economic news to keep themselves in office.
In other news, unrest in the middle east!