This is an entirely social problem that has very little (if anything at all) to do with genetics. Look at how it is diagnosed: you are diagnosed on a very vague scale of normalcy in several areas. If you're not normal, you're autistic.
Well, guess what? If you don't know how to be normal, it's because you weren't ever taught to be normal. Even the autistic parents have an idea of normalcy, but if they lack the skills to teach normalcy to their kids, hello autistic children.
Now, when is this most likely to happen? Well, let's say Christine is a poor child of one of these incompetent couples. She's six months old, and both her parents work twelve hour days while she stays in daycare. Level of human interaction? Approximately none. Time until she turns autistic? According to the article, eighteen months until her lack of taught normalcy outweighs the normal instinctive behaviour she is born with.
When I went through college, I saw all the smart people. Most of them weren't attracted to "The Valley," maybe because they wanted to spend time with their girlfriends and wives, but of the dozens that I knew, only two of them were antisocial like that. And I can tell you that when I meet them today, their children don't have any problems, either. As for the other two, I haven't seen them in years, but I hear that Wilfred is in San Jose, and Norm is in Seattle.
Really, this is just masturbation. Some of these people crave the attention that they can't get through normal human interactions like the rest of us have. Well, short of taking them away from their parents, there isn't much that can be done. Hi Christine! You're special, here's your stupid cookie.
One thing that these companies did not realize just a few years ago is that the supply of venture capital is limited. They can not keep on losing money for as long as they want. One thing they should know is that a large change in direction in this stage of a company's life doesn't reassure investors, it scares them.
VA looked like a company that was devoted to a buzz-word, "open-source", rather than to a goal or a business plan. They went out and made expensive acquisitions that had nothing at all to do with their core business. They didn't need to support a pile of open-source developers, and they had no use at all for Sourceforge, or Slashdot or the rest of Andover. Those seemed to be vanity moves with little effort to focus their business or make money.
Their more recent moves look like the last, desperate actions of a dying company. Eliminating their core business basically meant giving up any hope of becoming profitable, in favour of slowly wasting away. Now they want to put big advertisements all over Slashdot because it is losing too much money. Watch most of those ads be for ThinkGeek or OSDN and wonder why.
Way back when, VA appeared to be a sound company, with a well-executed business plan. We all had big hopes that they would be the ones to break through and show that you could make a profit with Linux. Then they went on a completely pointless shopping spree and forget about what they did best. Now, it seems very fitting that their name is VA, which is French for "go", because they are quickly going away.
Does anyone else find it VERY disturbing that the Russians didn't bother changing the default password on their database? I'm glad that the Los Alamos laboratory wasn't vulnerable to this "bug"!
Well, voip isn't very complicated. If you're unsatisfied with the currently available solutions like those available at LinuxTelephony or OpenPhone you can always roll your own. I know I'd lay down a couple bucks for a satisfactory one, so you can probably sell it and make a couple quick bucks from your effort, too. Stop whining and make a difference!
Free software is a wonderful thing, and it is definitely possible to make money off of it. Companies like Red Hat and IBM are demonstrating this. I encourage that. If you have a business that can survive while developing and releasing free software, that is excellent.
On the other hand, if you have no business plan, free software won't help you. HINT: "make a file manager and give it away" is not a complete business plan. Even if it becomes popular, if you lose money for every copy you give away, even if you lose less money per copy if you give away more copies, you still won't be a viable business.
I have no sympathy for anyone involved. Neither the idiot venture capitalists who sponsored a project with no clue how it would make money, nor the developers, who obviously confused coding sense with business sense.
I've been in business, and you can't always do what you want. Sometimes, you have to put a lot of effort into making a profit, or else you just won't survive. Where are your ideals then? I wish the best of luck to the hackers involved, and I have a lot of hope for Nautilus. But next time you get involved in a business venture, make sure that sound financial advice is one of the first things you get!
My last ASP went out of business a year ago. Our company was pretty new to the Internet, and we had outsourced all our ebusiness operations to them. They wouldn't give us the code to the applications, and worse, one of the assets they tried to sell off to pay their creditors was all the data they collected on behalf of their clients. I was pretty pissed, to say the least.
Anyway, we took them to court, and won. We managed to get our data back in very short order, and as a bonus, our lawyer managed to wrangle their application code into the deal. I think he had to pull a fast one on the judge for that, but, hey, they had us by the balls.
Our site was down for a little while, and I'm sure we lost customers, but we didn't have many at that point anyway, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
Yeah, I can get a 6502 or 68000 for a buck fifty, but then what? Where's my stinking colour monitor and super powerful tape drive? So, yeah, your C= 64 will be one 64th as powerful as this, but cost a whole lot more. And don't get me started on all the extra power you'd need for that many dirty old machines with less capability than a modern handheld.
And what advantage would you really give anyone? You can't program those in C++ or Lisp, even if you're really stupid, because the compiler won't fit into the pathetic ram footprint anyway. So you're going to make a nation or two of up and coming assembly language hackers, yeah, that will make them really great. Supposing you do manage to make your magic tech transformation complete, what do you get twenty years from now? Why, the third world will be twenty years behind us. Don't expect me to stand still while they learn to use an Apple ][.
Why not let them use modern technology; at least then they'll have a chance when our infrastructure trickles over to them. All people are created equal, so don't unfairly constrain them with ancient technology!
Slashdot Mirror
This is an entirely social problem that has very little (if anything at all) to do with genetics. Look at how it is diagnosed: you are diagnosed on a very vague scale of normalcy in several areas. If you're not normal, you're autistic.
Well, guess what? If you don't know how to be normal, it's because you weren't ever taught to be normal. Even the autistic parents have an idea of normalcy, but if they lack the skills to teach normalcy to their kids, hello autistic children.
Now, when is this most likely to happen? Well, let's say Christine is a poor child of one of these incompetent couples. She's six months old, and both her parents work twelve hour days while she stays in daycare. Level of human interaction? Approximately none. Time until she turns autistic? According to the article, eighteen months until her lack of taught normalcy outweighs the normal instinctive behaviour she is born with.
When I went through college, I saw all the smart people. Most of them weren't attracted to "The Valley," maybe because they wanted to spend time with their girlfriends and wives, but of the dozens that I knew, only two of them were antisocial like that. And I can tell you that when I meet them today, their children don't have any problems, either. As for the other two, I haven't seen them in years, but I hear that Wilfred is in San Jose, and Norm is in Seattle.
Really, this is just masturbation. Some of these people crave the attention that they can't get through normal human interactions like the rest of us have. Well, short of taking them away from their parents, there isn't much that can be done. Hi Christine! You're special, here's your stupid cookie.
One thing that these companies did not realize just a few years ago is that the supply of venture capital is limited. They can not keep on losing money for as long as they want. One thing they should know is that a large change in direction in this stage of a company's life doesn't reassure investors, it scares them.
VA looked like a company that was devoted to a buzz-word, "open-source", rather than to a goal or a business plan. They went out and made expensive acquisitions that had nothing at all to do with their core business. They didn't need to support a pile of open-source developers, and they had no use at all for Sourceforge, or Slashdot or the rest of Andover. Those seemed to be vanity moves with little effort to focus their business or make money.
Their more recent moves look like the last, desperate actions of a dying company. Eliminating their core business basically meant giving up any hope of becoming profitable, in favour of slowly wasting away. Now they want to put big advertisements all over Slashdot because it is losing too much money. Watch most of those ads be for ThinkGeek or OSDN and wonder why.
Way back when, VA appeared to be a sound company, with a well-executed business plan. We all had big hopes that they would be the ones to break through and show that you could make a profit with Linux. Then they went on a completely pointless shopping spree and forget about what they did best. Now, it seems very fitting that their name is VA, which is French for "go", because they are quickly going away.
Does anyone else find it VERY disturbing that the Russians didn't bother changing the default password on their database? I'm glad that the Los Alamos laboratory wasn't vulnerable to this "bug"!
Well, voip isn't very complicated. If you're unsatisfied with the currently available solutions like those available at LinuxTelephony or OpenPhone you can always roll your own. I know I'd lay down a couple bucks for a satisfactory one, so you can probably sell it and make a couple quick bucks from your effort, too. Stop whining and make a difference!
Free software is a wonderful thing, and it is definitely possible to make money off of it. Companies like Red Hat and IBM are demonstrating this. I encourage that. If you have a business that can survive while developing and releasing free software, that is excellent.
On the other hand, if you have no business plan, free software won't help you. HINT: "make a file manager and give it away" is not a complete business plan. Even if it becomes popular, if you lose money for every copy you give away, even if you lose less money per copy if you give away more copies, you still won't be a viable business.
I have no sympathy for anyone involved. Neither the idiot venture capitalists who sponsored a project with no clue how it would make money, nor the developers, who obviously confused coding sense with business sense.
I've been in business, and you can't always do what you want. Sometimes, you have to put a lot of effort into making a profit, or else you just won't survive. Where are your ideals then? I wish the best of luck to the hackers involved, and I have a lot of hope for Nautilus. But next time you get involved in a business venture, make sure that sound financial advice is one of the first things you get!
Anyway, we took them to court, and won. We managed to get our data back in very short order, and as a bonus, our lawyer managed to wrangle their application code into the deal. I think he had to pull a fast one on the judge for that, but, hey, they had us by the balls.
Our site was down for a little while, and I'm sure we lost customers, but we didn't have many at that point anyway, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
And what advantage would you really give anyone? You can't program those in C++ or Lisp, even if you're really stupid, because the compiler won't fit into the pathetic ram footprint anyway. So you're going to make a nation or two of up and coming assembly language hackers, yeah, that will make them really great. Supposing you do manage to make your magic tech transformation complete, what do you get twenty years from now? Why, the third world will be twenty years behind us. Don't expect me to stand still while they learn to use an Apple ][.
Why not let them use modern technology; at least then they'll have a chance when our infrastructure trickles over to them. All people are created equal, so don't unfairly constrain them with ancient technology!