Have we seen a spike in violence in children since video games became more prevalent?
Actually, I've read the FBI crime stats on children show a decrease through most of the period that video games were expanding into the market. Same with teen pregnancy. Of course, it's not too much of a leap that video games help prevent pregancy by reducing the rate of sex among teen geeks;)
Is it a cause or a symptom? For some, maybe the violent games are the root cause, but you can't generalize it to all children. I believe it causes more harm to restrict the freedoms of people (including children) unless there is a specific body of proof proving harm due to actual causation. If video games do provide a measure of relaxation, restriction of video games may actually cause a rise in agression harming others.
How about a cellphone on a pcmcia card. Maybe with an optional bluetooth interface for the head set. Then I could plug it into a PDA, a laptop, or mabe a plain phone chassis.
I agree that there's a license conflict. I just think that it is legally undefined unless one of the receiving companies actually tries to excercise their GPL rights. If it one of them actually tested the conflict between the NDA and GPL, I would guess that only the specific infringing clauses of the NDA would be voided while the rest of the NDA would remain in force - but I am neither a lawyer nor a judge.
If anything, the NDA just provides a pragmatic "cost-of-litigation" deterrent to breaking it - not an actual legal deterrent.
The NDA's might be incompatible with the GPL, but I'm not sure that the GPL is being violated unless one of the receiving companies tries to excercise their GPL rights with the UL distro and is denied. Now if UL was making it difficult for end customers to redistribute or receive source there might be a story here. Until then, it's just an undefined, untested legal situation. (And I doubt any of the NDA companies would will bother trying to redistribute the UL distro because of business reasons - not because they feel limited by an NDA.)
how about hybridizing it with spamassassin to help mark email for varying levels of analysis. You could use spamassassin with a low threshhold to do an initial low resource pass and then do a high resource pass with your system. Alternately, you could try to generate spamassassin rules from your database to help with that first pass filter.
How is this really different from outsourced call centers? The critical issue is handling customer problsmokepingiccems. If you provide "live" humans which can only respond to a "script" of answers, you're wasting money. If your company actually responds and solves my problem I don't care if its voicemail, e-mail, or a live person. I do care if I have to be bounced between phone reps, or voice systems without getting any results.
Its just a bargaining chip to deal with Motorola - who would be stupid to believe that it's actually going to happen. For one, Apple would have to weather the storm as MS decides to bury OS X.
To me VMS was one of the technical best of the proprietary systems. They cost an arm and a leg but you got value for what you paid for. Their OS, compilers, and other software had top notch documentation and were more stable than just about anything out there.
I usually don't mind some crunch time here and there. The key issue to me is - did management propose a time schedule knowing it would be needed, or make an honest effort at estimating the tasks. If it's too much of the former, I start looking for new employment. Of course it's much easier to forgive if the company issues some nice fat apology checks:), but in the long run the question is how much you value your personal life.
For video editing, I would think that you would get better performance by upgrading your hard drive to a raid setup and adding as much memory as the system will handle. Of course upping the FSB helps.
I don't mind the google cookie's, I'm thinking that they use them to help focus your results over many different queries. For example, I tend to query a lot of linux related topics. Not sure, but I think that some of my searches on a "fresh" browser (ie. no google cookies yet) come up with slightly differently ranked results - usually worse than the browser with google cookies.
Yeah, next thing you know we'll have goverment officals doing favors for money and detaining people without legal representation. Err.. Hmm.. which nation was I talking about?
Although I don't support the DSSA in its current form, I don't think that Tim has ever tried to sell products to the governments and their agencies - I have. Open Source has inherent disadvantages in trying to sell to a government customer. Government often creates lists of "qualified" vendors. These lists often serve as a procurement "menu" the government agencies decide what sofware technologies to implement. Going with off-list technology often requires extra justification and more work on the part of the procurement agency.
The nature of Open Source makes it difficult or impossible to participate in these lists. The regulation simply doesn't mesh well with the OSS paradigm. Look at California Educational List or the Federal Gov't GSA and try to imagine an Open Source project trying to qualify for a slot on those lists. Even if an Open Source business does qualify itself to the list, none of the other businesses offering service or support qualify - removing a key advantage of Open Source -- multi-vendor competition over support of the same product.
I do think some sort of "Consider Open Source First" software procurement policy is in order. Either that, or a gov't office to specifically qualify Open Source projects to these procurement lists.
I was watching an interesting show on PBS - a series on ethics. This particular show was a roundtable discussion with several old-school and newer execs, regulators, and even IIRC, Alan Greenspan. Some of the retired executives who ran corporations mentioned that one of their operating tentes used to incorporate an obligation to support the social good. It even used to be taught in the leading business schools in the US. The theory was that corporations were granted a special legal status by society, and to continue to deserve that status, they not only needed to make profit, but advance some social good.
Of course, the new execs claimed that the only thing they needed to look out for is profits, and that the social good they provided was employment. I think "social good" needs to go beyond employment and apply to how and what service, product they produce.
But, based off past procedures, you can expect the Q3 source to be GPL'd within 1-2 years of the Doom3 release. They did it with Wolfenstein, they did it with Doom (sans sound code), and they did it with both Q1 and Q2.
But that was an era where graphical game engine advances were happening fairly quickly. Now there are diminishing returns from graphical advances and game companies are just starting to look at better gameplay. I would guess that game engines (especially their graphical subsystems) will get updated at a slower rate than in the past. Because of this, I don't think that the Q3 source will be released as quickly as past engines.
1 in 10 VC-financed companies make it. Therefore 9 in 10 fail. To break even a VC has to make 10 times their investment back. Therefore for a $25m investment the company has to be sold (through IPO or merger) for at least $250 million.
Or the VCs need to learn improve their success rates. Maybe pushing along the company too fast causes 7 out of those 10 to fail, when they would have been perfectly fine taking more time. The investors providing VC funds with money have been pulling their funds back out. In the current climate, investors are going to be many times more critical about IPO buys - especially if the company seems like its propped up with low-integrity strategies. It would seem smarter to slow down your burn rate, wait for a better environment on Wall Street, and present solid financials for your IPO.
Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now? It's this need for disruptively fast riches that's driving the WorldCom silliness. It's really OK to be a small to medium company with steady growth.
My prediction is that they'll take on huge debts & expenses to try to expand, fail in 90% of their new "expansion" markets, and die completely or settle back to their same growth curve and niche only saddled with several times more debt. Are there any studies on companies trying for excessive growth?
Guess what, it doesn't take a supercomputer to guide a missile. There is some (flawed) logic to prevent export of supercomputers, but missile guidance isn't one of them. Think encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've read the FBI crime stats on children show a decrease through most of the period that video games were expanding into the market. Same with teen pregnancy. Of course, it's not too much of a leap that video games help prevent pregancy by reducing the rate of sex among teen geeks
Is it a cause or a symptom? For some, maybe the violent games are the root cause, but you can't generalize it to all children. I believe it causes more harm to restrict the freedoms of people (including children) unless there is a specific body of proof proving harm due to actual causation. If video games do provide a measure of relaxation, restriction of video games may actually cause a rise in agression harming others.
Yes! I'll have to look and see if there's a version availiable in the US. I'm already using a GSM carrier.
How about a cellphone on a pcmcia card. Maybe with an optional bluetooth interface for the head set. Then I could plug it into a PDA, a laptop, or mabe a plain phone chassis.
I agree that there's a license conflict. I just think that it is legally undefined unless one of the receiving companies actually tries to excercise their GPL rights. If it one of them actually tested the conflict between the NDA and GPL, I would guess that only the specific infringing clauses of the NDA would be voided while the rest of the NDA would remain in force - but I am neither a lawyer nor a judge.
If anything, the NDA just provides a pragmatic "cost-of-litigation" deterrent to breaking it - not an actual legal deterrent.
The NDA's might be incompatible with the GPL, but I'm not sure that the GPL is being violated unless one of the receiving companies tries to excercise their GPL rights with the UL distro and is denied. Now if UL was making it difficult for end customers to redistribute or receive source there might be a story here. Until then, it's just an undefined, untested legal situation. (And I doubt any of the NDA companies would will bother trying to redistribute the UL distro because of business reasons - not because they feel limited by an NDA.)
how about hybridizing it with spamassassin to help mark email for varying levels of analysis. You could use spamassassin with a low threshhold to do an initial low resource pass and then do a high resource pass with your system. Alternately, you could try to generate spamassassin rules from your database to help with that first pass filter.
How is this really different from outsourced call centers? The critical issue is handling customer problsmokepingiccems. If you provide "live" humans which can only respond to a "script" of answers, you're wasting money. If your company actually responds and solves my problem I don't care if its voicemail, e-mail, or a live person. I do care if I have to be bounced between phone reps, or voice systems without getting any results.
Its just a bargaining chip to deal with Motorola - who would be stupid to believe that it's actually going to happen. For one, Apple would have to weather the storm as MS decides to bury OS X.
Isn't "dedicated telecommuting office" an oxymoron - like jumbo shrimp?
To me VMS was one of the technical best of the proprietary systems. They cost an arm and a leg but you got value for what you paid for. Their OS, compilers, and other software had top notch documentation and were more stable than just about anything out there.
I usually don't mind some crunch time here and there. The key issue to me is - did management propose a time schedule knowing it would be needed, or make an honest effort at estimating the tasks. If it's too much of the former, I start looking for new employment. Of course it's much easier to forgive if the company issues some nice fat apology checks :), but in the long run the question is how much you value your personal life.
For video editing, I would think that you would get better performance by upgrading your hard drive to a raid setup and adding as much memory as the system will handle. Of course upping the FSB helps.
I don't mind the google cookie's, I'm thinking that they use them to help focus your results over many different queries. For example, I tend to query a lot of linux related topics. Not sure, but I think that some of my searches on a "fresh" browser (ie. no google cookies yet) come up with slightly differently ranked results - usually worse than the browser with google cookies.
If you're interested in Linux in libraries look at
http://www.oss4lib.org/
Most computer access in libraries is via a browser now anyway.
Drop me a line if you have questions...
thoughtcrime
Yeah, next thing you know we'll have goverment officals doing favors for money and detaining people without legal representation. Err.. Hmm.. which nation was I talking about?
Although I don't support the DSSA in its current form, I don't think that Tim has ever tried to sell products to the governments and their agencies - I have. Open Source has inherent disadvantages in trying to sell to a government customer. Government often creates lists of "qualified" vendors. These lists often serve as a procurement "menu" the government agencies decide what sofware technologies to implement. Going with off-list technology often requires extra justification and more work on the part of the procurement agency.
The nature of Open Source makes it difficult or impossible to participate in these lists. The regulation simply doesn't mesh well with the OSS paradigm. Look at California Educational List or the Federal Gov't GSA and try to imagine an Open Source project trying to qualify for a slot on those lists. Even if an Open Source business does qualify itself to the list, none of the other businesses offering service or support qualify - removing a key advantage of Open Source -- multi-vendor competition over support of the same product.
I do think some sort of "Consider Open Source First" software procurement policy is in order. Either that, or a gov't office to specifically qualify Open Source projects to these procurement lists.
I was watching an interesting show on PBS - a series on ethics. This particular show was a roundtable discussion with several old-school and newer execs, regulators, and even IIRC, Alan Greenspan. Some of the retired executives who ran corporations mentioned that one of their operating tentes used to incorporate an obligation to support the social good. It even used to be taught in the leading business schools in the US. The theory was that corporations were granted a special legal status by society, and to continue to deserve that status, they not only needed to make profit, but advance some social good.
Of course, the new execs claimed that the only thing they needed to look out for is profits, and that the social good they provided was employment. I think "social good" needs to go beyond employment and apply to how and what service, product they produce.
Or the VCs need to learn improve their success rates. Maybe pushing along the company too fast causes 7 out of those 10 to fail, when they would have been perfectly fine taking more time. The investors providing VC funds with money have been pulling their funds back out. In the current climate, investors are going to be many times more critical about IPO buys - especially if the company seems like its propped up with low-integrity strategies. It would seem smarter to slow down your burn rate, wait for a better environment on Wall Street, and present solid financials for your IPO.
Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now? It's this need for disruptively fast riches that's driving the WorldCom silliness. It's really OK to be a small to medium company with steady growth.
My prediction is that they'll take on huge debts & expenses to try to expand, fail in 90% of their new "expansion" markets, and die completely or settle back to their same growth curve and niche only saddled with several times more debt. Are there any studies on companies trying for excessive growth?
Guess what, it doesn't take a supercomputer to guide a missile. There is some (flawed) logic to prevent export of supercomputers, but missile guidance isn't one of them. Think encryption.
If they're more effient and cheaper to build, why do we have so many products that come with bulky, room-warming, transformer plugs? (Wall warts)
write twice, debug everywhere * (new releases +license update + security gaffes) * ms_reboot_multiplier