I wager that most companies are incapable of recognizing top programming talent, let alone nurturing such talent, offering a wage matching their skill, or offering a viable career path that doesn't end in management or even a leadership role. In fact, most larger corporations I've seen aren't even capable of using top talent accidentally; the way the work is organized in cookie cutter roles and jobs means that they are really better off with cheaper average talent; top talent will be somewhat better in those roles, but not that much.
If you want to prove these companies' inability to protect their customers, you hack into their systems and publish some anonymized but verifiable data. This is just petty vandalism; DDOSing game companies does not endanger customers or their privacy, it just denies them a service they paid for. It's like parking your truck across the entrance to the parking lot, in order to "prove that the mall has poor security".
Absolutely, and the skill and factors I mentioned are things that increase your chances of success, they by no means guarantee it. While I do believe that there's more to success than stupid luck, I also think that what we can learn from successful entrepreneurs is a great deal less than what MBA teachers and writers of business books lead us to believe. Perhaps Steve Jobs started in a garage at an early age, went for morning walks, always had cereal for lunch, and asked his mom for one piece of business advice every weekend, and made it a point to publicly humiliate at least one of his execs every week, or whatever (I made these up to make a point), but there's little point in blindly copying that behaviour to try and achieve our own success.
Many of us have had a few good business ideas at some point. The success of many entrepreneurs can be attributed to luck, being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people, rather than just having that great idea. But they then also have to recognize the idea as being good, recognize the opportunity presented by Lady Luck (timeliness and the right friends), have the guts to seize the opportunity and stake one's future on it, and then have the wherewithal to build a company around that idea.
I kinda miss Radio Shack... The shops were branded "Tandy" over here, and disappeared some time in the 90s, but as a kid I spent many hours in that shop. I might still have my Free Battery Club card somewhere!
Anyway, I'm holding out for a Commodore smart phone!
The idea wasn't even that good when it was invented.
“The granting of patents ‘inflames cupidity', excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits...The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just.”
That is what the Economist had to say about patents... in 1851.
The idea that inventors (both people toiling in their garage and Big Pharm companies spending billions on medical R&D) should be encouraged to invest their effort into research and share the results by allowing them to profit from them, is a valid one. But patents are, and have been for over a century, a particularly poor way to ensure reward for inventors without stifling innovation. And remember that patents were not even invented with the purpose of ensuring a profit for inventors; the purpose was to encourage inventors to share so that society as a whole might benefit. The inventor's profit was a means rather than an end.
It doesn't by definition. But I fail to see how 24 fps is aesthetically better. Some movies work better in black & white, but only some. (Reminds me of a scene with an aspiring cinematographer sitting in a bar, fawning over some "artsy" B&W movie playing on the TV... until the barman whacks the old set on the side, and the screen snaps back to color). Likewise, some movies might be better at 24fps, but I suspect the "soap opera effect"will be gone with a generation or two, and the next generations will prefer the higher framerate once 24 fps is associated with "old people movies".
You'll get used to it, it's just cultural bias. HFR movies and other content viewed on HDTVs that do motion interpolation look like soap operas because for a long time, soap operas were shot with video cameras with a higher framerate, whereas any serious production was shot on film stock (and most such productions are still shot at 24fps). The result is the "soap opera effect", in that we still associate the technically superior framerate with cheap-ass productions.
With that said, the CGI was pretty pad in "the Hobbit" at times, and some scenes got padded to incredible length ("when is that barrel riding scene going to end?!"). One movie wouldn't have done justice to the story, but 3 was too much.
For a small asteroid, the best response is not to do nothing, but to figure out where the thing is going to hit, and if it's going to hit a populated area, advise the authorities to start an evacuation or advise people to seek shelter. That is what ESA's exercise was about: can they gather, process, and share the right information in a timely manner?
"Andrews & Arnold Ltd". Sounds more like a haberdasher than an ISP. I love it! Companies seem to be struggling to come up with good names; the trend here is to use a common word with a Q or Z added somewhere, or they just pick a vaguely Latin sounding but fully anonymous and forgettable name. Nothing wrong with just using the names of the founders.
Wouldn't an impact wrench have been a more appropriate tool in that case? Or a regular wrench + a good number of firm taps with a hammer? An 18" lever and floor jack sounds like a good recipe to break off a frozen bolt.
Sure, information needs to be passed back and forth between the office and the plant. The first step in security is to assume that your office network is the same as "the Internet": you don't know what's on there, it is full of malware and hackers, and they are actively out to try and get you. Assume your office network fully compromised, and secure the production network accordingly.
Some people prefer hardware keyboards. I'm not one of them; I prefer to have a slimmer device with a larger screen instead, but I've tried one of the old BB models (one with a trackball) and found that its keyboard was rather good for typing longer messages. I can see the attraction if most of what you do is email and messaging.
What a lot of people (myself included) didn't appreciate is how much people hate having to carry two devices. Where I work, many people had a BB provided by the company as well as a personal cell phone (smart or otherwise). As soon as the company offered corporate email and calendar on personal smartphones, pretty much everyone dropped BB and continued to use their personal device. And pretty much no one choose BB as their personal device either. TFA praises BB for not trying to appeal to the mass market with this device, and instead offer something that does a couple of things really well, but BB need to understand that in the world of bring-your-own-device, the reality is that your device needs to service personal needs as well as business needs. Having a physical keyboard and a great messaging app clearly doesn't cut it anymore.
Adding the ability to run Android apps on modern BB phones is a great move though. That may be exactly what is needed to make them good enough for personal use.
Indeed, only the biggest companies have that integration. These are the "sprawling multinational oil corporations" GP was talking about. By the way, even the majors increasingly farm out work and expertise to service companies, and we're now close to the point where the small national oil companies can now hire that same expertise to handle more complex exploration and production projects, without needing to bring in the majors.
You mean the oil companies that are putting billions upon billions of dollars on the line and running significant risks, as opposed to the government who just stamp a concession and sit back to collect. Compare the nr. of dollars earned vs. the amount invested by oil companies, and you see decent but not exorbitant returns. Especially with the price of extracting that oil rising, and the price per barrel being relatively low at the moment. Now compare the amount of money that the government makes at the pump, compared to what the oil companies make. You know, the guys who find, extract, move, refine and ultimately sell it to us. In the US the ratio is 7:1; in Europe it's much worse. States do pretty well by that measure.
Of course you can argue that it's good that the states profit so much from oil, since ultimately that means we profit (by lower taxes or better services). However you can consider if the government is really the best party to decide how to spend a windfall like this. Look up "Dutch disease" to see what I mean. Norway is doing a lot better with that extra income, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
This. As far as I can hear, compression is the main difference between vinyl and digital, and that's something that is caused by the guys doing the mastering, not by the medium. For fun, compare a recording of an album like Californication on vinyl against the CD, and marvel at the difference. Now, rip that vinyl to your computer and turn it into a file using a lossless codec (or even use MP3 at a higher bitrate). You'll find that the audio file will faithfully reproduce the vinyl recording, pops, crackles, "warmth" and dynamic range and all.
It's sad that masters made for vinyl are not available as digital downloads, but perhaps ther ecord companies prefer to serve the long tail of the market with physical vinyl exclusively. Because selling proper masters might well eat significanly into that market, social factors and album art notwithstanding.
Memberships and influence. Greenpeace have repeatedly shown to put those before their stated goals, before simple integrity and truth, and before their own volunteers. Greenpeace's real mission is Greenpeace.
Maybe the CIA are thinking the same thing. They send the "artist" and his helpers into the embassy to make a cast of Assange, freeze him in carbonite instead and smuggle him to the USA that way. He'll end up as the favourite decoration in John Brennan's office.
Recommending people to learn how to code because computers play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives is laudable if you're a tech writer and open source advocate, but if you do so as a tech billionaire, you motives are immediately suspect? That's nice...
Besides that, the difference between coders and non-coders in any profession is remarkably apparent; people who have learned coding at some point in their life seem to be the better troubleshooters and analysts. There are other ways to acquire those useful skills and some people will have a natural aptitude for them, but apparently coding is a very good exercise to impart them. I'd say that coding is a useful subject in school even for people who will never code professionally later in life.
But you're not just selling widgets, you are also building roads to be able to bring those widgets to your customers, and paying for those roads with the sales of those widgets. If your customers are making their own widgets but are still using your roads to buy and sell them, your loss not only consists of the 1 cent net profit per widget; the average per-widget cost of that road is a loss as well. This means that you have to start charging the cost of the road separately instead of rolling it into the cost of each widget, and that is the problem: utilities will have to change their business models but in a lot of cases regulation prevents them from doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
I wager that most companies are incapable of recognizing top programming talent, let alone nurturing such talent, offering a wage matching their skill, or offering a viable career path that doesn't end in management or even a leadership role. In fact, most larger corporations I've seen aren't even capable of using top talent accidentally; the way the work is organized in cookie cutter roles and jobs means that they are really better off with cheaper average talent; top talent will be somewhat better in those roles, but not that much.
this raises the issue again of the always-on-line model for current gen gaming.
Now that would have been an excellent point to make, and a DDoS attack would be a good way to demonstrate the point.
If you want to prove these companies' inability to protect their customers, you hack into their systems and publish some anonymized but verifiable data. This is just petty vandalism; DDOSing game companies does not endanger customers or their privacy, it just denies them a service they paid for. It's like parking your truck across the entrance to the parking lot, in order to "prove that the mall has poor security".
Absolutely, and the skill and factors I mentioned are things that increase your chances of success, they by no means guarantee it. While I do believe that there's more to success than stupid luck, I also think that what we can learn from successful entrepreneurs is a great deal less than what MBA teachers and writers of business books lead us to believe. Perhaps Steve Jobs started in a garage at an early age, went for morning walks, always had cereal for lunch, and asked his mom for one piece of business advice every weekend, and made it a point to publicly humiliate at least one of his execs every week, or whatever (I made these up to make a point), but there's little point in blindly copying that behaviour to try and achieve our own success.
Are there any credible, scientific publications on LENR? Most articles on the subject are on Newenergytimes and E-catworld, which are hardly serious.
Many of us have had a few good business ideas at some point. The success of many entrepreneurs can be attributed to luck, being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people, rather than just having that great idea. But they then also have to recognize the idea as being good, recognize the opportunity presented by Lady Luck (timeliness and the right friends), have the guts to seize the opportunity and stake one's future on it, and then have the wherewithal to build a company around that idea.
I kinda miss Radio Shack... The shops were branded "Tandy" over here, and disappeared some time in the 90s, but as a kid I spent many hours in that shop. I might still have my Free Battery Club card somewhere!
Anyway, I'm holding out for a Commodore smart phone!
“The granting of patents ‘inflames cupidity', excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits...The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just.”
That is what the Economist had to say about patents... in 1851. The idea that inventors (both people toiling in their garage and Big Pharm companies spending billions on medical R&D) should be encouraged to invest their effort into research and share the results by allowing them to profit from them, is a valid one. But patents are, and have been for over a century, a particularly poor way to ensure reward for inventors without stifling innovation. And remember that patents were not even invented with the purpose of ensuring a profit for inventors; the purpose was to encourage inventors to share so that society as a whole might benefit. The inventor's profit was a means rather than an end.
It doesn't by definition. But I fail to see how 24 fps is aesthetically better. Some movies work better in black & white, but only some. (Reminds me of a scene with an aspiring cinematographer sitting in a bar, fawning over some "artsy" B&W movie playing on the TV... until the barman whacks the old set on the side, and the screen snaps back to color). Likewise, some movies might be better at 24fps, but I suspect the "soap opera effect"will be gone with a generation or two, and the next generations will prefer the higher framerate once 24 fps is associated with "old people movies".
You'll get used to it, it's just cultural bias. HFR movies and other content viewed on HDTVs that do motion interpolation look like soap operas because for a long time, soap operas were shot with video cameras with a higher framerate, whereas any serious production was shot on film stock (and most such productions are still shot at 24fps). The result is the "soap opera effect", in that we still associate the technically superior framerate with cheap-ass productions.
With that said, the CGI was pretty pad in "the Hobbit" at times, and some scenes got padded to incredible length ("when is that barrel riding scene going to end?!"). One movie wouldn't have done justice to the story, but 3 was too much.
For a small asteroid, the best response is not to do nothing, but to figure out where the thing is going to hit, and if it's going to hit a populated area, advise the authorities to start an evacuation or advise people to seek shelter. That is what ESA's exercise was about: can they gather, process, and share the right information in a timely manner?
"Andrews & Arnold Ltd". Sounds more like a haberdasher than an ISP. I love it! Companies seem to be struggling to come up with good names; the trend here is to use a common word with a Q or Z added somewhere, or they just pick a vaguely Latin sounding but fully anonymous and forgettable name. Nothing wrong with just using the names of the founders.
Wouldn't an impact wrench have been a more appropriate tool in that case? Or a regular wrench + a good number of firm taps with a hammer? An 18" lever and floor jack sounds like a good recipe to break off a frozen bolt.
"The best socket wrench is the one you have on you"
Sure, information needs to be passed back and forth between the office and the plant. The first step in security is to assume that your office network is the same as "the Internet": you don't know what's on there, it is full of malware and hackers, and they are actively out to try and get you. Assume your office network fully compromised, and secure the production network accordingly.
Some people prefer hardware keyboards. I'm not one of them; I prefer to have a slimmer device with a larger screen instead, but I've tried one of the old BB models (one with a trackball) and found that its keyboard was rather good for typing longer messages. I can see the attraction if most of what you do is email and messaging.
What a lot of people (myself included) didn't appreciate is how much people hate having to carry two devices. Where I work, many people had a BB provided by the company as well as a personal cell phone (smart or otherwise). As soon as the company offered corporate email and calendar on personal smartphones, pretty much everyone dropped BB and continued to use their personal device. And pretty much no one choose BB as their personal device either. TFA praises BB for not trying to appeal to the mass market with this device, and instead offer something that does a couple of things really well, but BB need to understand that in the world of bring-your-own-device, the reality is that your device needs to service personal needs as well as business needs. Having a physical keyboard and a great messaging app clearly doesn't cut it anymore.
Adding the ability to run Android apps on modern BB phones is a great move though. That may be exactly what is needed to make them good enough for personal use.
RIM has been dogfooding so long that they're institutionally blind.
That "word" needs to die a quick and painful death... If you want to use that saying as a verb, just write "have been eating their own dog food".
Indeed, only the biggest companies have that integration. These are the "sprawling multinational oil corporations" GP was talking about. By the way, even the majors increasingly farm out work and expertise to service companies, and we're now close to the point where the small national oil companies can now hire that same expertise to handle more complex exploration and production projects, without needing to bring in the majors.
And here's your citation: Oil Company Earnings: Reality Over Rhetoric for the US. For the Netherlands: Winst op benzine rekbaar begrip. Long story in Dutch, but the most optimistic view (that of the ministry of economics) still puts the ratio of tax vs profits at 4.6:1
Just Google it, do your own homework.
You mean the oil companies that are putting billions upon billions of dollars on the line and running significant risks, as opposed to the government who just stamp a concession and sit back to collect. Compare the nr. of dollars earned vs. the amount invested by oil companies, and you see decent but not exorbitant returns. Especially with the price of extracting that oil rising, and the price per barrel being relatively low at the moment. Now compare the amount of money that the government makes at the pump, compared to what the oil companies make. You know, the guys who find, extract, move, refine and ultimately sell it to us. In the US the ratio is 7:1; in Europe it's much worse. States do pretty well by that measure.
Of course you can argue that it's good that the states profit so much from oil, since ultimately that means we profit (by lower taxes or better services). However you can consider if the government is really the best party to decide how to spend a windfall like this. Look up "Dutch disease" to see what I mean. Norway is doing a lot better with that extra income, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
This. As far as I can hear, compression is the main difference between vinyl and digital, and that's something that is caused by the guys doing the mastering, not by the medium. For fun, compare a recording of an album like Californication on vinyl against the CD, and marvel at the difference. Now, rip that vinyl to your computer and turn it into a file using a lossless codec (or even use MP3 at a higher bitrate). You'll find that the audio file will faithfully reproduce the vinyl recording, pops, crackles, "warmth" and dynamic range and all.
It's sad that masters made for vinyl are not available as digital downloads, but perhaps ther ecord companies prefer to serve the long tail of the market with physical vinyl exclusively. Because selling proper masters might well eat significanly into that market, social factors and album art notwithstanding.
Memberships and influence. Greenpeace have repeatedly shown to put those before their stated goals, before simple integrity and truth, and before their own volunteers. Greenpeace's real mission is Greenpeace.
Maybe the CIA are thinking the same thing. They send the "artist" and his helpers into the embassy to make a cast of Assange, freeze him in carbonite instead and smuggle him to the USA that way. He'll end up as the favourite decoration in John Brennan's office.
Recommending people to learn how to code because computers play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives is laudable if you're a tech writer and open source advocate, but if you do so as a tech billionaire, you motives are immediately suspect? That's nice...
Besides that, the difference between coders and non-coders in any profession is remarkably apparent; people who have learned coding at some point in their life seem to be the better troubleshooters and analysts. There are other ways to acquire those useful skills and some people will have a natural aptitude for them, but apparently coding is a very good exercise to impart them. I'd say that coding is a useful subject in school even for people who will never code professionally later in life.
But you're not just selling widgets, you are also building roads to be able to bring those widgets to your customers, and paying for those roads with the sales of those widgets. If your customers are making their own widgets but are still using your roads to buy and sell them, your loss not only consists of the 1 cent net profit per widget; the average per-widget cost of that road is a loss as well. This means that you have to start charging the cost of the road separately instead of rolling it into the cost of each widget, and that is the problem: utilities will have to change their business models but in a lot of cases regulation prevents them from doing so.