HP has a history of desktop innovation as did Compaq. Prior to your experience with Compaq, HP created a Windows 3.11 extension called NewWave which was WAY ahead of it's time. 32 character file management, tracking OLE embedded objects, a real scripting facility (agents) and full drag and drop. It made windows a lot easier to use. Like many HP inventions, it was discontinued suddenly when the future was to be OS/2 which had a desktop that rendered NewWave unneeded.
I'm not sure what the best texts are these days, but I learned more about computers from the K&R C book and a book about writing games in BASIC back in the day. K&R taught me data types, pointers, functions and I/O -- all that stuff in one short, quick read.
The BASIC games book was a fun way to learn to create programs - taking game rules and turning them into code. The games were all text mode, so it was about how to implement games like the Game of Life, Star Trek, Tic-Tac-Toe, Yahtze, Text Adventures and Battleship. Each game emphasized something different like boolean logic, loops, branching, subroutines, arrays, text processing and interacting with the user. It was a lot like learning to cook - you got to play what you wrote when you were done!
Implementing the games from the BASIC book in C put the whole thing together. Breaking things down into functions, building reusable libraries and so on all were just natural ways to do things.
Man, I wish we had Python back then. BASIC sure was limiting and C took lots of lines of code...
You are suffering from what I like to call P.D.D. Perspective Deficit Disorder.
After you put down the AppleVision Glasses, you should take a look a channels available to sell your software product - and who controls it. HINT: NOT THE MARKET.
I love all the nuance people are suggesting. Forget that. Do what you believe to be the right thing. Don't lie about the situation - just do what you believe needs to be done. If you are fired or have to resign for sticking to your beliefs, so be it. It's happened to the best of us.
At will employment is for both parties. If you are asked to do something that is against your beliefs, then simply don't do it, dust off the resume and get yourself a raise. Believe it or not, many companies look for people who have courage and integrity. We call these people leaders.
Well, chalk one more freedom up as being completely dead. No that it's OK to make laws to tell our teachers, professors and other educators what they can and cannot teach we've turned our schools into indoctrination centers. Give this 10-15 years and schools will be nothing but a useless brainwashing that teaches nothing of value because ANYTHING of value is dangerous to someone's status quo.
Remember that slippery slope thing that your professors said was a falicy? Well it sure seems like it's working - and against the people who think it doesn't exist. Remember the old frog boiling analogy? The one where you slowly turn up the heat instead of toss it into 211 degree water?
Thanks a lot evolution zealots - you successfully shot all of us in the foot by trying to shout down and silence anyone who opposed your (much more fact based) view of the world. Even though you were right, you left your opponents no room to do anything other than change the rules. And so the rules change, and we can only hope for another Scopes Monkey Trial. Remember, you can win the battle and lose the war. SPECTACULAR FAIL!
I'm not bitter. Not at all. Stop being bitter and run for office and fix the problem. I'm getting sick of the choice of voting for dumb or dumber, awful or terrible, sad or pathetic, sick or ill, etc... It's our (meaning all Americans) fault things are as they are.
Yes. Any treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate carries the full force of law. The U.S. is a member of the U.N., created by a multinational treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate. Any action the U.N. takes in accordance with that treaty carries the weight of U.S. law (but of course this is only relevant in the U.S.).
This is NOT correct. Treaties and Federal laws are subordinate to the Constitution and are not equal. No treaty can take away your rights as granted by the US constitution. The phrase "supreme law of the land" is referring to Federal Law and ratified treaties being supreme to state law. For an education on this, try this page: http://www.answers.com/topic/supremacy-clause?cat=biz-fin
1. Process of validation = majority vote of the House of Representatives. Upon approval, the President is tried before the Senate.
2. Any member of the house may attempt to introduce articles of impeachment. Articles of Impeachment simply charge an official with "high crimes and misdemeanors" (whatever that is) and will remove that official if convicted. Articles of impeachment must be approved by a majority vote of the house.
3. There is no appeal to a conviction when tried for articles of impeachment.
3a. The process can go very quickly.
On the subject of the UN: Treaties are subordinate to the Constitution an subject to precident in case law as well. The president has power to make treaties (when ratified by congress), and to unfortunately to end them without much process at all. It is unlikely that a President violating a treaty would be impeachable for that offense unless the treaty was very popular. I do not share this view, but the UN is not universally loved in the US: many view it as ineffective at best, sometimes a farce (syria in charge of the human rights committee) and a tool used to gang up on the US.
Incidentally, the impeachment process is not usually used as a political weapon. While Kucinich ment well, I fear he has tried to impeach the president for the crime of doing things that Kucinich does not agree with (breaking the UN charter, for expample) that may not really violate the law or where Bush may not be the one who broke the law (bad intelligence leading to deception). If this particular impeachment stands, this may require a new constitution as Impeachment will be wielded as a weapon.
Any provision of the constitution can be done away with by getting 51 Senators and the President to sign a treaty.
FALSE. Treaties have the same strength as a law passed by congress, but are not exempt from the Constitution. "Our constitution declares a treaty to be the law of the land. It is, consequently, to be regarded in courts of justice as equivalent to an act of the legislature, whenever it operates of itself, without the aid of any legislative provision." -- Foster vs Nelson
Have you ever considered simply implementing public key infrastructure using good old fashioned rsa certificates? Almost all email clients support smime and it does two things:
- Allows for encrypted messages (secure) - Allows for automatic signing of messages (authentic)
PGP is another good choice, but it takes more work for the end user. Another nice feature of using PKI is that the same certificates can be used for web authentication as well!
In the UK, I can say "Gordon Brown is a noxious prick" without any legal repercussions.If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested.
I've lived in the US my whole life. Saying that any politician is a prick, fruad, cheat, liar, bastard, @#$#head or worse is constitutionally protected political speech. People can, and do voice their opinion on our leaders with bumper stickers, rants on national television, signs, t-shirts and more. Bush is more often the target than not. We have the absolute right to criticize our politicians. We have no thought police, despite peoples best attempts to imagine them!
What we are struggling with here is the right to peacefully assemble to voice these opinions where, say George Bush is going to give a speech at a graduation. The haters want to disrupt the event (which would fall out of bounds of our right to *peacefully* assemble), and Bush just wants to deliver his speech (and believe me, he doesn't want distractions).
Wow, I almost forgot about mine! That machine was amazing for it's time - small, useful and fairly fast. Unfortunately, mine died when it was fell off the balcony at Denver's airport.
I have continuously been involved in IT since 1986 in either a vendor, consulting or senior management role, but I've never worked in an IT department. Most often my role has been ramming new technology down the throat of risk and profit adverse technology managers who are busy protecting their precious integration plan, vendor allegiances, security model (usually doesn't work) or sacred cow application, not realizing that they no longer are defining the problems experienced by the corporation.
Outside of SMBs (up to $500 million in revenue) your situation isn't as common as you think. As most companies grow and become more risk adverse, decision making and pressure from wall street diminishes the importance of the CIO. In a few companies, the CIO and IT department stay relevant by becoming more innovative and even more supportive of business operations and internal entreprenuership. Unfortunately, many CIOs don't get this and end up being a business impediment department that basically says no to anything that doesn't come with an IT budget. In these companies, CIOs are simply the lightest weight C level executives in a company (C level in name only), and as a corporation grows, they become less and less important as the rest of the Executive team is more focused on M&A, financial performance and less on the next great productivity enhancement. IT no longer delivers competitive advantage the way it did in the 90's and 80's.
IT departments are typically the last adopters of anything. They typically roll up to the CIO, who typically is not a real C level executive. The CIO typically works for the CFO and is an advisory member of the executive committee in most companies. Information Technology generally has two crucial corporate functions: automating accounting functions and managing corporate communication platforms like phones and email. Everything else that happens on a computer - i.e. productivity applications, intranets, etc... are side effects of putting general purpose computers on desks and are secondary functionality. IT Departments have generally claimed fiefdoms over all things computerized so they can have bigger budgets, more resources and are harder to fire and outsource.
It's ugly. But true. Most IT innovation starts in some department, and goes like this:
Kid in sales writes really cool web app that sells product automagically on MySpace.
IT finds out about it, can't integrate it with accounting, tries to kill it.
Kid freaks out because someone who is three managers over him is calling him asking what he's doing.
Kid's boss freaks out because CIO is calling his employee.
Project is killed when Bosses Boss finds out about it because it doesn't make sense to him OR - Bosses Boss intervenes and tells IT to stuff it, and counts money from sales from web app.
IT is forced to support web app because CFO now needs to book revenues for month or quarter.
Kid is transfered from sales to IT and leaves company one year later to start company that sells MySpace widgets and goes on to become millionaire.
Maybe ISPs need to invest in more bandwidth to serve their customers instead of making my broadband internet less useful. This isn't the customer's problem. It's Time Warner's. It's not my fault I want to buy internet bandwidth for home and use it. It's the seller's fault if they don't have the capacity or aren't making enough profit. There are still enough choices in broadband that if you make it crappy, I'll change ISPs.
/ way too many Slashdotters saying, dear telco, charge me more.// way too many people who don't get that what makes the internet useful is the bandwidth part of it./// way way too many telcos and cable operators who could increase profits by simply tacking on $3/month to their unlimited broadband rate and make more money anyway.
Many IT department that are powered by Microsoft software have no interest in something that would reduce the value of their investment in Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware and security software and cuts manpower needs. This violates the TCO and ROI assumptions that they based their purchases on. Firefox may expose some anti-malware infrastructure as the useless rube goldberg that it is.
Additionally, the extensibility of FireFox presents a problem where users can easily add on to Firefox, and OH MY GOD change the way their GUI looks.
Right now software and technology companies have to compete with Biotech for investment dollars so this should really matter to/. Andy is right that the current players in pharma aren't really creating much new and are simply patenting tiny (and obvious) baby steps. One thing Andy isn't pointing out is what every terrible corporate disease movie will tell you: it isn't in biotech's financial interest to find true cures. Symptomatic treatments can be sold thousands of times instead of the one time a cure is sold.
The person who is sending you the letter is probably setting you up to buy the domain from him. Typical domain hoarder:
1. register domains.
2. list them for sale.
3. wait until someone registers the name and uses it.
4. use legal system to attempt shake down.
5. profit?
The only thing that can kill PowerPoint is real speaking skill. Unfortunately, being a good enough presenter that you can succeed without visual aids is beyond the reach for most of us. Not to mention, most of us really don't have anything that interesting to talk about.
No. Some processes like patent applications, incorporation and taxes feel to the average citizen as they are artificially difficult to the extent the government is using regulation to create a service industry. It's nothing personal, but why should I need a lawyer to tell the government about my invention and ask for the government to issue a patent? Why should I need a lawyer to dispute if a patent is obvious or to invalidate a patent because the patent is not new or novel?
Abolish the patent system?
I don't think many people really want patents to go away. Many people do see where perhaps the application and dispute process are artificially complex and not very do-it-yourself friendly. They also see things being patented that are painfully obvious. People also see patents being used to the detriment of mankind (patents for medications, high yield crops, etc...).
Slashdot Mirror
HP has a history of desktop innovation as did Compaq. Prior to your experience with Compaq,
HP created a Windows 3.11 extension called NewWave which was WAY ahead of it's time. 32 character file management, tracking OLE embedded objects, a real scripting facility (agents) and full drag and drop. It made windows a lot easier to use. Like many HP inventions, it was discontinued suddenly when the future was to be OS/2 which had a desktop that rendered NewWave unneeded.
I'm not sure what the best texts are these days, but I learned more about computers from the K&R C book and a book about writing games in BASIC back in the day. K&R taught me data types, pointers, functions and I/O -- all that stuff in one short, quick read.
The BASIC games book was a fun way to learn to create programs - taking game rules and turning them into code. The games were all text mode, so it was about how to implement games like the Game of Life, Star Trek, Tic-Tac-Toe, Yahtze, Text Adventures and Battleship. Each game emphasized something different like boolean logic, loops, branching, subroutines, arrays, text processing and interacting with the user. It was a lot like learning to cook - you got to play what you wrote when you were done!
Implementing the games from the BASIC book in C put the whole thing together. Breaking things down into functions, building reusable libraries and so on all were just natural ways to do things.
Man, I wish we had Python back then. BASIC sure was limiting and C took lots of lines of code...
You are suffering from what I like to call P.D.D. Perspective Deficit Disorder.
After you put down the AppleVision Glasses, you should take a look a channels available to sell your software product - and who controls it. HINT: NOT THE MARKET.
I suggest "COBOL on Crack".
I love all the nuance people are suggesting. Forget that. Do what you believe to be the right thing. Don't lie about the situation - just do what you believe needs to be done. If you are fired or have to resign for sticking to your beliefs, so be it. It's happened to the best of us.
At will employment is for both parties. If you are asked to do something that is against your beliefs, then simply don't do it, dust off the resume and get yourself a raise. Believe it or not, many companies look for people who have courage and integrity. We call these people leaders.
Well, chalk one more freedom up as being completely dead. No that it's OK to make laws to tell our teachers, professors and other educators what they can and cannot teach we've turned our schools into indoctrination centers. Give this 10-15 years and schools will be nothing but a useless brainwashing that teaches nothing of value because ANYTHING of value is dangerous to someone's status quo.
Remember that slippery slope thing that your professors said was a falicy? Well it sure seems like it's working - and against the people who think it doesn't exist. Remember the old frog boiling analogy? The one where you slowly turn up the heat instead of toss it into 211 degree water?
Thanks a lot evolution zealots - you successfully shot all of us in the foot by trying to shout down and silence anyone who opposed your (much more fact based) view of the world. Even though you were right, you left your opponents no room to do anything other than change the rules. And so the rules change, and we can only hope for another Scopes Monkey Trial. Remember, you can win the battle and lose the war. SPECTACULAR FAIL!
I'm not bitter. Not at all.
Stop being bitter and run for office and fix the problem. I'm getting sick of the choice of voting for dumb or dumber, awful or terrible, sad or pathetic, sick or ill, etc... It's our (meaning all Americans) fault things are as they are.
These people are my enemies.
Based on your criteria for enemies, you have very few people left to be your friend. That's really sad.
ow interesting is it that attempting to impeach a president because he got a BJ
FALSE. Clinton was accused of lying under oath about the BJ. Getting the BJ was *not* the issue tried before the Senate.
Yes. Any treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate carries the full force of law. The U.S. is a member of the U.N., created by a multinational treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate. Any action the U.N. takes in accordance with that treaty carries the weight of U.S. law (but of course this is only relevant in the U.S.).
This is NOT correct. Treaties and Federal laws are subordinate to the Constitution and are not equal. No treaty can take away your rights as granted by the US constitution. The phrase "supreme law of the land" is referring to Federal Law and ratified treaties being supreme to state law. For an education on this, try this page: http://www.answers.com/topic/supremacy-clause?cat=biz-fin
To answer your questions:
1. Process of validation = majority vote of the House of Representatives. Upon approval, the President is tried before the Senate.
2. Any member of the house may attempt to introduce articles of impeachment. Articles of Impeachment simply charge an official with "high crimes and misdemeanors" (whatever that is) and will remove that official if convicted. Articles of impeachment must be approved by a majority vote of the house.
3. There is no appeal to a conviction when tried for articles of impeachment.
3a. The process can go very quickly.
On the subject of the UN: Treaties are subordinate to the Constitution an subject to precident in case law as well. The president has power to make treaties (when ratified by congress), and to unfortunately to end them without much process at all. It is unlikely that a President violating a treaty would be impeachable for that offense unless the treaty was very popular. I do not share this view, but the UN is not universally loved in the US: many view it as ineffective at best, sometimes a farce (syria in charge of the human rights committee) and a tool used to gang up on the US.
Incidentally, the impeachment process is not usually used as a political weapon. While Kucinich ment well, I fear he has tried to impeach the president for the crime of doing things that Kucinich does not agree with (breaking the UN charter, for expample) that may not really violate the law or where Bush may not be the one who broke the law (bad intelligence leading to deception). If this particular impeachment stands, this may require a new constitution as Impeachment will be wielded as a weapon.
rabbitelephant? curvaceous coelacanth? fishfishfishrabbitfish?
You are making this hard. Everyone knows browsers are compound nouns:
Firefox. IceWeasel. Sea Monkey.
and Debian based linux distros are adjective-noun pairs:
curvaceous coelacanth
magnanimous mammoth
splendid spider
etc...
FALSE. Treaties have the same strength as a law passed by congress, but are not exempt from the Constitution.
"Our constitution declares a treaty to be the law of the land. It is, consequently, to be regarded in courts of justice as equivalent to an act of the legislature, whenever it operates of itself, without the aid of any legislative provision." -- Foster vs Nelson
Have you ever considered simply implementing public key infrastructure using good old fashioned rsa certificates? Almost all email clients support smime and it does two things:
- Allows for encrypted messages (secure)
- Allows for automatic signing of messages (authentic)
PGP is another good choice, but it takes more work for the end user. Another nice feature of using PKI is that the same certificates can be used for web authentication as well!
In the UK, I can say "Gordon Brown is a noxious prick" without any legal repercussions.If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested.
I've lived in the US my whole life. Saying that any politician is a prick, fruad, cheat, liar, bastard, @#$#head or worse is constitutionally protected political speech. People can, and do voice their opinion on our leaders with bumper stickers, rants on national television, signs, t-shirts and more. Bush is more often the target than not. We have the absolute right to criticize our politicians. We have no thought police, despite peoples best attempts to imagine them!
What we are struggling with here is the right to peacefully assemble to voice these opinions where, say George Bush is going to give a speech at a graduation. The haters want to disrupt the event (which would fall out of bounds of our right to *peacefully* assemble), and Bush just wants to deliver his speech (and believe me, he doesn't want distractions).
Wow, I almost forgot about mine! That machine was amazing for it's time - small, useful and fairly fast. Unfortunately, mine died when it was fell off the balcony at Denver's airport.
I have continuously been involved in IT since 1986 in either a vendor, consulting or senior management role, but I've never worked in an IT department. Most often my role has been ramming new technology down the throat of risk and profit adverse technology managers who are busy protecting their precious integration plan, vendor allegiances, security model (usually doesn't work) or sacred cow application, not realizing that they no longer are defining the problems experienced by the corporation.
Outside of SMBs (up to $500 million in revenue) your situation isn't as common as you think. As most companies grow and become more risk adverse, decision making and pressure from wall street diminishes the importance of the CIO. In a few companies, the CIO and IT department stay relevant by becoming more innovative and even more supportive of business operations and internal entreprenuership. Unfortunately, many CIOs don't get this and end up being a business impediment department that basically says no to anything that doesn't come with an IT budget. In these companies, CIOs are simply the lightest weight C level executives in a company (C level in name only), and as a corporation grows, they become less and less important as the rest of the Executive team is more focused on M&A, financial performance and less on the next great productivity enhancement. IT no longer delivers competitive advantage the way it did in the 90's and 80's.
I'm long past working in sales - I own my own company now and have been demoted to chief toilet cleaner and director of dirty work.
Maybe ISPs need to invest in more bandwidth to serve their customers instead of making my broadband internet less useful. This isn't the customer's problem. It's Time Warner's. It's not my fault I want to buy internet bandwidth for home and use it. It's the seller's fault if they don't have the capacity or aren't making enough profit. There are still enough choices in broadband that if you make it crappy, I'll change ISPs.
// way too many people who don't get that what makes the internet useful is the bandwidth part of it. /// way way too many telcos and cable operators who could increase profits by simply tacking on $3/month to their unlimited broadband rate and make more money anyway.
/ way too many Slashdotters saying, dear telco, charge me more.
Many IT department that are powered by Microsoft software have no interest in something that would reduce the value of their investment in Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware and security software and cuts manpower needs. This violates the TCO and ROI assumptions that they based their purchases on. Firefox may expose some anti-malware infrastructure as the useless rube goldberg that it is.
Additionally, the extensibility of FireFox presents a problem where users can easily add on to Firefox, and OH MY GOD change the way their GUI looks.
Right now software and technology companies have to compete with Biotech for investment dollars so this should really matter to /. Andy is right that the current players in pharma aren't really creating much new and are simply patenting tiny (and obvious) baby steps. One thing Andy isn't pointing out is what every terrible corporate disease movie will tell you: it isn't in biotech's financial interest to find true cures. Symptomatic treatments can be sold thousands of times instead of the one time a cure is sold.
The person who is sending you the letter is probably setting you up to buy the domain from him. Typical domain hoarder:
1. register domains.
2. list them for sale.
3. wait until someone registers the name and uses it.
4. use legal system to attempt shake down.
5. profit?
The only thing that can kill PowerPoint is real speaking skill. Unfortunately, being a good enough presenter that you can succeed without visual aids is beyond the reach for most of us. Not to mention, most of us really don't have anything that interesting to talk about.
No. Some processes like patent applications, incorporation and taxes feel to the average citizen as they are artificially difficult to the extent the government is using regulation to create a service industry. It's nothing personal, but why should I need a lawyer to tell the government about my invention and ask for the government to issue a patent? Why should I need a lawyer to dispute if a patent is obvious or to invalidate a patent because the patent is not new or novel?
Abolish the patent system?
I don't think many people really want patents to go away. Many people do see where perhaps the application and dispute process are artificially complex and not very do-it-yourself friendly. They also see things being patented that are painfully obvious. People also see patents being used to the detriment of mankind (patents for medications, high yield crops, etc...).