I love BMWs but if that BMW ad is par for the course this is one irritate advertising product! Like mentioned above: this will spur me to learn how to tweak blocking in Moz!
What I find fascinating is the difference in strategies for implementing a nation-wide WiFi cloud, particularly related to Cringely's recent
article
about how to jump start pervasive WiFi. The latter is typically American capitalist ingenuity (the idea is quite inspired, IMO, and probably the only way it will happen in the US), compared to the top-down, government "10-year-plan" style of solution of this idea for GB. Both involve piggy-backing WiFi on other objectives. It's the objectives difference that says so much about each country's view of itself and its people!
This is why I'm a nerd who's discovered a fondness for sociology and psychology! Those subjects have more impact on what technologies will take hold in the future than engineering excellence or creativity (unfortunately, the nerd in me says).
There are two "sustainable" sources of GDP growth: population growth and technology innovation. By that I mean, sources that have any chance of ongoing exponential growth, aka the definition of a "healthy economy".
Government spending can contribute to growth but it's a degenerative feedback loop - government "expenses" like taxes tend to eat up a portion of the economic kick each time money flows back through the goverment since most income is taxed. Thus government spending creates a blip which dissipates - if other growth sources aren't on the edge of recovery, the economy won't catch "fire" and start growing.
A space mission would eventually create technological innovation to fuel growth but it takes time to develop new technologies in the first place, more time for a critical mass of technology portfolios that are cross-purposeable outside of government/military to accumulate, and even more time for those technologies to finally take root. The rule of thumb is 15-25 years from the first scientific discovery/creation to the point when noticeable economic benefit results. Consider the Internet. Consider transistors. Consider integrated circuits. Of course you may not pick the correct newly discovered technology to bet on today.
It's not entirely clear how cost effective a Space Program would be. Sure there have been "homeruns" like semiconductors, computers and integrated circuits which never would of existed with the Cold War and the Space Race, but what's in the pipeline that would apply to a space mission, and then be applicable to a broader. The next "Velcro" won't power a major economic burst. Another internet or transistor might. Unfortunately computers and semiconductors themselves are mostly in evolution mode, rather than revolution mode. The "next big things" like nanotechnology and biotechnology are either just entering their 20-year obligatory incubation period or have industrio-technological structural impediments that will prevent revolutionary advances, and neither would seem to have a major role in a space program anyway.
My net-net is: don't assume a new space program will fix anything economically. If Bush thinks it will, he's, again, deluded. The time-constants are all wrong. If you use economics as a justification for a space program you are perpetrating an improbability. There are other good reasons to have a program. Jobs mean stability even if you don't have net growth. A space program, done right, can inspire a nation which is not a trivial thing. If you allow a economic window of 10-30 years, by then a space program will almost certain contribute to technology - the Net Present Value is still debateable. We certainly don't think that far ahead often enough though.
Since this was done on GaAs/InP, it pretty much assures that the massive adoption date is anywhere from Today+20years to Today+infinity. In case you hadn't heard, GaAs, and III-V in general, has been the "next big thing" in semductors for nearly 30 years now. It's pretty much a niche technology only used when Si absolutely can't do the job at any price because the price to do III-V is usually so high in capital and tech issues that Si, even when price inflated 1-2 orders of magnitude, is *still* overall cheaper.
Things that would get my attention:
implemented in SiGe instead of III-V materials
bidirectional transduction in O->E not just O->E at usable efficiencies
demonstration of integration into "conventional" manufacturing processes
Otherwise, it's an interesting academic exercise that might lead to the above points, which is "A Good Thing".
The corporate officers have their personal assets protected by being a C-corp, S-corp or LLC if and only if the corporation and its officers act within the law. The smoke and smell suggests massive criminal fraud by SCO and its executives. Their personal assets (homes, investments, cash...) could very well be on the line regardless of whether SCO Inc. is bankrupt.
Software Development Licensing won't work for the same reason Professional Engineer certification doesn't work for Electrical Engineering: the time constant of government licensing bureaucracy is orders of magnitude longer than the time constant of technology and professional change of the industry. By the time a new subject or advance has been incorporated into the certification process, it's already obsolete or superceded. The software industry definitely qualifies in the same way: the constant mantra of complaint is how nobody can keep up with the rate of change. To use a nerdy engineering analogy: you would be trying to push a high, increasing frequency signal though a fixed, low-pass filter, with the net result being essentially 100% attenuation of usable signal.
So, you say, we'll just test the fundamentals. Wrong! I sat for the California EE EIT (the pre-test for PE) back in the 80s: most of the test subjects were Civil, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering which no EE student gets any courses on, simply because there isn't even enough time in a four-year program to get everything in your own specialization, let alone the rest of EE, let alone any other field of engineering.
What few EE question there were (less than 10 out of 200-odd questions) included out-of-date novelties such as vacuum tubes and subjects like rotating machinery and power systems, a hyper-niche of EE that certainly an IC designer like myself would have never had classes in. I recently looked into the exam again and the test is essentially the same 20 years hence, despite being already out-of-date 20 years ago! Conclusion: PE Certification == irrelevant waste of time for any modern technology industry.
This is precisely what would happen to Software Development Licensing: it will become a dubious and irrelevant hurdle that disadvantages US programmers against the rest of the world. Has MSCE certification somehow made Windows installations the button-down, high-security platform that Unix more often is without any universal certification standards? Unless you have lived in at cave in 2003...
Professional Engineer certification works for Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering only because the core knowledge of these fields either ceased to advance more than 100 years ago or advanced only slowly with adoption of new technologies developed by other, non-regulated disciplines like CS, EE and Mat'l Sci. By contrast, the core knowledge of CS and EE have changed on almost a decade basis. When I first stated programming 30 years ago, the state of the art of common usage was FORTRAN and COBOL; then came procedural languages in the 80s, and then OO in the 90s. Each generation radically changed what was fundamentally possible to implement.
As an example: my father is a California PE in ME who does HVAC work. The only major advances in HVAC in the last 50-75 years have come from importation of CS and EE discipline advances in computing and sensors. The basic lore of enthalpy, steam tables and refrigerants was complete in the 19th century and early 20th century. In CE, berm, dam and road design theory hasn't had major technical changes since the 19th century, in some cases the 18th century; only materials developed by other disciplines have changed the constants that go into the same design equations used since the 19th century. It is precisely this "last century/centuries" knowlege that dominates professional exams in these disciplines.
It just shows that the people advocating this know nothing about existing engineering certification/licensing or the history of engineering as a whole, and worse know nothing of software development despite possibly even being former software developers.
To adopt such a thing would only guarantee that what few software development jobs that remain in the United States, after globalization exported most of the rest, will finally be destroyed also. That may suit profit-seeking business interests and micromanaging government bureaucrats, but in terms of national interest it will assure that mission-critical software is only developed outside the United States which makes backing such a proposal nothing short of treason.
If you think that only skills matter you're being naive. It's not politics to consider behavior and history of the individual in hiring (even though politics happen when you have two or more people interacting, so unless you live alone in a cave you can't divorce politics from anything). Non-technical skills have a direct bearing on results because technology does not exist in a vacuum. Can I trust someone with my business who quietly accepted ethical and moral misdeeds? Hell no!
Would I consider an applicant's job history and employers? Absolutely, because I consider a prospective employee's ethics as important as their skills. That I do so probably means I'll never be a Bill Gates, but quite frankly that suits me fine. I could not live with myself even if Bill can.
Would I summarily reject someone with SCO on their resume? Not if they worked at the original Santa Cruz Operation or SCO/Caldera pre-Daryl. Post-Daryl is absolutely a major red-flag: you'd have to assure me you weren't complicit by commission and by omission. Anyone at director level or above, including the board and any law firm associated with SCO? Summarily guilty and duely condemned by words and deeds to a life sentence. I won't hire you. I won't do business with you. I won't do business with people who do either. I won't associate with you professionally, socially or any other way. I won't eat at the same table with you. I won't give you money if you are homeless. I won't dial 911 if I find you on the side of the road bleeding to death. As human beings, you have ceased to exist. No possibility for parole short of making Mother Teresa look like a shiftless tramp.
Life is about the choices we make. We always make choices including not choosing, which is making a choice. The excuse of mortgage, kids, bills is just that: an excuse. A b*ull-sh*t excuse, IMO. You always, I mean, absolutely always, have a choice. If you believe you are "forced", it is just a belief, taken axiomatic or without contemplation, such as the belief you can't live without your SUV or your PS2 or you can't earn money some other way or that you can only be happy with your current lifestyle and level of affluence, or that you must be a sycophant to an SO's childish and greedy whims. Again, pointing to a fundamental problem within the individual's abilities to cope with the real world and ethics. Thankfully someone has already invoked Godwin's Law on this point.
BTW, other companies on resumes that raise red flags with me also include Microsoft and Oracle (big surprise). I primarily look at the words and deeds of a company's leadship and the nature of my interactions with line employees. If both are uniformally and consistently negative, it raises a flag. An applicant must prove they weren't part of the negative status quo. Life is too short to put up with *ss-h*les and miscreants, not matter how technically talented they may be!
Perhaps fortunately, there are only some many Congress-critters to account for. Black-holing them should be pretty easy. Add a press release when each is to explain their ethical lapse...
It's not just Microsoft's product adoption that may be tipping, but even their continued existence as a viable, ongoing business concern. Bill is correct to be paranoid, but not for the reasons he has stated in the past: being "competed to death" isn't really the whole story. This situation is pretty much a perfect storm of Microsoft's own creation and if Microsoft has problems it's because they've been sharpening the knife for years and have proceeded to stick the knife in their own chest without anyone else helping.
Ask yourself: how does Microsoft plan to continue double digit growth in the future when their core and only profitable markets are essentially saturated and, importantly, becoming elastic on price (demand changes with price). One of the signs: last years CIO revolt. Microsoft has only actual customer markets: IT dept and SW devels - end users are not their customers, as much as they might publically try to deny it! CIOs continue this revolt every time they pick Linux or BSD which seems to be picking up.
It's abundantly clear that Microsoft faces a revenue crunch in the next five years (if not sooner) that could very well destroy them. Simply stated they can not continue to simply raise prices to fund their revenue needs, yet growth in profitable business isn't there (where do you go from 95% market-share?). This is so clear that denying it would be comparable to saying Enron still has potential for profits. Their market-broadening ventures are still essentially failures: they still lose money (only now, more) on every X-Box; their other ventures like MSN only have decreased revenue projections based on available customers and price pressures.
Linux and BSD provide a killer value proposition that's hard to fight, and its not even mostly the price issue. Price matters but choice probably matter more, be it the choice to change distributions, the choice of hardware, the choice to go directly to the code; the value of choice makes the relative price even do negative when compared to escalating prices, security problems, and bloatware-driven hardware purchases.
Of couse, Microsoft has gotten to this point by following, rather slavishly and short-sightedly, exactly the maxims of Harvard's Dr. Michael Porter who is meat-and-potatoes for MBAs as "Competitive Strategy". If you've heard phrases like "barrier to entry" and "barriers to exit", you've heard of Porter. Microsoft has almost religiously followed Porter analysis and techniques. Every dirty trick in the "Embrace and Extend" is classic Porter executed on a tactical level utterly devoid of moral limits. What was missing was the work of Stanford University's Dr. Baron's "Business and it Environment". Business can *not* simply be about profit maximization alone because business does not exist in a vacuum disconnected from the rest of society, though Microsoft has largely acted over the last 20 years as if it is and does.
Their utter lack of business ethics over the last 20 years have pretty much assured that their own allies in the future will have be paid for loyalty and paid well. How can you afford to be that lavish when revenues and profits cap? Well for a while they still might be able to buy people off in exchange for a modicum of apparent loyalty. Yes, that might include politicians making protectionist legislation for them, but the fact they have outsourced overseas as much if not more than other corporations will make that course a patriotic tar-baby many would avoid at the very moments Microsoft needs them most.
So what happens when Microsoft products are actively shunned by most of the world, are priced far too high to be competitive and their stock tanks when revenue caps? Desperate acts are likely. Yes, SCO certainly fits past behavior even if Microsoft has plausible deniability or the unlikely seeming true lack of culpability. Such is the hole of muck they've dug for themselves. Well, let's just say shorting Microsoft may actually become profitable soon. This includes the choi
The question is whether you want to actually communicate the specific information of the request
"I want you to stop spamming me", or if you to communication the specific information "HATE HATE HATE HATE". The former may gain the original poster's goal. The latter will be disconnected from that goal.
I don't see the point of simply being harrassing without wanting to achieve something specific. Harrassing for the pleasure of it makes you a sociopath, not a legitimately aggrieved consumer escalating ignored requests. Another reason I'd include my real contact info and moderate the attack to irritating but not excessive.
Does anyone still use thermally printed faxes anymore? At least in California, particularlly a dot-com-ish kind of company, I certainly doubt it. Inkjet is more likely.
When you can't find the obvious contact point, try the non-obvious ones: there is contact info on their employment page
There's a fax #. It says to mark the fax "ATTN: Recruitment", but if you send 100 faxes with "ATTN: Spamming Department", it will probably get to the right place, be it marketing or IT. Try to be nice and polite, but clearly indignant.
There's also a nice job application web form. If they got 1000 applications (you're a geek, cobble up a Perl LWP program), all with a message asking them to stop spamming you, again it will probably get escalated and do you some good. Include the full text of relevant federal and state anti-spam laws. Yes, use your real name - you want to really be taken off their list.
Also notice: a physical address. Haven't tried looking it up, but odds are you'll be able to find some phone number some where with it. Start polite and direct. If that doesn't work, try working through the exchange/pbx prefix to people at random. Validate that they work for that company and then repeat the message. For most the hits will be "it's not my department, you have to call so and so", but who cares; keep calling them anyway. You'll destroy productivity and be communicating the fact their business processes are for shite; eventually the right people will hear about, even if it's from fellow employees who now hate them for making their lives miserable.
Is it possible that they might get huffy and spam you more? Sure, but like you said, they are trying or seem to be legit so they can't afford to take it too far.
With the dot.bust and layoffs it is a real possibility that the one person whose job it was to edit the spam list was layed off and the remaining crew are too clueless to spend the time learning how to fix it - a little insult and injury is usually what's need to kick a lazy compnay in the butt. Been on the receiving side enough to know.
Sorry, the discovery of pharmaceutical micro-pollution is several years old. It's quite real and quite man-made. I'm dubious of man-made greenhouse but this is pretty linkable. In temperate climates there aren't any natual caffeine sources. Even in tropical climate you have to be downstream from a cocoa plantation, etc. The original paper and other articles about this new paper mentioned ibuprofen, antidepressants, heart and cholesterol medicines. The issue is that:
most people don't realize that most medicines pass through the kidneys unmetabolized
water treatment doesn't remove these chemicals
micro-pollution such as estrogens are known to affect fertility and fetal development of everything from fish to mammals, and probably also humans
Previousstudies have shown similar findings in freshwater lakes and rivers, with similar medicines appearing including:
Caffeine levels in freshwater rivers and lakes followed diurnal cycles peaking in sewage plants after mid-morninng bathroom breaks, and hours later rising in processed effluent in open water - caffeine is passed almost entirely unmetabolized.
synthetic estrogen and progesterone from oral contraceptive have been found in water supplies and may be factors in amphibian and fish population declines - perhaps also a factor, combined with pseudo-estrogens like phthalates (you like "new car smell"?), etc., in the 50-year decline in human sperm count levels in industrialized nations
many drugs are synthetic with persistence comparable to DDT or Chlordane - they do not breakdown
if micro-pollutants are bioactive in other species or in humans, they may well be affecting us already - what happens when we are all receiving active doses of heart medicine, etc., all our lives from our own water supply?
The underlying variables are inventory levels (I(n)). The risk variables are linked to liquidation/acquisition of inventory (k(n) * dI(n)/dt). These k values include speed of exchange, margin, mix of inventories, manufacturing performance parameters, and various market inputs. The result is that the aggregate portfolio of inventories has better return on assets and investment that any individual strategy.
To control risk and return you control the flow of inventory through a number of buying and selling processes that each have varying risk. For example: auctioning inventory has high margin risk but low transaction speed/inventory risk, while long term delivery contracts have lower margin risk but high transaction speed/inventory risk.* If MBA-ers can be comfortable with currency hedging to protect product margins, this isn't much of a leap.
Are the input variables precisely known? Of course not. This is economics, not engineering. In general, even if they were, none of the equations governing even basic statistical inventory models for a single asset have closed form solutions. Instead one must use adaptive stochastic control systems, monitored by people (hopefully).
Again, personally, I think it's risky to assume that 1) people can change psychologically and organizations can change sociologically to what this type of business model really means. If you have to be able to switch between a long-term contract-based sales and auction sales model at the whim of market forces, humans necessarily must become a sheddable asset like computer keyboards! 2) that making a business non-people-centric is a risky operational decoupling. The old, now abandoned, HP Way was entirely human-centric. The new HP Way is not human -centric. 3) HP's value proposition and core competency has always been technological execution and excellence. HP's management started telling employees by words and deeds: "you are aren't good enough or smart enough to take us into the next generation" even though the real problem was that management forgot how technology develops - it's as much luck as planning.
However, this is the stated business model HP has chosen, in lieu of its traditional strategy of technology leadership "at the bowling alley" to use Geoffrey Moore's model of technology adoption. As one of the HP boardmembers naively boasted a few years ago: "we'll let Intel do hardware R&D, Microsoft do software R&D and we'll own the supply chain." And then you think of Dell, and try to imagine what it would take to beat and pound HP into a Dell, and then what it would take to be necessarily better than a Dell. I'm just glad I don't work at HP anymore. It's values have become as alien to Bill & Daves' vision as SCO has from its.
JGski
* a lesson not learned in the California power deregulation crisis a few years back, when first we suffered from going pure-auction, and then whiplashed to pure long-term contract. Both strategies are non-optimal when used alone. Every time I open my electric bill I see how non-optimal!
What HP is talking about is creating an adaptive supply chain, where financial and inventory risk are dynamically controlled through a multivariate risk set of buying and selling processes. Technology is part of the way you do this but it's not the biggest barrier to success.
The problem is that while this can be shown to be a mathematically optimal strategy, it would also requires fundamental change in organizational structure and control (the sociological element) which won't happen in most companies because of the impact on middle and executive level managements' roles, power and responsibilities (the psychological element).
My own personal view is that most managers would sooner run a company into the ground that have their own oxes' gored. In comparison to this barrier, technology and finances are utterly trivial.
Beyond this, it also ignores where most of the cost and process impediment in a company comes from (it's not the core supply chain), which, I think, is the fatal flaw of HP's "AE" strategy.
I actually know what there are offering, saying and trying to do, but is classic HP-marketing style they've flubbed the communication badly - used be they would flub marketing by being overly technical, yet correct ("HP would market sushi as cold, dead fish"). Now it appears that they are flubbing by over-MBA-ing, or more specifically, over-Operations-Research-ing their marketing. It may communicate with some MBAs but most techies won't have a clue. There isn't some specific technology that will give you an "adaptive enterprise". Even worse, most of what they are propose won't really do the job. However the vagueness is somewhat justified because what keeps most companies from being adaptive to changing market environments isn't technical or even financial, but rather sociological and psychological (how's that for mumbo-jumbo - but it's true).
As a 10-year ex-HPer I'm still dissapponted that they've abandon "HP as technology company" and now have embraced "HP as a supply chain consultant". Unfortunately, supply chain management will only get commodified, and quickly. It's an unsustainable business strategy. But I've also come to realize that certain board members and executives already knew this and are only out to line their pockets before the ship goes down.
The nickel is probably a barrier layer to prevent chemical mixing of Cu or HiK with other materials in the device. Usually barrier layers are real thin, but are absolutely essential to prevent the device from morphing spontaneously into a glob of uselessness
99% of all conduction in semiconductors is "phonon"-mediated/impeded. Metals conduct through a different mechanism. I doubt metal gates significantly affect semiconductor conduction through phonon modulation, especially since there is no direct contact with the active gate region and metal.
The issue with both copper and Hi-/Lo-K dielectrics is that they are chemically incompatible with silicon and many other tradional materials, that is, if they are allowed direct physical contact, either the silicon or the dielectric is irreparably damaged. For example Si sucks up Cu like a sponge and ceases to be a semiconductor in the process.
For this reason you add barrier metals between Cu & Si, or barrier dielectric jackets between Cu and Hi-/Lo-K, or Poly-Si and Hi-/Lo-K. These are often are weird-*ss transition metal compounds: Hafnium Silicide, Scandium Silicide, Tantalum Silicide/Salicide or complex dielectric compounds or structures. It's like a periodic table reunion.
Figuring out what works requires building a lot of sample devices, and then doing electrical reliability testing on them followed by failure analysis. Very expensive and time consuming, thus perhaps not something you want to share with free-riding competitors.
It depends on how you define "link". Using the word "wrap" was probably the wrong word and gave the wrong impression. For me and GPL/LGPL that always means separate program space, e.g. separate shared library or DLL, which is certainly OK (my lawyers have told me so anyway). Now if I need things modified in the GPLed code, fine, I add them and publish under GPL.
That's what I mean by "good design" vs. "bad design". If you have a good modular design, you will have things nicely separatable such that you can put the LGPL in a shared library with published API. Then your proprietary code talks the API of the LGPL shared library and the LGPL library talks to the GPL code, which remains pure and unfettered. To use an engineering analog, LGPL is an impedance matching filter; just like all filters it does not work if you allow leaks that bypass the filter.
It's the mixing GPL+Proprietary that causes the problem since this is "leaking" past the filter - don't mix with the GPL (unless you release that part wholly under GPL too) and you're OK. I guess I should have been more explicit about that, but I've always thought this was a pretty obvious inference and design structure for GPL+LGPL+Closed Source - apparently not.
IANAL but it seems the general solution to this kind of problem is to wrap GPL code with LGPL code with proprietary code, or the other way around. That was the point of the LGPL license, wasn't it? That's what I've done in the past.
The primary issue is: can you actually wrap it and keep the pieces properly separated so free pieces can be free and non-free can be dealt with apart or are the links too pervasive between the two (three)? If the different components are too interwoven to be cleanly separable, it suggests your code design sucks, the code design of the GPL your using sucks, or both.
Doesn't anyone learn anything from watching the news about Afghanistan or Iraq??? Why do think we're getting our butts kicked? Why is Ramadan now synonymous with Tet? Stabbing with a million little knives is always far deadlier and more effective than with a single large knife! Did Saddam plan it this way? Hell, yes! This precisely what the war-naysayers in the Pentagon was worried about.
J-H-C! Do the fixed and variable cost of engagement calculation. Learn something about Lanchester equations already! Why did Rumsfeld say "we're at a disadvantage... our cost structure is $1Bs and the resistance is $1Ms"? It's the fundamental weakness of centralized power against distributed power. It's a mathematical inevitability. It's why you don't jump into a guerilla war with a conventional force, unless you're an idiot or a shrub. Why do you really think open source kicks butt on proprietary source?
The most effective way to combat SCO's blatant copyright violation and rights theft is precisely to file a million separate C&D letters, followed by a million separate lawsuits, each for maybe only several $1K-100K each. To make this easy the EFF, open source lawyer, et al., should post a D&C template kit and a copyright lawsuit template kit (GPLed of course!) that can be taken to a local lawyer for a perfunctory blessing and establishment of legal figurehead.
Now, the overhead of addressing each and every suit (as SCO is required by law) is probably enough to burn out all their new venture money by itself and then some. To make it extra difficult and expensive, allocate the filings over every federal court district. Hey, lawyers do this calculation all the time!
But just case that isn't enough, follow through to step two. Next the EFF becomes a clearinghouse for a marketing and pr campaign against SCO based on all these D&Cs and suits. The campaign should focus on institutional investors, first and the general media. Add up the damages and publicize the enormous financial risk facing SCO and pretty soon even the most strident SCO supporters will be demanding they backdown or will be pulling their investments.
And then there's steps 3 and 4, but I won't go into those...
Sigh!
Group petitions?! Class-action?! Psshaww! This is war, unfortunately. You want to make yourselves an easy target for neutralization? Class-action has a single-point failure! Just like Lanchester's Convention-vs-Convention engagement you have a square-law force multiplier: double the legal clout and they get 4x better results. The only group action should be massively independent distributed action, just like open source development itself! Also like DDOS:-( The square-law multiplier and economies of scale (aka technology and financial resources) are neutralized and much more, by a distributed, asymmetric engagement. That also is a mathematical inevitability. That's how we lost Vietnam and how we'll probably lose in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps we can finally learn something good from it.
I've spent enough time in southeast Asian to know that the chances of eliminating piracy of closed-source products is about as close to zero as you can get. Going to open source is just about the only way the Government has to avoid trouble with the WTO and there's just about nothing Microsoft can realistically do short of dropping their prices to the blackmarket established pricing levels - which would mean selling at a loss given their expense and capital structure. They will have the fig-leaf for international markets: "We officially and actively support only non-infringing software". Excellently played capitalist move for a communist government!
This is the inevitable result for most Microsoft forays outside the developed world. Add to that Microsoft's problem of having saturating the markets in the developed world and, as a public company, needing to continue an unsustainable double-digit growth rate. Add to this their market extensions into non-computing markets are lack-luster and largely failed. You have to be worried if you own a lot of MSFT stock or if you are overly invest simply due to being an employee.
Love my Panther (he says writing this on WinXP!)
JGSki
Slashdot Mirror
I love BMWs but if that BMW ad is par for the course this is one irritate advertising product! Like mentioned above: this will spur me to learn how to tweak blocking in Moz!
This is why I'm a nerd who's discovered a fondness for sociology and psychology! Those subjects have more impact on what technologies will take hold in the future than engineering excellence or creativity (unfortunately, the nerd in me says).
Government spending can contribute to growth but it's a degenerative feedback loop - government "expenses" like taxes tend to eat up a portion of the economic kick each time money flows back through the goverment since most income is taxed. Thus government spending creates a blip which dissipates - if other growth sources aren't on the edge of recovery, the economy won't catch "fire" and start growing.
A space mission would eventually create technological innovation to fuel growth but it takes time to develop new technologies in the first place, more time for a critical mass of technology portfolios that are cross-purposeable outside of government/military to accumulate, and even more time for those technologies to finally take root. The rule of thumb is 15-25 years from the first scientific discovery/creation to the point when noticeable economic benefit results. Consider the Internet. Consider transistors. Consider integrated circuits. Of course you may not pick the correct newly discovered technology to bet on today.
It's not entirely clear how cost effective a Space Program would be. Sure there have been "homeruns" like semiconductors, computers and integrated circuits which never would of existed with the Cold War and the Space Race, but what's in the pipeline that would apply to a space mission, and then be applicable to a broader. The next "Velcro" won't power a major economic burst. Another internet or transistor might. Unfortunately computers and semiconductors themselves are mostly in evolution mode, rather than revolution mode. The "next big things" like nanotechnology and biotechnology are either just entering their 20-year obligatory incubation period or have industrio-technological structural impediments that will prevent revolutionary advances, and neither would seem to have a major role in a space program anyway.
My net-net is: don't assume a new space program will fix anything economically. If Bush thinks it will, he's, again, deluded. The time-constants are all wrong. If you use economics as a justification for a space program you are perpetrating an improbability. There are other good reasons to have a program. Jobs mean stability even if you don't have net growth. A space program, done right, can inspire a nation which is not a trivial thing. If you allow a economic window of 10-30 years, by then a space program will almost certain contribute to technology - the Net Present Value is still debateable. We certainly don't think that far ahead often enough though.
Things that would get my attention:
implemented in SiGe instead of III-V materials
bidirectional transduction in O->E not just O->E at usable efficiencies
demonstration of integration into "conventional" manufacturing processes
Otherwise, it's an interesting academic exercise that might lead to the above points, which is "A Good Thing".
The corporate officers have their personal assets protected by being a C-corp, S-corp or LLC if and only if the corporation and its officers act within the law. The smoke and smell suggests massive criminal fraud by SCO and its executives. Their personal assets (homes, investments, cash...) could very well be on the line regardless of whether SCO Inc. is bankrupt.
So, you say, we'll just test the fundamentals. Wrong! I sat for the California EE EIT (the pre-test for PE) back in the 80s: most of the test subjects were Civil, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering which no EE student gets any courses on, simply because there isn't even enough time in a four-year program to get everything in your own specialization, let alone the rest of EE, let alone any other field of engineering. What few EE question there were (less than 10 out of 200-odd questions) included out-of-date novelties such as vacuum tubes and subjects like rotating machinery and power systems, a hyper-niche of EE that certainly an IC designer like myself would have never had classes in. I recently looked into the exam again and the test is essentially the same 20 years hence, despite being already out-of-date 20 years ago! Conclusion: PE Certification == irrelevant waste of time for any modern technology industry.
This is precisely what would happen to Software Development Licensing: it will become a dubious and irrelevant hurdle that disadvantages US programmers against the rest of the world. Has MSCE certification somehow made Windows installations the button-down, high-security platform that Unix more often is without any universal certification standards? Unless you have lived in at cave in 2003...
Professional Engineer certification works for Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering only because the core knowledge of these fields either ceased to advance more than 100 years ago or advanced only slowly with adoption of new technologies developed by other, non-regulated disciplines like CS, EE and Mat'l Sci . By contrast, the core knowledge of CS and EE have changed on almost a decade basis. When I first stated programming 30 years ago, the state of the art of common usage was FORTRAN and COBOL; then came procedural languages in the 80s, and then OO in the 90s. Each generation radically changed what was fundamentally possible to implement.
As an example: my father is a California PE in ME who does HVAC work. The only major advances in HVAC in the last 50-75 years have come from importation of CS and EE discipline advances in computing and sensors. The basic lore of enthalpy, steam tables and refrigerants was complete in the 19th century and early 20th century. In CE, berm, dam and road design theory hasn't had major technical changes since the 19th century, in some cases the 18th century; only materials developed by other disciplines have changed the constants that go into the same design equations used since the 19th century. It is precisely this "last century/centuries" knowlege that dominates professional exams in these disciplines.
It just shows that the people advocating this know nothing about existing engineering certification/licensing or the history of engineering as a whole, and worse know nothing of software development despite possibly even being former software developers.
To adopt such a thing would only guarantee that what few software development jobs that remain in the United States, after globalization exported most of the rest, will finally be destroyed also. That may suit profit-seeking business interests and micromanaging government bureaucrats, but in terms of national interest it will assure that mission-critical software is only developed outside the United States which makes backing such a proposal nothing short of treason.
Would I consider an applicant's job history and employers? Absolutely, because I consider a prospective employee's ethics as important as their skills. That I do so probably means I'll never be a Bill Gates, but quite frankly that suits me fine. I could not live with myself even if Bill can.
Would I summarily reject someone with SCO on their resume? Not if they worked at the original Santa Cruz Operation or SCO/Caldera pre-Daryl. Post-Daryl is absolutely a major red-flag: you'd have to assure me you weren't complicit by commission and by omission. Anyone at director level or above, including the board and any law firm associated with SCO? Summarily guilty and duely condemned by words and deeds to a life sentence. I won't hire you. I won't do business with you. I won't do business with people who do either. I won't associate with you professionally, socially or any other way. I won't eat at the same table with you. I won't give you money if you are homeless. I won't dial 911 if I find you on the side of the road bleeding to death. As human beings, you have ceased to exist. No possibility for parole short of making Mother Teresa look like a shiftless tramp.
Life is about the choices we make. We always make choices including not choosing, which is making a choice. The excuse of mortgage, kids, bills is just that: an excuse. A b*ull-sh*t excuse, IMO. You always, I mean, absolutely always, have a choice. If you believe you are "forced", it is just a belief, taken axiomatic or without contemplation, such as the belief you can't live without your SUV or your PS2 or you can't earn money some other way or that you can only be happy with your current lifestyle and level of affluence, or that you must be a sycophant to an SO's childish and greedy whims. Again, pointing to a fundamental problem within the individual's abilities to cope with the real world and ethics. Thankfully someone has already invoked Godwin's Law on this point.
BTW, other companies on resumes that raise red flags with me also include Microsoft and Oracle (big surprise). I primarily look at the words and deeds of a company's leadship and the nature of my interactions with line employees. If both are uniformally and consistently negative, it raises a flag. An applicant must prove they weren't part of the negative status quo. Life is too short to put up with *ss-h*les and miscreants, not matter how technically talented they may be!
Perhaps fortunately, there are only some many Congress-critters to account for. Black-holing them should be pretty easy. Add a press release when each is to explain their ethical lapse...
Ask yourself: how does Microsoft plan to continue double digit growth in the future when their core and only profitable markets are essentially saturated and, importantly, becoming elastic on price (demand changes with price). One of the signs: last years CIO revolt. Microsoft has only actual customer markets: IT dept and SW devels - end users are not their customers, as much as they might publically try to deny it! CIOs continue this revolt every time they pick Linux or BSD which seems to be picking up.
It's abundantly clear that Microsoft faces a revenue crunch in the next five years (if not sooner) that could very well destroy them. Simply stated they can not continue to simply raise prices to fund their revenue needs, yet growth in profitable business isn't there (where do you go from 95% market-share?). This is so clear that denying it would be comparable to saying Enron still has potential for profits. Their market-broadening ventures are still essentially failures: they still lose money (only now, more) on every X-Box; their other ventures like MSN only have decreased revenue projections based on available customers and price pressures.
Linux and BSD provide a killer value proposition that's hard to fight, and its not even mostly the price issue. Price matters but choice probably matter more, be it the choice to change distributions, the choice of hardware, the choice to go directly to the code; the value of choice makes the relative price even do negative when compared to escalating prices, security problems, and bloatware-driven hardware purchases.
Of couse, Microsoft has gotten to this point by following, rather slavishly and short-sightedly, exactly the maxims of Harvard's Dr. Michael Porter who is meat-and-potatoes for MBAs as "Competitive Strategy". If you've heard phrases like "barrier to entry" and "barriers to exit", you've heard of Porter. Microsoft has almost religiously followed Porter analysis and techniques. Every dirty trick in the "Embrace and Extend" is classic Porter executed on a tactical level utterly devoid of moral limits. What was missing was the work of Stanford University's Dr. Baron's "Business and it Environment". Business can *not* simply be about profit maximization alone because business does not exist in a vacuum disconnected from the rest of society, though Microsoft has largely acted over the last 20 years as if it is and does.
Their utter lack of business ethics over the last 20 years have pretty much assured that their own allies in the future will have be paid for loyalty and paid well. How can you afford to be that lavish when revenues and profits cap? Well for a while they still might be able to buy people off in exchange for a modicum of apparent loyalty. Yes, that might include politicians making protectionist legislation for them, but the fact they have outsourced overseas as much if not more than other corporations will make that course a patriotic tar-baby many would avoid at the very moments Microsoft needs them most.
So what happens when Microsoft products are actively shunned by most of the world, are priced far too high to be competitive and their stock tanks when revenue caps? Desperate acts are likely. Yes, SCO certainly fits past behavior even if Microsoft has plausible deniability or the unlikely seeming true lack of culpability. Such is the hole of muck they've dug for themselves. Well, let's just say shorting Microsoft may actually become profitable soon. This includes the choi
I don't see the point of simply being harrassing without wanting to achieve something specific. Harrassing for the pleasure of it makes you a sociopath, not a legitimately aggrieved consumer escalating ignored requests. Another reason I'd include my real contact info and moderate the attack to irritating but not excessive.
Does anyone still use thermally printed faxes anymore? At least in California, particularlly a dot-com-ish kind of company, I certainly doubt it. Inkjet is more likely.
There's a fax #. It says to mark the fax "ATTN: Recruitment", but if you send 100 faxes with "ATTN: Spamming Department", it will probably get to the right place, be it marketing or IT. Try to be nice and polite, but clearly indignant.
There's also a nice job application web form. If they got 1000 applications (you're a geek, cobble up a Perl LWP program), all with a message asking them to stop spamming you, again it will probably get escalated and do you some good. Include the full text of relevant federal and state anti-spam laws. Yes, use your real name - you want to really be taken off their list.
Also notice: a physical address. Haven't tried looking it up, but odds are you'll be able to find some phone number some where with it. Start polite and direct. If that doesn't work, try working through the exchange/pbx prefix to people at random. Validate that they work for that company and then repeat the message. For most the hits will be "it's not my department, you have to call so and so", but who cares; keep calling them anyway. You'll destroy productivity and be communicating the fact their business processes are for shite; eventually the right people will hear about, even if it's from fellow employees who now hate them for making their lives miserable.
Is it possible that they might get huffy and spam you more? Sure, but like you said, they are trying or seem to be legit so they can't afford to take it too far.
With the dot.bust and layoffs it is a real possibility that the one person whose job it was to edit the spam list was layed off and the remaining crew are too clueless to spend the time learning how to fix it - a little insult and injury is usually what's need to kick a lazy compnay in the butt. Been on the receiving side enough to know.
- most people don't realize that most medicines pass through the kidneys unmetabolized
- water treatment doesn't remove these chemicals
- micro-pollution such as estrogens are known to affect fertility and fetal development of everything from fish to mammals, and probably also humans
Previous studies have shown similar findings in freshwater lakes and rivers, with similar medicines appearing including:To control risk and return you control the flow of inventory through a number of buying and selling processes that each have varying risk. For example: auctioning inventory has high margin risk but low transaction speed/inventory risk, while long term delivery contracts have lower margin risk but high transaction speed/inventory risk.* If MBA-ers can be comfortable with currency hedging to protect product margins, this isn't much of a leap.
Are the input variables precisely known? Of course not. This is economics, not engineering. In general, even if they were, none of the equations governing even basic statistical inventory models for a single asset have closed form solutions. Instead one must use adaptive stochastic control systems, monitored by people (hopefully).
Again, personally, I think it's risky to assume that 1) people can change psychologically and organizations can change sociologically to what this type of business model really means. If you have to be able to switch between a long-term contract-based sales and auction sales model at the whim of market forces, humans necessarily must become a sheddable asset like computer keyboards! 2) that making a business non-people-centric is a risky operational decoupling. The old, now abandoned, HP Way was entirely human-centric. The new HP Way is not human -centric. 3) HP's value proposition and core competency has always been technological execution and excellence. HP's management started telling employees by words and deeds: "you are aren't good enough or smart enough to take us into the next generation" even though the real problem was that management forgot how technology develops - it's as much luck as planning.
However, this is the stated business model HP has chosen, in lieu of its traditional strategy of technology leadership "at the bowling alley" to use Geoffrey Moore's model of technology adoption. As one of the HP boardmembers naively boasted a few years ago: "we'll let Intel do hardware R&D, Microsoft do software R&D and we'll own the supply chain." And then you think of Dell, and try to imagine what it would take to beat and pound HP into a Dell, and then what it would take to be necessarily better than a Dell. I'm just glad I don't work at HP anymore. It's values have become as alien to Bill & Daves' vision as SCO has from its.
JGski
* a lesson not learned in the California power deregulation crisis a few years back, when first we suffered from going pure-auction, and then whiplashed to pure long-term contract. Both strategies are non-optimal when used alone. Every time I open my electric bill I see how non-optimal!
The problem is that while this can be shown to be a mathematically optimal strategy, it would also requires fundamental change in organizational structure and control (the sociological element) which won't happen in most companies because of the impact on middle and executive level managements' roles, power and responsibilities (the psychological element).
My own personal view is that most managers would sooner run a company into the ground that have their own oxes' gored. In comparison to this barrier, technology and finances are utterly trivial.
Beyond this, it also ignores where most of the cost and process impediment in a company comes from (it's not the core supply chain), which, I think, is the fatal flaw of HP's "AE" strategy.
JGski
As a 10-year ex-HPer I'm still dissapponted that they've abandon "HP as technology company" and now have embraced "HP as a supply chain consultant". Unfortunately, supply chain management will only get commodified, and quickly. It's an unsustainable business strategy. But I've also come to realize that certain board members and executives already knew this and are only out to line their pockets before the ship goes down.
And, yes, I have an MBA.
JGski
(I worked at Intel at the time and still have a complete manual set for the 432!).
99% of all conduction in semiconductors is "phonon"-mediated/impeded. Metals conduct through a different mechanism. I doubt metal gates significantly affect semiconductor conduction through phonon modulation, especially since there is no direct contact with the active gate region and metal.
And has been since the late 1970s!!
For this reason you add barrier metals between Cu & Si, or barrier dielectric jackets between Cu and Hi-/Lo-K, or Poly-Si and Hi-/Lo-K. These are often are weird-*ss transition metal compounds: Hafnium Silicide, Scandium Silicide, Tantalum Silicide/Salicide or complex dielectric compounds or structures. It's like a periodic table reunion.
Figuring out what works requires building a lot of sample devices, and then doing electrical reliability testing on them followed by failure analysis. Very expensive and time consuming, thus perhaps not something you want to share with free-riding competitors.
Moore's Law is a market imperative, which to a business is pretty much the same thing as a law.
That's what I mean by "good design" vs. "bad design". If you have a good modular design, you will have things nicely separatable such that you can put the LGPL in a shared library with published API. Then your proprietary code talks the API of the LGPL shared library and the LGPL library talks to the GPL code, which remains pure and unfettered. To use an engineering analog, LGPL is an impedance matching filter; just like all filters it does not work if you allow leaks that bypass the filter.
It's the mixing GPL+Proprietary that causes the problem since this is "leaking" past the filter - don't mix with the GPL (unless you release that part wholly under GPL too) and you're OK. I guess I should have been more explicit about that, but I've always thought this was a pretty obvious inference and design structure for GPL+LGPL+Closed Source - apparently not.
The primary issue is: can you actually wrap it and keep the pieces properly separated so free pieces can be free and non-free can be dealt with apart or are the links too pervasive between the two (three)? If the different components are too interwoven to be cleanly separable, it suggests your code design sucks, the code design of the GPL your using sucks, or both.
Group petitions?
WTF?
Doesn't anyone learn anything from watching the news about Afghanistan or Iraq??? Why do think we're getting our butts kicked? Why is Ramadan now synonymous with Tet? Stabbing with a million little knives is always far deadlier and more effective than with a single large knife! Did Saddam plan it this way? Hell, yes! This precisely what the war-naysayers in the Pentagon was worried about.
J-H-C! Do the fixed and variable cost of engagement calculation. Learn something about Lanchester equations already! Why did Rumsfeld say "we're at a disadvantage... our cost structure is $1Bs and the resistance is $1Ms"? It's the fundamental weakness of centralized power against distributed power. It's a mathematical inevitability. It's why you don't jump into a guerilla war with a conventional force, unless you're an idiot or a shrub. Why do you really think open source kicks butt on proprietary source?
The most effective way to combat SCO's blatant copyright violation and rights theft is precisely to file a million separate C&D letters, followed by a million separate lawsuits, each for maybe only several $1K-100K each. To make this easy the EFF, open source lawyer, et al., should post a D&C template kit and a copyright lawsuit template kit (GPLed of course!) that can be taken to a local lawyer for a perfunctory blessing and establishment of legal figurehead.
Now, the overhead of addressing each and every suit (as SCO is required by law) is probably enough to burn out all their new venture money by itself and then some. To make it extra difficult and expensive, allocate the filings over every federal court district. Hey, lawyers do this calculation all the time!
But just case that isn't enough, follow through to step two. Next the EFF becomes a clearinghouse for a marketing and pr campaign against SCO based on all these D&Cs and suits. The campaign should focus on institutional investors, first and the general media. Add up the damages and publicize the enormous financial risk facing SCO and pretty soon even the most strident SCO supporters will be demanding they backdown or will be pulling their investments.
And then there's steps 3 and 4, but I won't go into those...
Sigh! :-( The square-law multiplier and economies of scale (aka technology and financial resources) are neutralized and much more, by a distributed, asymmetric engagement. That also is a mathematical inevitability. That's how we lost Vietnam and how we'll probably lose in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps we can finally learn something good from it.
Group petitions?! Class-action?! Psshaww! This is war, unfortunately. You want to make yourselves an easy target for neutralization? Class-action has a single-point failure! Just like Lanchester's Convention-vs-Convention engagement you have a square-law force multiplier: double the legal clout and they get 4x better results. The only group action should be massively independent distributed action, just like open source development itself! Also like DDOS
JGski
Shouldn't that be "Mugglesoft"?
This is the inevitable result for most Microsoft forays outside the developed world. Add to that Microsoft's problem of having saturating the markets in the developed world and, as a public company, needing to continue an unsustainable double-digit growth rate. Add to this their market extensions into non-computing markets are lack-luster and largely failed. You have to be worried if you own a lot of MSFT stock or if you are overly invest simply due to being an employee.
Love my Panther (he says writing this on WinXP!)
JGSki