Is there any real analysis (financial or otherwise) which would bear up your assertion that Kodak is "going downhill fast"? Or is this a blind assertion based purely on anecdotal "evidence"? Kodak and other companies of its ilk periodically go through phases where they trim the dead wood.
I suspect this "Kodak is going downhill fast" meme is much like the predictions of Apple's demise, which have been going steady for what, over a decade now?
Too bad for Kodak they haven't made a competitive digital camera in like 5 years.
I would have to disagree with you on this. At least in the consumer space, Kodak's digital cameras are very competitive on features and price, and are still quite popular. The latest Kodak innovations (picture dock, including a compact photo printer that has the printer dock on its top side) help reinforce that position.
I recently purchased a Kodak DX6490 (a 10x optical zoom camera with an SLR-style body and a 4 megapixel sensor), mainly based on my preference of its feature set, its preferred media (SD/MMC, which is also usable in Palm-branded PDAs), and reviews which compared the camera favorably against the Fuji Finepix S5000. And, oh yeah, good Mac OS X integration out of the box. So far, I've had no disappointments; even the movie clips the thing takes are excellent, for what they are.
Better quality camera and better quality pictures from a camera that's at a price point at-or-below the nearest competition? Yeah, I'd call that competitive.
If this counts as extortion, it sets a
VERY dangerous precedent... A precedent that basically makes slavery legal, by making it a crime to stop performing a voluntary service.
Thank you! This, perhaps, is the most important detail of this entire situation. This man was arrested for ceasing to perform a voluntary service at his own expense. Granted, he could have transferred the site to the county's control, and arranged for them to move the site to their own hosting service, but that still would have required the county government to provide money to do this.
In short, the sheriff's department of that county abused their powers and levied four criminal charges for a matter that, at most, should have been resolved in civil court.
I might also add that the second link in this article makes it clear that the site content was owned by the admin who put it together, not by the sheriff's department -- and this was stated clearly on the home page for the site.
It really pays to read carefully before posting on Slashdot.
The thread went like this:
Anonymous Coward number 1 writes: "Please educate me. What has Compaq contributed to technology?"
Someone replies, "They reverse-engineered the BIOS of the original PC and established the close [sic] market." I'm assuming this person was trying to write "clones."
Anonymous Coward number 2 writes: "Wrong. That was Compaq (and maybe Phoenix, too)."
Idiot. If you followed the thread, your post would have been completely unnecessary.
If anything should serve as a base between here and Mars it should be ISS (after all it's a big reason we built the thing.)
The problem is, the ISS was all about compromise to allow various countries to participate meaningfully... which meant that ultimately, the ISS isn't really good for any one thing. The ISS was originally justified as a waypoint for a mission to Mars, but changes were made to the planned orbit for the ISS to accommodate the Russians (if memory serves) which made it unsuitable for that mission. Thus, it's no longer even a consideration for a Mars mission.
The ISS has turned into an expensive boondoggle, and since money has gotten tight, the astronauts stationed there spend all their time with maintenance, and have nothing left over to do real science with.
I'm all for international cooperation in space travel and exploration, but frankly, the ISS suffers from too much international politics.
...but the patent's claims seem to be very specific. What Microsoft has done is to devise a way to consolidate and organize scripts on a computer system. The patent's claims cover user interaction methods, the steps involved in parsing out a specific script from the XML file (which is basically a heterogeneous collection of scripts with descriptions), etc. This isn't exactly clever, but it hasn't been done in precisely this way before.
The patent talks about high level programming languages and scripting languages, and attempts to draw a distinction between the two. The patent limits itself to the scope of scripting languages, although as anyone with a Computer Science degree knows, that distinction can be murky at times.
I've read and re-read the patent application today, and although I am of the opinion that this sort of thing should not be patentable, the patent was granted. Is this the end of the world? Probably not. It's a defensive patent. From the looks of things, this patent will probably cover features in upcoming versions of the Windows OS (Longhorn?) as well as Office.
There's plenty of similar prior art regarding embedding scripts in XML; for example, XHTML (which is XML written to the XHTML DTD) allows embedding JavaScript in an XML document. It seems that this Microsoft patent could not be construed to cover embedding JavaScript in HTML or XHTML, and if Microsoft were to try to make this claim, they run the risk of having their patent voided.
I once worked for a company called Essential Wisdom, later renamed eWisdom after incorporating in Delaware and relocating the office to San Jose. During my tenure at eWisdom, I devised a method of embedding a high level AI language derived from SCHEME (itself a dialect of Lisp) in XML files. I did this so we could preserve intelligent behavior of objects being manipulated in a drawing/diagramming application. For instance, if you wanted to draw a network topology diagram, you could have an object representing a network hub that, when you dropped it on the canvas and started attaching network "cables" to it, would flag errors such as attaching too many network cables for the number of ports on the hub.
The embedded language was a Lisp dialect, and the container was XML. What I avoided were explicit uses of CDATA wrappers in the XML, and I disallowed certain special characters that are reserved in XML (such as the less-than and greater-than symbols). The application that used this stuff was written in Java, which was kind of interesting -- and surprisingly, the performance of interpreting Lisp inside of a Java application wasn't that bad, at least for a modest number of objects on the canvas at any given time.
The point is, we were embedding code in XML long before Microsoft even dreamed of this patent, and all of the work that was done on this was carefully documented because eWisdom was hot to patent some of our core ideas. Unfortunately, I don't think we ever made any progress on patenting any of the ideas. Looking at this Microsoft patent, it seems clear that it wouldn't cover the kind of stuff that I did for eWisdom. A creative lawyer could argue otherwise, but the preponderance of evidence would be against them.
Where are the moderator points when I need them? Yeah, this is Flamebait, or a Troll, definitely. Still, I'll bite...
Sure there are other IDEs (don't do.NET well) but again, not even in the same league as Visual Studio.
If you want to do.NET development, or COM/DCOM stuff; otherwise, Visual Studio is... all right, but not stellar. Some people swear by it, and others can't stand it.
There is a nasty Java version but Java is a joke
And any hope you had of being taken seriously went right out the window. Especially when you consider that many database tools are written in Java these days, because JDBC insulates application writers from DB-specific and platform-specific issues. Not to mention the numerous enterprise computing tools and application servers written in Java, etc.
Sure there are other databases but nothing even on the same level for Macs.
I guess Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL don't count? Seriously, Microsoft SQL Server ain't all that.
That and the G4s are so patheticly underpowered it is amazing.
The G4 is only a consideration for the current generation of Apple laptops and consumer-grade computers; even so, it's really not that bad a performer, if you load the system with sufficient RAM. Since this Slashdot article is nominally about laptops, it should be noted that G4 Powerbooks are quite serious machines both for developers and power users. The G5 Powerbooks will be nice, and even faster (and probably faster than this Acer/Ferrari laptop being reviewed), but you don't need to wait for a G5 Powerbook to get decent Powerbook performance.
I don't know how our graphics guys do it. They wait forever to resize windows!
No G4 performs this poorly. So either you're talking about G3 or pre-G3 hardware with insufficient RAM, or you're blowing smoke out of your ass. I'm wagering it's the latter.
Macs are toys, plain and simple.
And what little credibility you had has disintegrated. This kind of schoolyard name-calling is the last resort of the unenlightened and the insecure. What puzzles me is why people have been parroting this line since 1984, even though the Mac has evolved since then, changing CPU architecture and OS architecture dramatically in the process? Even most diehard Wintel zealots don't say this stuff anymore; I'm just not sure what subset is responsible for keeping this tired old non-argument alive.
Nice specious reasoning. The article you cite doesn't in any way negate my argument -- specifically, I said that such clauses in employment contracts are typically unenforceable. Reading the article you linked to demonstrates a couple things -- number one, the employee represented himself in court, which is grade A stupid. Number two, the court case is a grade A example of bad law, because it creates a precedent that a company can own ideas in your head even if they're not expressed in a tangible form. The employee even argued that he had come up with about 80% of his idea prior to his employment with Alcatel. If this dope had a decent attorney and had argued the case differently, he would have gotten off.
The moral of the story is, keep your fucking ideas to yourself, and make sure you cover your ass by waiting a sufficient amount of time between severing your business relationship with an employer and implementing some idea you had, to make sure that it's as hard as possible for your former employer to claim the work as theirs. Then it really will be next to impossible to enforce any draconian employment contract clauses.
Of course, most reasonable employers won't spend the kind of money necessary to fight such a case in court in the first place, if only because it's not financially wise. Again, this speaks to my point that such clauses are typically unenforceable. Just because you can find a single case (and a very bizarre one, at that) where some guy got screwed, you can't generalize that finding of law and say that every such contract is automatically enforceable. And in states where such contractual clauses are illegal, they are absolutely unenforceable.
First off, employment contracts which claim that an employer owns everything you do regardless of whether you're using company time or resources are typically unenforceable. Most employers know this. A few will try to slip these clauses through anyway in order to try and own your intellectual output, and scare you off from doing work on the side.
In some states, such contractual clauses aren't just unenforceable, they're outright illegal.
Before I posted this response, I actually asked a coworker who has similar experience to my own (but a lot more job experience and life experience, overall). So this is what I have distilled out of that discussion, and my own experience.
First off, it's perfectly acceptable to cross out objectionable items in a contract and initial the changes. Initialing the changes is very important, because it lets someone know that you either originated the changes, or that you're agreeing to them. Having said that, it's also perfectly acceptable for a prospective employer to reject your changes. But don't let that scare you off. This is part of negotiation.
If your changes are rejected outright, you have two choices -- walk away, or attempt to negotiate a compromise. A good compromise would be to stipulate that they could claim ownership to inventions and ideas that are materially related to the company's line of business, but anything else that you come up with on your own time is your own. There's standard boilerplate that covers this, and I'm sure you can find examples if you're dilligent enough.
I'm lucky enough to have a friend who is a lawyer, and he often looks over legal documents for me to tidy up the language and protect me. Most people don't have that luxury, but it's possible to consult with an attorney for a flat fee, if it's an initial consultation. It could be the best $50 or $100 you ever spent. Once you are advised of your rights, assuming there are no complications, you shouldn't need to pay a retainer unless you need further services.
If you're really desperate for the job, and these guys won't budge, then ask for them to at least let you provide a list of inventions and projects you developed prior to your employment, with the explicit written stipulation that your employer would not gain ownership of anything developed prior to your relationship with them. If they won't even do this, then you really should look elsewhere for employment. Seriously.
Having said all that... usually, my deletions or changes to a contract have gone through unchallenged, even when I explicitly point them out. Even large corporate entities like Microsoft have been forced to cave in to such demands, such as when the original Windows NT team came on board after being hired away from DEC. In that case, the people in question were being asked to sign a rather restrictive non-compete clause, and they refused; Microsoft's legal department caved in after it was pointed out that these very same engineers would never have been able to leave DEC for Microsoft if they had signed a similar non-compete agreement with DEC. Of course, it helped that this was an entire team of engineers, not an individual hire, but the principles are the same. You probably won't have collective bargaining power on your side, but you also don't have to take just anything that's handed to you.
If you're making any contract changes beyond a simple strike-out of an objectionable clause, then it's a good idea to have a lawyer review your changes.
This is not underhanded. This is standard practice. It's their obligation to review the contract before they sign off on it. (Both parties must sign.) If they don't agree to your changes, they won't sign off on the contract. At that point, you either negotiate on a mutually agreeable contract, or you sever your relationship. It's really that simple.
One of the problems is that the last big space race took place during the Cold War. As a result, knowledge was compartmentalized; no one person had enough knowledge to build an entire Saturn rocket. As I recall, there were three engineers who, together, had enough knowledge to reconstitute any part of the Saturn rocket program. (The Saturn was the launch vehicle used for the Apollo missions.) Of those people, most are dead.
Yes, there's documentation locked up in various places -- again, there isn't one single place for everything. You'd have to scour the entire country for the various pieces of plans and documents necessary to reconstitute the program.
And the fact is, much of the technology that was relied upon for our space program back in the 60's and 70's is now obsolete. It's unfortunate that NASA takes so long to go from concept to implementation -- usually by the time a design is approved and has gone through the necessary review and revision, much of the technology relied upon in said design is already obsolete. With the current pace of technology, this problem is exacerbated. So really, there are two problems -- one is to reduce the turn-around time on designs for space vehicles and other space-rated equipment, and the other is to come up with space-worthy replacements for the old technologies our space vehicles used to rely upon.
Yes Wolfram used a lot of work based on others (and he cites it all)
Evidently he does not, for many have accused Dr. Wolfram of plagiarism. Personally, I find his citations inadequate. He doesn't give nearly enough credit to Edward Fredkin or Tommaso Toffoli or any of the other key researchers in Cellular Automata who advanced the idea that the universe is a giant computational process long before this book was ever published.
Wolfram claims to have originated this idea, and he seems hell-bent on taking the credit away from others, to the point that he's put some rather onerous copyright restrictions on his NKS book and website. This is academically dishonest, to say the least.
That he fucked over his own research assistant, Matthew Cook, is a crime against the advancement of math and science. (Check the Wikipedia article on Matthew Cook. It's enlightening.)
I myself did some work with using Cellular Automata to model physical systems -- my bachelor's thesis (submitted in 1992 to the MIT Physics Department) concentrated on modeling gas diffusion using a one-dimensional CA, and comparing the results against statistical physics theory. Wolfram came late to the party, claims ownership of ideas that rightfully don't belong to any one person (and which he definitely did not originate), and killed a lot of trees to disseminate relatively little new information (the proof that a specific CA is Turing complete, furnished by his research assistant, being the primary noteworthy item). Save yourself the money and the 1200+ pages and read the source material. It's more enlightening.
No idea if Sun has changed the language specification to allow 64-bit array indices, but they seem to have added 64-bit optimizations to some versions of the Java VM, according to these release notes for JDK 1.5. I will refrain from assuming that 64-bit array indices are allowed if you turn 64-bitness on. I noticed, though, that there seems to be a compile time switch that needs to be used for this, not just a run-time switch. This implies byte-code optimizations, at the very least.
Well, Apple's focus is on stability and user experience, so I think they'll probably trail the Windows world by a month or two. Fortunately, most of the JDK 1.5 improvements are under-the-hood, and affect the compiler more than the VM. Of the VM-side improvements in JDK 1.5, it looks like a lot of them were already implemented on the Mac side in some form (such as this memory sharing technology), so it might take a lot less work for Apple to get up to speed with 1.5. Here's hoping!
As pointed out elsewhere, they're actually limiting the number of simultaneous connections in the $500 version of the software, not the total number of users.
I would like to point out that the Xserve hardware ships with the unlimited client license by default, a selling point Steve Jobs touted when unveiling the Xserve G5 at his latest MacWorld keynote address. This provides an incentive to businesses to purchase the latest Xserve hardware; since Apple still makes the lion's share of its profits off of hardware, this makes all kinds of sense.
The reason why both Voyager and Enterprise suck compared to ST:TOS and ST:TNG is that Berman, et. al., hired writers who cut their teeth writing for frigging soap operas.
Back in the days of ST:TOS, they had scripts written by real, established SciFi writers. (Well, OK, David Gerrold got established after he wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles," but Harlan Ellison was well established by the time he churned out "City on the Edge of Forever." Pity that Gene Roddenberry felt the need to rewrite the script.)
This is why in recent Star Trek movies and TV shows, the emphasis has been on melodrama and romantic intrigue and not on science fiction. I mean, seriously, can anyone forget the soft-core Vulcan porn shots in the first season of Enterprise? A female Vulcan bridge officer was included in Enterprise for the same reason Jeri Ryan was cast as Babe of Borg in Voyager -- to appeal to a certain adolescent male demographic. In other words, spank material for the fan boys. The cynicism that drives these decisions is enough to nauseate me.
If Paramount is serious about salvaging the Star Trek franchise, they need to get serious about who they hire to write the damned scripts. Either that, or send these soap opera writers to a boot camp. But since you can't polish a turd, I'd just suggest hiring some competent science fiction writers.
Which means you were probably overpaid in the first place. That was one of the MAJOR problem of the dot.com boom: Labor squeeze, which begat wage inflation.
Actually, no, it means that the job I was hired for was working for a company that was stingy and didn't want to spend top dollar for a competent person. To be fair, the type of work I was doing at this job was considerably different, and probably warranted a lower paycheck than what I'd been making previously... but not to the extent of the pay cut I wound up taking.
I might also point out that now, even in this shitty economy, my pay scale has risen to about 80% of what I was making before the dot-com bust. Because of the bankruptcy, I have less debt to service, and therefore my effective take-home pay (and thus, my disposable income) is higher.
On the other hand, I'm also working far harder than I ever did before the dot-com bust, with the possible exception of a stint I did at a start-up company that lasted almost two years. Then, as now, I find myself getting burned out. But I daren't jump ship, because jobs aren't plentiful for programmers of any kind on Arizona right now (except maybe VB programmers, but even that market is shriveling).
Considering you went bankrupt, unless you owned a house who's value plummeted or had an uninsured medical catastrophe, I suspect it was due to some wicked credit card debt.
It was mostly credit card debt, combined with a crushing car loan that I should have refinanced far sooner. At least I had the sense to get rid of the SUV when gas prices climbed back up above $1 per gallon and stayed there. Too bad the loan for the Eclipse was obtained through Keybank.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy has definitely helped me restructure my finances. The bankruptcy let me save my house (which is modest, a mere $75,000 home when I bought it, 800 square feet, certainly not a "phat pad") and effectively refinance my car.
Although I may have been overpaid before the dot-com bust, I certainly don't feel overpaid now. I have, however, learned my lessons. I'm trying to save more and plan for cyclic down-turns in my industry. Not that I ever "partied every night like Prince," but I did buy a lot of gadgets and other luxuries that I shouldn't have; that's stopped as well. Everything now has to serve a function, or else it had better fall within the constraints of my entertainment budget.
One last bit: Your comments about what happens when outsourced labor turns out to suck are spot-on. My current employer had to massively scale back their outsourcing to India when they realized that these jokers weren't up to most of the tasks we wanted them to do. (That, and their estimates on time-to-completion for a given set of tasks were ridiculously inflated, effectively negating any cost savings from paying lower hourly wages.) The Dell example you cite is perfect.
Do you mean smack in the same way how no one has yet to discover prior art to invalide Amazon.com's patent, so Apple's patent is probably unique and valid too?
Like the One-Click patent, I think this Allowances patent (well, pending patent) falls under the category of "obvious," and therefore shouldn't be patentable. There actually have been several people who have pointed out potential prior art on One-Click, only to be shot down on a nit-picking technicality. Since you seem to have a disdain for nit-picking, perhaps you'll modify your position accordingly. But probably not.
Seriously, will the anti-patent zealots actually try to tear apart the specific claims in a patent before calling them invalid? Because ultimately, that's what matters.
Pardon me, but what's the fucking claim? The concept of giving your child an allowance has been around since before I was born. The iTunes Music Store's Allowances feature is simply one implementation of this concept, but the patent application was probably written to be overly broad, so anyone trying to implement anything similar will have to license the patent.
Back in the good old days, when the USPTO actually did a real job and didn't just rubber stamp every patent application that slid by, such a patent application would be rejected on the grounds that it is trivial and obvious. Neither One-Click nor Allowances would survive culling if that standard were applied today.
Why are you calling on others? If you believe there's prior art, why aren't you looking for it yourself?
Ah yes, the stereotypical humorless Slashdot geek who, true to his psychological make-up, misses the mildly humorous wording of "Obligatory call for prior art examples goes here," and then goes a step farther and misses the smiley face immediately following.
But, stepping back for a moment and answering your question at face value, I'll simply say that I think it's a waste of my time to look for prior art for this. It's not my fucking job, and nobody is paying me to do this. If I need to create a web store that implements such a feature, I'll make a business decision at that time and decide whether it's cheaper to hire someone to find prior art and challenge the patent, or to simply license this absurd patent.
Regardless, this idiocy has a finite life span, so in the long run, it doesn't matter that such things are patented. It is, however, a nuisance to small Web retailers in the short run.
If an Indian will do you overpaid IT job for less than good for him.
Nice, glib non-argument. Problem is, you assume that someone here must be overpaid if they are an IT professional. But that doesn't track, because IT salaries have been falling since the dot-com implosion. No, what it really boils down to is, guys in India can work cheaper because the cost of living (and the standard of living) is lower. As soon as they start demanding a higher standard of living, or emigrate to the U.S. to seek a better standard of living (which many of the good Indian IT professionals do), companies will start shifting the jobs elsewhere. There's always someone in a developing country who's willing to sling code for peanuts.
Maybe you need to look into a new field. Its called a free market.
And some of us are too old and/or too poor from the recent IT job crisis to be able to afford to retrain for a completely different job in a different field. And some of us like working with computers -- we're the ones who are true geeks, and would be computer hobbyists even if we weren't working IT jobs. Then again, it's hard to maintain a computer hobby if you can't afford a cutting-edge computer... Because a real hobbyist does more than read e-mail and do word processing, right? Right?
As for a "free market," what a joke. A truly free market would allow anything, including outright corporate warfare and terrorist action. Right now, we have a rule of law imposed by our government to keep everyone and everything in check, individuals and corporations alike. As soon as governments become irrelevant, look to see disgruntled and highly-skilled people turning to more radical expressions of their disaffection.
If I don't have a right to a job, then I don't have a right to much else, do I? But then again, neither do you. Taken to the logical extreme, anything becomes fair game, including murder and outright thievery. It's amazing what a thin thread our entire society hangs by. People become like cornered animals when their livelihoods are threatened. Nuff said.
Joe Slashdot: just like everyone else "Keep the gov't off my back, man... but put it on HPs because they've found someone that can do my job for half the price. Fuck progress, I have a mountain of credit card debt to pay off."
They may have found someone to do the same job, but almost certainly not at the same level of competency. I've had some first-hand experience now with outsourcing work to India-based programmers, and I'm not that impressed. In the Java arena, asking an Indian programmer to do anything beyond a simple JSP page or a trivial Servlet is asking a lot. At least, that has been my experience. And these programmers want a lot of hand-holding -- i.e., so much specified up-front that the person writing the spec might as well write the code too.
Of course, most of the better programmers wind up filtering out of India and into the United States, in search of better wages and a better standard of living. How ironic.
Another issue I've run into is the language barrier. There's a real, tangible lack of understanding of some basic concepts, things that just don't seem to get across very well. This usually results in longer development cycles (which, when you factor in the latency induced by 24-hour round trip time for most e-mail exchanges, can be a real productivity killer), because what you get isn't exactly what you asked for. This becomes a creative exercise in learning to rephrase the same fscking request different ways until the guy on the other end just "gets it."
Evolve or die, simple as that. If you're [sic] skill level was only as high as your average India-based call center worker / HTML jockey you ain't all that skilled.
I'll agree to an extent. The problem is, it's not just call center jobs and web authoring anymore. More and more of the upper-tier programming jobs are being exported, to the point that a company might only keep one or two chief software architects (if that) in the United States, and have the rest done by code slingers working for peanuts overseas.
Of course, everyone keeps saying that the truly competent coders will always be able to find work Stateside, and that might be true. It just seems to me that the definition of "truly competent" seems to be shifting, or maybe it's the level of competency that's considered acceptable to get a given job done.
This Social Darwinism crap that conservatives always spout really turns my stomach. When the middle class has eroded to the point where there are no skilled workers left in the United States, who will remain to be the consumer of all the cheap goods and services that this global capitalist economy supposedly will provide?
When I was forced into bankruptcy by the dot-com implosion, and couldn't find decent steady work for over a year, only to eventually find a job that required me to do more work for about a third of the money that I used to make, even a $99 iPod would have been too expensive.
Take a lesson from Computer Science. Greedy algorithms don't always work best.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way trying to turn this into a flame war about the theory of evolution. I'm talking about Social Darwinism, not biological evolution. Just to insure that nobody accuses me of straying too far off-topic.
I submitted a similar article earlier today, but I guess I didn't beat the person who posted this article. However, one point that I made in my submission, and that nobody has made here: Check the press release. Notice something? Apple is claiming that the "Allowance" feature of the iTunes Music Store is patent pending. This smacks of the One Click patent that Amazon.com secured. Obligatory call for prior art examples goes here.:-)
and we would have no idea on the existance of "a little solar system in the solar system" in the form of the Jovian moons
The existence of the Jovian moons was known even before the invention of decent optical telescopes. Up until the last decade or so, you could still find bushmen who could easily pinpoint the four Galileian satellites with the naked eye. (I read that westernization of Africa is causing many traditional hunting skills to disappear through disuse. Many traits that are prized for hunting are no longer useful, and so you'll be hard pressed to find someone today who has that degree of visual acuity and the skill and training to recognize what he's seeing.)
Not to nit-pick, but the idea that the Jovian system offers us a miniature "solar system within a solar system" to study has been around for a while.
Then you might as well ask why the machines in the matrix didnt just go to another planet or the moon to gather solar energy, or hell, even create some dirigibles/platforms to go above the cloud cover to harness the power of the sun?
I think the answer to that is in The Matrix: Revolutions. Notice the weird "lightning" crawling through the black clouds? Notice how the engines of the Logos (I think that was the ship Neo and Trinity used, the one Niobe used to captain) stopped working when they got above the cloud cover? I think the black cloud-cover is insidious to machinery somehow. It's certainly self-perpetuating, since if it were merely soot, it would have eventually come out of the atmosphere over the course of years, decades, or centuries, depending on the amount. And it seems to interfere with the operation of machinery, or perhaps it just interferes with power sources. Regardless, it seems to provide some kind of effective barrier that the machines couldn't figure out a way around.
The "race" at the end of Spielberg's AI were merely more advanced robots, all that's left after the humans died out. The robots kept building more and better versions, and after the humans were gone, the robots were the only civilization left on Earth. This has been pretty well hashed over in reviews of AI as well as in the bonus material that came with the AI DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any real analysis (financial or otherwise) which would bear up your assertion that Kodak is "going downhill fast"? Or is this a blind assertion based purely on anecdotal "evidence"? Kodak and other companies of its ilk periodically go through phases where they trim the dead wood.
I suspect this "Kodak is going downhill fast" meme is much like the predictions of Apple's demise, which have been going steady for what, over a decade now?
I would have to disagree with you on this. At least in the consumer space, Kodak's digital cameras are very competitive on features and price, and are still quite popular. The latest Kodak innovations (picture dock, including a compact photo printer that has the printer dock on its top side) help reinforce that position.
I recently purchased a Kodak DX6490 (a 10x optical zoom camera with an SLR-style body and a 4 megapixel sensor), mainly based on my preference of its feature set, its preferred media (SD/MMC, which is also usable in Palm-branded PDAs), and reviews which compared the camera favorably against the Fuji Finepix S5000. And, oh yeah, good Mac OS X integration out of the box. So far, I've had no disappointments; even the movie clips the thing takes are excellent, for what they are.
Better quality camera and better quality pictures from a camera that's at a price point at-or-below the nearest competition? Yeah, I'd call that competitive.
Thank you! This, perhaps, is the most important detail of this entire situation. This man was arrested for ceasing to perform a voluntary service at his own expense. Granted, he could have transferred the site to the county's control, and arranged for them to move the site to their own hosting service, but that still would have required the county government to provide money to do this.
In short, the sheriff's department of that county abused their powers and levied four criminal charges for a matter that, at most, should have been resolved in civil court.
I might also add that the second link in this article makes it clear that the site content was owned by the admin who put it together, not by the sheriff's department -- and this was stated clearly on the home page for the site.
It really pays to read carefully before posting on Slashdot.
The thread went like this:
Anonymous Coward number 1 writes: "Please educate me. What has Compaq contributed to technology?"
Someone replies, "They reverse-engineered the BIOS of the original PC and established the close [sic] market." I'm assuming this person was trying to write "clones."
Anonymous Coward number 2 writes: "Wrong. That was Compaq (and maybe Phoenix, too)."
Idiot. If you followed the thread, your post would have been completely unnecessary.
The problem is, the ISS was all about compromise to allow various countries to participate meaningfully... which meant that ultimately, the ISS isn't really good for any one thing. The ISS was originally justified as a waypoint for a mission to Mars, but changes were made to the planned orbit for the ISS to accommodate the Russians (if memory serves) which made it unsuitable for that mission. Thus, it's no longer even a consideration for a Mars mission.
The ISS has turned into an expensive boondoggle, and since money has gotten tight, the astronauts stationed there spend all their time with maintenance, and have nothing left over to do real science with.
I'm all for international cooperation in space travel and exploration, but frankly, the ISS suffers from too much international politics.
...but the patent's claims seem to be very specific. What Microsoft has done is to devise a way to consolidate and organize scripts on a computer system. The patent's claims cover user interaction methods, the steps involved in parsing out a specific script from the XML file (which is basically a heterogeneous collection of scripts with descriptions), etc. This isn't exactly clever, but it hasn't been done in precisely this way before.
The patent talks about high level programming languages and scripting languages, and attempts to draw a distinction between the two. The patent limits itself to the scope of scripting languages, although as anyone with a Computer Science degree knows, that distinction can be murky at times.
I've read and re-read the patent application today, and although I am of the opinion that this sort of thing should not be patentable, the patent was granted. Is this the end of the world? Probably not. It's a defensive patent. From the looks of things, this patent will probably cover features in upcoming versions of the Windows OS (Longhorn?) as well as Office.
There's plenty of similar prior art regarding embedding scripts in XML; for example, XHTML (which is XML written to the XHTML DTD) allows embedding JavaScript in an XML document. It seems that this Microsoft patent could not be construed to cover embedding JavaScript in HTML or XHTML, and if Microsoft were to try to make this claim, they run the risk of having their patent voided.
I once worked for a company called Essential Wisdom, later renamed eWisdom after incorporating in Delaware and relocating the office to San Jose. During my tenure at eWisdom, I devised a method of embedding a high level AI language derived from SCHEME (itself a dialect of Lisp) in XML files. I did this so we could preserve intelligent behavior of objects being manipulated in a drawing/diagramming application. For instance, if you wanted to draw a network topology diagram, you could have an object representing a network hub that, when you dropped it on the canvas and started attaching network "cables" to it, would flag errors such as attaching too many network cables for the number of ports on the hub.
The embedded language was a Lisp dialect, and the container was XML. What I avoided were explicit uses of CDATA wrappers in the XML, and I disallowed certain special characters that are reserved in XML (such as the less-than and greater-than symbols). The application that used this stuff was written in Java, which was kind of interesting -- and surprisingly, the performance of interpreting Lisp inside of a Java application wasn't that bad, at least for a modest number of objects on the canvas at any given time.
The point is, we were embedding code in XML long before Microsoft even dreamed of this patent, and all of the work that was done on this was carefully documented because eWisdom was hot to patent some of our core ideas. Unfortunately, I don't think we ever made any progress on patenting any of the ideas. Looking at this Microsoft patent, it seems clear that it wouldn't cover the kind of stuff that I did for eWisdom. A creative lawyer could argue otherwise, but the preponderance of evidence would be against them.
If you want to do
And any hope you had of being taken seriously went right out the window. Especially when you consider that many database tools are written in Java these days, because JDBC insulates application writers from DB-specific and platform-specific issues. Not to mention the numerous enterprise computing tools and application servers written in Java, etc.
I guess Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL don't count? Seriously, Microsoft SQL Server ain't all that.
The G4 is only a consideration for the current generation of Apple laptops and consumer-grade computers; even so, it's really not that bad a performer, if you load the system with sufficient RAM. Since this Slashdot article is nominally about laptops, it should be noted that G4 Powerbooks are quite serious machines both for developers and power users. The G5 Powerbooks will be nice, and even faster (and probably faster than this Acer/Ferrari laptop being reviewed), but you don't need to wait for a G5 Powerbook to get decent Powerbook performance.
No G4 performs this poorly. So either you're talking about G3 or pre-G3 hardware with insufficient RAM, or you're blowing smoke out of your ass. I'm wagering it's the latter.
And what little credibility you had has disintegrated. This kind of schoolyard name-calling is the last resort of the unenlightened and the insecure. What puzzles me is why people have been parroting this line since 1984, even though the Mac has evolved since then, changing CPU architecture and OS architecture dramatically in the process? Even most diehard Wintel zealots don't say this stuff anymore; I'm just not sure what subset is responsible for keeping this tired old non-argument alive.
Nice specious reasoning. The article you cite doesn't in any way negate my argument -- specifically, I said that such clauses in employment contracts are typically unenforceable. Reading the article you linked to demonstrates a couple things -- number one, the employee represented himself in court, which is grade A stupid. Number two, the court case is a grade A example of bad law, because it creates a precedent that a company can own ideas in your head even if they're not expressed in a tangible form. The employee even argued that he had come up with about 80% of his idea prior to his employment with Alcatel. If this dope had a decent attorney and had argued the case differently, he would have gotten off.
The moral of the story is, keep your fucking ideas to yourself, and make sure you cover your ass by waiting a sufficient amount of time between severing your business relationship with an employer and implementing some idea you had, to make sure that it's as hard as possible for your former employer to claim the work as theirs. Then it really will be next to impossible to enforce any draconian employment contract clauses.
Of course, most reasonable employers won't spend the kind of money necessary to fight such a case in court in the first place, if only because it's not financially wise. Again, this speaks to my point that such clauses are typically unenforceable. Just because you can find a single case (and a very bizarre one, at that) where some guy got screwed, you can't generalize that finding of law and say that every such contract is automatically enforceable. And in states where such contractual clauses are illegal, they are absolutely unenforceable.
In some states, such contractual clauses aren't just unenforceable, they're outright illegal.
Before I posted this response, I actually asked a coworker who has similar experience to my own (but a lot more job experience and life experience, overall). So this is what I have distilled out of that discussion, and my own experience.
Having said all that... usually, my deletions or changes to a contract have gone through unchallenged, even when I explicitly point them out. Even large corporate entities like Microsoft have been forced to cave in to such demands, such as when the original Windows NT team came on board after being hired away from DEC. In that case, the people in question were being asked to sign a rather restrictive non-compete clause, and they refused; Microsoft's legal department caved in after it was pointed out that these very same engineers would never have been able to leave DEC for Microsoft if they had signed a similar non-compete agreement with DEC. Of course, it helped that this was an entire team of engineers, not an individual hire, but the principles are the same. You probably won't have collective bargaining power on your side, but you also don't have to take just anything that's handed to you.
If you're making any contract changes beyond a simple strike-out of an objectionable clause, then it's a good idea to have a lawyer review your changes.
This is not underhanded. This is standard practice. It's their obligation to review the contract before they sign off on it. (Both parties must sign.) If they don't agree to your changes, they won't sign off on the contract. At that point, you either negotiate on a mutually agreeable contract, or you sever your relationship. It's really that simple.
One of the problems is that the last big space race took place during the Cold War. As a result, knowledge was compartmentalized; no one person had enough knowledge to build an entire Saturn rocket. As I recall, there were three engineers who, together, had enough knowledge to reconstitute any part of the Saturn rocket program. (The Saturn was the launch vehicle used for the Apollo missions.) Of those people, most are dead.
Yes, there's documentation locked up in various places -- again, there isn't one single place for everything. You'd have to scour the entire country for the various pieces of plans and documents necessary to reconstitute the program.
And the fact is, much of the technology that was relied upon for our space program back in the 60's and 70's is now obsolete. It's unfortunate that NASA takes so long to go from concept to implementation -- usually by the time a design is approved and has gone through the necessary review and revision, much of the technology relied upon in said design is already obsolete. With the current pace of technology, this problem is exacerbated. So really, there are two problems -- one is to reduce the turn-around time on designs for space vehicles and other space-rated equipment, and the other is to come up with space-worthy replacements for the old technologies our space vehicles used to rely upon.
Evidently he does not, for many have accused Dr. Wolfram of plagiarism. Personally, I find his citations inadequate. He doesn't give nearly enough credit to Edward Fredkin or Tommaso Toffoli or any of the other key researchers in Cellular Automata who advanced the idea that the universe is a giant computational process long before this book was ever published.
Wolfram claims to have originated this idea, and he seems hell-bent on taking the credit away from others, to the point that he's put some rather onerous copyright restrictions on his NKS book and website. This is academically dishonest, to say the least.
That he fucked over his own research assistant, Matthew Cook, is a crime against the advancement of math and science. (Check the Wikipedia article on Matthew Cook. It's enlightening.)
I myself did some work with using Cellular Automata to model physical systems -- my bachelor's thesis (submitted in 1992 to the MIT Physics Department) concentrated on modeling gas diffusion using a one-dimensional CA, and comparing the results against statistical physics theory. Wolfram came late to the party, claims ownership of ideas that rightfully don't belong to any one person (and which he definitely did not originate), and killed a lot of trees to disseminate relatively little new information (the proof that a specific CA is Turing complete, furnished by his research assistant, being the primary noteworthy item). Save yourself the money and the 1200+ pages and read the source material. It's more enlightening.
No idea if Sun has changed the language specification to allow 64-bit array indices, but they seem to have added 64-bit optimizations to some versions of the Java VM, according to these release notes for JDK 1.5. I will refrain from assuming that 64-bit array indices are allowed if you turn 64-bitness on. I noticed, though, that there seems to be a compile time switch that needs to be used for this, not just a run-time switch. This implies byte-code optimizations, at the very least.
Well, Apple's focus is on stability and user experience, so I think they'll probably trail the Windows world by a month or two. Fortunately, most of the JDK 1.5 improvements are under-the-hood, and affect the compiler more than the VM. Of the VM-side improvements in JDK 1.5, it looks like a lot of them were already implemented on the Mac side in some form (such as this memory sharing technology), so it might take a lot less work for Apple to get up to speed with 1.5. Here's hoping!
As pointed out elsewhere, they're actually limiting the number of simultaneous connections in the $500 version of the software, not the total number of users.
I would like to point out that the Xserve hardware ships with the unlimited client license by default, a selling point Steve Jobs touted when unveiling the Xserve G5 at his latest MacWorld keynote address. This provides an incentive to businesses to purchase the latest Xserve hardware; since Apple still makes the lion's share of its profits off of hardware, this makes all kinds of sense.
The reason why both Voyager and Enterprise suck compared to ST:TOS and ST:TNG is that Berman, et. al., hired writers who cut their teeth writing for frigging soap operas.
Back in the days of ST:TOS, they had scripts written by real, established SciFi writers. (Well, OK, David Gerrold got established after he wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles," but Harlan Ellison was well established by the time he churned out "City on the Edge of Forever." Pity that Gene Roddenberry felt the need to rewrite the script.)
This is why in recent Star Trek movies and TV shows, the emphasis has been on melodrama and romantic intrigue and not on science fiction. I mean, seriously, can anyone forget the soft-core Vulcan porn shots in the first season of Enterprise? A female Vulcan bridge officer was included in Enterprise for the same reason Jeri Ryan was cast as Babe of Borg in Voyager -- to appeal to a certain adolescent male demographic. In other words, spank material for the fan boys. The cynicism that drives these decisions is enough to nauseate me.
If Paramount is serious about salvaging the Star Trek franchise, they need to get serious about who they hire to write the damned scripts. Either that, or send these soap opera writers to a boot camp. But since you can't polish a turd, I'd just suggest hiring some competent science fiction writers.
Actually, no, it means that the job I was hired for was working for a company that was stingy and didn't want to spend top dollar for a competent person. To be fair, the type of work I was doing at this job was considerably different, and probably warranted a lower paycheck than what I'd been making previously... but not to the extent of the pay cut I wound up taking.
I might also point out that now, even in this shitty economy, my pay scale has risen to about 80% of what I was making before the dot-com bust. Because of the bankruptcy, I have less debt to service, and therefore my effective take-home pay (and thus, my disposable income) is higher.
On the other hand, I'm also working far harder than I ever did before the dot-com bust, with the possible exception of a stint I did at a start-up company that lasted almost two years. Then, as now, I find myself getting burned out. But I daren't jump ship, because jobs aren't plentiful for programmers of any kind on Arizona right now (except maybe VB programmers, but even that market is shriveling).
It was mostly credit card debt, combined with a crushing car loan that I should have refinanced far sooner. At least I had the sense to get rid of the SUV when gas prices climbed back up above $1 per gallon and stayed there. Too bad the loan for the Eclipse was obtained through Keybank.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy has definitely helped me restructure my finances. The bankruptcy let me save my house (which is modest, a mere $75,000 home when I bought it, 800 square feet, certainly not a "phat pad") and effectively refinance my car.
Although I may have been overpaid before the dot-com bust, I certainly don't feel overpaid now. I have, however, learned my lessons. I'm trying to save more and plan for cyclic down-turns in my industry. Not that I ever "partied every night like Prince," but I did buy a lot of gadgets and other luxuries that I shouldn't have; that's stopped as well. Everything now has to serve a function, or else it had better fall within the constraints of my entertainment budget.
One last bit: Your comments about what happens when outsourced labor turns out to suck are spot-on. My current employer had to massively scale back their outsourcing to India when they realized that these jokers weren't up to most of the tasks we wanted them to do. (That, and their estimates on time-to-completion for a given set of tasks were ridiculously inflated, effectively negating any cost savings from paying lower hourly wages.) The Dell example you cite is perfect.
Like the One-Click patent, I think this Allowances patent (well, pending patent) falls under the category of "obvious," and therefore shouldn't be patentable. There actually have been several people who have pointed out potential prior art on One-Click, only to be shot down on a nit-picking technicality. Since you seem to have a disdain for nit-picking, perhaps you'll modify your position accordingly. But probably not.
Pardon me, but what's the fucking claim? The concept of giving your child an allowance has been around since before I was born. The iTunes Music Store's Allowances feature is simply one implementation of this concept, but the patent application was probably written to be overly broad, so anyone trying to implement anything similar will have to license the patent.
Back in the good old days, when the USPTO actually did a real job and didn't just rubber stamp every patent application that slid by, such a patent application would be rejected on the grounds that it is trivial and obvious. Neither One-Click nor Allowances would survive culling if that standard were applied today.
Ah yes, the stereotypical humorless Slashdot geek who, true to his psychological make-up, misses the mildly humorous wording of "Obligatory call for prior art examples goes here," and then goes a step farther and misses the smiley face immediately following.
But, stepping back for a moment and answering your question at face value, I'll simply say that I think it's a waste of my time to look for prior art for this. It's not my fucking job, and nobody is paying me to do this. If I need to create a web store that implements such a feature, I'll make a business decision at that time and decide whether it's cheaper to hire someone to find prior art and challenge the patent, or to simply license this absurd patent.
Regardless, this idiocy has a finite life span, so in the long run, it doesn't matter that such things are patented. It is, however, a nuisance to small Web retailers in the short run.
Much to my chagrin.
Nice, glib non-argument. Problem is, you assume that someone here must be overpaid if they are an IT professional. But that doesn't track, because IT salaries have been falling since the dot-com implosion. No, what it really boils down to is, guys in India can work cheaper because the cost of living (and the standard of living) is lower. As soon as they start demanding a higher standard of living, or emigrate to the U.S. to seek a better standard of living (which many of the good Indian IT professionals do), companies will start shifting the jobs elsewhere. There's always someone in a developing country who's willing to sling code for peanuts.
And some of us are too old and/or too poor from the recent IT job crisis to be able to afford to retrain for a completely different job in a different field. And some of us like working with computers -- we're the ones who are true geeks, and would be computer hobbyists even if we weren't working IT jobs. Then again, it's hard to maintain a computer hobby if you can't afford a cutting-edge computer... Because a real hobbyist does more than read e-mail and do word processing, right? Right?
As for a "free market," what a joke. A truly free market would allow anything, including outright corporate warfare and terrorist action. Right now, we have a rule of law imposed by our government to keep everyone and everything in check, individuals and corporations alike. As soon as governments become irrelevant, look to see disgruntled and highly-skilled people turning to more radical expressions of their disaffection.
If I don't have a right to a job, then I don't have a right to much else, do I? But then again, neither do you. Taken to the logical extreme, anything becomes fair game, including murder and outright thievery. It's amazing what a thin thread our entire society hangs by. People become like cornered animals when their livelihoods are threatened. Nuff said.
They may have found someone to do the same job, but almost certainly not at the same level of competency. I've had some first-hand experience now with outsourcing work to India-based programmers, and I'm not that impressed. In the Java arena, asking an Indian programmer to do anything beyond a simple JSP page or a trivial Servlet is asking a lot. At least, that has been my experience. And these programmers want a lot of hand-holding -- i.e., so much specified up-front that the person writing the spec might as well write the code too.
Of course, most of the better programmers wind up filtering out of India and into the United States, in search of better wages and a better standard of living. How ironic.
Another issue I've run into is the language barrier. There's a real, tangible lack of understanding of some basic concepts, things that just don't seem to get across very well. This usually results in longer development cycles (which, when you factor in the latency induced by 24-hour round trip time for most e-mail exchanges, can be a real productivity killer), because what you get isn't exactly what you asked for. This becomes a creative exercise in learning to rephrase the same fscking request different ways until the guy on the other end just "gets it."
I'll agree to an extent. The problem is, it's not just call center jobs and web authoring anymore. More and more of the upper-tier programming jobs are being exported, to the point that a company might only keep one or two chief software architects (if that) in the United States, and have the rest done by code slingers working for peanuts overseas.
Of course, everyone keeps saying that the truly competent coders will always be able to find work Stateside, and that might be true. It just seems to me that the definition of "truly competent" seems to be shifting, or maybe it's the level of competency that's considered acceptable to get a given job done.
This Social Darwinism crap that conservatives always spout really turns my stomach. When the middle class has eroded to the point where there are no skilled workers left in the United States, who will remain to be the consumer of all the cheap goods and services that this global capitalist economy supposedly will provide?
When I was forced into bankruptcy by the dot-com implosion, and couldn't find decent steady work for over a year, only to eventually find a job that required me to do more work for about a third of the money that I used to make, even a $99 iPod would have been too expensive.
Take a lesson from Computer Science. Greedy algorithms don't always work best.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way trying to turn this into a flame war about the theory of evolution. I'm talking about Social Darwinism, not biological evolution. Just to insure that nobody accuses me of straying too far off-topic.
I submitted a similar article earlier today, but I guess I didn't beat the person who posted this article. However, one point that I made in my submission, and that nobody has made here: Check the press release. Notice something? Apple is claiming that the "Allowance" feature of the iTunes Music Store is patent pending. This smacks of the One Click patent that Amazon.com secured. Obligatory call for prior art examples goes here. :-)
The existence of the Jovian moons was known even before the invention of decent optical telescopes. Up until the last decade or so, you could still find bushmen who could easily pinpoint the four Galileian satellites with the naked eye. (I read that westernization of Africa is causing many traditional hunting skills to disappear through disuse. Many traits that are prized for hunting are no longer useful, and so you'll be hard pressed to find someone today who has that degree of visual acuity and the skill and training to recognize what he's seeing.)
Not to nit-pick, but the idea that the Jovian system offers us a miniature "solar system within a solar system" to study has been around for a while.
I think the answer to that is in The Matrix: Revolutions. Notice the weird "lightning" crawling through the black clouds? Notice how the engines of the Logos (I think that was the ship Neo and Trinity used, the one Niobe used to captain) stopped working when they got above the cloud cover? I think the black cloud-cover is insidious to machinery somehow. It's certainly self-perpetuating, since if it were merely soot, it would have eventually come out of the atmosphere over the course of years, decades, or centuries, depending on the amount. And it seems to interfere with the operation of machinery, or perhaps it just interferes with power sources. Regardless, it seems to provide some kind of effective barrier that the machines couldn't figure out a way around.
The "race" at the end of Spielberg's AI were merely more advanced robots, all that's left after the humans died out. The robots kept building more and better versions, and after the humans were gone, the robots were the only civilization left on Earth. This has been pretty well hashed over in reviews of AI as well as in the bonus material that came with the AI DVD.