And finally they've got a beef with Google Ads. On the advertiser side, Google isn't allowing advertisers to share any data gleamed from Ads with anyone non-Google. On the user side, Google is disallowing competing search bars from being embedded on websites that display Google Ads. Microsoft wants to get its Bing search bar out there, and Google is making it tough.
But allowing people to take Google's data and then give it to someone else basically violates Google's terms of service, and more or less says that they expect Google to gather this stuff, but then give it to Microsoft to incorporate into their own stuff. Why should Google be forced to provide their competitors with the stuff they want to use to make money with? Why is it Google's problem to give Microsoft the tools they need to compete? Does Microsoft give people the source code for the Windows kernel so people can write competing operating systems?
On the user side, Google is disallowing competing search bars from being embedded on websites that display Google Ads. Microsoft wants to get its Bing search bar out there
Well, if you're paying Google for adwords, or using Google to put ads on your site and make money... why should you then be able to have a Bing toolbar? Google pays you to display ads and then you do your searching on Bing?
I'm sorry, but I just fail to understand why Microsoft feels that it is up to Google to give them the data and tools needed to be a competitor.
Competition means you get to put out a product and hope that people use it. Large numbers of people have decided they don't give a crap about Bing, and aren't using it. Now Microsoft is acting like it's Google's job to help foster adoption of their search engine?
No other part of the article make a statement about what the complaint is about. So, I fail to see how slashdotters are stupid. Maybe the author of the article was (intentionally?) misleading?
Did you get to page two? The fourth to last paragraph pretty much spells out the six things they're on about... most of it is related to search.
It isn't true that no other part of the article makes a statement about what the complaint is about... here it is:
Specifically, the complaint charges that Google hurts competition by "walling off" content on its YouTube site, so other search engines can't display accurate results; by making it difficult for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube; by blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored; by not allowing advertisers to use their own data about customers garnered from Google on other sites, such as those owned by Microsoft; by blocking websites from using competing "search boxes"; and by making it expensive for potential competitors to Google to advertise online.
How can MS claim Google prevents MS from gaining market share when Bing is using Google search results? Without Google, Bing would have even less market share.
Because Microsoft figures it's up to Google to keep handing them everything Google has as a competitive advantage so Microsoft can have equal access to it. Some of the stuff is utterly absurd:
Specifically, the complaint charges that Google hurts competition by "walling off" content on its YouTube site, so other search engines can't display accurate results; by making it difficult for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube; by blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored; by not allowing advertisers to use their own data about customers garnered from Google on other sites, such as those owned by Microsoft; by blocking websites from using competing "search boxes"; and by making it expensive for potential competitors to Google to advertise online.
So, First, Google are mean because they have a popular site and haven't made it easy for competitors to use that content (YouTube).
Next, either Microsoft failed to implement something that worked with YouTube, or YouTube is actively trying to make it tough for a Windows Phone to display stuff. Let me guess, the phone only supports WMV files?;-)
Not giving access to data owned by someone else -- I mean, wow, how dare you not let us access someone else's stuff because that gives you an advantage. Seriously? If this data is owned by book publishers, why does Google have to make it available to Microsoft?
My personal favorite.... I believe that they're whining about the terms of service for the data. So, they want Google to collect it, and then let Microsoft combine that with other data they have, and then use it on their own web sites so they can compete with Google. WTF does Google gain by collecting data for its competitors?
I'm not sure I follow the last one about competing search boxes. I mean, if you're using Google ads, I can see they want you to be using a Google search... they don't want to sell you advertising clicks, and then have any searches you do get sent somewhere else. Just because Microsoft was forced to allow different search engines and browsers from within their OS doesn't mean that I want to see every web site allowing me to pick the search engine to use.
I don't see this as any legitimate complaint about antitrust behavior. Microsoft has lost the ability to compete in some areas, and they mostly seem to be whining that someone should force Google to make the same data available to Microsoft, which makes no sense.
This reminds me of "energy retailers" we have here... some genius decided that the power company was a monopoly, and opened it up for a bunch of little companies to essentially re-sell the same stuff as the power company and called it competition. All it really did was to create a bunch of shady companies whose only goal is to convince you to "switch" energy companies and sign up with them for a contract duration. They show up at your door saying they're the "energy company" and try to get you to sign on the dotted line at "locked in rates". (I had to throw one out of my house because he lied to my wife and said he was from our energy company, and we needed to replace the piping for our furnace and get a new hot-water heater.)
There's no actual new competition, and in many ways the consumer is actually harmed by this because the companies can be a bit dubious. But, we get the illusion of a somewhat open market, which makes certain people happy. I fail to understand why letting the parasites sell the product of another company under the guise of "competition" does anything other than create middle-men since these companies don't do anything related to power except to re-sell it.
It's usually block level, so if you and I rip a CD it's possibly that we share most blocks except where I had a scratch, or we share just the metadata because we both ripped with the same program.
Even if I rip to MP3? I just figured different machines would generate different MP3s, even under similar circumstances, but that might be naive.
I guess it makes sense that the same program ripping to MP3 at the same settings on two different machines should generate the same output.
I suspect different MP3 encoders would produce different files... or is the encoding pretty consistent? I've never looked closely at the actual mechanics of it.
O RLY? [cnet.com] I know that Sony-hating is popular here these days, but take the 30 seconds to do a little research, instead of spouting some BS that's going to be picked up and spread around endlessly by the freetards.
First off, I don't need to do research to give my opinion... I really do think that they'd be quite likely to trot out the lawyers under most situations because, in my opinion, Sony is a bunch of litigious bastards.
Sony is giving you a program you put on your PS3 which acts as a server which allows all of the motion information to be forwarded to a PC. I'm betting if you hooked the Move directly up to a machine, and bypassed anything approved by Sony, their response would be entirely different.
I'm sorry, but at this point, Sony has exhausted any good-will that I and many others ever had for them. I simply do not trust them anymore, and, I just simply don't buy stuff from them. They've got far too long of a track record of being assholes. I'm not willing to assume that they might do it this time -- I'm going straight to the "Sony sucks balls" position, and acting accordingly.
You would store 100,000 different copies because storage is cheap, and you might not be able to get away with feeding me back Bubba's tiny bitrate rip of the song's chorus played over and over when I ask for the version I uploaded. Excepting, of course, copies that match checksum, file size, and meta data with the version sold by Amazon, maybe (even that sounds like a lot of work when storage is so cheap).
Well, the big storage vendors already have technology to do this. It's called deduplication.
Basically, the storage arrays do this themselves. They find files which are identical to other files, and then collapse them so that there is only one actual copy, but it looks to the individual users like they have their own copy. Unless someone edits the file, the same copy is shared across everybody.
In this case, it certainly wouldn't give you a different file at a different bit rate. It would only collapse files that are identical. So, you and Bubba wouldn't share the same copy of the file.
So, presumably, if you and I both rip files to MP3, there might be some differences. If you and I download it from Amazon, that is going to be a good candidate to remove duplicates.
As far as I know, that process happens in the background once you set it up, and it happens at the storage level of things. This is in use all over the place, and it certainly wouldn't be purely based off the file name.
Lets not forget MS didn't invent it, they wrapped in a package and sold it. I don't think they could really have a hope stopping any API
Well, they didn't actively encrypt or obfuscate it. So, at least they decided to play nicely and let people develop for this.
What corporation would go after a completely home brown [sic] API package for a physical device?
Well, I know you're not new here... but, really? I think Sony would sue people into oblivion for something like this at the drop of a hat. It seems to be increasingly the norm for some corporations to more or less say that it is illegal to use hardware they sold you in a way they don't approve of. Seems to be Cuecat did it several years ago.
And, corporate hand-wringing aside, I think it's really cool that people are using the Kinect to make things like this. From the sounds of it, this is opening up lots of interesting avenues for researchers to be able to build cool things.
I for one, welcome our new fully autonomous 3D navigating multicopters.:-P
We can have shoe pornish. Pornish game hens. Crime and pornishment.
Sorry, I've not seen much porn from the 70s, so I can't speak to the mustache attributes -- though, I gather they weren't the only things to be out-of-control hairy back then.;-)
Sure, that just leaves them with taking their lumps. They're trying hard to dodge that one.
What lumps? This is someone else saying these companies could/should stop selling to/updating these countries.
At the end of the day, unless countries pass laws saying companies need to be nice global citizens and not do anything which undermines freedom or some other value, nothing will happen.
To these companies... quarterly revenue stays up, shareholder value is maximized, executive bonuses are paid... and all is right with the world. The way they see it, if a couple of people get dragged off in the night, that's not their fault. They merely provided a service to bad people. They're not responsible for anything.
I just don't see any repercussions coming to them. There's certainly nothing in it for them to ignore potential markets. In fact, they have a bigger incentive to sell to them since a competitor would if they didn't.
It's funny how that works. The bean counters manage to assign an actual cost to every bit of trivia and insist on tracking it and justifying every last penny. Except for accounting.
It's not just accountants.
Long ago, I worked on a project that had experienced some churn in project management. We got a new guy, and he wanted us to track our time in five minute increments.
I more of less told him that if that's what he wanted, 1-2 minutes out of every 5 minutes would be dedicated to tracking which bucket any particular task went into, and 1 minute of that five would be updating it. That left 1-2 minutes out of any given 5 minutes to actually work, but if he was OK with 20-40% productivity, we'd be happy to accommodate him.
When the process of management actually becomes prohibitive to doing your actual work, the whole process has jumped the shark and missed the point. The problem is, the people who make these policies are totally oblivious to the fact that the reason the software is late is because they imposed such a high management overhead, that effectively 40% or more of my week was taken up with it, so all of our estimates were thrown off.
Sadly, I have actually had to explain to PMs what it means when someone says that "nine women can't have a baby in one month".
If they actually have a local office in any of the companies in question, they have lost all moral high ground.
Oh, I figure by the time you're selling this kind of software to these kinds of governments you've long since decided that the money was far more important than having any form of "moral high-ground".
I mean, it's not like companies like Siemens etc haven't been more than happy to help Iran with its nuclear program or whatever.
I've largely given up any expectations that corporations will even care about moral high ground. It's not in their interest to do so, so why should they?
Having worked for a company which went from fairly small and agile, to being publicly traded and fully "corporate"... it's a one way trip.
Once the accountants and management layers are in place, it's too late. Then, it's mostly becoming more bureaucratic and management heavy and filling out TPS reports.
Sure, if you try hard you can give some room to you engineering staff to actually do their jobs... however, I have seen entire development teams grind to a halt as someone from finance gets everybody bogged down in paperwork and reports to explain what it is that we do.
Of course, nobody in finance was capable of recognizing that the labor costs of the people they'd derailed far exceeded the middle-level idiot who insisted that everything be done in the first place.
While I admit that these people actually do useful things, sometimes they can stop a lot of people from building the products just so their spreadsheets are up to date.
They would have to be sued in the U.S. I doubt very much that a judge anywhere would touch that with a 10 foot pole.
Unless, they have offices in the country in question like Google used to have in China.
If they have any presence there, then the local people get hauled before whatever passes for a judicial system, and held responsible for this. Bad form for the parent company to piss off the country, and leave people stranded locally to be the scapegoats.
If all they've done it simply sold the software, thrown it over the border, and left... what you say is likely true. But, I'm imagining a branch office with a bunch of people... at which point it's much more complicated to walk away from this.
Exactly. I don't see how companies are going to be motivated to stop selling to these countries, or cut off existing ones.
They might even be contractually obligated, at which point they can't easily just walk away.
Personally, I think a company selling such software to an "oppressive regime" shouldn't have done it in the first place, but companies aren't going to start ignoring potential markets for ethical reasons in most cases.
Too many children are held up as "savants" for doing things like this, which sucks for them. So much of what he could become is dependent on him having normal social and emotional development in addition to his math and logic skills, and being treated like this means he'll never get that.
Dude, he's got Asperger's. He had already been diagnosed with it, and he was never going to have a "normal" social and emotional development. Think "Rain Man", for lack of a better analogy... though, somewhat higher functioning.
This isn't some kid they've shunted into math because he has an aptitude for it and his parents played Mozart to him. This is a kid whose brain works quite differently from you or I, and who just seems to be able to do this stuff. They do this so that he continues to be interested in/engaged in school and doesn't get bored/frustrated and pull back.
He's always going to be slightly odd by most people's standards, and in a couple of years he might lose interest in mathematics and stop doing it.
More to the point, when was the last time you heard of a "savant" like this actually doing something worthwhile?
And, he may not. Hopefully people let him develop his own interests and not force him to become the next uber researcher.
I don't think a 12 year old needs to be forced into doing something like this... you could suck all of the fun out of math for him. For now, just let him develop in a way that is going to be particular to him and see what happens. Guide him, sure. But don't force it on him.
I would take that with a grain of salt. He obviously has something akin to a photographic memory. FTA:
Actually, there's nothing obvious about how he does these things, since nobody understands the mechanism fully.
He either has an enhanced ability to work with spacial relationships, or he's memorized it, or something else is at work. I've even heard explanations about how some mathematical prodigies "see" or "hear" the relationship.
Short answer, is there isn't a definitive understanding of this. And, since he can do more than recite the facts, but can apply them and solve problems, there's more to it than straight memorization.
So a more likely explanation is that he ran through the books very fast because he only needs to read it once to memorize it. I would agree with your point that memorizing facts does not automatically mean you know when to apply them.
But, seriously, read the article. He hasn't merely memorized the facts and can't apply them... he works at an exceedingly high level of math (think PhD student), and solves abstract problems. I sort of get the impression he can look at complex mathematics and "know" the answer right away, without having to work out the solution.
He also has some trade-offs in that, having Asperger's, he's not entirely "normal" like the rest of us (ha!) and will have some areas we take for granted he can't do very well.
My understanding is you wouldn't equate his gifts with an eidetic memory. It's different, and an eidetic memory doesn't give you corresponding problem solving and application to abstract reasoning. It's just an endless stream of facts (if it even is a real thing).
Again, how so? His disability seems to be offset by the fact that he has a singular talent for mathematics. For a lot of other things, he might be totally lost. He might only be "smart" for math, and struggle with basic language.
If they held this kid accountable and really put him through the full coursework, he could turn into a very powerful mathematician, or physicist.
I'm not sure that would work for him... we're talking about a kid with Aspergers'. They basically let him do the things he was interested in so they could keep him engaged and not start withdrawing:
The Barnetts decided it was time to follow Jake's lead, adopting a method that some parents of children with autism use -- floor-time therapy -- to help foster developmental growth. They let their children focus intently on subjects they like, rather than trying to conform them to "normal" things.
They've got him attending college courses because people figured that, developmentally, not letting him do it would leave him bored and frustrated. At which point, he'd like tune out and stop trying, which would leave him to wither.
And, really, I don't get the impression he's covered only the "first brush" material:
"He needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics, i.e., a post master's degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy and astrophysics."
So, we have a 12 year old whose math (according the the college professors who teach him) is at the PhD level... hardly just a couple of trig identities and simple stuff.
You can't force a kid like this to follow a specific academic path... the best thing you can do is to let them do the things they excel at, try to help them with the stuff they struggle with.
This isn't so much about building the next genius, as trying to let someone who has some natural talents in a specific area pursue them while he still can. I just figure he's lucky that he gets to play with this stuff and hasn't been shoved into a corner to be utterly bored and frustrated by the math and science his peers are doing.
I certainly doubt most of us here on Slashdot are qualified to actually talk about what is best for this kid -- developmentally, academically, or more anything else.
I for one with the guy luck, and to not have other people tell him how he should be doing this.
[blockquote]The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week[/blockquote] I call bullshit.
How so? It's not unprecedented for people to be savants, and to have singularly amazing mathematical abilities. The human brain is an amazing thing... I don't even think this is the first time I've heard about a teenager with some form of autism who is a math prodigy.
According to the article:
At this point, Jake's math IQ -- which has been measured at 170 (top of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) -- could not get any higher.
"You could tell right off the bat, his performance has been outstanding," said Ross, who, at age 46 with a Ph.D. from Boston University, has never seen a kid as smart as Jake.
Sure, it's rare. But, I don't think it's unprecedented to see this.
Of course, I can only imagine that between being this smart (for math) and having some degree of autism is going to make it difficult for him -- I can only imagine how messed up it would be to be doing graduate-level mathematics, and still have all of the other crap a 12 year old has to go through on top of that.
But, I don't dis-believe that he taught himself high school math in a week or two. Some of these kinds of problems are well documented as something that occasionally someone with autism or something similar just "see" and work with naturally.
I'm skeptical, but interested in this... that would actually be fairly alarming. Though, you'd think cell-phone users would be breaking hips all over the place if that were the case. Certainly some people have their cell-phone in close proximity for an awful lot of hours in a day.
Though, it does make one think a tin-foil codpiece might be in order in case your junk is getting equally affected by the proximity.:-P
No, if you are driving as part of a business then you can't listen to music unless the business have brought the appropriate protection money, so this would apply to anyone traveling on company business. Trucks, Salesman, Field Support etc.
So, if I listen to my iPod at work, my employer needs to pay for a license for the music? That's absurd.
I really hope someone moves to reign in these copyright people... in their minds, there is barely a scenario in which I could listen to music and not owe them more money.
Have friends over and put on music -- public performance, pay up. Drive with my windows down -- public performance, pay up.
I can think of no defensible reason why someone sitting in a truck needs to pay extra for the music any more than someone who is driving in a car under any other circumstances.
It's hard to care about these people's "rights" anymore when all they want to do is make sure we don't have any.
And, likewise, it is only infringement if you did it the same way.
They were using CCDs in astronomy before we had digital cameras.
As a company, Kodak seems to have been reduced to purveyors of cheap and low quality consumer goods. I hope they don't get to go around messing with digital photography as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
But allowing people to take Google's data and then give it to someone else basically violates Google's terms of service, and more or less says that they expect Google to gather this stuff, but then give it to Microsoft to incorporate into their own stuff. Why should Google be forced to provide their competitors with the stuff they want to use to make money with? Why is it Google's problem to give Microsoft the tools they need to compete? Does Microsoft give people the source code for the Windows kernel so people can write competing operating systems?
Well, if you're paying Google for adwords, or using Google to put ads on your site and make money ... why should you then be able to have a Bing toolbar? Google pays you to display ads and then you do your searching on Bing?
I'm sorry, but I just fail to understand why Microsoft feels that it is up to Google to give them the data and tools needed to be a competitor.
Competition means you get to put out a product and hope that people use it. Large numbers of people have decided they don't give a crap about Bing, and aren't using it. Now Microsoft is acting like it's Google's job to help foster adoption of their search engine?
Did you get to page two? The fourth to last paragraph pretty much spells out the six things they're on about ... most of it is related to search.
It isn't true that no other part of the article makes a statement about what the complaint is about ... here it is:
Because Microsoft figures it's up to Google to keep handing them everything Google has as a competitive advantage so Microsoft can have equal access to it. Some of the stuff is utterly absurd:
So, First, Google are mean because they have a popular site and haven't made it easy for competitors to use that content (YouTube).
Next, either Microsoft failed to implement something that worked with YouTube, or YouTube is actively trying to make it tough for a Windows Phone to display stuff. Let me guess, the phone only supports WMV files? ;-)
Not giving access to data owned by someone else -- I mean, wow, how dare you not let us access someone else's stuff because that gives you an advantage. Seriously? If this data is owned by book publishers, why does Google have to make it available to Microsoft?
My personal favorite .... I believe that they're whining about the terms of service for the data. So, they want Google to collect it, and then let Microsoft combine that with other data they have, and then use it on their own web sites so they can compete with Google. WTF does Google gain by collecting data for its competitors?
I'm not sure I follow the last one about competing search boxes. I mean, if you're using Google ads, I can see they want you to be using a Google search ... they don't want to sell you advertising clicks, and then have any searches you do get sent somewhere else. Just because Microsoft was forced to allow different search engines and browsers from within their OS doesn't mean that I want to see every web site allowing me to pick the search engine to use.
I don't see this as any legitimate complaint about antitrust behavior. Microsoft has lost the ability to compete in some areas, and they mostly seem to be whining that someone should force Google to make the same data available to Microsoft, which makes no sense.
This reminds me of "energy retailers" we have here ... some genius decided that the power company was a monopoly, and opened it up for a bunch of little companies to essentially re-sell the same stuff as the power company and called it competition. All it really did was to create a bunch of shady companies whose only goal is to convince you to "switch" energy companies and sign up with them for a contract duration. They show up at your door saying they're the "energy company" and try to get you to sign on the dotted line at "locked in rates". (I had to throw one out of my house because he lied to my wife and said he was from our energy company, and we needed to replace the piping for our furnace and get a new hot-water heater.)
There's no actual new competition, and in many ways the consumer is actually harmed by this because the companies can be a bit dubious. But, we get the illusion of a somewhat open market, which makes certain people happy. I fail to understand why letting the parasites sell the product of another company under the guise of "competition" does anything other than create middle-men since these companies don't do anything related to power except to re-sell it.
Even if I rip to MP3? I just figured different machines would generate different MP3s, even under similar circumstances, but that might be naive.
I guess it makes sense that the same program ripping to MP3 at the same settings on two different machines should generate the same output.
I suspect different MP3 encoders would produce different files ... or is the encoding pretty consistent? I've never looked closely at the actual mechanics of it.
First off, I don't need to do research to give my opinion ... I really do think that they'd be quite likely to trot out the lawyers under most situations because, in my opinion, Sony is a bunch of litigious bastards.
Sony is giving you a program you put on your PS3 which acts as a server which allows all of the motion information to be forwarded to a PC. I'm betting if you hooked the Move directly up to a machine, and bypassed anything approved by Sony, their response would be entirely different.
I'm sorry, but at this point, Sony has exhausted any good-will that I and many others ever had for them. I simply do not trust them anymore, and, I just simply don't buy stuff from them. They've got far too long of a track record of being assholes. I'm not willing to assume that they might do it this time -- I'm going straight to the "Sony sucks balls" position, and acting accordingly.
Well, the big storage vendors already have technology to do this. It's called deduplication.
Basically, the storage arrays do this themselves. They find files which are identical to other files, and then collapse them so that there is only one actual copy, but it looks to the individual users like they have their own copy. Unless someone edits the file, the same copy is shared across everybody.
In this case, it certainly wouldn't give you a different file at a different bit rate. It would only collapse files that are identical. So, you and Bubba wouldn't share the same copy of the file.
So, presumably, if you and I both rip files to MP3, there might be some differences. If you and I download it from Amazon, that is going to be a good candidate to remove duplicates.
As far as I know, that process happens in the background once you set it up, and it happens at the storage level of things. This is in use all over the place, and it certainly wouldn't be purely based off the file name.
Well, they didn't actively encrypt or obfuscate it. So, at least they decided to play nicely and let people develop for this.
Well, I know you're not new here ... but, really? I think Sony would sue people into oblivion for something like this at the drop of a hat. It seems to be increasingly the norm for some corporations to more or less say that it is illegal to use hardware they sold you in a way they don't approve of. Seems to be Cuecat did it several years ago.
And, corporate hand-wringing aside, I think it's really cool that people are using the Kinect to make things like this. From the sounds of it, this is opening up lots of interesting avenues for researchers to be able to build cool things.
I for one, welcome our new fully autonomous 3D navigating multicopters. :-P
Best new word ever.
We can have shoe pornish. Pornish game hens. Crime and pornishment.
Sorry, I've not seen much porn from the 70s, so I can't speak to the mustache attributes -- though, I gather they weren't the only things to be out-of-control hairy back then. ;-)
What lumps? This is someone else saying these companies could/should stop selling to/updating these countries.
At the end of the day, unless countries pass laws saying companies need to be nice global citizens and not do anything which undermines freedom or some other value, nothing will happen.
To these companies ... quarterly revenue stays up, shareholder value is maximized, executive bonuses are paid ... and all is right with the world. The way they see it, if a couple of people get dragged off in the night, that's not their fault. They merely provided a service to bad people. They're not responsible for anything.
I just don't see any repercussions coming to them. There's certainly nothing in it for them to ignore potential markets. In fact, they have a bigger incentive to sell to them since a competitor would if they didn't.
It's not just accountants.
Long ago, I worked on a project that had experienced some churn in project management. We got a new guy, and he wanted us to track our time in five minute increments.
I more of less told him that if that's what he wanted, 1-2 minutes out of every 5 minutes would be dedicated to tracking which bucket any particular task went into, and 1 minute of that five would be updating it. That left 1-2 minutes out of any given 5 minutes to actually work, but if he was OK with 20-40% productivity, we'd be happy to accommodate him.
When the process of management actually becomes prohibitive to doing your actual work, the whole process has jumped the shark and missed the point. The problem is, the people who make these policies are totally oblivious to the fact that the reason the software is late is because they imposed such a high management overhead, that effectively 40% or more of my week was taken up with it, so all of our estimates were thrown off.
Sadly, I have actually had to explain to PMs what it means when someone says that "nine women can't have a baby in one month".
I was thinking Borat, myself.
I'll spare you the pictures in the mankini. ;-)
Oh, I figure by the time you're selling this kind of software to these kinds of governments you've long since decided that the money was far more important than having any form of "moral high-ground".
I mean, it's not like companies like Siemens etc haven't been more than happy to help Iran with its nuclear program or whatever.
I've largely given up any expectations that corporations will even care about moral high ground. It's not in their interest to do so, so why should they?
Having worked for a company which went from fairly small and agile, to being publicly traded and fully "corporate" ... it's a one way trip.
Once the accountants and management layers are in place, it's too late. Then, it's mostly becoming more bureaucratic and management heavy and filling out TPS reports.
Sure, if you try hard you can give some room to you engineering staff to actually do their jobs ... however, I have seen entire development teams grind to a halt as someone from finance gets everybody bogged down in paperwork and reports to explain what it is that we do.
Of course, nobody in finance was capable of recognizing that the labor costs of the people they'd derailed far exceeded the middle-level idiot who insisted that everything be done in the first place.
While I admit that these people actually do useful things, sometimes they can stop a lot of people from building the products just so their spreadsheets are up to date.
Mine was more along the lines that since I hadn't heard them mentioned in any news stories for so long, they likely didn't exist anymore. :-P
Obviously, not being a user I have no idea ... I know Facebook still exists, because they're in the news all of the time.
Unless, they have offices in the country in question like Google used to have in China.
If they have any presence there, then the local people get hauled before whatever passes for a judicial system, and held responsible for this. Bad form for the parent company to piss off the country, and leave people stranded locally to be the scapegoats.
If all they've done it simply sold the software, thrown it over the border, and left ... what you say is likely true. But, I'm imagining a branch office with a bunch of people ... at which point it's much more complicated to walk away from this.
Exactly. I don't see how companies are going to be motivated to stop selling to these countries, or cut off existing ones.
They might even be contractually obligated, at which point they can't easily just walk away.
Personally, I think a company selling such software to an "oppressive regime" shouldn't have done it in the first place, but companies aren't going to start ignoring potential markets for ethical reasons in most cases.
As you say, it's all about quarterly profits.
Pedantry, while we're discussing someone Asperger's?
Trust me sir, pure brilliance. ;-)
Dude, he's got Asperger's. He had already been diagnosed with it, and he was never going to have a "normal" social and emotional development. Think "Rain Man", for lack of a better analogy ... though, somewhat higher functioning.
This isn't some kid they've shunted into math because he has an aptitude for it and his parents played Mozart to him. This is a kid whose brain works quite differently from you or I, and who just seems to be able to do this stuff. They do this so that he continues to be interested in/engaged in school and doesn't get bored/frustrated and pull back.
He's always going to be slightly odd by most people's standards, and in a couple of years he might lose interest in mathematics and stop doing it.
And, he may not. Hopefully people let him develop his own interests and not force him to become the next uber researcher.
I don't think a 12 year old needs to be forced into doing something like this ... you could suck all of the fun out of math for him. For now, just let him develop in a way that is going to be particular to him and see what happens. Guide him, sure. But don't force it on him.
Actually, there's nothing obvious about how he does these things, since nobody understands the mechanism fully.
He either has an enhanced ability to work with spacial relationships, or he's memorized it, or something else is at work. I've even heard explanations about how some mathematical prodigies "see" or "hear" the relationship.
Short answer, is there isn't a definitive understanding of this. And, since he can do more than recite the facts, but can apply them and solve problems, there's more to it than straight memorization.
But, seriously, read the article. He hasn't merely memorized the facts and can't apply them ... he works at an exceedingly high level of math (think PhD student), and solves abstract problems. I sort of get the impression he can look at complex mathematics and "know" the answer right away, without having to work out the solution.
He also has some trade-offs in that, having Asperger's, he's not entirely "normal" like the rest of us (ha!) and will have some areas we take for granted he can't do very well.
My understanding is you wouldn't equate his gifts with an eidetic memory. It's different, and an eidetic memory doesn't give you corresponding problem solving and application to abstract reasoning. It's just an endless stream of facts (if it even is a real thing).
Again, how so? His disability seems to be offset by the fact that he has a singular talent for mathematics. For a lot of other things, he might be totally lost. He might only be "smart" for math, and struggle with basic language.
I'm not sure that would work for him ... we're talking about a kid with Aspergers'. They basically let him do the things he was interested in so they could keep him engaged and not start withdrawing:
They've got him attending college courses because people figured that, developmentally, not letting him do it would leave him bored and frustrated. At which point, he'd like tune out and stop trying, which would leave him to wither.
And, really, I don't get the impression he's covered only the "first brush" material:
So, we have a 12 year old whose math (according the the college professors who teach him) is at the PhD level ... hardly just a couple of trig identities and simple stuff.
You can't force a kid like this to follow a specific academic path ... the best thing you can do is to let them do the things they excel at, try to help them with the stuff they struggle with.
This isn't so much about building the next genius, as trying to let someone who has some natural talents in a specific area pursue them while he still can. I just figure he's lucky that he gets to play with this stuff and hasn't been shoved into a corner to be utterly bored and frustrated by the math and science his peers are doing.
I certainly doubt most of us here on Slashdot are qualified to actually talk about what is best for this kid -- developmentally, academically, or more anything else.
I for one with the guy luck, and to not have other people tell him how he should be doing this.
How so? It's not unprecedented for people to be savants, and to have singularly amazing mathematical abilities. The human brain is an amazing thing ... I don't even think this is the first time I've heard about a teenager with some form of autism who is a math prodigy.
According to the article:
Sure, it's rare. But, I don't think it's unprecedented to see this.
Of course, I can only imagine that between being this smart (for math) and having some degree of autism is going to make it difficult for him -- I can only imagine how messed up it would be to be doing graduate-level mathematics, and still have all of the other crap a 12 year old has to go through on top of that.
But, I don't dis-believe that he taught himself high school math in a week or two. Some of these kinds of problems are well documented as something that occasionally someone with autism or something similar just "see" and work with naturally.
Unfortunately, 100% of people who don't breath oxygen also end up dead, and usually in a shorter period of time.
Tough call.
I'm skeptical, but interested in this ... that would actually be fairly alarming. Though, you'd think cell-phone users would be breaking hips all over the place if that were the case. Certainly some people have their cell-phone in close proximity for an awful lot of hours in a day.
Though, it does make one think a tin-foil codpiece might be in order in case your junk is getting equally affected by the proximity. :-P
So, if I listen to my iPod at work, my employer needs to pay for a license for the music? That's absurd.
I really hope someone moves to reign in these copyright people ... in their minds, there is barely a scenario in which I could listen to music and not owe them more money.
Have friends over and put on music -- public performance, pay up. Drive with my windows down -- public performance, pay up.
I can think of no defensible reason why someone sitting in a truck needs to pay extra for the music any more than someone who is driving in a car under any other circumstances.
It's hard to care about these people's "rights" anymore when all they want to do is make sure we don't have any.
And, likewise, it is only infringement if you did it the same way.
They were using CCDs in astronomy before we had digital cameras.
As a company, Kodak seems to have been reduced to purveyors of cheap and low quality consumer goods. I hope they don't get to go around messing with digital photography as a whole.