I don't know why they're so damn fixated on engineers though. Doesn't take an engineer to slam a plane into a building, and that's about the most successful piece of terrorism to date.
But, in fact, it *was* an engineer who executed it! In general, there's no question that people with technical training (engineering and medicine, in particular) are heavily overrepresented in the leadership of terrorist groups. The outrage here of "Are you saying I'm a terrorist?" mostly underscores that IT people a) have no grasp of even the most basic concepts of statistics and b) think they're "engineers".
That was my first thought too (Do they run Linux?) but I don't think they exist yet. It sounds like the $3 billion is mostly projected cost savings from the handhelds that won't be attained, not that there's $3 billion in handhelds sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.
(BTW, does everyone now have hideous Reply to This buttons on their comment display or do I need to refresh something?)
Sounds like you should be in charge of OLPC 2! Just give those kids a fluorescent green plastic case, and they'll be taping out the CPUs of the future in no time!
As for the original topic: that's frequently how it is for corporate Mac users. You can have your machine, but don't expect IT to come in and break it for you like they do with the Windows computers.
In fairness, the article gives some more prominent examples, although I doubt that Jeff Raikes and Bill Gates are leaving in the hope of striking it rich at a Web 2.0 startup.
That's why patents are normally written in an "inverted pyramid" style, with a broad claim at the beginning that narrows to details of a specific implementation or implementations. Most of the scaremongering patent stories here are based on someone reading the first, vague claim of a patent and freaking out. (In any case, if your goal is to create prior art, not to go around suing people, who cares if someone else can scrape out a narrow patent when you have a perfectly good unpatented implementation in place?)
That said: as with most of these prior art creation schemes, this guy seems to have a unrealistically low notion of how developed an "idea" needs to be for patent purposes.
It looks like they're adding ~180 new projects per month. With nine months remaining, that doesn't come out to 4000 by year end, let alone 5000.
Additional thoughts:
1) Any time I read something involving "If this trend continues", even if it's based on solid data I hear it in my head in Disco Stu's voice, which tends to undercut its credibility.
2) This ("Four new GPL 3 projects this week!") is arguably the most boring blog in the world.
How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby?
Outside of Lebanon, I don't see this as being a huge concern. (And calling it a "privacy" issue seems a bit of an understatement.) The local governments aren't sufficiently motivated to fill potholes, let alone install IEDs specifically targeted at me.
The humor of this "rickrolled" thing is completely lost on me. You say "Here's a link to a YouTube video" and OMTFG it's a Rick Astley clip! Who the hell cares? At least with goatse.cx there was a genuine element of tricking people.
Perhaps the joke is in the 80's music, but I spend all day listening to Duran Duran and Fastway anyway...
I loved his earlier books, read a third of the way into Quicksilver, found it unreadable and gave up, glanced at the next one and thought it looked even worse, and stopped paying attention at all.
Has he gone back to writing enjoyable books or are they still self-indulgent treatises that he's too important to allow editing of? (Judging from ScuttleMonkey's "...author of greats like Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon...", the latter seems more likely.)
When you put enough numbers together, all you really get is the sort of bland result that is acceptable to the largest number of people....No real room in there for the beauty that can occasionally startle you, stop you in your tracks, that we all look for and seldom find on television.
You obviously don't watch Univision!!!
Anyway, even if you're completely right, explaining 98% or 99% of beauty still seems like an interesting intellectual exercise.
Babe Ruth was revered, and Maris failing to break it in 154 games, which was the season length when Ruth set it...
Yes, I know what the asterisk story is, but my understanding is that it's not literally true (although the record book did note both records, unlike the practice for most 154 game records). Both Wikipedia and Bud Selig disagree with you, although admittedly neither is a completely convincing source.
What I've always found odd about Wikipedia is how their conflict of interest policy forbids people with overt interest in a subject from editing, but people with free-floating obsessions are free to spend their lives banging away at the page of their choice. Of course, that is the traditional idea of conflict of interest, but anyone familiar with the Internet should have learned by now that fanboys and crackpots are willing to put at least as much zealotry into their campaigns as anyone with money at stake will. So it's a SCANDAL!!!! if anyone from a Wal-Mart IP edits the article on the company, but it's fine for a full-time Wal-Mart hater to edit it day after day after day as long as he's not getting paid by the union-funded anti-Wal-Mart astroturf group which coordinates his efforts.
I'd say, just let everyone have at it. I don't see why Clinton's page would be any less accurate with her campaign editing it than with this weirdo doing it.
I'm no baseball fan, but I never thought there was "The" record book. Isn't there just a series of "A" record books?
My understanding is that MLB (and the other major North American leagues) does maintain an official record book, but that the Roger Maris asterisk is a myth.
There's no reason why you can't contribute to the community project of your choice without Google's pre-approval. If anything, Summer of Code, with the hand-holding it's supposed to have, is probably less representative of a real workplace than just showing up is. (Although neither really gives the sort of workplace experience he wants.)
Frighteningly, two female friends of mine got pretty much that line ("Your picture makes you look like you're ovulating") from a guy on an online dating site. It didn't work like he thought it would, either...
Wouldn't you get a whip-cracking effect at the end of the tether? And it seems like the "would burn up" and the "terminal velocity would be really slow" contradict.
Good heavens, this is a godawful summary. The submitter seems to have been so busy making every word as inflammatory or nerd-snide as possible that he only vaguely alluded to what the report is about! Also, I don't think he knows what "objective" means.
Do you have anything, even anecdotal evidence to support that?
Conveniently, the DailyWTF steps in to provide some anecdotal evidence:
When I showed my lead the old code and the new, he responded, ah, that must have been Jed Code; yeah, he really hated anything that had to use arrays or loops, he couldn't see the point of them... I think each month he would uncomment the next month and redeploy the application
In fact, I've encountered quite a few programmers (whom I don't hire, so don't blame me) who don't understand anything past variable assignment and flow control. I also know that the people who do hire programmers routinely ask the most basic questions about iteration and weed out quite a few candidates that way.
Incidentally, I didn't mean to denigrate web developers, who come in great, good, adequate and DailyWTF, just as everyone else in IT does. But I'd be surprised if including them in "developers" didn't further drive down the percentage with experience in parallelization.
If you ask how many can "regularly achieve significant performance through use of multiple threads" then 0.1% is far too high.
I was thinking more along the lines of "learned something about parallelism in a CS class and remember having done so, although not necessarily what it was".
Admittedly I work in a place that does "parallel programming," but it still seems awfully low.
I think your experience is wildly skewed toward the high end of programming skill. The percentage of working programmers who can't iterate over an array is probably in the 15-20% range, even without getting into whether "web programmers" are included in that statistic. I'd be astonished if the number with parallel experience is significantly above 1%.
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And it's not like it's far-fetched to think that the people purchasing child porn might use stolen or misappropriated credit cards to do so...
But, in fact, it *was* an engineer who executed it! In general, there's no question that people with technical training (engineering and medicine, in particular) are heavily overrepresented in the leadership of terrorist groups. The outrage here of "Are you saying I'm a terrorist?" mostly underscores that IT people a) have no grasp of even the most basic concepts of statistics and b) think they're "engineers".
(BTW, does everyone now have hideous Reply to This buttons on their comment display or do I need to refresh something?)
As for the original topic: that's frequently how it is for corporate Mac users. You can have your machine, but don't expect IT to come in and break it for you like they do with the Windows computers.
In fairness, the article gives some more prominent examples, although I doubt that Jeff Raikes and Bill Gates are leaving in the hope of striking it rich at a Web 2.0 startup.
That said: as with most of these prior art creation schemes, this guy seems to have a unrealistically low notion of how developed an "idea" needs to be for patent purposes.
I underestimated you guys -- it'd be like anything Google-related not having ten "Steve Balmer through another chair!" posts.
Additional thoughts:
1) Any time I read something involving "If this trend continues", even if it's based on solid data I hear it in my head in Disco Stu's voice, which tends to undercut its credibility.
2) This ("Four new GPL 3 projects this week!") is arguably the most boring blog in the world.
Outside of Lebanon, I don't see this as being a huge concern. (And calling it a "privacy" issue seems a bit of an understatement.) The local governments aren't sufficiently motivated to fill potholes, let alone install IEDs specifically targeted at me.
IIRC, individual photons are actually visible to darkness-adapted eyes...
Perhaps the joke is in the 80's music, but I spend all day listening to Duran Duran and Fastway anyway...
Has he gone back to writing enjoyable books or are they still self-indulgent treatises that he's too important to allow editing of? (Judging from ScuttleMonkey's "...author of greats like Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon...", the latter seems more likely.)
You obviously don't watch Univision!!!
Anyway, even if you're completely right, explaining 98% or 99% of beauty still seems like an interesting intellectual exercise.
Frankly, that's not a bad way to approach the other 364/5 days of the year here also...
Yes, I know what the asterisk story is, but my understanding is that it's not literally true (although the record book did note both records, unlike the practice for most 154 game records). Both Wikipedia and Bud Selig disagree with you, although admittedly neither is a completely convincing source.
I'd say, just let everyone have at it. I don't see why Clinton's page would be any less accurate with her campaign editing it than with this weirdo doing it.
My understanding is that MLB (and the other major North American leagues) does maintain an official record book, but that the Roger Maris asterisk is a myth.
There's no reason why you can't contribute to the community project of your choice without Google's pre-approval. If anything, Summer of Code, with the hand-holding it's supposed to have, is probably less representative of a real workplace than just showing up is. (Although neither really gives the sort of workplace experience he wants.)
Frighteningly, two female friends of mine got pretty much that line ("Your picture makes you look like you're ovulating") from a guy on an online dating site. It didn't work like he thought it would, either...
Wouldn't you get a whip-cracking effect at the end of the tether? And it seems like the "would burn up" and the "terminal velocity would be really slow" contradict.
Good heavens, this is a godawful summary. The submitter seems to have been so busy making every word as inflammatory or nerd-snide as possible that he only vaguely alluded to what the report is about! Also, I don't think he knows what "objective" means.
Conveniently, the DailyWTF steps in to provide some anecdotal evidence:
In fact, I've encountered quite a few programmers (whom I don't hire, so don't blame me) who don't understand anything past variable assignment and flow control. I also know that the people who do hire programmers routinely ask the most basic questions about iteration and weed out quite a few candidates that way.Incidentally, I didn't mean to denigrate web developers, who come in great, good, adequate and DailyWTF, just as everyone else in IT does. But I'd be surprised if including them in "developers" didn't further drive down the percentage with experience in parallelization.
I was thinking more along the lines of "learned something about parallelism in a CS class and remember having done so, although not necessarily what it was".
I think your experience is wildly skewed toward the high end of programming skill. The percentage of working programmers who can't iterate over an array is probably in the 15-20% range, even without getting into whether "web programmers" are included in that statistic. I'd be astonished if the number with parallel experience is significantly above 1%.
I wouldn't mind it in the slightest if it were limited to non-voice uses. What's to object to? But conversations would be justification for homicide.