Even the unionized employees at the Brampton plant realize they are doomed if this sale doesn't go through and they've been lobbying for the sale.
I would tell the employees "Be suspicious - be VERY suspicious." How would a sale to the US change the order book? The short answer - it won't. Either they're producing something needed, or they're not. This BS about "you're doomed if we don't sell out" ignores this simple fact.
1. Their jobs won't be any more (and probably less) secure if it's sold to US concerns;
2. There's less reason for the Canadian government to continue to put more dollars into it if it's owned by US concerns;
3. There's an incentive for someone to start a competitor, to grab all that nice government pork (Canadian Bacon). No guarantee that it will be in Ontario, and in fact, more likely that either Alberta or Quebec will spend the bucks necessary (Alberta as an investment, Quebec as a political move).
Also, I can imagine it must be somewhat sobering to understand just what exactly would happen to you when you decide to ingest lye.
You mean like the guy who tried to commit suicide 5 times by drinking lye, and failed each time? He then drank some Lestoil brand cleaner, and ended up at the Pearly Gates. Moral of the story - "It's so easy when you use Lestoil!"
Web sites encouraging suicide? That is so depressing - I think I'll go slashdot my wrists... zzzzzZZZZZZ
Or in the case of mergers: the merging was presumably done because it was in the companies' shareholders best interests.
... or in the personal best interests of the board of directors and their buddies at the banks and underwriters doing the deal, leaving the shareholders with a cropper...
Well, this is the Harper government. They would probably consider the sale of entire provinces to be a net benefit for Canada simply because it might make the US happy.
Depends on the province. The ROC (Rest of Canada) would probably vote to sell Quebec to the US, but the US already has too many people who "refuse to speak english like God intended them to." Besides, Americans are still pissed off about our tricking them into taking Celine Dion.
Q: What are 100 lawyers in an airplane?
A: Air pollution.
Q: What are 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
Q: What are 100 lawyers buried in sand up to their necks?
A: Not enough sand.
And for the bonus...
Q: Why do they use lawyers instead of mice for AIDS research?
A1: Lab assistants don't get attached to them.
A2: PETA won't protest over their mistreatment
A3: There are some things mice just won't do...
No - dumping the satellite and collecting the insurance is the smart thing to do. The satellite was supposed to have a 15 year lifespan. With the reduced fuel after the "patented application", it only has 4 years - so they're only going to get about 1/4 the revenue, and still have to launch another one. In other words, their satellite had already lost 3/4 of its' value no matter what.
Since this is slashdot, let's use a car analogy.
You buy a car, and you expect it to last 15 years (okay, you buy a JAPANESE car, and expect it to last 15 years), for $30k. However, just after you take it off the dealer's lot, it gets pretty much totalled. The insurance company will pay to fix it, but it will never be the same, and they've told you that after 4 years, you'll have to scrap it because the repairs will not last beyond that time. In other words, even after everything is "fixed", you'll have to fork out for another car within 4 years...
You will have spent $60k for 2 cars, for 19 years of combined service, or more than $3k/year.
Or you can take the insurance payout for the full value and buy another new car that will last 15 years. The new car is, essentially, free, so you $30k investment for 15 years brings your cost down to $2k/year.
Scale up the numbers, and they hold true for the satellite company. Keeping the old one will saddle them with additional capital costs of almost 60%.
I agree that it doesn't make sense. Even at the lower value, 1 terabye isn't enough - all you're doing is saving state - taking a snapshot at a point in time.
It's the equivalent of saying "I took a screen shot, so I've saved all the information on my computer, and I am done with it forever." The state of your screen, and of your brain, changes with new inputs. More importantly, the state of your brain changes even without new inputs, and the state of the screen doesn't necesarily represent what's going on in the computer iteslf (seti@home, background jobs while the screensaver is running or the screen's off, etc).
Besides, even if we posit that the "snapshot" of the brain is somehow valid, and we take the lower value of 1.25 gigabytes, at the rate of only 1 snapshot of your brain's state a second, your terabyte of storage is consumed in just over a minute.
Recording all your life involves recording everything you sense - even stuff you don't consciously notice at the time that might affect you later. The claim is bogus on the face of it.
Heck, just the information (tactile, visual, musculo-skeletal) from petting my dog's head greatly esceeds 653 bytes/second.
Then again, he works for Microsoft, and he doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between what he experiences, and his recording of "significant events". For example, he saves every web page he visits, but that doesn't contain as much data as even a 10-minute walk in the park. He needs to get out more.
Here's a sample from his "log":
Blockquote>
08:23 Chair thrown
08:24 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:15 Chair thrown
09:16 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:17 Heard "I'm gonna fucking bury them"
09:18 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:20 Heard "Fucking Yahoo! Fucking Google"
09:20 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:20 Heard "Fucking Google"
09:30 Toilet break. Toilet seat thrown. Heard "Fucking Jerry Yang. I'll fucking kill him!"
09:31 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:35 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
10:43 Chair thrown, heard "I'm gonna fucking bury them"
10:44 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
10:45 Heard "I'm gonna fucking bury them. Fucking Yang!" [3x]
10:46 Looked up price of Yahoo! stock (web page saved)
Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage."
Just goes to show you don't have much of a life if you could store the whole thing in one terabyte.
Just do the math:
1 terabyte (1024x1024x1024x1024)
divided by 80 year lifespan
= 13743895347.2 bytes
divided by 364 days
37,654,507 bytes/day
16 waking hours/day
2,353,407 bytes
divided by 60 minutes
39,223 bytes/minute
divided by 60 seconds/minute
653 bytes/second.
There's no way you'll record everything about your life in 653 bytes/second. And that's ignoring that lossy compression isn't an option, since then you *aren't* recording *everything*, and ignoring your dreams, etc.
All this is is an "enhanced blog" - big f*cking deal.
However it would be particularly poetic if he were to be buried holding that particular gun in his "cold, dead hands". (I can just imagine him guffawing at the idea.)
Good idea! Except... the grave would be vandalized, and the gun on eBay within a month - from a dozen different people, all claiming they have the real one.
Of course, there's an obvious and easy solution to this: heterogeneous ages.
After six months, replace the first disk whether it needs it or not. (or shorter or longer period depending on the ratio of "disks that can fail safely" to "disks in the array" and how long you desire between complete disk refreshment cycles) Then, replace the next disk after another six months. Continue indefinitely.
That leaves you vulnerable to the high initial failure rate of drives. Most of us have had drives that have failed either out of the box, within a few hours, or in the first few weeks. It's a bit of a crap-shoot. The real answer is always have a good backup.
Regarding the phone calls while working from home - why not get a business phone line? Don't give it to your friends. Shut off the home phone when you're "at work" and answer the personal messages later. Let your friends be miffed at the answering machine.
Friends understood after a while that just because I was at home, it didn't mean I wasn't working. I figured it was better to educate them than to erect barriers. On the other hand, I want my daughters to always feel free to call me any time, even at 3 in the morning. They might be adults, but they'll always be my kids...
I'm not saying you have to go the "suit and tie" route, but a lot of people get too easily distracted when they're not able to divide their time between work and non-work.
For many coders, it's different. I know I'm more productive at home than in the office, because I don't need the rituals - "office stuff" just keeps you from "getting into the zone" too many times. The ideal would probably be a "split" - a half-day, once or twice a week, at the office, and the rest as "organize yourself, keep in touch, and if you have a problem, here's everyone else's contact info | email | chat".
If you enjoy solving problems with code, you'll be like Charlton Heston - "you can have my keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands." You won't need the routines to "get you into it" - and you'll still enjoy it 25 years later.
If the problem-solving aspect doesn't really appeal to you that much, you'll be "up or out" in a decade. The problem is - what to do with those who want to go "up" instead of "out", or how to capture and use the knowledge they've accumulated? Hence the cubicle farms and project managers and reports, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps we need a new style of project management that allows individual coders to telecommute much more, while allowing the people with the "more senior knowledge" to stay in touch, help, motivate, etc.
For example, instead of telecommuting being an either | or (either you're at home, or you're at the office), why not fix it so that 1 or 2 workers can also meet up at each others' homes once in a while to thrash out a key piece of code on their laptops? It's not like we don't all have high-speed internet, etc., or (hopefully) backups.
With the low cost of hardware, and so much free software around, there's no reason why every dev can't have a home server to play with, and sync their repository with the office once in a while.
Okay, the style sheet is b0rked, so remove idle. from the url, and you'll get a full-width editbox. However, this is "idle" not "idol".
Posting a story about a beauty pageant for "Miss Landmine 2008" is a good thing.
Remember how Pirncess Di used to be a strong advocate against land mines? Ever since she lost her head over some media coverage, it's been on the back-burner. It's good to see someone trying to give these people a leg up. It's not like they waste their time at the casino playing Texas Hold-em (they'd have to quit after throwing in their hands).
On a more serious note, this helps bring attention to the immorality of land mines. Do any of the victims look like they were soldiers, or a threat?
I guess you missed all the complaints about Roland Piquepaille and links to primidi.com. There were accusations of kickbacks, etc., so now they just go with the actual source, to keep everything above-board.
Hope that clears it up for you. Of course, there's nothing to stop a submitter from posting their comments somewhere in the thread, or linking to them elsewhere...
Hey, it proves they actually do edit the articles (sometimes).
As to your question of "why" - the answer is obvious - you aren't the original source. You're also not the story. The real story isn't "what Andrew Feinberg thinks about bloggers dropping dead", it's about bloggers dropping dead.
We've all (okay, many of us) submitted stuff and seen it mangled. Big deal. You didn't see me complain when they ran a copy of my poll, stripped of my text,on the front page. And no, I didn't submit it - someone else must have. They didn't ask if they could use it (and it was 100% original, not a blog posting about an article someone else wrote), but I didn't go crying about it - I was glad to be able to contribute something people thought was worthwhile.
You want to ear respect? Don't whine. I remember one time when a print reporter misquoted something I said - it came out in print the exact opposite, and she remembered what I had really said (this was in the middle of an election campaign). She promised to print a retraction, and I said "Don't bother - if anyone asks, I said it, and it was just a stupid slip of the tongue." From that day on, I was gold.
People make mistakes. People have honest differences of opinion. Editors edit. Shit happens. You can always blog about it, if you feel the need to vent. Just stop with the whining - it comes across as very unprofessional, low uid notwithstanding.
Slashdot Mirror
I would tell the employees "Be suspicious - be VERY suspicious." How would a sale to the US change the order book? The short answer - it won't. Either they're producing something needed, or they're not. This BS about "you're doomed if we don't sell out" ignores this simple fact.
1. Their jobs won't be any more (and probably less) secure if it's sold to US concerns;
2. There's less reason for the Canadian government to continue to put more dollars into it if it's owned by US concerns;
3. There's an incentive for someone to start a competitor, to grab all that nice government pork (Canadian Bacon). No guarantee that it will be in Ontario, and in fact, more likely that either Alberta or Quebec will spend the bucks necessary (Alberta as an investment, Quebec as a political move).
Just "follow the money."
In other words, the government has the last say ... same as CanadArm and Dextre.
Too bad they didn;t name the new robot Dexter after this show instead.
You mean like the guy who tried to commit suicide 5 times by drinking lye, and failed each time? He then drank some Lestoil brand cleaner, and ended up at the Pearly Gates. Moral of the story - "It's so easy when you use Lestoil!"
Web sites encouraging suicide? That is so depressing - I think I'll go slashdot my wrists ... zzzzzZZZZZZ
Depends on the province. The ROC (Rest of Canada) would probably vote to sell Quebec to the US, but the US already has too many people who "refuse to speak english like God intended them to." Besides, Americans are still pissed off about our tricking them into taking Celine Dion.
No, it's not the company's choice. They've received a LOT of funding from the Canadian government, as did their predecessor.
It's the same as the sale of US ports to outsiders.
Even if they deducted 1/4 from the payout, the satellite company would still be way ahead in terms of cost per year.
Also, they don't want someone else buying it at salvage rates and running it in direct competition for the next 4 years ...
After all these years saying Gartner "analysts" doesn't know their as from their elbow, I am *so* conflicted ...
The real "what are 100 laywers ... questions.
Q: What are 100 lawyers in an airplane?
A: Air pollution.
Q: What are 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
Q: What are 100 lawyers buried in sand up to their necks?
A: Not enough sand.
And for the bonus ...
Q: Why do they use lawyers instead of mice for AIDS research? ...
A1: Lab assistants don't get attached to them.
A2: PETA won't protest over their mistreatment
A3: There are some things mice just won't do
No - dumping the satellite and collecting the insurance is the smart thing to do. The satellite was supposed to have a 15 year lifespan. With the reduced fuel after the "patented application", it only has 4 years - so they're only going to get about 1/4 the revenue, and still have to launch another one. In other words, their satellite had already lost 3/4 of its' value no matter what.
Since this is slashdot, let's use a car analogy.
You buy a car, and you expect it to last 15 years (okay, you buy a JAPANESE car, and expect it to last 15 years), for $30k. However, just after you take it off the dealer's lot, it gets pretty much totalled. The insurance company will pay to fix it, but it will never be the same, and they've told you that after 4 years, you'll have to scrap it because the repairs will not last beyond that time. In other words, even after everything is "fixed", you'll have to fork out for another car within 4 years ...
You will have spent $60k for 2 cars, for 19 years of combined service, or more than $3k/year.
Or you can take the insurance payout for the full value and buy another new car that will last 15 years. The new car is, essentially, free, so you $30k investment for 15 years brings your cost down to $2k/year.
Scale up the numbers, and they hold true for the satellite company. Keeping the old one will saddle them with additional capital costs of almost 60%.
I agree that it doesn't make sense. Even at the lower value, 1 terabye isn't enough - all you're doing is saving state - taking a snapshot at a point in time.
It's the equivalent of saying "I took a screen shot, so I've saved all the information on my computer, and I am done with it forever." The state of your screen, and of your brain, changes with new inputs. More importantly, the state of your brain changes even without new inputs, and the state of the screen doesn't necesarily represent what's going on in the computer iteslf (seti@home, background jobs while the screensaver is running or the screen's off, etc).
Besides, even if we posit that the "snapshot" of the brain is somehow valid, and we take the lower value of 1.25 gigabytes, at the rate of only 1 snapshot of your brain's state a second, your terabyte of storage is consumed in just over a minute.
True, but there are some things we shouldn't do because they just scream "*I* *need* *to* *get* *a* *life*!".
My point is he's saving the stuff that ISN'T important - the mundane. The web pages he's visited, crappy pix that nobody else will ever see, etc.
Recording all the sensations in a sky jump, on the other hand, would take terabytes, but people would definitely want to experience that second-hand.
Besides, slashdotters already have the ultimate way of dividing up images, video, etc.
It's binary: Everything is either "pOrn" or "recycle bin."
Recording all your life involves recording everything you sense - even stuff you don't consciously notice at the time that might affect you later. The claim is bogus on the face of it.
Heck, just the information (tactile, visual, musculo-skeletal) from petting my dog's head greatly esceeds 653 bytes/second.
Then again, he works for Microsoft, and he doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between what he experiences, and his recording of "significant events". For example, he saves every web page he visits, but that doesn't contain as much data as even a 10-minute walk in the park. He needs to get out more.
Here's a sample from his "log":
Blockquote> 08:23 Chair thrown
08:24 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:15 Chair thrown
09:16 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:17 Heard "I'm gonna fucking bury them"
09:18 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:20 Heard "Fucking Yahoo! Fucking Google"
09:20 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:20 Heard "Fucking Google"
09:30 Toilet break. Toilet seat thrown. Heard "Fucking Jerry Yang. I'll fucking kill him!"
09:31 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
09:35 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
10:43 Chair thrown, heard "I'm gonna fucking bury them"
10:44 Looked up price of Microsoft stock (web page saved)
10:45 Heard "I'm gonna fucking bury them. Fucking Yang!" [3x]
10:46 Looked up price of Yahoo! stock (web page saved)
FTFA:
Just goes to show you don't have much of a life if you could store the whole thing in one terabyte.
Just do the math: 1 terabyte (1024x1024x1024x1024)
divided by 80 year lifespan
= 13743895347.2 bytes
divided by 364 days
37,654,507 bytes/day
16 waking hours/day
2,353,407 bytes
divided by 60 minutes
39,223 bytes/minute
divided by 60 seconds/minute
653 bytes/second.
There's no way you'll record everything about your life in 653 bytes/second. And that's ignoring that lossy compression isn't an option, since then you *aren't* recording *everything*, and ignoring your dreams, etc.
All this is is an "enhanced blog" - big f*cking deal.
Good idea! Except ... the grave would be vandalized, and the gun on eBay within a month - from a dozen different people, all claiming they have the real one.
Friends understood after a while that just because I was at home, it didn't mean I wasn't working. I figured it was better to educate them than to erect barriers. On the other hand, I want my daughters to always feel free to call me any time, even at 3 in the morning. They might be adults, but they'll always be my kids ...
I'm not saying you have to go the "suit and tie" route, but a lot of people get too easily distracted when they're not able to divide their time between work and non-work.
For many coders, it's different. I know I'm more productive at home than in the office, because I don't need the rituals - "office stuff" just keeps you from "getting into the zone" too many times. The ideal would probably be a "split" - a half-day, once or twice a week, at the office, and the rest as "organize yourself, keep in touch, and if you have a problem, here's everyone else's contact info | email | chat".
If you enjoy solving problems with code, you'll be like Charlton Heston - "you can have my keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands." You won't need the routines to "get you into it" - and you'll still enjoy it 25 years later.
If the problem-solving aspect doesn't really appeal to you that much, you'll be "up or out" in a decade. The problem is - what to do with those who want to go "up" instead of "out", or how to capture and use the knowledge they've accumulated? Hence the cubicle farms and project managers and reports, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps we need a new style of project management that allows individual coders to telecommute much more, while allowing the people with the "more senior knowledge" to stay in touch, help, motivate, etc.
For example, instead of telecommuting being an either | or (either you're at home, or you're at the office), why not fix it so that 1 or 2 workers can also meet up at each others' homes once in a while to thrash out a key piece of code on their laptops? It's not like we don't all have high-speed internet, etc., or (hopefully) backups.
With the low cost of hardware, and so much free software around, there's no reason why every dev can't have a home server to play with, and sync their repository with the office once in a while.
Okay, the style sheet is b0rked, so remove idle. from the url, and you'll get a full-width editbox. However, this is "idle" not "idol".
Posting a story about a beauty pageant for "Miss Landmine 2008" is a good thing.
Remember how Pirncess Di used to be a strong advocate against land mines? Ever since she lost her head over some media coverage, it's been on the back-burner. It's good to see someone trying to give these people a leg up. It's not like they waste their time at the casino playing Texas Hold-em (they'd have to quit after throwing in their hands).
On a more serious note, this helps bring attention to the immorality of land mines. Do any of the victims look like they were soldiers, or a threat?
The same article points out that you can run Photoshop CS 2 under wine (no need for codeweaver's crossover). That's only one version behind.
I guess you missed all the complaints about Roland Piquepaille and links to primidi.com. There were accusations of kickbacks, etc., so now they just go with the actual source, to keep everything above-board.
Hope that clears it up for you. Of course, there's nothing to stop a submitter from posting their comments somewhere in the thread, or linking to them elsewhere ...
Hey, it proves they actually do edit the articles (sometimes).
As to your question of "why" - the answer is obvious - you aren't the original source. You're also not the story. The real story isn't "what Andrew Feinberg thinks about bloggers dropping dead", it's about bloggers dropping dead.
We've all (okay, many of us) submitted stuff and seen it mangled. Big deal. You didn't see me complain when they ran a copy of my poll, stripped of my text,on the front page. And no, I didn't submit it - someone else must have. They didn't ask if they could use it (and it was 100% original, not a blog posting about an article someone else wrote), but I didn't go crying about it - I was glad to be able to contribute something people thought was worthwhile.
You want to ear respect? Don't whine. I remember one time when a print reporter misquoted something I said - it came out in print the exact opposite, and she remembered what I had really said (this was in the middle of an election campaign). She promised to print a retraction, and I said "Don't bother - if anyone asks, I said it, and it was just a stupid slip of the tongue." From that day on, I was gold.
People make mistakes. People have honest differences of opinion. Editors edit. Shit happens. You can always blog about it, if you feel the need to vent. Just stop with the whining - it comes across as very unprofessional, low uid notwithstanding.