Well, assuming that he has no knowledge about how the thing works and has no other information, his computation of probabilities is technically correct:)
I see. So all those jobs at defense contractors, whose only customer is the government, must not be `real jobs'. Neither must all the military jobs, civil service jobs, police jobs or any other jobs.
Funny how the Republicans are not against new laws and government regulations when it comes to suiting their own interests, viz, safeguarding the interests of the super-rich.
Expand dubious `Intellectual Property' rights, and shift resources to enforce those, instead of going after the white collar crooks robbing the country blind? Oh, those are OK.
New laws banning abortion, and shifting resources to enforcing them? Those are fine too.
Spending resources bullying other countries into adopting our IP laws? Just peachy.
Shovel tons of money at the military because they believe in `American Exceptionalism' and the need to `Project American Power Worldwide' when the only real reasons are protecting corporate profits and ensuring that American corporate criminals and mercenaries never get caught and punished for fucking up other countries? Wonderful.
Each time the right wing bleats about govt spending, they should demonstrate their sincerity by first cutting things that are important to the super rich and megacorps. I'll bet that will balance the budget pretty quickly.
We need to stop letting everybody start legal proceedings in Texas just because it's a favorable venue. Way too many of these stories by patent trolls seem to be out of that jurisdiction.
I never understood why it is that this particular jurisdiction is so favorable to patent holders. Could someone with some perspective on this please comment?
"Director" is a business title, like "Director of Software", "Director of Business Development", "Director of Engineering", "Director of Sales" etc. In this case, it means it is a senior role with good pay & perks, and probably a decent-sized staff.
I've been out of the wireless space for a while and haven't been paying attention, thanks for sharing. That is quite a major move, I hope it works out for the guys, I know quite a few of them.
Nokia is one of the few companies that has really good wireless baseband technology. In fact, their baseband phone chipsets are second only to Qualcomm's. They have lots of very good and probably very well-paid wireless engineers who do all this stuff. Mr. Steven Elop probably doesn't give a damn about baseband, if he even knows what it is. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that he will sack the entire wireless engineering division and start using chips from Qualcomm or someone else. Actually, he'll probably go for a 2nd or 3rd tier vendor for the baseband. After all, it is all about the OS and apps, right? That is all he knows.
Within a couple of years, Nokia will be another pure OEM that simply assembles phones in China based on 100% sourced components. Mr. Elop and his Wall Street buddies will enjoy a couple of years of profit because of all the cost savings due to the sacked engineers, during which his bonus will be large enough to let a couple of generations of his family live in luxury. After that, Nokia will slide down to be part with the Chinese OEMs, and Elop will go on to rape the next company.
The obvious thing for spammers to do is hire lots of third world labor to start marking legitimate web sites as spam. This will mess up Google's data collection and render this useless.
What I personally find maddening is how most of the younger generation of women say `I'm not a feminist', but have no problem laying claim to the outrageous `rights' championed by even the craziest of the radical fringe.
Fathers have no rights, but still owe child support? Of course, that is part of the natural order of things and anyway, he should have kept it in his pants.
Alimony even though it was the woman who left? The jerk deserves it.
Falsely accused of rape of sexual harassment? Well, he may be innocent at this time, but some man somewhere is harassing a women right now, so this punishment can be a deterrent.
Punish women for false rape claims? That will cause a `chilling effect' for other raped women.
A woman who has a privileged upbringing in an upper middle class suburb in the US still needs to benefit from affirmative action at work? Of course, don't you know that women are subjected to ritual gender mutilation in Africa?
And so on and so forth. The `I'm not a feminist' line is trotted out by women in their 20s & 30s who are still interested in attracting men, because they have the sense to know that there are few men dim enough to cast their lot with a self-professed feminist.
If the genders had been reversed, he would have been judged guilty of criminal sexual assault and categorized as a violent sexual offender. Gotta love those double standards.
The `Tea Party' is a fiction that was planned and created by the far-right in anticipation of the loss of the executive branch in 2008. The planning, organization and funding started in late 2005. A bunch of far-right billionaires and republican strategists scheduled the whole thing. Fox, the hate-talk hosts and the others were primed, and the launch was kicked off after Obama was elected. If Obama had lost to McCain, we'd never have heard of the Tea Party.
You are naive if you think they were short-sighted. They knew exactly how this would play out, and the 5 guys who voted for this wanted, and counted on, the current situation.
Let us face it: the US supreme court is now a 100% political instrument. The 5 right-wing judges were put in place with the explicit mandate of guiding the US along the way to complete corporate hegemony. We can now predict with 100% certainty how a particular justice will vote on any given issue. Every single justice is politically controlled and motivated, and takes his/her orders from the appropriate master(s). The right-wing guys are just more blatant about it, they don't even give a shit about the appearance of judicial impartialkity.
The architect thought it would be cool to have a massive dish-like glass structure on the side of the building, shaped like an enormous microwave antenna. Unfortunately, the thing focused the suns rays like a magnifying glass. The insides got really hot, especially near the security desk! Dont' know if anyone got burned, though.
Absolutely agreed. I have nearly 20 years experience (in Electrical engineering, not exactly IT, but I have worked with and managed more than my share of IT guys) too, and the number of `stereotype fulfilling' characters I have met is less than 1/100. Most of the engineers I have had the privilege to work with have been well adjusted and normal. In fact, the only objectionable trait I found as a pattern was a disposition to laziness and politicking, something that is definitely not isolated to men.
I'll tell you something else: the myth about salaries for engineering women being lower than that of men on the average is just that: a myth. I have managed mid-size engineering organizations in multiple companies, and have found that the women who work there are almost always paid in the top 80th percentile of the salary band or higher. This tactic is deliberately employed as a 'lawsuit shield' by many companies, and is feasible because the number of women engineers were less than 10% of the total workforce.
Good points all. The other function that meetings serve (that completely bypasses the mostly socially handicapped tech folks, myself included) is providing the inter-personal glue that holds groups and companies together, builds comradeship and makes individuals feel part of the team.
I can see some technical people go to a meeting and come away thinking `what a horrible waste of time'. And maybe it was a waste to them. But be assured, for every such discontented individual, there are two that are served.
Of course, I am referring to well-run meetings and not `dick-size' meetings as described by a subsequent poster.
These numbers are bogus. They include products made abroad by nominally American companies. All the cars produced by GM in China are counted as part of this. If you remove the offshore production, the GDP and manufacturing has been in decline for more than a decade. This has been exposed multiple times in the business press. BusinessWeek had an excellent article on this about a year back.
This is completely misleading. These numbers include goods produced by nominally American corporations even if all the work is done by employees based outside of the US. This particular scam has been debunked multiple times by the business press.
BTW, the US GDP numbers also include goods produced outside the USA by non-American labor.
If you strip out the work/products made by non-US employees of US corporations, you'll see that both the US GDP and exports have been in steep decline for the past decade.
Studies conducted in academia about decision-making process in corporations have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that most corporations are run by managers for managers.
There is some pretense of working for the shareholders, but most corporations these days don't even bother claiming to take their customers' or employees' interests into account.
I've been using Emacs for more than 20 years, and while it is unbeatable as a text editor, it suffers in comparison with modern code editors. For example, it does not have a source browser like visual slickedit does. In fact, the open source world at present does not have a good code browser that can handle C++ or any of the other modern languages. Sorry, cscope does not cut it. Xrefactory comes close, but suffers from its own weirdnesses and is not open source anyway. Even though I am as hard-core an Emacs bigot as anyone, I find myself using visual slickedit more and more these days.
The baseband chipset used in the iPhone is from a second tier vendor. Apple went with them instead of using a chip from one of the major players like Qualcomm or Ericcson Mobile because they wanted someone they could control. That is why the iPhone's reception is poor.
So the iPhone is the equivalent of a Rolls Royce with a Yugo engine inside.
But Fox news is really not a `news' organization at all. They are an organ for the hardcore right wing of the US, and they exist just to push the right-wing agenda, and what they report as news is uncorrelated with the facts.
Just because they have circulation is not a reason to invite them anywhere. I don't think the National Enquirer or Penthouse is invited to the White House either.
BTW, I don't remember the right wing issuing loud howls of protests when unfriendly reporters were banned from reporting being `embedded' with the military during the Bush years.
I'd also like more details before jumping to conclusions.
If the guy is really a terrorist `mole' or agent who has been actively working to supply them with secret knowledge, I don't have any trouble with the book being thrown at him. But if his connection is that this second-cousin twice removed is a terrorist, it is a different matter. Considering the 6-degrees of separation truism, I don't know how many of us will survive if that standard is widely applied.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, assuming that he has no knowledge about how the thing works and has no other information, his computation of probabilities is technically correct :)
I see. So all those jobs at defense contractors, whose only customer is the government, must not be `real jobs'. Neither must all the military jobs, civil service jobs, police jobs or any other jobs.
Funny how the Republicans are not against new laws and government regulations when it comes to suiting their own interests, viz, safeguarding the interests of the super-rich.
Expand dubious `Intellectual Property' rights, and shift resources to enforce those, instead of going after the white collar crooks robbing the country blind? Oh, those are OK.
New laws banning abortion, and shifting resources to enforcing them? Those are fine too.
Spending resources bullying other countries into adopting our IP laws? Just peachy.
Shovel tons of money at the military because they believe in `American Exceptionalism' and the need to `Project American Power Worldwide' when the only real reasons are protecting corporate profits and ensuring that American corporate criminals and mercenaries never get caught and punished for fucking up other countries? Wonderful.
Each time the right wing bleats about govt spending, they should demonstrate their sincerity by first cutting things that are important to the super rich and megacorps. I'll bet that will balance the budget pretty quickly.
We need to stop letting everybody start legal proceedings in Texas just because it's a favorable venue. Way too many of these stories by patent trolls seem to be out of that jurisdiction.
I never understood why it is that this particular jurisdiction is so favorable to patent holders. Could someone with some perspective on this please comment?
"Director" is a business title, like "Director of Software", "Director of Business Development", "Director of Engineering", "Director of Sales" etc. In this case, it means it is a senior role with good pay & perks, and probably a decent-sized staff.
I've been out of the wireless space for a while and haven't been paying attention, thanks for sharing. That is quite a major move, I hope it works out for the guys, I know quite a few of them.
Nokia is one of the few companies that has really good wireless baseband technology. In fact, their baseband phone chipsets are second only to Qualcomm's. They have lots of very good and probably very well-paid wireless engineers who do all this stuff. Mr. Steven Elop probably doesn't give a damn about baseband, if he even knows what it is. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that he will sack the entire wireless engineering division and start using chips from Qualcomm or someone else. Actually, he'll probably go for a 2nd or 3rd tier vendor for the baseband. After all, it is all about the OS and apps, right? That is all he knows.
Within a couple of years, Nokia will be another pure OEM that simply assembles phones in China based on 100% sourced components. Mr. Elop and his Wall Street buddies will enjoy a couple of years of profit because of all the cost savings due to the sacked engineers, during which his bonus will be large enough to let a couple of generations of his family live in luxury. After that, Nokia will slide down to be part with the Chinese OEMs, and Elop will go on to rape the next company.
The obvious thing for spammers to do is hire lots of third world labor to start marking legitimate web sites as spam. This will mess up Google's data collection and render this useless.
What I personally find maddening is how most of the younger generation of women say `I'm not a feminist', but have no problem laying claim to the outrageous `rights' championed by even the craziest of the radical fringe.
Fathers have no rights, but still owe child support? Of course, that is part of the natural order of things and anyway, he should have kept it in his pants.
Alimony even though it was the woman who left? The jerk deserves it.
Falsely accused of rape of sexual harassment? Well, he may be innocent at this time, but some man somewhere is harassing a women right now, so this punishment can be a deterrent.
Punish women for false rape claims? That will cause a `chilling effect' for other raped women.
A woman who has a privileged upbringing in an upper middle class suburb in the US still needs to benefit from affirmative action at work? Of course, don't you know that women are subjected to ritual gender mutilation in Africa?
And so on and so forth. The `I'm not a feminist' line is trotted out by women in their 20s & 30s who are still interested in attracting men, because they have the sense to know that there are few men dim enough to cast their lot with a self-professed feminist.
If the genders had been reversed, he would have been judged guilty of criminal sexual assault and categorized as a violent sexual offender. Gotta love those double standards.
The `Tea Party' is a fiction that was planned and created by the far-right in anticipation of the loss of the executive branch in 2008. The planning, organization and funding started in late 2005. A bunch of far-right billionaires and republican strategists scheduled the whole thing. Fox, the hate-talk hosts and the others were primed, and the launch was kicked off after Obama was elected. If Obama had lost to McCain, we'd never have heard of the Tea Party.
You are naive if you think they were short-sighted. They knew exactly how this would play out, and the 5 guys who voted for this wanted, and counted on, the current situation.
Let us face it: the US supreme court is now a 100% political instrument. The 5 right-wing judges were put in place with the explicit mandate of guiding the US along the way to complete corporate hegemony. We can now predict with 100% certainty how a particular justice will vote on any given issue. Every single justice is politically controlled and motivated, and takes his/her orders from the appropriate master(s). The right-wing guys are just more blatant about it, they don't even give a shit about the appearance of judicial impartialkity.
The architect thought it would be cool to have a massive dish-like glass structure on the side of the building, shaped like an enormous microwave antenna. Unfortunately, the thing focused the suns rays like a magnifying glass. The insides got really hot, especially near the security desk! Dont' know if anyone got burned, though.
Apple does not use the Qualcomm chipset. I believe they use chips from a company called Infinion.
Absolutely agreed. I have nearly 20 years experience (in Electrical engineering, not exactly IT, but I have worked with and managed more than my share of IT guys) too, and the number of `stereotype fulfilling' characters I have met is less than 1/100. Most of the engineers I have had the privilege to work with have been well adjusted and normal. In fact, the only objectionable trait I found as a pattern was a disposition to laziness and politicking, something that is definitely not isolated to men.
I'll tell you something else: the myth about salaries for engineering women being lower than that of men on the average is just that: a myth. I have managed mid-size engineering organizations in multiple companies, and have found that the women who work there are almost always paid in the top 80th percentile of the salary band or higher. This tactic is deliberately employed as a 'lawsuit shield' by many companies, and is feasible because the number of women engineers were less than 10% of the total workforce.
Good points all. The other function that meetings serve (that completely bypasses the mostly socially handicapped tech folks, myself included) is providing the inter-personal glue that holds groups and companies together, builds comradeship and makes individuals feel part of the team.
I can see some technical people go to a meeting and come away thinking `what a horrible waste of time'. And maybe it was a waste to them. But be assured, for every such discontented individual, there are two that are served.
Of course, I am referring to well-run meetings and not `dick-size' meetings as described by a subsequent poster.
These numbers are bogus. They include products made abroad by nominally American companies. All the cars produced by GM in China are counted as part of this. If you remove the offshore production, the GDP and manufacturing has been in decline for more than a decade. This has been exposed multiple times in the business press. BusinessWeek had an excellent article on this about a year back.
This is completely misleading. These numbers include goods produced by nominally American corporations even if all the work is done by employees based outside of the US. This particular scam has been debunked multiple times by the business press.
BTW, the US GDP numbers also include goods produced outside the USA by non-American labor.
If you strip out the work/products made by non-US employees of US corporations, you'll see that both the US GDP and exports have been in steep decline for the past decade.
Magnus.
And you believe all that?
All these backstories are carefully crafted PR creations, targeted for maximum emotional impact and consequent sponsorship dollars.
Magnus
Southwest: the airline whose fanboys make those of Apple seem like intelligent, rational adults.
Studies conducted in academia about decision-making process in corporations have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that most corporations are run by managers for managers.
There is some pretense of working for the shareholders, but most corporations these days don't even bother claiming to take their customers' or employees' interests into account.
Perfect? Not quite.
I've been using Emacs for more than 20 years, and while it is unbeatable as a text editor, it suffers in comparison with modern code editors. For example, it does not have a source browser like visual slickedit does. In fact, the open source world at present does not have a good code browser that can handle C++ or any of the other modern languages. Sorry, cscope does not cut it. Xrefactory comes close, but suffers from its own weirdnesses and is not open source anyway. Even though I am as hard-core an Emacs bigot as anyone, I find myself using visual slickedit more and more these days.
Magnus.
The baseband chipset used in the iPhone is from a second tier vendor. Apple went with them instead of using a chip from one of the major players like Qualcomm or Ericcson Mobile because they wanted someone they could control. That is why the iPhone's reception is poor.
So the iPhone is the equivalent of a Rolls Royce with a Yugo engine inside.
Magnus.
But Fox news is really not a `news' organization at all. They are an organ for the hardcore right wing of the US, and they exist just to push the right-wing agenda, and what they report as news is uncorrelated with the facts.
Just because they have circulation is not a reason to invite them anywhere. I don't think the National Enquirer or Penthouse is invited to the White House either.
BTW, I don't remember the right wing issuing loud howls of protests when unfriendly reporters were banned from reporting being `embedded' with the military during the Bush years.
Magnus
I'd also like more details before jumping to conclusions.
If the guy is really a terrorist `mole' or agent who has been actively working to supply them with secret knowledge, I don't have any trouble with the book being thrown at him. But if his connection is that this second-cousin twice removed is a terrorist, it is a different matter. Considering the 6-degrees of separation truism, I don't know how many of us will survive if that standard is widely applied.
Magnus
Especially considering most code is written nowadays by inexpensive 20-somethings in Bangalore on their first commercial project.