The real techies that do go to Fry's avoid the salespeople like the plague. Those guys will fight like sharks over a lousy 3% (or whatever) commision, and most are less knowledgeable than the customers (there are exceptions of course).
Ddr ram is the closest competitor, and it's price is now on the rise
That depends on the configuration. I've been watching the pc2100 512mb sticks go steadily down toward my price range, haven't seen a single uptick yet.
So what's your point? I was just pointing out that damages had been done. Whether the damages were to a prof who spent 20 years working on an idea, or to Cornell who paid him (you say generously), it's still damages, which was my point. Whether stolen from Cornell or the Prof, it's still a life's work stolen.
In addition, these arrangements invariably involve a royalty payment to the patent author by the patent owner. So the Prof is still egtting shafted.
I am using my +1 bonus here to point out to the majority of fair-minded and level-headed moderators the exchange to which I now reply.
Note that we have a supposed "moderator" posting anonymously about why he modded somebody down, in a pompous and heavy-handed manner, including a spelling flame.
I noted this guy's own spelling mistake in his spelling flame, and justifiably accused him of crack-smoking.
Now, I stand modded for "flamebait" while the crack-smoker hides in a cloak of anonymity, yet stands ready to spring out of hiding and maul us with his mod-points. I can't even tag him as a "foe."
Foul!, I cry!
Will this injustice stand????
Will this post send good points after bad?
Ladies and gentlemen of slashdot, the decision lays in your hands. Don't let the crack-smokers get away with this!!!
I'm sure you're right. If I had considered I would have not stated they were "well-paid," but that, as they call this Torng's life work, that Cornell sees it as quite a sum they invested over time.
I think it was outsourced in Mexico and to be honest, Mexico is not the center the of world as far as high quality standards go.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Mexico that prevents quality. "Made in Japan" used to mean junk, then Korea, then Taiwan, and with each turn the cycle has grown shorter. Globalization is not my favorite thing, and there are plenty of reasons I'd rather see the Xbox made in the US, but globalization has helped in the area of global quality standards. If you want to implement quality, you can do so, anywhere.
Outsourcing houses can shrink like crazy, even if one or two projects within the company are growing explosively. At the moment, pretty much everybody in that business is shrinking, mostly because of a shrinking number of clients and new endeavors to replace the businesses that went bust over the past 18 months. Xbox is probably one of a very few bright stars on Sykes' horizon. The Xbox project is probably benefiting from the shrinkage in other projects (all their best people will be xferred to xbox instead of getting canned).
It works like this: If you have clients, you fill as many seats as your client will pay for, you cannot lose money on that. If your client wants X number of people on the phone, you put them there, or your contract will bite you in the ass.
If you still must shave staff, you take them from middle management, not people your client pays you for. The guys on the phone are "revenue-producing." The supervisors and the managers are "non-revenue producing."
One thing that's certainly happening right now is that none of their support staff is experienced. How can they be? The things just started rolling off the lines a few weeks ago, when their staffers were out looking for work. Since we are talking about outsourcing here, we are not talking about highly-paid technical staff. Usually a client will specify a minimum rate of pay for new hires, and I guarantee it's no more than $12 an hour, possibly as low as $8. There's a fair number of bright, technically-adept people who will work for that pay, but the vast majority of applicants are not those people! Guess who gets hired? Well, if a project has a tight deadline, everybody,, because if the seats aren't filled to the client's quota when the date arrives, you lose big. The real incompetents, the ones who make you scream and tear your hair out when you get 'em on the phone, tend to weed themselves out over time.
Here's the abstract of the patent:
"An instruction issuing mechanism for boosting throughput of processors with multiple functional units. A Dispatch Stack (DS) and a Precedence Count Memory (PCM) are employed which allow multiple instructions to be issued per machine cycle. Additionally, instructions do no have to be issued according to their order in the instruction stream, so that non-sequential instruction issuance occurs. In this system, multiple instruction issuance and non-sequential instruction issuance policies enhance the throughput of processors with multiple functional units."
If that description fits the processors you mention, then you have a point.
one has to wonder what has caused the delay in action on Cornell's part
If HP did steal it, do you suppose they bragged about it? If they didn't brag, how was Cornell supposed to know what HP's microcode contained? I rather suspect that after a few years of getting away with it, some overconfident engineer at HP spilled the beans on how they maxed their speed. Bet that guy's in trouble.
According to the article, Professor H.C. Torng, who taught at Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1960 to 1999, spent most of his career working on the concept. That means over twenty years. If you don't think usurping a guy's life work results in "damages," perhaps you should try to grow a soul. Then there's Cornell's expenses for underwriting his research, I think Cornell Profs are paid rather well. The value of an unenforced patent is zero, while an enforced one very well can be worth $100 million.
"Damages" doesn't necessarily mean Cornell lost funding in a visible manner, just that they lost value in the particular patent.
As for what they need to prove, they don't need to prove the patent was taken (as in a copyright case), only that it was violated, and that can be demonstrated from the code.
That's the "Mira," and is what should have been posted here. The Homestation seems to be a hoax, or at best a half-baked report on a gadget-in-development that may never see light of day. The Register picked up the same story from PCFormat back on 9/9/01.
The same article was cited twice in slashdot in Sept.,
here and here. I know, I am the one who submitted it the 2nd time...
The phrase "dark side of the moon" is misleading here. "Far side of the moon" would be better. The new moon does not come from the moons's rotation, but from its revolution around the earth every 28 days.
Rate me redundant as I posted this before...but why is everybody having difficulty with this? How hard can it be to drop a couple of compact relays on the lunar surface?
Dear Jared.Slashdot,
I was quite interested to read your recent post to the Slashdot Message Board Community, concerning the difficulties of communicating with a radio telescope placed on the far side of the moon. You indicate that we could only communicate with it "half of the time." Which half do you mean? The half of the time when the moon is in between the earth and the radio-telescope? Or do you mean the other half of the time, when the exact same situation exists?
Slashdot Mirror
No. The point is, it's not. It's tired. Recycled. Been done. Yawn.
mod up! Insightful!
Mr. "Barry" may wish to disassociate himself from his brother Chuck, but we all know better.
Or at whatever age he became incapable of original creative thought.
Or, possibly, he's just too busy with the big movie project, so he's phoning in his columns.
Doesn't that have to be funny?
Funny:
Dilbert, Robot Monster, South Park, Jon Katz falling out of a window.
Not Funny:
Teen comedies, Jim Carrey, Recycled/Out-Of-Date 'Windows is unreliable' jokes, Dave Berry.
The real techies that do go to Fry's avoid the salespeople like the plague. Those guys will fight like sharks over a lousy 3% (or whatever) commision, and most are less knowledgeable than the customers (there are exceptions of course).
That depends on the configuration. I've been watching the pc2100 512mb sticks go steadily down toward my price range, haven't seen a single uptick yet.
So what's your point? I was just pointing out that damages had been done. Whether the damages were to a prof who spent 20 years working on an idea, or to Cornell who paid him (you say generously), it's still damages, which was my point. Whether stolen from Cornell or the Prof, it's still a life's work stolen.
In addition, these arrangements invariably involve a royalty payment to the patent author by the patent owner. So the Prof is still egtting shafted.
Note that we have a supposed "moderator" posting anonymously about why he modded somebody down, in a pompous and heavy-handed manner, including a spelling flame.
I noted this guy's own spelling mistake in his spelling flame, and justifiably accused him of crack-smoking.
Now, I stand modded for "flamebait" while the crack-smoker hides in a cloak of anonymity, yet stands ready to spring out of hiding and maul us with his mod-points. I can't even tag him as a "foe."
Foul!, I cry!
Will this injustice stand????
Will this post send good points after bad?
Ladies and gentlemen of slashdot, the decision lays in your hands. Don't let the crack-smokers get away with this!!!
I understand the abstract doesn't come into play legally, but, for the sake of this argument, the abstract's a tiny bit easier to follow!
I'm sure you're right. If I had considered I would have not stated they were "well-paid," but that, as they call this Torng's life work, that Cornell sees it as quite a sum they invested over time.
I think you mean it's "fabricated" by Flextronics. It is made (designed and spec'ed) by MS, who put their name on it.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Mexico that prevents quality. "Made in Japan" used to mean junk, then Korea, then Taiwan, and with each turn the cycle has grown shorter. Globalization is not my favorite thing, and there are plenty of reasons I'd rather see the Xbox made in the US, but globalization has helped in the area of global quality standards. If you want to implement quality, you can do so, anywhere.
Outsourcing houses can shrink like crazy, even if one or two projects within the company are growing explosively. At the moment, pretty much everybody in that business is shrinking, mostly because of a shrinking number of clients and new endeavors to replace the businesses that went bust over the past 18 months. Xbox is probably one of a very few bright stars on Sykes' horizon. The Xbox project is probably benefiting from the shrinkage in other projects (all their best people will be xferred to xbox instead of getting canned).
It works like this: If you have clients, you fill as many seats as your client will pay for, you cannot lose money on that. If your client wants X number of people on the phone, you put them there, or your contract will bite you in the ass.
If you still must shave staff, you take them from middle management, not people your client pays you for. The guys on the phone are "revenue-producing." The supervisors and the managers are "non-revenue producing."
One thing that's certainly happening right now is that none of their support staff is experienced. How can they be? The things just started rolling off the lines a few weeks ago, when their staffers were out looking for work. Since we are talking about outsourcing here, we are not talking about highly-paid technical staff. Usually a client will specify a minimum rate of pay for new hires, and I guarantee it's no more than $12 an hour, possibly as low as $8. There's a fair number of bright, technically-adept people who will work for that pay, but the vast majority of applicants are not those people! Guess who gets hired? Well, if a project has a tight deadline, everybody,, because if the seats aren't filled to the client's quota when the date arrives, you lose big. The real incompetents, the ones who make you scream and tear your hair out when you get 'em on the phone, tend to weed themselves out over time.
Here's the abstract of the patent:
"An instruction issuing mechanism for boosting throughput of processors with multiple functional units. A Dispatch Stack (DS) and a Precedence Count Memory (PCM) are employed which allow multiple instructions to be issued per machine cycle. Additionally, instructions do no have to be issued according to their order in the instruction stream, so that non-sequential instruction issuance occurs. In this system, multiple instruction issuance and non-sequential instruction issuance policies enhance the throughput of processors with multiple functional units."
If that description fits the processors you mention, then you have a point.
If HP did steal it, do you suppose they bragged about it? If they didn't brag, how was Cornell supposed to know what HP's microcode contained? I rather suspect that after a few years of getting away with it, some overconfident engineer at HP spilled the beans on how they maxed their speed. Bet that guy's in trouble.
Don't you mean "a restarant?"
When moderators decide to "mix in" why doesn't their sense of fair play tell them not to do so anonymously? Oh, I know -- too much crack!
According to the article, Professor H.C. Torng, who taught at Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1960 to 1999, spent most of his career working on the concept. That means over twenty years. If you don't think usurping a guy's life work results in "damages," perhaps you should try to grow a soul. Then there's Cornell's expenses for underwriting his research, I think Cornell Profs are paid rather well. The value of an unenforced patent is zero, while an enforced one very well can be worth $100 million.
"Damages" doesn't necessarily mean Cornell lost funding in a visible manner, just that they lost value in the particular patent.
As for what they need to prove, they don't need to prove the patent was taken (as in a copyright case), only that it was violated, and that can be demonstrated from the code.
That's the "Mira," and is what should have been posted here. The Homestation seems to be a hoax, or at best a half-baked report on a gadget-in-development that may never see light of day. The Register picked up the same story from PCFormat back on 9/9/01.
The same article was cited twice in slashdot in Sept., here and here. I know, I am the one who submitted it the 2nd time...
wait...no...I was right....as well as snide....Ro-Man is getting headache....
Yep you're right I was the one not thinking...but at least I was snide about it.
The phrase "dark side of the moon" is misleading here. "Far side of the moon" would be better. The new moon does not come from the moons's rotation, but from its revolution around the earth every 28 days.
Dear Jared.Slashdot,
I was quite interested to read your recent post to the Slashdot Message Board Community, concerning the difficulties of communicating with a radio telescope placed on the far side of the moon. You indicate that we could only communicate with it "half of the time." Which half do you mean? The half of the time when the moon is in between the earth and the radio-telescope? Or do you mean the other half of the time, when the exact same situation exists?
Transmitter in lunar orbit would be nice. Relays along the lunar surface would be cheaper though. But it ain't that tough a nut.