The trouble with this analysis (and no argument on most of it) is that the CEO is the one who decides that since the Company needs to put another 70 engineers on the new hot project, the place to do it is in Ghana because engineers in Ghana are cheaper than the ones in Prague or Mumbai.
The details, such as Ghana having no engineers who are up to speed with the technology of the new hot project? That kind of thing is, as you say, below his level of concern. But the total price of the new team? That's his. So you get the top-level decision to move the project to Ghana.
Seen it happen too many times. As the old saying goes, "they know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
whatever it is that your developers are producing (other than warm chair seats) then you start talking like management: "Put X engineers on Project Y to get us to the Z man-months required within schedule."
I'm retired now and have never worked for a middle or senior manager who has read Brooks. They live at the man-month metric, and base their hiring on the fact that you can get the man-months you need for less if you get them from fresh-out developers working from a remote site in Afghanistan.
No joke. I've talked to the CEO of a $2B/year semiconductor company and that is precisely as deep as his plaanning goes.
Interesting definition of "older." Rather revealing, in fact, that your horizon only extends to those of us with kids at home.
Leaving aside the fact that not all of us ever had kids, the most discriminated-against group are those whose children have moved out. Who, unlike 20-somethings, don't spend their off-duty time trying to get families. Oh, yeah -- that.
This whole thing is a signaling to the appellate federal courts (which normally hear these things) that the standards need to be toughened. Said appellate courts have a recent history of being extremely pro-patentholder on software patents. They'll knuckle down, or the Supreme Court will hear a case and have to rule again.
It's not "federal appellate courts," it's the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. There is only one, and it hears all patent appeals. And much as it needs to be smacked around, this isn't the case for it because the SCOTUS affirmed the (IIRC unanimous) en banc ruling of the Federal Circuit.
In short, this case is not nearly the landmark that people are making it out to be.
to explain to a judge that the claimed patent covers something that a human being can do with nothing more than a sufficient supply of paper, pencils, and time?
I'm reminded of how upset the Court got when it turned out that the real heart of one patent was that it claimed infringement by doctors making the mental connection between a lab test and a diagnosis. It wasn't that the lab test was unique, it was that any test that informed the physician of the measured physiological indicator would lead to the diagnosis.
Can't some member of the patent bar get the Court to the same realization with regard to software? Or is it that any party with the warchest to show up before the SCOTUS has too much invested in the current regime?
How much does a plaintiff "get for free" if the settlement just covers legal expenses?
Not my first rodeo, Chief. I've seen some of those class-action settlement checks, and the bank charged more than the face value of the check to cash them.
And as Joe Arpaio has so beautifully demonstrated, once you've bought a toy like that, you have to find a use for it. Even if it's busting into a chicken coop with a light tank.
An Intel x86 chip build on 22 nm stands a very good chance of blowing the doors off of an ARM (or MIPS, or...) built on 45 nm. However, this is not a decisive win for the x86 ISA.
What I interpret him to mean is that he wants to do the same as Amazon, (a) charge me the same price for a file I download as if I bought a hardcover book, and (b) still wrap it in highly restrictive DRM so that having bought it, I don't own it, and my ability to read is at the mercy of whatever DRM configuration they dream up and only as long as they continue to support it.
Nice hypothesis. As it happens, Mr. Stross' most recent books have been published by Tor -- which does not do DRM.
Tor and Baen don't do DRM. That's a very good start.
There may be others, too, but it's remarkably hard to find out who they are without buying a book to find out you can't read it. Anyone care to contribute to the list?
Never mind energy [1] -- goats love it. They can actually snarf it down faster than it grows (which is a trick, let me tell you, in the Gulf States.)
Kudzu-fed goat milk cheese is perfectly good stuff, or you can just let them feed their kids. Which not long afterward become cabritos. Nom!
[1] Long-term sustainability issue here unless you return the non-fuel sludge to the area to restore minerals. Not so much of a problem with goats excreting all over place.
There's a reason that we who are serviced by Cox have established the unofficial motto, "Cox sucks."
Pay more here for megabit speeds (no, that's not as in "50 megabit," that's as in "one, on a good day) at prices higher than Google charges for gigabit. And for the "it's all about density" set: that's central Phoenix, which sure has more density than Kansas City.
The speeds keep dropping, and they use "we need to invest in more capacity" as an excuse. The charges go up, but the speeds go down anyway.
The only thing Cox has going for it is that it's not CenturyLink -- which advertises that they'll keep charges from rising, but doesn't tell you that it's because they make the older services stop working so that you have to sign up for the new service at higher prices (plus buy new hardware) even though the speeds are no faster.
Yah, I can only imagine this will be useful in some very very specific situations.
You mean, like when a fire is crowning? Crown fires are fast and account for most (almost all?) of the firefighter fatalities (including the recent one at Yarnell where someone I used to work with died.) Interrupt that process, even briefly, and you may save some firefighters on the ground.
In NM, as in Oz, a lot of fires start as brushfires -- no wood, no particular heat retention -- stop it even briefly and it doesn't get into the forests.
Do I know some people in NM who are going to love this! And the fact that theyr'e next door to the NM firefighters' training academy ain't gonna hurt, either.
We have IR cameras set up to watch the back yard at night. There's a fox that spends a lot of time there, and she seems to have brought a toy (a tennis ball) with her. She plays with it a lot.
... but it's probably just enough to pay off the lawyers. Going to trial would put them out a lot more in time and expenses and the payoff would be proportionately lower due to haveing to split the take with the plaintiffs.
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The trouble with this analysis (and no argument on most of it) is that the CEO is the one who decides that since the Company needs to put another 70 engineers on the new hot project, the place to do it is in Ghana because engineers in Ghana are cheaper than the ones in Prague or Mumbai.
The details, such as Ghana having no engineers who are up to speed with the technology of the new hot project? That kind of thing is, as you say, below his level of concern. But the total price of the new team? That's his. So you get the top-level decision to move the project to Ghana.
Seen it happen too many times. As the old saying goes, "they know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
whatever it is that your developers are producing (other than warm chair seats) then you start talking like management: "Put X engineers on Project Y to get us to the Z man-months required within schedule."
I'm retired now and have never worked for a middle or senior manager who has read Brooks. They live at the man-month metric, and base their hiring on the fact that you can get the man-months you need for less if you get them from fresh-out developers working from a remote site in Afghanistan.
No joke. I've talked to the CEO of a $2B/year semiconductor company and that is precisely as deep as his plaanning goes.
Older people have families, they come first.
Interesting definition of "older." Rather revealing, in fact, that your horizon only extends to those of us with kids at home.
Leaving aside the fact that not all of us ever had kids, the most discriminated-against group are those whose children have moved out. Who, unlike 20-somethings, don't spend their off-duty time trying to get families. Oh, yeah -- that.
This whole thing is a signaling to the appellate federal courts (which normally hear these things) that the standards need to be toughened. Said appellate courts have a recent history of being extremely pro-patentholder on software patents. They'll knuckle down, or the Supreme Court will hear a case and have to rule again.
It's not "federal appellate courts," it's the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. There is only one, and it hears all patent appeals. And much as it needs to be smacked around, this isn't the case for it because the SCOTUS affirmed the (IIRC unanimous) en banc ruling of the Federal Circuit.
In short, this case is not nearly the landmark that people are making it out to be.
to explain to a judge that the claimed patent covers something that a human being can do with nothing more than a sufficient supply of paper, pencils, and time?
I'm reminded of how upset the Court got when it turned out that the real heart of one patent was that it claimed infringement by doctors making the mental connection between a lab test and a diagnosis. It wasn't that the lab test was unique, it was that any test that informed the physician of the measured physiological indicator would lead to the diagnosis.
Can't some member of the patent bar get the Court to the same realization with regard to software? Or is it that any party with the warchest to show up before the SCOTUS has too much invested in the current regime?
How much does a plaintiff "get for free" if the settlement just covers legal expenses?
Not my first rodeo, Chief. I've seen some of those class-action settlement checks, and the bank charged more than the face value of the check to cash them.
$320 million will just about cover the plaintiffs' legal expenses.
might as well snap them up if the price is good.
And as Joe Arpaio has so beautifully demonstrated, once you've bought a toy like that, you have to find a use for it. Even if it's busting into a chicken coop with a light tank.
police (deputies, etc.) over the past five years have been attacked with IEDs?
Alternately, how would something like this have helped the cops in Las Vegas this weekend?
Might remember to do so at the same process node.
An Intel x86 chip build on 22 nm stands a very good chance of blowing the doors off of an ARM (or MIPS, or ...) built on 45 nm. However, this is not a decisive win for the x86 ISA.
Again, it's not 'Amazon DRM'.
Whose DRM is it, then? Hint: Amazon can disable your access to the book after you've bought it and downloaded it (and has done so in the past.)
Any publisher who wants to can upload DRM-free ebooks to Amazon.
And yet somehow even books from Baen and Tor (who don't DRM their books) end up on Amazon indistinguishable from those from other publishers.
What I interpret him to mean is that he wants to do the same as Amazon, (a) charge me the same price for a file I download as if I bought a hardcover book, and (b) still wrap it in highly restrictive DRM so that having bought it, I don't own it, and my ability to read is at the mercy of whatever DRM configuration they dream up and only as long as they continue to support it.
Nice hypothesis. As it happens, Mr. Stross' most recent books have been published by Tor -- which does not do DRM.
Facts. Annoying things.
Tor and Baen don't do DRM. That's a very good start.
There may be others, too, but it's remarkably hard to find out who they are without buying a book to find out you can't read it. Anyone care to contribute to the list?
The cow, the chicken, the pig... these animals have no natural habitat anymore really
I'll grant you chickens. As for the other two -- you've obviously never visited Texas.
Never mind energy [1] -- goats love it. They can actually snarf it down faster than it grows (which is a trick, let me tell you, in the Gulf States.)
Kudzu-fed goat milk cheese is perfectly good stuff, or you can just let them feed their kids. Which not long afterward become cabritos. Nom!
[1] Long-term sustainability issue here unless you return the non-fuel sludge to the area to restore minerals. Not so much of a problem with goats excreting all over place.
There's a reason that we who are serviced by Cox have established the unofficial motto, "Cox sucks."
Pay more here for megabit speeds (no, that's not as in "50 megabit," that's as in "one, on a good day) at prices higher than Google charges for gigabit. And for the "it's all about density" set: that's central Phoenix, which sure has more density than Kansas City.
The speeds keep dropping, and they use "we need to invest in more capacity" as an excuse. The charges go up, but the speeds go down anyway.
The only thing Cox has going for it is that it's not CenturyLink -- which advertises that they'll keep charges from rising, but doesn't tell you that it's because they make the older services stop working so that you have to sign up for the new service at higher prices (plus buy new hardware) even though the speeds are no faster.
Yah, I can only imagine this will be useful in some very very specific situations.
You mean, like when a fire is crowning? Crown fires are fast and account for most (almost all?) of the firefighter fatalities (including the recent one at Yarnell where someone I used to work with died.) Interrupt that process, even briefly, and you may save some firefighters on the ground.
Well, yeah. Not surprising for a school of mines, after all.
As it happens, one of my kids did take explosives engineering there (as an elective) and I'm in the process of moving to Socorro.
Classic NM McMansion out in fire country.
In NM, as in Oz, a lot of fires start as brushfires -- no wood, no particular heat retention -- stop it even briefly and it doesn't get into the forests.
Could it possibly be because fire season is starting in New Mexico, and ending in Oz?
Do I know some people in NM who are going to love this! And the fact that theyr'e next door to the NM firefighters' training academy ain't gonna hurt, either.
We have IR cameras set up to watch the back yard at night. There's a fox that spends a lot of time there, and she seems to have brought a toy (a tennis ball) with her. She plays with it a lot.
... but it's probably just enough to pay off the lawyers. Going to trial would put them out a lot more in time and expenses and the payoff would be proportionately lower due to haveing to split the take with the plaintiffs.