This is quite common on military exercises. I was in the reserves before, and it was quite common to have weekend exercises without sleep. After being up 2 nights straight you don't have any ability to concentrate, so forget about programming or surgery. You wouldn't want to be at the controls of a vehicle either.
You can dig trenches, march, and shoot after extended periods of sleeplessness. But even then, I remember some recruits would actually start hallucinating beyond that point. One friend who was on sentry duty after 3 days without sleep told me he saw trees moving about and changing positions on him. This was shortly before somebody walked up to his checkpoint. He was supposed to challenge the guy approaching him, and ask him for the password. Instead, he remembers the other soldier walk straight up to him and wave in his face while he stood motionless as if he was watching it in a dream. He knew what he was supposed to do, but he felt disconnected from his body. Needless to say, he was relieved a few minutes later and given some down time.
I know they were trying to research ways of keeping soldiers alert and awake for days at a time with stimulants, but there was no cheating the need for downtime. You invariably start to go nuts after several days.
Working death march hours is possible for a short term crunch, but there is no way you can keep it up for extended time and still be productive in any task that requires high concentration. And there is an increasing chance over time that you will suffer a psychological breakdown of some sort.
> Will the grocer give you a discount because you had to go to the trouble of getting to the store?
No, but I would expect them to if the food I purchased turns out to be rotten or otherwise unfit for consumption.
There are plenty of other good games out there, I wouldn't waste my time on something that takes away so much of my rights. Thanks, but I won't even be giving it a look.
There is an article in Groklaw about how Poland is voting against EU software patents, and that the majority has tipped against them. His comments only help to underscore why this is the correct decision, and can only help our cause. It looks like the US will be the only country to recognize software patents.
What is to stop perverts or spies from covering the flash with masking tape, or disabling it? Just forbid or jam cell phones anywhere where you wouldn't want pictures taken.
You have to be very careful with the context of forensic evidence. I recently watched a show called "masterminds" where a jewel thief in Raleigh made a point of deliberately leaving behind tiny snippets of other people's hair, blood and skin, and tromping around the crime scene in huge boots leaving footprints that were 3 sizes too big, in order to throw off investigators. He was only caught when his fence tried to hawk part of the loot on EBay.
The interpretation of results can be highly subjective. There was a famous case a few years back in Canada where a well known doctor accused of rape willingly drew his own blood sample for investigators, which came up negative. They were sure he was guilty, but couldn't figure out how he had faked the blood test, as they had seen him draw the blood sammple from his arm right in front of them. As it turns out, he later confessed that he had inserted a sealed, plastic surgical tube into his arm from a small (unseen) incision further up his forearm ahead of time that contained a sample of somebody else's blood.
I still remember the encyclopedia salesman that would set up in the mall. Heck, we even have a couple of very nice encyclopeidas in the house.
The problem is that information becomes dated very fast. Encyclopedias are useless for researching anything technology related, except as a historical snapshot. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, new countries were springing into existance faster than the maps could be printed. Revolutions happen, presidents change and information that was once 100% correct becomes stale or downright wrong as new things are discovered. (How much more have we learned about Mars in the past year?) Despite the problems, online encyclopedias are still the way to go, and I would value Wikipedia as a reference far more than the beautiful leather bound dead tree editions.
My parents have a 1930's vintage encyclopedia set that they picked up in a garage sale once. It is quite facinating to go through and read a snapshot of what was known and believed to be true at the time.
Despite the recent improvements in LCD technology, it is easy to forget that most of you are reading this off a vaccum tube CRT. Your household microwave contains a cavity magnetron tube. The niches for tube technology are diminishing but far from dead yet.
I have even heard of tiny tubes being etched out of silicon using the same photolithography techniques used to create other forms of nanotechnology. This is not as silly as it sounds, they could survive heat and radiation that would cook a transistor, and would be ideal in environments no solid state component could survive. (In a jet engine combustion chamber, a venus lander or on a space probe operating well inside Jupiter's radiation belts, or close to the sun)
IANAL, but you might have a case even if your job is classified as "exempt", if it reaches such extremes that it becomes a health and safety issue.
For example: - Employees driving home after working 100+ hour week. Anybody at work get injured in a wreak driving home from the office under such condition? Did they harm anybody else in the process? Imagine the lawsuit if a trucking firm or airline was found forcing their drivers/pilots to work these hours that led to an accident.
- Employees suffer from ill health and mental breakdown, especially if it requires hospitalization.
I also wonder if there might be a constitutional challenge here - unlike military/police/fire/hospital workers, it is pretty hard to argue that video game programmers are "essential", and must be kept working long hours at all costs.
From a managerial perspective, it is just plain dumb as well. I know I am not fully there if I have been working more than 12 hours straight, and you are fooling yourself if you think you can write/debug solid code with 4 hours sleep.
Yeah, now if we can only get the earth to rotate exactly 1000x per trip around the sun, then we can have metric years as well! Setting the galactic rotation rate to produce metric eons is going to be a tad trickier.
Actually, any form of combat would be nearly impossible at mach 10. Even with the pilot pulling 10 G's, your turning radius would be half a continent wide. Most dogfights occur at subsonic speeds. We will have to invent Star Trek's intertial dampeners. Look how bad the patriot missiles were at hitting a missile moving mach 4.
You can't do any low altitude flight either, because the denser air would quickly melt and tear apart the aircraft at those speeds. What this is great for, is a potentially cheaper way of reaching low earth orbit since it is an air breathing engine, and you don't need to carry any LOX. Mach 10 is sufficient to vault you out of the atmosphere. You just have to get up enough velocity for the scram jets to operate.
You could potentially fly around the world in 2 hours, but it wouldn't be a very comfortable way to fly. You would alternate between several G's when the scram jets are fired, to weighlessness while you skipped across the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond. No trips to the lavatory, and keep your barf bag handy!
But if this technology is declassified, it would potentially be a great way for somebody to net the X-prize follow up.
I imagine it would be a lot cheaper to launch corpses into orbit. Or for that matter, a small containing their cremated remains. Eliminates the need for pressurized cabins, life support, as well as heat shields on the way down. It doesn't matter if they get slightly toasted on the way down. Sort of a space-age viking funeral.
I can just imagine the racket this thing would make. As shake velocity increases to reduce seek time, so will the inertia of the object being moved. Your laptop would take on a life of its own, as it bounces across the desk like a thing posessed.
It is a fairly minimialist search engine that searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, LookSmart, Overture and FindWhat. I tried it a few times and find it occasionally returns a few more useful results than Google, and doesn't have an annoying clutter of ads.
(I supposed if it did I wouldn't know, I have mozilla configured to block even flash ads, and my firewall is configured to route most known ad servers to 127.0.0.1)
Just think, an autonomous drug smuggling robot sub that could drop its cargo if the coast guard gets uncomfortably close, then go back and retrieve it later. And even if it were captured or destroyed, there would be nobody on board to turn state's evidence against their boss. (Presumably it would automatically wipe its memory if tampered with) About the only way to catch the smugglers in the act would be to covertly track the robot to the rendezvous point.
In the vein of the shotgun toting robot, it might make an effective military weapon as well. A tiny, autonomous sub that could navigate a pre-programmed course and deliver a nuke, launch torpedoes and drop mines at a predesignated target. Sort of an underwater cruise missile or recon drone.
They have been using armed predator drones in Iraq and Afghanistan for some time now. Police have used armed remote control robots with shotguns and TV cameras to enter buildings in hostage situations. How is this any different?
I think I might be able to find Bin Laden with my tarot cards and trusty ouija board. I just need a $500K/year 10 year research grant. Hey, you never know right?
Ultimately he may be right - somebody has to clean up the mess, and the lawyers will have a field day the first time an outsourcing agency loses, or loses control of your medical records.
I worked in a large telecom company before that had a history of winning signed contracts, only to have the customer later pay some nominal cancellation fee and go with a cheaper competitor, because the cost situation had substantially changed over the past year or two.
I wonder if the contract is written to avoid a "lock in" situation, that lets the customer decline or opt out if they decide to use non-MS solutions.
I think the 9 year thing is to ensure they have support for a newly purchased system that will be in maintainance mode five years from now.
On the other hand, having lived with the Canadian sponsorship scandal, you never know what kind of dirty backroom sweetheart deals go on behind the closed doors of government offices.
The piece was intended as a satire that was mistakenly posted as a genuine news article. This whole thing may be just a weird mistake, but if so I would hope the editors at linuxworld put a disclaimer or retraction up ASAP, or they may be getting an unfriendly nastygram from IBM's lawyers. I don't need to be a lawyer to know that posting verifiably wrong information about somebody can get you into serious trouble.
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This is quite common on military exercises. I was in the reserves before, and it was quite common to have weekend exercises without sleep. After being up 2 nights straight you don't have any ability to concentrate, so forget about programming or surgery. You wouldn't want to be at the controls of a vehicle either.
You can dig trenches, march, and shoot after extended periods of sleeplessness. But even then, I remember some recruits would actually start hallucinating beyond that point. One friend who was on sentry duty after 3 days without sleep told me he saw trees moving about and changing positions on him. This was shortly before somebody walked up to his checkpoint. He was supposed to challenge the guy approaching him, and ask him for the password. Instead, he remembers the other soldier walk straight up to him and wave in his face while he stood motionless as if he was watching it in a dream. He knew what he was supposed to do, but he felt disconnected from his body. Needless to say, he was relieved a few minutes later and given some down time.
I know they were trying to research ways of keeping soldiers alert and awake for days at a time with stimulants, but there was no cheating the need for downtime. You invariably start to go nuts after several days.
Working death march hours is possible for a short term crunch, but there is no way you can keep it up for extended time and still be productive in any task that requires high concentration. And there is an increasing chance over time that you will suffer a psychological breakdown of some sort.
I am having just as much fun playing the free alpha Wurm Online.
http://www.wurmonline.com
The client is even written in Java so it should be runnable under Linux.
> Will the grocer give you a discount because you had to go to the trouble of getting to the store?
No, but I would expect them to if the food I purchased turns out to be rotten or otherwise unfit for consumption.
There are plenty of other good games out there, I wouldn't waste my time on something that takes away so much of my rights. Thanks, but I won't even be giving it a look.
To be followed by the JFK Junior Flight Simulator game.
There is an article in Groklaw about how Poland is voting against EU software patents, and that the majority has tipped against them. His comments only help to underscore why this is the correct decision, and can only help our cause. It looks like the US will be the only country to recognize software patents.
What is to stop perverts or spies from covering the flash with masking tape, or disabling it? Just forbid or jam cell phones anywhere where you wouldn't want pictures taken.
You have to be very careful with the context of forensic evidence. I recently watched a show called "masterminds" where a jewel thief in Raleigh made a point of deliberately leaving behind tiny snippets of other people's hair, blood and skin, and tromping around the crime scene in huge boots leaving footprints that were 3 sizes too big, in order to throw off investigators. He was only caught when his fence tried to hawk part of the loot on EBay.
The interpretation of results can be highly subjective. There was a famous case a few years back in Canada where a well known doctor accused of rape willingly drew his own blood sample for investigators, which came up negative. They were sure he was guilty, but couldn't figure out how he had faked the blood test, as they had seen him draw the blood sammple from his arm right in front of them. As it turns out, he later confessed that he had inserted a sealed, plastic surgical tube into his arm from a small (unseen) incision further up his forearm ahead of time that contained a sample of somebody else's blood.
I still remember the encyclopedia salesman that would set up in the mall. Heck, we even have a couple of very nice encyclopeidas in the house.
The problem is that information becomes dated very fast. Encyclopedias are useless for researching anything technology related, except as a historical snapshot. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, new countries were springing into existance faster than the maps could be printed. Revolutions happen, presidents change and information that was once 100% correct becomes stale or downright wrong as new things are discovered. (How much more have we learned about Mars in the past year?) Despite the problems, online encyclopedias are still the way to go, and I would value Wikipedia as a reference far more than the beautiful leather bound dead tree editions.
My parents have a 1930's vintage encyclopedia set that they picked up in a garage sale once. It is quite facinating to go through and read a snapshot of what was known and believed to be true at the time.
Despite the recent improvements in LCD technology, it is easy to forget that most of you are reading this off a vaccum tube CRT. Your household microwave contains a cavity magnetron tube. The niches for tube technology are diminishing but far from dead yet.
I have even heard of tiny tubes being etched out of silicon using the same photolithography techniques used to create other forms of nanotechnology. This is not as silly as it sounds, they could survive heat and radiation that would cook a transistor, and would be ideal in environments no solid state component could survive. (In a jet engine combustion chamber, a venus lander or on a space probe operating well inside Jupiter's radiation belts, or close to the sun)
No, I think that it is a sure sign that their search engine is becoming self-aware.
The more complex the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the works!
IANAL, but you might have a case even if your job is classified as "exempt", if it reaches such extremes that it becomes a health and safety issue.
For example:
- Employees driving home after working 100+ hour week. Anybody at work get injured in a wreak driving home from the office under such condition? Did they harm anybody else in the process? Imagine the lawsuit if a trucking firm or airline was found forcing their drivers/pilots to work these hours that led to an accident.
- Employees suffer from ill health and mental breakdown, especially if it requires hospitalization.
I also wonder if there might be a constitutional challenge here - unlike military/police/fire/hospital workers, it is pretty hard to argue that video game programmers are "essential", and must be kept working long hours at all costs.
From a managerial perspective, it is just plain dumb as well. I know I am not fully there if I have been working more than 12 hours straight, and you are fooling yourself if you think you can write/debug solid code with 4 hours sleep.
MIPS is doing pretty well in the embedded world. I recently worked on a SOC project that contained an onboard MIPS core.
Yeah, now if we can only get the earth to rotate exactly 1000x per trip around the sun, then we can have metric years as well! Setting the galactic rotation rate to produce metric eons is going to be a tad trickier.
Actually, any form of combat would be nearly impossible at mach 10. Even with the pilot pulling 10 G's, your turning radius would be half a continent wide. Most dogfights occur at subsonic speeds. We will have to invent Star Trek's intertial dampeners. Look how bad the patriot missiles were at hitting a missile moving mach 4.
You can't do any low altitude flight either, because the denser air would quickly melt and tear apart the aircraft at those speeds. What this is great for, is a potentially cheaper way of reaching low earth orbit since it is an air breathing engine, and you don't need to carry any LOX. Mach 10 is sufficient to vault you out of the atmosphere. You just have to get up enough velocity for the scram jets to operate.
You could potentially fly around the world in 2 hours, but it wouldn't be a very comfortable way to fly. You would alternate between several G's when the scram jets are fired, to weighlessness while you skipped across the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond. No trips to the lavatory, and keep your barf bag handy!
But if this technology is declassified, it would potentially be a great way for somebody to net the X-prize follow up.
I imagine it would be a lot cheaper to launch corpses into orbit. Or for that matter, a small containing their cremated remains. Eliminates the need for pressurized cabins, life support, as well as heat shields on the way down. It doesn't matter if they get slightly toasted on the way down. Sort of a space-age viking funeral.
I can just imagine the racket this thing would make. As shake velocity increases to reduce seek time, so will the inertia of the object being moved. Your laptop would take on a life of its own, as it bounces across the desk like a thing posessed.
It is a fairly minimialist search engine that searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, LookSmart, Overture and FindWhat. I tried it a few times and find it occasionally returns a few more useful results than Google, and doesn't have an annoying clutter of ads.
(I supposed if it did I wouldn't know, I have mozilla configured to block even flash ads, and my firewall is configured to route most known ad servers to 127.0.0.1)
IANAL, but I think this would apply here. This doctrine should be applied more often to sink submarine patent claims.
p pe l.htm/ /www.converium.com/2103.asp
http://www.legal-definitions.com/equitable-esto
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/l056.htm
http:
Just think, an autonomous drug smuggling robot sub that could drop its cargo if the coast guard gets uncomfortably close, then go back and retrieve it later. And even if it were captured or destroyed, there would be nobody on board to turn state's evidence against their boss. (Presumably it would automatically wipe its memory if tampered with) About the only way to catch the smugglers in the act would be to covertly track the robot to the rendezvous point.
In the vein of the shotgun toting robot, it might make an effective military weapon as well. A tiny, autonomous sub that could navigate a pre-programmed course and deliver a nuke, launch torpedoes and drop mines at a predesignated target. Sort of an underwater cruise missile or recon drone.
They have been using armed predator drones in Iraq and Afghanistan for some time now. Police have used armed remote control robots with shotguns and TV cameras to enter buildings in hostage situations. How is this any different?
I think I might be able to find Bin Laden with my tarot cards and trusty ouija board. I just need a $500K/year 10 year research grant. Hey, you never know right?
Damn, I want a ticket on that gravy train.
Ultimately he may be right - somebody has to clean up the mess, and the lawyers will have a field day the first time an outsourcing agency loses, or loses control of your medical records.
I worked in a large telecom company before that had a history of winning signed contracts, only to have the customer later pay some nominal cancellation fee and go with a cheaper competitor, because the cost situation had substantially changed over the past year or two.
I wonder if the contract is written to avoid a "lock in" situation, that lets the customer decline or opt out if they decide to use non-MS solutions.
I think the 9 year thing is to ensure they have support for a newly purchased system that will be in maintainance mode five years from now.
On the other hand, having lived with the Canadian sponsorship scandal, you never know what kind of dirty backroom sweetheart deals go on behind the closed doors of government offices.
The piece was intended as a satire that was mistakenly posted as a genuine news article. This whole thing may be just a weird mistake, but if so I would hope the editors at linuxworld put a disclaimer or retraction up ASAP, or they may be getting an unfriendly nastygram from IBM's lawyers. I don't need to be a lawyer to know that posting verifiably wrong information about somebody can get you into serious trouble.