I still don't buy it and any shareholders in HP shouldn't, either. How can she increase income by 0.01%? Launch a new product? It's not her, it's those people producing the product that make the money. Cut costs? She's not the one doing the actual cutting - the decision on what individual department or worker stays and what goes happens at a much lower level (unless it's axing a whole division, in whihc case they're be a whole team assigned to handle it). And if she does cut costs, that implies there was waste under her watch and the money should go back into the firm or to the shareholders - not a dime of it to line her pockets.
I believe that compenent CEOs do contribute to a company more than the average joe. I just have trouble valuing any indidual in a company at more than 2000 times that of the average salary (and that assumes 50K is is the average at HP - probably a bad assumption). Ten times is a nice round, symbolic, figure more in line with CEOs in other countries.
If Carly's jet lost an engine, does she have 2000 times more rights to a parachute than the guy serving the cocktails? I don't think so.
I've heard this joke beofre, but it makes sense if you look just at the numbers. I can't find her current salary, but Carly was on track for $115M/year.
If you reduce her salary to $500,000 (ten times what a sacrificing $50K engineer might make), you can save 2290 well paying (50K) jobs.
For the life of me, can you imagine any CEO contributing as much to a company as 2290 rank and file workers? Unless they can literally print money, I have trouble imaging how an executive can make that kind of contribution compared to the employees they lead.
I posted this a long time ago, but I'll dust off the cobwebs. Basically, it was a buffer coding bug that caused a computer to reset if two toilets on an airliner were flushed simulataneously. Thankfully, it never made it to the field, but it's a nice case study on porting code and testing methodologies. Pardon the length and techie details...
In another life, I was a devloper/lead on an embedded system that controlled the cabin lighting, reading lights and attendant call lights on a popular passenger aircraft. Basically, all automated functions (except for in flight entertainment - movies, video games and such) that are used by anyone in the passenger cabins. One input was a discrete that indicated when a toilet valve was thrown (flushed). The discrete would stay set if the waste tanks were filled with, er, waste. Our system would light the "toilet occupied" light above the door, which we normally only lit when another discrete indicated the door was locked.
For various reasons, we were upgrading the computers to an embedded 80186, a workhorse 16 bit processor that my company had a lot of experience with. As a technical lead, I ported an executive (it would be misleading to call it an "embedded operating system," but it did the same job) that we had used on another 80186 based system.
The discrete driver used a linked list to handle queued inputs, chaining a number of structures together, each about 20 bytes big. I did not need a lot of the features the driver had, so I pared it down to a three byte structure. What I didn't know was that the garbage collection routine did a type casting trick with a four byte pointer (instead of putting the pointer into the structure itself or using a union) which would overwrite the three byte structures. The net result was that the chaining was worthless: the driver interrupt routine could only handle one input each time it ran (at 60Hz).
During our in house testing, we hit the dicretes as fast as we could, but we never caused the bug to show up. Our customer, however, had a dedicated lab that simulated an entire 400 passenger aircraft. To allow a single operator to stress test the system, a lot of the inputs (passenger reading light switches, attendant call switches, etc) were wired together. One such arrangement was wiring two "toilet waste tank full" discretes together.
So, shortly after we delivered our first hardware and software to the lab, the lab guys were checking out the wiring on their test stands. One of them threw the ganged switch (that is, flushed two toilets). My driver recieved two inputs in the same 1/60 of a second. It read the first, processed it just fine, then tried to read the second via a corrupted pointer and... BAM!!... my computer reset.
The lab guys thought it was hillarious. My boss was less amused, I'm afraid. Ironically, I now work for my former customer, albeit at a different division. I guess word never got out...
Breaking out the Wayback machine, some intersting war stories can be found in the first article I submitted to slashdot, "Embedded Computer War Stories".
I understand your annoyance at the hype around Harry Potter, but you shouldn't rule it out. After all, at least some kids are reading something. My hope is that a kid with a steady diet of Rowling will move onto other YA stuff and later when they're required to read Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or Hemmingway (apologies if I'm being U.S.-centric here) in high school they'll have an open enough mind to appreciate it. The real literary value of a mainstream author (Rowling, Stephan King, Danielle Steele) is that they open the door for readers to even better stuff.
The Potter books have the additional advantage of being fun and pretty well written, even if Rowling will never supplant Shakespeare.
Thanks for the reply. I too saw only about three episodes (are we begining to see the pattern that killed the series?) and came away posative, but not ecstatic (perhaps the inverse of your reaction?). Perhaps it was guilt that made me run out and buy the DVDs, but I was glad I did. There's only two episodes I was lukewarm on and only one that I consider a real stinker. That's saying a lot when you look back at season 1 of ST:TNG or most SF series.
Since you weren't gung ho in the first place, I recommend renting the DVDs instead of buying, though. Better yet, wait until January and borrow the set from a fellow geek. It's not like there's any real chance of the series coming back and viewing in a timely manner would help you view the next season.
Not to flame (honest!), but what didn't you like about it? I've always been a pushover for clever dialog and intelligent characters (ro, what I percieve as clever and intellignet), so I suspect I've been watching with rose colored glasses. My wife (a fellow geek) sat politely next to me when I played a marathon session with the DVDs last weekend, but she couldn't (wouldn't?) explain why she wasn't as enthused as I.
I'm legitimately curious, so please let me know.
P.S. A quick scan of the posted comments shows that you are indeed the only one with enough guts to speak your mind. Kudos for not using the A.C. button.
Sounds like Mutant Enemy picked the wrong network and the wrong continent for Firefly. Drop me a line if Joss starts the series up again just for the UK. I may consider emigrating.
Locus is one of the primary trade magazines for speculative fiction. It has inclued Heinlein in it's latest Notable new SF, Fantasy, and Horror books report. Kind of cool to see it there with the latest from Baxter and others.
It should be neat to track it up up the best seller lists (Locus summarizes SF titles from the major lists weekly).
For kicks, look at the bottom of the page and try to guess which opening paragraph goes with which reviewed book.
If you are starting a business, I presume you are consulting with a lawyer over the basics (partnership/incorporation issues, DBAs, employee relationship basics). If you are serious about your policies, though, you ought to have your counsel review them.
While I do not know the legal standard for such things, it would not be surprising for a court to treat your posted policies as legally binding agreements with the client. An attorney can help you avoid any unforseen pitfalls (e.g. Could a loophole in your warranty policy expose you to unforseen damages?). Your lawyer will also help you put in the legal boilerplate to allow you to comply with any subpeonas or warrants against a client by a third party (divorcing spouse seeking financial records, investigators wanting to search private files archived by you on the client's behalf for kiddie porn, etc.) without exposing yourself to liability.
As many posters have mentioned, some of the best intentions disappear when a company faces the brutal face of reality. This happens most often when you make promises without thinking through all the ramifications. While it is not possible to predict the future, I feel it would be a good idea for a firm to build flexibility ("wiggle room," not "weasel room") into their policies.
For example, many people have proppsed on the privacy front to never sell the names of contacts or clients. That database, however, might wind up being an incredibly valuble asset. Instead, I would humbly suggest to put a clause that is restrictive but clear cut: "We will never disclose a client's name or contact information to another party without that client's consent. Should we wish to sell this information, we may request your permission. Should you refuse, it will not be given out."
Perhaps not the best example, but I hope you get what I'm trying to illustrate. Can anyone think of other rights that the original poster should explictly reserve?
The article states that the device uses "technology similar to a digital camera." To me this implies a visible spectrum sensor. I was wondering if tumor tissue might stand out with more contrast in other regions of the spectrum, such as ultraviolet (I assume the body would generate too much heat to make infrared useful). If so, added sensors might be of value. Unlikely that those tissues would behave that much differently in another region of the spectrum, but it's still something I'm curious about (just in case there's any oncologists reading this thread).
Another poster brought up the issue that this technique generates enormous amounts of images that need to be examined by the doctor. To me this seems to be an ideal use for a pattern recognition utility. While it would be too much to ask software to diagnose a tumor on its own, something that flagged images where an anomoly of the correct color appears in the same place for several frames (so as to distinguish for a piece of partially digested food) might be useful in helping a specialist sieve through the backlog of images.
Apologies for stating the obvious, but you bring up a very good point: Simply because the pictures were taken in a linear order, there's no need for them to be analyzed in the same order (especially when there's so many to be analyzed). Since it's a new technology, likely no one's written up a protocol/procedure/whatever on how to analyze the images. One would hope your grandfather's doctors will soon publish a paper or simply give feedback to the camera's manufacturer that users should do something akin to a binary search: Run a first check over every tenth (or hundredth or whatever) image and then check the images in between.
Actually, you should make a point of going to your grandfather's doctors and (after thanking them with a bottle of good scotch) pester them to give exactly that feedback to the manufacturer. A letter to the manufacturer's CEO would also be a good idea. I'm sure the people who make the device would be glad to hear your story.
There's an organization called Freecycle that does a (nonprofit) variation on this theme:
The Worldwide (!) Freecycle Network is open to all cities and to all individuals who want to "recycle" that special something rather than throw it away. Whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano or an old door, feel free to post it. Or maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself! One constraint: everything posted must be free.
The site is organized by cities and most of the chapters seem to be yahoo groups, so you can't do online browsing (now there's an idea for Ebay: a "free to a good home" service for nonprofits [subject to verification and limited so as not to dent their cash flow, of course]). Still, it's a neat alternative to the landfill.
I rememebr when Sony was going after everyone who auctioned EQ items & accounts on Ebay, saying it violates the terms of service (and, yes, I know you can still find auction sites if you look hard enough where this hasn't been shut down). Wouldn't cashing out EQ PP's be basically the same thing? The FAQ dances around this by simply saying they're a currency exchange. I only skimmed it, but it appears they don't touch TOS issues at all.
I was suprised to discover that they were the same company. At first, I thought it was a recent acquisition overshadowed by HP/Compaq, but when I dug into their history I found that the merger occurred back in 1985! I had always simply assumed that Epson was a wholey owned American company.
Any slashdotters out there work for S-E? I'm curious if the corporate culture is more Japanese or American. Just wondering.
Seiko Epson Corporation ("Epson") has developed the FR ("Micro Flying Robot"), the world's smallest*1 flying prototype microrobot. Epson developed the
FR to demonstrate the micromechatronics technology that it has cultivated in-house over the years and to explore the possibilities for microrobots and the development of component technology applications. The company will display its latest offering at the 2003 International Robot Exhibition, which will be held at Tokyo Big Sight on November 19 - 22, 2003.
Based on its micromechatronics technology, which is one of the company's core technologies, Epson has developed and marketed a family of microrobots known as the EMRoS series*2, beginning with Monsieur, which was put on sale in 1993 and is listed in the
Guinness Book of Records as the world's smallest microrobot. In April of this year Epson developed Monsieur II-P, a prototype microrobot that operates on an ultra-thin, ultrasonic motor and a power-saving Bluetooth module that allows multiple units to be remote-controlled simultaneously. Using these robots, Epson also realized the world's smallest*3 full-blown robot ballet theater. In this way, Epson has played a pioneering role in research and development relating to microrobots and component technology applications.
The FR, which will be shown at the exhibition, causes levitation by use of
contra-rotating propellers powered by an ultra-thin, ultrasonic motor with the world's highest*4 power-weight ratio and can be balanced in mid-air by means of the world's first*5 stabilizing mechanism using a linear actuator. Furthermore, the essence of micromechatronics has been brought together in high-density mounting technology to minimize the size and weight of the circuitry's control unit.
By developing the FR, Epson has demonstrated the possibility of expanding the activity range of microrobots from two-dimensional space (the ground) to three-dimensional space (the air). Epson intends to use the occasion provided by the exhibition to feel out the reactions of visitors, discover and test problems related to the functional use of space by microrobots, and thus to further concentrate its efforts on advancing its original micromechatronics technology and cultivating applications to meet future needs.
*1,3,4,5: According to Epson's research.
*2: EMRoS stands for Epson Micro Robot System. The series consists of Monsieur (1 cm3 in volume; listed in the Guinness Book of Records; 1993); Nino (0.5 cm3, 1994); Ricordo (1 cm3; equipped with a recording and playback function; 1995); and Rubie (1 cm3; equipped with a capricious wandering function; 1995). All are autonomous travelling robots that chase a light source. Sales of the EMRoS series have been discontinued.
Please see the attachment for an overview of the FR.
About Epson
The Epson Group increases its corporate value through its innovative and creative culture. Dedicated to providing its customers with digital image innovation, its main product lines comprise information-related equipment such as printers and projectors, electronic devices including displays, semiconductors and quartz devices, and precision products such as watches. Epson products are known throughout the world for their superior quality, functionality, compactness and energy efficiency.
The Epson Group is a network of 73,797 employees in 114 companies around the world, and is proud of its ongoing contributions to the global environment and to the communities in which it is located. Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corp., which is listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Group had consolidated sales of 1,322 billion yen in fiscal 2002.
(Apologies if redundant - I didn't see this idea in doing a brief skim of posts)
Several posters have advocated an automatic response with a 'bot to crawl to any URLs in the EMAIL, thus flooding the site and denying a connection. Presumably, the tactic would be more effective if a few hundred expendable addresses posted on the net/usenet were used as bait. It would also not flag your personal account as a live one.
I forsee a countermeasure, though. By using human readable forms (i.e. "Type the word you see in the graphic" type gateways on Yahoo and elsewhere), a Spammer could filter out Spamkiller 'bots, just as larger sites filter the Spambots that attempt to acquire addresses in the first place. While some Spammer site bandwidth would be devoured, a properly coded site would optimize the front end and then refer real customers (suckers) to the secure server for the transaction.
I still like the idea of an automated bot doing this, if only because it would force Spammers to expend resources and also make it more difficult for Spam respondants (again, suckers) to reward the Spammers. I just think it'd be foolish for anyone to develop such a tool and assume it would not be countered in a relatively quick manner.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that compenent CEOs do contribute to a company more than the average joe. I just have trouble valuing any indidual in a company at more than 2000 times that of the average salary (and that assumes 50K is is the average at HP - probably a bad assumption). Ten times is a nice round, symbolic, figure more in line with CEOs in other countries.
If Carly's jet lost an engine, does she have 2000 times more rights to a parachute than the guy serving the cocktails? I don't think so.
If you reduce her salary to $500,000 (ten times what a sacrificing $50K engineer might make), you can save 2290 well paying (50K) jobs.
For the life of me, can you imagine any CEO contributing as much to a company as 2290 rank and file workers? Unless they can literally print money, I have trouble imaging how an executive can make that kind of contribution compared to the employees they lead.
In another life, I was a devloper/lead on an embedded system that controlled the cabin lighting, reading lights and attendant call lights on a popular passenger aircraft. Basically, all automated functions (except for in flight entertainment - movies, video games and such) that are used by anyone in the passenger cabins. One input was a discrete that indicated when a toilet valve was thrown (flushed). The discrete would stay set if the waste tanks were filled with, er, waste. Our system would light the "toilet occupied" light above the door, which we normally only lit when another discrete indicated the door was locked.
For various reasons, we were upgrading the computers to an embedded 80186, a workhorse 16 bit processor that my company had a lot of experience with. As a technical lead, I ported an executive (it would be misleading to call it an "embedded operating system," but it did the same job) that we had used on another 80186 based system.
The discrete driver used a linked list to handle queued inputs, chaining a number of structures together, each about 20 bytes big. I did not need a lot of the features the driver had, so I pared it down to a three byte structure. What I didn't know was that the garbage collection routine did a type casting trick with a four byte pointer (instead of putting the pointer into the structure itself or using a union) which would overwrite the three byte structures. The net result was that the chaining was worthless: the driver interrupt routine could only handle one input each time it ran (at 60Hz).
During our in house testing, we hit the dicretes as fast as we could, but we never caused the bug to show up. Our customer, however, had a dedicated lab that simulated an entire 400 passenger aircraft. To allow a single operator to stress test the system, a lot of the inputs (passenger reading light switches, attendant call switches, etc) were wired together. One such arrangement was wiring two "toilet waste tank full" discretes together.
So, shortly after we delivered our first hardware and software to the lab, the lab guys were checking out the wiring on their test stands. One of them threw the ganged switch (that is, flushed two toilets). My driver recieved two inputs in the same 1/60 of a second. It read the first, processed it just fine, then tried to read the second via a corrupted pointer and... BAM!!... my computer reset.
The lab guys thought it was hillarious. My boss was less amused, I'm afraid. Ironically, I now work for my former customer, albeit at a different division. I guess word never got out...
Breaking out the Wayback machine, some intersting war stories can be found in the first article I submitted to slashdot, "Embedded Computer War Stories".
The Potter books have the additional advantage of being fun and pretty well written, even if Rowling will never supplant Shakespeare.
Since you weren't gung ho in the first place, I recommend renting the DVDs instead of buying, though. Better yet, wait until January and borrow the set from a fellow geek. It's not like there's any real chance of the series coming back and viewing in a timely manner would help you view the next season.
I'm legitimately curious, so please let me know.
P.S. A quick scan of the posted comments shows that you are indeed the only one with enough guts to speak your mind. Kudos for not using the A.C. button.
Sounds like Mutant Enemy picked the wrong network and the wrong continent for Firefly. Drop me a line if Joss starts the series up again just for the UK. I may consider emigrating.
Here (compliments of Locus
It should be neat to track it up up the best seller lists (Locus summarizes SF titles from the major lists weekly).
For kicks, look at the bottom of the page and try to guess which opening paragraph goes with which reviewed book.
While I do not know the legal standard for such things, it would not be surprising for a court to treat your posted policies as legally binding agreements with the client. An attorney can help you avoid any unforseen pitfalls (e.g. Could a loophole in your warranty policy expose you to unforseen damages?). Your lawyer will also help you put in the legal boilerplate to allow you to comply with any subpeonas or warrants against a client by a third party (divorcing spouse seeking financial records, investigators wanting to search private files archived by you on the client's behalf for kiddie porn, etc.) without exposing yourself to liability.
For example, many people have proppsed on the privacy front to never sell the names of contacts or clients. That database, however, might wind up being an incredibly valuble asset. Instead, I would humbly suggest to put a clause that is restrictive but clear cut: "We will never disclose a client's name or contact information to another party without that client's consent. Should we wish to sell this information, we may request your permission. Should you refuse, it will not be given out."
Perhaps not the best example, but I hope you get what I'm trying to illustrate. Can anyone think of other rights that the original poster should explictly reserve?
It would break my heart to find out that about my dog. :)
Human nature never changes.
The article states that the device uses "technology similar to a digital camera." To me this implies a visible spectrum sensor. I was wondering if tumor tissue might stand out with more contrast in other regions of the spectrum, such as ultraviolet (I assume the body would generate too much heat to make infrared useful). If so, added sensors might be of value. Unlikely that those tissues would behave that much differently in another region of the spectrum, but it's still something I'm curious about (just in case there's any oncologists reading this thread).
Just my $0.02.
Actually, you should make a point of going to your grandfather's doctors and (after thanking them with a bottle of good scotch) pester them to give exactly that feedback to the manufacturer. A letter to the manufacturer's CEO would also be a good idea. I'm sure the people who make the device would be glad to hear your story.
Heehee. Heehee. He said "laptop"!!!
</Beevis Voice>
<Ducks>
Hmmm... Since I'm not in the markst, I hadn't thought of the obvious approach. I wonder if it would work for other metals.
The Worldwide (!) Freecycle Network is open to all cities and to all individuals who want to "recycle" that special something rather than throw it away. Whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano or an old door, feel free to post it. Or maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself! One constraint: everything posted must be free.
The site is organized by cities and most of the chapters seem to be yahoo groups, so you can't do online browsing (now there's an idea for Ebay: a "free to a good home" service for nonprofits [subject to verification and limited so as not to dent their cash flow, of course]). Still, it's a neat alternative to the landfill.
Does anyone have a take on this?
Any slashdotters out there work for S-E? I'm curious if the corporate culture is more Japanese or American. Just wondering.
Damn. I was hoping to add one to my list for Santa/Thinkgeek
Epson Develops World's Smallest Flying Microrobot
-TOKYO, Japan, November 17 -
Seiko Epson Corporation ("Epson") has developed the FR ("Micro Flying Robot"), the world's smallest*1 flying prototype microrobot. Epson developed the FR to demonstrate the micromechatronics technology that it has cultivated in-house over the years and to explore the possibilities for microrobots and the development of component technology applications. The company will display its latest offering at the 2003 International Robot Exhibition, which will be held at Tokyo Big Sight on November 19 - 22, 2003.
Based on its micromechatronics technology, which is one of the company's core technologies, Epson has developed and marketed a family of microrobots known as the EMRoS series*2, beginning with Monsieur, which was put on sale in 1993 and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's smallest microrobot. In April of this year Epson developed Monsieur II-P, a prototype microrobot that operates on an ultra-thin, ultrasonic motor and a power-saving Bluetooth module that allows multiple units to be remote-controlled simultaneously. Using these robots, Epson also realized the world's smallest*3 full-blown robot ballet theater. In this way, Epson has played a pioneering role in research and development relating to microrobots and component technology applications.
The FR, which will be shown at the exhibition, causes levitation by use of contra-rotating propellers powered by an ultra-thin, ultrasonic motor with the world's highest*4 power-weight ratio and can be balanced in mid-air by means of the world's first*5 stabilizing mechanism using a linear actuator. Furthermore, the essence of micromechatronics has been brought together in high-density mounting technology to minimize the size and weight of the circuitry's control unit.
By developing the FR, Epson has demonstrated the possibility of expanding the activity range of microrobots from two-dimensional space (the ground) to three-dimensional space (the air). Epson intends to use the occasion provided by the exhibition to feel out the reactions of visitors, discover and test problems related to the functional use of space by microrobots, and thus to further concentrate its efforts on advancing its original micromechatronics technology and cultivating applications to meet future needs.
*1,3,4,5: According to Epson's research.
*2: EMRoS stands for Epson Micro Robot System. The series consists of Monsieur (1 cm3 in volume; listed in the Guinness Book of Records; 1993); Nino (0.5 cm3, 1994); Ricordo (1 cm3; equipped with a recording and playback function; 1995); and Rubie (1 cm3; equipped with a capricious wandering function; 1995). All are autonomous travelling robots that chase a light source. Sales of the EMRoS series have been discontinued.
Please see the attachment for an overview of the FR.
About Epson
The Epson Group increases its corporate value through its innovative and creative culture. Dedicated to providing its customers with digital image innovation, its main product lines comprise information-related equipment such as printers and projectors, electronic devices including displays, semiconductors and quartz devices, and precision products such as watches. Epson products are known throughout the world for their superior quality, functionality, compactness and energy efficiency.
The Epson Group is a network of 73,797 employees in 114 companies around the world, and is proud of its ongoing contributions to the global environment and to the communities in which it is located. Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corp., which is listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Group had consolidated sales of 1,322 billion yen in fiscal 2002.
Seiko Epson Corp.
Corporate Communications,
+81-266-58-1705 or +81-3-3340-2637
E-mail
http://www.epson.co.jp/e/
Several posters have advocated an automatic response with a 'bot to crawl to any URLs in the EMAIL, thus flooding the site and denying a connection. Presumably, the tactic would be more effective if a few hundred expendable addresses posted on the net/usenet were used as bait. It would also not flag your personal account as a live one.
I forsee a countermeasure, though. By using human readable forms (i.e. "Type the word you see in the graphic" type gateways on Yahoo and elsewhere), a Spammer could filter out Spamkiller 'bots, just as larger sites filter the Spambots that attempt to acquire addresses in the first place. While some Spammer site bandwidth would be devoured, a properly coded site would optimize the front end and then refer real customers (suckers) to the secure server for the transaction.
I still like the idea of an automated bot doing this, if only because it would force Spammers to expend resources and also make it more difficult for Spam respondants (again, suckers) to reward the Spammers. I just think it'd be foolish for anyone to develop such a tool and assume it would not be countered in a relatively quick manner.